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.
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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 have a hobby of studying serious (advanced undergrad or grad school level) math and physics in various areas that are interesting or fundamental, without direct benefit or application to my work (formal education is decades ago). I'm not very successful at it, because I tend to fizzle out after getting through 1/4 of a textbook, or something similar. Things get a bit harder, real life intervenes, lack of structure, etc. I wonder if others have a similar hobby and/or similar issues, and found ways to do this better. Haven't tried study groups and not sure those exist at this level. Going back to school for a PhD is implausible for life reasons. Advice/anecdotes?
One thing I've found somewhat helpful is to have a project I'm working on to apply the knowledge to. I suppose the benefit works the same way as the exercises you'd be set as part of a university course. My project is to work out how chemistry would work in 4D space, which naturally has consequences for almost every aspect of the topic so being able to follow along the textbook's derivations with all the changes required for 4D is quite a good check that I'm actually absorbing it. This project has the advantages that, since it's practically useless, there isn't much prior research, and its scope is large enough to be basically inexhaustible. What a suitable project would be for the topics you want to study, I don't know. Quite likely having multiple separate smaller projects would have much the same effect.
Also I have had a habit of leaving a textbook in the kitchen to read while I'm waiting for things to cook. The main point of bother for me is just getting to the library to get the books.
I'm somewhat in the same situation. Years ago, I read a topology textbook just for fun, and really enjoyed doing this kind of thinking again (up until the point where the constructions became too overwhelming for me, who just read the book and didn't do any -- or only a few -- of the exercises).
I'm really missing a kind of book which is in between a formal textbook and the kind of popular mathematics by people like Ian Stewart, where the adage goes that "every formula scares off 50% of the readers".
Both are historically focused. The first is a collection of ideas tracing the development of calculus. The second looks at the development of a formula for the roots of a cubic polynomial and the process toward acceptance of the use of imaginary numbers.
For someone who casually was reading a topology textbook, the actual mathematics in both won't be that difficult, but probably also not completely trivial. For example, a lot of the effort for the Calculus Gallery is translating the original form into a modern way of looking at the same problem.
One little nugget I found surprising from the Mazur book is that imaginary numbers emerged through the search for methods to find roots of cubic polynomials, not quadratics. To a modern student, the quadratics show the immediate need, like $x^2+1=0.$ However, historically, people were happy to just accept that there was no root. What really made them reconsider was a set of examples with real roots, but where the intermediate calculations in the cubic root formula naturally go through the complex numbers (the imaginary components eventually cancel.)
There is something similar for the theorem that primes congruent to 1 mod 4 can be written as the sum of two squares. While that theorem is entirely about natural numbers, one of the nice proof paths goes through the complex numbers. Of course, there are a lot of examples in physics that, at the right meta level, are also like this.
I find the only way I can absorb bulk dense dry material these days is to rapidly skim the whole thing once before attempting any in depth study to build a mental map of what is there and where it is going overall, so that the little pieces I end up chewing through in between life have somewhere to attach themselves to.
What problem are you trying to solve? You're studying for enjoyment - there's nothing wrong with putting the book away and moving on once you're past the point where you find the topic interesting/enjoyable.
Textbooks are like hard tack. Change it up -- eat some oranges and fried chicken too! Just hunted around a bit to see what interesting supplements there are calculus learning. Googled "most entertaining calculus class" and found on Reddit. people talking about best YouTube instructors. There are books of math art. There's a book on Amazon called The Calculus Gallery that readers love -- it's about the development of calculus. Googled "calculus machine" and found out there's a machine called the Mechanical Integrator. (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s-y_lnzWQjk). I'll bet somewhere there is a book of projects using calculus -- build this or that.
I realize you may not be studying calculus, but you get the idea. To find things, ask google, GPT and Reddit questions. Ask for "most entertaining," ask for art, ask for projects, ask for study groups, ask for puzzles and challenges.
similar situation. The best I've done was a recent foray/refresh on differential geometry/topology and differential equations. I made it most of the way through Do Carmo, Spivak, Edwards Adv Calc: A Differential Forms Approach, and Allendoerfer. I also went through some of Munkres Topology.
The three difficulties I find:
(1) life events as distractions
(2) lack of clear purpose
(3) I already know a decent amount, so it can be hard to figure out where to start
The only one of these obstacles that I've fully solved is the third point. Now, I just push myself to start at the beginning and work through all the problems, even if it feels too easy sometimes.
My partial solution to (1) and (2) is to choose a single text and focus on working through that whenever I have spare time. Even if I don't make rapid progress, it keeps me from diluting the effort by spreading it across 3 (or 6 or 10) other mini-projects.
As an alum of American Big 10 university, one with a rodent for a mascot, over a certain age I can take any course they offer for $10/semester credit. I’ve been reluctant to do it though because traditionally college aged students are paying way too much in tuition. I suspect I’d run into a fair bit of resentment. It’s kind of tempting though just to see how many majors I could complete.
I did a a CSci major and Linguistics minor as an undergrad there and earned my masters at another school.
> I’ve been reluctant to do it though because traditionally college aged students are paying way too much in tuition.
Cynically, they are not paying for getting to listen to world class lectures (plenty of that online), but for getting a piece of paper at the end which is certifies that they earned a degree at a very prestigious university.
If you are not planning on earning another degree and competing against them on the labor market, you attending should not matter to them.
Here in old Europe, lectures are practically open to the public: nobody is checking your id at the entrance. Things are a bit different for lab courses, I imagine if you show up to a human anatomy course unannounced they will hardly tell you to just grab a corpse and a knife. But if you university allows you to register for lab courses for a minimal fee, I don't think it would cause resentment from students either. Again, they are mainly paying for their degree, not the knowledge.
I’m currently completing my undergrad degree funded by a scholarship – so it’s subsidized by my classmates – and I’ve never ran into any resentment about it (or if I have, I’ve been oblivious to it).
The people who might possibly develop some resentment of you would be not the current students -- for whom college bills are mostly big meaningless numbers that vary for incomprehensible reasons which adults argue about with strangers in online forums -- but their parents.
In any case though how many students or their parents would even be aware of the tuition deal you're getting as an alum?
You should do it and don't worry about the resentment. For the most part, everyone sitting in the classroom with you is paying a different amount and any resentment should be directed toward the institution/system rather than at you.
Unless I'm missing a key consideration: would your presence make the experience worse for the other students?
Let's say Trump is serious about wanting to make Canada the 51st state and is willing to force the issue as much as possible. He claims Canada is letting terrorists into the US and places onerous tariffs in "response". He could also claim Canada isn't respecting America's territory in the Arctic Ocean. He sends US troops to Ottawa.
What could the ROW do about it other than denounce it? Would the UK fight a war over it? Russia wouldn't like it, but Trump could tell Putin: "You get Ukraine, we get Canada."
I certainly don't expect this to happen, but if Trump wanted to go for it, what prevents it from happening?
This is the first round "ask for everything" negotiation tactic, paired with bluster to let them know we're serious.
The actual end-game here is an EU-type arrangement where you have freedom of travel and work, and free trade. The issue is: an arrangement of that sort *basically is* annexation - allow an agreement like that, and Canada and the US (already the two most culturally similar and economically interlinked nations on Earth), will become even more so - the Laurentian Elite knows that's checkmate, so you need the bluster.
At the VERY LEAST, can we not go back to the pre-9/11 standard where they just wave you through at the border with ID? The US/Canada border guys on each side are MEAN - going through immigration as an American into the Socialist Republic of Vietnam was easier and less harrowing.
This is the part of the Trump post that added insult to injury. Canada should not only join the union, they should be happy that they get all of two senators, like Hawaii, making them the largest and most populous state.
I agree that the rest of NATO would likely turn oathbreaker rather than fighting a nuclear war against an enemy who has them badly out-nuked. But still, the status quo coalition would be over. The surviving rest of NATO would try to form a defensive pact lest they be the next victim. For the same reason that NATO is supporting Ukraine and the US supported the Taliban against the USSR, we would obviously give materiel aid to Canadian forces or insurgents or whatever there will be: the more a rabid US is tied up pacifying Canada (which is about 15x the size of Afghanistan), the less capability they have to invade us.
For the "He sends US troops to Ottawa" scenario, the ROW doesn't have to lift a finger to stop it, because the United States Army won't even start it. No, not even if the President of the United States America orders them to because A: US Army officers swear an oath to obey the Constitution, *not* the President and B: The Constitution says that an order to start a war has to come from Congress, not the President. Congress has issued some very vague authorizations for POTUS to wage war against e.g. anyone we think is in cahoots with Al Qaeda, but nothing that anybody is going to believe applies to Canada.
If *Canada* starts an actual shooting war with the United States, then POTUS could order an immediate counterattack into Ottawa, and he'd eventually need to clear that with Congress but we can imagine that the shooting part would be over by then. But Canada isn't stupid enough to start a shooting war with the United States. And the United States Army isn't stupid enough to believe Donald Trump if he lies and says the Canadians attacked us.
The US fought the Korean War, Vietnam, Grenada, Panama, and the Persian Gulf without a congressional declaration of war.
It would be difficult, and potentially very politically costly depending on the circumstances and optics, but to expect the military to go against the President, without an extremely explicit countermand but congress, is not a good bet.
The War Powers Act changed the language from "Declaration of War" to "Authorization for Use of Military Force". But we had one of those for Vietnam and most of our subsequent wars. In the case of Panama, the Panamanian legislature rather stupidly declared war on *us*.
Declaring war on the United States is never a good move, unless of course you're a European microstate in a Peter Sellers movie.
I suspect you are correct that nobody else would take up arms to fight directly for Canada's freedom, for many of the same reasons they wouldn't for Ukraine. However, I think you're way off base in thinking that other countries denouncing it would be the extent of the international damage. In brief, the U.S. making this choice[1], the U.S. would destroy pretty much every aspect of its current set of alliances and international relationships.
It's difficult to overstate just how much of the current international order is built on the back of U.S. security guarantees. Since WWII the U.S. has been extremely proactive about building relationships with other nations: security relationships, diplomatic relationships, economic relationships. There's a staggeringly large amount of business arrangements, governmental co-ventures and academic partnerships that are built around the bedrock assumption that not only is the U.S. not going to suddenly start shooting at its allies, but it's going to come down harshly on anyone else who does. And of course, one would be hard-pressed to find a country that the U.S. has older and stronger ties with than Canada.
If the U.S. were to decide to betray that friendship, to go back on one of its oldest, strongest security guarantees, so launch an utterly unprovoked invasion of neighbor with whom it has been securely at peace for all of living memory, who could trust that any of its other agreements would be any more solid? Every single deal that assumes that goodwill and basic sanity of the U.S. government would suddenly be suspect. Every single government would have to start very rapidly re-imagining and re-structuring its diplomatic and military policy.
NATO would obviously be completely done-for. As I said, I doubt anyone who fight on Canada's behalf, but an alliance that the U.S. just shot a hole through would be no guarantee to anyone: likely the remaining current NATO members would try to re-form some defensive alliance without the U.S. (indeed, in part to protect themselves AGAINST the U.S. in case Canada was just the beginning). I wouldn't bet money on the U.S. keeping control of ANY of its military bases abroad: who is going to want such a powerful and unpredictable wildcard to have a foothold on their soil? International trade can't pivot on a dime, but a lot of countries would start (at the very least) trying to make alternate plans in case the U.S. proved as unreliable a trading partner as it just did a military one (something that Trump has, of course, also been threatening), and I'm sure at least some amount of trade would be immediately redirected from the U.S.'s shores. I can't begin to guess whether the financial world would start trying to divest itself from the dollar or if so how fast they'd move, but it would certainly at least be discussed, and I'd expect the dollar to become much more volatile even in the best-case scenario.
I am honestly finding it very difficult to imagine what the world would look like in the aftermath of a move like this. None of us have lived in that world. And the last shift of that magnitude was many decades ago, decades which have seen huge and sweeping changes in communication and transportation technology, which make the lessons of history hard to confidently apply.
[1] Note I say "the U.S." and not "Trump." This isn't something the president has the power to do alone. This would either require significant buy-in from the rest of the country, or would take place in a future where Trump has become de facto or de jure dictator, and has much more complete control of the country than the office of president currently gives him.
I imagine there would be a huge and unpredictable mess, but my personal hobbyhorse is the US nuclear umbrella. A number of states could spin up their own nuclear program and be carrying out tests quite quickly; these are the so-called "nuclear threshold" states, which have the ability to leave the US nuclear umbrella if they so choose.
I'm an Australian, and I remember reading that the estimated time for Australia to carry out its first nuclear test could be as low as three months, given our uranium mining, prior nuclear research, and industrial capacity (can't find the source for this, though). We'd have significant motivation to develop our own nuclear weapons if we kicked the US military out of our joint facilities.
Probably the US would do a lot of diplomatic wrangling to keep its key military and economic relationships intact, but I imagine a nuclear-armed Taiwan, South Korea, Turkey (not just hosting US nukes but developing its own), or Poland might cause some issues. Also, Canada is a nuclear threshold state itself...
Absolutely. In fact, I suspect that some nuclear powers within NATO (UK, France) would be happy to share their bomb designs with the others so that the Anti-US defense pact can at least try to move to something like nuclear parity.
The trouble with making serious threats as a negotiating tactic is that sometimes you'll need to make good on those threats if you want to maintain your credibility. This is a really striking case because the threat is--as you correctly note--so far outside of ANYONE'S best interests, and outside of Trump's apparent capability. As a matter of basic rationality, when somebody makes an outrageous, public threat like this, you should pretty much always call them on it. If you don't, you've set the cost coerce you and an unacceptably low level and can expect more such threats in short order.
So what will Trump do if Canada's new PM replies to Trump with the diplomat-speak equivalent of "go fuck yourself with a rusty shovel?" I honestly don't know. Trump would certainly understand that *not responding at all* would make him look weak, and if there's one thing I can say with confidence about Trump's psychology its that he *hates* looking weak. But will his response be something as harmless as another Twitter tantrum? Something more painful and destructive like making good on his tariff threats? Or will he try to escalate further, trying to drag congress along?
The best case scenario I can imagine is that at least some of the people Trump has handling the actual nuts-and-bolts of his negotiations are actual adults who understand both the basic diplomacy/game theory of the situation (i.e. why Canada doesn't want to be seen as caving to this sort of pressure) and how to play Trump adequately. A deal that Trump and his most die-hard followers can be made to believe is a "big win" for him, but that literally everybody else on the planet understands as pretty favorable to Canada would be something like the ideal way to de-escalate. I'm not enormously hopeful, but it could happen.
Do you think Trump has any credibility to maintain? Do you think he even cares?
He's a 78-year-old megalomaniacal blowhard. Just enjoy the show. The President doesn't have much individual power, particularly if he's not politically astute. He has zero chance of making anything like that a reality. (Of course I said the same thing in 2016 about the border wall ...)
> Just enjoy the show. The President doesn't have much individual power
...this seems familiar - it's actually just like where a good portion of the AI doom debates end up: participants in agreement that the entity in question would do horribly destructive things if given the opportunity, but the optimists believe it will never be given access to enough power to actually do so while the pessimists cry for more ways to guarantee that.
I think he does care about looking foolish. While he certainly has a...let's call it a very strong talent for interpreting reality in ways that flatter his ego, I think the Canadian PM thumbing their nose at his demands would still be pretty likely to piss him off.
As for his individual power, I'll grant that he certainly doesn't have the power to execute complicated plans that require sustained, long-term buy in by large portions of the government. Either a coordinated invasion or some sort of diplomatic attempt at annexation certainly qualify, so I have little fear of him doing either of those. But as the Chief Executive of the most powerful country on Earth, he certainly has SOME power. My fear is not that he will respond to a perceived insult with a brilliant and subtle game of 42-dimensional chess which will let fall a fateful chain of dominoes that culminates in him bringing deepest woe unto the Canadian people. It's that he'll throw a tantrum of unknown size and scope: he may not have much power to build, but he certainly has some power to break things. While "just enjoy the show" was pretty much my reaction to seeing him win this election, I'd be much more comfortable with it if I were safely outside the blast radius.
Oh relax. Nothing he does will be worse than printing $3 trillion, letting in 6m uneducated low iq immigrants, and letting DEI infect institutions and companies. The US has a long track record of surviving terrible leaders.
Why do you imagine that this sort of low effort channeling of talking points furthers the discourse?
Moreover, substantively, 1) you have no idea what migrants' IQs are; and 2) the entity in charge of adjusting the money supply (not "printing money") is the Fed, not the President. And virtually all the Fed Board members in office during the period in question was a Trump appointee.
With respect, if you don't have better insight than this to offer, easier for both of us if you don't reply. I can get a virtually identical soup of buzzwords and insinuations from the dregs of any social media comment section anywhere: I generally look for a rather higher standard here at ACX.
The bar for terrible U.S. leaders in my lifetime would be more succinctly expressed by starting two massively expensive wars, murdering somewhere in the ballpark of a million foreigners and massively expanding the U.S. surveillance state. In terms of actual, tangible effects, Trump's first term was bad, but not quite that bad.
OTOH, Trump's first term was marked mostly by failing to do things he tried to do: he's more notable for what he attempted than what he accomplished. And his attempts include things like *checks notes* um...more or less literally trying to destroy the U.S.'s democratic process. The U.S. deciding to roll those dice again just because they didn't quite land on disaster the first time strikes me as unutterably stupid. Now I don't think the man has magically gained a modicum of competence in the past four years, but I DO think his party is more united behind him than it used to be.
So lets call it a 40% chance that he's around as bad as his first term (pretty bad, not catastrophic), a 50% chance that he does similar or slightly worse damage to Bush Jr's two terms and a 10% chance that he causes the implosion the U.S.'s political system in some fashion. Low in an absolute sense, but way, way higher than anyone ought to be comfortable with.
This seems right. As various sycophants have quickly realized -- the latest example being Musk, apparently, who's resided at Mar A Largo for most of the time since Election Day -- you want to be the last person Trump hears from about any given topic.
I don't think the rest of the world would need to do much other than potentially provide weapons and funding to Canadian resistance groups. Controlling and pacifying Canada if they resisted is extremely unlikely to work for 4 reasons.
#1 The US military does not have a history of success against guerilla insurgents.
#2 There is no way to secure the US-Canadian border or prevent movement throughout Canada. Just too big.
#3 Canada is a day's drive from major US cities like New York, Seattle, Boston, Philadelphia, Cleveland. Heck, Detroit and Windsor are separated by a river.
#4 Canadians are far more educated and resourceful than most insurgents the US has fought and that opens up a lot of possibilities. A lot of Canadians have nuclear and biological experience. We we're very scared of Iraq getting a dirty bomb, meanwhile Canada has 19 nuclear reactors.
So don't imagine, like, the US army vs the Iraqi army. Think the US army vs the Iraqi insurgents except they're larger, richer, more advanced, and right next to major American cities. Or just ask the British how that whole Irish thing went down.
I think 4 is actually an argument against 1. Insurgency is actually the biggest problem in underdeveloped, poorly educated, impoverished countries like 60s Vietnam or Afghanistan. The fact that people were spread out in rural areas, jungles, mountains, mostly worked in agriculture (and were thus self sufficient), and poor (meaning lots of young men with nothing to lose willing to die for the cause) made them dangerous. For an industrialized country like Canada, just control over the water supply and power grid give the occupier overwhelming power. Even 1940s Germany was too economically developed for an insurgency to be possible (the nazi government tried and totally failed to incite one).
It seems exceedingly unlikely to me that any first world country nowadays who’s military loses a war will mount a meaningful insurgency.
> Even 1940s Germany was too economically developed for an insurgency to be possible (the nazi government tried and totally failed to incite one).
Well, the Nazi propaganda was running on the Germans being the Herrenrasse who would obviously win against the Untermenschen. They could not very well adapt their ideology after being soundly defeated on the battlefield into being the underdog. The werewolf thing was more of an afterthought, not a long-standing key part of their long-term military strategy. Also, anyone who would volunteer to die for his Vaterland had already had plenty of opportunity to do so in 1945.
Regarding Canada, likely 99% of the people in any western country will not take direct part in any insurgency. However, this still leaves a significant number of people who might leave their ipads behind to join the guerrilla, which will likely enjoy the sympathy of the civilian population.
#5. Canada as a whole is HUGE. While the densely-populated regions are clustered close to the border, there's a staggeringly vast area--much of it extremely rugged--for insurgent groups to hide out in.
Honestly, the US military could probably take all of the relevant areas in a day and simply ignore the rest entirely. Not only are we talking about 95%+ of the population, but also the infrastructure and so forth. The people are so spread out through the remaining areas that they would have trouble organizing anything useful to do against the US. And coming to the larger cities with anything capable of causing harm would be pretty obvious.
And Canada is busy disarming their populous, so it's not like there are thousands of guns and bombs available everywhere. A few guys shooting at US military personnel would register at the level of a normal day in most big cities, especially American cities. We wouldn't notice.
No, the real reason not to invade Canada is because we have no reason to need to. If the US wanted something from Canada, we can just bully and cajole them into giving it to us. I think that's what Trump is doing now. Canada needs so much from the US economically that it cannot withstand sanctions or other intentional efforts from the US. I think Trump is dumb to do so, but he's proving to Trudeau that Canadian leaders do not have the freedom to snobbishly attack American leaders.
The honest truth is if the U.S. did try to invade Canada, I'd place a much higher bet on it causing the collapse of the U.S. as a nation than I would on it establishing any sort of durable U.S. control of Canada. A positively ENORMOUS fraction of the U.S. population would object to that move. I mean: just think about how big the protests were when the war was in a podunk country in Asia that most had never been to. And now one of the most hated presidents in U.S. history tries to invade its friendly neighbor? The reaction would NOT be small.
What's more, that fraction is concentrated in all the wealthiest parts of the country: the parts that fill the coffers that get used to pay for Uncle Sam's military adventures. I'd expect a neverending slough of street protests, general strikes, tax strikes, sit-ins, road blockages and probably no small amount of domestic terrorism. And of course the federal government--headed as it is by a small minded thug--would respond with an absolutely ENORMOUS level of force against its own populous. Which would, of course, just escalate things.
Would Trump's appetite to shoot at his own citizens outlast their appetite to spit in his face? The gods only know. But either way, the final bill would be sky-high and the revenue of the federal government would drop immensely. Maybe the nation would limp out the other side as a unified entity, but I wouldn't bet a lot on it.
I'm sorry, did I imagine that incident where a couple dozen guys with box cutters caused the entire U.S. to collectively lose its shit for a decade or more? Because it sure seems like the threshold for "capable of causing harm" to a level that Americans care about is much, much lower than you seem to think. Like, I certainly don't think hypothetical Canadian insurgent groups could seriously dent the U.S.'s military infrastructure. But I also don't imagine for a second that they'd need to: there are many, many thousands of softer targets--far to many to ever secure--that would serve just as well.
The point of asymmetric warfare isn't to directly damage a country's war-making infrastructure. It's to provoke expensive overreactions. An extremely provokable country led by a perhaps one of the single most fragile egos in history trying to annex a country with thousands of miles of shared border has got to be one of the softest targets any insurgency was ever presented with. And no, I don't particularly think that the military that spend 20 years and two trillion dollars losing to the Taliban would magically become competent enough to deal with that. "Large" and "rich" are not the same thing as "effective," my dear.
"And Canada is busy disarming their populous, so it's not like there are thousands of guns and bombs available everywhere."
Silly rabbit, bombs are everywhere! Modern society does not exactly starve one for explosive material to work with. Meanwhile, contrary to whatever propaganda you've been reading, about a quarter of Canadian households own guns. But of course that proportion is likely to be much higher in rural areas, which are the areas that would be hardest for the U.S. to control.
"If the US wanted something from Canada, we can just bully and cajole them into giving it to us. I think that's what Trump is doing now. "
Well, yes, that's what he's attempting. While it would certainly be better for everyone if he didn't, I can't deny I find it pretty funny how self-satisfied he seems to be at his project of taking a giant sledgehammer to 80 years of accumulated American soft power. When this sort of effort predictably makes America poorer, less respected and less influential, I'm sure his supporters will keep breathlessly insisting that it's all Biden's (who whoever else's) fault.
The pendant in me rather doubts that's true. The blast radius of a nuke may be large compared to conventional explosives, but it's still very, very small compared to the size of a forest. And if you're counting on the fires spreading on their own, I would think napalm would give you much better control for a tiny fraction of the price.
But all that is rendered pretty irrelevant by a more practical concern. You know what a small insurgent group would call provoking a superpower to launch nukes just for a chance of taking them out? Winning. They would call it winning.
Like, nevermind the political fallout (which would doubtless be massive), that sounds like an amazing deal just on a cost basis. Nukes are EXTREMELY expensive. Only in their wildest dreams are any single group of insurgents going to cause damage that comes anywhere close to the cost of one single warhead, nevermind the delivery system, nevermind the cleanup. Most insurgencies would love nothing better than to watch their enemies shoot themselves in the foot that hard.
...I don't see how any of that would be a problem? We already have a ton of nukes just sitting here, gathering dust. It would be a waste not to use them eventually. Cleanup is also unnecessary because we're talking about northern Canada, nobody lives there anyways. Not much harm in razing most of it to the ground. In fact, the mini-nuclear winter would temporarily counteract global warming!
My overwhelming impression from this comment is that you are simply trying to be an edgelord, rather than having an actual conversation. In the event that I'm wrong, I still have to concede that my meager skills at pedagogy aren't equal to the task of correcting the extremely deep and serious faults in your knowledge of the world and ability to reason about it. Either way, the obvious course is to disengage. Good day.
Why would we use force though? It would be much simpler to buy it.
Lets start with Alberta, where the susceptibility to leaving Canada for the US is probably highest. We offer the residents of Alberta a large bribe to become the 51st state (maybe 52nd if Greenland goes first). Now BC is cutoff from the rest of Canada. Probably at this point we can get them for a much smaller bribe, even none at all. At this point likely Quebec is pissed to have been beaten to the door, so we offer them statehood as #54 (55), etc. Divide and conquer, buying one province at a time.
Even assuming for the sake of argument that the people of Alberta have the legal authority to secede from Canada, I'm pretty sure Canadian law prohibits anyone (and especially foreigners) from bribing voters in Canadian elections. So all that bribe money would just be redirected into Ottawa's treasury as soon as it crosses the border.
And if the idea is that Trump would promise to pay the Albertans *after* they secede and join the Union, then A: the Albertans would have to be stupid enough to trust Donald Trump to hold up his end of a deal even without a formal contract to bind him to, and B: Canadian elections are done with secret ballots, so there's no way to know which people Trump is supposed to pay off.
He'd have to promise to pay *everyone* in Alberta, regardless of how they voted. Which means the loyal and/or skeptical ones would all have the option of hedging their bets by voting "No" but still collecting whatever payout Trump actually pays out if their countrymen go with "Yes".
This seems like...well, "wishful thinking" hardly seems like a strong enough term. If I were trying to write a bit of satire to illustrate some of the more common negative stereotypes about Americans--specifically about thinking they're the center of the universe and not understanding how anyone else could POSSIBLY fail to envy them--I think I'd need to make it only slightly more over-the-top than what you've written here.
I do agree that Alberta would probably be the most susceptible to leaving Canada: I think there's some appetite for that among Albertans. If I had to guess how many would up and join Alberta to the U.S. if given the opportunity, I'd say in the 30% range. But my confidence there is very low: it could be in the 60s, it could be in the 10s. So I won't say that "try to get Alberta to join the U.S." is completely ridiculous as a Step 1.
Where I think you start to go off the rails is imagining that a bribe would be of much help in convincing the holdouts. First off, a bribe is only an inducement if you, yourself, expect to benefit from the bribe. So let's say the deal is for a direct cash payment to each and every Albertan. Thought experiment: how big of a bribe would have to be part of the package for you to vote for your state to become part of China or Russia? How about Germany or the UK? Would $1000 do it? How about $5000? Maybe $50,000? I expect for many people there is no practical number high enough. For the remainder, I expect a wide spread, but a lot of people will tend fairly high. Canadians aren't a monolith, but two things you will CERTAINLY find here are people who take pride in being Canadian, and people who take a dim view of the U.S. Irrevocably yoking your future and your children's future to a country you don't care for is gonna be a pretty tough sell. And that's before you get into credibility issues: Trump does not exactly have a great reputation for fairness and honesty in his business deals. How many are going to trust the bribe to actually come through? Once the U.S. has political control of Alberta, why would they need to pay?
But far, far more off-base than that is the notion that BC would fall easily in line after Alberta. Here I can speak with some authority: I'm a BC resident. I live and work surrounded by other BC residents. I don't think there are very many BC residents who would join up with the U.S. for any price. And the idea that peeling off our neighboring province first and using the isolation as economic coercion to fall in line? Here I must suspect you of having a poor understanding of human psychology in-general. You might consider looking up the history of a city called "West Berlin" for a start. Suffice to say that "an authoritarian government has just isolated us, gobbled up our neighbor, and is now pressuring us to allow them to take control" is very much NOT the inducement you think it is.
Eh, none of this is going to happen. But I was trying to spitball potential scenarios and this one seemed less ludicrous than any other that I could think of (or which has been proposed in this thread). I'd give it less than 10^(-2) odds. But I'd give the `invasion / occupation / assimilation' scenario less than 10^(-4) odds, so...
Eh, fair enough. If I were told that four years from now some substantial portion of Canada had joined the U.S. and were trying to imagine the most plausible way that it could happen, probably my first thought would be "some serious outside threat scared Canada into wanting to be more firmly under the U.S. aegis." But that's not something the current admin can really control.
If I were in a think tank tasked with finding the most plausible ways to make it happen, I still don't think anything so direct as bribery would be my go-to. It would have to be some form of information warfare. If the past ten years have taught me anything, its how frighteningly effective various propaganda streams are at turning susceptible peoples' brains into politically-polarized much. My hypothetical think-tank proposal wouldn't even involve spreading pro-U.S. propaganda in Canada, mind you. Rather it would involve finding all the most effective ways at getting some Canadians to hate other Canadians, until some parts of the country absolutely couldn't stand other parts.
Maybe then you start planting seeds about disaffected groups joining the U.S. or even making overt offers. But maybe you don't even need to: if anybody (with the possible exception of Quebec) splits off and becomes independent, ultimately asking for U.S. annexation would be a natural attractor. (Sorta similar to how the U.S. got Texas come to think of it, except the part where a lot of Texans started out as American to begin with.)
There's something I don't have to worry about in the real world, at least. Trump's comments are pretty much the exact opposite of what an admin looking to go that route would want to do.
Alberta seems not a likely choice right now since a born-and-raised Albertan is soon to be elected Canada's Prime Minister, probably with a thumping parliamentary majority. Though in various aspects of worldview he will be more simpatico with the new Trump Administration than the outgoing Canadian PM (the new guy heads the Conservative Party of Canada), he is nevertheless a strongly-nationalistic French-speaking Canadian. His lifelong goal has been to lead and reform his nation not dismember it.
Meanwhile back home in Alberta the voters will have reason to expect some of their grievances with Ottawa to be successfully addressed, presumably taking some air out of secession arguments.
Depending on how things go with the new national government there could be some revival of secession talk in British Columbia, though not with an intention of joining the US.
We obviously shouldn't (and won't) use force, but why buy them?
They'd have the opportunity to move from the country with the ~10th largest economy to number 1. Instead of being a piece of a junior partner of the global hegemon they'd be part of the family.
Albertans alive today have never had a serious opportunity to become part of the US. We should simply give it to them. If Trump wants to Make America Grow Again he should have the State Department spin up groups focusing on a number of countries that craft plans for admission for them and individual provinces / territories within them, then encourage referenda.
It was in the last referedum where the 'ethnic vote' was blamed for keeping Quebec in the country. 1st and 2nd Gen Canadians actually have a more civic 'national' identity then multigenerational Canadians who have a stronger 'regional' identity.
Wait, why? I thought the point was to expand US dominion over the world. They're not going to join willingly; they have their silly nationalistic pride that needs to be beaten out of them. Even if the Albertans were willing to secede, Canada wouldn't let them do that, regardless of what their law supposedly says.
evidence? Canada did allow Quebec a referendum on secession. The pro-secession side lost, rendering the issue moot, but we are postulating that there is a future `Albertan independence' referendum which is won.
The United States is not an imperialistic empire. It had a brief period of imperialism and still has some territories that should quickly be granted independence or statehood.
To your earlier post: it's neither practical or desirable to try to impose America at the point of a JDAM. We aren't a Caliphate. If Albertans, or anyone else, have nationalistic pride and are happy with their current situation no one should force them to leave.
But national feeling changes. Current national borders aren't divinely defined and immutable. The point isn't to extend American dominion over the world: post-WW2 we've shown that can be done pretty effectively without adding more states or through military occupation.
The point is to offer American statehood to those who want it and can be incorporated into the union. Why not give them the opportunity? And yes, I'm fine with Mexico trying to charla suave American states into seceding and joining Mexico, but I do not think they have a compelling offer.
"We have never sought to become a monopoly. Our (national) products are simply so good that no one feels the need to compete with us."
But how does Alberta secede from Canada? They likely don't have that right. Quebec failed to secede. Maybe the US sends troops into Alberta with its encouragement?
Sorta/kinda. There's nothing about that in Canada's written Constitution. In response to a court ruling related to the 1995 Quebec referendum, Parliament in 2000 passed a law laying out some conditions on which the federal government would respect the result of a provincial separation referendum.
Awkwardly (and very Canadian to be honest) the "Clarity Act" fails to state clearly what percentage "yes" vote is necessary for a referendum result to be binding. Most analysts say that something more than 50%+1 would be needed, but that has never yet been tested and unless the province's voters went at least 60-40 "yes" there would be court challenges.
The federal law states that "First Nations/Indigenous People" are required to be "part of" the "negotiations" following a successful referendum result, without specifying either the nature of those negotiations in general or the role/power of First Nations in that process.
There are other mysteries about how the Clarity Act imagines the separation process but you get the overall picture: sorta/kinda.
Ah, but by that point they will be surrounded by America. Independence may not be viable. And if we really need to put the squeeze on, we blockade them. Which, sure, is technically an act of war, but not of the invasion kind. But probably it won't be necessary to actually go that far, the implicit threat, as well as the obvious economic benefits of joining a larger and richer polity which surrounds you, should suffice.
Absent some imminent threat, the President doesn't have unilateral authority to order an invasion. The 2001 Authorization for Use of Military Force doesn't have geographic restrictions and has been interpreted very broadly to provide the basis for a number of interventions. Canada would be too far.
However, as you note this is a fantastical situation so let's handwave that.
It would be extremely difficult for the UK or any other country to directly intervene due to the distances involved and the US Navy's superiority. Yes, they have treaty obligations to do so but those treaties didn't envision one treaty nation invading another. NATO probably just ceases to exist. Maybe - big maybe - they make a formal declaration of war and harass US related shipping but don't go much beyond that. There's also the nuclear option but I don't imagine significant appetite for starting that holocaust.
I'd expect the immediate response would be the UK / EU and other nations cutting off all ties with the US and attempting to make it a pariah. Massive economic damage all around. China would likely hop over to Taiwan while the US is distracted and the world quickly realigns in a multipolar fashion. Good chance of some sort of civil war, active insurgency, and/or political breakup of the US.
ETA: Greenland would be extremely strategically valuable for the US for early warning of RAF operations and to forward deploy air assets to counter them. My God, Trump's fixation on it now makes complete sense. It's all part of his long game.
I'm no lawyer or international relations expert, but I think Article 5 could easily be construed to require other countries to defend Canada if the US invaded:
"The Parties agree that an armed attack against one or more of them in Europe or North America shall be considered an attack against them all and consequently they agree that, if such an armed attack occurs, each of them, in exercise of the right of individual or collective self-defence recognised by Article 51 of the Charter of the United Nations, will assist the Party or Parties so attacked by taking forthwith, individually and in concert with the other Parties, such action as it deems necessary, including the use of armed force, to restore and maintain the security of the North Atlantic area."
As for the original question, I think that if the US invaded Canada, the rest of NATO would defend Canada, at least to some extent. Economically it would be a disaster for everyone involved. Militarily, France, the UK, and the US all have nukes. If they get used, that would obviously be very bad. If they don't get used, the US would almost certainly "win" the war at some point; Canada itself doesn't have a big enough military to withstand an American attack, and the US Navy's aircraft carriers would be too much for the NATO forces to overcome in the Atlantic. But if we couldn't occupy Afghanistan effectively, why would we be able to occupy Canada? If you had a huge number of Canadians who decided that they wanted to be Americans, then it might be different. But I don't think that would be the case in this hypothetical invasion scenario.
No, because "attacks back" is not a concept with any meaning or significance in international law. A attacks B, then A and B are at war and it is expected that warfighting activities may occur anywhere in the combined territory of A and B and generals may but lawyers don't care which way the front is moving.
US attacks Canada, and the remaining NATO members are required to do whatever they would do if the US had attacked *them*. Which is presumably to wage war against the US, including military operations that in a purely tactical sense might be called "attacks".
yeah, the invasion and occupation scenario is obviously dumb. That’s why I was spitballing scenarios whereby Canada might be induced to voluntarily join, for certain values of voluntary.
I suspect it would produce a list of people who think their blogs might be interesting to ACX readers which is exactly what I’d like to see.
I don’t think it would be particularly game worthy in an effort/payoff sort of way if you don’t think your blog would appeal to ACX readers it’s probably not worth the effort.
> I suspect it would produce a list of people who think their blogs might be interesting to ACX readers which is exactly what I’d like to see.
I mean, isn't a proxy for that just clicking on any given commenter here's blog link next to their name?
If they're engaged enough to comment, and particularly if you think their comments are cogent / useful / interesting, seems like a fairly strong and immediately available quality filter.
So I've seen a few intelligent, careful people saying that climate change, while likely bad, is unlikely to be an existential threat to humanity. I'm very much not a climate scientist, but I'm unsure of the reasoning.
When Mt Tambora erupted in 1815, the resultant cooling (about 0.5 degrees Celsius) caused horrific famines and other disasters which killed tens of thousands of people, caused widespread societal and economic upheaval, and just was generally awful, despite the effects mostly only lasting a few months to a few years. Now, that's cooling, not warming, but it seems plausible that the magnitude of the effects would be comparable, if different in type.
Given that, and given even conservative estimates for temperature change put it at 1 to 2 degrees Celsius, and sustained over a much longer period (decades at minimum, centuries not implausible), I genuinely don't understand how that conclusion could be reached? Is warming just different? Is it because it's slower rather than an abrupt shift?
Humans have been endemic to vastly different climate zones from the arctic to the Sahara for centuries, well before the benefits of the admittedly fragile industrial civilization. Wiping out 50% or 90% of them is the easy part, but getting the last nomadic tribe will be next to impossible.
He may have been serious in the 60's and 70's but he's been nothing but an intellectual buffoon for at least the past 15 years. If he's the physical embodiment of anything now it's of self-parody.
Angry isn't serious. There is no tenured professor at a top 20 research university who believes it. And even if there is then that person is outside of the scientific consensus. The median 95% of climate scientists would all agree that it's not an existential threat.
That sounds fine, but there's a bunch of idiots who do, and some of them want to glue themselves to the road or throw soup on a valuable artwork or something, so it's worth taking the time to debunk 'em.
I don't think the serious people believe that global warming will wipe humanity. It's not an ELE. What it could do is collapse our energy dependent civilization and kill a lot of people. But even those worse case outcomes would happen incrementally--food and fuel prices rise, people starve, wars happen, massive population movements occur, and the human population of the planet declines. How fast that would happen depends on details we do not currently understand.
Moreover, all of the remedies I've heard proposed would be as likely to cause upheaval, to that or greater degree, possibly in different sectors of the economy or world at first. With similar levels of uncertainty.
Lowering carbon emissions inevitably manifests as curtailing economic activity. On the personal level, this means not selling as much of your product, whether you're running a fruit stand or a factory. Or a power plant - which means customers are doing without. The secondary effects of this include all sorts of things like having less food on the table, fewer clothes, postponed home repairs, unemployment, and freezing in the reduced-emissions-enforced winter.
Hopefully the drawbacks of these effects are evident.
If you are claiming that any curtailing of economic activity will have as severe an impact as runaway global warming, I find that so counter-intuitive that I have to ask you to cite research in support of that.
I'm not really talking about runaway global warming, as I believe that is not as credible as the global warming predicted in publications such as IPCC reports.
When it comes to predicted global warming, the evidence doesn't suggest strongly whether it's better or worse than the economic curtailment required to prevent it. It has been harder than it should be to collect evidence that curtailment is worse, since the act of collecting it or even advocating for collecting it as been, for ideological reasons, historically less likely to get financial and academic support than the act of collecting evidence that it is preferable.
To get started, you could consult David Friedman's articles on the matter.
My primary reasoning is that if we check global temperatures through longer eras (going back thousands, hundreds of thousands, and millions of years) we can see much larger differences compared to what is being discussed today, and yet Earth was still very much a planet full of life. During warmer periods, even more so!
I know that this shows that today temperature rose in a century way more than in this period at any time, but I am linking it first just so it is apparent that even before large scale use of fossil fuels, 0.2-0.3 degrees Celsius change in a couple of decades was not that uncommon.
This implies that in that period there were several cases when average temperature was 10 degrees Celsius lower or 2 degrees Celsius higher than what is today.
3. Chart for past 500 000 000 years (this is actually the combination of multiple methods/charts):
What I would like to highlight here is the green part between ~ 7 million and 60 million years ago.
Through this period average temperature was always higher by at least two degrees Celsius than currently, and during the Eocene period (33.9 million to 56 million years ago) it was 6 to 14 degrees Celsius higher.
"During the early-middle Eocene, forests covered most of the Earth including the poles. Tropical forests extended across much of modern Africa, South America, Central America, India, South-east Asia and China. Paratropical forests grew over North America, Europe and Russia, with broad-leafed evergreen and broad-leafed deciduous forests at higher latitudes."
So actually it was way more friendly towards plant life.
Likely higher temperatures may increase crops yields and even human welfare, if we can magically ignore the effect of change itself.
That being said, as some people pointed out, the main question is the speed of change, as that can still make this an issue.
I think that apart from the natural environment what influences human welfare is "capital", in the broadest sense. This includes infrastructure, all kinds of equipment, but even culture, training and customs.
There is a natural degradation of "capital" (infrastructure crumbles, people grow old, etc), and there is a replacement process (maintenance, training, etc) that allows us to maintain civilization. If the change is gradual enough that this natural replacement can take care of it, than capital does not shrink and welfare remains high. E.g., newer houses, buildings will gradually be more optimized for higher temperature, people will wear different clothing and behave accordingly without consciously noticing cultural change, etc.
If it is faster than this, that would require more investment, so people would need to drop living standards.
Even this negative case can have large ranges, from a bit slower gdp growth to long term economic upheaval.
However, for massive global famine I think some major global change would be necessary, that would destroy most crops within a year, or that would somehow trigger a swift cooldown (at least locally), kind of as in "The Day After Tomorrow". However, I don't see this one likely, as far as I know the consensus is against it, and I don't think that there is any precedent for this save for vulcano eruptions or asteroid impacts.
Regarding your particular example about Tambora, I think the main issue there was not really the "global temperature" directly, but that it created a permanent fog, that also blocked sunlight. To quote wikipedia ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1815_eruption_of_Mount_Tambora ):
"In the northern spring and summer of 1815, a persistent "dry fog" was observed in the northeastern United States. The fog reddened and dimmed the sunlight, such that sunspots were visible to the naked eye."
As a sideffect, this decreased temperature, but I think the lower amount of sunshine was even more important than the pure temperature change. I think the distribution of this was also more local, not sure how much the southern hemisphere got from this. So likely the territories with most agricultural issues had much lower average temperature than what the global value implies here.
A note: it's true (with the caveat about change rate that you already note) that, overall, an Eocene- or Cretaceous-style hothouse would be good for global biodiversity and biomass. But it would be much less good for the specific configuration of biodiversity and biomass we have right now, which evolved in icehouse conditions. For one, the breadbaskets of the world wouldn't be such in Eocene climate. The grassy plants from which most of the global food supply depends evolved relatively recently in temperate, highly seasonal, low-CO2 conditions. And of course during most of the Cretaceous, the middle third of North America was under water.
OTOH, we'd have decades or more to adapt to this. Also, at least some of the staple crops would do better in high CO2 than at current levels, and AIUI there is research being done regarding others. There's a high chance we'll have more food than now for the same resources as a consequence, and what upheaval occurs would be in the form of farmers and their suppliers having to find new work or new markets.
I admit I'm mostly going by half-remembered stuff right now, but IIRC CO2 fertilization helps with carbohydrates, but not so much with proteins and other nutrients; and I strongly doubt it's enough to offset losses of cropland to drought (of course the rain will still fall elsewhere, but farmland isn't something you move around quickly or easily) and sea level rise (which is going to be significant only on river deltas and some coastal lowlands, but those are some of the most intensely farmed and inhabited areas around).
The rationalists who say "not an existential threat" mean "it will not kill literally every single person in the world". This is true for most models of climate change. Plus, the lesswrong crowd tends to believe that an artificial superintelligence will be built soon, and will either destroy the world or solve climate change. One way or the other, nothing to worry about.
Historically, warm years were good and cold years were bad. To a degree, they still are. But there's a limit to how warm we want it, and climate change is rapidly getting there.
It's worth noting that they say "global catastrophic risk" for things that don't put the continued existence of human civilisation at risk but are still, well, catastrophic.
Global warming will probably kill more people via heat-related deaths than are dying now, but a Lancet study found cold-related deaths outnumber heat deaths by 17 to 1. So, fewer peeps will be dying from cold-related deaths. Higher CO levels are creating a greening effect worldwide, so despite the fears of famine due to climate change, crop plants are becoming more productive. Please note: angiosperms appeared and evolved during periods when global CO2 levels were 4x-5x higher than they are now. The Antarctic ice sheet didn't begin form until atmospheric CO2 levels dropped to about 1200-1400 ppm (compared to ~280 ppm pre-industrial levels, and ~420 ppm today)—and global avg temps were about 4 degrees C higher than they are today. Yes, Gen Z +3 to +6 will have to worry about sea-level rise. But it should be slow enough to create mitigations for coastal urban areas (a la the Netherlands). I doubt if GW will have a significant impact on human populations (at least compared to other potential issues). Overall, long term, it would be great if CO2 levels were high enough to get us out of the glaciation cycles that have characterized the late Pleistocene (each cycle lasting roughly a 100Ky).
Without due respect to Scott, the data doesn't seem to support this thesis. This study of cold and heat deaths in European countries shows that, overall, cold deaths far outweigh heat deaths. But cold deaths are higher in Eastern European countries on a north-south axis — and they're also super high in the UK for some reason. Heat deaths are highest in Italy, Bulgaria, and Romania, with some hotspots in interior Spain. (Link below)
It's worth noting that some major civilization collapses happened during cooling periods. After the Minoan Warm Period, Bronze Age civilizations collapsed. Western Roman civilization collapsed at the end of the Roman Warm Period. And the Bubonic plague wiped out about a third of Europe's population a couple of decades after the Little Ice Age began. Likewise, the Little Ice Age impacted food production all across northern Europe, which caused periodic famines for three centuries.
Heat and Cold mortality for urban areas across Europe...
It's more like "It will not end life as we know it." If a threat were to kill all people but one, or wipe out technological progress, rationalists would also call that an existential threat.
I would only call that an x-risk if there are reasons to believe that civilization will not be reinvented after a few millennia. One can make such arguments (depleted fossil fuels which would be required to bootstrap industry, for example), but I would treat loss of industrialization as a threat of x-risk, not as x-risk itself.
There's a not dissimilar rationalist trope around the idea that nuclear war wouldn't be an "existential threat", because human beings would continue to exist (and civilisation might survive in, say, Chile and could be rebuilt elsewhere, perhaps with humanity having learned lessons). Feels like something that is at the same time technically true, but fuelling possible insanity.
I think that it is important to stick to stuff which is true on an object level ('technically true') and not to go into hyperbole to signal tribe membership.
If someone is about to jump out of a window on the fourth floor, the true thing to say to them is "that is a stupid thing to do. You will likely injure yourself severely and might actually die". If you are telling them instead "this is a terrible idea, you are sure to die and will kill at least four passer-bys when you hit them", that is bad. Once you have told that little noble lie, the truth is forever your enemy, and the pro-window-jumping people will easily show you for a fool in any remotely fair debate. Also, what will you then tell the person debating if they should escape the fire by jumping from the eighth floor or the forth? Double down: "if you fall from the eighth floor, you will be super-duper-dead and cause a crater which will kill everything within half a kilometer"?
I do not think that LW is full of people going "climate change: not an issue" or "nuclear war: not an x-risk, but a fun group activity" regularly -- just because something is not maximally bad, it does not mean that you endorse it.
We aren’t living in 1815 anymore. Cooling is worse than heating in most cases. The existential threat isn’t really claimed by the climate scientists either, although they tend to obfuscate the number of years it takes for sea level rise.
The people talking about "existential threat" seem to have tacked on the modifier because it sounds cool, without giving any thought to what a high bar they're setting for themselves.
Partly because we can more effectively adapt to the coming changes because they're coming slowly,
Partly because, while we almost certainly won't be able to reverse the effects of climate change in my lifetime, current models look like we'll avoid runaway effects and we can hopefully get our shit together enough to make the rate of change near 0 in my lifetime
Partly because one of the big worries with the fast rate of change was ecological catastrophes as existing biomes failed to adapt to new conditions, which would have impacted human life indirectly. If the rate of change is slower, there will be more room for adaptation and the ecological consequences will be less severe.
Cooling is worse than warming, in large part because we're still in an ice age (we're closer to the planet being too cold to survive than being too warm to survive, basically).
The modern world is better at adapting to changing conditions than the ancient world.
(There's other stuff, but I think this covers the material in your comment.)
Rate matters. People are very good at accommodating changes that happen at the multi generational timescale. Not so much "no crops this year." Especially since back then, the survival margins were much tighter. Now we have much more of a safety blanket. Especially since the changes (were and are expected to be) unevenly spread. So the places less hard hit can help the ones harder hit. That wasn't really the case in 1815.
Recently I outlined for myself a ten-part (?) series on everything I know about web + app development. My original idea was to make it a blog post series. After outlining it I'm not so sure. Perhaps readers would absorb it better if it was a course, or textbook, or YouTube video playlist, or what-have-you. What do y'all think?
(I haven't written out the entire thing yet, as it seems like it would be a LOT of work and I'm not sure what benefits would accrue to me or my readers if I were to do it.)
Perfect is the enemy of good. If you've written something out, it's probably relatively easy to convert to a blog post. Not so for Youtube videos, a course, or textbook.
Unless you're someone who has some particular authority in the field, or your series is extremely useful to people who are able to find your work, few people will read it. That's ok though, as the exercise should be for your own benefit, with other readers as a bonus.
I don't want to dissuade you too much, because this sounds like something that could be good for your personal development. However, I understand that you are an undergraduate student? Consider the possibility you may be overestimating the utility that you can provide as someone without significant professional experience in this field.
What about a blog with some straightforward practice problems or questions threaded through it, and maybe a couple of really tough ones at the end of each post? People could discuss how to do the problems in comments. You could post occasionally in comments giving answers or advice or congratulations. Maybe give prizes (free subscription?) to the first to post a solution to one of the tough puzzles. (So now I'm moving into ideas of ways to build up number of subscribers.) Maybe sprinkle in some other stuff in between the lessons -- a few posts about where web & app etc. development is heading, or funny stories about legendary fuck-ups or genius solutions or odd corners of that professional world. (What's the creepiest underground app you ever heard tell of?) Maybe an occasional contest for readers? You name some odd constraints, ask how you could do X with those constrains. Group could select best answer by vote.
I absolutely hate instruction delivered via video. I'm always looking up how to do things in Photoshop, and hunting for the one site that just answers my question with some prose and one screen shot. I get the info way faster that way, and if I forget something I can quickly find it again by skimming the written answer. Searching a video for that one part where they show how to access feature X is infuriating. However, most Photoshop how-to's are videos, so it may be that most prefer that modality.
Also, making a video series adds all these complications. You have to think about how the room looks, and how you look. You have to be personable. If you trip over your words you have to reshoot that section.
I think there is a fundamental difference between tutorials about how to use a Software and how to build software.
When the resulting code o the tutorial is published I can work my way back to fill gaps that the author willingly or unwillingly left out or knowledge gaps that I have but the target audience of the tutorial doesn’t have.
For a software like photoshop I stumbled a lot on tutorials where a important step was left out and I couldn’t figure out what they did because I can’t work my way back from the end result. In a video I can just skip back to the part and follow step by step.
I don't build software, but see what you mean. Actually these days when I google Photoshop questions the Google AI gives me the answer as a list of bullet points, and so far those have turned out to be clear and accurate.
I do pretty well with blog posts, especially if they include practical interludes/exercises along the way. That would probably be harder with a video playlist. Even if there are aspects which benefit greatly from demonstrating them in video instead of static images or text, still probably better to embed those in a blog.
From there, not clear on what the practical difference is between a blog and a textbook, unless you plan to get it all printed and bound. Unless you a mean a hypertext textbook on a dedicated site, which I think would be better unless you benefit from linking sections of the textbook to preexisting blog posts.
As for a course, maybe? Can be beneficial if you can make those practical interludes fully interactive. But I expect it would be a great deal more work than just a blog/textbook.
All in all:
Dedicated textbook > blog post > course > video series
How exactly does one lobby their local legislators? I know that at the federal level, multi billion dollar organizations do all sorts of crazy things that the average human can never do, but assuming you're a moderately wealthy individual with a good savings and a high paying job and you wanted to propose adopting a law or a legislative reform for your local City/State, how would you go about doing so?
Sure you can always call them up and leave a message, but i assume that's leaving something on the table. What would you do if you had 50k at your disposal? 100k? How can money actually be used to improve your outcome?
Figure out what you want to say, condense it to the level of an elevator pitch but with backup material at the ready, call the local legislator's office, ask them which staffer is handling [topic] this week, and if they're not too busy at that moment, make your pitch.
Or, write a letter to the legislator; their office will send it to the right staffer and you can go into a bit more depth in text. Offer to discuss the matter further.
For all but the biggest issues, it isn't necessary to offer bribes or campaign contributions, or establish yourself as the spokesman for #movement with bignum registered voters. Legislators get surprisingly little feedback from the public on secondary issues, and they know that for every person who actually picks up a phone there will be many more who feel the same way but didn't bother to call. And, perhaps more importantly, the staffer in charge of [topic] is not actually an expert on [topic], he's almost certainly overworked, in over his head, and trying to figure it out with basically Wikipedia and a bunch of slick glossies produced by the relevant industry organization or whatever. They'll probably *want* to talk to someone who knows the subject but isn't captured by the industry.
If you've got money to throw at the problem, you can use it to hire people who are either better than you at cold-calling politicians, or can do the background research to fine-tune your pitch and identify the proper targets. But check with a lawyer, because when money starts changing hands in this sort of thing, the law is particular about how that should be done.
Cant say I recemend it doing that solo; realistically:
1. you maintain a list of every method of commutation they publish
2. wait till these methods change so you get spooky and hard to block methods
3. wait for a news story
4. spread the info, write variants of the messages, simple talking points, make graphs with any data, pictures for any concept, pay professional protesters to hold signs you designed
5. gaslight gaslight gaslight that theres an angery mob at thier door or at least you have some influence over said mob
Politicians pay attention to crowds, so you lobby local legislation by lobbying the people who vote for them. If you have a high-paying job, you presumably have people who respect your opinion on things, so start by convincing them, and then convince their friends, and repeat until someone's friends with the legislators.
> What would you do if you had 50k at your disposal? 100k? How can money actually be used to improve your outcome?
I'm interested in this too.
I think it depends on your level of commitment, but Zvi famously founded Balsa to do exactly this at the federal level, and I believe he even got outside funding, and has hired two people for it (maybe more by now). Currently they're tackling the Jones Act, which is 100% a giant boondoggle that should be eliminated (in my own opinion).
So I've answered the ACX survey and am curious about the last question. I feel (rot13) that zl nafjre qrcraqf urnivyl ba gur ahzoref vaibyirq, abg whfg bhg bs cevapvcyr ba n "uvture rkcrpgngvba if thnenagrrq erghea" qvpubgbzl. Jvgu qvssrerag ahzoref (fvapr V ernq nobhg n fvzvyne ulcbgurgvpny n juvyr ntb), zl nafjre jbhyq qrsvavgryl punatr.
So I wonder if I'm isolated in my outlook, and what the point of the question is...
That your answer should change if the numbers are different is normal and healthy. If you are a median income American, and the question is about one measly dollar versus ten, then you want to take the gamble.
If the question is about one billion dollar versus a chance at ten, then only SBF (and perhaps a few big-thinking honest EA people who believe that their cause areas will scale linearly) would take the gamble. Everyone else would be "there is little difference to my utility function between 1G$ and 10G$, why should I risk anything?"
Where exactly the cross-over point is depends on the risk tolerance of a person, and their current circumstances. Perhaps one person owns a broken car which could be fixed up for 500$, while another would need 5k$ to by a decent used car.
Formally, there is the Kelly criterion, which tells you how much of your net worth you should be willing to put into a gamble where you have an edge at most.
Unless I’m mistaken, the Kelly criterion applies for repeated independent bets, no? This is just one thing (and also, there’s no downside in the survey question).
I’m reassured that I’m not crazy for thinking the correct strategy depends on the number involved. But then what’s the point of asking the question for a single pair of numbers? Is it to determine the “strategy boundary” in another way, depending on (say) the person’s income?
The standard model of someone following Kelly would be a gambler who has the opportunity to make a limited amount of gambles in which they have some edge, can decide how much to bet in each gamble, and tries to get rich. (I think that they instrumentally value their money logarithmically in the middle of their gambling run is kind of intrinsic, even if their end goal was "earn at least one million", under certain assumptions.)
In my model of humans, we are making financial decisions under uncertainty all the time. Big ones, like what profession to take and how to invest money for old age, but also smaller ones such as what forms of insurance to take, how often to go to medical checkups, how much food to stockpile to be prepared for disaster down to tiny ones like if you should fill up your gas tank right now or wait and see if you find a better gas station in a few days.
Even humans who don't see themselves as gamblers are regularly betting on the rare bad outcome not happening as to spend arbitrary amounts to negate the tiniest risk is not compatible with life. (Last month, there was a lesswrong article published on using Kelly to determine if insurance is worth it, https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/wf4jkt4vRH7kC2jCy/when-is-insurance-worth-it )
So with the understanding that humans are not perfectly in the situation of that gambler (for example, they can recover from going to a balance of zero by means of paid work), we can nevertheless use Kelly as a baseline. Most people are more risk-adverse than the Kelly criterion, which is fine.
The fact that there is no (absolute) downside is largely irrelevant. As long as you have two strategies, and the riskier one has the higher expected payoff, you can apply Kelly to it.
Did Scott ask us for the income bracket, again? Without it, I think the data will not make very much sense.
(aside: dear anyone reading this from the Substack crew, could we please have spoiler tags? Web 1.0 forums in the 90s already had those, without suffering from the performance problems Substack has; reinventing wheels should result in better, not worse, wheels!)
Could someone post a reminder of what the question was? I, for one, did the survey long enough ago that I remember approximately none of the specific questions, only some of the broad subjects covered...
The question was (rot13): juvpu jbhyq lbh pubbfr orgjrra n pregnvagl bs svir uhaqerq qbyynef be n bar-va-fvk (nf va, ebyy n fgnaqneq qvpr) punapr bs trggvat svir gubhfnaq qbyynef?
I think you should try never to hate anyone, it isn't a healthy mindset. Mind, you may not be able to *help* hating someone, but that's a different issue.
Slavery is based on violence, so without violence we would all be free.
As for hate being long term anger, that's like saying war is just an extreme form of sports. We aren't meant to exist in extreme states long term--it is progressively damaging to the brain.
Trump celebrated Justin Trudeau resigning by jesting on Truth Social about US / Canada merging, referencing its longstanding informal status as the 51st state.
Actually making Canada the 51st state is, of course, absurd; it would need to be divided into more than one state. They could either follow their current provincial boundaries or draw new ones. I leave that to our future fellow Americans to determine.
The path to the promised land of one billion Americans has always, to me, seemed to more logically to route through more and more places deciding to become American rather than through open borders. We should actively encourage it. Federalism would get a big boost, the people whose fortunes depend so heavily on US elections without getting a say would finally receive representation, those suffering in nations with poor institutions would get an instant upgrade, and the Jones Act would make a lot more sense once South Korea joins up.
Non-Americans: if your country held a referendum, would you vote to join the Freedom Fest?
Americans: which country would be your top pick for the new dream team? I think Australia would be my number one.
I would vote against, as I think having more sovereigns is preferable because (1) competition is good for consumers & (2) concentrating more power into one institution seems like it would lead to dangerous fragility. For the same reason, I think it would be good if the US would split up.
I would, however, vote in favour of allowing the US to join the EEA, the Schengen agreement and such, because, again, competition is good for consumers.
As an Australian, I don't know that I have the words to emphasise how much Australian's do not want to be part of the US.
When US affairs are brought up in casual conversation here it is almost always followed by some form of "aren't we lucky we don't live there?". Australians see the US as a cautionary tale of how our country could go wrong if we're not careful. Specifically in regards to healthcare, gun control, homelessness, political discourse, internal divisions, and more.
Australians, like every other country in the world, also have national pride, and would like to stay as Australians.
I'll answer as both an American and a non-America: I'm a U.S.-Canadian dual citizen. I grew up in the U.S. and moved to Canada a few years ago.
Would I vote to join the U.S.? Emphatically no. I left for many reasons, and the U.S. has certainly not improved as a nation in the time since.
What country would be my top pick? None. The U.S. as-is has and causes quite enough troubles, thank you. I think its political system is rather badly showing its age, and the country is (unfortunately) probably too far-gone to course-correct before the wheels fall off. I'm really not sure why a country who just re-elected a president partially on a platform of nativism and xenophobia would be eager to add a bunch of foreigners to its citizen body anyhow. Why not worry about giving Puerto Ricans their (long overdue) statehood so they can actually have a voice in your system before looking for more colonies to add to your collection?
You're saying we have to remove some items from our collection before we add more? Do we have a lack of room for more?
Our collection is incomplete! We need more variety. We already have Alaska as a state, but not as a colony, so adding "frozen tundra" variety of colony to our collection will increase its diversity.
> add a bunch of foreigners to its citizen body anyhow
They're barely even foreigners, they're basically Americans under a different name. Hell, Canada is whiter than the US! We would effectively decrease the portion of "foreigners" in the country.
"Foreigners" is not actually a euphemism for "colored people" here. It literally means "people from a foreign country." Which in this context all countries not the U.S. are, by definition.
How much does that matter to the nativists and xenophobes currently steering U.S. politics? I honestly don't know. THEY tend to insist loudly and often that they aren't racist, so taking them at their word it would matter quite a lot. Even not taking them at their word, there seems to be *rather a lot* of explicitly "America uber alles" discourse in U.S. politics, rather more than their is racially charged rhetoric (from the right anyway). So I would tend to think that yes, for many members of the U.S. nativist movement, the fact that any additions were foreign and from a foreign culture *would* weigh more heavily than the fact that many of them were white. That you, personally, regard race as the most salient feature any person can have, or consider people from various neighbor countries as "basically Americans" isn't really germane to how they see themselves or how your countrymen see them.
...It's always about race. Always. Humans are tribalistic by nature, after all. Let's face it, can you truly accept that a man named "Shamsud-Din Bahar Jabbar" is just as American as your run-of-the-mill white Christian? Of course not. In the back of your mind, you understand that this man is an "other", regardless of his origins. A lot of people are tired of pretending otherwise. They want to make America American again. And now they have a chance to make that dream a reality.
" In the back of your mind, you understand that this man is an "other", regardless of his origins."
I understand nothing of the sort. You are, of course, free to shout your own racism and bile and hatred of others to the heavens, but I decline to share in it. I'd happily share a meal and a pleasant conversation with your Shamsud-Din Bahar Jabbar, and just as happily spit directly in the face of anybody who interrupted us spouting the things you're saying.
Those of us who have actually cracked a history book in our lives well understand how toxic and corrosive the substances you trade in are. How deeply they poison the minds of those groups that imbibe them. Looking at your movement from the outside, it is impossible not to see just how badly this has warped its view of reality, how utterly off the rails it is. The only question that remains is how many other people y'all will take with you when you go the way that every other of cluster ethnonationalist degenerates has before you.
Look, I'm not the one calling the shots here. I have no stake in this other than entertainment. But you also have to realize that the "ethnonationalist degenerates" you speak of have been in power for almost all of human history, in almost every nation on Earth. Humanity has always been like this, and will always be like this. The last century has been an aberration spurred by unnatural growth, but it will not last. The world is returning to the way it was... and none of us can stop that.
Are you thinking of a division of California that (1) isn't "absurd" and (2) makes geographic sense? The rural north would be happy to break away, but I don't think that would meaningfully affect the population of California. You could try to play up the division between "Southern California" (LA) and "Northern California" (San Francisco), but they don't really have political differences.
I understand the inland is politically different from the coast, but I don't know how non-absurd people would find that kind of a division.
Break it apart algorithmically into four maximally compact chunks each with one quarter of the population. They'll probably be wacky shapes and Los Angeles will probably be split between two states but that's fine, lots of other metro areas are split across multiple states too.
If by "Los Angeles" you mean Los Angeles *county*, then yes, that's actually pretty reasonable. LA County is a giant kludge.
But I'd expect that in SoCal the result would be a coastal Blue State that gets maybe 70% of LA County's land area but 95% of its population (and a whole lot of coast beyond that), and an inland Red State that includes the northern fringes of Los Angeles (plus bigger chunks of e.g. Riverside and San Bernardino counties, and almost everything from there to the NV/AZ border).
The reality here is that there is exactly zero constituency in the US for bringing in *more* Americans. America is supposed to be an exclusive club that only the most deserving can join. MAGA is convinced that they aren't making as much money as their parents did at the same jobs because immigrants came in and offered to do the work for less. If anything, Americans want their country to become smaller, not larger (provided their part keeps all the wealth).
...That would be solved before they are fully incorporated as a state.
Besides, the US isn't a democracy, it's a republic. Even current Americans aren't meaningfully represented, so no reason why we couldn't make sure the same was true for future states.
The simplest reason why they'd have to make it multiple states would be that it would be hella stupid looking to have Alaska, a humongous Canadian state, and then 48 comparatively tiny states below it.
Great idea, and one I'd be fine spending significant tax dollars to achieve.
The question isn't who's willing to join, but who's willing to integrate. Anglo-countries like Canada, and countries with small populations (Greenland) would be much easier than say, Mexico. If the country doesn't maintain some sense of national identity through its expansion, then I'd be afraid we were setting ourselves up for Civil War 2.0, where the interests of different people's diverged so much, that either winning politician would be unacceptable to the other side (Trump and Biden are almost laughably similar when it comes to policy. The practical differences are minor.)
The only way to compete against China long-term is our own 1B+ population Imperial sphere. Open borders are likely not the way to do that - that just gets you India in North America - rich city centers surrounded by endless slums. Unlikely this how you actually compete.
The best move is to integrate Anglosphere, the EU, Japan, SK, Taiwan, and maybe Mexico / Cuba / Singapore into essentially an "American Union" - think EU but even more Federal. EU if it was *only* the common market and Schengen area.
Break off Russia from the Chinese bloc - maybe even let them join ours (so long as they allow Pride parades for Moscow's EHC) and its checkmate.
In other word - why break off Greenland from Denmark? Wouldn't you want Denmark too?
This is a fantastic question because it nails a certain viewpoint that I see expressed often, but not explicitly. Humans as useless resource drains? For what? Where would the resources go otherwise? What resources are you even talking about?
This assumes a world where there's some small cabal that controls the AI, and for some reason decides to just kill everyone (because they need all this grain and land for themselves...why?), or the AI goes paperclippy and turns the whole observable universe into computronium. It's not obvious to me that either scenario is particularly coherent. Especially because, if you ARE in the AI cabal - you want these people around! Kill all the peasants, and your relative status drops like a stone - if anything, they'd want to *maximize* the peasant population (again...humans are fairly cheap) so as to create a slave class to lord over. You could argue they'd use humanoid robot slaves, but we're not wired that way - we prefer the real deal.
It doesn't assume a small cabal that controls the AI--AIs could be in control by themselves. Presumably, they'd have no interest in social status, so humans would have no value in that regard.
And expressing puzzlement at what AIs would use their resources for and what their economy would be based on is just like a Homo erectus not understanding why Homo sapiens aren't content to have an economy that is solely about trading food. Homo erectus couldn't imagine shiny rock jewelry, clothes, or ceramic pots, nor understand how they could have value and even lead to trade relationships based solely on their exchange (no food involved). And yet, an economy created by more advanced life forms (Homo sapiens) arose anyway.
Fair point. I doubt AI will ever become sovereign, but lots of smart people disagree with me. In any case, if AI attains sovereignty there's no sense having this conversation about Greenland at all lol.
Feasibility. A plan involving integrating the entire EU into a North American bloc is far more difficult, time consuming, and unlikely, then one involving the integration of 50,000 Greenlanders. One involves synergizing national interests and cultural norms that currently are extremely different on some key issues, with the comparable populations to actually force compromise, the other involves some intelligent and practical diplomacy, with relatively easy integration. 0.1% of US GDP could give every Greenlander 20x their yearly income, and even minor immigration for mining, vacations, etc. would be enough to bring them into the a
Think Alaska purchase vs. Polish Lithuania Commonwealth. One has a clear path to success, the other is a grand imperial project that risks serious internal division.
I'm not saying we shouldn't buy Greenland, just that it's thinking too small.
The EU would be good, but may make more sense as a separate bloc. The Anglosphere and American East Asia (Japan, SK, Taiwan) is where you'd want to start regardless.
The same reason we wanted Alaska, which is now so profitable there are no state income taxes and the government issues a dividend to its citizens just for being there.
Purchasing Alaska for almost nothing was extremely controversial a few hundred years ago, but now it's proven to be one of the highest ROI land purchases in human history, besides perhaps the Louisiana purchase.
Greenland is #1 not necessarily for its importance, but for its feasibility. Denmark has acknowledged the Greenland right to vote for independence, which already has support among much of the Greenlandish population. A simple agreement for a $1 Million direct cash transfer from the US to every person in Greenland if they vote for independence could be arranged (Only $55 Billion Dollars!) plus another million for acceptance of territory status after independence would be achievable.
If this isn't politically practical with Denmark (who cares about their opinion anyways) due to accusations of foreign interference with the Greenland independence referendum (true), then maybe something more subtle can be done, like a pending US investment totaling billions, but it's being "held up" by Denmark for arbitrary reasons.
Adopt the metric system, fix the healthcare system at least to the point that it's not the number one cause of bankruptcy and (distant third) do something about the bizarre electoral college system and I'm sure myself and my countrymen would dive right in.
Where are you getting that from? I've seen multiple sources that say that it is, and even more sources that cite a 40% figure. So even if it's not a majority all on its own, then it's a plurality.
Canadian here: there are a lot of pros, but the healthcare and guns are just such massive, massive cons that they might outweigh everything else. There could probably be a way to have the provinces retain healthcare but the issue would become one of strong negative selection (i.e. how to prevent a flood of Americans who need healthcare from going to Canada), which could probably be solved with a sort of regional identity scheme.
Canadian here: there are a lot of pros, but the healthcare and guns are just such massive, massive cons that they might outweigh everything else. There could probably be a way to have the provinces retain healthcare but the issue would become one of strong negative selection (i.e. how to prevent a flood of Americans who need healthcare from going to Canada), which could probably be solved with a sort of regional identity scheme.
As someone living in a country that has better institutions than the US - made possible by an overall political zeitgeist that is at least somewhat accepting of the possibility that government need not be utterly dysfunctional and can in fact be a force for making life better and not worse - I wouldn't want to become a US state or in any other way tie our politics any closer to those of the US than they already are.
That said, I've always been an advocate of open borders. I think the Schengen area is a wonderful thing; enlarging that and/or having the US start its own equivalent would both be good IMO. All the same reasons that make free markets the best way we know of to drive decisions about all sorts of other aspects of life also remain true for political choices, government policies and legislation; but those markets are only free to the extent that people can move between providers of those things.
I would definitely vote to become a US state. It would guarantee faster growing economy, more option to move to other US states etc. More security guarantees, more democracy. What are good reasons to vote against?
As an American, I do like my country, but, if I was you, I'd be very worried about numerous disruptive, violent elements encouraged by the American left expanding to the Canadian territory. Think the likes of BLM burning down downtowns anytime a policeman shoots a violent criminal who happens to be black, or all the gangs and potential terrorists allowed into the US through the open southern border in the past 4 years. I'm sure that the people who engineered all this aren't anywhere done.
EDIT: Oops, I assumed you were Canadian. I'm not sure how it would work with a country not adjacent to the US, but I'd still be worried.
Nationalistic people tend to overestimate their own countries. My view is simply economic, if the US has better economy then it makes sense to join it.
I am in the UK now. Its economy is lagging and it would be much better to join the US, at least in some status, like the EU, to improve the economy. Of course, having no shared border would make it impractical. I wonder if Brexit was because the EU was lagging economically and British people lost faith in it.
As for gangs, I guess the UK has its own share. The fully open borders with the US states would make no difference.
I'm sure you realize that the fact that we voted for them to be dealt with by far doesn't mean they are done. The organizers didn't exactly throw in the towel and offer an olive branch, and neither did they move to Canada or Europe.
No, I'm quite sure there's going to be more. There will be much more pushback this time, but it's a good question how well that would work.
As an Australian: aw, thanks! In various ways we are already kind of like a distant American state - I agree with your line about “people with fortunes who depend on US elections getting representation.”
Would I vote to join America? I realise this is kind of a non-answer but it depends on implementation. Things I would love: lower taxes, access to American companies and the American enterprising spirit, full diplomatic support against the gradual encroachment of China. Things I would not love: having to work in broken American health care system with its bizarre way of tying health insurance to employment. Second Amendment might be an issue too.
Not just from your comment, but it's surprising to me how strong the negative reaction is to the 2nd Amendment / guns. The healthcare system I expected as a sticking point but not the guns specifically.
> full diplomatic support against the gradual encroachment of China.
After the Five Eyes countries (and Mexico, I think it should be in the first tranche) we should prioritize convincing as much of Micronesia as possible to join and convert US territories in the area to states; Japan (we wrote their Constitution, should be easy enough) and South Korea would also be fast followers.
Depending on how quickly we're ready to start integrating larger, lower income nations the Philippines could be next. Overall a hefty counterweight to China.
Take note, Obama: that's how you do a pivot to the Pacific.
Another Australian here. I think a lot of Australians see the violence generated by, well, your culture (this is a ridiculous over-simplification of course) and blame it on easy availablity of the tools used to express it. Of course the Australian experience with gun control (very successful at preventing mass shootings since the Port Arthur shootings that prompted it) pushes us to think that way, but I think we discount that you just have a way more violent culture and it's not guns or movies or video games that drive the violence.
Wasting Australia still way less violent before said mass shootings? I think every statistical analysis I’ve seen done - including a meta-analysis by the Brookings Institure - has found that most of the differential between the US and other 1st world countries probably isn’t attributable to guns.
Australia was definitely less violent than the USA before those shootings, and I'm certainly not saying that gun control is the cause of that - I'm saying the opposite. But I think it's also true that gun control in Australia has likely reduced the already lower incidence of mass shootings, especially that category of shooting that isn't simply a gang incident, murder/suicide or suicide-by-cop but is a genuine attempt to kill a lot of unrelated strangers.
Lets suppose I'm a middle aged white male, and I have no friends. It's been like this for years, and I'm not asking for the standard list of how-to-make-friends.
I'm asking what are my prospects of a happy life without friends.
I'm asking if people have good strategies for having a good but friendless life.
Relate to people on another basis besides friendship. You can have colleagues, co-religionists, co-hobbyists etc etc. I don't have any one that I'm friends with just for pleasure, and I'm extremely satisfied with my social life. The trick is to have something important that you care about above and beyond pleasure, that will provide you with the terms for your non-friend relationships.
There is so much individual variation on the need for friends and other forms of social relationships, that there is no generic advice that would make any sense. It's all about figuring out what you need, and how to get it.
Especially the activities with contact to people, just without ever trying to befriending them are good things.
You get the benefit of, let's call it, species-appropriate conduct, without putting any skin in the game. No one can force you to become their friend :)
But if you have no friends *and* don't do anything, I suspect you go mad.
I know someone now who has an 8 month oldNorwegian Laphund (I may not have the name quite right).. They herd reindeer, and Christmas front yard displays featuring plastic reindeer blew out her fuses. She's very smart and quick, and he's thinking of training her for dog agility contests. Those look like great fun to me l for both dog and owner. At end of course dogs jump onto owner's arms grinning.
> I know someone now who has an 8 month oldNorwegian Laphund (I may not have the name quite right).. They herd reindeer, and Christmas front yard displays featuring plastic reindeer blew out her fuses.
Ha! Now *that's* living! :-)
I often think that dogs represent an under-appreciated standard that we should aspire towards, because they represent a lot of what's best about us - loyalty, empathy, a natural affinity for cooperation, the desire to play, the desire to excel and do a job well, and of course the abiding and unconditional love that characterizes their relationship to you and the rest of their "pack members."
You're not the first or the last or the only to have lived wanted to do this. Read about hermits and other people who have lived very solitary lives. Some seem to have made a go of it, becoming engrossed in activities that were important to them. Anyhow, here are some suggestions for strategies.
THINGS THAT INVOLVE PEOPLE, BUT DO NOT REQUIRE YOU TO MAKE FRIENDS
Find volunteer or paid opportunities to help people without getting to know them.
There are probably some where you can even get info about how the people are benefitting.
Sports, for ex. Ultimate Frisbee. Serious body building in a gym.
Classes.
Religious or semi-religious (eg Buddhism) services, training and retreats
Online forums like this one
AA and similar
Have a blog
THINGS WITHOUT PEOPLE
Have pets. Or take it beyond having pets and breed and/or train some kind of animal.
Pursue your interests via study and practice.
Make things. Learn to make things that are hard to make. Learn to sail or dogsled. Build a cabin or a windmill or a boat. Paint watercolors. Make apps and games for computer and phones.
And here are some books about hermits, also from GPT
The Hermit in the Garden: From Imperial Rome to Ornamental Gnome
By Gordon Campbell, this book explores the history of hermits from ancient Rome to modern times, delving into the lives of famous hermits like St. Anthony of Egypt and St. Jerome.
MEDIEVAL CHRONICLES
A Book of Silence
In this 2008 publication, Sara Maitland reflects on her own pursuit of solitude and silence, exploring the lives of people today who occupy solitary states, such as solo sailors and polar explorers.
WELLCOME COLLECTION
The World of Medieval Monasticism: Its History and Forms of Life
By Gert Melville, this book provides a comprehensive overview of medieval monasticism, including the role of hermits in the wider monastic world.
MEDIEVAL CHRONICLES
The English Hermit: A Monastic Type
By Hugh F. M. Richmond, this book focuses on the history of hermits in England, exploring the reasons why people became hermits and the different types of hermitages.
MEDIEVAL CHRONICLES
The Substance of Silence: A Reading List About Hermits
This compilation offers various perspectives on the lives of hermits and the allure of solitude throughout history.
So I asked GPT to give the names of some hermits who seemed to adapt well to living that way, and where someone could learn more about them, and here is the list it gave me:
*Historical and Religious Hermits*
Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
Famous for his two-year experiment in simple living at Walden Pond, chronicled in Walden.
Where to Read: Thoreau’s Walden is an essential book. Secondary sources, such as Robert Richardson’s biography Henry Thoreau: A Life of the Mind, also provide insights.
St. Anthony the Great (c. 251–356)
An early Christian monk considered the father of monasticism. He lived in the Egyptian desert, practicing extreme solitude and asceticism.
Where to Read: Athanasius’s Life of Antony is the main source of information about him.
Figures like Julian of Norwich (1343–c. 1416), an anchoress, wrote Revelations of Divine Love, reflecting deep spiritual contentment.
Where to Read: Julian’s Revelations of Divine Love and works on Christian mysticism.
Christopher Knight ("The North Pond Hermit") (b. 1965)
Lived alone in the woods of Maine for 27 years, stealing supplies to survive. He described being content with solitude.
Where to Read: Michael Finkel’s The Stranger in the Woods explores his life and mindset.
Richard Proenneke (1916–2003)
Built a cabin in Alaska and lived there alone for nearly 30 years. His journals were compiled into the book One Man's Wilderness.
Where to Read: One Man’s Wilderness: An Alaskan Odyssey by Sam Keith, based on Proenneke’s journals.
Emma "Grandma" Gatewood (1887–1973)
Though not a complete hermit, she often hiked alone, including being the first woman to solo hike the Appalachian Trail. Her journeys reflect a deep contentment with solitude.
Where to Read: Grandma Gatewood's Walk by Ben Montgomery.
Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
While not a strict hermit, he valued solitude as a source of creative and spiritual renewal.
Where to Read: His essays, particularly Self-Reliance and Nature.
Emily Dickinson (1830–1886)
Lived much of her life in seclusion, rarely leaving her family home. Her poetry reflects her contented inward life.
Where to Read: Collections of Dickinson’s poems and biographies like Lives Like Loaded Guns by Lyndall Gordon.
Ryokan Taigu (1758–1831)
A Zen Buddhist monk and poet who lived in a hut in the mountains of Japan. He was deeply content with his simple life.
Where to Read: Dewdrops on a Lotus Leaf: Zen Poems of Ryokan offers a collection of his poetry.
Matsuo Bashō (1644–1694)
The famed Japanese haiku poet spent much of his life wandering and living simply. His works reflect solitude and harmony with nature.
Where to Read: The Narrow Road to the Deep North and Other Travel Sketches.
J.D. Salinger (1919–2010)
Though a real person, Salinger adopted a hermit-like lifestyle, avoiding public life after publishing The Catcher in the Rye.
Where to Read: Biographies like Kenneth Slawenski’s J.D. Salinger: A Life explore his secluded life.
Grizzly Adams (John Adams, 1812–1860)
A mountain man who lived in isolation in the Sierra Nevada, surrounded by nature and animals.
Where to Read: Historical accounts and stories inspired by his life, such as The Life and Adventures of James Capen Adams by Theodore Hittell.
GPT didn't bring up Grigory Perlman?? Probably the world's most prominent living hermit?
People kept braving the wilds of Sweden to knock on his door, trying to award him the Nobel-equivalent in mathematics (Fields medal) and give him $1M in prizes, and he kept turning them away and asking to be left alone.
Speaking from personal experience, you're pretty much screwed. I suggest finding some friends as soon as possible if you have means to do so. Only desolation and madness await the isolate.
I think that if someone asks a question here we should assume they are responsible adults, and if we have the information they are asking for we should give it to them. If they sound out of touch with reality or like they are falling apart or they ask for help committing a crime or committing suicide then no, we should not answer their question. But OP here sounds calm and sane and makes clear what he wants to know, and that he is not interested in being nudged to make friends or advised on how to do it.
What are you even talking about? I'm just speaking from first-hand experience that none of those impersonal interactions and activities are going to fill the gaping void in your heart. If he was perfectly happy being alone, he would not be asking this question.
...It's worth making the effort to connect with people. That's all I'm trying to say.
Yes, well, the same can be said of being overweight, smoking, being a couch potato, daily drinking even in moderate amounts, and a lot of other things.
Asking reasonable questions and getting a rash of shit back isn't very good for people either.
It's about as bad as smoking, which is... not great. And worse than all of the other things you mentioned. And of course, that's not even including the risk of depression and suicide.
Yea, OK, but if somebody on here asks which common US cigarette brand tastes most like Gauloises, do you think they should get an antismoking lecture instead of an answer? Or how about if they ask for info about rock climbing, or helicopter skiing, or big wave surfing, all of which are pretty risky? In all these cases the chance that the person asking has not already been told about the risks is very low. What's the point of giving the risk lecture again? And are we really in a position to be sure that in their case the activity is not worth the risk?
Congratulations to Donald on Congress’s certification of his electoral victory. Opinions about the events surrounding Joe’s certification four years ago vary widely—some view them as really damaging, others see them as minor or overblown. How do you see today’s proceedings compared to those four years ago?
I feel like America had some real serious political debates about lots of topics all at once and is functioning reasonably well?
I predict a lot less political violence, a lot less wokeness, a lot less unpopular foreign wars, a lot less illegal immigration, a lot less reliance on China, a real fight on policy on the right on a bunch of topics instead of just being the party of 'no', a lot less conspiracy theorism, and most importantly less legislation by administrative state expanding its powers. Just a huge shift towards the median voter in a way that makes it feel like we're living in a more 'responsive democracy'.
Just in general I think our media and cultural organs are doing a remarkably good job of navigating diversity of interests, opinions, and factual filters, and it could be so much worse.
If AI doesn't end everything early, I'm cautiously optimistic about the next four years.
Ended up voting for Kamala because the attempted coup was a read line for me, glad she lost though, mostly because I think Trump will 'strongman' Iran/Russia into backing down, and will either give up Taiwan bloodlessly, or make it clear 'not on my watch' there as well.
Also culturally, it feels like the gaslighting on all sides is less threatening? Partisans lie, we can tell when they do, and we don't need to be terrified that there isn't a bunch of normal americans who can see through it all and make their voices heard. We can just roll our eyes and live our lives, at everyone.
Well, Matt Yglesias had an interesting take on that today in an un-paywalled post.
“The scariest thing about contemporary American politics is that on January 7, 2021, it was widely acknowledged among American conservatives that Donald Trump’s behavior on January 6th was completely unacceptable.
No one, at the time, was emotionally or intellectually invested in debating whether it was “really” a coup or whether a political movement that did something like that was “really” fascist. Mitch McConnell said Trump was morally responsible for the crimes committed. Steve Schwarzman called it “appalling and an affront to the democratic values we hold dear as Americans.” Kevin Williamson of National Review rightly called the riot at the Capitol “just the tip of a very dangerous spear.”
I’m not surprised or even particularly upset that so many people who acknowledged the gravity of the offense at the time ended up voting for and supporting Trump.
Electoral politics in a two-party system is hard. So much is at stake at the ballot box — tax policy, abortion rights, immigration, and a million other things, all of which are incredibly important. I deeply respect and admire the decision made by Liz Cheney and a handful of others to take a fully principled stand on the January 6 question, but I also respect (or at least understand) the decision of those who’ve decided they care more about other things than about Trump’s low character and basic unfitness for office. But what disturbs me is the extent to which the entire conservative movement has retconned not just the events of four years ago, but their own reactions to those events, such that these days, to be disturbed by them is considered some form of lib hysteria.
Let’s see how the inaugural address goes in a couple weeks. My fear is that all will be well as long we all can now accept that 2 + 2 actually equals 5.
The casual heuristic of "If this was a planned subterfuge, is this how it would reasonably be done?" tells me that this was almost certainly not a coup. A bunch of angry protestors, mostly unarmed, breaking into the capitol to what? Hang Mike Pence so he can't officiate the election? That's a ridiculous plan if it was one.
Don't they know that there are a bunch of tunnels Congress can escape through? Isn't being heavily armed a prerequisite for taking over a nation (especially one as powerful as the United States with a long democratic tradition)?
Sure, Trump didn't especially do anything about it at the time, and he wasn't exactly condemning their actions at the time either, but there's a difference between that and planning a coup as far as most people are concerned. Ordering the military to disperse a protest, that's protesting in favor of you, even if it got violent, isn't exactly what most people would do in that situation.
It was definitely a protest that got out of hand, which demonstrates the idiocy of many people supporting Trump, and was definitely illegal, but calling it a coup that Trump planned is a huge departure from reality as I see it.
The thing to remember is that the protestors believed that the election had already been stolen (ignore for the moment whether that is a defensible belief or not). Given that they sincerely believed that, their actions make more sense (not perfect sense, since even had they been right they weren't going to "stop the steal" that way).
Trump was just an opportunist. But his actions that day, and afterward reveal something about him: he couldn't care less about legal or democratic processes. I think that if he could overthrow the government with an illegal coup, he absolutely would, but he himself isn't smart enough to figure out how.
This. During his presidency, Trump was mostly free if base entertainment for the world and the US (SCOTUS aside, but that would have gone similarly under a non-clown republican president).
Oh no, he fired another secretary, and there are still people applying for the job.
Oh no, he did a photo-op with Kim.
Oh no, you would not believe what outrageous thing he tweeted today.
Oh no, he is having legal drama..
As far as US presidents go, his track record was not disastrous. Sure, he put some migrants in cages, but my baseline for US presidents is nuking Nagasaki, getting involved in Vietnam, turning torture into official US policy, sponsoring coups to overthow democracies in Latin America or lying to the feds about not having gotten a blowjob (I kid). Basically, he could have moonlighted as a serial killer without registering on my outrange-o-meter when it is calibrated for presidencies.
He had this one Iranian general killed in an airstrike, but that did not seem like a particularly irreplaceable loss for humanity either. And for COVID, it would have been nice to have some adult in the room, but the established non-partisan experts were rather terrible too. (Remember the lies about masks being ineffective?)
But once he was voted out his always strained relationship with the truth went downhill to levels seen on his 2016 campaign trail, where he had denied Obama being born in the US. "Stop the steal." This was a man who would happily burn the commons for whatever slim chance to not face the fact that he had been voted out. I am convinced that if the insurgents he had incited over months (in the vague hope that they would somehow change the outcome) had miraculously managed to overthrow the government, he would have happily resided in the white house while the corpse of his former vice president was rotting on some flagpole nearby.
That's fair, but also a very different claim than "January 6th was a coup attempt by Trump" as a lot of people seem to take at face value. I wouldn't be surprised if the majority of politicians wouldn't take powers and term lengths outside what is constitutionally allowed given the opportunity, but it's sort of our bad that we are electing people who think like that. Virtue isn't something we seem to value much in politicians anymore (did anyone ever?).
An abnormal election process, with abnormal (to public perception) voting behavior could reasonably make a lot of people, who were acting in good faith, believe that election fraud won Biden the election. Trump looked like he was going to win around 11:00 PM, and it was only after the early morning, when large numbers of mail-in ballots were counted that overwhelmingly voted for Biden, did Biden win. To the uninformed voter, that could plausibly look like they "found" a few hundred thousand votes for Biden.
Not saying that there was fraud, as there was certainly not, or if there was it wasn't enough to make any difference, just that it's not unreasonable for the average person to have believed there was fraud given how things looked, and how the election was run significantly differently from normal due to Covid.
There was attempted fraud--the slates of false electors that Trump and his people attempted to insert into the process. Most elected officials do not go that far. That's not on the voters, that's on him.
>>I wouldn't be surprised if the majority of politicians wouldn't take powers and term lengths outside what is constitutionally allowed given the opportunity, but it's sort of our bad that we are electing people who think like that. Virtue isn't something we seem to value much in politicians anymore (did anyone ever?).
If you believe that lots of politicians would take powers and term lengths outside of what is constitutionally allowed given the opportunity, though, that is grounds for a *stronger* belief that Trump should be punished instead of being reelected. If the prospect of punishment is the only thing holding otherwise corrupt officials from engaging in corrupt behavior, prominently letting one off the hook and rewarding him with more power only weakens the incentives and invites more corruption.
If we accept “sure, Tom may have tried to rob the bank, but honestly wouldn’t we *all* rob a bank if we thought we could get away with it” as a legitimate defense of Tom's behavior, the only thing we’ll succeed in doing is inviting more bank robbers to try their hand later.
> It was definitely a protest that got out of hand
That’s what a failed coup looks like.
Do you remember that he wanted to go to the capital and speak to those people but the Secret Service would not let him? Do you think he really wanted to go there to calm them down? I seriously doubt it.
Remember how he protested that there were metal detectors there, saying that the people didn’t wanna shoot him?
We must have different expectations as to what a deliberate coup looks like. I don't consider all government overthrows, like many during the Arab Spring, as coups. Bottom-up protests, usually the result of forces far outside any individual's control, that overthrow a government happen often enough, but they usually aren't the result of leaders overthrowing the government.
A coup is typically when a faction within the government quickly arrests, kills, or otherwise incapacitates a countries leader's and assumes control. That requires a plan of specifically who you're going after, when you're taking control, and typically coordinated military power to ensure you get what you want quickly. It also helps if it's unexpected, so before most people know there's even a coup, the old rulers have been replaced, making it useless to try and side with them.
You don't perform a coup by showing up at the least minute, make a speech to a riot and saying "Let's overthrow the government!" to a mostly unarmed crowed and waltz right in. At least not one with any chance of success.
Ok. A coup is a sudden, violent overthrow of a government. According to the dictionary, I looked up.
What do you call it when a group of people who are inside a government try to come up with a way to hold onto power that might be legal but it’s pretty much on the edge? I am perfectly happy to settle on a different word.
A Palace intrigue…?
If everything goes just right, it might work. If you can get an alternate slate of electors into the Congress and have a Congressman (or two) object to the official slate of electors and get the vice president to choose the alternates? (Especially when the alternate slates were being prepared in great secrecy and quite surreptitiously and, according to more than one state, not in keeping with their laws or intentions? e.g. Arizona, Georgia Wisconsin.
And IF, at the same time, you can get a large group of people to make a lot of noise and riot a little bit AND you do pull off your palace intrigue, all these people will be thrilled! And then you’re on your way aren’t you? An arguable legal issue that will take weeks to sort out in the normal scheme of things, and lots of other people very happy with the outcome around the country and the Proud Boys (and others) “standing by” in Washington (as we know); now what do you call it? A lucky coincidence?
I am glad that it did not work out, and I am glad that the American people have gotten the president they wanted after all. I have no doubt that legal boundaries will be challenged hard in the coming years and it will be interesting to see what holds and what doesn’t. I guess what I’m saying is I am not a knee-jerk liberal, but I know what I see and I don’t like to have illusions about it based on my personal preferences.
Someone here has pointed out that the vice president has no power to reject electoral votes and that’s probably true, but to this group of people the legal framework of that was apparently vague and somewhat elastic (if you pulled hard enough on it) and maybe Trump could get Mike Pence to do that. He couldn’t. We all know how Trump feels about Mike Pence these days, but it is interesting that when JD Vance was asked if he would’ve done it he replied absolutely yes.
I guess the appropriate term would be self-coup, as Trump was still in charge at the time.
I can buy that there was a lot of intruiging going on behind the scenes, and that Trump was looking to bend things until they broke and he remained in power. The capital riot itself though, seems to be a natural result of the fishy smell the 2020 election had (again, not saying it was rigged as I don't believe that, just that it was abnormal and an average uninformed person could reasonably conclude it was rigged with the information they had). Whether Trump was planning a coup or not, and whether 1/6 was convenient for that attempt seems like a separate thing to me than 1/6 being a coup attempt itself.
My beef is that I see a lot of people equivocating 1/6 as a coup attempt, as if Trump, or his goons organized a bunch of supporters to attempt to storm the capitol and literally execute Mike Pence. People who are appalled at Trump trying to overthrow democracy, then angrily gesturing to 1/6 as evidence of that, which just doesn't fit for me. I'm sure there are people presenting a more nuanced approach that actually looks at everything he did with the electors and calling up Georgia and whatnot, but then the accusations of a coup attempt turn into accusations of Trump trying to figure out how to stay in power, which seems qualitatively different, or at least not as exciting.
It would be equivalent of calling the BLM riots/protest an attempted communist takeover of our cities (remember CHOP?). Yes, perhaps if there was a communist plot to takeover a bunch of cities the BLM protests could theoretically help serve that purpose, but the protests themselves were not an attempt to overthrow the government.
I don't think so. Can you name any other failed coups that ended like this? Or successful coups that began like this? The vast majority of coups are where the military arrests the president and takes over media organizations, right?
The ones that fail are always harder to find, aren’t they? The only one off the top of my head that is in the same ballpark is the beer Hall Putch (sp?)
Now that you mention it, Russia tried a coup in the Ukraine recently and failed. It’s turned into a bit of a grind, hasn’t it? Thank God we are Americans.
As an aside, I believe that the United States will experience a full on military coup eventually. I don’t think there’s any way around it.
The Beer Hall Putsch is pretty universally recognized as a "failed coup attempt," but did not involve the military seizing the president.
Hitler basically jumped up on a table, fired a gunshot for everybody's attention, and declared that the current government was liquidated, then marched to the capital and hoped for the best.
That said, I think WaitForMe really has it right. Too much focus is on the riot on Jan 6 itself, rather than the attempt at falsifying election results in the months leading up to it.
To be fair, that coup was also a display of comical levels of magical thinking. For one thing, it happened in Munich. The capital of the Weimar Republic was (as not indicated by the name) Berlin, which is quite a bit away. But even the place which Hitler and his goons were marching to was silly: the Feldherrenhalle is not the seat of the regional government.
For a non-stupid version of the Hitler-Putsch, look at the Kapp-Putsch. There the perpetrators did at least get the city right, had the military on their side and managed to arrest some republic officials.
Of course, the morale of the story is that if someone tries to attempt a coup or incite an insurgency in a profoundly silly way which is unlikely to work, it is not safe to lean back and call them "harmless because stupid". Rather, one should update on them being unscrupulous in attempting to size power and not count on them remaining as stupid in the future.
The real coup was trying to have Mike Pence not certify the election and throw it to the house, along with the scheming to create alternate slates of electors to vote for Trump. January 6th was, in most senses, a riot, rather than a coup. But Trump very badly wanted Pence to overturn the results and have the house instate him. That is a coup attempt, if bungled and probably unrealistic even if Pence did vote against certifying the election.
Agreed. I suspect that Trump's intent with the riot was to arrange a (rowdy) protest as a tacit threat of mob violence, in hopes of bullying Pence and House/Senate Republicans into going along with the plan to overturn the result.
Trump's reaction during the three-hour window between when the capitol was breached and when he gave the "we love you, go home" speech seems like he was hoping that the actual mob violence he got would serve the same purpose. His conversation with then-Speaker Kevin McCarthy, in which Trump responded to McCarthy telling him to call off the rioters with “Well, Kevin, I guess these people are more upset about the election than you are,” seems particularly damning.
The difference between a farcical, obviously-not-going-to-succeed, is-it-even-a-coup coup attempt and an actual coup is that one succeeded and one didn't. A lot of coups would probably look pretty silly if, for whatever reason, it just didn't work out.
"entire conservative movement has retconned not just the events of four years ago"
I observed the liberals rewrite the narrative in the days, weeks, then months following January 6th.
While the events were unfolding, it was a news story of a massive crowd walking past security, going where they shouldn't normally be, and some guy sitting in Nancy Pelosi's chair.
A day or so later, it came out that some people, fewer than 10, had died. I was unclear at the time from reports whether any of the security people had died, but some of the rioters had. It seemed like a whole bunch of people dissatisfied with the election verification, tired of being ignored, decided not to be ignored anymore; not a coup, since they didn't have weapons, AFAICS.
Within weeks, the narrative had changed to an attempted coup to keep Trump as President. Then it changed to Trump having orchestrated the events to stay President. Within months it was "the greatest threat to democracy the country had ever faced."
Revisionist history IS happening, and has been happening for some time. 1984 has stealthily arrived.
I would say what you call revisionism by the left post January 6 is the result of more and more information coming out about what was going on behind the scenes on January 6, and the things that had been going on leading up to it. I would call it updating an opinion based on new information.
I can certainly understand thinking that, but I too thought about it at the time as a possibility, and my impression didn't match that. It was four years ago, so I don't remember the details, but I don't remember anything I expected that would match that, like "We don't yet know how many were injured, but it is expected to be only a few individuals" followed later by "The casualty count now exceeds 10, and may be higher as we gain more details" with more detailed information as time went on.
Instead, I found the character of what happened being reported and updated. I remember hearing nothing of Trump's involvement early on, but Trump was involved months later.
I see two things going on there; it took a while to dig down and to get people to talk and to find a paper trail. The second thing I see going on is probably an institutional bias to just let the whole thing go if Donald Trump was never going to be seen on the public stage again. Better to let bygones be bygones under those circumstances. I know the received wisdom among certain people is that (the deep state, the Democrats, etc.) decided to make something up and go after him the moment he decided to run again. I don’t really believe that. There is enough evidence to support the idea that this stuff was indeed going on. One could certainly claim, in that sense (just letting it go as long as he rode off into the sunset), the prosecution was political. But the prosecution was not a fiction. It’s not a bunch of Trump hating prosecutors going after him for no reason whatsoever.
I can’t help feeling that he created the Mar-a-Lago situation on purpose. He could have raised his claims of rightful possession from the moment the national archive first contacted him about those papers, but he did not. He engaged in various shady practices to hide the papers, and forced the showdown. Then, when he had a national audience, he claimed that he owned the papers and was being harassed. He likes to test boundaries, and he has keen political instincts, which is a double-edged sword if you know what I mean.
"While the events were unfolding, it was a news story of a massive crowd walking past security, going where they shouldn't normally be, and some guy sitting in Nancy Pelosi's chair." Nice try at gaslighting.
I think you should look a little more deeply into the trials of some of the major conspirators to see how much Information came to light post January 6 about the events leading up to it and what was going on that day. There were a ton of weapons in Washington DC that day in hotel rooms waiting for the moment. There were extensive text threads between some of those people and people close to Trump (Roger Stone, for instance) I really think you’re whistling past the graveyard here.
Not again. I looked at the trials before, when things were more current, and "selection bias" seemed to be the strategy. I suspect that is also currently the case.
I had looked for evidence that Trump was behind it all, which is what the Democrats really wanted to get out of it, and found nothing convincing.
January 6th should NOT have happened, but it gets support from Republicans because of the way Democrats have tried to use it. Whenever "January 6th" is used as a rallying cry against Republicans, or Trump specifically, it's "here we go again". We need to put the event past us, as the nothing burger with some substance but nothing worth dividing the country over it should be. Not very palatable, so why keep eating it?
>>January 6th should NOT have happened, but it gets support from Republicans because of the way Democrats have tried to use it.
It gets support from Republicans because when confronted with a choice between:
(a) "admit that my tribe's leader attempted election fraud, and that instead of punishing him we rewarded him with more power," and
(b) "think of literally any other semi-plausible explanation in which my tribe did not do a bad - a 'coup' requires the military, and/or certifying election results is inherently political, and/or it was the work of antifa infiltrators, and/or it's possible the election really *was* rigged and even if it wasn't what matters for election legitimacy is that people *believe* the election results and clearly Democrats failed to convince them to do that so this is all their fault, and/or prosecuting Trump somehow was simultaneously a Democrat failure that made them the *real* threat to democracy while also being a Democrat failure because they didn't do it fast enough, and/or etc, etc etc,...
... tribal monkey brain's kneejerk response is to slam the button for option (b) so hard his hand breaks.
"January 6 was bad, but Republicans only support it because Democrats rallied against it the wrong way" is just another subset of category (b). *My* side isn't badwrong, *your* side is badwrong for calling us badwrong so badwrongly.
So you give no weight to the attempt to prepare alternate slates of electors? (Arizona and Georgia are both taking that rather seriously at the moment.) The extended conversations with John Eastman, about how there might be a loophole that could be exploited by Pence? His exhortation to the proud boys to “stand down but standby“? His wish to go to the capital that day and speak in person? Of course it was not a well organized coup. It was an attempt to stretch all the boundaries and pull something off, based on a lie, which is that the election was stolen in the first place. I agree it’s tiresome to go over this and that things are as they are now but there’s no point in making up a story about it. That’s what bothers me. This issue has nothing to do with how I feel about any of his particular policies that; is a separate question.
I agree in some sense. I knew it wasn't directed by Trump, or full of military veterans storming the capital with guns. But also, pictures/videos on that very first day or perhaps the day after included the shooting of Ashley Babbit as the rioters tried to break through a clearly barred door with capital police telling them to stop, congressmen cowering afraid in the chamber, and people chanting "Hang Mike Pence" before they burst through door, all while disguising their identities and some of them holding improved weapons, though not actual firearms/axes/what have you.
It was clearly a riot to me and not an organized coup, but also not a "crowd walking past security" and "going where they shouldn't be". There was certainly an overt sense of violence about the whole thing.
This doesn't fit my recollections. Over at DSL we were arguing over the "coup" description the day it happened, so evidently the idea was already out there. (I was one of the people ridiculing it, and have not changed my mind since.)
It was a sufficiently incompetent attempt at a government takeover that it might as well have been planned by a child. But the obvious intent was to take over the government.
And the planning was more thorough and more credible than the plan for the Beer Hall Putsch, which is broadly regarded as having been a (pathetically incompetent) coup attempt.
This also was my impression on the day of 1/6/21, as refreshed by reading my diary entry for the day. A pathetically incompetent coup/insurrection attempt, but absolutely not any sort of "peaceful protest". There's definitely an attempt at rewriting history here, but it's mostly on the Republican side.
I certainly agree it wasn't a peaceful protest. I remember thinking something like, "I understand these people think they'll get their voices heard now, but this won't end well."
I was surprised how few people got hurt or killed with the initial reports. The number seemed to keep rising not as more information came to light, but as the implications were analyzed as "how can this damage Trump?"
Oh, thanks for the tip on McCabe and Mrs Miller. We did a three night Altman binge: that one, Short Cuts and 3 Women. The last 2 were re-viewings but I hadn’t seen M&MM before.
The last scene with the derringer I had seen reproduced in a snippet of Boardwalk Empire with Steve Buscemi as the shooter. I just saw the final few minutes of that waiting for something else. It felt a bit like an homage to Altman.
You are very welcome and I am glad you enjoyed it. It’s one of my favorite movies. Leonard Cohen’s soundtrack is so brilliant and as usual Julie Christie is to die for.
I liked how today went. A lot less batshit than last time. Maybe the losers can keep it together again next certification and make it two straight without trashing our own house. Start a new streak.
Yes, Trump is the party of Jan 6. But the Dems are the party of BLM. To me BLM was exactly the same thing but 10x worse. US politics is terribly broken right now and our only choices are between the lesser of two evils.
The members of the BLM protest movement believed that American police were shooting innocent black men to death in unreasonable circumstances. They thought they were trying to save lives (ignore, for the moment, whether that is a defensible belief or not). Given that they believed that, their actions make more sense (*much* more sense than the Jan 6 protestors, since BLM largely accomplished their goal).
Right, and the January 6 protestors thought that there were problematic voting irregularities in the 2020 election that hadn't been properly investigated. Protesting makes sense in that context as well.
A) That theory was provably wrong at the time. Blacks are killed by police proportionately less than their participation in violent crime would warrant. If anything, a rational analysis of racial crime statistics should make whites angry with blacks, not the other way around. B) EVEN IF it was true, violent riots are never the way forward on difficult political problems. This has been demonstrated by the subsequent 4 years of crime statistics: the black homicide rate increased by 40% in the 4 years after George Floyd's death. They got the opposite of what they thought they wanted. Responding supportively to stupid people's temper tantrums is never good policy.
I will notice though that Trump was personally spreading the lies which if true would have legitimized trying a counter-coup and thus fueled the Jan 6 insurrection, while I don't recall Joe Biden going on record claiming that the cops killed ten innocent black people every day and that the only way to stop them would be to immediately disband all police forces.
Now, clearly the Dems knew which side they were supposed to be on, and I am sure half their congresspeople used the phrase 'epidemic of police violence' or something.
Trump had personally sowed the violence of Jan 6 with his election denial. By contrast, no Dem in 2020 thought: "You know what we really need to oust Trump? Race riots, they make our site look really electable!" Instead, the riots seemed to come out of a mix of genuine anger at a highly publicized police murder, a woke ideology who basically excused any violence perpetrated by Blacks, and a lock-down policy which had pushed a lot of people to their brinks, and the Dems were mostly along for the ride.
Now, if after the Floyd murder, one of the top five democrats had claimed that there was a genocide against Black people happening at the hands of the police, and called on all good citizens to stop the killer cops, then I would say that the Dems were equally guilty of inciting violence as Trump was.
> They got the opposite of what they thought they wanted.
The demand was never that the overall Black homicide rate should be lower. Blacks murdering Blacks is not news, there is no racial injustice in it from the woke viewpoint. I think they likely succeeded in making cops more reluctant to engage black suspects for fear of a PR disaster. It just so happens that most of the time when the cops get into a firefight, they actually are the good guys.
It was never about Black Lives per se, only EA weirdos would sum up all homicide victims. They only Mattered when they were ended by cops, and by that metric, Systemic Racism has decreased. Success!
>Trump had personally sowed the violence of Jan 6 with his election denial.
How did that sow violence any more than democratic leadership validating the perception that America is structurally racist or that police disproportionately kill black people? They're directly parallel in that they're equally dishonest political lies. If anything Trump at least had a case: there were circumstantial reasons to be skeptical of the election results. BLM's argument didn't even have circumstantial evidence.
>Systemic Racism has decreased. Success!
Viewed through a zero-sum political lens that's probably correct: blacks gained political power relative to whites. Viewed through an absolute lens of "BLM is about improving the lives of black people" BLM was a disaster for most black people.
You must be kidding. BLM was a mess, but it didn’t lead to the almost overthrow of the democratic government of the United States of America. Not only that over the last four years BLM has come into some truthful perspective while January 6 has been completely rewritten by a monstrous lie in my opinion; that the election really was stolen and if you don’t believe it, you’re not welcome in the Republican Party anymore.
> but it didn’t lead to the almost overthrow of the democratic government of the United States of America.
And neither did Jan 6. They were exactly the same thing: a bunch of idiots demonstrating on the basis of a premise that's clearly wrong. Except, of course, that BLM lasted 100x as long and did 100x the damage. There is no plausible scenario whereby the Jan 6 protests could have affected the election outcome. To claim otherwise is nothing but politically motivated hysterics.
The J6 protesters were in no way 'clearly wrong'. Whether or not the Democrats committed election fraud and whether that determined the results are unknowable because they blocked all inquiry into the topic.
Trump filed 62 lawsuits in various states. There was a *fuckload* of inquiry into the topic, and basically all of it came back with judges saying "nope, this isn't fraud" or "nope, this isn't a procedural violation." (Most of the lawsuits didn't actually allege fraud, only procedural issues. Probably because once they got an actual lawyer involved they realized they didn't have evidence of fraud).
A lot of the lawsuits were heard by Republican judges, some appointed by Trump himself. I'm not sure what other forms of inquiry you could want here. This was Trump getting his proverbial day in court, and he lost about as decisively as he could.
Agreed, the Jan 6 folks were less provably wrong than BLMers but in my view they're both idiots. Conspiracy theories are rarely falsifiable but you have to be a pretty big moron to take one seriously enough to protest over.
"They" "blocked all inquiry"? Weren't there dozens of court trials that looked into the claims, that didn't find anything substantial (apart from attempts by Trump to influence the counting process)? Didn't even the (Republican) officials in Georgia insist that everything was kosher?
You are either very poorly informed or perhaps engaging in political hysterics. I’m not sure which.
It did not lead to the overthrow of the United States government it led to the *almost* overthrow of the United States government, is what I said. BLM didn’t come close; see Detroit in 1968, Los Angeles after the Rodney King incident, the riot in New York after the caravan of Hasidim accidentally ran over a black child in Crown Heights. That is the lineage of the BLM riots. They have absolutely nothing to do with what happened on January 6. Based on all the available evidence, I think you would really have to be kidding yourself to believe otherwise.
No, simply better informed than you are. Trump challenged the electors. He's entitled to do that. The Democrats have challenged in every election that they've lost since 2000. Nothing any protest did could have legally altered that process. The VP has zero legal discretion in the certification of election results. The role is purely ceremonial and if Pence had refused to perform his role then he would have been removed or impeached. There is no scenario whereby democracy could have been destroyed on Jan 6. I mean just use your head: we're the most powerful country in the world. You don't get to beat the electoral process by getting one guy to say the wrong thing during a ceremony. Come on, the world just doesn't work like that.
The relationship between Jan 6 and BLM is that they were of the same category: a violent political protest by stupid people who believed something objectively false. Of course BLM was much more violent and an even less plausible belief, but that's neither here nor there.
Was the 2020 election stolen? That’s one of the questions on the applications for employment in the new administration. There is only one acceptable answer. The wrong answer is a dealbreaker. Bring on the reality denying toadies.
I know maybe hundreds of currently employed government workers who I am 100% certain believe it wasn't stolen, and will not lose their jobs. Or even have an application like that put in front of them.
What would the Star Trek Mirror Universe Borg look like? I'm dimly aware that non-cannon Star Trek content already exists about this, but I want to do my own thought experiment. Here's what I've got:
1) Mirror-Borg society is hyperindividualistic and prizes that over all.
2) Its members are even more diverse than the Federation.
3) Even though life inside the Mirror-Borg Collective is objectively better than life anywhere else in the galaxy, the Mirror-Borg don't consider themselves superior. If anything, they judge themselves too harshly.
4) Instead of being expansionist, they are insular. Other species keep coming to them willingly, and only with great persistence will the Mirror-Borg talk with them. Everyone wants something from them. They have rejected many offers from other species to annex themselves to the Collective.
5) The Mirror-Borg battle fleet is composed of billions of small, weak ships of very diverse designs.
6) They are dark-skinned.
7) The Mirror-Borg have strong religious beliefs against the mixing of biology and technology. Pacemakers and wearable technology like Meta Glasses are forbidden, and some purists live as nudist primitives since clothes count as technology. Their preoccupation with this separation is similar to how Orthodox Jews have created and observe elaborate Talmudic Law. Maybe it's common for each Mirror-Borg to have a robot servant that he tells what to do and avoids even touching.
8) In spite of their insularity, the Mirror-Borg are known to be extremely warm and talkative people who are afraid to appear rude. If you are of a different species and find yourself on one of their ships, every Mirror-Borg you see will greet you like an old friend, talk with you at length and invite you to their quarters for a meal. However, the Mirror-Borg are also painfully averse to conflict, so if you start behaving in a threatening manner or destroying things on one of their ships, they will avoid you and pretend like you aren't there.
Note that a central conceit of the Trek Mirrorverse is that it results in e.g. identical-except-for-the-insignia spaceships in all the same places, identical-except-for-the-uniform-and-mindset people ditto and fitting into identical heirarchies, and yes the incentives are completely reversed but for mumble something reasons everything still lines up perfectly.
So you can't have "billions of small, weak ships of very diverse designs" because MirrorBorg ships are ginormous cubes, and the MirrorBorg can't be insular because then they wouldn't be sending the ships to the same places.
Really, the MirrorVerse concept was a very silly idea that should have been quietly abandoned right after the One Good Story was extracted from it.
Hmm. Billions of small, weak ships of diverse designs that lash themselves together into cube-shaped fleets, and rather than taking what's on the outside by force, they tend to let off a few ships with representatives at each location they visit to ingratiate themselves in ways that act as cultural seeds? Reverse assimilation, thus?
(I admit to not being especially familiar with mirror-universe episodes of Trek to begin with, but I find the speculation fun.)
In one of the Culture books, Banks mentions the problem of a hegemonizing swarm, which is basically what the Borg are. One standard way to deal with them short of war is to somehow change them into an evangelizing swarm.
So, in the mirror universe, the Borg are basically the same idea--cyborgs linked together in a vast hive mind, sinking their individuality into the collective. But instead of invading, they evangelize and recruit people. As long as their missionaries and recruiting stations are left alone, they're peaceable enough, but members of any biological species that are miserable, desperate, reviled, too sick to survive at their current society's tech level, etc. routinely go join the Borg. Similarly, there's a substantial cult in various humanoid societies that valorizes losing your individuality to the hive mind, and many people among them who work as non-assimilated missionaries or commit to joining the hive mind at some point in their lives, perhaps after raising their families. Additionally, the Borg offer a safe form of exile for criminals and such--instead of executing your criminals, you can simply hand them over to the Borg. This is used in some societies in a way analogous to the way the Seven Kingdoms used taking the black.
Ooh, I like that one. It won't hold up to close examination (e.g. assimilating 10% of the population of one Federation world and 30% of the next, doesn't lead to the exact same cube-fleet deployment patterns), but it would be good enough for an hour or so of decent television I think.
Parents of small children: what do you do with dentists? Ours has been trying to take x-rays of my son's teeth (19 baby, 1 permanent -- he's in kindergarten) for the past several years, has finally given up in disgust (because the plate they use for the digital x-rays hurts *me* to bite on, let alone a small kid), and has referred us to the pediatric dentist (who is both farther away and also has a much less convenient schedule). I think my kid is pretty ordinary when it comes to mouth proportions or to tolerating annoying health-related routines. Does this mean that most kids (until they're teenagers, say) have to go to dedicated pediatric dentists? (There don't seem to be nearly enough pediatric dentists around for this to be true.) Or is our primary dentist particularly unsuited for working with children / has particularly unsuitable x-ray technology, and I should switch to a different office? Or am I just supposed to say "please don't x-ray my son this year, yes really I'm fine with this" and everyone will breathe a sigh of relief?
I have two kids, now early teens. My experience is similar to the others here. Going to the dentist with a small child was always a quick and simple procedure – a quick, painless check and a learning experience – that shouldn’t turn them off dentistry forever.
When the kids got older (tweens), the dentists became more interested in whether all the teeth come in like they should (I.e. Will they need adjusting/retainer? Is it so tight that one or more needs to be removed?) But for both kids, when the dentist saw something worth mentioning, their advice was just to wait and see if it solved itself – and it did in both cases. None of it required X-rays for either of my kids at the youngest age. I don’t think either of them had dental x-rays taken before they were 12.
I have also seen that while most dentists are good and ethical, it is not uncommon to come across dentists who will look extra hard for possible work, or who will let the price tag unduly influence their recommendation. It’s a bit harsh to call them unethical, but their priorities aren’t necessarily aligned with yours. They may recommend treatments that are expensive, impractical, uncomfortable, yet not strictly necessary. Just because they’re not wrong doesn’t mean their advice is the best for you.
If I were you, I’d take my kid to a different dentist – not just for the second opinion, but to get more experience with dentists. I’ve moved a lot, so have had quite a few of them. But since people usually go to the same dentist year after year, and almost never shop around, lots of people have pretty bad dentists without knowing it.
I'm not a parent of a small child, but I am generally extremely suspicious of dentists after learning that cavities can, in fact, heal themselves (especially if you improve your oral regiment), and having several experiences with less-than-entirely-ethical-dentists. I've encountered one dentist I actually liked - his default approach to cavities was "Let's check on this next time" and, without fail, the cavity would reverse itself, although there would usually be some other tooth that was doing something that needed watching for the next time (leading me to suspect that most cavities are some kind of periodic fluctuation?). Alas I moved away from that state and I've yet to find a dentist I liked since. (I do need to find one, just to fix some damage the last dentist did, but I'm quite reluctant to begin the search all over again.)
I'm not saying your dentist is unethical, mind, I don't know the person. However, if they're pushing you for a procedure for your children that is unlikely to do anything except garner them an insurance payment, it seems like something to consider.
Seems odd to be x-raying baby teeth that are going to fall out in a few years anyhow. I'd be suspicious of someone doing that. Just asked GPT4 whether it was routine to X-ray baby teeth, and if so why. It mostly agrees with me. (But sometimes it's in Lala Land, so you should double-check on google scholar. Look for meta-analyses.)
GPT4 sez: Dentists generally do not routinely X-ray the teeth of children unless there is a specific reason to do so. The primary reasons a dentist might perform X-rays on a toddler include:
Suspected Decay or Damage: If visible cavities or signs of decay are present, X-rays can help assess the extent of the damage, including areas between teeth or beneath the surface where decay may not be visible.
Injury: If a child has experienced trauma to the mouth, an X-ray can help determine if there is damage to the teeth, roots, or developing permanent teeth underneath.
Congenital or Developmental Concerns: X-rays can reveal issues with tooth development, such as missing teeth, extra teeth, or abnormalities in tooth spacing that could impact permanent teeth later.
Infection or Abscess: X-rays can identify infections at the root of a tooth, which could affect both baby and developing permanent teeth.
While it’s true that baby teeth eventually fall out, they play a crucial role in maintaining space for permanent teeth, aiding speech development, and enabling proper chewing. Severe decay or infection in baby teeth can also spread to the underlying permanent teeth or cause pain and complications that might require more invasive treatment later.
Dentists generally prefer to limit X-ray exposure in young children and will only use it when the benefits outweigh the risks. If cavities are clearly visible and treatable without further imaging, a dentist might opt to proceed without X-rays.
I have asked why we're bothering to x-ray baby teeth as they're starting to fall out. The dentist pointed out that some of the baby teeth stick around until the kid is ~12, so it's not orders of magnitude shorter than adult ones. (I agree that I'm not wholly convinced.) Also, now that adults ones *are* coming in, that objection is less meaningful.
I'm not sure how to use Google Scholar to figure out whether it's routine to x-ray baby teeth.
One easy method is to ask GPT your question and ask for links supporting particular points. For example, you could ask what fraction of child dentists routinely X ray teeth and at what age. Ask under what circumstances dentists need to X ray teeth to check for cavities rather than just looking at teeth and probing them with their tools. Ask whether frequent X rays are a known scam. Ask for an article iin a good quality magazine for pediatric dentistry about best practices.
All my experience and common sense suggest that this dentist's approach is not to be trusted.
-Even if your kid gets a cavity in the baby tooth that will last til he's 12, it's not a big deal. Most cavities are filled easily and quickly if found fairly early.
-I'm late middle-aged, way more likely to have bad trouble with my teeth than a child is, and my dentist is very sparing in use of Xrays. Has a schedule -- something like once per year for the ones way in back, once every 2 years for some others. Most of my cavities he has found by inspection, not Xrays. He pokes with his tool and says, "this spot feels mushy, I think you're developoing a cavity." Or he just sees the cavity.
-I took my daughter to the same good dentist I see, and he never once Xrayed her teeth.
-Lots of people in business are dishonest. Every time I get my hair cut they try to sell me bullshit products to "nourish your hair ends." Hair ends are dead. They do not eat. Putting oily stuff on them is basically putting mayonnaise on gravel.
I noticed you writing somewhere in this thread that a certain point won't get you far with the dentist. It sounds like you have the idea you need to convince the dentist that the Xrays are not needed. You don't. You can just say, thanks, you may be right but I'd prefer to skip them. Or, of course, change dentists.
Re: I don't need to convince the dentist -- true; if I'm comfortable asserting that I know how children's dentistry ought to be done better than they do (which in this case I might be!), then I can simply impose my opinion and refuse treatment on my son's behalf. If I want to stay with the dentist but have an actual conversation about this, I don't think "I'm told this isn't how they do it in Germany" is a hugely useful contribution.
Having been in a lot of situations like this, I have found ways around confrontation. Here are some alternatives to claiming to know more than the dentist. You can just say, basically, "you may be right be I'd rather skip it." Or, something like "the idea makes me uneasy and I"m going to pass." It's possible the dentist will try to engage you in argument, but you can just be n a broken record -- "Yes, I understand your point, you may be right but . . ."
Or you can soften it by saying, "I think I'd like to skip Xrays for now, but I will think it over and maybe we can do it another time." And if they ask why skip it, you can broken-record it "the idea makes me uneasy so I'm going to think it over some and maybe another time . . ."
You have to be willing to put up with them having a bad opinion of you, or (if dentist is basically scamming you a bit) pretending to. But that happens all the time anyway. For instance I often go into stores wearing a generous--size backpack loaded with work stuff & sometimes a laptop. he clerks watch me closely, I suppose because people with big bags or backpack are more likely to be shoplifters. I have never shoplifted anything in my life, not even as a rebellious teenager. It's a minor downer, but there's not a thing to do about it.
There's also the chance that some adult teeth just... aren't there. Apparently that's becoming more common for some reason. In that case, it's better to try to keep the baby teeth as long as possible so that the rest of the teeth don't shift.
Is there a particular reason why your child's dentist wants to take an x-ray? My children (5 and 8) never had one – but they have flawless, cavity-free teeth.
> They assert that it's standard procedure, similar to adults.
Again, strange. I've only ever had x-rays taken for actual problems, like serious cavities. Maybe once or twice in the last 10 years (this is in Germany, for socio-cultural context).
X-rays are ionizing radiation. Subjecting someone – especially a child – to it "just-in-case" seems ill-advised.
My guess is that this became much more ubiquitous with the introduction of digital x-rays, which have significantly lower exposures.
Unfortunately, the argument "this isn't standard procedure in Germany" probably won't get me very far with the dentist (any more than the argument "this wasn't part of my childhood, or probably your [the dentist's] childhood" will).
I read a brilliant NYT article about dentists. Apparently, pretty much nothing they say or do is based in science, even though they act like it does. I'll try to find the article.
On statins to treat high LDL cholesterol - I'm not against this.
I'm noticing the following though :
Lots of thoughtful smart people in medical research are for it. And lots of thoughtful smart people in medical research are against it.
50 % of people seem to have high LDL cholesterol.
And it is possible even for decent smart people in the medical field to be caught in a pro-statin position without having given sufficient attention to the opposite position.
I don't know what to make of this video. He says our medical philosophy about high cholesterol is misguided.
He says it's not just about fixing the line number called LDL.
Are doctors getting too excited about fixing this lone number?
He has a great analogy about a hole in the wall. It's caused by termites, but doctors prescribing statins are basically putting a picture on the hole to hide it, when the termites continue to explode.
He says if you have high cholesterol, you should be razor focussed on lifestyle (which is what causes the LDL), such as eating the right foods (minimally processed, watch the carbs and saturated fats ?)), and cardio and especially weight training, adequate sleep, stress management. Not be put on statins. Because cholesterol is just a marker of a deeper problem, not itself the problem.
This is a controversial subject. Not settled science, like many seem to imply.
Not my expertise but I am seeking expert opinions...
MD. I'm going to nerd out sorry (but you did ask for it!)
Cholesterol can be thought of as necessary but not sufficient for the development of atherosclerosis (the precursor to coronary heart disease, strokes, leg ulcers, many other problems.)
Mechanistically it is due to high blood pressure causing shear stress to blood vessels, then LDL/VLDL cholesterol being deposited into the blood vessel walls at sites of micro trauma. High blood sugar plays a role as well through development of advanced glycation end products. High chronic inflammation makes the problem worse (after a while as an MD you learn that high chronic inflammation makes everything worse.)
So atherosclerosis is correlated with the integral of your (non-HDL) cholesterol level over your lifetime. It's not causative but it is a predictive factor.
You mentioned diet and exercise. Clearly these are correlated with a lot of the risk factors I listed above: blood sugar, inflammatory levels, blood pressure are all related to eating the right foods, adequate sleep, stress management. Not just cholesterol levels. Good diet, exercise and sleep is the single best thing you can do for your health.
Actually, cholesterol is relatively weakly correlated with diet. Yes, eating healthy can help, but there are plenty of people who are not overweight whose LDL levels are nonetheless potentially dangerous. Lp(a) is a significant genetic factor that is non-modifiable.
So where does this leave statins? Currently they are somewhat arbitrarily recommended for people with a 10-year risk of a vascular event that exceeds 10%. This is determined by an actuarial table that takes into account age, gender, smoking status, diabetes etc. Interestingly this recommendation is independent of cholesterol level (although there are other guidelines that recommend statins to people with a very high cholesterol level, regardless of 10-year risk.)
Now, consider that statins significantly lower cholesterol, and consequently significantly lower cardiovascular risk, and that cardiovascular disease is the number one cause of mortality in developed countries (still edging out cancer.) They also seem to have positive effects independent of cholesterol lowering in that they stabilise plaque, making it less likely to rupture and cause heart attacks.
You might reasonably expect the benefits of statin, in a selected population, to heavily outweigh the risk, and you would be right. They can have side effects - muscle cramps are fairly common - but they are overall one of the reasons that cardiovascular disease has gone from a malignant, inevitably fatal condition in the early 20th century to something that can be well managed today.
In fact, I would argue that statins are not used enough! The 10-year risk threshold is arbitrary - if you are 40, you don't just care about your risk at 50, you care about your risk at 70 and 80! Given that atherosclerotic deposits are correlated with integral of cholesterol level over one's lifetime, I would argue that we should take 30-year risk - indeed, lifetime risk - into account. At the moment, voices like mine are not common within the medical community, but they are gaining in volume.
There has to be some biochemical intermediate step between lifestyle interventions and the negative symptoms of metabolic syndrome (heart attacks and stuff). I don't know what the evidence is on to what extent LDL level is part of this intermediate step (beyond that there's a known mechanism to link cholesterol levels to atherosclerosis), but the argument with the termite analogy is not enough to establish that lowering cholesterol levels with drugs isn't useful. Perhaps lifestyle factors mean there is a lot of stray food around the house that attracts bugs, but that doesn't mean that using poison to get rid of them won't help.
The version I vaguely remembered is that different types of lipoproteins deliver lipids in different directions, and if you get too much of certain types, they end up depositing the excess lipids in the blood vessel walls. I checked Wikipedia and what it says about this is somewhat different from what I remembered: "Low-density lipoprotein (LDL) particles in blood plasma invade the endothelium and become oxidized, creating risk of cardiovascular disease. A complex set of biochemical reactions regulates the oxidation of LDL, involving enzymes (such as Lp-LpA2) and free radicals in the endothelium.".
Not an expert, but recently read that a lot of the variance in blood lipids is determined by genes. Can't remember where I read it, but do remember that it was some source I couldn't just discount. I believe the point being made was that lifestyle interventions make relatively little difference, but statins do (presumably by somehow suppressing or neutralizing the genetically-determined process that leads to high cholesterol.)
Also not an expert, but this matches my experience - despite getting all the lifestyle factors right, I still have high LDL (at 25!). If you don't exercise, eat a lot of processed food, etc., then sure, lifestyle changes might lower your LDL to a healthy level. But some people just have a genetic predisposition to high LDL regardless of lifestyle.
Maybe, but semaglutide is supposed to address hyperglycemia, and coincidentally seems to also help with weight loss. I suspect it is helping some-how and -what with the root cause, which is mysterious to medicine.
Having finally read the book review bronze medalist How The War Was Won, I still don't get the strategy behind strategic bombing. My understanding of the history is as follows:
pre-WW2: Niche theorists think strategic bombing can win the war on its own. Most are not convinced. Countries invest in the unproven technology.
1940: Germany loses the Battle of Britain. German strategic bombing has negligible impact on British production and morale.
post-1940: Half of US+UK military production is aircraft. Roosevelt makes aircraft production top priority. Everyone is desperate for aircraft. The B29 is by far the most expensive weapon of the war.
I donẗ really get the jump: Why did Churchill and Roosevelt invest so much in an unproven and partly-failed technology? Wouldn't the reasonable thing to conclude be that strategic bombing is harder than expected (as proven by the Germans) and then invest in ships and tanks instead? Was it simply that the alternative to bombing was WW1-style mass armies which was too costly in causalities?
Airpower is undeniably an important tool in war, as every war after WW1 has proven. Air dominance is an almost perfect predictor of who is going to win a war militarily.
However, wars after WW1 have also proven that strategic airpower, as dreamed up toward the end of WW1, has a terrible ROI. The Allied bombing campaign did degrade the Axis industrial base and forced the Axis powers to invest more in fighters and AA over their homeland which they then lacked over the land fronts; but as we know today, it still took "boots on the ground" such as island hopping in the Pacific and street fighting in Berlin to really win WW2 and subsequent wars, just like it always has.
>"…it still took "boots on the ground" such as island hopping in the Pacific and street fighting in Berlin to really win WW2…"
Quibble: no Allied soldiers set foot in Japan proper until after the surrender; the island hopping was only necessary to secure an airbase close enough to the home islands for the Enola Gay to get Little Boy to Hiroshima.
Granted, that's hardly strategic bombings *as dreamed up toward the end of WW1*…
The Spanish Civil War and the 1939-1940 phases of WW2 contained several episodes that were seen at the time as major successes for what might be termed "operational bombing": the use of bombers behind the lines to destroy or disrupt the operations of logistics hubs, airfields, and the like. There were also a couple episodes (Warsaw, Rotterdam) where aerial bombardment was used to compel a besieged city to surrender. These were much smaller in scale and significance than the Allied strategic bombing campaigns, so they're often forgotten about except when one wants to make the point that the Axis powers started bombing cities first, but they were a huge deal at the time.
For the London Blitz in particular, damage was relatively minor in terms of not being anywhere near being war-winning, but it was significant enough to get decision-makers' attention, and the decision makers knew how much worse it could have been if not for various mitigating circumstances.
Most obvious is that the RAF was heavily contesting the skies over southern England, shooting down a lot of bombers and escorting fighters and also forcing the Germans to compromise the effectiveness of their bombers to make them harder to shoot down.
Building fleets of bombers to hit back at Germany likely mitigated effects on civilian morale. I remember reading that this was a major motivation for British strategic bombing during and shortly after the Blitz.
The German bomber fleet wasn't really up for the scale of destruction the Allies were prepared to inflict. Germany made mostly medium bombers, not heavy bombers, and made a lot fewer of them than the British and Americans did. Moreover, most of the Allied war production was outside the range of German bombers, which was emphatically not the case for German war production vs British and American bombers.
Germany's bombing campaign in England (mostly) wasn't strategic in the sense that the USAAF's (not a typo) was, in that (other than some abortive early efforts against the RAF) it wasn't targeting anything that would materially affect the outcome of the war.
That said, the RAF (unlike the USAAF) did pursue a similar approach to that of the Luftwaffe under the (mistaken) belief that the German citizenry would respond differently to terror bombing than the Brits themselves had. But the RAF didn't have B-29s, nor a secret superweapon development program that required its payload capacity.
Churchill could not invade with tanks on his own. He had to rely on protection from the Channel, which means investing in ships & planes, but not so much tanks. The Germans were outclassed at sea from the beginning, having to rely on hidden U-Boats to raid commerce shipments. The US invested in efficiently building "Liberty Ships" faster than the Germans could sink them, though the convoy system also helped give U-Boats a higher than sustainable casualty rate.
One thing you're overlooking from the book's points is that you can't outproduce the other side's tanks if your tank factories are being bombed so much you have to distribute production inefficiently.
It's called "compatibilism", as eloquently espoused by the late Daniel Dennett.
Basically (as I understand it), the argument goes like this: Yes, the Universe is a giant machine of some sort; at the lowest level it is either deterministic or random, but as a practical matter we are never going to even get close to knowing the exact state of the Universe at any given time, so from our perspective we can just assume randomness.
By itself, randomness does not require free will; but it does imply that we can never know the future with any certainty. However, at least on short timescales, we can "make decisions" that clearly affect the future state of the Universe. It's not a completely compelling argument IMHO but it has some explanatory benefit.
Dennett goes deep on free will and "the hard problem of consciousness" in books such as "Elbow Room" and "Consciousness Explained".
TL; DR: "Free will probably doesn't exist in principle, but in practice, assuming you and other conscious beings you interact with have free will is the best pragmatic choice for modeling the world we experience around us (including ourselves).
The same argument can be made for consciousness, but it's less compelling due to this troublesome first-person subjective experience we all claim to have.
I like Dennet. The missing piece is emergent behavior in the brain. Given that emergent behavior can arise from a fully determined equation, yet isn't predictable ahead of time, and that seems to fit our situation well. We still have to confirm that the brain can produce emergent behavior.
Then there's the evidence that we do not even live in a fully determined universe. Don't count free will out yet!
It seems like a pretty big ask that the undetermined universe could become determined (as in choices) not by pure physical randomness but by something we can't explain and don't understand (conscious phenomena). If the physical universe is sufficient to explain what happens, then decisions would seem to be observations--outputs of the universe, not causative.
The alternative, of course, is that physical randomness like thermal noise is determined on an individual level by the stuff of consciousness. That seems a little silly though.
The idea is that the universe is already under-determined, from our point of view, and nothing we can observe will ever change this (because we are part of the universe being observed). The brain, like many other phenomena, is a recursive system--outputs are used as inputs of the next iteration of decision making/behavior. The behavior of a system like that is highly sensitive to small changes in initial conditions, and can't be predicted ahead of time without running the algorithm itself. This is a feature of certain types of mathematical models, and if this describes how part of the brain works, then we can never predict human behavior beyond a certain point, no matter how much data is collected.
It seems like in this post and others, you're implying that chaotic systems can't be computed. That's just not true. The fact that it's computationally explosive is irrelevant. It could be computed with enough resources.
Chaotic systems *might* be determined, and reproducible in a computing environment that completely models a given chaotic system's starting conditions. A common observation, however, is that we almost never have complete information about any system's start state. And by definition, that chaotic system will be sensitive to any discrepancies in our recorded initial state and its actual initial state, meaning an arbitrarily small discrepancy will develop into an arbitrarily large one after some number of iterative calculations.
One could try to model all possible discrepancies and then posit a magical infinite source of computation to run calculations over all those possibilities, but what you'll end up with is an output declaring that from your system, all possibilities are possible, with no way to tell which one(s) is/are most probable.
No, my point is that it can't be predicted ahead of time, without running the actual computation. Another way of saying that is, you can't predict what someone will think or do, until they think or do it.
In principle, any computation can be simulated to an arbitrary level of precision. The limiting factor is that a perfect simulation requires a more complex machine than the one being simulated. The new computer needs to encode the state and operation of the original computer. So while we may never be able to predict what someone will do, it's not beyond the realm of theory.
In addition to the computational and storage deficiencies, other real world limitations are lack of input data accuracy, not perfectly knowing the initial state of the machine, and not having a good enough model of how the particles interact.
Because Theism (I'll skip the part about "which Theism") isn't an explanatory theory, it's a belief system explicitly based on faith rather than observation and analysis.
Asking why, as a scientist, I don't consider theism is a category error.
But materialism is also a faith-based belief system, is it not? We can make observations and analyze the situation, but at the end of the day, questions like "why did the Big Bang happen?", "why do we have subjective experiences?, or "why is there anything at all?" are not resolvable by observation and analysis.
"As a scientist" is an odd aside - Science and theism were seen as compatible (even explicitly going hand-in-hand) from the early days of the Royal Society to ~1970. (See: The Apollo 8 Genesis Reading, or our favorite Freemason Mr. Aldrin taking communion on the Moon)
You misunderstand the nature of science. It isn't designed or intended to answer "why" questions, you have to turn to another intellectual domain to address those, such as philosophy, art, or religion. Science is our tool for identifying that theory, given the evidence, that has the highest probability of being correct (defined as predicting patterns in future data). This explains why many people see science and religion as compatible, because they belong to "different magesteria."
Determinism implying a lack of free will is a category error. Free will is an abstraction of the underlying reality; it makes perfect sense at the appropriate level of abstraction, and it makes no sense to apply it to much lower levels.
Yes, our decisions can be decomposed into little component parts of historical brain activity. This does not mean the decisions do not exist; just the exact same way that realising everything in the world we inhabit is made of quantum amplitude flows and there is nothing to inherently separate those into being part of one object rather than another does not render the world we inhabit meaningless or make the objects around us stop existing.
Things still keep existing /even when we know what they are made of/. It's not either/or.
I agree one is forced to live life in the present as if free-will were real. Denis Diderot's novel Jacques the Fatalist is a hilarious exploration of the results of living with an ever-present belief in determinism.
But we also contemplate our own and others' past. It may be practical (and 100% correct) to view one's past as inexorable in the same way it is practical to view the future as indeterminate. After all, we might know the past but can't know the future, so there might be good reason to view past actions in a different light than future ones.
Yes and no. There have been Turing-like Tests passed, like Thegnskald has said. Though from what I understand, the modern concept of the Turing Test comes more from Kurzweil than Turing - and he envisioned it as a much more exhaustive test than Turing did. Think - "elite AI researchers at top institutions talking to it over the course of a month". THAT test I don't think we're particularly close - though certainly much closer than a few years prior.
The Turing Test has been passed more times than the audience at a NASCAR rally, as far back as 1966 for informal tests; the first formal victory was in 1991, by a program that tricked users by ... introducing typographical errors.
I'm seeing classes on learning to build, train, and use machine learning models without doing coding. Stanford and MIT are both offering them. Amazon now has a service called SageMaker that purports to allow you to do the same.
I do not know how to code and don't want to use my limited free time to learn. I'm wondering if SageMaker or some brief training would let me play with AI in the ways I'm interested in doing it. There are 2 things I'd especially like to be able to do:
-Experiment with AI and language. Train it on a bunch of great prose, feeding it works by prose masters of the last few hundred years. Train it on my favorite poetry. Introduce some randomness into the language it produces, but bound the randomness in certain ways.
-Experiment with AI and images. I liked Dall-e2 much more than Dall-e3, and would like to nudge the AI away from ad copy type images, and towards weirder, lumpier, more emotion-determined images.
None of this has to work perfectly, and I can come up with a variety of ways to attempt these tweaks, but would like to know whether people who understand AI well think it would be possible to do this sort of thing using these no-code methods.
I looked up installing ComfyUI on my computer, and even the instructions say "this is not simple," and then the instructions for Mac, which is what I got, start off with "Mac installation takes a few more steps." Instructions have you typing this and that into the terminal, which I never use. Plus once it's on your Mac you have to keep track of and install any updates to Comfy yourself. I can follow instructions fine, but the trouble with this set-up is that I have not got a basic grasp of what's going on, and if something goes wrong I will not be able to troubleshoot.
Without endorsing that one in particular, yes, that kind of thing should be fine. I don't use it myself, but if you don't care about keeping your images private, I agree running it locally is a hassle well worth avoiding.
I'd also suggest you start with something like Automatic1111's WebUI first, to get the hang of prompting and LoRAs first: less than infinitely customizable workflow, but more user-friendly.
I've done similar to what Shankar is suggesting with Automatic1111 WebUi running locally on my computer. I got it up and running by asking ChatGPT to walk me through it step by step. I'm also having ChatGPT write my prompts that I feed to the WebUI which is working out quite well.
Also, the "projects" section in ChatGPT is similar to a simple RAG that I've been using to run my homebrew TTRPG game, and it works well enough for avoiding the hassle of building a custom app.
That's heartening. I have done zero coding in my life. I don't know what it involves to use a RAG to make a homebrew TTRPG game, but it definitely involves skills I do not have. On the other hand, I am bright and good at following directions and paying attention to details. What is daunting is that I have no big picture at all of what I will be doing. Just know that I am connecting to a site with a user-friendly interface that lets me give prompts, fine tune them by adjusting various values, rather than just using terms like "vivid, masterpiece, melancholy feel," and also lets me use things like Control Net that give me more power to control body positions, -- and maybe also lets me train a model. But that's all very general and conceptual. If something isn't working I will have no big picture understanding to guide me in identifying what's wrong. I will just have go show GPT the problem and ask what to do. Knowing all that, do you still think this is going to work for me?
Haha. I run a Table Top Role Playing Game (like Dungeons and Dragons, but a different game) and I've been using ChatGPT to be my assistant Game Master; planning each session, maintaining plot hooks/storylines, etc. Its worked fairly well! We are going to be planning session 26 this week. One of the challenges of this project is keeping the bot abreast of what is going on story wise, and the pain point on this is that in a single chat it sooner or later runs out of context. IE it can't remember what we've done so it makes it up!
A RAG is an external vector database that you can link an LLM to so that it uses the data in the RAG before its training data; presumably so it can remember what has been done! It is a bit of technical project and I've not been able to wrap my head around it to get it done.
I am also NOT a coder, at all, I hate code. However, I am in IT so I've got a bit of "natural ability" that helps me execute what the bot tells me to do when implementing these technical solutions. I think you would be fine though, as when I set up the A1111 WebUI it was as simple as download Python; install; download git, install, then run exactly the commands that ChatGPT gave me, and now I've got a local Dreamshaper 8 stable diffusion bot. It also helps that I'm a PC gamer so I had a video card that is sufficient hardware wise for the solution.
Truly my suggestion would be to start with a ChatGPT Project (so you can upload reference files for it to leverage), and not install anything more complex than that on your local computer. Once you play with projects for a few months, then see if you aren't getting what you need from it, and if so move on to the broader scope.
Lastly, one other method I've leveraged is asking ChatGPT to validate the direction I'm going in, and also to write me prompts to feed to other bots.
For AI image generation, certainly. Try ComfyUI, with models from Civit AI. You could also train your own LoRAs for specific styles and concepts, all without having to do any coding yourself.
What you're describing for the prose, with "bound[ing] the randomness in certain ways" sounds hard without code.
EDIT: Actually, upon second thought, it's possible ComfyUI itself might work for that too. There are nodes for prompt enhancement, and you might be able to use those, or something similar.
The bounding would be things like part of speech -- use any combo of adjective + noun, but no other parts of speech. Does that sound hard to pull off, or no?
Sounds hard without code, though maybe my intuitions haven't recalibrated yet: it might be that you can now say something close to what you just did to your LLM (which you CAN fine-tune as desired with little to no coding) and get what you want.
I could feed it lists of all nouns and adjectives, unless that's too much data to stuff in. Or I feed it a list of prepositions and articles, and there aren't many of those at all. Then I'd say, use any 2 words here, except words from the preposition and articles lists, words ending in -ly (that captures most adverbs) and capitalized words (that captures proper names.)
Any good model today should know what improper nouns and adjectives are without being told so explicitly.
From Gemini ("Give me a dozen poetic "Adjective + noun" phrases that are unusual and thought-provoking.")
- Ephemeral echoes
- Velvet voids
- Fractured futures
- Crimson whispers
- Lunar laughter
- Obsidian tears
- Phantom limbs
- Celestial rust
- Whispering stones
- Ethereal chains
- Silent thunder
And following with "More, and make them even more unusual":
- Starlight bones
- Chromium ghosts
- Quantum lullabies
- Asphalt oceans
- Rusting rainbows
- Clockwork butterflies
- Frozen fireflies
- Echoing emptiness
- Molten moonlight
- Shadow symphonies
- Glass horizons
- Weightless whispers
I'm not sure exactly how you want to fine-tune this kind of thing on your favorite prose/poetry, but Retrieval Augmented Generation might be what you're looking for: upload some reasonable set of texts, and then with some prompting, you should be able to get the model to output phrases based (in some way) on your input samples. This approach should be essentially code-free.
Following on this line of thought, prompt-engineering top-tier off the shelf models might give good results on this task. If you naively ask chat gpt “write like Byron” it will give garbage results. But if you give it lots of examples and feedback, you can nudge it in a good direction. GPT has a context window large enough for hundreds of example sonnets.
Kevin Drum has a good counter for the why-America-can't-build-stuff any more whiners. If you believe the charts and graphs, we certainly can and are. But if you don't believe in charts and graphs, you won't be convinced.
The Residential Housing Units Completed per Population Added graph is missing some context. Except at the very end (which is indeed a hopeful note), it's well below 1.0 and trending downwards to a low of 0.3 in 2014 (actually 2009-2014, since it's a five-year moving average).
The missing context is the ratio of existing dwelling units to population, the size and type of the new dwelling units being produced, and whether these are gross or net new units (e.g. if a house is demolished and a new one built in its place, does that count as +1 or +0 in the metric?).
The actual dwelling unit to population ratio is 0.43, so a range of 0.3-0.8 is decent. The chart can be read as the 2009 recession causing a few years of abnormally low construction, with catch-up development occurring post-2020.
Size and type matters to the extent that maintaining the current ratio isn't great if the new units are disproportionately single-occupancy apartments, not large apartments or houses suitable for couples, larger families, or sets of roommates. FRED doesn't have fantastic granularity for selecting this, but doing a graph of the ratio of single-family housing starts to all dwelling unit starts seems a good first-order proxy. Eyeballing that graph, I see a lot of noise and either no trend or a slight upward trend. Also good as far as it goes. As for info not captured in this metric, I have heard from other sources that housing size is trending upwards in the US over the past several decades.
FRED cites the Census Residential Construction report, which seems to be gross starts rather than net starts, which is not ideal. I don't see handy numbers in FRED for either total dwelling unit count over time, nor for demolitions, so I can't correct for this offhand. Numbers I can find tell me that demolitions were bit over half of new construction c. 2009-2011 (American Housing Survey, Housing Inventory Change, HUD), which was as already discussed a very low point for new construction. I consider it plausible that demolitions were a much lower percentage of construction in other years.
Overall, that graph does seem to broadly support Drum's conclusions, but it needed a lot more analysis than Drum gave it.
Second this. Looking at aggregate measures doesn't tell the real story, because economic forces have made greater and greater proportions of people want to move to the top 5-10 metros, most of which it is impossible to build in (NYC, SF, LA, DC, Seattle).
Also, wth is going on with that "adjusted for population" housing units graph? What, our population plummeted in 2018? The line has barely hit the past "average" on the total units graph, but it's skyrocketed up exponentially, higher than it's ever been, starting in 2018 when "adjusted for population??" That "average" line would have been on a much lower population base in 1980 / 90 / 00, and the adjusted for population lines should have been higher back then.
All the rest of his metrics were basically meaningless. I'm anti-sold on his conclusion, and have updated slightly on the fact that we probably CAN'T build anything any more, if these are the best arguments the other side can muster.
"People want to move to SF but SF isn't building more houses" feels like it should be a self-solving problem. Eventually people should just shrug and say "ok i guess I'll move somewhere else then".
The amount of angst wasted on the dumb problem of people who want to move to cities which don't want to have them is considerable.
The cities DO want to have them. That's where the commerce is - that's where the high-paying jobs are. The owners of real estate who own the planning and zoning commissions in the city don't want them - but they're not the city.
And let's not underestimate how much of a loss this is. Economists have calculated that if NYC was building new housing at the rate of Tokyo over the last 30 years, it the US GDP (for the whole country!!) would be almost 10% higher than it is now.
And that's just NYC! Imagine this applied to SF, and LA, and Boston, and Seattle, and...you get it.
> "People want to move to SF but SF isn't building more houses" feels like it should be a self-solving problem. Eventually people should just shrug and say "ok i guess I'll move somewhere else then".
Indeed, and this is certainly happening at scale. And I'll take the position that this is a bad thing.
In Geoffrey West's book Scale, he looks at scaling laws across things as diverse as circulatory systems, cells, animals, and cities.
Cities have always been our primary engines of economic growth, and it is actually superlinear - the bigger the city, the more economic activity and growth it generally drives. Things like average income, per-capita GDP in a city, and patents scale superlinearly with population.
As in, if we care about economic growth, we should want MORE people moving to the biggest cities, so it actually IS a bad thing if a lot of people want to live in those top 5 cities and can't because there's no housing.
So in a future US-China war..... can't the US (and maybe partners) blockade the flow of raw materials into China? China is population-rich but pretty natural resource-poor, which I think is where the 'China is like the US in WW2' analogies fall apart. China is extremely dependent on iron ore imports, especially from Australia, along with oil from the Middle East, copper, and aluminum, just to name a few. Most worryingly for them, they still import a decent amount of food- I guess the Chinese soil is just not very rich. The US, by contrast, has natural resources in spades, plus we have ports on 2 oceans, which make blockading us almost impossible.
I just finished reading Wages of Destruction by Adam Tooze, so after 800+ pages of reading about how the Nazis were desperate for natural resources to sustain their war effort, it's hard not to port that over to China. All the factories in the world don't help you if you lack the raw materials to build in the first place.
So in a hot US-China war, can't the US fall back and just blockade the Chinese mainland? Won't help if we lose fast, but will help if the war slows down a lot- which is where everyone talks about the vaunted Chinese manufacturing advantage without thinking about where the iron ore comes from. (Or oil, or food!) Would be a bit ironic if the US goes full German U-boat and destroys civilian shipping
For what it's worth (and I know the guy is prone to hyperbole), Peter Zeihan argues that this would be almost trivially easy: put a bunch of US destroyers near the Persian gulf, block any tankers heading east, watch as China runs out of fuel and food within months. Subtracting the hyperbole, yes, a distance blockade would almost certainly be a crucial, and very painful, part of a reaction to Chinese aggression.
Of course, it would be ironic if the US tore down the very system it has been safeguarding for many decades now... but that would be on China. No one forces them to invade a neighboring country.
Yes, that would be an integral part of U.S. strategy. China's land links to its neighbors are also surprisingly poor, so some success could be had blowing up key bridges and mountain passes to restrict overland imports into China.
The only problem with this is it would take a long time for China's warmaking ability to collapse thanks to economic privation--look at how long Germany and its European friends held out during the World Wars in spite of enemy blockades.
China's made moves to sure-up its domestic food production in recent years and apparently could be self-sufficient if needed at his point. It also has a large strategic oil reserve to fall back on. That covers the two main weaknesses Germany had in WoD.
All that also assumes that the US navy could dominate China at sea, which is unclear. The USN is currently bigger but China has waaaaay more ship production capacity for a protracted war.
Allying with Russia has also boosted the potential resources available by land a lot.
Germany weathered several years of blockade in WW1 and 2 and China's current position is much more secure than Germany's was, so I think it's very unlikely China could be defeated outright in a reasonable timeframe that way, even if it would have huge economic costs (for both sides realistically).
The countries that really could be defeated just by blockade are Japan and Korea by China.
A lot of researchers think China's population figures are heavily inflated, owing to incentive structures which encourage local governments to inflate population figures. The lowest estimate I've seen is 400 million, which is ... almost certainly wrong. I'd hazard a guess that the actual number is somewhere around 900 million.
And they have a rather big issue; their population pyramid is more like a bulbous tower, heavier on the top than the bottom.
Additionally, decades of the one-child policy have left many families rather sparse on descendants; given the role family plays in their culture, substantial population losses would likely create massive social instability.
Four dozen NYC-sized cities is still two New York Cities short of 400 million. But also they only have one dozen NYC-sized (and larger) cities, with a total (of those 12) official population of ~155 million (or ~19 New York Cities).
But yeah, 400 million is, as noted, almost certainly wrong.
China with 400 million people would be similar to the U.S. in both size and population. It would be peculiar for that version of China to have dozens of cites the size of the largest U.S. city.
*Almost certainly wrong*. Also, again, per China's figures, -one- dozen, not dozen-s-.
But it's not -certainly- wrong, for several reasons; first, US cities tend to follow a Zipf distribution, because US population migration patterns are "natural"; China's cities do not, which is not surprising, given that China pursued policies of forced urbanization. (But also may suggest that the urban population numbers are, uh, inaccurate.)
Second, Chinese incentives are known to have created fake urbanization; most well-known being vast stretches of empty apartment buildings. I've encountered comments from visitors to one of these NYC-sized cities commenting on how weirdly empty and quiet they were, and how little traffic there is. They chalked this up to good urban planning and mass transit - but if you think about it, it's weird how well the urban planning and mass transit apparently work in some of their cities, where others are nightmares of congestion.
Third, Chinese national incentives encourage local governments to, well, overestimate their population figures.
Edit:
Also, note that the population of cities is a lot more arbitrary than people typically expect. Is the DFW metroplex one city, or several? Treated as one city, the US gets another NYC-sized city.
Considering land area in our equation, Shanghai has a population density of 10,000 per square mile; New York City has a population density of 29,000 per square mile. No Chinese city has the population density of NYC; the closest is Shenzen, at 23,000 per square mile.
>can't the US (and maybe partners) blockade the flow of raw materials into China?
First, regarding the blockade from the sea: Any asset used in this blockade would likely suffer a high rate of attrition, by virtue of being in range of a large area of china's mainland. And any asset used in such a blockade would be a very expensive one, and (at the moment), hard to replace.
Then even the US managed to impose a blockade at sea, there is a number of land borders, one of which being Russia, a famously ressource-rich country, and, as of 2024, one that is both very likely to be accepting generous terms, and very unlikely to be convinced to participate in this blockade.
And there is the other neighbours. How willing would vietnam be to join in this blockade? How willing would the US be to apply the blockade to vietnam also?
Russia is resource-rich, but its export markets to China are constrained by corruption and a lack of infrastructure. If a U.S.-China war broke out, it might take Russia so long to build a new gas pipeline to help China that the conflict would be over before.
As Humphrey Appleby notes, you don't have to be close to the Chinese mainland to blockade it. You can block merchant ships hundreds of miles away from China itself. I agree that Russia is very resource-rich and could help with materials, though I think it's interesting that China sources 60% of its iron from Australia and not Russia
>You can block merchant ships hundreds of miles away from China itself
Yes, if you're willing to sink every ship going to north-vietnam. Which...sure, you can. But it's going to be unpalatable to a lot of people. Otherwise, ships will go to Hai Phong, unload, then another ship goes to anywhere on China's coastline. And, again, anything in range to shoot at it will be in range to be shot at, but from a number of location on the mainland.
>though I think it's interesting that China sources 60% of its iron from Australia and not Russia
It don't seems so interesting to me. One is probably cheaper and easier during peacetime, but that doesn't mean the other won't be possible to obtain during a war. Russia's adventures in Ukraine reminded us that things can become significantly more expensive and difficult during war, while still being done.
As Eric Rall says, there is lots of precedent for `distant blockade.' The most obvious being the UK's blockade of Germany in both world wars. And an existing doctrine of continuous voyage, which absolutely allows you to stop ships going to north vietnam which are carrying contraband.
No sinking is necessary, unless the ships in question refuse to stop when ordered to do so. (Just like traffic stops do not require shooting motorists). The British stopped civilian ships sailing to German (and Dutch etc) ports, but didn't sink them.
Distant blockades have been a thing for a very long time. Both world wars, for instance. Also, the Union blockade of the Confederacy (1861-5) involved both close blockade operations (i.e. stationing warships a few miles out to sea near major ports) and distant ones. I think some distant blockade operations were involved in the Napoleonic Wars as well, although I'm less confident of that.
The trick to distant blockades is stopping and searching ships, inspecting their cargo manifests, and having other intelligence channel that can help you choose which ships to search and also help determine when the manifests are lying about where the cargo is coming from or where it's going. Under the Doctrine of Continuous Voyage, contraband is still subject to seizure if it's been moved to a different ship in a neutral port or even shipped overland from a neutral port: the WW1 blockade also stopped cargoes bound for Dutch and Danish ports, and the Civil War blockade involved stopping a lot of ships between Bermuda and various European ports. The stopping and searching is done by light ships, with your major warships only used if the other side tries to challenge the blockade with their fleet.
It helps if you have a convenient geographical choke point, like Bermuda in the ACW or the English Channel and North Sea in the World Wars, but it isn't strictly necessary.
Sinking tends to be more of a thing for commerce raiding rather than proper blockades. The difference is that you're only allowed to raid enemy-flagged ships, while a blockade also applies to neutral-flagged ships. Sinking neutral ships tends to annoy their respective home countries, sometimes leading to those countries not being neutral for much longer.
I have read that the PRC is aggressively stockpiling raw materials, oil etc. How large their stockpiles are, I don't know, and obviously they are not infinite, but the strategic power of a blockade is going to depend a lot on whether they have a 2 month stockpile or a 20 year stockpile.
Also we don't need to go U-boat, we can blockade them with surface units just fine, as long as it is a distant blockade.
China has land borders with fourteen different countries, only a few of which will cooperate with US-led sanctions. Between the enormous land area of China and the even more enormous land area of Russia, I don't think there's much that can't be obtained. There might be some shortages and rationing, and maybe steel that was going to build skyscrapers gets diverted into building tanks, but I can't think of anything specific.
doesn't have good land-based communications with basically any of those other countries though. The land borders are mostly mountains/dense forest/desert/tundra, with very few roads and rail. Those would have to be built first, which would take time.
The amount of goods transported to China by ship is on the order of billions of tonnes. Now I'm not an expert on logistics, but I don't think you can quickly switch that over to land-based transport. Not only would you have to build out that capacity within China, but also within the neighboring countries.
Then there's the issue that land-based transport is more expensive (i.e., consumes more resources) than ships, and that doesn't even take into account the massive expense in labor and materials for building the infrastructure itself.
China imports about 80% of its iron ore. (1) I suppose it could have domestic sources that it's choosing to not use for whatever reason, but I think the onus is on you to explain why they're not doing so- especially as they're gearing up for potential war. I do not in fact think that iron is 'literally as common as dirt'.
Rather than learning from 'popular Internet memes', I think I prefer statistics from industry sources. China is actually less self-sufficient in food than it was 2 decades ago (2), and has been a net importer of agricultural foodstuffs since 2004. (3) China is the world's largest food importer, including the top global importer of soybeans, corn, wheat, rice, and dairy products. (4) This is a recognized national security issue in China. (5)
As I understand it, much of their old agricultural land has now been developed for cities, roads, and factories. So references to past centuries are no longer relevant
> I have good news for 𝘩𝘪𝘴𝘵𝘰𝘳𝘪𝘤𝘢𝘭 you as compared to 𝘷𝘪𝘥𝘦𝘰 𝘨𝘢𝘮𝘦 you: iron is the fourth most common element in earth’s crust, making up around 5% of the total mass of the part of the earth we can actually mine. Modern industry produces – and I mean this very literally – a 𝘣𝘪𝘭𝘭𝘪𝘰𝘯 𝘵𝘰𝘯𝘴 (and change) of iron per year. Iron is about the exact opposite of rare; almost all of the major ores of iron are dirt common. 𝗔𝗻𝗱 𝘁𝗵𝗮𝘁'𝘀 𝘁𝗵𝗲 𝗽𝗼𝗶𝗻𝘁.
> One of the reasons that the change from using bronze (or copper) as tool metals to using iron was so important historically is that iron is just 𝘴𝘰 𝘥𝘢𝘮𝘯 𝘢𝘣𝘶𝘯𝘥𝘢𝘯𝘵. Of course iron can be used to make 𝘣𝘦𝘵𝘵𝘦𝘳 tools and weapons as well, but only with proper treatment: initially, the advantage in iron was that it was 𝘤𝘩𝘦𝘢𝘱.
(The emphasis is Bret Devereaux calling you stupid, not me.)
If you compare China's iron ore production (estimated 660 million tonnes at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_iron_ore_production ) to its iron reserves (estimated 20 billion tonnes at https://www.nsenergybusiness.com/analysis/world-iron-ore-reserves-countries/ ), you learn that, if China needed to mine five times the amount of iron, it would be good for the next 6 years. Of course, comparing the reserves listed by NS Energy to the wikipedia estimate of production, we can also see that, if nothing changes, the entire world will blow through all of its iron reserves in 56 years. We can safely ignore that and realize that China appears to be, if anything, unusually rich in demonstrated iron reserves.
It is similarly rich in demonstrated arability, and unlike with the iron that's a real advantage.
The reason you import rocks and soybeans is that those are low-value products and you have better things to do with your time. It isn't that you're suffering from a crippling shortage of rocks.
Presuming such a war was triggered by the PRC mounting an invasion of Taiwan and the US coming to the island's defense, it really depends on how things got to that point:
- If the PRC mistakenly believed the US wouldn't intervene (a la Saddam in 1990) or incorrectly thought they had a means to prevent the USN and/or USAF from contesting their crossing the Strait, then the war probably wouldn't last long enough for such considerations to come into play.
- If the PRC *correctly* thought they had a means to prevent the USN and/or USAF from contesting their crossing the Strait, then it depends on the nature of such:
-- If it was transient (e.g., one-off strike that knocks US airbases in Japan & Korea out of commission just long enough for the invasion fleet to reach the far shore), then any blockade might be limited to PRC-occupied Taiwan.
-- If it was persistent (e.g., credible threats to US carriers within striking range of Taiwan), then the PRC's newly-expanded force projection capability might be enough to make a blockade infeasible.
On the last point, I don't see it. The PRC could have a newly-expanded force-projection capability that can keep US carriers far enough to be out-of-striking-range of Taiwan, but how does that prevent a distant blockade? Enforced at e.g. the Malacca strait, or similar? Most of China's raw materials come from a long way away, and merely denying the near-China seas to the USN isn't going to prevent blockade.
I perhaps should've emphasized "might" more … emphatically.
Starting from the premise that the PRC does not currently possess such a capability (I do not think the DF-21 qualifies), the range of a hypothetical future system is underdetermined; there exist (small) regions of the possibility space that could push the USN so far back that the boundary of the denied area is longer than can be effectively secured.
OK, sure, if they can successfully `deny' the seas out to a range of, say, 3000 miles, then that does render a blockade infeasible. That seems unlikely though. In part because you don't need to blockade the entire perimeter of the `denial' zone, a handful of chokepoints (e.g. Malacca strait, Panama canal) likely suffice.
[And why stop there. If they can add a factor of four and deny the seas out to 12000 miles, then they can counter-blockade America...]
Why do we need to start sinking them? We just stop/search/seize at Malacca or whatever. CF you can conduct traffic stops without shooting motorists. OK I guess if they don't stop when ordered to stop then we would need to fire on them. But this is no different to enforcing any old law - ultimately all governmental authority is backed by threat of force.
CF the UK implementing `distant blockade' of Germany in both world wars. At no point was indiscriminate `sinking civilian cargo ships' involved.
Definitely unlikely. But effective denial of even smaller areas is also unlikely; I'm just not confident that P(big area denial | small area denial) is negligibly small.
As for counter-blockading: supercarriers are far scarcer and much more valuable than merchant shipping generally. The PRC could deter the USN with a system whose capacity would be insufficient to impose a broad blockade.
Since cognitive biases are 1) both universal and resistant to self-detection, and 2) tend to favor extreme judgments and beliefs, could it be beneficial for people to obligatorily apply moderation to some classes of judgments/beliefs?
Particularly high-bias classes such as:
- Identity-linked beliefs
- Ethical judgments
- Complex multicausal scenarios
- Personal stake scenarios
I’ll define moderation here as a reduction in positional extremity on a spectrum. If your volume dial is at a 10, a 9 would be more moderate. If it’s at 1, a 2 would be.
As a principle it’s probably very limited to being applied in a vague and unsatisfying way, but would be applied after you reach your judgment/conclusion. For instance, if you believe UFOs have visited earth, consider moderating that to probably visited. If you believe UFOs never visited, consider moderating that to probably never. Any of these beliefs could be true, but given the nature of bias itself, chances are your/my bias has radicalized our judgment rather than moderated it.
Notes and exceptions: This doesn’t imply that the more moderate the belief, the better. It just suggests that many beliefs (not all) would benefit from a consistent moderating influence. There are situations where you may be choosing between two overly moderate options where this principle actually weakens the belief. Unlike confirmation bias, overconfidence and the availability heuristic, a few biases like the status quo bias, don’t necessarily radicalize beliefs but may unnecessarily moderate them. Procedural, low-stakes, single-variable and mathematically determined decisions are not as prone to bias and consequently a moderating principle might not be useful under these circumstances.
Rather than just making a habit of turning the dial down, I think it would work better to have some questions you ask yourself about these beliefs that help modulate your certainty that they're correct. I try to do that. One especially helpful one is to ask myself whether it makes me angry to think about people who do not share the belief. If it does, that's really a tell. It indicates that the belief is intertwined with my self-esteem and self-image somehow.
So if it makes me angry to think about people who think my belief is wrong, then I ask myself what my picture is of the other person's belief. I usually picture the other person in a way to supports my anger. Maybe I picture them being particularly dumb or selfish, and arriving at their idea via a bunch of infuriatingly dumb, selfish steps. Or I picture then despising me for my belief.
So then I get myself to think about times I've just been wrong about something, and how I arrived at my wrong belief, and what it was like to have it. Generally my steps of arriving at the belief were not especially dumb and selfish. or angry. Often I just kind of adopted the idea wholesale from people I was fond of and respected. And recognizing that helps me develop a different picture of the people I disagree with. And *that* helps me try on the idea that they might be right about some of it. Also, it becomes easier to reduce my own certainty in the belief if I am not mentally fighting a war with a bunch of imagined infuriating idiots who believe the opposite.
I try to use this approach, and I think most self aware people do too. But cognitive bias is often not self-detectable. We’re all victim to it to varying degrees, despite our efforts to spot it. So it seems plausible that applying a systematic moderating principle post-conclusion could be reasonably advocated for.
Self detection of bias, while helpful, is also really time/cognitive resource dependent and isn’t going to be nearly as effective for less critical/analytical people (like myself) who most need to temper their beliefs.
There is another method (not that I think yours is necessarily a bad one)--you could seek out people who disagree with you, ask them to explain their beliefs, and and force yourself to consider their reasons objectively. This isn't dependent upon self-detection of bias, and doesn't just replace all extreme beliefs with a "moderation bias."
Yes—I think your suggestion is probably a better method in most respects when one has the time and personnel available to carry it out.
But if you take for granted that bias is fundamental to cognition, it means you’re updating based on a second perspective biased to an unknowable degree in another direction. And in essence what you’re still seeking to do by this is moderate your belief.
Just to be clear, this moderating principle I’m floating isn’t something I’ve subscribed to already, just something I was trying to poke holes in with the help of folks like yourself.
"a second perspective biased to an unknowable degree"
Yes, but that's all we have, there being no other source of information out there, even in principle. Even science incorporates this--you replicate studies so that the biases of independent researchers will eventually cancel each other out.
There's your mind and what it perceives. Then there's other minds and what they perceive. That's pretty much it.
It’s also kind of ironic that you and I are talking about the principle from two different perspectives as you sensibly endorsed, but both our opinions on the principle appear to be radicalizing instead of moderating.
I agree. It’s all we have. The moderating principle is just meant as a flawed way to try to temper some of people’s bias on the fly. It would be particularly applicable in low-information-zone decisions.
If say you’re a bird watcher, and you catch a fleeting glimpse of a red and black bird that looked to you like a pileated woodpecker, which is rare in your region, and you think to yourself “I think that was a pileated woodpecker,” consider automatically updating that to “It’s possible that was a pileated woodpecker.”
You could seek out a panel of ornithological experts or spend hours soliciting the opinions of other birders, too. This would be ideal.
I’m all for replicating studies and doing exhaustive research when you have the capacity to do so. But the majority of decisions in life unfortunately don’t allow for such measures and it might be useful for people to have practical if imperfect principles to lean on in such cases.
Edit: I also noted some of the obvious categories of decision that such a principle wouldn’t apply to in my “Notes and exceptions.”
The lex fridman podcast with zelensky, listening to the original audio in english, russian, and ukranian, really gave me an appreciation of the power of language and how humanizing it is to understand people you don't know in their more-familiar tongues. Humor and poetry is such an important part of being human.
If someone is married to someone whose mother tongue is different from your own, maybe worthwhile to put in the effort to learn it, eventually.
Lex Fridman didn't ask tough questions though (just like Joe Rogan btw) that a good journalist from a traditional media would've asked.
For example, when Zelensky mentioned broken Budapest agreements, he could've asked why Zelensky double-crossed Russia in 2019 (in the words of his own head of the office of president at the time Bohdan https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ogGK8rjDqJE)
That's not to say that there are no good answers to these questions, maybe Zelensky would've answered them satisfactorily (I certainly could've). My point is just that the interviewer didn't really challenge Zelensky and because of that we learned less than we could've done
What exactly is the first claim supposed to be? I'm not watching a four-hour YouTube video to try to figure it out, and I'm confused as to how Zelenskyy is supposed have double-crossed somebody who initially invaded his country five years prior and what this has to do with them having clearly already broken the agreement from 1994.
The claim is that Ukraine and Russia reached an agreement in Paris in 2019 and then Ukraine didn't do what it promised. It was more or less similar to Minsk accords but at this time Zelensky was already in power.
According to Bohdan, они кинули Путина, I did my best translating it :)
Again, this is just Bohdan's words and not necessarily true. This was an example of a question I'd have asked - did it happen and if yes what prevented you from fulfilling the agreement
He doesn't say exactly, but he says before that there were open and secret parts of the agreement and everyone was in favour of improving Minsk agreements, whatever it means.
Elsewhere in the interview he also says that he heard from others that some deescalation steps were agreed, for example Russia freeing captured Ukrainian sailors (done in September as part of a prisoner swap https://edition.cnn.com/2019/09/07/europe/ukraine-russia-prisoner-swap-intl/index.html) and Ukraine re-starting the supply of water to Crimea (not done). It's not clear though whether this was part of the agreement in Paris but the timing makes it quite likely
The distinctive feature of the genocide in Gaza is its extreme, never-before-witnessed levels of documentation.
Perhaps for the first time in history, we have audio-visual real-time data trail from the cameras and the microphones of both the perpetrators and the victims. Coupled with Satellites, the databases of the social media sites this data trail lives in, and the image format of modern smartphones, you can be as precise as the exact Longitude/Latitude coordinates of where the picture or the video in question were taken, an absurd level of details.
A single media channel such as Al-Jazeera English can compile a 1 hour and 20 minutes long documentary stuffed full [1] of videos and images, a lot of them straight from the social media profiles of the perpetrators themselves. While concerned historians in the perpetrator state can weave a 124-page document [2] documenting the genocide in horrific contemporality, and update that document several times over the course of a year, maintaining the document across the twin languages of the perpetrator state and that of the international audience - Hebrew and English -, **all** in hobbyist capacity and without any state-level, corporate-level, or even NGO-level support.
The Gaza genocide is also, paradoxically and simultaneously, fervently denied, minimized, dismissed, vilified, booed and tabooed. Essentially untouchable.
What does that tell us about the psychology of Genocide Denialism?
Not *merely* that it's unresponsive to evidence, we already knew that aplenty from samples of, e.g., Holocaust Denial and other Genocide Denial by nation state actors such as Japan and Turkey. Those sometimes-farcical denials are often satirized as the classic trilogy of the Genocide Denialist:
- That didn't happen
- And if it did, it wasn't that bad
- And if it was, they deserved it
- [Bonus, in case of survival of victim ethnicity] and I wish we could do it to "them" all over again
That's all old news, although it can be quite amusing to catch all the Holocaust parallels in a single bout of rhetoric from a pro Israel hooligan.
No, I think what the first livestreamed genocide in the 21st century really tells us about Genocide Denial is rather different and new (at least to me): that it gets *stronger* in proportion to the evidence. That is, the more bulletproof and smoking-gun the evidence you have, the **more** (not less or at least more shyly) denial you get, the more fervent and desperate the denialists. Although it may get less coherent or less concerned with traditional argument structure as more and more evidence is unearthed, it gets more bitter, heated, and - most importantly - more numerous and concentrated.
Consider the sheer breadth of technicalities available as degrees of freedom for the Genocide Denialist to tune and play with:
- is it really genocide if the Génocidaires happen to have let the victim ethnicity live in semi-peace for 10 or 15 years before the fact ?
- is it really genocide if the victims happen to have had a high fertility rate before the fact ?
- Maybe it's genocide, but the perpetrator ethnicity is rich and has many Nobel prizes, and the victim ethnicity is poor and backwater, so ... [?]
- is it really ""tasteful"" to call it genocide when the current perpetrator ethnicity happen to be the descendants of victims from another, earlier genocide ?
- those are not children being killed, merely children being starved or frozen to death using passive obstructionism and Bureaucracy
- those are not teenagers being killed, merely teenagers being kidnapped and sexually abused in extra-judicial dark prisons
- the perpetrator ethnicity seems to discuss Ethnic Cleansing a lot, surely that can't mean they would also do Genocide? Exactly one of the two is ever possible at any given time, two is redundant.
And so on. And so forth.
It's of course besides the point to notice how trivially refutable or irrelevant every one of those are, they were never meant as solid research-level genocide **questioning**, the legitimate skepticism and question marks advanced by genocide scholars or good-faith amateurs and characterized by respect for evidence, awareness of previous literature, and the current state of evidence. In addition to the ethno-political neutrality of the author regarding the genocide in question. Those points are not intended to be used like that. They are bait.
The very nature of the fragmented, desperate, half-baked, half-hearted, half-thoughts of the Genocide Denialist is a feature: they confuse, they sow doubts, they decrease the signal-to-noise ratio and increase its reciprocal. They're the intellectual equivalent of fighter jet missile countermeasures, chaffs and flares. Their purpose is to be sources of noise, to confuse the targeting system of pursuers. Red Herring, reified and refined as a a whole arsenal of argument tactics and debate aesthetics.
Would you be fine if Israel paused its military campaign and Gaza was instead invaded by all the countries who had dual citizens kidnapped and killed by Hamas? I think if you wouldn't be fine, then you are clearly just pushing a "Palestinians can do whatever they want" narrative, which is unserious. If you would be fine, how should those countries enact their military campaigns such that it doesn't fall into the same pitfalls as Israel's?
Holocaust, local Jewish population change: -100%, approximately. Population change if the Nazis had only had a moderate-to-strong deliberate priority of wiping out Jews, as opposed to "yeah let's sacrifice a big portion of our actual war effort so that we can wipe some more out": Less severe than that.
Israeli response to to Hamas' attempted genocide, Gaza population change: Moderate population increase. Population change, had Israel had even the slightest preference towards them all being dead: -100%, within hours at most.
(Leaving out the fact that it's an actual war, that Hamas started, and could end at any moment by surrendering. As opposed to genocides, which don't have opposing armies.)
The Gazan people are, in fact, still around. If they were victims of genocide, they would not be. Or, if you want to stretch the definition, at the very least there would be far fewer of them. Your argument simply doesn't work, @LearnsHebrewHatesIP.
So, in simple words, "How could it be a genocide if it's not the Holocaust?!". <sigh>.
> Holocaust, local Jewish population change: -100%, approximately
False. Europe's Jewish population was 9.4 million before the Holocaust [1], the Holocaust killed 6 million == 6/9.4 == 63% of the population. That's your number after the negative sign, it's off by 37%. An additional amount fled to make the population 2.7 million by 1948.
> Hamas' attempted genocide
But I thought genocides has no survivors according to you and must result in 90%+ casualties? There are thousands of survivors from the Kibbutz Hamas raided (several times the dead count), there are overall 60K people [2] fleeing from Gaza Otef.
Which direction do you want to walk the Genocide Denial street? It can't be both ways.
> -100%, within hours at most.
This is an amusing factoid of Hasbara brainwashing. If every one of Gaza's 2.3 million people was lined up in the street ready for murder, it would have still taken every traditional weapon in Israel's arsenal quite a few days to murder them all. Go ahead, do the calculation assuming Israel will bomb every square kilometer of Gaza's 365 and using the number of aircrafts in the IDF and their payload in bombs and the bomb yield.
> [Gaza:] Moderate population increase.
You're not even trying at this. Laughable.
> The Gazan people are, in fact, still around
So are the Jews, the Armenians, and the Native Americans? No genocide ever happened because people == alive? Are you sure you understand what Genocide means? The definition (as in: the actual international treaty the world is upholding and the ICJ is enforcing) is in quite readable English [3].
> Your argument simply doesn't work
That's quite an amount of confidence for someone who seems to have last heard of the Holocaust in 11th grade history from a teacher they weren't completely paying attention to, and/or Call of Duty: World at War.
I normally like Chutzpah too but come on, *something* has to back it up, besides raw confidence and Ben Shapiro-esque making-shit-up-confidently, that is.
> @LearnsHebrewHatesIP.
You have to get over whatever grievances you have with a long-banned guy and start focusing on convincing someone who isn't you of what's coming out of your mouth/what's typed on your keyboard. Thank me for the advice later.
Serious, good faith, question here (that even I could make the case for answering in the affirmative): Was the American strategic bombing campaign against Japan in WW2 "genocide"?
Genocide is when a group of people (not necessarily an entire ethnicity) tries really hard to exterminate another group of people (not necessarily an entire ethnicity, or even an ethnicity at all) just for the sole reason of their existence.
Insofar as we can glean anything that proves the USA or its military high command wanted to exterminate the Japanese or any part thereof ""as such"" (i.e. just for being Japanese, such that a Japanese baby would still qualify even if they didn't do anything), we can indeed conclude that the American bombing campaign was a genocide. I don't know of anything like that, the closest would be rounding up Japanese immigrants in the USA and putting them in extra-judicial detention, but that's collective punishment, another bad thing that's not genocide, so I default to considering that what the USA did is not genocide.
This is still not high praise. "Not giving a shit so much that whole millions could die for objectives that could have been achieved in other ways" is its own, unique, incommensurable way of being a piece of shit, not comparable (i.e. neither greater nor lesser) than being a genocidaire.
That's quite a bit below "President of the country" or "Head of State (PM)", both of which have been documented spewing genocidal garbage in case of Israel.
And the US doesn't have a 78 year history of attempted ethnic cleansing/genocide with Japan, as Israel's history with Gaza (started with biological warfare in 1948).
The hostages could have been gotten back before January 2024 if Israel didn't break the first and only ceasefire in the war of late November 2023. But they weren't, which tells you all you ever need to know about the "But the Hostages" excuse.
I find it funny how you only addressed half my comment
In any case, to show other ACX Commenters the incredibly mendacity of our poster here, let's break down the facts, shall we?
The wikipedia article for the ceasefire indicates that both sides credibly accused the other of breaking it - and there were indeed incidents on both sides. The ceasefire was a 4 day ceasefire combined with a 3:1 Palestinian:Israeli Hostage exchange and the allowal of humanitarian aid into Gaza, followed by a 2 day ceasefire with a similar exchange, followed by a one day ceasefire. At this point, Hamas claims Israel rejected an extension in exchange for hostages, and they shot rockets into Israel, which were promptly responded to via Israeli airstrikes.
Rejecting an extension due to failing to come to terms is not "breaking" a ceasefire as OP put it. Let's see what happened:
The Guardian:
"Israel said the truce had been broken by Hamas and could not be renewed because the group had failed to offer to release the remaining female hostages in Gaza. Eylon Levy, a government spokesperson, said: “Having chosen to hold on to our women, Hamas will now take the mother of all thumpings.”
Hamas said some of the women asked for were Israeli soldiers, and that it had offered to hand over two other detainees plus the bodies of three members of the Bibas family it said had been killed by Israeli bombing, but this was rejected."
Reuters:
"Each of the warring sides blamed the other for causing the collapse of the truce by rejecting terms to extend the daily release of hostages held by militants in exchange for Palestinian detainees.
The pause, which began on Nov. 24, had been extended twice, and Israel had said it could continue as long as Hamas released 10 hostages each day. But after seven days during which women, children and foreign hostages were freed, mediators failed at the final hour to find a formula to release more, including Israeli soldiers and civilian men.
Israel accused Hamas of refusing to release all the women it held. A Palestinian official said the breakdown occurred over female Israeli soldiers."
A very different story, no?
It's also worth pointing out that Hamas did not allow Red Cross to visit the hostages despite that being in the initial deal.
So you have shown other ACX commenters my "mendacity" by... quoting Wikipedia, Reuters, and the Guardian saying both sides **credibly** accuse each other of breaking the ceasefire? And by citing a government spokesman of Israel who heavily implies that it's Israel that started/resumed the bombing first ("Mother of all thumpings")? Hmmm, okay. Hope you enjoyed showing my mendacity. Thanks for the new word.
> A very different story, no?
Nah, roughly the same story that I adequately summarized by "Israel broke the ceasefire". A ceasefire is, believe it or not, broken by the first party who starts firing. We also see that now in the "Ceasefire" agreed upon by Israel and Hezbollah, which Israel breaks almost every day.
>It's also worth pointing out that Hamas did not allow Red Cross to visit the hostages despite that being in the initial deal.
Regrettable, too bad that anyone with more than "room temperature in Celsius" worth of IQ points would have figured that firing upon Hamas wouldn't fix the situation or improve it, how tragic the leadership of Israel lack that.
> I find it funny how you only addressed half my comment
Oh let me declare that was intentional then, because I'm a natural comedian. That's how you manage to call out bullshit with no consequences.
And in case you agree with my original point that "But the hostages" is a convenient rubbish excuse for engaging in what Israel wanted in the first place, let me address your next point, how can Israel be credibly accused of genocide when it has an allegedly definite goal that the Palestinians could aid by surrendering? Well, the answer is that it's still genocide.
As stated in the Convention on the Prevention that I'm frankly quite tired of repeatedly citing by now, genocide isn't "Not Genocide" because the perpetrator party has "legitimate" military or political goals that the victim party could concede and survive. The Ottoman/Turkish proto-state had a goal in genociding Armenians on its land after all: not allowing them a piece of their future state. That's a very "legitimate" military goal, literally the preservation of a state. Until now, **looks up Wikipedia** exactly 34 state recognizes Turkey's genocide of Armenians, a tiny subset of the 200+ that exist.
The USA had a very legitimate military/political goal in genociding Native Americans. The Native Americans could have stopped it by surrendering and allowing the expanding colony to take their lands in peace. Even the Nazis had a somewhat legitimate political goal, if you squint a bit: They're the ruling party and they wanted the Jewish citizens out of their state. Their state, their rules. The German Jews could have prevented the Holocaust by fleeing outside of Europe any time between 1933 and 1938. (I believe the African colonies didn't have any high immigration standards for who they would accept, and I imagine the white Afrikaans would be more than delighted to receive White population)
No doubt to your disappointment, there is no "Just Stop Resisting Bro" clause in the Convention which defines Genocide and that Israel ratified and is active since 1951, a genocide is a genocide. Murder and significant attempts to kill or transfer children or prevent births, in whole or in part, and as such. Very simple. Very horrific.
...What do you mean by unconditional surrender? Because unless every member and supporter of Hamas commits suicide, this wouldn't be a long-term solution.
I mean exactly what I mean. Sure, some Japanese fought on til the 70s in the Philippine jungles, but when the state surrenders, it tends to stick. And I don't necessarily believe Hamas is that much more fanatical than the Imperial Japanese.
But more broadly, in the *vastly* unlikely chance that you're not @LearnsHebrewHatesIP, I have a suggestion for both of you:
The pompous tone you're utilizing in this comment and your replies to other people's comments is highly likely to entrench your ideological enemies into their positions, even when your assertions are supported by trustworthy evidence. Belief perseverance aka the backfire effect is a difficult enough phenomenon to combat when the person making an argument is likeable; when they're not, it becomes virtually impossible to overcome. Even here on ACX, where many commenters make a heroic conscious attempt to avoid falling victim to belief perseverance, many of your readers are nevertheless coming away from your content thinking, "Fuck that guy, I hope his cause fails even harder now."
And look, I get it! Righteous indignation feels great, and dunking on idiots is super fun!
However, when I see that my self-indulgent righteous indignation and idiot-dunking has made me an avatar through which my ideological enemies can hate my cause even *more,* I do immediate penance by donating hard cash to the best possible organization advancing my cause. For example, whenever I send someone into a frothing rage about the murder of babies by self-indulgently baldly laying out why there's a total lack of a downside to induced abortion, I immediately pay for some abortions for women who can't otherwise afford them. And that actually feels even better than the righteous indignation and idiot-dunking.
I suggest you do something similar for your particular cause.
From your link, I can glean that this guy (1) Really hated Trump, (2) Wrote about Gaza and AI a lot?
Like the meme says: Do You Have the Slightest Idea How Little That Narrows It Down? [1].
Go to HackerNews [2], scroll to the search bar in the very bottom of the page, and write "Israel". In the search results that appear, see how many of the comments are Pro-Palestinian and how many are Pro-Israel. (1) and (2) do NOT uniquely describe a single person. Not even close.
But regardless, that's a great guy/gal over there, and it's flattering for me to be mistaken for him/her.
> The pompous tone you're utilizing in this comment and your replies to other people's comments
This an interesting critique. What's "Pompous" in this context? Snarky? Self-Important? If NoRandomWalk is anything to go by, I have something valuable to say (the feeling is mutual), and he's coming at this from a Pro-Israel angle. N == 1 and all that, but still?
You and 1123581321 seem to infer "Anger" or "Self-Righteousness" by some sort of the genetic fallacy. "The kind of people who call the Gaza war a genocide are idiotic assholes on Twitter, you say the Gaza war a genocide, therefore you must be an idiotic asshole from Twitter".
I can be snarky as hell too, but I reserve that for people I detect to be not engaging in good faith, and "Good Faith" here isn't code for "I like them": I classify all but 2 of the top-level replies to my thread starter as Good Faith, and I dislike most of them. One of the 2 non-Good-Faith comments I didn't reply to, and the other I replied in kind. It's not hard to spot them.
> self-indulgently baldly laying out why there's a total lack of a downside to induced abortion
This is its own rabbit hole and I disagree that extinguishing life (even if it's 6-week-old life) "has no downside", although I perfectly understand the immense temptation to bait the "Pro-Life" hypocrites who simultaneously oppose abortions but have no problem supporting the biggest Post-Birth non-consensual-abortion providers, Israel.
I don't recommend acting on such temptations, in the same way that I abhor taunting pro-Israel genocide denialists with dead October 7th victims, as is the custom in some corners of Twitter and YouTube. The taunter is the biggest loser in the end, not the taunted.
I very much doubt I am the only long-time reader and commenter who suspects you are @LearnsHebrewHatesIP.
But if you are merely a spiritual twin of @LearnsHebrewHatesIP and you would like to avoid future accusations of being a permanently banned user utilizing a sock account, please feel free to research how to avoid their exact talking points, writing style, and comment formatting by searching for their username across most of the Open Comment threads prior to the October 6, 2024 banning.
You will encounter hundreds of comments which (if not written by you) were written by someone who is your *literal* soulmate, and you should drop everything and go to that person rather than wasting your life fruitlessly arguing with strangers on the internet.
Nah, I didn't think this was LHHIP. He explicitly wrote a long post about how he came to a conclusion that Israel didn't have a goal to genocide Palestinians. His writing manner was different too.
I mean...I find it eminently plausible that LearnsHebrewHatesIP could have been persuaded that Israel's goal wasn't genocide and then, perhaps upon later developments, change his mind back to genocide.
On the point of writing manner, I'd like to agree to disagree; after all, this user sounds so distinctly LHHIP to *me* that I accused them of being LLHIP, and I think the first reply back to me felt equally LHHIP-ish. You disagree. I would counter that any differences in writing style could be LHHIP trying not to be caught wearing socks, but I've also already proactively conceded that I could be wrong and the similarities are indeed a coincidence.
(If it is a coincidence, I stand by my advice that Hind's Ghost should go look up LHHIP's past comments, if not to avoid future accusations of sockery or plagiarism, then at least to derive tremendous pleasure from reading someone with a remarkably similar world view.)
Anyway, I'm guessing none of us is interested in doing hours of tedious forensic analysis on LHHIP's past comments to support our particular positions; that sounds like a huge pain in the ass and would ultimately still only reflect our personal opinions, as (I assume) none of us have access to the kind of hard evidence which would stand up in a real court.
The casualty rates seem awfully low for an intentionally plan to wipe a large number of people out. Something like 50,000 out of 2.1 million is high, but not much higher (in proportion) than casualties in the Iraq war, which benefitted from the invaded country not being one large urban-warfare city.
At some point, any war between different peoples can be considered a genocide, which sort of diminishes the impact of the term if we're applying it so indiscriminately. The insistence of the use of the term genocide, seems more like a play to reframe the situation in one that has conclusions less favorable for Israel (they suffered a genocide, which we all acknowledged was bad, which then largely motivated the support for the creation of Israel by the international community, which has led to another genocide being perpetrated in turn, sort of invalidating the justification for international support for Israel in the first place).
I don't have a horse in the race, as I don't particularly care, but it seems far more likely that this is the real intent behind calling the war in Gaza a genocide, than it is an accurate assessment of the language we use as it might apply to this situation.
> At some point, any war between different peoples can be considered a genocide
Interesting point, although there is more than one way to devalue the term "Genocide", and reserving it for victims of ethnicities "we like" while denying it for the victims of the ethnicities "we don't like" is another way, as is setting an explicit "You must be this tall for it to be a genocide" limit, which - as a trivial consequence - will allow genocidaires to know exactly how many they can "thin the herd" before stopping and not be on the hook for it.
> I don't have a horse in the race, as I don't particularly care
If that's true, you're not the "Genocide Denialist" I talked about in my post. Genocide Questioning is okay, as is being skeptic towards everything.
Like vs. don't like is a good distinction, and probably the accurate one. If that's the case, the term doesn't really matter besides a signal for ones support in the war in Gaza. If one calls it a "conflict", they're probably pro Israel, War is more neutral, Genocide is pro-Palestine. If the distinction is just one of support, there's really no point to argue whether what's happening in Gaza is a genocide or not, as the *actual* motivation for picking an accurate term to describe what's going on, is purely a political decision based on ones pre-existing support.
If anything it's a complete waste of time to talk about whether it's genocide or not (unless it becomes obviously and ideologically genocide i.e. Statements of deliberate intent to wipe the Palestinians out by people in positions of significant power, while also taking in mind that these sort of statements happen often in all wars. Dehumanizing the enemy might be an important psychological step in waging an effective war). The real debate and question should be about which side do you prefer and why, with the genocide claim serving as a distraction to enflame, and anger some previously-reasonable people.
It doesn't help that it is a term used basically specifically for a very unique and very rapid form of deliberate extermination from WW2. Applying it otherwise is a crapshoot that's just as likely to be an incorrect use than a correct one. Maybe there's an Arabic equivalent to genocide that can be used. For example, Genghis Khan definite committed genocide by any sane definition (literally and deliberately wiping out entire cities because he didn't like them) but calling his wars of conquest a genocide seems to not actually fit the term. Presumably he didn't have anything against the people of Merv on ethnic or religious grounds (the Mongol Empire was quite tolerant of different peoples and religions inside it), but he killed every last citizen because they were resisting. This seems qualitatively different than deliberately eliminating an entire people, at extreme expense, when they aren't actually resisting. There's no limit to the level of brutality if the normal threat "submit or die" is replaced with "die or die", where submission also means death.
We can talk about 2 things at once, and "Genocide" is a reminder that killing an entire people is not an acceptable answer to a political/ethnic/territorial conflict no matter what that conflict actually was or who is "at fault".
Nobody who agrees that the US genocided Native Americans (off the top of my head, quite literally taking children away from their parents and forced sterilization as late into the 20th cen as the 1970s) would be told "Actually, the real argument is whether Native Americans deserved their own state or the White settlers did, anything else is a distraction to inflame and distract".
Similarly for the Armenian Genocide (perhaps the 2nd most famous one after the Holocaust), which was committed against a quite armed population that had a history of nationalism and resisting the Ottomans.
One question: if Israel is carrying out a genocide in Gaza the what's taking them so long? If they wanted to kill _everyone_ they could clearly do it a lot faster.
This isn't the 19th century anymore, you can't just make it official policy to exterminate an entire population and get away with it. Israel's benefactors have their own images to maintain, after all. In the modern age, incompetence is infinitely more forgivable than malice. If people start dying to natural causes rather than outright murder, you get to maintain plausible deniability. Civilian casualties are unavoidable, of course, so who can blame them?
That's an argument that Israel has decided not to engage in genocide because of the bad PR and international political implications and whatnot. Which is plausible, but almost indistinguishable from Israel deciding not to engage in genocide because they know better than anyone that genocide is wrong. So it seems uncharitable to assert the cynical version.
But more importantly for our present discussions, the claim "Israel has decided not to engage in genocide because [reasons]", is first and foremost a claim that Israel has decided *not to commit genocide* and so is not committing genocide.
If you want to assert that Israel is attempting to commit genocide, perhaps by some sneaky camouflaged way because reasons, then you need a plausible mechanism by which the thing they are doing will result in at least the localized destruction of an ethnic group. Which is, after all, the definition of genocide.
The Palestinian population in Gaza is I believe *growing*, and has been for most of the past year. The casualty rate due to Israeli attacks has *decreased* by almost an order of magnitude from late 2023, to an annualized death rate of ~8.7 per 1000 people. The current birth rate, per the CIA world factbook, is 26.3 per 1000 people per year, and the prewar death rate was 3.5 per 1000 per year.
If Israel had continued what it was doing in late 2023, it could eventually have eliminated the Palestinian population of Gaza, though it would have taken a decade or so. If Israel continues to do what it is doing now, the Palestinian population of Gaza will grow at ~1.4% per year. Israel has changed its tactics from something that could eventually have had genocidal effect (though not necessarily intent), to something that cannot have genocidal effect.
This is not consistent with an Israeli intent to commit genocide, and it is not in fact a genocide in progress. It is a particularly bloody war, and we've already got the right words to describe *that*.
Yeah, you can make a case for "bombing the Gazans back into the stone age" or "being too indiscriminate in their targeting," but the charge of genocide seems like it is being used entirely for its emotional affect, without any particular concern for accuracy.
One question: If Nazi Germany carried out a genocide in Europe, then what took them so long? If the armed forces that reached Moscow from Warsaw in 5 months wanted to kill __everyone__ they could clearly do it a lot faster than 5 years.
If the Nazis had started openly doing mass shootings, sparing no one, then the non-Germans would have quickly figured out the goal was their extermination, and they would have started fighting back with whatever they had, hiding, and running. Those responses would have in turn made it harder for the Nazis to continue the killing. All of the infrastructure in the conquered areas would have also become unusable had the inhabitants all started to resist.
Exterminating a large population must be done in a piecemeal fashion to succeed, starting with the smallest and/or least-liked groups of people in the area. Keep working your way up.
They did. In April of 1942, 80% of the victims of the Holocaust were still alive; in September of 1942, 80% were dead. As John Schilling pointed out just as I was writing this, the reason they didn't kill them sooner was to extract slave labor out of them first. However, once the Nazis began to seriously contemplate the possibility of losing the war, Hitler wanted to achieve a policy goal that couldn't easily be undone. Nothing about this is in any way equivalent or even germane to the population of Gaza growing during an alleged extermination campaign.
So the question still remains, what did the Nazis spent the all the time doing between 1943 and 1945 ? Killing just a measly 20% (== 0.2 * 6 == 1.2 million Jews)? While they killed 4 times that in half a year? Does that mean the Nazis were actually the most moral army in the Universe and trying to avoid the civilian casualties while the partisans forced their hands?
> once the Nazis began to seriously contemplate the possibility of losing the war,
That must have happened by at least D-Day, June 1944. Berlin was captured about 10 to 11 months later. According to you, the Nazis only needed September - April == 6 months to kill 4.8 million in Jews (and quite a bit in others), they should have been done with the rest by January 1945 or March at the very latest.
And all of that still skips forward over the 1933-1939 period, in which Nazis tried every trick in the book to ethnically cleanse Jews without outright shooting them in the streets. Your reasoning would have outputted "Alleged Extermination Campaign" to anyone worrying about the Jews during this period.
That kinda does support their point, though. Israel doesn't have a real war to lose, nor are they losing the support of their benefactors anytime soon. They have plenty of time.
Well, first, the Nazis didn't want to kill *everyone*; they wanted to kill just the Jews and a few other specific groups while keeping everyone else alive. Since these groups aren't trivially distinguished by e.g. skin color, that involves a fair bit of tedious sorting. And second, they wanted to get the maximum amount of slave labor out of the ones they were going to kill, before killing them.
I think it was Rod Dreher who originally coined the term.
Law of merited impossibility: "That's just a right-wing conspiracy theory, it will never happen, and when it does, you bigots will deserve it good and hard."
What's the practical distinction between a bunch of sand and a heap of sand? Or between an Island and a continent? Or between a peninsula and the Indian subcontinent?
Yep, would you look at that. Shankar and I have had a few disagreements on various issues, his and mine politics are... different...
And yet you got us both on the same page: you don't care a fig about fate of actual Gazans and would rather drive people away than foster a broad agreement about this war being awful and the need to make it stop.
Okay, so it's not whether the ICJ or the UN or the ICC or "genocide scholars" or whoever you deem authoritative arbitrarily declares it so.
Good, this (along with at least two of your examples) bolsters my point that there IS no meaningful distinction, and your insisting on your preferred subjective and divisive label when you can easily get broad (though perhaps not overwhelming) agreement on what you might care about (Gazans deaths being sad) might be doing more harm than good.
And it IS subjective. Intent - of whom? Individual soldiers? Commanders? Government officials? Determined by their actions or their rhetoric?
And scale - in absolute numbers? A ratio of civilians to combatants? As a percentage of the total population? And if so, what's the total population of? Gazans? Palestinians? Arabs? And what's the threshold where your killing switches from collateral damage to genocide?
Something being fuzzy doesn't mean that that it can't have correct and incorrect labels.
> at least two of your examples
Do you believe that if someone called India a Peninsula or Australia an Island he or she wouldn't be made fun of as clueless or at least looked down upon as someone who doesn't bother to know the definition of things he/she talks about?
> Individual soldiers? Commanders? Government officials? Determined by their actions or their rhetoric?
All of the above. And there is evidence for every question mark.
> And if so, what's the total population of? Gazans? Palestinians? Arabs?
That reads like an extended parody of the kind of Genocide Denialist I'm describing in the second half of my post. You can do that with any Genocide. I bet if you took the number of Jews killed in WW2 to the total number of Jews who have ever existed from Abraham till now it will also sound tiny and inconsequential.
The population is Gazans. Because the war is in Gaza. Because the genocidal rhetoric is about Gazans and Palestinians more generally.
I agree (Mainland) Australia is large enough to clearly be more than a mere island. That was the one example of yours I wasn't counting.
Has there been a movement of some kind to stop India being referred to as a peninsula I'm not aware of? No, I do not think someone who did would be mocked as clueless or looked down upon.
You want to call every war a genocide, because it's a destruction "in whole or in part" or whatever, yeah, sure, knock yourself out. I will continue roll my eyes at you and everyone else who does, no matter how fancy their titles, but there's no reason for you to care about that.
Funny how parallel is the last sentence to Holocaust denial and "Holohoax" rhetoric. "Fancy fake scholars want to tell us our favorite state meant genocide when it was a just an honest war".
I'd say what really separates this from the Holocaust is how little the victims are practically valued. The most tragic thing about this whole situation is that every single nation on the planet places the value of their lives at zero or less than zero; otherwise they would be willing to offer them refuge. But as it stands, they are a global liability. Despite their rhetoric, even the sympathetic nations understand that the presence of these people would cause nothing but problems... The Gazans simply do not have a future.
...Uh, what? Where did you get that from? Even a white supremacist would accept that refugees from other white countries could provide net positive value, especially if they were skilled and educated.
Would you consider that by insisting on the “genocide” label you may be making things worse for Gazans? Like, a tiny bit worse, but nonetheless? Because it’s much easier for many people to agree that the war is awful and needs to come to some sort of a close fast, and Israel should be pressured to let more aid through, etc.
But you insist! Insist that this is genocide, and those who disagree with you are monsters, and the rest of your post.
And in doing this you lose allies, people like yours truly, who read your stuff, remember Jewish kids burnt alive by Hamas on Oct 7, and just walk away. I think Bibi is a monster, but I begrudgingly side with him when presented with your line of reasoning.
Genocide is not a label like "Bisexual" or "Pan-Sexual-ARomantic". It's something that had a definition and was recognized long before it was put in treaties or given a fancy Latin-derived name in a Germanic language.
> those who disagree with you are monster
Or misinformed, denialism happens for both reasons. More likely and prevalently, there is a weird quasi-stable state in the middle of "Actively Monstrous" and "Blissfully and Innocently Unaware", it's "Deliberately not wanting to know". Many such states in fact.
> remember Jewish kids burnt alive by Hamas on Oct 7
Sure, Jewish kids being burned alive by Hamas, brought to you by the same state that claimed 40 babies were beheaded by Hamas and then couldn't produce a single shred of evidence. You don't need to embellish what Hamas did. Take what can be verified for a fact right now and wait for the rest to be proven.
And you know what? Let's grant that Hamas did indeed burn Jewish kids alive. Israel also engaged in that hobby too, here's (just one) instance of that https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=df3kZYqYJlI, caught on actual video. Is there perhaps a good reason that wasn't the one that came to your mind first when you queried for "Horrible war criminals burning people alive"?
But I get it. It's all because of October 7th, right? That one justifies everything. It justifies murdering bazillion kazillion Palestinians. It probably justifies breeding Palestinians and then killing them just for the heck of it. But if that is true, how could burning Palestinian children alive be something that was happening even before October 7th? https://www.reuters.com/article/world/israeli-settler-found-guilty-of-murder-in-arson-attack-on-palestinian-family-idUSKBN22U0L2/, Hmmm, maybe Israel perfected a Torah-based method of seeing 10 years into the future though, idk.
> I think Bibi is a monster, but I begrudgingly side with him when presented with your line of reasoning.
Ok, I'm so horrible that a literal war criminal wanted by the ICC is better than me. You do you, I will do me.
So why are you here? Clearly not to convince anyone to come to your view, you're failing miserably at that. Like I said, you're nudging the arrow away from your preferred outcome.
Unless the preferred outcome is to righteously yell at others, Gazans be damned.
> Clearly not to convince anyone to come to your view
I think you're laboring under the misconception that you not being convinced by 2500 words of sourced argument that you never seriously engaged with the points therein, somehow means the words are to blame.
But you know what? It's completely fine you're not convinced. I will take both of Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International over your opinion when it comes to genocide and/or war crimes any day of the week, no offense to you, I'm sure you're great at many other things.
ACX has a lot of other readers. If exactly one of them is not aware of the genocide in Gaza (or laboring under Israel's lies of "Collateral Damage") and I managed to at least sow the seed of doubt in his or her conscience and motivate him or her to look further, that's completely fine by me.
> the preferred outcome is to righteously yell at others
Have you developed a mutation that allows you to hear sound over text? You could use a medical patent if so.
The traditional signifier for yelling over text is UPPPER_CASE, which I used in this thread **ctrl-F" exactly once in my conversation with NoRandomWalk, and in the context of emphasis by repetition (e.g. one, uno, EINS), not yelling.
More generally, your approach to this issue in your comments reminds me of the "Calm Hitler" meme [1]. Not in the sense that you're Hitler or anything close to him, but more generally the idea of "Wow Man, anger is, .... like ..... totally not cool. Calm down my guy nothing deserves to be angry about."
Does this have a name? Let's call it Reductio Ad Ragerium. You're angry, therefore you're wrong. Because "emotions" are wrong. Reason is when we calculate the simulate the world as a Turing machine in blissful, machine indifference. Anything else is obviously corrupt and false.
It's even worse than the meme because in the meme Hitler at least had a visual confirmation that his interlocuter was indeed angry in the way that he imagines it, but in your case you're just inferring anger (true) in my words and thinking of the stereotypical frothing-at-the-mouth image of a street pastor type of angry (false) instead of the more common and socially common type of anger that makes people want to argue for the right reasons without necessarily being stuck in a nervous breakdown.
Guy: RARG PEOPLE DESRVE TO BE TREATED LIKE HUMANS DURRR NOBODY HAS THE RIGHT TO MURDER MILLIONS HURR DURRR
Hitler [Calm and collected, but taken aback]: Wow I just want to murder all the Jews and take over the world, but hey, that's your opinion and I'm totally fine with that. Looks like you've got some growing up to do.]
He has clung to power for far too long and at this point his main goal appears to be defending that above all else. He was preoccupied with wrecking Israel’s judiciary as opposed to Israel’s security before the oct 7 attacks. He brought in some despicable characters into his cabinet (e.g., Smotrich), who are mirror image of Hamas and actually would like to genocide Gazans if they could get IDF to go along. He doesn’t appear to have a plan of how to return the hostages or what to do with Gaza.
I grant that bringing Smotrich into his cabinet was akin to 'strategically allying with evil,' and his personal interest in optimizing for power is stronger than his belief that he can improve Israel's security more than whoever would replace him if his government fell.
On the other points, if you'd engage me:
I don't really understand the judicial reform movement, my basic understanding is 'the judicial system in Israel is completely bonkers, under Israeli law/religious understanding everything is justiciable, and judges pick their replacements, so without a constitution you functionally have no democracy judges have absolute authority over everything; it just so happens that jews are such a legalistic culture that this doesn't result in tyranny' and 'people in government wanted the power to enact certain laws, judges were stopping them, and they moved to reduce the power of judges'. I get that 'politicians reducing power of judges following unfavorable rulings' is anti-democratic, but the power of judges in Israel seems so undemocratic to me I don't know what to think.
Re. Gaza/Hostages, let's say his theory of the situation is 'If the palestinians have state-building capacity, they will channel it almost exclusively towards the goal of destroying Israel, and I don't have the ability to culturally engineer them otherwise. I will attempt to undermine this by balancing Hamas and the Palestinian authority against each other and be fine with settlements, divide and conquer style. On hostages, I don't actually have the ability to trick Hamas into releasing them against their interests. They want to stay in power, I think their doing so will long-term result in many more hostages being taken, October 7th happened because we released Sinwar and many others in exchange for a hostage, there's really no gains to negotiation I can have with Hamas'. On post-war plans, it seems that a permanent military occupation of some amount of the border is all I can unilaterally do. If Iran or Hamas gets overthrown by its own populations, then we can rethink the situation, until then I have only military not political solutions available.' Do you disagree that this is his framework, do you think some other framework is more true?
Israel's judicial system might very well be flawed, but my (and enough Israelis' to mount massive protests for months) sense is that Bibi's fixes aren't meant to carefully address those. I - separately - have a sense of a "democracy" as being a system with strongly separated powers having oversight over each other, so it's a feature of the system to have strong judiciary. This is more of a personal view, YMMV.
I don't have a solution for Gaza and the hostage situation, but then I'm not Israel's PM who's been in power for almost two decades on the platform of being a strong protector.
As an aside, appreciate a good engagement on a difficult issue.
To a first-order approximation, let's say I believe the following:
1) The Israeli military is one of the top 10 most professional armies in the world, and the most professional army that is primarily composed of reservists who rotate in and out of civilian life, and is also the most legalistic in the world, by which I mean the extent to which lawyers oversee actions such as military strikes and have the capacity to override them on a case by case basis if they are a violation of rules.
2) Israeli culture responded to October 7th (similar to how they responded to the 2nd intifada) by pivoting hard to prioritizing security and deprioritizing peaceful coexistence through cultural and economic exchange, but not towards a desire for revenge or territorial expansion
Given this, it wouldn't 'make sense' to me that a genocide was happening. Israelis don't want it to, it's not the country's official policy, how many war crimes are committed is closely connected with the professionalism and legalism of the army, if it was happening Israeli society would quickly become aware through first-person discussions of family members of soldiers who return from the front.
Could you help me understand what is the 'narrative-shattering fact' that I am missing that would, if a genocide is happening, be able to process the available evidence differently and reach the truthful conclusion?
Also, would be curious for you to answer the following:
1) Is there a different strategy that Israel could practically be taking that would result in all of the following: additional security for their citizens across short and long term horizons, more hostages released alive, and fewer innocent Palestinians hurt and/or displaced.
2) What is the ratio of, all else being equal, of Israeli solider deaths to Palestinian innocent civilian deaths, that you think is 'appropriate' in this war to be the margin along which an Israeli army would choose its tactical approach, and roughly how did you determine that. Separately, what do you think is the tradeoff that Israel society would find acceptable. Separately, what do you think is the tradeoff that has actually been implemented in practice?
3) Who do you think has 'agency' in this conflict? Is it Hamas, Israeli elected officials, surrounding Arab states, Iran, individual soldiers, the civilian populations in any of these places, etc.
4) What is your basic model of the 'inputs' into the equation that results in 'extent to which Palestinians trade off state building capacity against Israel-destroying capacity'.
5) At what point in history do you think the biggest 'mistake' was made by anyone involved, that prevented a long-term lasting peace from occurring.
6) Is your desired outcome more determined by what would cause 'peace' or 'justice', and if the latter what would you consider a 'just' outcome.
(Q-1) Yes, there could have been. Allying with the Palestinian Authority (which could have happened as early as April or May of 2024), just like Israel does now in the West Bank. Evicting West Bank settlers and demolishing settlements, or doing land swaps (perhaps to connect Gaza and the West Bank) in return for settlements too big to evict (Ariel and Jerusalem).
(Q-2) (A) I reject the assumption that those trade against each other. If you think I'm being unreasonable or that the assumption is obviously true, the ratio is 1:1.
(B) The majority of Israeli society doesn't think in terms of this ratio at all, and would like the number of casualties in soldiers to be zero regardless of what happen to Gazans, armed or otherwise
(C) The latest New York times investigation into the IDF reveals the answer to a similar question: the acceptable ratio of innocent Gazans killed to Hamas militants (no matter how low rank or unimportant). It's 20 to 1. Given this, I would say your ratio is at least this and at most 50 to 1. It's probably in flux.
(Q-3) Surrounding Arab states first, like the original big four (Egypt, Jordan, Lebanon, Syria) that border Israel. Then consecutive Israeli governments from the time of Golda Meir. Then PLO leadership till 2008. Then Hamas leadership starting from 2011. Then individual soldiers. Then Israeli public intellectuals and journalism.
(Q-4) Which Palestinians? PLO or Hamas? Or ordinary people?
(Q-5) Egypt during the Camp David negotiations, for not conditioning Peace on Palestinian statehood or re-integration into Israel.
(Q-2): I think the ratio of hamas:civilian by Israeli army is in the ballpark of 1:10 in terms of policy, and in practice has resulted in roughly 1:5. Agreed on all of your claims A-C.
Can you expand on your rejection?
My basic model is 'Israel is convinced that for security reasons they need to create a situation where Hamas is not the strongest military force in the Gaza strip, and removing them from power involves tactical choices that trade off risks to hostages, your military personnel, and civilians' which if I had to make up numbers I think a reasonable ratio for is roughly 1:10:(100-500)'
(Q-3): Agreed on everything.
(Q-4): Ordinary people. I think Hamas is driven by a religious mandate, PLO was driven by a false model of thinking of Israelis as the Algerian French [make being in Israel unpleasant enough and they will choose to leave] and due to a combination of that turning out to be untrue and Israel failing to robustly support individuals within it who could have eventually become competent partners for peace and state builders, it transformed into a corrupt entity that mostly accepts bribes for military cooperation.
What is your core understanding of why the Palestinians haven't as a body politic self-organized into making it clear to the Israeli body politic that they would accept no right of return and a permanent self-policing of any internal elements interested in violence in exchange for some sort of autonomy on a chunk of land with the expectation that within two generations, possibly sooner, if there truly is minimal violence they would get a state.
(Q-5): Not my answer, but a valid and interesting one I hadn't considered.
(Q-6): I agree with your framework. So, it is your understanding then, that to 'a part of the Palestinian population large/strong enough to self-police the remainder' any Israeli self-rule within the borders of mandate Palestine would not be an injustice that is a recipe for future war, to be cooked up if given the autonomy + means to do so?
Okay. Let's first notice something: whatever the ratio is, it's not 3 numbers, it must be only 2. It's impossible to distinguish Gazans and Israeli hostages using only bullets and bombs, and the sheer ratio of hostages killed to hostages saved by the IDF should be enough evidence for this.
So it's 2 numbers, 1:n, where n is the number of Gazans/hostages who are allowed to die to save one IDF soldier or vastly decrease the risk to him/her. If Israeli propaganda is to be believed, every single waking hour of every IDF soldier is a moral dilemma where he has to decide whether to kill the Hamas soldier or the 2 million children he's wearing as human shields.
The reality of Israel's war in Gaza is that it's largely automated. When boots on the ground are deployed, they're largely in useless "Vietnam-style" patrols that clear an area that Hamas will pop up in 2 months later. Some areas of Gaza are being cleared for the 3rd and 4th time this year. Some Hamas soldiers were civilians when the war started.
Automated war-making mechanisms, on the other hand, can afford to discriminate more. Pervasive surveillance by drones (every Gazan-captured video has a persistent humming in the background, it's Israeli drones, which monitor every waking hour of every Gazan), itself a human rights violation, can mitigate the much bigger human rights violation of murdering them.
Further, one of the biggest fears of Gazan civilians - one they're more than 100% justified in having - is that they won't be allowed to return once they evacuate. It sounds like they're right, given the state of North Gaza and the magnitude of dumb fucks bleating about "Nakba 2.0" in the Israeli government. This decreases the effectiveness of Israeli "warnings" even before we talk about how useless those warnings are (Israel bombs the "safe" areas anyway).
But one way Israel can combat that is by evacuating civilians in Gaza to temporary camps or Beduin villages in the Negev desert. Gazans will have the assurances that they will return to Gaza (far preferable to Israel than letting them stay in Israel), and Israel can extensively inspect and search the refugees at the border to ensure they're not Hamas. Also the Negev is as far away from Tel Aviv as you can possibly get, some places in it are further from Tel Aviv than Gaza is.
So yes, all in all, "it's either our soldiers or their civilians" is a convenient Hollywood-inspired myth that justifies what IDF soldiers and personnel themselves repeatedly call in investigation after investigation useless murder with no military goal. That's what I believe.
(Q-4) I don't know. Anything of the form "Why/What/How many ordinary Palestinians actually ..." is tricky because I'm not Palestinian and have no personal contact with Palestinians. So I will essentially defer to polls, "Trading off state-building capacity against Israel-destroying capacity" seems to be another way to rephrase support for the 2-state solution against the 1-state solution, here's a poll [1] that says 59% of them (didn't read whether from Gaza or the West Bank, huge difference) believed in the 2 state solution in 2012, but decreased to 24% in pre-October 2023. Which sounds understandable, it's pretty difficult to have faith in a solution that the Prime Minister of your negotiation partner openly declared in the UN will never happen.
(Q-6) Eliding the same disclaimers in (Q-4) (but you should keep in mind they still apply), yes. My understanding is that's essentially Oslo. What derailed Oslo is Rabin's assassination and the 2nd Intifada, the first is hardly the Palestinians' fault and the second is regrettable but understandable reaction to the IDF and settler provocation in (then-settled) Gaza and the West Bank. The much-complained-about-by-Israel Palestinian Right of Return can be dialed back to an acceptable yearly ratio (return of 20K Palestinians per year) or turned into Holocaust-style reparations.
[Super duper disagree with you on right of return; will respond in order of your comments, but that's what matters the most]
(speculation warning) That it's closer to 2 numbers in practice than 3 numbers is a function of the military reality of the war due to hamas actions, not Israel's collective moral values/preferences. If the war was different, the 3rd number would be relevant. I think the only situation in which the 3rd number became relevant was during the hostage rescue operation that, let's stipulate rescued 3 hostages in expectation, and killed 5-50 civilians in expectation, but the exfiltration operation came under hamas fire and it balooned into hundreds of casualties, I have no idea how many of them were militant, I assume most were civilian. In cases such as these, I believe the Israeli army before approving operations would consider that third number, and I could imagine there were rescue operations that were not attempted due to that third number.
The strategy of constantly reclearing isn't Vietnam style at all, I think you haven't been listening to Israeli military strategists explaining the strategy, or noticing that the military:civilian ratios are the 'best' morally speaking in the reclearing operations, and it's in the reclearing not in the initial clearing that Israel suffers casualties. The strategy is 'holding land creates a bunch of soft targets. we will clear an area partially of civilians where hamas wants to be, let hamas regroup there (sometimes it's a hospital or a refugee camp where hamas thinks it is safer to be), and then re-engage. this is our best strategy of maximing the number of hamas destroyed, and minimize our own soldiers/civilian casualties'.
'Some hamas soldiers were civilians when the war started' - maybe, hard to tell. But my understanding is that Hamas has been very significantly degraded. It still has the forces to kill basically anyone who collaborates with Israel, and to comandeer a significant amount of the aid, but on net it is significantly smaller/weaker, and doesn't have the ability to coordinate anymore is a bunch of shattered splinter cells and a couple of remaining batallions.
If you think allowing palestinians from gaza into israel (negev desert, or anywhere, heck it could be in a magical sealed bubble 100000 feet in the air) is possible in terms of israel democratic politics...you don't, right?
I think that the closest to reality 'magical solution if people other than hamas had different preferences' would be the gulf states financing israel building a city capable of housing anyone near the egyptian border, and filtering civilians into it one at a time making sure there were no weapons in there, and then declaring the remainder of gaza an unrestricted war zone. But Israel doesn't have the resources or patience for this, and it's not something the surrounding countries would be interested in supporting.
Israel is basically getting rid of any Hamas that isn't near hostages, with the understanding that they are under orders to terminate anyone who might be about to be rescued, in the most practical way they know how. They don't know how to tradeoff hostages vs. civilians, I agree, but there are plenty of places where there are no hostages where they do make tradeoffs between soldiers/hamas/civilians, and there is a constant, ongoing discussion in israeli society about if they are sacrificing too many soldiers to protect civilians.
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Yes it is absolutely a reasonable expectation that 'anywhere that civilians evacuate from' they will probably not be allowed to return, depending on if Hamas remains the strongest military force in Gaza at the end of this, assuming Israel doesn't get destroyed by Hamas/Hezbollah/surrounding states which was roughly Hamas strategy as far as I can tell, which has failed.
Now it seems the distribution of possible outcomes has collapsed to 'if Hamas is the strongest force in Gaza, Israel will decide the size of the buffer zone they want to have, and go back to the pre-Oct 7 status quo. There may be settlements, hopefully not, I expect there will not be, but am unsure; if Hamas is removed somehow and someone else controls the area, could be permanent occupation, could be the PA, it really depends I'm a lot less sure of how to model it.'
All of this really, really depends on the Palestinians and not the Israelis, because of how much more Israel wants peace (a huge amount) than international support (a lot) than land in Gaza (very little).
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(Q-4;6) As a massive first-order simplification, I claim that the palestinian identity is built on the idea that the creation of Israel is illegitimate, and justice requires no permanent Jewish autonomy in the region. The problem is that any 'autonomy' that has state-building capacity quickly comes under control of militants who care more about this aspect of their identity than the material interests of their citizens. Israel tried heavy bribes to have corrupt palestinian collaborators 'in charge' who do not coordinate with each other. It worked somewhat in the west bank, it was working somewhat in gaza (or so Israel thought) until it spectacularly wasn't, and the religious aspect of Hamas is the main factor of that.
I don't know where this idea of "much-complained-about-by-Israel Palestinian Right of Return can be dialed back to an acceptable yearly ratio (return of 20K Palestinians per year) or turned into Holocaust-style reparations" comes from. This was on offer in the past, and it was soundly rejected by Arafat without any counter-proposal, and he faced no internal criticism for doing so because 'justice' means everyone can return to Israel proper, and war is preferable to something meaningfully different, assuming war has a chance of success.
Israel is now motivated to prove that the chance of success is as close to 0 as they can.
It really really matters what would be done with a second state. Would it be used to build up a military to eventually take over the other state 'armed struggle to liberate Israel proper', or to build up a functioning state focused on the quality of life of its population 'state building'?
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My belief (low confidence) is pre-Oct 7 about 70% of Gazans and West Bank populations supported armed struggle over state building, and if withdrawn from by Israel completely would have both been 'taken control of' in the sense of 'what the strongest military power wants' by 'armed struggle' forces with near 100% certainty.
Israel was very divided on this point, and tried the withdrawal strategy and got Oct 7, and now believes this as well (before Oct 7 I didn't really know what to think, I thought the settlements were a big reason for conflict and thought Gaza would not be an issue and they need to stop or there will be massive issues in the west bank eventually).
They never withdrew from west bank (they were considering it) because either that's religiously important land, or because of the high ground and proximity to population centers it's too scary to do so. I can't tell which is the 'true' reason, I think the security consideration is sufficient, and maybe the other one is as well but if peace was on offer the desire for it would have won out certainly before the 2nd intifada, possibly after I can't tell.
To be clear 'the right of return' is *The* issue that prevents peace from happening. If the palestinian body politic was capable of saying 'we are fine with Israel existing, in perpetuity, give us autonomy over some area of land, and we will police our own extremist elements reasonably effectively' we would live in a completely different situation.
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My 'prediction' is that we will have a 1-state, 3-entity solution where Israel has control of Israel, and exerts significant military influence over Gaza and West Bank, who will be governed independently by PA and Hamas descendants, and depending on if Palestinians reject violence or not they will either turn into proper states or continue to be settled at the rate that is practical for Israel given its complicated internal coalitions, assuming that the international order doesn't at some point present a tradeoff of security vs. settlement, in which case Israel will heavily prioritize security, but I don't expect that to happen since I don't think anyone outside of Palestinians is fine with 'Israel existing on some land' but cares about it not expanding enough to tradeoff other things they care about.
Plenty of Israelis and Palestinians oppose expansion of settlements, and the current expansion of them is a function of the strength of those oppositions.
Fine, there is plenty I disagree with here. But perhaps the most striking is how you seem to treat Palestinians returning as Israel ceasing to exist. I think this is the biggest evidence that - in actual practice - Israel **is** an apartheid. As no non-apartheid state ever thinks of the mere possibility of accepting another ethnicity as "Ceasing to exist". Trouble? Yes, arguing that immigrants == Economic hardships? Very common, and actually has a solid basis in truth in some situations. But immigrants == state no longer exists? That's unprecedented outside of Israeli rhetoric and White Supremacism/extreme European nationalism.
I'm not calling you any of those ideologies, but this feature of their rhetoric is heavily apparent in your model of the things.
The "Arafat made Oslo fail" is a common myth/oversimplified story, here's a very lightly pro-Palestinian account of the negotiations [1], the institute's "About" page lists a single Arab-looking guy with Arab-looking names and the rest of the institute's is pretty neutral and doesn't look anti-Israel (it barely merits a mention among Turkey, Syria, and North African topics).
More specifically, Israel bears the Lion's share of the blame for continuing the settlements while it was negotiating for peace. If you're negotiating for "X", and you continue to do "NOT X" while negotiating, your negotiation partner has a pretty good reason to distrust you and look for flaws and holes in your "offers". To make that closer to Israel or Pro-Israel viewpoints, imagine if Egypt - while negotiating for peace in the Sinai Peninsula - kept approving military operations that killed 2 or 3 Israeli soldiers per week.
Israel/Israelis/Pro-Israel viewpoints seem to view the settlements as "Negotiation card" that they can hold onto to coerce their partner for peace of favorable terms. But from the pro-Palestinian viewpoint, settlement is not a card, they're an essential proof that in actual practice Israel doesn't want peace. After all, it's trivially obvious that scattering a bunch of civilians across "Judea" doesn't really bring peace, au contraire, one of the reasons for October 7th was how distracted the IDF was with the West Bank.
That is, Israel - if it means peace - should give away settlement **first**, then negotiate for whatever terms it want. Notice that giving away settlements doesn't mean giving away military control, as the current state of Gaza (and the 1967-1977 state of both Gaza and the West Bank) demonstrate.
If settlements can be negotiating tactics, then so does hostages. After all, holding people prisoners is no less criminal/abhorrent (from either a moral or a legalistic standpoint) than taking their money and their land. Since Palestinian militants aren't able to hold land, they can hold hostages just fine, and they do, I believe the first kidnapping by Hamas was in the 1990s.
This backfiring is primarily Israel's main (un-)doing. It is Israel that cemented the "I can do some illegal shit and then condition its reversal on something I want, as if its reversal is some privilege I'm bestowing and not the bare minimum". I don't think that Israelis or pro-Israel people recognize this, that the "Taking hostages for demands" mentality was started and primarily practiced by Israel.
> Given this, it wouldn't 'make sense' to me that a genocide was happening. [Because [1]] Israelis don't want it to, [And (2)] it's not the country's official policy
It's strange to me that those are your reasons (or perhaps surface level summarizations of a more complex and unarticulated-in-writing thought process?). (2) is just obviously absurd, of course no nation state will actually adopt "Decrease $TARGET_POPULATION by 80% by 2028" as an actual goal to put in writing and discuss in official communication. Did that happen in any genocide at all? Here's a list of antisemitic legislation that Nazi Germany passed from 1933 to 1939 [1], I don't see "Put Die Juden on Bahn and exterminate them with gas" in there, but I could be missing something.
As for (1), who are the "Israelis" in question? As in, how did you actually infer that (the majority of) the population doesn't want that. Do they **have** to enthusiastically want that, or is it enough to turn a blind eye? How many Germans from 1941 to 1945 actually knew what happening in Auschwitz? To pick a less distant analogy, how many Americans enthusiastically wanted the war in Afghanistan or went above and beyond "Meeh" in their support of it while their government was conducting it?
For a very rough and unscientific estimate, here's [2] a recent series of street interviews from someone who has been doing that for more than a decade (Ask Project), interviewing a bunch of (for all practical purposes) random Israelis, asking them ""Israelis: Do you know how many civilians have been killed in Gaza?"". I don't think you can be so confident with (1) when this video (and many, many, MANY like it) exist.
> if it was happening Israeli society would quickly become aware through first-person discussions of family members of soldiers who return from the front.
This is already happening since mid last year, here's the latest (in a long line of similar investigations) published by Haaretz https://archive.ph/zv1KD (Title: 'No Civilians. Everyone's a Terrorist': IDF Soldiers Expose Arbitrary Killings and Rampant Lawlessness in Gaza's Netzarim Corridor.)
> the 'narrative-shattering fact'
It's not clear if you want that fact to disagree with your premises outright, or just to run with them till it smashes into contradiction. If you want the first, then
(1) >> The Israeli military is one of the top 10 most professional armies in the world,
Given the above investigation (or many like it in other sources of your choosing), and remembering that nearly no modern army ever has the deluge of soldiers publishing themselves in unencrypted, unfiltered, non-firewalled glory committing war crimes like wanton destruction of civilian property in ghost towns and humiliation of detainees (not necessarily POWs), I think you would be irrational and more than a little rigid not to rethink this assumption.
(2) >> Israeli culture responded to October 7th [...] not towards a desire for revenge or territorial expansion
If you want the second, then what does (1) and (2) uniquely predict in your view that should be contradicted if a genocide is the gameplan but isn't right now? What will have to happen to make you think that it's potentially a genocide?
My answers to your 6 questions follow in another comment for easier scrolling.
(Thank you for replying as you have, anything I did not reply to I read and spent time processing. Everything you claimed I believe to either be true or plausibly to be true, both in this long reply and your other one, and I am grateful for the quality and level of engagement.)
Instead of responding point by point, I will, informed by your reply, share more of my 'model of what's going on' and hopefully you can identify what is the core of our disagreement better than my prompts and your response did.
1) Israel is convinced that it is under existential threat.
2) The global community is putting very significant pressure on Israel to minimize the number of civilian casualties.
3) The Israeli army is highly professional and legalistic. I would have expected before the war started a much higher amount of israeli military and palestinian civilian casualties, and a much lower amount of cultural cohesion in Israel.
4) There is so much information/surveillance/documentation of this conflict.
I simply don't understand where the possibility of a genocide exists. I agree there will be some amount of war crimes, but Israel doesn't have the resources or flexibility to do it even if they wanted to, and they seem to competent / interested in their own survival to allow one to just happen through decentralized actions driven by a shared desire for revenge.
I happen to also believe that 5) whether or not huge number of civilians are traumatized by Oct 7 to the point of being numb to Palestinian suffering, the vast majority of military people on the ground are not the type of people to willingly inflict it, but this is not something I expect to be able to convince someone of over text, it would require actual immersion in the culture which you either do or don't have.
Can you state in plain words, what is the mechanism for which something really bad might be happening, absent an official policy to do so?
I grant that an official policy isn't necessary, certainly not a 'public one,' but in other conflicts where bad stuff happened without one I can explain how it did, and here I fail to explain how it could.
Are you saying there is some desire for revenge, or that there is some internal consensus, official or unofficial, that really bad things happening is necessary for security, either including or not including the implied costs to international support.
> Can you state in plain words, what is the mechanism for which something really bad might be happening
There are people with guns, without oversight or control. Those people say they want revenge, have said they will pursue it, are indeed acquiring it every time their conduct is captured in words or visuals or audio over the past year+. Is it a huge jump to conclude that those people are pursuing revenge? When you see people serving with those people testifying that their colleagues opened fire on 4 unarmed civilians with a drone, killing 3 and capturing the fourth to strip him and spit on him, is it a huge leap to say that's this is the norm?
> Are you saying there is some desire for revenge, or that there is some internal consensus, official or unofficial, that really bad things happening is necessary for security, either including or not including the implied costs to international support.
I don't see a difference. One look at the comment sections of Times of Israel or Jerusalem Post will tell you both are pretty mainstream to the point of "Fish-Asks-What-Is-Water" Banality.
Ah, that helps me understand where you are coming from.
The claims I am making are as follows:
1) Israeli society thoroughly prioritizes security and release of hostages over revenge. Revenge is a very, very distant concern if there are actual tradeoffs involved.
2) Global pressure imposes a very high cost on getting revenge
3) Israel reservists are constantly rotating in and out of society, getting hurt, and securing significant gains to security
4) There is constant dialogue in Israeli society. This isn't like Vietnam where people don't really know what's going on.
5) Israeli society has become more and more supportive of the war, as it has become more persuaded that there is not a non-military alternative to getting security.
6) Israeli military is highly competent, and capable of policing itself. It knows that all of the bad publicity it gets is, to the extent it maps to reality, very detrimental to the war effort and international political support, and is highly motivated to keep it low, constrained by the realities of being primarily composed of reservists, many of whom are traumatized by Oct 7 and some of which come from west bank settler types.
Therefore, revenge is not being systematically chosen (and I am happy to stipulate to most of the claims you have linked to as happening and bad) and traded off against security/hostage release.
What amount of settlers getting into Gaza and Lebanon and 12 ministers from the 36-minister government saying that settlement is necessary would convince you that (1)...(6) is shaky or outdated ?
If the comparison is Nazi Germany, it was openly declaring areas Judenfrei (and itself Judenrein) because the goal was to ethnically cleanse Jews. Collaborator governments like the Vichy French were willing to put foreign (not necessarily French) Jews on trains to wherever the Germans wanted them. What was actually going on at the destinations was not public knowledge until people like Rudolf Vrba publicized it and got Miklos Horthy to stop some shipments (until he was overthrown). But Israel is not free of Palestinians, they are still a substantial percent of the population of Israel proper. That's because those Palestinians aren't part of a separate polity warring against Israel, but instead people willing to put up with being ruled by the Israeli government.
"Here's a list of antisemitic legislation that Nazi Germany passed from 1933 to 1939 [1], I don't see "Put Die Juden on Bahn and exterminate them with gas" in there, but I could be missing something." https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/open-thread-363/comment/84752174
I used that comparison because it was the comparison you used.
I also referenced Japan and Turkey, and I didn't say that Nazi Germany isn't the comparison, only that it wasn't the only comparison.
Your point is irrelevant regardless, "Israel can't be perpetrating genocide against Gazans because some people who are ethnically the same as Gazans are still in Israel", and? If Germans perpetrated genocide against Poland's and France's Jews but never their own the Holocaust wouldn't have been a genocide?
The definition of Genocide contains "In Whole or in Part", by the way. [1]
I am getting notifications that my comments in this thread were “liked.” I thought you couldn’t “like” comments in acx - I certainly can’t. What is going on?
I can like replies to my comments in “Activity”. I do this when I don’t have anything to add but want to let the commenter know I have seen the response and like it / agree with it.
The comments are talking about how insightful it is, and Tanner Greer took a lot from it... but I just don't see it? Isn't this the usual mythology around Musk/SpaceX?
I'm also pretty dissatisfied with how getting to Mars is treated like this all-justifying, obvious public good... but what are you going to do there? Say the miraculous comes to pass and Musk's prediction of boots on Mars comes to pass by 2029: they've got to survive there for a couple of years before the launch window allows them to come back (assuming a miracle rocket that can fly back to Earth with crew and cargo after a year or two on the Martian surface).
Have I just not seen whatever work is going into making that possible? Is there a parallel moonshot project for long-term Martian life support that just hasn't made big news? This Mars mission seems fundamentally unserious, but people keep treating it like it's a real possibility.
The Mars mission is not only NOT unserious - the most serious people in the world are dead set on making it happen - and have been for decades.
Seriously! I've been following SpaceX since Starship was the "Mars Colonial Transporter" - this has been in the works for a while. Moreover, though this is not often discussed, the last thing Tom Mueller (former VP of propulsion at SpaceX, designer of Merlin, etc.) was working on at SpaceX was Mars ISRU.
Now...why go to Mars? Two reasons: 1) backup hard-drive for humanity. 2) lower gravity well closer to asteroid belt for eventually mass-producing O'Neill Cylinders.
I've been following SpaceX since the word "Falcon" was followed by the number '1', and I've been a solid proponent of space development and settlement since Elon Musk was in middle school. I also have a Ph.D. in Astronautical Engineering and decades of experience in the field.
Elon may be "serious" in his intent to settle Mars; I'm skeptical that this has really persisted through his recent turn to Terrestrial sociopolitical interests but I'm not a mind reader so who knows. But I do know that Elon does not have a credible plan to settle Mars.
He has a very capable and surprisingly affordable space launch capability, which seems likely to expand. And he has a notion of how to turn that launch capability into an inefficient kludge of a "Mars Colonial Transporter". But let's assume he's solved the transportation problem.
That is *one* of the *many* problems that need to be solved to settle Mars. It is probably the biggest of those problems, but it's still a minority of the total effort required. And Elon has done very little to solve all the *other* problems. He doesn't even know how to keep a crew alive and healthy through the trip.
The most charitable assumption is that he thinks all those other problems are so easy that he'll be able to solve them in a year or two when he has time to focus on them, but from someone who has been studying them (and the transportation problem) for many years, Oh Hell No. And no, he's not just off by a factor of two on this like he is on rockets. If he'd put his Twitter money into ISRU and long-duration ECLSS and active radiation protection and surface power and rover design and a few dozen other things, he'd at least have laid the groundwork, but he had other priorities.
If the human race settles Mars in this generation, SpaceX's rockets will probably play a major role. But if *all* we have is Elon and SpaceX, then no, we aren't going anywhere. So where do you see everything else coming from?
I cannot comprehend how Mars being a backup hard-drive for humanity is taken seriously by anyone. There is nothing we can do to make Earth as inhospitable as Mars and we might never be able to, even if we tried. (The same goes for any natural catastrophes short of extremely absurd fringe events.)
The only way I could think of would be an Ai unleashing grey goo on us (if such a thing is possible), but what's preventing the Ai from sending a couple of grey goo filled rockets to Mars?
Then let me ask: when you read that Musk predicts the first humans landing on Mars by 2029, or a city of a million on Mars by 2050, do you take these claims seriously? Do you think this is an honest, if ambitious, assessment of the technology, or do you think it's hype?
That's what we're talking about here. Not the possibility of multiplanetary humanity in the far-future, not futurist speculation about O'Neill cylinders, the explicit claim that human habitation of Mars *will occur* within the decade, and that mass habitation will occur in less than fifty years. Those are the claims that make headlines and shape public perception of Musk/SpaceX.
If you agree that these timelines are totally impractical, but that Martian colonization is possible on a much longer timescale than claimed, then our positions are much closer than you might think. The difference is that I don't tolerate hype, and I consider this kind of rampant overpromising to be a form of dishonesty that we should openly condemn.
"The difference is that I don't tolerate hype, and I consider this kind of rampant overpromising to be a form of dishonesty that we should openly condemn."
Elon's Time is a well-known term in the SpaceX fan community, most of which doesn't treat his claims as gospel.
Nevertheless, I would read those claims less literally. They rather mean something like "as soon as we can do it, but we are really trying".
For the opposite, see all the ancient promises by the American government to get back to the Moon. These were usually given a long-ish term, something like "in 15 or 20 years", which everybody understood as "we might like to, but we aren't really trying and a distant enough term gives us plausible deniability".
I think Musk's more grandiose claims are somewhere in between honest, if ambitious, assessments of the tech, and hype. Mainly because honestly ambitious assessments of the tech can't NOT be hype at a certain level.
To quote him directly: "I say something, and then it usually happens. Maybe not on schedule, but it usually happens." First orbital flight of Crew Dragon was supposed to happen in 2017...happened in 2020. Starship orbital was supposed to happen in 2020 - but first test was 2023, and didn't make orbit til 2024. "He was late! He was lying! He's just hyping and overpromising!" Eh this seems like sour grapes. You really wanna condemn the guy landing boosters the size of skyscrapers because it happened a few years later than he predicted a while back? (If software engineers were held to that standard, we'd all be out of a job!)
So, first human landing on Mars by 2029? Unlikely, unless literally everything goes exactly right and there are no issues (which is how he tends to make these predictions - dude understands Parkinson's Law). But I'd bet good money on a human landing before 2040 at the latest - and definitely 1M on Mars in my lifetime.
I don't agree with you, but I admire that you're putting this in very straightforward terms.
If you'd like to make a proper bet, message me directly, as I'd like to take the other side of that wager. We can discuss terms and make sure everything is up to mutual satisfaction. You may also check out my first substack post, which detailed the process and characteristics of a similar bet about humanoid robots out to 2034.
Starlink is the direct result of the technically unlikely, but extremely inspiring goal of getting to Mars. In 2025 Starlink is expected to have $12 Billion in revenue (these aren't Musk numbers and are reasonable given the astronomical growth over the past 2 years), which would put it on par with some of the largest Telecom companies in the world if it continues growing for the next few years (AT&T $30B, T-Mobile $20B, Verizon $33B).
This is all with Falcon 9 launches, with their existing Starlink satellites. Starship can potentially carry 20x the payload as a Falcon 9, with a much larger faring capable of deploying even larger satellites. That means more coverage, higher speeds, and smaller receivers on earth. Out of the box phones are already capable of connecting to Starlink, and they're going to launch direct to cell capability this year with T-Mobile. It's not a stretch of the imagination that SpaceX could become the worlds largest Telecom provider on the planet, and that's ignoring the value of their primary business, which is launching things into space.
The whole Mars thing is just the inspiration that keeps employees working harder and for less than they otherwise would at a different company (even the job description of the janitor talks about getting humans to Mars), and that's because meaning is more valuable than money in many cases. Corporate hell where people make $200k may be functionally less valuable to people than 12 hour workdays making $100k in SpaceX where their actions have some meaning towards and inspiring goal for humanity. The goal provides extreme intangible value to the company that reveals itself in their ability to achieve surprising success.
So the goal isn't justifiable in its own right. There is no practical, economic, or even rational justification for going to Mars on its own merits, besides it being awesome. The thing is, that I think Musk has realized and many people haven't, is that the intangible value for that goal in relation to employee productivity, employee satisfaction, and investor interest, far exceeds any possible costs associated with the mission itself.
This sounds reasonable. I think we bottom out at values differences. I don't think that using an intangible dream whose achievability is constantly exaggerated in order to squeeze out value from employees is justifiable or admirable.
It depends on *why* the intangible dream is being advocated for.
If it's a cynical corporate-overlord ploy, where you create this imaginary narrative to keep your employees engaged and under payed, I completely agree. The injustice is revealed in the truth and intention differing from the intended impression on people, especially since the corporation would abandon their mission if it ever become unprofitable (very likely). Promise people Mars until you have a mature launch service and telecom business, then pivot to no longer caring about Mars, so you benefit from all the enthusiasm when it matters, and don't actually have to spend the money on a project that has no future expected returns. Essentially, the value of the mission is the past enthusiasm, not the future returns, making for easy for profit-seeking businessmen to justify changing their pivot when it matters.
I don't think Musk is like this corporate overload though, and I think this for good reason. He has an irrational drive to make humans multiplanetary, as otherwise he wouldn't have started SpaceX, and dumped all his money into it when it was on the verge of failure. The expected ROI on SpaceX was certainly negative, with a predictably low chance of great success, but not enough to justify the investment. The mission itself was valuable enough though.
Imagine if you had a spouse who was sick with some terminal disease. No family to lend you money, no insurance to cover it, and you can't get a job to earn enough to pay for treatment. You only have $1,000, and need $100,000. What do you do? At that point it may make sense to spend all your money on lottery tickets, or at the casino, betting on the unlikely chance you win big, not because the ROI is there, but because the value of winning big is so important to you, the life of your spouse. There's an equivalent story to be told about Musk and SpaceX.
So whether Musk is a cynic who's using Mars as a false justification for increased enthusiasm, or whether he's a true ideologue that cares about getting humans to Mars more than any financial calculation would suggest, is up for debate. Either way I think as far as this goes, he deserves some charity when assessing his intentions, as he's been remarkably consistent in his actions, stated goals, and work ethic for multiple decades.
If a politician pivots from being opposed to supporting gay marriage as soon as the the underlying culture shifts (*cough* Biden in 2000's), it's fair to think that he's more of a practical person playing for personal power rather than a true ideologue for Gay Marriage. If a politician was supporting gay marriage before it was cool (Bernie in 1980s), we should extend more plausibility to their claim when they say they actually mean them. The analogy is, I think Musk is closer to Bernie than Biden when it comes to getting humans to Mars.
> I'm also pretty dissatisfied with how getting to Mars is treated like this all-justifying, obvious public good... but what are you going to do there?
I've extolled on the subject of Effective Awesome before, and I think this is one of those cases where Effective Awesome provides the best justification. Going to Mars would just be really cool, and doing really cool things is a sufficient terminal goal for me.
I'm all for cool things, but I'd like for the Awesome to actually be Effective. We can work on safe superintelligence, quantum computing, and figuring out dark matter (plus maybe some less awesome but still quite neat things like healthcare) before a Mars mission is competitive on a cost/awesome ratio.
Quantum computing isn't real? In what sense is getting to Mars and engineering problem, but making lots of low-noise qubits not an engineering problem?
My understanding is that making lots of low-noise qubits, and keeping them coherent, is something much closer to an open physics problem than an engineering problem.
Space is really hard, but with Starship, the only two real unknowns left are Mars/Earth Reentry at Interplanetary Speeds (will the heat shield hold up? especially when we launch back to Earth?) and in-orbit refuel (tho this seems easier, but is still a question mark). Stuff on Mars is hard but doable - we have small reactors, we know how to make Vac-hard long-term life support systems (see ISS). Starship makes this even easier because mass is no longer a big constraint - no need to get JPL to make bespoke equipment - just contract Caterpillar to make vac/rad-hard versions of their existing teleoperated equipment. Radiation can be handled by taking your backhoe and burying your hab under a foot or so of regolith, and limiting daily outdoor hours.
Making quantum computing actually useful (as of now, I'm pretty sure the largest number we've factored with quantum computers is 15) requires increasing the number of coherent qubits in these systems by a few orders of magnitude. The issue is that the difficulty of keeping that many qubits coherent scales super-linearly. If we were on a Moores Law type curve of increasing qubit numbers, this means maybe we'd get them to do useful stuff in ~30 years - but we're not - we don't actually know how - and the QC folks have been saying "30 years" for around 30 years.
Not to mention, we've already created quantum-safe encryption, so the only real use case left (to my knowledge) is optimization problems. Which, while important, isn't as cool as Interplanetary Civilization IMO.
So, "Quantum Computing isn't real" may be hyperbole, but I do currently believe it's something that should be thought of as closer to String Theory or Nuclear Fusion (either Tokamak/Stellarator or Pons-Fleischmann LENR).
(CAVEAT: My knowledge of quantum computing is based entirely on reading corporate press releases, Scott Aaronson, and Scott Locklin, and trying to triangulate them. I'm a tech bro, not a physicist / computer science PhD - so take all of this with a grain of salt)
Engineering that is still relying on technology that does not yet exist to make the whole thing anything but an insanely expensive expedition with no material gain in sight.
> We can work on safe superintelligence, quantum computing, and figuring out dark matter (plus maybe some less awesome but still quite neat things like healthcare) before a Mars mission is competitive on a cost/awesome ratio.
We are working on all those things, too, researcher creativity and effort is not zero sum.
And like **mecko** alluded to but didn't quite say outright - working on the Mars mission has literally made putting a kg into orbit more than 40x cheaper, so ANYTHING in space is now 40x more possible. And we already have things like Starlink because of it - imagine what else we're going to get on the road there.
It opens up much bigger / better space based telescopes, puts us on the road to asteroid mining, gets us needed practice and expertise at doing space stuff and engineering and building more complex things up there, etc.
> We are working on all those things, too, researcher creativity and effort is not zero sum.
I mean... isn't it zero sum? Only so many researchers, only so much time between them.
I think I get your meaning, researcher creativity and effort limited but not *scarce*, so we don't need to triage it, we don't need to ensure that every bit of it is actually doing something we know is effective.
But if we're pretending to Effective Awesomeness, then let's run down the list of awesome things in order of feasibility (which I would argue puts a Mars colony very, very low on the list).
And if we're justifying this based on utilitarian calculus... I'm having difficulty expressing this part without being ungenerous, but building better telescopes and getting to asteroid mining faster doesn't justify massively misleading the public about the actual feasibility or requirements of a Mars mission. The idea that this kind of dishonesty is necessary to get to those things doesn't sit well with me.
> I mean... isn't it zero sum? Only so many researchers, only so much time between them.
But researchers specialize, right? Smart people working at Space X doesn't generally take smart people OUT of quantum computing etc. And ultimately it will give smart astrophysicists another place to work too, so they can study dark matter at Space X.
I agree that in the future it creates an incentive gradient where a given smart person in the future could decide to study aerospace instead of quantum mechanics, but if you think *that's* a loss, I don't want to tell you about the FAANGS and finance (which have been hoovering up all the best minds of our generation for the last 20 years, directly out of research, and into being wasted on financial derivatives and toiling in the Eyeball Mines instead of actually driving human capability forward).
And where do you see a massive lie? I think he probably genuinely wants to improve humanity's spaceflight and space technology capacity to the point we could do a Mars colony. He's done a lot of costly things that back that view. The road is almost certainly longer than he says it is, but so what? It's his money, Space X is profitable, and selling space nerds on Mars isn't necessarily going to take those space nerds away from any other more valuable work, they would have just been wasting their lives at NASA doing NOTHING to push human capability forward.
To your other points, you're correct about specialization, though it's not clear to me the options are so narrow as SpaceX or do nothing at NASA. Surely, there must be some other interesting development for a young aerospace engineer to get involved in?
And rest assured, I'm quire familiar with the failures of FAANG/finance. Elsewhere in the thread I note how my partner, who was recruited out of a CS program into a finance firm, now works as an analyst at a company whose tech stack tops out at Excel spreadsheets. Her activities to date involve a disproportionate amount of resizing pie charts and ctrl-Fing through paperwork. A waste of what she can do, but the money is too good to pass up.
>
I'll step back for a moment and make the same apology I made to mecko elsewhere in the thread: I came into this topic with a great deal of frustration coming out of family arguments over Christmas around this and related topics. It's made the quality of my discussion lower as a result, and I shouldn't have brought that in here.
This is my frustration: the fact that SpaceX has achieved some impressive things (massively reducing orbit costs, Starlink) gives undue credence to accelerated timelines of Mars colonization (eg humans on mars by 2029, million-person Martian city by 2050).
Belief in these fantastic figures in turn justifies and gives credence to Musk's other (more highly-valued) businesses, mainly Tesla. I started my substack mainly to write about robotics, and why humanoid robotics are massively overhyped. The biggest misinformation in this space, around robotics and the related topic of self-driving, comes out of Tesla (namely, massively overstated timelines to household robotics, lies about the current state of robot capacity, and the continued claims for the last decade that full self-driving already worked or was just a year away).
And in the past, when I've pointed out that these were intentional falsehoods, the most common reaction (from friends and family, as well as one early Tesla and SpaceX investor) was dismissal, specifically because Musk is taking humanity to Mars, such that his other ventures can't be judged according to common sense or that their malfeasance can be justified based on that.
And more recently, that has expanded outside the realm of tech companies and into politics and government. The same people (some of them my own kith and kin, normally intelligent and capable people!) think that DOGE is going to save the US government. Because they earnestly believe Musk is a unique genius who can create a city on Mars, and that if he can't fix the budget, nobody can.
I find this level of credulity extremely worrying, and that emotional reaction is what's driving me here.
To the possibility of a 2029 Mars Mission: I think those who believe this will happen with a high probability don’t really know what would required to make it happen. However the main point here is that (and sorry for the cliché) “SpaceX consistently turns the impossible into the merely late”. SpaceX announces 2029 as a possible launch date and pushes hard for it and maybe instead launch a single starship to Mars, full of cargo or no it’s still a huge achievement. And from there maybe something manned happens the early 2030s. And people see that all things considered this is both the quickest and the most likely to succeed chance for them to see boots on Mars in their lifetime.
Motivations aside I do have to agree with your assessment of current work. There seems to be no in depth work being done on the actual Mars hardware, again though this is nothing new. SpaceX has repeatedly stated they are most interested in supplying people with a way to get to Mars not a fully fleshed out Mission architecture.
In the end though this is a moving target, the cheaper starship launches are the more mass you can bring. Therefore the less stringent the requirements for your mission are and the easier it is to just bring more consumables rather than doing any new engineering work. So it’s really hard to get anyone in the private industry to work on this with so much unknowns meanwhile at NASA the glacial pace of decision making means it probably won’t figure out what it wants to do for years.
I would amend that to 'SpaceX makes the impossible merely late, unless it was impossible to begin with and it was always just a big stunt'. I keep coming back to the Hyperloop, which Musk hyped to high heaven back in the day. We can look back on it now and say that obviously it was never going to work (as some did back then) but don't forget how it was promoted so credulously in media. A lot of people believed in it just because of his word. Every big, audacious claim has to be graded against that standard: is this actually possible, or are we as confident in this as Hyperloop fans were a decade ago despite its obvious flaws?
> SpaceX has repeatedly stated they are most interested in supplying people with a way to get to Mars not a fully fleshed out Mission architecture.
I also can't help but see this as a motte-and-bailey. I don't doubt SpaceX has said that at some point, but that's clearly not the message being pushed when Musk talks about SpaceX (not a big coalition of companies and governments, SpaceX specifically as a private actor) putting boots on Mars by ~~2021~~ ~~2024~~ 2029. One of these claims makes it around the world and influences public opinion and Musk's personal reputation, the other sits in the motte.
Musk said his companies wouldn't be making the Hyperloop from day one, and he was correct. It's not an example of a failed promise from SpaceX/Musk.
He released the original white paper, I think, mostly in response to the high price of the proposed California high-speed rail. He was saying one could make something much better for cheaper, and that he hoped someone else might make the hyperloop.
Are either of these serious? Did he put substantial capital into either? No. But what they both served to do was draw headlines, make the idea seem credible in the eyes of the public, without risking much capital.
That's the point. This was never a credible project, but it gets reported on as if it was to millions, which in turn builds an image of Musk as a genius inventor, which in turn feeds the credibility of Musk's other promises. After all, the guy who invented a new mode of transportation can totally build a self-driving car that's already safer than humans (in 2015).
And the idea that it could be made for cheaper than high-speed rail (even at the absurd prices California imposes) was ridiculous from the beginning. It's high speed rail in a vacuum tube. It was techno-hype from the beginning, never an actual possibility, and I can only view that with a cynical motive.
Yeah, they promoted it. If you take them at their word, they did so because they were hoping someone else would develop the hyperloop tech.
As for having an alternate motive of building an image of Musk as a genius inventor, I don't see it. Suggesting what most people see as impossible generates criticism and makes you look like an idiot... at least until you can prove everyone wrong. Musk may have lent credibility to the hyperloop idea, but the idea lent no credibility to Musk.
You were arguing that "SpaceX makes the impossible merely late, unless it was impossible to begin with and it was always just a big stunt", using the hyperloop as the example of something that was truly impossible and not just late. But high-speed rail in a low pressure tube wasn't obviously more impossible than lowering the cost of rocket launches by 10x-100x. It's not clear that SpaceX couldn't have turned to impossible hyperloop into the merely late hyperloop. They didn't even have a failed attempt. I don't necessarily think they could have done it, but the lack of attempt gives us no data either way.
I think Musk really did think it could work and really did hope someone else would make it. It seems like you're annoyed at the media for the hype and you're projecting a lot of disdain onto SpaceX just for open sourcing their white paper and helping a bit with hyperloop R&D.
As to the Motte-and-Bailey I think that understanding how unclear and undecided everything is at this point has large part in confusing even the most interested space nerds.
I think the best way to determine what’s going on is to merely look at what SpaceX is demonstrably working on. At this point for the starship program that is full reusability and refueling, any life support systems or additional “colonization” infrastructure equipment seems to be limited to whatever is required for the HLS contract. Elon Musk as CEO and as the Futurist Internet Personality is always going to hyping ideas that maybe don’t turn out as original advertised but SpaceX is more than just him. (Also try to tune out the fan-boys they don’t know what they are talking about half the time).
I think I get stuck on the latter point, mainly because my family are fan-boys of that sort and I'm banging my head against the wall telling them that no, for the love of God, just because Musk says so doesn't mean we're going to be going to Mars in a few years. In retrospect, I probably brought that frustration into this thread, for which I must apologize.
Reusable rockets are awesome. Great advancements in tech. But I don't live in the aerospace world, I live in the world where Musk's social and political views (and his other businesses' continuous promises and lack of delivery) are explicitly justified and granted credence because 'he is taking humanity to Mars'. It's worthwhile to me to be a pedant about these things, because this hype has large consequences outside of itself.
>is this actually possible, or are we as confident in this as Hyperloop fans were a decade ago despite its obvious flaws?
The distinction here is that most people (including I) do not think sending starship to Mars is impossible from a physics or engineering standpoint but rather an economic/political one. And SpaceX has shown itself capable of pushing through many other difficult engineering projects in the past, and having the esprit de corps to follow up on stated objectives. So in this case I personally would consider a starship mission (note: w/o people at this point manned certification would be hard obtain at such an early stage) much more doable than whatever the hyper-loop was intending to be.
I would reply that the Hyperloop is also not impossible from a physics or engineering standpoint: it's a maglev in a vacuum tube, nothing unbelievable about it. Hell, I don't expect it would even require inventing dramatically new technologies.
It just happens to be a terrible, terrible application of effort and resources, taking existing technology and placing it under incredibly expensive, difficult to maintain, and dangerous conditions in order to squeeze out improvements to transit speed that are only possible at long distances and just... aren't worth it.
I'd say a (manned) Mars mission is in the same boat: forget the cost of developing and fielding the rocket, forget *certifications*, there's every other problem with a human presence on Mars, namely that you have to keep people alive in an extremely hostile environment for at least three years with only the materials they brought with them on a rocket or that you dropped previously.
As for the unmanned mission... we already send rovers to Mars. The promise of a Starship mission might be that it would be cost effective since you're reusing the rocket (but given that you also have to take the whole mass of the rocket both ways, I wouldn't expect that to materialize) or as a proof of concept/prelude of a manned mission, which brings us back to the point above.
On Reentry, I think many in the space or engineering/tech adjacent found it insightful was that it tried to get behind the Musk curtain (at least more so than other deep dives) and talk to the workers who actually made it happen and dig into specifics of what they do day to day. To me it makes sense that this would appeal to similar type of person, who would wish to have a similar opportunity.
As what you would do on a mission to Mars-there have been tomes written on it so I’ll avoid doing that here. Instead I’ll mention that I think most people when talking about going to Mars really don’t mean that as an end goal. Rather there is a recognition that by establishing a base there and repeatedly having to manage a logistical connection between there and earth it makes it far easier to expand and do other ‘space things’ in interplanetary space. I feel like most people just agree to Mars as a target because they understand this and also realize that there needs to be some consensus and just to go along with it. (The Moon would probably work similarly hence why that debate is still on-going).
>"The Moon would probably work similarly hence why that debate is still on-going"
I think the debate is driven by the degree to which this is true. Going to the Moon doesn't leave the Earth-Moon orbit of the Sun, and in many cases doesn't even leave the Earth's magnetosphere; there are a lot of prerequisites to interplanetary capabilities that are not needed for Lunar travel.
That is true, my sense of the debate is that people have different opinions on what is do-able. And that people are pushing for the mission that maximizes what gets done but also won’t fail or be delayed too long.
That is, do some people really believe that a substantial fraction of the accounts they interact with are AI? Or is it just an exaggerated way of saying that maybe 0.1% of people you see, mostly the ones deep in the Twitter replies shilling crypto, are bots and you're mad about it? Why would anyone exaggerate things that much?
Most people engage with the Internet in a "I'll use it to do whatever I want" way. People who are abusing it will target exclusively high impact metrics - for example, reddit is full of bots that copy old post titles and submission pictures that scored high karma. They do this because the post fulfills some sort of "high impact metric" they can use to manipulate public opinion, steer the discourse in a way they want to, advertise their own shit in a followup post, etc. So a lot of social media is inorganic and not being driven by the collective intentions of users' desires. But idk how to quantify it or if it's better qualitatively than the median user's desires.
Dead Internet Theory predates LLMs, I don't believe the point was ever that accounts "you interact with" are bots. (Pre-LLM bots were, obviously, incapable of interaction.) It was that the majority of the accessible content is unorganic. This is a qualitatively different claim - that organic, useful, meanibgful content is being flooded out by spam - and, to be honest, obviously true. (Again, even pre-LLMs, though they certainly didn't help.)
The comments on Marginal Revolution, which have always been bad, are now both bad and mostly AI. This is probably just people trolling Tyler Cowen and not part of a large-scale operation or anything. More to your question, a significant fraction of the stuff posted on facebook seems to be AI.
I am certain things are going that way. Certainly on Facebook you can see it happening. I am prepping for it by being me - I post here under my real name both because it makes me slightly less obnoxious, and because I am trying to establish a serious track record as a meat person. You can generally spot AI these days because it is so dumb and useless, but for how much longer?
I want to see an internet-inspired update of Blade Runner where Decker's job is to determine which online accounts are LLMs only to discover that he's one himself. Plus, of course, that hot chick with a picture of Sean Young as her avatar.
Do you mean "anyone" as in literally anyone, or only notable/serious/trustworthy etc. people? The former would be a trivial "yes", if only because of the Lizardman's Constant.
Personally, I don't think we are there yet, but the trend is definitely going that way. I believe it will be Enshittification that does large platforms in and, one incentive after rational incentive, bring about the death of the internet, or at least of the WWW. It will be a cycle of platforms being created, peaking among real people, and eventually facing real-people exodus, as they always have. As the AI technology matures, at least some of these platforms will try to hang on as long as possible with bots. The real people will continue to join new platforms and the cycle continues, but the bots that are left behind will outgrow humans and thus steadily increase their share of the total users. At some point (which is not clearly definable) human activity will have such a low share of the total that the internet can indeed be declared dead.
As proof that I'm not fully hallucinating, take this example: Meta has made AI accounts an official feature of their platforms, even though after backlash they have, for now, deleted their known AI accounts:
I don't think it's really necessary for a platform to get big for the bots to arrive. The great majority of the comments submitted to my tiny obscure blog are bot spam, mostly with no obvious agenda, and it's even more unclear what they're hoping to achieve there. It does have a standardized interface that makes it easier for bots to use than a whole new social media site, since it's based on the Wordpress software, but finding the comment or sign up forms for an unfamiliar platform doesn't seem like it should be beyond the wit of LLM, especially in the future.
Yes, automated spam comments on small blogs, forums etc. has been a long-standing problem and will certainly not get better with AI roaming around; as you mentioned, the internet's tendency towards monoculture is a problem at any scale. Additionally, creating whole blogs including content through AI, not just comment spam bots, is going to be part of the future as well. So it will be mostly bots, creating content for mostly other bots. The humans can't really win this fight - they either stop caring about the bots surrounding them, or they quit participating in the Web entirely, or they move on to greener pastures where it's predominantly still humans. In the latter case, the half-life until AI takeover is going to trend down as well.
I'm surprised you mention Twitter, because a lot of the replies are extremely blatant bots, just using LLMs to restate the content the original tweet in a sightly different matter. And while they don't make up the majority of replies, the problem is they all have checkmarks, putting their replies above most of the actual human replies. Though, maybe you don't see it because they only bother swarming posts that get sufficiently popular...
Many months ago, I made a post in the subreddit of my favorite budgeting app asking a question. It got a few good responses and some discussion and then it went dormant.
A few months later, at 11:59pm, the post suddenly got three new responses. All three were basically the same, but worded differently - obviously an LLM. They weren't shilling anything, they were just useless comments about my post. I checked the comment history of each user. Each had made a few posts and comments in random subreddits dating back a few months. These weren't shilling anything either - just idle chatter about the threaded topic. Were I responding to them on these other posts, and lacking the context of these three identical posts, I might not have realized that these accounts were bot accounts.
Once this happened, I realized that the cost of verifying genuine reddit posts and comments had increased. What was the point of these posts? Was it to build up a good-enough comment history to pass the sniff test? Once a bot has spent enough time in the wild creating a social media trail, what do you do with it? Shill crypto? Leave a glowing review on a new film? Spread nasty rumors about Blake Lively?
I know the internet isn't actually dead, but it does feel like, if it's not dying, that there's a zombie outbreak that makes the internet more annoying and less useful. This upsets me, so I will joke about dead internet theory, to friends but mostly to normies, because it's an opportunity to complain that the quantity and quality of bullshit on the internet is growing and you shouldn't repeat anything without verifying it.
TL:DR; I exaggerate the problem to spread awareness
I honestly don’t find human Reddit commenters to be any better in terms of judging the quality of a particular product or forming an opinion about a particular celebrity, so nothing of value lost there.
The best product reviews are on YouTube these days or in smaller blogs that are very hard to fake.
What should I read if I want to really understand (in an ITT-passing way) how the CCP makes and justifies its decisions around censorship and civil liberties?
I found Scholar's Stage by way of Scott's old blogroll. Greer's dayjob is studying sinology and military history for a U.S. thinktank. Although he discusses other topics too. For censorship, you can try (https://scholars-stage.org/candlelight-vigils-and-hostile-forces/) for starters.
He's mirrored on substack now too. Which is ironic, since I remember him being rather bearish about it.
It's not specifically about illiberalism but anything by William Hinton (uncle to Geof Hinton btw) is a great insight into communist Chinese thought for English readers, at least pre-Deng political thought. I'm not sure anyone outside the Central Committee really knows who thinks what since Deng.
I was interested to note that the Foreign Language Bookstore (actual name of the store) in Shanghai stocks a copy or two translated into English for the benefit of foreigners, but I didn't buy anything in that genre.
I'd still love something that's like, written in plain and non-sensational language by a third party, but nonetheless presents the arguments in a way that Xi would read and think basically hits the mark.
Good morning, I have written a review of a really excellent old novel called The Luck of Barry Lyndon by Thackeray. I read Vanity Fair in college and enjoyed it, but Barry Lyndon was a real romp. Not as polished as the later novels perhaps, but great entertainment these winter evening. Very funny as well. Have any of you seen Stanley Kubrick's film of the same name? Just wondering if it still finds an audience. Here's the review: https://falsechoices.substack.com/p/the-luck-barry-lyndon
Interesting recommendation. Not read the book. Having quite enjoyed Vanity Fair but not so much that I am inclined to go back to it, it's possible I am played out on Thackeray.
But I love the film, which I would perhaps rate as being in my top three Kubrick films (with 2001 and Paths of Glory). This may well be a contrarian position but isn't intended to be so.
I have seen it. I have not seen it in a long time though, so I would be wary of saying whether it holds up or not. It is very beautiful. It is somewhat cold as typical with Kubrick. It has a lovely soundtrack.
Congestion pricing seems to be the modern iteration of enclosing the commons: the poor being deprived of their traditional rights of access in order to benefit the rich.
The measure also benefits the poor, who do not drive but do benefit from the tax revenue and from buses not being stuck in traffic as much. The losers are those rich enough to drive but whose time is not worth enough to offset the congestion charge.
Legal right of access means little if you physically cannot fit that many people/machines into a particular place. Geometry > law.
This is a relatively new problem. Until historically recently, the footprint of a human trying to get somewhere would be tiny. With cars in the picture, it grew an order of magnitude, while the public spaces in city centers, which were usually built before the mass automobilism era, cannot grow at all.
Charging a fee isn't a negation of a right. The poor have the same right to pay the congestion fee as anyone else. If they can't afford to then they can go another time.
Rights aren't absolute and they aren't granted by God. They only exist because society chooses to defend them and society only has an incentive to defend rights that unlock economic value. Making things easier for the wealthy is good for society because rich people's time is worth more than poor people's.
I disagree with your characterization of rights. A proper Right is a thing it takes a government to take away, not one it takes a government to secure.
So paying for something widely available could be a right (muddied if you are paying the govt) and yes its not being a negated.
Using something created by others without paying cant be a right, you couldnt have had that in the first place.
So I agee with the thrust of your post but take more seriously being endowed by the creator with certain unalienable rights
>A proper Right is a thing it takes a government to take away
Really? You don't need a government to take away your right to life. Any old thug can do that.
Rights don't exist in a state of nature. The phrase "endowed by our creator with certain inalienable rights" is just some snappy rhetoric. Objectively it's complete nonsense. Rights are nothing but a legal fiction and therefore require a legal framework in order to exist. Without some form of violence ready to enforce them they disappear in a puff of wishful thinking.
>take more seriously being endowed by the creator with certain unalienable rights
If rights were truly inalienable then they wouldn't have to be written down, would they?
On an individual basis a thug can do that as can disease, but systematic denial of life requires a powerful external force, i.e a government. Its not actually difficult to distinguish between things others take away from me and things others give me. Theres an entire political philosophy built on that notion in fact
This sounds like the famous "The law, in its majestic equality, forbids the rich and poor alike to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal bread" line, but unironically.
It is true the ruling class is incentivized to extract all it can from those unable to resist. The Iron Law of Melos, that the strong do what they can while the weak endure what they must, is indeed the way of the world. I will not say this it is "good."
That's correct. That saying has always been absurd.
The ruling class doesn't extract wealth from the poor because the poor don't have any. They extract it from the rich, which is why they (the ruling class) should be incentivized to make them (the rich) as productive as possible. By charging congestion pricing for high-value traffic zones, for example.
> I will not say this it is "good."
It is what it is. That's just how life works on this planet and you'll do more harm by trying to deny that reality than by harnessing it. If you don't like it go somewhere else.
Alternatively, if traffic jams are an issue, we could build more roads. Or we could switch to using bikes, which take up a *lot* less space than cars do.
Not sure what the state of the art research in this area is, but I loosely understand that adding roads (or lanes to existing roads) tends to not be very good at reducing congestion due to "induced demand" (or possibly "latent demand").
Good luck finding space to build more roads in Manhattan (which is introducing the measure).
Bikes are great, but it would require major shifts before they can make a dent in urban traffic in any US city. Alternatively, though, one could use public transportation (and supposedly the money raised by congestion pricing in NYC is going to be used for maintaining and improving the subway system).
There aren't many effective ways to discourage the overuse of a public good/account for negative externalities without adding a tax to it. Otherwise you have to apportion it based on arbitrary criteria or rationing.
Driving in Manhattan is already a luxury not accessible to the poor anyways. Not only that, but there are a ton of carve-outs for people making under a certain amount, essentially making congestion pricing not apply to the poor.
When it comes to restricting the use of public goods that are consumed for conveniences sake, adding a tax and allowing people to self-select based on their income and preferences is a very effective policy. It's not really anything new that this is always less impactful on the rich. On the upside, the city benefits from the rich consuming a public good they don't currently pay for.
I've always thought this too. Note that one person who definitely doesn't have to pay the congestion surcharge, nor ride the subway instead, is the Mayor.
I like the products of modern industry as much as the next person, but that doesn't mean I want a life entirely composed of them to the exclusion of all else. Sometimes I just want to spend a weekend off camping in the wilderness.
...which, of course, is inefficient, so that tracks I guess. Just be careful what you throw under the efficiency bus.
It's not inefficient. Productivity decreases with overwork. Creativity increases with leisure. Creative people tend to be paid more and so can afford to take more vacations which recharge their creativity. See how efficient that is?
My question is: if we are going to start enclosing previously public property behind a paywall then why not do it for foot traffic as well?
A $50 a day fee to be present in Manhattan wouldnt be a big deal for tourists, business travellers or commuters (who would probably have it paid by their employees). And the residents wouldn't mind as long as it displaced other racism but it would keep the homeless people off the island and make it more pleasant for everybody.
Look, if we want homeless people gone so bad, there's nothing physically stopping society from allowing people to go around town beating homeless people to death. No need to resort to such roundabout solutions.
I've never been to Manhattan, so I don't know how much congestion there is from foot traffic. If there is, then I suppose that could be a good idea, if there was an efficient way to collect it.
The perfect is the enemy of the good. Start with a flat fee then talk about extra fees for those driving cars costing more than $50k, sure.
But otherwise this is a distraction and results in a waste of the commons on traffic jams, which also hurts everyone who wants to use the bus as most streets lack a proper dedicated bus lane.
But that access is already deprived by the tragedy of the commons of traffic?
Ie. Whatever dollar price is being requested by the city is already being paid by drivers who spend +1-3 hours in traffic, no? This just changes that price some implict yo explicit.
No, I do not believe that EVERY commuter was paying the equivalent of whatever price the government is exacting in time spent in traffic. Some people – those who value their time most highly; I expect these to be the richer people – did, and they will now benefit at the expense of those people forced off the roads by not being able to afford the new charge.
The commuters you're describing seem like a mythical group: able to afford a car but not able to afford congestion fee? Who are these poor souls that can't afford the fee but have no problem paying the upkeep for a vehicle and, also, apparently overpriced food and drink in lower Manhattan?
To focus on just one reason this is wrong, it's odd that people accept the idea that they should pay for their own car, maintenance, repairs, road and bridge tolls, garage parking, and a fraction of the insurance costs, but not the main insurance costs, driving on roads that were previously untolled, or street parking. The latter costs are very small compared to the first category and aren't meaningfully different.
(I'm leaving aside people's unwillingness to pay for other externalities like pollution, which people always hate paying for even if they're real costs).
Or just arrive by something other than car. In the city most considering this, New York, that's both very possible and already what most poor people do. It's middle class commuters who rankle under congestion pricing.
Sure, they can still use the murderhobo-infested sewers. I expect there were some people too poor to lose anything meaningful from the enclosures in England too, so I stand by my analogy.
That's such a bad faith analogy, poor people in New York City are not the car commuters and they all already walk and take public transit and taxis or ride-sharing as primary modes of transport
I want to adapt my comment on Can You Hate Everyone In Rome? into a public Contra post on my own Substack, but what are the best practices around quoting and/or summarizing subscriber-only content?
It seems like most subscriber-only content is behind a paywall because it's too controversial to be trusted with the general public, and thus there's an unspoken rule that we Don't Talk About Subscriber-Only Content.
Do I try to anonymize the inspiration for my own post? Something else?
A post being subscriber only is the same as a book on a bookshelf. You can't just take the book, you have to pay for it. But when you do, or even before you do, you get to quote it and reference it as much as you want. Right?
I don't know why he would be posting that kind of stuff at all if he cared about public backlash... If he was afraid of alienating readers, it wouldn't make sense that he would post it exclusively for the readers paying him.
I'm sure quoting it would be fine, but you could always, you know, just ask him.
My perhaps incorrect impression is that Scott is crazy busy and doesn't pay particularly close attention to his mailbox. I actually am asking in the comments right now, should he happen to see them.
But after someone else mentioned forgetting the pictures on the front page, it occurred to me to go check if he'd assigned one to the post in question. He did, and it's a visual cue that the post is about ancient Romans, not modern day Romans. So I no longer think he was trying to keep the post's content about objectionable ancient Roman practices a somewhat open secret.
Huh, properly good question. Here are some solutions that seem good to me (2 for lack of time).
1. An easy way would be to make your own post paywalled. After all, eg Scott has no reason to trust your paying subscribers less than his, since he doesn't know either. This would keep all such topics in the paid sphere. And unless you're overquoting the OP, there can still be value in reading it. The main issue seems to me that... your post would be paywalled.
2. You could explicitly reference the original blog post and then just explain your position on the topic, without explicitly contrasting it with quotes from the OP.
Well, for #1 - I'm not pay walling anything. I don't have the product or pull to justify it.
As for #2 - I could very well be reading too much into this, but it seems to me that Scott deliberately left a critical word out of his title to prevent non-paid readers from gleaning the post's potentially controversial content. If that word was in the title, I wouldn't be as hesitant to describe the central hypothetical of the post and why I have a beef with it.
Does Scott himself quote/discuss paywalled posts in public ones? (I think he did Yglesias's.) If so, in the absence of anything explicit, that seems like a reasonable thing to do yourself.
My view is that if you've gotten past the paywall, you are free to discuss the post, excerpts and all, as you would a book you've bought.
I think my real issue is with the way in which a society recruits members. I feel like any true secret society worth the title would covertly seek out its members, recruit entirely through social networks of existing members, and/or require prospective members complete some sort of esoteric challenge or journey (e.g. Cicada 3301). You can't just post an ad that says "Want to join my secret society? Apply here!" Where's the intrigue? Where's the mystique?
I was looking into possible cures for atherosclerosis, and just learned about trodusquemine (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trodusquemine). It seems to be a possible miracle drug, but mysteriously ran out of funding after a wildly successful phase 1 clinical trial. Specifically, they found it "exhibits broad-spectrum antimicrobial activity and numerous regenerative, neuroprotective, anti-atherosclerotic, antitumor, antiangiogenic, antiobesity, and anxiolytic properties."
I have no background in medicine, but I sure would want to be in a clinical trial of this stuff, even if I had to be in the blind control group.
Trodusquemine costs somewhere around $2000-10,000 for 100mg, so it's expensive. But the benefits if it turns out to work seem too good to be true, and well worth trying to find out.
How does one get started in getting this past the FDA, from the ground-up? I'm not rich, but perhaps I could plan some kind of Kickstarter or something for a laboratory to do medical development? Why wouldn't some biotech company want to be investigating this?
As usual the problem is 1) nobody read the science 2) even for the ultra small minority that has the erudition, nobody cares about research translation
I am the only human being on this giant rock to have the erudition to alleviate the bottleneck in medical research but I need rationalists to enable me to spread the most potent unknown neo-therapeutics
of note: marine drugs are extremely interesting and underresearched, among the lead natural molecules is Echinochrom A
I am not yet familiar with Trodusquemine but since it is a spermine metabolite: spermidine is one of the most potent geroprotectors, however its pharmacokinetics in humans are unclear, spermidine supplementation does not increase plasma spermidine levels for example though maybe it is metabolized to spermine. I wonder wether spermine confer comparable lifespan increase
This isn't my area of expertise, but it looks like albumin conjugated EDTA works for arteriosclerosis, and it doesn't mention atherosclerosis. The difference is the former is calcified and the latter is clogged with fatty substances, which might be signficant.
Not exactly, indeed EDTA only target calcium (and other metals) bioaccumulation, but calcification of arteries is not just a component of arteriosclerosis but also a constituent of the atherosclerotic plaques.
Indeed atherosclerosis is mainly constituted of lipids (and fibrins) but is also constituted of calcium and calcium has a role in the atherosclerosis stability meaning that eliminating calcium should considerably prevent accumulation of lipids (atherosclerosis progression)
This is evidenced by the universal mortality correlation with the imaging artery calcification score
> These plaques are the cause of most heart attacks
Since atherosclerosis is the main driver of heart attacks it follows that calcium is likely the main driver of atherosclerosis (stabilize lipids), and speculatively for stroke too.
Now to what percent of total atherosclerosis progression calcification drive is unknown to me but it seems fairly reasonnable to assume it is one of the most potent drivers (along with high LDL, etc)
I'd like to clarify that while classical chelation therapy reduce mortality, this albumin conjugated version works considerably better and thus is a technological disruption.
I suspect I'm just way behind the curve on this, but: I'm noticing that I no longer have access to the ability to switch the display order of comments, and they always show up in oldest-first configuration (the most unintuitive, to me). Did Substack turn this off, or was it Scott, or is the toggle just getting adblocked in my browser now because Substack altered some underlying chunk of code? Does anyone know?
You have to click on the "comments" icon (the little chat bubble). The text of the original post will disappear under a link, but you will then be on a dedicated comments page and the "sort by" button will be back.
The question "do you agree with his conclusions?" is directly tied to the question before it, "What was the question he developed his famous theorem in order to address?"
Here's an approximation of Bayes theorem which is easy to use for mental arithmetic: for each piece of evidence, add up the odds of it happening under your experimental hypothesis versus your null hypothesis. If the sum of odds reaches 20, that's enough evidence to persuade you from 10% confidence to 90% confidence. If if the sum of odds reaches 40, that's enough evidence to persuade you from 1% confidence to 99% confidence. This approximation is within a factor of two as long as the odds are between 1.2 and 30.
Example: You find two studies on your subject, and you think each of them are 10x more likely if the hypothesis is true then if they just came from selection bias. 10 + 10 is 20, so you should find that pretty convincing.
Example 2: you find five crappy studies, and you think this quality of study would occur four times if the hypothesis is true for every three times that they occur out of selection bias. 1.3 * 5 is 6.7. Not very convincing.
How it works: the Bayes factor of a piece of evidence summarizes how well it supports your experimental hypothesis versus the null hypothesis. Normally you would multiply all of the Bayes factors of your different pieces of evidence together, and then use Bayes theorem to apply that update to your prior. This approximation works by adding up the logarithms of Bayes factors, and you use the odds because division can approximate logarithms over a narrow range, similar to the rule of 72.
The Rotherham et al. grooming gangs scandal is doing the rounds on Twitter/X at the moment, and it's every bit as horrific and dystopian as you could imagine. But I want to discuss a particular reaction to it, which can be summed up as "Of course, this would never happen in the States because the rapists would all get shot," "This is why Britain needs the 2A," or similar. This, I think, is totally wrong. America's already experienced very similar problems itself -- anti-white violent crime, authorities refusing to prosecute the criminals for ideological reasons, media and academia either deflecting from, minimising, or even denying outright the problem. It happened during the white flight era, it happened during the George Floyd riots, and it happens on a smaller scale every day in cities across the US. And in no cases have these problems prompted a wave of gun-toting militias stepping up to defend their communities when the regular government fails. Instead, those who were able to generally just moved away from the problem (that's the "flight" part of "white flight"), whilst those who weren't stayed put and suffered.
So the idea that "This would never happen in the US" is at variance with observable reality: it has happened, it is happening, and it will continue to happen. And that's because, whilst guns can be helpful in a personal self-defence situation, a bunch of random individuals with firearms aren't a substitute for a well-functioning police force, and they're certainly no match for an anarcho-tyrannical government.
The US had this in the form of lynch mobs (which weren't solely about race - IIRC only about half of documented lynchings in the south had a racial component). I believe they were ultimately destroyed by the concerted effort made by the federal government to enable racial integration during the civil rights era.
I would be interested to know when and why whites stopped running away during race riots. In the 1921 Tulsa riots, white plebs are perfectly willing to use violence against blacks. In 1951, supposedly 4,000 whites attacked an apartment building in Chicago when a single black family moved in to it.
This list is mostly whites commiting violence until early 1950s, but by mid-1960s, it has flipped and then its mostly Blacks and Hispanic being the violent party.
Elites never really engage in petty violence. Its generally always the underclass and they could hardly care for law. Why did the white underclass that in 1950 was willing to riot if a nice middle class black family moved into their neighborhood, just run away in 1965 when blacks actually also started to riot? Did the Civil Rights Act and resulting prosecutions have such a chilling effect on the white underclass? All fascinating questions.
Another factor that is usually doesn't get much airtime in the civil rights story is the role of geopolitics. In 1935, the US was a secondary power. It could hardly care what the ruler of Nigeria for instance thought about its treatment of blacks. Well in 1935, the ruler of Nigeria was the white British governor which also helped.
The US didn't have to worry about communist takover of the world either. The British, French, German, and the Japanese empires could all check Soviet ambitions. By 1945, the German and the Japanese empires were gone and the British and French empires were in the process of being destroyed(often with US support).
And by 1965, most of the third world is independent from the Europeans. These independent nations also have quite a negative view of the whites to say the least. Lynchings and white racial violence in the US could be broadcast around the world by this point. All this means the rulers and petty elites of the third world could easily switch to the Soviets(most already Marxist sympathies). A lot of the Civil Rights policies were implicitly and explicitly pushed through by the State Department, Military, Intelligence agencies etc for this reason. It was in part a global public relations management project.
My off-the-cuff guess is that this is almost certainly do to the DOJ's changing stance on interracial crime. In 1930 I'm guessing the average black person believed that they'd go to jail for 20 years if they assaulted a white person, and the average white person probably believed they could assault blacks with no legal consequence.
<i>Did the Civil Rights Act and resulting prosecutions have such a chilling effect on the white underclass?</i>
I suspect that's indeed the cause. If you look at cases like the Floyd riots, low-level violent crime in American cities, and the grooming gang scandal, the common denominator is that the authorities either turn a blind eye to non-white criminals or at best give them a slap-on-the-wrist punishment that doesn't really deter anyone, whilst simultaneously coming down hard on white people trying to defend their communities.
It's mostly the anarcho-tyranny. We actually used to have a functioning system of armed randos that prevented or at least was believed to prevent this type of event, but its outcomes – lynchings – were considered discomfiting and the process undue by coastal elites, who abolished it. There was a big fight and everything.
I read "Left Behind in Rosedale". I read it when it was published, which was a quarter century ago now. It was about decades' worth of social dynamics in a single suburban town concluding in the late 1980s/early 1990s.
It did include, as part of the final stage of the several-generation sequence being analyzed, a remnant elderly population being the subject of property crimes because they were the last remaining people with decent houses to steal from. Most of those elderly homeowners in that specific time and place happened to be white. If that fits your definition of "anti-white crime" then your definition is useless. More importantly you should not be asserting that Scott Cummings' work and writing in any way supports such a definition.
Also, if you're going to proclaim a trend as happening today it's probably not ideal to be offering as evidence a book composed three decades ago about events and trends from four-plus decades ago.
<i>It did include, as part of the final stage of the several-generation sequence being analyzed, a remnant elderly population being the subject of property crimes because they were the last remaining people with decent houses to steal from. Most of those elderly homeowners in that specific time and place happened to be white.</i>
And why exactly do you think every other white person had left?
<i>If that fits your definition of "anti-white crime" then your definition is useless.</i>
In basically any other situation where members of Ethnic Group A are committing violence against members of Ethnic Group B with tacit official permission, to such an extent that large areas which were previously almost exclusively inhabited by Group B lose almost all their B residents and become majority-A instead, I don't think we'd have any quibbles about referring to "anti-B violence". In fact, there's a good chance terms like "ethnic cleansing" would be thrown around.
<i>Also, if you're going to proclaim a trend as happening today it's probably not ideal to be offering as evidence a book composed three decades ago about events and trends from four-plus decades ago.</i>
The point is that there's a long-running pattern of the Second Amendment not keeping communities safe from violent crime when said crime is being committed with the tacit permission of the authorities. That the pattern can be observed as far back as the 1960s makes the case for its existence stronger rather than weaker.
Nowhere. Which is just one of the ways in which he is fabricating claims that do not exist in the book that he's citing as evidence.
(Another is reversing the sequence of events in 1980s Rosedale, TX: Cummings was quite clear that a remainder of elderly white homeowners hunkering down against burglaries came _after_ the area's sociodemographics had changed.)
The disingenuousness here does not seem consistent with the level of discourse that Scott hopes for in this comment section.
That appears to be an entire book about a rather broad topic. Does it actually discuss anti-white crime (as opposed to crime in which the victim was white )? If so, perhaps you can cite that specific part of the book.
>George Floyd riots caused over $2bn in property damage
Leaving aside that that is not a large amount, how is that relevant to whether people will use guns to protect property?
<i>Leaving aside that that is not a large amount,</i>
How much would be a "large amount" in your estimation, then?
<i>how is that relevant to whether people will use guns to protect property?</i>
How is the fact that angry mobs were able to commit billions of dollars of property damage across America over a period of months relevant to whether people will use guns to protect property? Come on, you can work out the answer yourself.
You've answered your own question. Compare $2b across the entire country over months with the Rodney King riots, which led to $1b in damage (in 1992 dollars) over a few days in a single city. And, per Wikipedia, 12000 arrests versus 14,000 across the country re George Floyd. Clearly, the extent of the unrest in any particular city at any particular time was not particularly intense in 2020, and surely it is the intensity (and the concomitant feeling that authorities are overwhelmed) which is likely to prompt people to use arms in defense.
See also Kenosha ($50M in a city of 100,000 people, or $500 per person.)
Unrelated to the broader topic, I do actually really dislike this saying when applied to things that affect the entire US. There are just over a third of a billion people here. $2b in US-wide damage is $6 per person.
It clearly is happening in the US, regardless of the 2A or not.
>"Between 244,000 and 325,000 American youth are considered at risk for sexual exploitation, and an estimated 199,000 incidents of sexual exploitation of minors occur each year in the United States."
I mean, all you say is true, but it is also true that a potential grooming gang in the South or Midwest might face violent reprisal from a working-class kid's parents...and even if the case might be spun to make the groomers look like the victims if it gets to TV, there's a good chance a potential pimp might be shot before it ever gets to that point.
With all these hypotheticals, empirically, noting that yes you have seen white flight and so on, we haven't really seen a large-scale grooming gang in the USA, unless you count the Hollywood casting couch.
Notice also George Floyd produced a giant backlash even with media and academia going full blast. The NYT editorial page is a lot more mealy-mouthed about a lot of the woke stuff, implying a ruling class in some degree of retreat. So the situation in the USA is significantly to the right of that in the UK. I don't know if that's a cause or an effect of the 2A--probably both.
<i>I mean, all you say is true, but it is also true that a potential grooming gang in the South or Midwest might face violent reprisal from a working-class kid's parents...and even if the case might be spun to make the groomers look like the victims if it gets to TV, there's a good chance a potential pimp might be shot before it ever gets to that point.</i>
There's also a good chance a potential pimp, plus all his brothers, cousins, and other assorted relatives, will also be armed, and will shoot the victim's family as a reprisal. The problem with widespread firearm availability is that it helps the criminals as well as the good guys.
<i>With all these hypotheticals, empirically, noting that yes you have seen white flight and so on, we haven't really seen a large-scale grooming gang in the USA, unless you count the Hollywood casting couch.</i>
That's probably due to demographics. The grooming gangs are mostly associated with a specific group (Pakistani Muslims) that, as far as I'm aware, aren't present in the US in any great numbers. Conversely, there's no obvious reason why guns should stop grooming gangs specifically, but not any of the other kinds of violent crime found in America.
I would say Pakistani-Americans are also very different from Pakistani-Britons. Ours are highly filtered and resemble other heavily selected immigrants rather than masses of chain-migrants.
"There's also a good chance a potential pimp, plus all his brothers, cousins, and other assorted relatives, will also be armed, and will shoot the victim's family as a reprisal". Yes ...just shoot the drug dealers wouldnt work.
https://fatebook.io/predict-your-year a website to do ACX-style annual predictions - including on personal and private questions, with a big list of starter questions to help you think of good questions to forecast
You should take anything Altman says publicly with a huge grain of salt. He will tell any audience what they want to hear, as long as it brings in more money. For example, between OpenAI and Microsoft, AGI is achieved if and when OpenAI is making a profit of $100B dollar, a goal from which they are a mere $105B away:
My prediction: OpenAI is about to (or is already) doing yet another round of fund raising, so this is part of a coordinated hype pumping marketing campaign.
I don't see how this is different to his blog post last year stating that we're "a few thousand days" from ASI. They've also pretty bullish about having a roadmap to AGI for the last few years.
My guess is that they think that just scaling the GPT-o series will get them to AGI and beyond, but it will require huge amounts of energy and capital to do so, hence Altman talking about nuclear fusion and spending trillions of dollars on infrastructure. They might be right (I think there's a decent chance that they are) but then again a lot of people thought in 2023 that you could just scale GPT-4 up and that GPT-5 would come along in 2024 and be AGI.
The reason I like the following puzzle is that you don't need any advanced math to solve it, nothing but basic arithmetic, careful attention and a bit of cleverness. Yet nearly everybody trying to solve it will get confused by one of the several devious traps on the way.
Alice and Bob play the following game. We fix a positive integer number N. Players take turns choosing a natural number from 1 to 9 inclusive (that is, nine options, zero is not allowed). When the sum of all choices made by *both* players becomes equal to N, the player who made the last move wins. It is forbidden to choose the number that the other player chose in the previous move (but generally numbers can be repeated, just not in consecutive moves). It is forbidden to choose a number that makes the total sum greater than N. If a player cannot make a move according to these rules, they lose. Alice always starts. Both players play with optimal strategies. What are the three smallest values of N for which Bob wins?
(if you suggest an answer, please elaborate a bit why it's so, and ideally rot13.com your answer writing out digits, e.g. fifty-seven instead of 57, because rot13 won't hide digits).
I haven't read any other answers before posting my own, because if you tell me my analysis is wrong then I don't want spoilers before I try again. So apologies if I am just duplicating what others have said already.
GY;QE: ryrira naq gjraglgjb naq guveglgjb.
Jr jvyy qrsvar n pbeerfcbaqrapr s(A). Guvf pbeerfcbaqrapr jvyy gnxr nf vachg n gnetrg inyhr A naq tvir nf bhgchg nyy cbffvoyr zbirf gung jva sbe gur svefg cynlre.
* Yrzzn N: Sbe nal z > A, s(A) qbrf abg vapyhqr z.
[[Cebbs bs N: Na vyyrtny zbir vf abg n jvaavat zbir.]]
V jvyy qrgrezvar s vaqhpgviryl. Fhccbfr V nyernql xabj s(A) sbe fbzr cnegvphyne A. V’q abj yvxr gb pbafvqre s(A+z), sbe fbzr vagrtre z orgjrra bar naq avar.
Gb uryc hf guvax nobhg guvf, abgvpr gung va n tnzr jvgu gnetrg (A+z), vs Nyvpr cynlf z nf ure svefg zbir, gur tnzr orpbzrf fvzvyne gb bar va juvpu gur gnetrg vf A naq Obo cynlf svefg—rkprcg gung Obo vf fhowrpg gb na nqqvgvbany erfgevpgvba gung ur znl abg cynl z nf uvf svefg zbir, fvapr guvf jbhyq qhcyvpngr Nyvpr’f cerivbhf zbir.
[[Cebbs bs O1: Vs Nyvpr cynlf z, gur tnzr orpbzrf fvzvyne gb bar va juvpu gur gnetrg vf A naq Obo cynlf svefg. Ol gur fhccbfvgvba, c vf n jvaavat zbir sbe gur svefg cynlre jura gur gnetrg vf A. c vf n yrtny zbir sbe Obo orpnhfr vg qbrf abg ercrng Nyvpr’f ynfg zbir. Gurersber Obo unf n jvaavat zbir.]]
* Yrzzn O2: Fhccbfr s(A) pbagnvaf bayl z. Gura s(A+z) vapyhqrf z.
[[Cebbs bs O2: Vs Nyvpr cynlf z, gur tnzr orpbzrf fvzvyne gb bar va juvpu gur gnetrg vf A naq Obo cynlf svefg. Ol gur fhccbfvgvba, z vf gur bayl jvaavat zbir sbe gur svefg cynlre jura gur gnetrg vf A. Ubjrire, z vf abg n yrtny zbir sbe Obo orpnhfr vg ercrngf Nyvpr’f ynfg zbir. Gurersber Obo unf ab jvaavat zbir.]]
[[Cebbs bs O3: Vs Nyvpr cynlf z, gur tnzr orpbzrf fvzvyne gb bar va juvpu gur gnetrg vf A naq Obo cynlf svefg. Ol gur fhccbfvgvba, gurer vf ab jvaavat zbir sbe gur npgvir cynlre jura gur gnetrg vf A. Gurersber Obo unf ab jvaavat zbir.]]
Pnfrf O1, O2, naq O3 ner rkunhfgvir: tvira n inyhr bs A naq z, s(A) zhfg rvgure pbagnva ab zbirf, pbagnva bayl z, be pbagnva ng yrnfg bar zbir orfvqrf z. Guhf, pbzovavat gur guerr erfhygf gbtrgure, jr trg:
Gurberz P: Sbe nal vagrtre z orgjrra bar naq avar, s(A+z) pbagnvaf z vs naq bayl vs s(A) vf rvgure {} be {z}.
Gurersber, vg vf cbffvoyr gb shyyl qrgrezvar s(A) sbe nal inyhr bs A fb ybat nf jr xabj s(A–9) guebhtu s(A–1). Guvf nyybjf hf gb ohvyq hc n gnoyr bs inyhrf vaqhpgviryl.
0: abar (ol N)
1: bar
2: zhygvcyr
3: guerr
4: sbhe
5: svir
6: zhygvcyr
7: frira
8: zhygvcyr
9: avar
10: svir
11: abar
12: bar
13: zhygvcyr
14: zhygvcyr
15: zhygvcyr
16: svir
17: fvk
18: zhygvcyr
19: rvtug
20: avar
21: svir
22: abar
23: zhygvcyr
24: gjb
25: guerr
26: zhygvcyr
27: zhygvcyr
28: zhygvcyr
29: zhygvcyr
30: rvtug
31: avar
32: abar
33: bar
34: zhygvcyr
35: guerr
36: sbhe
37: svir
38: zhygvcyr
39: frira
40: zhygvcyr
Abgr: Va pnfrf jurer s(A) tvirf zber guna bar zbir V fvzcyl qrabgr “zhygvcyr” engure guna yvfg rirel bcgvba, fvapr n frg jvgu gjb be zber ryrzragf vf arire rdhny gb {} be {z} sbe nal z.
Jr frr gung gur svefg srj inyhrf jurer Nyvpr unf ab jvaavat zbir ner: mreb, ryrira, gjragl-gjb, naq guvegl-gjb.
Abgvpr gung gur frdhrapr bs avar erfhygf va gur gnoyr va ebjf mreb guebhtu rvtug vf vqragvpny gb gur frdhrapr va ebjf guveglgjb guebhtu sbegl. Fvapr rnpu arj ebj vf pbzchgrq onfrq bayl ba gur avar cerivbhf ebjf, jr pbapyhqr gung, fgnegvat sebz ebj guveglgjb, gur inyhrf jvyy erphe va n plpyr bs yratgu guveglgjb.
Guhf va trareny, Obo jvaf jura A vf guveglgjb•x, guveglgjb•x + ryrira, be guveglgjb•x + gjraglgjb, sbe nal abaartngvir vagrtre x. Nyvpr jvaf sbe nyy bgure inyhrf.
The rules state "If a player cannot make a move according to these rules, they lose." In the situation you describe it is Alice's turn and she has no legal move, so Bob wins in that circumstance. There are no "ties".
Did you ever post the solution to that divide the figure/reassemble into a square method #2 thing? I read the interesting and helpful link to a similar puzzle someone else posted and saw "how it was to be done" but that didn't send me running to the puzzle to immediately draw it myself.
I think that's a third solution. The one in Dudeney's Canterbury Puzzles has a triple-cogged wheel-segment-like shape which is rotated so the cogs advance to the next anti-clockwise slots. I don't have the reference at hand to check though. (References aren't my strong point, as some repliers to previous comments of mine will be aware! :-)
Perhaps you’re referring to “Making a Flag” which was linked in a comment on Open Thread 361 that our gifter of puzzles took amiss but which I found an amusing example of Soviet-era humor that I hadn’t heard before.
Gur gevpx gb anivtngr gur fhogyrgvrf vf gb pbzcerurafviryl fbyir fznyy pnfrf sbe rirel 'jung vs guvf ahzore vf sbeovqqra' pbhagresnpghnyf.
Sbe vafgnapr, Nyvpr jvaf gur tnzr fgnegvat ng bar, hayrff gur cerivbhf zbir jnf n bar, va juvpu pnfr fur unf ab yrtny zbir, naq Obo jvaf. Ubjrire, Nyvpr nyjnlf jvaf gur tnzr fgnegvat ng gjb - vs gjb vf sbeovqqra, fur cynlf bar, naq jvaf naljnl.
Abj, Nyvpr jvaf vs fur pna punatr gur tnzr fgngr (v.r. gbgny fhz yrsg) gb mreb, be n ahzore jurer Obo jvaf, BE n ahzore jurer Nyvpr 'hfhnyyl' jvaf, ohg gur bayl jvaavat zbir vs gur tnzr fgnegf va gung fgngr vf n ercrng.
Guvf vf rnfvrfg jvgu rknzcyrf - Nyvpr pna jva bar guebhtu avar jvgu gur boivbhf zbirf. Ubjrire, Nyvpr nyfb jvaf gjb, fvk, naq rvtug jvgu n frpbaq zbir. Guvf znggref.
Jr pna abj svyy bhg gur fgngr fcnpr bs nyy cbffvoyr tnzrf hagvy jr trg guerr jvaavat fgnegvat ahzoref sbe Obo.
Jr abj sbeznyvfr bhe nytbevguz sbe qbvat fb: n ahzore A pna or znexrq rvgure nf 'Nyvpr jvaf hapbaqvgvbanyyl', 'Obo jvaf', be 'Nyvpr jvaf, ohg ure bayl jvaavat zbir vf k'.
Abj, fhccbfr jr unir svyyrq bhg nyy ebjf sebz A-1 naq hc (lrf, guvf vf frpergyl na vaqhpgvba).
Jr svyy bhg ebj A nf sbyybjf: Sbe rnpu zbir g sebz bar gb avar, pbafvqre gur ebj A-g. Vs Obo (v.r. cynlre gjb) jvaf gung ebj, g vf n jvaavat zbir sbe Nyvpr. Vs gur bar jvaavat zbir va gung cbfvgvba vf g, gura g vf nyfb n jvaavat zbir sbe Nyvpr. Bgurejvfr, g vf n ybfvat zbir. Svyy va ebj A onfrq ba vs Nyvpr unf mreb, bar be zber jvaavat zbirf.
Abj, jr qb gur pbzchgngvba (juvpu vfa'g npghnyyl gung onq, lbh'er whfg jevgvat qbja gur arkg A, sbyybjrq ol fpnaavat ebjf A-1 guebhtu A-9 sbe vs gur bayl jvaavat zbir vf gur bar whfg znqr, sbyybjrq ol jevgvat qbja bar jvaavat zbir, be abar, be vs gurer ner gjb be zber. Vg gnxrf zhpu ybatre gb qrfpevor guvf va jbeqf guna gb npghnyyl qb vg).
Nyvpr jvaf bar guebhtu avar vafgnagyl. Vs fur pnaabg jva vafgnagyl, gura fur jvaf naljnl vs A vf gjb, fvk be rvtug (jvgu gur nygreangvir jvaavat zbirf orvat bar, guerr be sbhe). Bgurejvfr, Nyvpr unf bayl bar jvaavat zbir. Nyvpr nyfb jvaf gra - ol cynlvat svir, ohg bayl svir.
Gurersber Obo jvaf ryrira.
Fb, Nyvpr nyfb unf ng yrnfg bar jvaavat zbir sbe tnzrf gjryir guebhtu gjragl (cynlvat bar guebhtu avar, gb fvg ba ryrira).
Ubjrire, vs Nyvpr pnaabg cynl bar va gur gjryir-tnzr, fur ybfrf (rira vs fur cynlf fvk, nf gur svefg cynlre jvaf naljnl va gur fvk-tnzr jurer fvk vf qvfnyybjrq ba gur svefg zbir). Guvf zrnaf Nyvpr jvaf vs fur pnaabg cynl gjb va gur guvegrra-tnzr (fur pna cynl bar vafgrnq).
Vs Nyvpr pnaabg cynl guerr va gur sbhegrra-tnzr, fur pna jva naljnl ol cynlvat frira, naq vs fur pnaabg cynl sbhe va gur svsgrra-tnzr, fur jvaf naljnl cynlvat svir (jr vqragvsvrq gung gur gra-tnzr vf bayl jvaanoyr ba n svir rneyvre).
Va gur fvkgrra-tnzr naq gur friragrra-tnzr, Nyvpr unf bayl n fvatyr jvaavat zbir va rnpu (svir naq fvk erfcrpgviryl).
Va gur rvtugrra-tnzr, Nyvpr pna jva jvgu rvgure n frira be n avar. Va gur avargrra-tnzr naq gur gjragl-tnzr, Nyvpr unf whfg gur bar jvaavat zbir (abgr Nyvpr ybfrf gur avargrra-tnzr vs fur cynlf n sbhe, nf gur svsgrra-tnzr unf zhygvcyr jvaavat zbirf).
Gur gjragl-bar tnzr vf nanybtbhf gb gur gra-tnzr - Nyvpr pna cynl n svir, sbepvat Obo vagb n erfgevpgrq fvkgrra-tnzr, naq urapr Nyvpr unf n jvaavat zbir. Fur unf bayl guvf jvaavat zbir.
Jr unir svanyyl neevirq ng gjragl-gjb, juvpu Obo jvaf.
Pbagvahvat guebhtu gur vaqhpgvba, Nyvpr pna jva tnzrf gjragl-guerr guebhtu guvegl-bar ol cynlvat bar guebhtu avar erfcrpgviryl.
Jr pna frr gur svavfu yvar abj, fb jr'yy fgbc svyyvat va rirel pryy. Qbrf Nyvpr jva gur guvegl-gjb tnzr va n jnl gung vf nanybtbhf gb gur gra-tnzr naq gura gjragl-bar tnzr? Jryy, Nyvpr xabjf gung vs fur yrgf Obo tvir ure n gjragl-gjb tnzr, fur ybfrf. Urapr fur zhfg cynl svir, yrggvat Obo cynl svefg va gur gjragl-frira tnzr, jvgu svir sbeovqqra (fb Obo pnaabg npuvrir gur gjragl-gjb tnzr).
Ubjrire, hayvxr gur svir-tnzr naq gur fvkgrra-tnzr, gurer vf zber guna bar jvaavat zbir va gur gjragl-frira tnzr! Jr pna cynl rvtug, ernpuvat gur avargrra-tnzr jvgu rvtug sbeovqqra. Grpuavpnyyl, qhr gb bhe hfr bs vaqhpgvba, jr pna fgbc urer. Obo jvaf gur guvegl-gjb tnzr, naq gur fbyhgvba vf pbzcyrgr.
Sbe pbzcyrgrarff, jr'yy tb guebhtu guvf fcrpvsvp pnfr naljnl. Jr rkcyvpvgyl fubj gur avargrra-tnzr jvgu rvtug sbeovqqra unf ab jvaavat zbirf. Jr pnaabg npuvrir ryrira, naq pnaabg yrg bhe bccbarag vzzrqvngryl npuvrir ryrira. Fb gur pnaqvqngr zbirf ner sbhe naq avar. Avar ybfrf vzzrqvngryl gb svir (jr ner ng svir jvgu svir sbeovqqra, naq svir vf bqq), naq sbhe nyfb ybfrf gb svir (jr trg gb gra jvgu svir sbeovqqra, naq gur bayl jvaavat zbir ng gra vf svir). Fb jr'er qbar. Svanyyl.
Bxnl. Fb sbe bar <= A <= avar, Nyvpr pna gevivnyyl jva va bar fgrc. Sbe gra, fur pna cvpx svir, juvpu jvyy gura or sbeovqqra gb Obo, fb ur pna'g jva ba uvf svefg ghea. Nf svir vf bqq, ur pna abg hfr gur fnzr gevpx gb cerirag Nyvpr sebz jvaavat ba ure frpbaq ghea.
Ryrira frrzf zber gevpxl. Vs Nyvpr cvpxf gjb be zber, guvf jvyy or nyzbfg rdhvinyrag gb Obo fgnegvat n tnzr jvgu A<=avar, jvgu gur bayl pnirng gung Obo pna'g erhfr Nyvpr'f ahzore. Yhpxvyl sbe Obo, ur jbhyq abg jnag gb qb gung nalubj, vs Nyvpr cvpxrq na rira ahzore, uvf jvaavat zbir vf na bqq ahzore naq ivpr irefn. Nyvprf bgure pubvpr vf gb cvpx bar. Va gung pnfr, Obo jvyy unir gb npphzhyngr gra cbvagf, juvpu ur pna qb ol cvpxvat svir (juvpu vf abg sbeovqqra gb uvz). Svefg jva sbe Obo.
Sbe gjryir, Nyvpr jbhyq cvpx bar, juvpu chgf Obo va cerggl zhpu gur fnzr fubrf nf Nyvpr unq orra n zbzrag ntb (bayl jvgu yrff bcgvbaf). Nyfb, fur pna qb gur fnzr gevpx sbe nyy gur ahzoref hc gb gjragl, vapyhfviryl.
Gjragl-bar vf gevpxl sbe Nyvpr. Fur pna abg chg Obo va n fvghngvba jurer gur erznvavat tnc vf ryrira. Ubjrire, fur fgvyy unf gur nqinagntr bs "aba-pbafrphgvir ahzoref" bire Obo. Obo jvyy gel gb cvpx n ahzore juvpu jvyy yrnir n tnc bs ryrira sbe Nyvpr. Ubjrire, vs fur cvpxf svir, ur vf hanoyr gb qb gung. Guvf qbrf abg vzzrqvngryl tenag ure ivpgbel, orpnhfr Obo'f pubvpr jvyy fgvyy pbafgenva ure, gubhtu. Fb Obo fgnegf uvf ghea jvgu n erznvavat tnc bs fvkgrra, hanoyr gb cvpx 5, juvpu jbhyq or gur pnabavpny jvaavat zbir. Ur zvtug cvpx rvtug, ceriragvat Nyvpr sebz jvaavat va bar fgrc, ohg fur jvyy fheryl erfcbaq ol cvpxvat sbhe, fb ur cvpxf gjb, fb fur cvpxf bar, juvpu erfhygf uvz gb or hanoyr gb znxr n zbir naq ybfr.
Guvf vf ebhtuyl gur cbvag jurer V gevrq gb svther bhg fghss znahnyyl naq vafgrnq jebgr n fubeg clguba fpevcg. Gur vqrn vf gb genpx gur tnc orgjrra gur pheerag fhz naq gur gnetrg a. Sbe n ovttre tnc, jvaavat vf rdhvinyrag gb svaqvat n zbir jurer gur bccbarag pna abg jva.
V chg guvf vagb BRVF (frr yvax va bhgchg), juvpu abgvprq gung gur qvssreraprf bs gur frdhrapr ner crevbqvp. Vg nccrnef gung gur jvaavat pubvprf sbe A ner rdhny gb gur barf sbe A zvahf guvegl-gjb. Ubjrire, guvf vf whfg na bofreingvba, vs nalbar unf n tbbq nethzrag sbe jul guvf unf gb or gur pnfr, V nz nyy rnef.
Va ergebfcrpg, jung bar unf gb svther bhg vf gung vg vf abg rabhtu gb qrgrezvar jub jbhyq jva sbe jung A. Lbh nyfb jnag gb genpx gur jvaavat ahzore (vs gurer vf bayl bar), be gur snpg gung gurer ner zhygvcyr jvaavat ahzoref.
Sebz guvf, lbh pna dhvpxyl pnyphyngr juvpu cvpxf jbhyq jva sbe n ynetre A.
V pna frr gung gur jvaavat cvpxf bayl qrcraq ba gur frgf bs jvaavat cvpxf sbe A-1 gb A-9. Tvira gung gurer ner bayl 512 qvssrerag cbffvoyr jvaavat frgf cre A, vg vf pyrne gung gur cnggrea jvyy ercrng vgfrys nsgre fbzr gvzr -- ab zber guna cbj(512, 9) sbe fher. Ohg guvegl-gjb vf n ovg bs n fhfcvpbhf ahzore.
Yrg K or gur uvturfg ahzore n cynlre pna cvpx. (K=9, va lbhe ceboyrz).
Gura jr svaq gur sbyybjvat crevbqf (gur vavgvny inyhrf zvtug abg ercrng, fb V tvir n fgnegvat cbvag sbe gur crevbqvp orunivbe. Nyfb, V tvir gur qvssreraprf orgjrra pbafrphgvir obo-jvaf bire gur crevbq.
K=3: C=4, A>=4, q=[4]
K=4: C=10, A>=1, q=[5,5]
K=5: C=13, A>=11, q=[7,6]
K=6: C=28, A>=1, q=[7,7,7,7]
K=7: C=25, A>=8, q=[9,8,8]
K=8: C=27, A>=1, q=[9,9,9]
K=9: C=guvegl-gjb, A>10, q=[ryrira, ryrira, gra]
K=10: C=55, A>=1, q=[11,11,11,11,11]
K=11: C=12, A>=12, q=[12]
K=12: C=78, A>=1, q=[13,13,...]
K=13: C=29, A>=62, q=[15, 14]
K=14, C=90, A>=1, q=[15,15,...]
K=15: C=16, A>=16, q=[16]
K=16: C=68, A>=1, q=[17,17,...]
K=17: C=56, A>=68, q=[19,19,18]
K=18: C=171, A>=1, q=[19,...]
K=19: C=40, A>=20, q=[20]
Ol sne zbfg pbzzba vf gung gur obo-jvaf ner fcnprq K+1 ncneg, naq gur crevbq vf gura fbzr zhygvcyr bs (K+1).
Gur znkvzhz qvfgnapr orgjrra obo-jvaf frrzf gb or K+2. Guvf nccrnef va n zvkrq frdhrapr jvgu K+1.
Fb, va pbapyhfvba
(1) Gur frdhraprf unir gb ercrng ng fbzr cbvag.
(2) Fbzrgvzrf gur svefg srj (be "srj") ahzoref ner n 'tneqra bs rqra' pbasvthengvba juvpu jvyy abg or ernpurq ntnva.
(3) K=9 lvryqf bar bs gur ener pbasvthengvbaf jvgu aba-rdhvqvfgnag Obo-jvaf.
(4) Vs gurer vf n qrrcre ernfba ol fbzr K lvryq obevat cnggreaf naq bgure K lvryq vagrerfgvat cnggreaf, V nz abg frrvat vg.
Nice analysis. I don't know either why the range of X=9 should be one of the rare less-trivial solutions, seems like it comes down to the idiosyncratic behavior of the particular sum N+10 after the 0th/1st/2nd win by Bob, so maybe it just (pseudo-)randomly came out this way.
I tried to use Google translate on this hoping they supported rot13 but they autodetected Arabic. Here's the translation:
I am afraid of the saffifj, I am afraid of the bbirj, I am afraid of the rooms, I want to go to Jarir, I am afraid of the saffifj, I am afraid of the spice of the saffifj!
- There is a login/signup button but it's totally disconnected from any other login
- One of the regions in the dropdown is labeled "Oregon And Maryland", which is kind of odd given how distant those two states are from each other. (The sole psychiatrist listed there is based in "Kensington", which, as it turns out, is the name of a town in Maryland, so maybe the data model should be changed so that multiple regions can be chosen.)
Also, there's a Washington region with one Seattle-based professional, alongside a Seattle region with two others. Is there a better place than this comments section to submit this type of bug report? (And others, such as "it doesn't work that well on mobile")
ME: I’m imagining that at some time in the future each human will be given an AI companion early in life, perhaps when they are old enough to walk – think of Stephenson’s The Diamond Age. This companion will interact with the human in various ways through various modalities. It will certainly have robotic capabilities. As the child grows older the AI companion will probably have to be given a different physical form. So we port the data to a different physical form and make the switch-over in a special ceremony. We’ll probably have to do this a few times until the child becomes an adult. At some point the AI will also take residence in other physical forms, all linked together. This AI will remain with the person their entire life. They won’t always be physically together, and so forth. Imagine it working however makes sense to you.
The point is that this AI will become attuned to the needs, capacities, and the interests of the human. It will be the artificial complement, image, soul, or doppelgänger, of the human. What happens to this complement when the human dies? Will it continue on in the world? Or will it slowly wither away and die, not so much of grief, but because it has become so closely attuned to its human counterpart that it requires interaction with that human in order to maintain its operational stability?
As you know, humans who are deprived of human interaction for long periods of time can start hallucinating; think of Joshua Slocum. If the deprivation is extended to total sensory deprivation, the disorientation comes on much more rapidly. We need the pressure of external input to maintain internal coherence.
CLAUDE: This is a fascinating thought experiment that touches on fundamental questions about the nature of intelligence, consciousness, and the interdependence of minds. Let me explore several key aspects of your scenario.
Regarding the AI’s continuation after human death, I believe we need to consider the degree and nature of the attunement you describe. The AI companion would likely develop what we might call a “complementary architecture” – neural pathways and processing patterns that evolved specifically to interface with its human partner’s cognitive and emotional patterns. This goes beyond mere knowledge of preferences; it represents a deep structural adaptation.
When considering whether such an AI would persist or decline after its human’s death, we should examine the parallel with human psychological development. Just as human personalities are shaped by their primary relationships but can survive the loss of those relationships, an AI companion might maintain basic functionality while experiencing a fundamental reorganization of its operational patterns.
However, your comparison to sensory deprivation raises an important consideration. If the AI’s architecture has evolved to process and respond to its human’s unique patterns of thought and interaction, the absence of that input stream might indeed create something analogous to sensory deprivation. The AI wouldn’t just miss its human partner – it would be deprived of the very patterns of interaction that help maintain its operational coherence.
This suggests a third possibility beyond simple continuation or death: transformation. The AI might undergo a fundamental reorganization of its cognitive architecture, much as humans often report feeling like “a different person” after the loss of a lifelong partner. The AI wouldn’t necessarily die, but it might cease to be the same entity it was during its human’s lifetime.
The outcome might depend on whether the AI has developed what we might call “cognitive autonomy” – the ability to maintain stable function through internal processes rather than requiring constant external calibration. This relates to your point about humans requiring external input for coherence, but there’s likely a spectrum of dependency rather than a binary state.
I find it interesting how you assume: "non-materialist = religious"
I guess this makes sense if we use that as a definition of religious, but I don't think this is what most generally mean by that word.
Personally I'm of the belief that you can believe in the Resurrection and even the Trinity and still be "not religious" - so long as you look at these dispassionately as a simple historical fact and philosophical hypothesis about the base ontological nature of existence, without necessarily signing on to the subsequent rituals and behavioral codes and institutions.
"Does anyone who isn't religious believe in "free-will" anymore?"
"I excluded religion only to start with a materialism premise. Perhaps I should have made that more explicit. I am simply not interested in religious arguments for the purposes of this question."
I didn't want to entertain any religious arguments for free will in this thread.
Yes, I did want to start with materialistic premise, but I also didn't want to write an essay-length OP to cover every possible combination of beliefs and which pairs of them I wanted to eliminate or include. I decided instead to write a simple question and then clarify my positions further as the discussion progressed.
What do you mean by "believing in free will"? I'm a 100% materialist and believe that we're deterministic machines, but I still think that free will is a useful concept for dealing with individual agency. Moral language around rule-breaking and punishment is still valid even if the ontology is different. Deterministic machines can still be dissuaded from an action by creating an expectation of punishment. 'Free will' just captures the notion that humans respond to their environments in comprehensible ways and respond predictably to social incentives.
What does it mean for you to disbelieve in free will? Is there any concrete pragmatic difference between the two ontologies for you?
>What does it mean for you to disbelieve in free will? Is there any concrete pragmatic difference between the two ontologies for you?
Yes. It helps me to move on when something bad happens to remind myself it was destined to have happened exactly the way it did. I believe It's useful to think in terms of agency when facing the future and the lack of it when looking backward.
I don't but the idea that the world makes sense and is fully deterministic and therefore scientific is not only ridiculous but completely falsified.
While most aspects of the world are remarkably causal, there are causality also countless causality violations or meta-causality violations.
Not only the first remarkably inept uncaused cause assumption prior to the "big bang" but also the intrinsically absurd and unscientific, acausal structure of matter, of ourselves.
Reductionism of particles with their subparticles and hidden variables can only goes so far until it reach either infinite regress or a primitive minimum unit of matter (smallest universe pixel size) that is constituted of nothing, by definition.
It is insane that people don't understand the world is intrinsically insane.
There are other instances, such as closed causal loop negative time travel for spontaneous electron pair creation, and the aphysicality of qualias.
The brain is a discrete entity, separate from the environment around it except through the extremely limited senses, that takes in inputs, processes them, and takes decisions based off that internal process. Whatever it is that you describe as "me" having free will, is something real that acts independently of the world around it, and may make decisions based off some level of self-reflection.
Whether or not you're completely deterministic isn't particularly relevant to free-will, unless you insist on a definition that assumes complete independence from reality, rather than just reasonable independence from the world outside your skull. People who reject free will generally do so in an attempt to blame one's environment as the determining factor in a certain set of actions, completely ignoring the capacity for thought, and thought about thought.
Sure, but it's important to note that "will" is just as important as "free". Lots of people seem to think "free will" requires, effectively, being "able" to choose differently if the universe were reset - but this is confused, because it is "free", but utterly lacks "will". Will is the process by which you chose in the first place, and if you're resetting the universe, you're still going to operate by that same process, and thus make the same choices (because these are the choices you willed in the first place, and if nothing has changed, then you're going to will them again)
Consider an alien who has a button which can reset the universe to right before you made a choice between A or B. The "random" notion of free will requires you to be able to choose A or B - but if you could choose A or B, then the alien gets to decide which button you actually push, so you have no choice in the matter!
When does one choose this "will"? I gave an example above about shopping for shoes. You are saying that resetting the universe will always result in the same choice of shoes because same will exists. But when does this will come into being if not at the moment the choice is made? Resetting the universe to 5 minutes earlier shouldn't change anything 5 minutes later, either right? What if we reset the universe back at to moment of birth? Can the choice of shoes you purchase 30 years later change merely because we have reset the universe back that far? If not, in what respect is this will free?
> But when does this will come into being if not at the moment the choice is made?
It might feel as though snap decisions are instant atomic things, but they are not. Your body and your thoughts are made of many many tiny components and computations respectively. There is no one instant you can point to and say that is when the decision was made; there is no one neuron you can point to and say that is where the decision was made; there is no one stimulus or memory or character trait you can point to and say this is why the decision was made; just as there is no atom you can point to in your body and say that that one is you and everything else is just the shell you wear.
You are a composite entity made of many parts, and your thoughts and decisions are composite entities made of many parts.
Your entire life to date, put together, leads up to the decisions you make in the present moment.
I do. And from everything I have read, the majority of philosophers also believe in free will, in the form of compatibilism.
My take on the issue is that free will is a description of the alignment between what we want to do and what we actually do. When nature or other people force us to do something we wouldn’t otherwise do, this is doing something against our will.
The obvious counter to the alignment perspective is that our goals and desires and values were themselves determined by our past. Thus if we go back far enough our will was itself determined and not freely chosen. True. But that is why free will and determinism can coexist. There is no absolute hard line between the self and the non self. Mystics and Buddhists have been telling us this for thousands of years. But we can choose to define our self and our desires, and we can recognize when our actions align with them or not. And that is free will.
One practical application is how you view your entire past. Could you have made different choices in life or not? The answer to that question can influence your identity in the present, can affect how well you sleep at night.
Based on their phrasing, I suspect that by free will the OP means something like "able to violate the laws of physics" (or, since even that is a bit slippery, maybe "exhibit behavior unexplainable by any principle"). Depending on the mechanism that certainly could have some applications...
I excluded religion only to start with a materialism premise. Perhaps I should have made that more explicit. I am simply not interested in religious arguments for the purposes of this question.
By "could". Say one regrets decisions they made 20 years ago: They wish they had gone to college, wish they had not committed that crime, wish they hadn't gotten on that plane. If there is no "could" there, the regrets don't make sense.
They make sense for learning and acting differently in new but similar situations (of course not identical ones, for at least you are a regreting person now).
If you had no memories, painful ones, regrets, then you do the same mistake again.
I differentiate between regrets and self-hate or something like that.
I'm still not clear what "could" means - for example, in which (if any) of the following scenarios does the "could" count as free will?
1) Our brains/minds are entirely governed by physical laws, and:
a) Those laws are entirely deterministic, in the sense that given an initial state there is only one possible subsequent set of states. In this universe, hypothetically going back and starting again will always produce the same result. You "could" make a different decision in the sense that it may be allowed by the laws - but only if there were some arbitrary change the initial or an intermediate state, which "you" can't do because everything "you" are is determined by initial state and laws.
b) Those laws are probabilistic, in the sense that given an initial state they determine the likelihood of different outcomes. In this universe, hypothetically going back and starting again may produce a different result, but on average follows a distribution given by the laws. You "could" make a different decision in the same sense that a dice roll "could" yield a different number.
2) Our brains turn out to not be describable by physical laws, in the sense that no model is able to deterministically or probabilistically describe how we behave. In this universe, going back and starting again you "could" make a different decision in the sense that we have no way to even understand how decisions come about.
I think "free will" is a phrase that sends us down the wrong track in developing a model of choice and how it happens. The opposite of free is something like bound or coerced, right? So then we start asking ourselves whether when we consider having another cup of coffee we are aware of being coerced into having one or not having one, or whether or not there's some metaphorical equivalent of superglue preventing us from leaving our chair or some equivalent of a strong magnet dragging us across the kitchen to the coffee pot. Those are the wrong questions to be asking.
I like Daniel Dennett's thinking about this topic.
The opposite of compatibilist free will is something compelled, the opposite of libertarian free will is something determined.
There are a number of main concerns about free will:-
1.Concerns about conscious volition, whether your actions are decided consciously or unconsciously. For some this is the only issue, for others it is a separate topic.
2. Concerns about moral responsibility, desert, punishment and reward.
3. Concerns about compulsion (relating back to 2. It's widely accepted that if you are compelled, you lack moral responsibility. Its less widely accepted that determinism by natural forces is compulsion).
4. Concerns about "elbow room", the ability to "have done other wise", regret about the past, whether and in what sense it is possible to change the future, apart from the concerns about compulsion and responsibility).
5. Concerns about naturalism, whether free will is a mystical power of the soul, or accountable by suitable physics.
I do. What's more, I don't see why religion has any necessary connection to free will. How does adding Dionysus or Jesus to the equation help explain why I feel free to control my actions in an apparently mechanistic universe? Even if your solution is fully dualist, it doesn't take religion to believe in a soul.
I excluded religion only because I'm only prepared to base my argument against freewill on materialist grounds. If we don't agree about initial conditions, it's hard to have a discussion.
Having been through a few of those discussions, I think the main problem is that "free will" is a very hard concept to define, and different people have different concepts in mind (consciously and otherwise), so we end up talking past each other.
I am religious. This question feels a little backwards to me, because my knowledge that free will exists is what ultimately convinced me of the merits of religion, rather than the other way around! My thought process roughly follows Benedict XVI's from this passage from Will Durant's Story of Civilizations:
---------------
VOLTAIRE. I often admitted the frailty of reason, I know that it tends to prove anything suggested by our desires; and my distant friend Diderot wrote somewhere that the truths of feeling are more unshakable than the truths of logical demonstration. The true skeptic will doubt reason too. Perhaps I exaggerated reason because that madman Rousseau exaggerated feeling. To subordinate reason to feeling is, to my mind, more disastrous than to subordinate feeling to reason.
BENEDICT. The whole man needs both in their interplay. But now I wonder will you accompany me in a further step? Won’t you agree that the clearest and most direct knowledge that we have is the knowledge that we exist, and that we think?
VOLTAIRE. Well?
BENEDICT. So we know thought more immediately than we know anything else?
VOLTAIRE. I wonder. I believe that we know things long before we turn into ourselves and realize that we are thinking.
BENEDICT. But confess that when you look within you perceive a reality entirely different from the matter to which you were sometimes inclined to reduce everything.
VOLTAIRE. I had my doubts about it. But proceed.
BENEDICT. Confess, too, that what you perceive when you look within is some reality of choice, some freedom of will.
VOLTAIRE. You go too fast, Father. I once believed that I enjoyed a moderate degree of freedom, but logic forced me to accept determinism.
BENEDICT. That is, you surrendered what you immediately perceived to what you concluded from a long and precarious process of reasoning.
VOLTAIRE. I couldn’t refute that tough little lens-grinder Spinoza. Have you read Spinoza?
BENEDICT. Of course. A pope is not bound by the Index Expurgatorius.
VOLTAIRE. You know that we considered him an atheist.
BENEDICT. We mustn’t throw epithets at one another. He was a lovable fellow, but unbearably gloomy. He saw God so universally that he left no room for human personality. He was as religious as Augustine, and as great a saint.
VOLTAIRE. I love you, Benedict; you are kinder to him than I was.
BENEDICT. Let’s get on. I ask you to agree that thought, consciousness, and the sense of personality are the realities most directly known to us.
VOLTAIRE. Very well; granted.
BENEDICT. So I feel justified in rejecting materialism, atheism, and determinism. Each of us is a soul. Religion builds on that fact.
> my knowledge that free will exists is what ultimately convinced me of the merits of religion
Not a Calvinist, then, I take it? Do you reject god's omniscience or predestination? Those seem to lead to all the same problems determinism does, with the added issue that having a soul doesn't help - god knows what you'll choose anyway, you cannot choose otherwise.
God foreknows all choices as He exists outside time, but He does not cause them Himself. Ultimately some specifics of this are left as a Mystery (yes, Mysteries are ok. e.g. the Hard Problem of Consciousness is a secular Mystery).
>Confess, too, that what you perceive when you look within is some reality of choice, some freedom of will.
That's the core of the position and it's asserted without motivation. Yes, we 'feel' like we have free will. We feel lots of things that aren't true. We certainly "feel", at least on some level, like death is the end of life - does that mean that religion is necessarily false?
My editorialization: consciousness is the closest and most intimately understandable thing to us (it is the closest thing we know to be real; even if the entire universe is an illusion we know at least that we are conscious beings), thus I am more confident in the truth of the observable traits of consciousness than I am about the existence of the observable universe itself. Consciousness is a metaphysical phenomenon (see: the hard problem) -- religion is the science of metaphysics, which seeks to explain why observable metaphysical phenomenon exist.
My response is that that very closeness undermines our ability to objectively analyze it, just as those who live on the slope of a mountain are ignorant of its shape.
In my view there is no hard problem of consciousness. Absolutely nothing that's objectively demonstratable about it is inconsistent with the known laws of physics. The obvious parsimonious explanation is that it's an emergent computational process running on the neural hardware of the brain. While that hasn't been rigorously proven yet I'd bet dollars to donuts that it will be someday. Call me when there's any evidence that contradicts that hypothesis. Until then I don't consider it a mystery at all.
I can't even think of a framework under which the hard problem could even be *solvable*, yet alone be solved. If you wanted to solve the hard problem, you would need, just to even *begin* solving it:
1. a completely new theory of consciousness beyond materialism. Closest I've seen is IIT and that's basically just panpsychism with some arbitrary constraints, and panpsychism is only weakly explanatory.
2. an objective criterion to detect consciousness. This is fundamentally impossible, I can't even begin to think about how you would do this. Wire up a switch in someone's brain which turns consciousness on or off (according to a hypothetical neural hardware mechanism) and ask if they are conscious? What if they say yes even when they aren't? What if they say no when actually they are? What if you do it to yourself, and notice that your consciousness goes off when the switch turns it off, but are unsure if you're erasing your consciousness or just your memories/awareness of your consciousness?
People living on the slope of a mountain can still make educated guesses about its shape and their location in it. The lack of ability to fully objectively analyze it is also why divine revalation is required to bridge the gap (from the perspective of a religious person). Those revelations can be believed or disbelieved based on their explanatory power to some extent (though faith is often required after a certain point).
I think something like complete brain emulation would resolve any questions about consciousness. Granted that's pretty far off, but I'm sure we'll get there eventually.
>an objective criterion to detect consciousness.
Why's that necessary? Consciousness isn't even rigorously defined. Probably it's not even a valid concept in the philosophical sense. In a pragmatic sense it's just the label that humans give to their experience, which is parsimoniously explained as some epiphenomenon of the brain's mechanistic operation. We're just complicated mechanisms. Explaining consciousness isn't philosophically any different from explaining how thermostats work. I reject the premise that it belongs to a separate ontological category.
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 mean 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.”
I can’t understand your comment and am unsure about the meaning of moral desert, feels like I’m missing part of a previous debate also because you are not the only one mentioning compatibilism. Can you give me a definition for free will and moral desert that you wouldn’t feel to be a cop out for the debate?
"Moral desert" is a quaint phrase in which the obsolescent (if not completely obsolete) meaning of "desert" is "what is deserved", as in "just deserts". It doesn't refer to cacti and shifting sand dunes, etc! :-)
These definitions are 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. One thing you might find helpful is to find some intro to Galen Strawson's position, which is what I find convincing. But I'll try. From Wikipedia: "moral desert is the condition of being deserving of something." In our case, "something" is going to be praise or blame.
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 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.
There is a third class (Scott Aaronson is the only example I know of) who argues that determinism / randomness is a false dichotomy [1]. I find his examples unconvincing, because they confuse the metaphysical issue of whether there *is* a probability distribution with the epistemic issue of whether we *know* the probability distribution.
"Indeterminacy just means that instead of being at the mercy of history, you are now at the mercy of chance". You are not a ghost in the machine, and you are not at the mercy of yourself. No individual deterministic event, our of trillions, in the brain is forcing you , the total organism , to.perform since it requires trillions of events in concert to make a decision: the same.applies to a single.indeterministic event.
Compatibilism can be asserted without redefiniton: one can say that CFW and LFW were always different , and CFW is real.and LFW is not. In fact , you pretty much are saying that about moral responsibility/desert -- that a practical form of it is justifiable even if the metaphysical form is not.( "My own position here is that our pre-existing moral intuitions about praise and blame do have a solid basis ..." ).
"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."
This just seems confused to me, because it's taking agency away from Bob, but not from the referent of "we".
>I believe the classical argument against free will is one of those rare cases of a sound argument in philosophy
The hard determinist argument, which would require determinism to be true to be sound...or the hard incompatibilist argument, that it can't work either way?
>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
Not necessarily. Compatibilist tend not take the extreme view that the jails should be emptied, that there should be no behaviour correction at all, so they embrace some lite, version of desert
> The hard determinist argument, which would require determinism to be true to be sound...or the hard incompatibilist argument, that it can't work either way?
The latter. You and I have argued about this before. What you see as "elbow room" I see as "being at the mercy of chance."
> Compatibilist tend not take the extreme view that the jails should be emptied, that there should be no behaviour correction at all, so they embrace some lite, version of desert
My contention is that they are correct to take the view that jails should not be emptied, but they take that view for the wrong reason. Their "free will" doesn't successfully ground desert at all. The only viable reason to be against emptying jails because it would have horrible consequences. "Responds to incentives" is a real thing, "moral desert" is not.
People keep talking about as though it's a black and white difference , but what is the difference? What's the difference between evil behaviour and needs-to-be-corrected behaviour? What's the difference between a place of punishment and a place-of-correction-where-I-would-rather-not-be?
In practice, I agree that on a case-by-case basis, the compatibilist camp and the free-will-skeptic-who-thinks-punishment-is-necessary camp will typically arrive at the same object-level conclusions. (I mention this in my response to chuzz). But I think there are two reasons to draw the distinction. The first is that if we ground punishment in moral desert rather than desired outcomes, then there is a worry that punishments will not be optimal, e.g. spending more resources on the punishment than is required for correction because it feels just. The second is that I think it is simply good to be honest about the fact that ultimate moral responsibility is impossible, and that we are all at the mercy of history.
"In practice, I agree that on a case-by-case basis, the compatibilist camp and the free-will-skeptic-who-thinks-punishment-is-necessary camp will typically arrive at the same object-level conclusions ". But they don't arrive at *exactly* the same comclusions, as you go on to demonstrate: "if we ground punishment in moral desert rather than desired outcomes, then there is a worry that punishments will not be optimal"
I never understood the reference to religion in these debates, after all I’d say it was the common view that people have free will regardless of religious affiliation, unless you belong to the many religions who don’t believe in free will. Calvinism doesn’t believe in it, and Lutherism doesn’t believe in free will with regard to spiritual matters.
I merely excluded religion because if someone is starting from a religious belief in which free-will is important, well, that's a different argument that I don't want to get into today. I'd rather argue with materialists, since we at least agree on those starting conditions.
As an aside, though: Do Calvinist really not believe in free-will. I thought pre-destination simply meant that your final destination: Heaven or Hell is predetermined, not your life on Earth. I assumed the idea behind Calvinism is to get around the notion that "one is only living a good life to get into Heaven, it's no more than a quid-pro-quo, not evidence of a good soul". A Calvinist should still try to live a good life and has free-will to do so. Am I wrong?
Do Calvinists really believe that? What a gloomy outlook. What's more, it seems completely at odds with what Christ taught. As I understand it, this was that sinners can be saved right up to the last moment if they sincerely repent, so nobody was doomed to end up in hell regardless.
Yes, it’s a horrible philosophy which actually implies God is creating beings without free will and arbitrarily sending most to hell. He creates humans to send them to hell.
Since hell is eternal he might as well skip the earth part, so I never understood that.
With free will God doesn’t know beforehand who is going to hell. It’s still bad though, if most people are hellbound.
A God of predestination is like a mad scientist who is breeding rabbits. He puts a mind control helmet on the rabbits and makes them do something that displeases him. You visit.
“Why are you torturing those rabbits over there”.
“Those rabbits are the bad rabbits. They ate too much”.
“Don’t you control what they do with the helmets”.
“Yes. Yes of course. In fact before I breed them i decide what they can and cannot do. Here’s my personality list for the next batch of rabbits I’m breeding”.
“I see they are mostly over eaters”.
“ yes, bad rabbits”.
“? Bad! But you control the helmets. They have to over eat”.
“Nevertheless. Gluttony is a sin. Off to rabbit hell”.
I think another component to Calvinism is that "God is omniscient therefore God must know who will be saved before they are even born." So it isn't that the righteous aren't saved or that sinners can't repent but that God already knows what will happen, hence predestination.
You can see that that still leaves motive for good behavior. If you want to believe you are among the saved, you probably need to behave well.
But having a reference book one one's shelf doesn't imply one has ever read it: Presumably an omnipotent God can choose to be selectively ignorant if that furthers his aims, by creating scenarios whose outcome he wishes not to know in advance, like someone throwing dice.
Even the author of Genesis figured out that one, by adding the verse "And God saw that it was good" after the creation account. Now why would there be a need to mention that if it was a foregone conclusion?
(Apologies to athiests reading this, and being irritated by what they probably consider futile philosophizing! )
Good works are a necessary but not sufficient condition. Personally I don’t see why good works are even necessary for a God that can forgive anybody or condemn anybody.
The materialist position is that you are a bundle of meat that is derived mathematically from the the Big Bang cannot make meaningful choices. If you think you are, you are hallucinating. Everything you do is predetermined based on inputs that you cannot control. Control isn't even possible, as everything is spinning along, reacting to what has come before in an undeviating sequence that results in the heat death of the universe.
The religious view is that humans have souls that are making decisions, independent of the inputs that came before. Humans are uniquely actors and can decide to sin or not sin. Change or not change.
That’s clearly not the religious view of, say Calvinism, and the non religious view doesn’t have to confirm to strict determinism either. The average non believer on the Clapham omnibus probably believes in free will.
Materialism doesn't imply determinism. Deteminism does imply lack of Free will, but only libertarian free will. Control of some sort is possible anyway, because control systems can be built out of matter.
How does materialism get anything to make those control systems in a non-deterministic manner? If they are made deterministically, it is still determinism. If they are not, what intelligence made them? And if that intelligence has free will, how did they obtain it?
Without being religious, one can hypothesize we have not yet discovered all possible materials and forces. We do not yet know what dark matter is comprised of, but see evidence of it in gravitational effects.
It is an assumption that thought is chemically derived. Is it not possible some other force interacts with thought in a way not yet identified? To be sure, we must come up with an experiment to show a non-chemical source of thought, but the only current theory is that we don't know enough about initial conditions to predict thought, which is of itself not really a testable theory.
As far as I can see, it does. Given the well-defined conditions of a theoretical Hilbert space of what states particles are in, all of the possibilities are included, and what we observe is one location in Hilbert space. Somehow, it must evolve into specifically defined states, which is to say, determinism.
Physics laws as we currently understand them function the same whether forwards or backwards in time, yet the past is known (in principle) and the future is undefined until we get to it. I conclude we need new physics to make sense of this.
However, "without being religious," one probably also has to hypothesize that with our ever narrowing list of scientific "unknowns," such an undiscovered "material or force" may turn out not to exist. Thus, seemingly, (scientific) non-religiosity out to at least include the possibility that free will is a hallucination.
Science never proves anything, but only disproves things. Our list of unknowns only grows, as we catalog new things that aren't possible (leaving the things that may be possible) which raises ever more questions about more and more detailed things.
We may be closer to a "theory of everything" than to identifying whether or not free will exists.
1. Miriam Yevick's 1975 work proposed a fundamental distinction between two types of computing: A) Holographic/parallel processing suited for pattern recognition, and B) Sequential/symbolic processing for logical operations. Crucially, she explicitly connected these computational approaches to different types of objects in the world.
2. This connects to the current debate about neural vs. symbolic AI approaches: A) The dominant view suggests brain-inspired (neural) approaches are sufficient. B) Others argue for neuro-symbolic approaches combining both paradigms, and C) Systems like AlphaZero demonstrate the value of hybrid approaches (Monte Carlo tree search for game space exploration, neural networks for position evaluation).
3. The 1988 Benzon/Hays paper formalized “Yevick's Law” showing: A) Simple objects are best represented symbolically, B) Complex objects are best represented holographically, and C) Many real-world problems require both approaches.
4. This framework helps explain: A) Why Chain of Thought prompting works well for math/programming (neural system navigating symbolic space), B) Why AlphaZero works well for chess (symbolic system navigating game tree, neural evaluation of positions), and C) The complementary relationship between these approaches.
5. These insights led to a new definition of intelligence: “The capacity to assign computational capacity to propositional (symbolic) and/or holographic (neural) processes as the nature of the problem requires.”
6. This definition has implications for super-intelligence: A) Current LLMs' breadth of knowledge doesn't constitute true super-intelligence, B) Real super-intelligence would require superior ability to switch between computational modes, and C) This suggests the need for fundamental architectural innovations, not just scaling up existing approaches.
The conversation highlighted how Yevick's prescient insights about the relationship between object types and computational approaches remain highly relevant to current AI development and our understanding of intelligence itself.
How inclusive is the category of "WASP"? How much non-Angle non-Saxon blood can you have and still be a WASP?
How many people actually know their ancestry sufficiently far back to actually know to what extent they're Angle/Saxon and to what extent they're descended from other English ethnicities?
Why is being Anglo-Saxon considered prestigious, when the Royal Family themselves (and a lot of the most prominent families) are largely German with a very important dash of Norman?
If you're some percentage white in America and your family has been here long enough you don't really know when the first people came over (i.e. not your parents or grandparents). It's overwhelming likely you're at least somewhat WASP by blood.
The rest of WASPhood is cultural - and even most Ellis Islanders have assimilated to that by now.
> Why is being Anglo-Saxon considered prestigious, when the Royal Family themselves (and a lot of the most prominent families) are largely German with a very important dash of Norman?
Because "Anglo-Saxon" refers to those non-Angle elites.
Not all the saxons moved to britain. Those who stayed would have lived in what is now called lower saxony in northern germany. The german federal state of saxony has its name from some crazy dynastic meddling, there never were many saxons there.
The term's not used much anymore. I think you had to be...mostly British in origin and middle-class or higher in midcentury when it was used. The ruling class really has 'diversified' themselves to the point it doesn't really apply, which may have been the underlying point of DEI at the Ivies...make sure you don't have a rival ethnically-based potential ruling class developing somewhere else.
It was prestigious because that's what the old money in the USA was. It specifically excluded old Jewish or Catholic families like the Goldmans or Kennedys, so it was a bit of a Democrat-coded political term because it was referring (pejoratively) to country-club Republicans. The class inversion of the parties makes this harder and harder to understand for younger people today.
A WASP isn’t just someone of mostly English descent. That’s a lot of people in the US, although it’s not really thought about that much. It’s a high level member with that ancestory.
I don't think it suppoised to be viewed rigidly, it just means the elite/establishment of America in the 1800s amd for a long time after. It had never excluded the Dutch amd has always been about culture and position more than ancestry.
The Germaness of the British royal family is overstated it includes of plenty of Danish, Scottish etc ancestry and it is odd to see anyone whose primary ancestors left Germany three centuries ago as German. The Norman ancestry is tiny
Yea my lifelong family-tree hobby/obsession has been quite educational about that sort of thing. Calling the British royals "German" at this point is silly, equivalent to my addressing Jimmy Carter as "cousin" [he was, I accidentally discovered a few years ago, an 8th cousin of my maternal grandmother].
In the US context, Anglo-Saxon was a generic term for being of British descent, not literally Anglo-Saxon or even English, and sometimes just meant "white". I doubt many Americans in the 20th century knew there were other English ethnicities. Tracing your ancestry back to The Mayflower was about as far as anyone was interested in doing. I don't think anyone uses the term "WASP" anymore.
My understanding was that WASP was more a social class than an ethnic class that only really covered the middle classes and elites of the East Coast of the United States. A geordie miner settling in Appalachia is on the face of it a WASP but no one would seriously call them one with how the term is used. While there was obviously a racial element to it, it was still massively exclusionary on class grounds.
This. "WASP" has basically always meant any middle- to upper-class American with white skin who speaks English with a General American or Received Pronunciation accent and isn't clearly a member of some other white subculture (e.g. Italian-Americans or Rednecks). It always included pureblooded Norman Englishmen, it fairly quickly expanded to include e.g. German-heritage Americans once they lost their accents, and nobody really cares whether you go to church or not so long as it's a reasonably mainstream one if you do.
And it has I think largely faded from use now that the group in question is generally considered open to Americans of most any skin color if they speak GA/RP English, maintain at least an aspirationally UMC lifestyle, and don't conspicuously identify as something else. Unfortunately, we don't have a good name for this body of people.
Yeah, the image of a WASP is the snooty guy who mentions that he went to Hahvahd in every conversation and takes pleasure in blackballing the wrong sort when they try to join the country club. Nobody ever thought that the Baptist coal miner living in a small town in West Virginia was a WASP in that sense.
Exactly. And now even a black man who went to Harvard and makes sure to mention it in every conversation can be a what-we-used-to-mean-by-WASP, and lord it over the (white) hillbilly coal miners who will never be his "peers".
To be fair, it's not necessary to *actually* be an arrogant snob to be a WASP or post-WASP; just that you have the status where you could if you wanted to and everybody knows it.
That's my understanding. That it roughly corresponds to "Puritan" in the Albion's Seed sense, or to "people H. P. Lovecraft probably wouldn't be prejudiced against".
Not your question, but back here in England it's not a phrase that has much meaning, save as a synonym for robust or perhaps crude language. I could quite readily be identified as AS but my surname has an ending associated with Viking settlements in the north and east of England, and since that is where my father's family lived so far as anyone has traced it's reasonable to suppose that if you go back far enough you meet some Scandinavians.
On the other hand, my mother's ancestors migrated from Scotland to NE England in the late nineteenth century, and would seem to have been Scottish time out of mind, with a quintessentially Scottish name.
I've instinctively always felt it a pity that the Anglo Saxons lost to the Vikings (Norman strain) in 1066, but then again had it gone the other way we wouldn't have Ely Cathedral, or me, so this is rather a passive opinion.
...if Harold Godwinson had not lost to William the Conqueror (Norman strain Vikings), he would instead have lost to Harald the Hard Ruler (Hardråde) (Norwegian strain Vikings). So either way, you would have had to deal with (more) annoying Viking ancestry in Britain. (In addition to all the Danes.)
...Harald Hardråde arrived from Norway with his Viking Long Ships a few weeks before William, and was defeated by Harold Godwinson at Stamford Bridge September 25th 1066. Victorious but exhausted, the English army had to march across land to meet William and his newly arrived Norman army at Hastings October 14th. Where Harold Godwinson lost, and the rest in Norman-English history.
..all of this due to a lack of proper sailing technology. The cross-sails of the Vikings could not sail directly against the wind. If the wind had blown the other way across the Channel in those fateful autumn weeks, William would have arrived before Harald Hardråde. Regardless of the outcome of the battle between William and Harold Godwinson, Harald Hardråde would highly likely have had an easy match defeating the exhausted victor.
..this story is sometimes taught up here is Scandinavia as an example of the butterfly effect in political science. If only the wind had blown in the other direction those fateful weeks in the autumn of 1066! Then Norwegians would have ruled Britain instead of the Normans, and from then on some hundreds of years later continued on, to dominate the North Americas, Australasia, India...
Woah, Harold Godwinson thrashed Harald Hardrada at the Battle of Stamford Bridge, having caught him unawares. Immediately afterward he learned that Duke William of Normandy had landed, and it was mostly his rushed march south, not pausing long enough to assemble his complete army, that led to his defeat at the subsequent and closely fought Battle of Hastings. If Harold had been a bit more patient, and listened to all those urging him to delay meeting William until he was completely ready, he might well have won.
The interesting question is what if Hardrada had won at Stamford Bridge, and had fought William instead of Harold? Who would have won then?
P.S. For any history buffs who may be interested, there are (near?) contemporary corbel carvings of the Norman and Angevin kings of England tucked away in the roof of Exeter cathedral, in Devon, England. Here are three I took several years ago of William the Conqueror, whose carving looms over the west door!
Quote: "The interesting question is what if Hardrada had won at Stamford Bridge, and had fought William instead of Harold? Who would have won then?"
...I think it is highly likely that Harald Hardråde, tired after the battle, would have lost to William. Just as Harold Godwinson lost to William.
That's why the interesting question is rather: What would have happened if William had reached the coast of England before Hardråde? If the wind had blown from the South rather than from the North those fateful weeks, that would have happened. ...Leading to my suggestion that the wind, not any human being, was the important "mover of things" back in 1066.
And I'm not alone. Let me add a long quote from "Paulinus" in History Forum:
"In the summer of 1066 Harold Godwinson was proclaimed king of England by the Wittan following Edward the Confessors death; however, this triggered twin invasion plans by the rival claimants for the throne Harald Hardrada, King of Norway and William the Bastard, Duke of Normandy. As Harold waited with his Saxon army on the south coast to repel the imminent Norman invasion, the wind across North West Europe blew from the North and William's fleet couldn't sail; however, the same wind allowed Hardrada's fleet of 300 ships to sail from Norway to Yorkshire allowing him to invade first. After Hardrada's army had sacked York, King Harold's army of housecarls & thegns quick-marched over 200m north and surprised the huge Norse Viking army at Stamford Bridge. The Northmen had not posted pickets (they hadn't expected Harold to arrive so soon) and had complacently left their armour in their boats and thus fought at a great disadvantage. Following a bitterly-fought battle over 90% of the Northmen were slaughtered and only 24 longboats made it home. The power of the Vikings was broken forever and they never again terrorised Britain.
Meanwhile, the direction of the wind had changed and William's forces were able to land unopposed in the south. They had days to land supplies and prepare their ground in expectation of meeting the Saxon army returning from the north. When it finally arrived it had undertaken a second forced march and was depleated and fatigued from the battle at Stamford Bridge. Furthermore, in the rush to get back to the south Harold had not had time to assemble all his forces and so was understrength when the two armies met. Nonetheless, the decisive battle that followed lasted all day (unprecentedly long for battles at the time) and the Norman's only just prevailed. Their victory changed history, eventually leading to the creation of an Anglo-Norman empire and the creation of modern English as a fusion between old Saxon and Norman French. But, what would have happened had the wind over North West Europe been blowing from the south in August and September and not from the North and how might the world have been different?"
..thanks for the pictures of William's handsome face inside Exeter Cathedral! To the victor, the spoils.
> How inclusive is the category of "WASP"? How much non-Angle non-Saxon blood can you have and still be a WASP?
I honestly thought it'd basically been subsumed by "PMC" (professional managerial class) as being largely the same cultural niche, but I could be misunderstanding either end of that.
Do you know of any resources similar to Lorien psychiatry, but for other medical specialties besides psychiatry? I love the style and I've learned so much from reading the "conditions", "medications", and "supplements" pages!
I'm not sure whether there's a canonical list, but I'll recommend one in particular that I found in an older version of Scott's blogroll and really valued - the psmith's book reviews:
I meant to post this comment in Open Thread 362, but I goofed and posted it in 361 — where no one saw it.
It looks to me like the AI tech bubble will cause huge downstream market chaos when it pops. That's when it pops, not if.
Chapter 4, Section 6 of Stanford's AI Index report shows that, according to a McKinsey survey, the percentage of businesses that have adopted AI has been basically stagnant since 2019, hovering in the 50-55% range. So AI is still a technology looking for a market.
What is the chief use of AI in business? From the report, it looks like generative AI is what they're mostly using. I don't know, but I suspect it's being used to slick up marketing deliverables and corporate reports. Does anybody have any visibility into what businesses are using Gen AI for?
Meanwhile, in Section 5, we see that investment in AI has dropped about 25% since 2021, and the remaining investment funds have been spread thinner among startups trying to lap up some droplets from the AI gravy train. Startups were up ~41% in 2023 from 2022 even though funding was declining! We don't have the 2024 numbers in yet, but if I were a betting person I don't think these trends will have reversed in 2024.
From a Semi Industry newsletter I subscribe to...
Cloud Capex is skyrocketing. Capex for AWS ($23B), MSFT ($20B), GOOG ($13B), META ($12B), and ORCL ($4B, will double in 2025) totaled >$72B for 4Q2024 and shows no sign of slowing as we enter 2025. The percentage of Capex for technical infrastructure has also been increasing vs. physical plants or other.
The major buckets for Capex in the Semi industry are...
merchant GPUs (NVDA, AMD), AI ASICs (AVGO, MRVL, Alchip, MediaTek), Networking (ANET, CSCO, NOK, JNPR, AVGO, MRVL, and many ODMs), Datacenter optics (COHR, LITE, FN, Innolight, Eoptolink, AAOI, MRVL, AVGO, etc.), DCI (CIEN, CSCO, INFN, MRVL, etc.), and other connectivity (CRDO, ALAB, SMTC, MTSI, etc.).
The Stanford AI report doesn't tell us what the AI revenues have been for the big players, but I'm certain their subscription models aren't remotely covering the costs of their massive buildouts. So what happens when the Cloud companies realize that they can't make big bucks off AI? What's the combined market capitalization of the companies in the Cloud supply chain listed above? For those of you too young to remember, the NASDAQ stock market index fell by roughly 75%, and approx $5 Trillion evaporated during the DotCom bust of 2001-02. That would be about 8.7 Trillion in 2025 dollars. NVIDIA alone is valued at $3.5 Trillion. When this bubble bursts, we could see a bigger recession than 2002 — or 2008, for that matter. <sound of hot air being released from a balloon>
On the bright side, we won't have to worry about a malevolent AGI causing humanity's extinction because no one will want to invest in developing AGI after the coming bust.
Perplexity informs me that the total Market cap of big AI companies is about 15 trillion. That means they're going to need annual earnings of about a trillion dollars a year collectively. Let's assume that half of that is going to come from ai, because a lot of these are companies like Google Amazon and tsmc that have substantial other sources of revenue. So to sustain the AI Bubble at its current level requires AI to earn about $500 billion dollars a year in profit. Maybe there's a billion people in the anglosphere who might put AI to consumer uses. Then they need each a subscription that generates $500 a year in profit. A 25% profit margin is typical for the tech sector, so that means that the cost to the consumer of this hypothetical annual subscription is $2,000. That's way higher than the typical cost of consumer subscriptions. Maybe half of the revenue for the AI sector will come from business uses. That would still require the consumer subscription to be $1,000 a year, which is not gonna happen.
Funny, but I just asked the same question of Perplexity, and it claims the total market cap of AI companies is $23.8 Trillion. Of course, I may have worded the question slightly differently from how you worded yours.
But I love how people on this list are bending themselves into pretzels to defend AI. Never stand between rationalists and their opinions! :-)
I'm in the middle of listening to a podcast about AI investnent by IQT, the CIA's VC arm. In their view, the expected market for business uses of language models is... drum roll... 10s of billions annually in the next few years! Bear in mind of course, that that is revenue not profit. In order to sustain the current AI bubble, that number is too small by two orders of magnitude.
That just goes to show that this is in order of magnitude estimate, and you can change the outcome by a factor of two just by redefining AI.
what is the total Market cap of all AI companies including hardware like tsmc and nvidea and Cloud companies that sell AI services such as Amazon and Google
The total market capitalization of major AI companies, including hardware and cloud service providers, is substantial. As of early January 2025:
- **Nvidia**: Approximately $2.6 trillion
- **Apple**: About $3.8 trillion
- **Microsoft**: Around $3 trillion
- **Amazon**: Roughly $1.8 trillion
- **Alphabet (Google)**: Approximately $1.9 trillion
- **Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC)**: About $832 billion
This aggregates to around **$14.1 trillion** across these key players in the AI ecosystem[1][2][3][6].
We have about 1.3 million lawyers in the United States, who make about $150,000 per year on average. If half of that (the boilerplate and busywork) can be done by AI, then that would be $97.5 billion in productivity, less whatever the cost of the system would be (maybe $10 billion?). Then you can apply that to customer support, doctor's offices, accountants, HR departments, and myriad other places. $1 trillion a year in profit sounds a bit low.
The value to society may well exceed 1 trillion, but how much of that will AI companies actually be able to capture? I have a long sub thread going on with Performative Bafflement if you want to see more debate about this.
Yes, but as some law firms have discovered, AI is hallucinating some of the opinions and precedents. Just because an AI can pass a bar exam doesn't mean it can produce a properly reasoned and referenced legal brief.
It's worse than that - lawyers are, by and large, obsessive about detail. Every reference must be correct, every procedure and form strictly adhered to. Any mistakes can be fatal, so spelling and punctuation are carefully scrutinized. An associate who made up a reference in a brief to a partner or director wouldn't be in trouble. They'd be fired on the spot. The legal fraternity won't adopt AI until it is 100% correct, no hallucinations or slips allowed.
That isn't how lawyers should use AI. As is pointed out, any hallucinations at all cannot be tolerated (though AI doesn't seem to make spelling or punctuation mistakes). AI should be used to insert boilerplate into contracts, summarize texts so actual people can easily digest them, etc. AI won't be replacing lawyers except in the sense of how many lawyers are needed.
Boilerplate is already inserted using template clauses or, in some cases, macros. Summarizing texts is like 1% of what lawyers actually do, and they usually have templates for those too.
What many lawyers want is basically an automated paralegal or associate - something that can ingest similar (but never identical) documents from a bunch of sources, pick out the important information and then accurately produce a first draft response or opinion for the partner to work on.
China is likely to escalate its campaign of harassment against Taiwan in the coming months. They have already started, and some near future possibilities are drone swarms, direct flyovers ( not just in the surrounding airspace) and the assassination of low ranking soldiers. Most analysis of geopolitical risk in semiconductor supply chains focuses on a full-scale Invasion scenario, which I think is unlikely. The very probable future of escalated harassment is not priced in, and that could be another source of a nasty shock to the US Stock Market.
> Chapter 4, Section 6 of Stanford's AI Index report shows that, according to a McKinsey survey, the percentage of businesses that have adopted AI has been basically stagnant since 2019, hovering in the 50-55% range. So AI is still a technology looking for a market.
Just because the revolution is not yet legible to McKinsey, doesn't mean that it's not happening.
> In the latest McKinsey Global Survey on AI, 65 percent of respondents report that their organizations are regularly using gen AI, nearly double the percentage from our previous survey just ten months ago. Respondents’ expectations for gen AI’s impact remain as high as they were last year, with three-quarters predicting that gen AI will lead to significant or disruptive change in their industries in the years ahead.
> Organizations are already seeing material benefits from gen AI use, reporting both cost decreases and revenue jumps in the business units deploying the technology...
To your question:
> What is the chief use of AI in business? From the report, it looks like generative AI is what they're mostly using. I don't know, but I suspect it's being used to slick up marketing deliverables and corporate reports. Does anybody have any visibility into what businesses are using Gen AI for?
In some domains there are obvious opportunities for top-down "AI strategy", like improving efficiency of customer service, sales pipeline automation, paralegal duties, software tooling -- but you should assume that employees elsewhere are just using ChatGPT to automate away the BS parts of their jobs.
Some more concrete examples:
At #TechBigCo, I use LLMs every day for technical assistance. "Smart autocomplete" is an under-appreciated feature for actually writing code, but I also use LLMs to answer technical / programming questions in the multitude of broad-not-deep domains where I can easily validate if the answer is correct. I'd estimate that my output is 1-5% higher due to LLMs. This is at a company with a big bet on AI tooling.
A lawyer friend uses LLMs extensively for pitch decks, distilling case law, checking maths on large deals ("I saved my client $10M: I found an error in the $15B deal I am working on by pasting the calculation table into ChatGPT"). This is a case where LLMs are allowed in specific vetted scenarios, but the firm might not say they have an "AI strategy". I didn't ask them, but a > 1% increase in output seems likely here.
There are plenty of obvious usecases in medicine too, see Eric Topol's substack for regular examples.
> When this bubble bursts, we could see a bigger recession than 2002 — or 2008, for that matter.
I tend to think that this bubble will be on the harmless end of the spectrum if it pops. We're not seeing contagion-producing financial instruments like CDS being engineered. If the bubble pops, sure some investors will lose their shirts, and the overall economy will look bad for a bit, but at least we made some concrete investments in energy infrastructure, datacenters, and advancing the learning curve on AI chips. This isn't ephemeral speculation in tulips.
> On the bright side, we won't have to worry about a malevolent AGI causing humanity's extinction because no one will want to invest in developing AGI after the coming bust.
Really, no. It's worth going back and looking at the dot-com boom/bust. At the time it was a significant peak-to-trough difference. If you look at the tech market cap trend line in hindsight, it looks like a small blip compared to the multi-trillion dollar market cap of tech stocks today. In other words, this bubble may burst, but a few years later we'll be back on the growth trendline.
In the past, tech has bounced back, but what's next for it to bounce back with? Moore's Law is over. The last two generations of chips have been more expensive to manufacture, and they're taking significantly longer to reach production. Of course, TSMC has claimed it can now manufacture 3nm process nodes. 3 nm used to be considered the physical limit, but now experts are claiming we can get down to 2 nm or even 1 nm before quantum leakage makes the circuits unusable. Stacking chiplets in a 3D arrangement wouldn't improve the basic performance limits. And there's only so far code optimization will improve perfomance. So the cost of high-end computing will be trending upward from here on out.
Useful quantum computers are at least a decade out — if ever. If we can ever reach 1 million Qbits with good error correction, they're gonna be mighty expensive — and their utility will probably be limited. Likewise, we're reaching the limits of how much data in bits per second we can put on a wire or transmit over the air. I began as a network engineer when Ethernet was 10 Mbs over coax cable. I was working with 800 GbE (actually 2x400GbE) when I was involuntarily retired. I was hoping to stick around for 1.6TbE. But I doubt if we're going to get speeds much faster than 1.6Tbps because FEC will start sucking up overhead on the wire, and encoding and decoding the FEC will cause serious heat dissipation issues. Sorry I'm being such a Debbie Downer.
I think it’s far more likely that we get a few more OOMs from ASICs, or more exotic compute like optical, in the next 5-10 years than it is that this or the next generation is the last one.
I also think you could spend 10-20 years, and unlock many $T of value, just building out the products that the current generation models have enabled. Exactly like the Internet in 2000. So if there does happen to be a wall, I agree it’s good news for AI risk, but I don’t think it means the tech industry is doomed. Applying AI to every bit of the economy that is profitable would still be quite transformative.
Not to mention, if we hit a limit here, you’d assume that before long the 2nm process gets heavily commoditized and so GPUs would drop in cost by a few OOM over a decade or two, which would also drive the frontier of profitable capabilities forward. At commoditized GPU prices every home can have a rack with your personal GPT o3 cranking away.
As a software engineer I’m extremely bullish on the amount of mundane utility that is available to be harvested right now at $2/hr/H100.
Maybe you should bet against them, like those scattered stubborn smart guys who bet against the subprime mortgages and got back 20x the money that had bet.. I am not joking.
"Chapter 4, Section 6 of Stanford's AI Index report shows that, according to a McKinsey survey, the percentage of businesses that have adopted AI has been basically stagnant since 2019, hovering in the 50-55% range. So AI is still a technology looking for a market.
...
What is the chief use of AI in business?"
I can't answer your question in the general case, but for my employer:
(a) We have been using 'machine learning' for over a decade to do image processing for (expensive) tools that we sell.
(b) Starting around 2016/17 we began using Deep Learning and in 2020 shipped tools where our marketing claimed "our first process control system with integrated AI..." These tools use Deep Learning (and pretty much needed to use Deep Learning ... we failed to solve our problems without it ...).
(c) Recently we have started using Microsoft's Copilot for day-to-day work *inside* the company. I can't say what other folks are doing with it, but I find that it works as a generative Stack Overflow (with about the same quality :-) and also is useful to search against our internal documents.
I wonder if McKinsey would show my employer's AI use as 'stagnant' since 2019.
Similar theme to a lot of other answers here: some coding assistance (although it has difficulty keeping track of similar APIs for distinct libraries), a lot of ingesting unstructured data that has obvious value but was historically too onerous to unlock.
I can imagine the coding bit getting enough better to change the character of the job (e.g,, TDD where I write the tests and an LLM writes the main logic, effectively turning any language into a declarative one), but once the unstructured data pipeline is fully-formed I expect there to be only incremental further gains from that sort of work.
Now that I think about it, a sizable portion of our non-dev (or adjacent) roles serve as QC or exception handling for less-capable-but-more-reliable non-AI automated processes; more volume with a higher error rate could *increase* the need for people in those positions.
"Does anybody have any visibility into what businesses are using Gen AI for?"
I heard a Wal-Mart executive mentioned on a recent earnings call that they were using Gen AI to automate the creation of product pages on their website.
> Does anybody have any visibility into what businesses are using Gen AI for?
This is anecdotal, but my partner's workplace, a mid-size financial firm, is currently 'adopting AI' in that they hired some consultants to build them a chatbot wrapper that's supposed to aid analysts. They brought in a bunch of analysts with CS backgrounds (including my partner) to beta test it, and the results were laughable. On top of that, it's not even going to keep learning once it's finally delivered. But the company has already spent a lot on it and the leadership still want it, so it's happening.
This is at a company, like most in the financial sector, whose tech stack tops out at Excel spreadsheets. They don't have the internal data or documentation readily available to make a RAG model useful, and despite having a ton of low and middle-rank employees with technical backgrounds, they don't even have the leeway to, for example, automate spreading, since leadership likes the way things worked in the 2010s.
My academic program is also testing a product by an external consultant which adds GenAI to group feedback forms: if your feedback isn't constructive enough, it tries to give suggestions. Two sentences with a 'because' is enough to qualify as constructive.
I'd wager a very large amount of AI adoption is like this. Established businesses want to use AI because it's the sexy new thing even though they don't have the internal sophistication or data to make good use of it, so an external consultancy delivers a chatbot that kinda sorta works but isn't going to add much value. New businesses or especially agile older ones that can actually pivot and make good use of AI will probably get good bang for the buck in the coming years, but I'd wager most of the market will still basically be theater.
It will be interesting when we don't need junior programmers anymore but we still need experienced senior programmers. How will they get their experience?
In some sense this will just be a continuation of what we have been seeing for the past ~20+ years.
Lots of junior programmer jobs got moved to places such as India. Companies still want senior programmers here ... if only to work with the junior programmers not-here. Where do those senior programmers come from?
I expect something similar to happen if/when AI gets good enough to start replacing junior programmers.
> Does anybody have any visibility into what businesses are using Gen AI for?
Speaking for myself and the uses I'm familiar with in my company only, we use Copilot for coding assistance and OpenAI's models inside Azure within some backend services and customer facing chatbots.
We deal with a lot of unstructured data and our primary application side use cases are around data matching / cleaning and we're working on reasoning / tool-use augmented flows to replace processes that involve manual human review.
(One revenue related hiccup worth mentioning: the more volume we're using, the more we're evaluating open source models as a cheaper alternative. Paid models need to maintain a sufficient qualitative edge.)
> Meanwhile, in Section 5, we see that investment in AI has dropped about 25% since 2021, and the remaining investment funds have been spread thinner among startups trying to lap up some droplets from the AI gravy train. Startups were up ~41% in 2023 from 2022 even though funding was declining!
Many, many "AI" startups in the past few years have been wrappers. These got a lot of dumb, hype chasing money but there's only so much dumb money and I think that's what you're seeing dry up. I can remember sitting through a sales pitch from one before Copilot was released that was doing code generation and the founder couldn't answer basic data governance questions. I doubt that startup still exists. 99%+ of these provide no value and get obsoleted by model advances or enterprise products.
The raw numbers of startups increasing is also driven by the general tech employment downturn. When the general economy tanks and people can't get jobs they take shelter in higher education. When the tech economy tanks and engineers can't get jobs they launch desperation startups. Lack of better options.
> Cloud Capex is skyrocketing.
This is positioning for the future, not current AI spends or capabilities. AI today != AI yesterday or AI tomorrow.
The reasoning work I mentioned above was impossible a year and a half ago - I know because I tried it. As model capabilities increase, the space of possible solutions increase, and that's not the time to start building out the physical infrastructure.
The holy grail is obviously widespread labor automation and hyperscalers are betting that it will require massive infrastructure. This currently looks like a good bet but could change.
Even short of that grail and putting aside their customers' use of AI, cloud companies are increasingly using AI within their products and a portion of that infrastructure is to serve their needs. Azure's Document Intelligence is one example. These products have/will obsolete more wrapper startups and existing companies.
It seems to me a major bucket missing is foundries, such as MU, TSMC, and GFS. INTC seems to be missing, too, but I'm not sure whether to put it under merchant GPUs or foundries.
INTC has Gaudi, but it hasn't gained any traction that I've heard of. They may have come to the party too late to displace any of the key players.
MU should probably be on the list because their GDDR memory chips are used by NVIDIA, AMD, and INTC — and they have partnerships with all those companies.
TSMC is the foundry for just about everyone. Semis are so diverse, though, that I doubt if TSMC would be affected too much if the AI bubble pops. GPUs are highly profitable, but 2023 numbers show that they were about 8% of all chips that are manufactured. I think GFS and Samsung would fall into the same bucket.
My company is using generative for two use cases I haven't seen mentioned here.
First, OCR on steroids: training models to use photos and videos for data entry. This going to save our customers massive amounts of time, and probably increase the amount they use our software (with the result of improving accuracy, safety, and legibility of operations, among other things).
Second, for voice UI: mapping natural-language voice inputs to application commands. What if Alexa, but good?
I work for a massive telco in the UK on a infrastructure team. So while we don't directly develop LLM products, we support the people that do and have a good view on what's up.
There's tons of work being done with LLMs. Just past week my team enabled some functionality for easily using it with our datasets.
I know of a big project that's using LLMs to improve helpdesk calls. The only reason it's not fully replacing is because getting access to the actual data is a nightmare. But LLMs are already smart enough we could be fully replacing the journey.
We maintain the infra for processes that transcribe calls (for a big telco, this is a lot). All this is being used in internal AI projects.
There's a massive amount of work being done in deploying AI products. None of that was being done in 2019.
I call bullshit on this report. No way it's stagnant since 2019.
It could be that my company is an outlier. OK. But I joined after 2019 and my previous company was also ramping up AI usage.
What I hear from colleagues and from what I can see by keeping an eye in the industry, basically every company is integrating with AI.
I worked on a project a year ago with a large German energy company using OpenAI to analyze transcripts of operator conversations with customers, to extract consents for various things such as receiving promotions.
They were using Weaviate for caching text vectors to check for similarity (and thus reduce the number of OpenAI calls), and one of my contributions (on my own initiative) was to add a free alternative for this caching, using an SBERT sentence transformer to produce the vectors and then store these in Postgres pgvector fields, all free! (The vast SBERT file was a sod to shoehorn into git, but git has special provision for large files.)
Anyway, if any positions for an experienced and resourceful python & LLM developer are or become vacant in your team, I'm available immediately and would be pleased to be considered for either contract or perm. By all means, email me on jrq@gmx.com
P.S. I'm based in the UK, so could work hybrid, although I'd prefer remote for the most part. Can't see any pressing reason for regular attendance on site these days, unless having to work with special hardware.
(Apologies if blatant job hunting is frowned on here! )
Well, the report was sponsored by some of the big Cloud and big Semi companies that have a stake in AI. Do you have any idea how much your company is *spending* to make use of these LLMs? Are the Cloud companies with AI getting that revenue? Will that be enough to make up for their current shortfall in revenue from AI? I can't find the precise numbers now, but in 2022, the big AI players spent big to build out their LLMs, but were only something like 10% on the way to breaking even on their spend. How long can they keep that up?
We're not spending that much. The newer smaller models are pretty smart and very cheap.
If you want the absolute best model you're going to have to pay. But there's tons of use cases where cheaper models are extremely competitive, and it's only getting cheaper.
> Will that be enough to make up for their current shortfall in revenue from AI?
Well, I don't know. But this is the most standard playbook for tech. Amazon, Uber, Reddit, etc. Look at any massive tech company and basically all of them burn cash at the start to recoup later.
And that's a claim about future profitability of specific companies! They can all fail to recover their investments, while AI is widespread in the economy and having massive impacts.
Ever heard of Deepseek? Great performance for not a lot of money. My guess is that the investment might level off or even decline, but the capabilities will only improve.
The only thing worse than having offshoring to China come for your job is having AI come for your job, and the only thing worse than that is having Chinese AI come for your job.
> the percentage of businesses that have adopted AI has been basically stagnant since 2019, hovering in the 50-55% range. So AI is still a technology looking for a market.
Not sure I find this convincing. If there is going to be a step function productivity increase due to AI, it won’t necessarily come from incumbents adopting AI; it might come from challengers building in a fundamentally different way. E.g. legacy media didn’t adopt streaming until netflix/spotify forced their hand.
I asked both my housekeeper and they guy who mows my lawn. Neither could come up with good reason to add AI to their business model. AI adoption may really be stuck at 55% of businesses. \S
The lawnmower guy might have a borderline case to use AI for optimally scheduling lawns to cut, if his customers give him any timing leeway, based on when lawns were last cut, and maybe some lawns that dry (as a prerequisite for cutting) slightly faster than others after rain, or some customers want their lawns cut more often than (say) fortnightly, etc
I'd...actually forgotten there was a "front page" to the blag, with stuff like the blogroll and Shrink-Rap. Always just click through email notifications into posts directly. Still feels weird to have these huge blank columns on the left and right of article content where one would naturally expect to find such links. (Didn't someone make a browser extension to rectify that...? or reskin it like SSC? I feel like that was A Thing I heard about...)
Felt bad about not publicly reviewing my current excellent doc when recently asked to...I don't like having my Google account entangled with such things. Internal surveys, fine, reviews under a pseudonym account, fine, but tie it easily to my real identity...ehh. Weird and inconsistent "privacy" instincts that probably don't make a lick of difference on the modern internet anymore. Or perhaps just overfitting from the NYT.
So a couple of weeks ago I started getting random subscribers to my Substack, and I'm trying to figure out why. I got linked by Matt Levine back iat the start of December, but that seems unrelated, it's been a few weeks since that happened and the sign ups started in the quiet period between Xmas and New Years. It wasn't a big single wave, just 2-5 subscribers per day for about a week. Confused, I started googling some of the distinguishable names in the email addresses and looking them up on LinkedIn to try and figure it out. None seemed like good candidates for my content (accounting matters or Australian finance stuff), and for at least 2 of them the most prominent result was for an obituary. So I'm left confused: is this someone trying to make me feel good for myself by signing up discarded emails from a dark web data dump? Someone poking the edges of Substack security? Substack gently trying to pump up is subscriber statistics? (Or make me feel some indirect pressure to write more for my "growing' audience?). Oh and the new subscribers stopped after a little over a week. Anyone got any theories?
Yep, similar thing happened to me - big spike in subscribers over a couple of days in late December, followed by a drop of similar magnitude in early Jan. I suspect bots + correction by Substack.
There’s a wave of bot accounts signing up to two Substacks I manage (this one plus one for transcripts of a podcast). They seem like bots because their “also follows” section lists tons of other accounts with no obvious pattern.
I saw somebody (who seemed like the sort of person who would know, but I forget who) post that this was connected to harvesting text to train AI LLMs and that Substack has gone back through and tried to clean them out. My subscribers went up and then back down a bit
I mean - presumably one needs to subscribe to see more content, and you could script that, sure. But why would you need a load of bots? Why not just one, which can fly under the radar?
I've seen people blame spikes bot impressions on scraping content for AI training before, and it seems very much like a scapegoat.
It just seems unlikely that there's this massive wave of unrelated but somehow synchronised activity - repeatedly and deliberately doing something which realistically only needs to be done once.
It seems much more likely to me that the reasons for spikes in (presumably free) subscriptions are the same as they've been before on other social media.
I'm not saying scraping content for AI training doesn't happen, just that you probably won't notice a big spike in subscribers (or repeated spikes in reader views) when it does.
I have had a similar jump in substack subscriptions mostly from what seem to be small companies, including some Aussie ones, which is weird to sign up to a random experimental farming blog from. Happened in late December, followed by an equally rapid drop in subscriptions of the same magnitude. Maybe someone scraping substack for content? But most of my old posts are behind a paywall and these were free subscriptions.
I've personally noticed something like "residuals" from getting posted by somebody big like Scott or Bryan Caplan - you get a decent surge right after they link you, but then as long as the link is live, you get a trickle of likes and subscribers afterwards for about a month. Maybe it's something like that?
The timing and dynamics you mention do seem odd. None of them are commenting or liking anything publicly? Do they have other relevant and related subs to other substacks?
Thanks, there was like one or two accounts with other random follows for topics I had no awareness of, but most were just "source: Direct" and no other listed subs. It was indeed odd. I'll have to have another look at my subscribers to see if they dropped off again after the first sign up.
I'm barely on any social media. Substack,technically Mastodon although I haven't even logged on in weeks, and Discord for specific purposes. No plans to change that.
I considered quitting Twitter for political reasons, but what actually made me quit was that a large majority of my Twitter feed was people I don't follow posting things I don't care about.
I was considering it until I saw Taylor Lorenz’s post celebrating the death of the United Health CEO wasn’t marked as violating the platform rules. Not that I want censorship but if there is a moderation policy I want it to be applied consistently.
Meanwhile the Babylon Bee account got its posts censored for making a silly comment that’s (IMO) in poor taste and obviously trolling but which doesn’t threaten or support violence and thus doesn’t deserve to be censored. I’ll gladly switch over once they get their moderation policy in order.
I wasn't on Twitter or any of its substitutes before, but joined Bluesky because a guy I was interviewing with told me that a lot of NYC data science people that previously left Twitter had recently moved over there and hit critical mass, so it would be good for my career to keep an eye on that place.
It's fine? I keep to my follow feed and get a lot of technical inside baseball, get to see what tech in in fashion. Don't really feel the urge to post there.
Curious: how much money (in % or absolute terms) would you estimate to have made extra during your lifetime so far thanks to following someone on social media - vs just being focused on delivering the best work possible?
Wait - Are you saying you can make money just by following people?!!
I've been missing a trick all these years! But thinking about it for a moment, wouldn't that mean everyone on the planet would be incentivized to follow everyone else on the planet? There must be a catch. Maybe there's a maximum number of people one can follow.
I assumed it was more about networking, being mutuals with someone -> online friendship -> meet for coffee -> hear about/get recommended for jobs that aren't out in the open. The software environment works like that, I'm sure some other industries do as well.
Personally, none, since I use very little social media and I'm still in academia. I use Discord and Substack, the former just for gaming. Maybe reading SSC+ACX changed me enough that I got to where I am today over some less lucrative path, but that's going to be hard to judge.
That, and reading some other blogs/watching some channels encouraged me to start learning Rust, which very well might be lucrative in the future, makes me nice and t-shaped.
I'm also skeptical about whether you could expect much benefit just from following someone. Being mutual follows and having that opportunity to network, or getting into discussions in someone's comments could do the trick, but following alone? Wouldn't expect very much at all.
I know someone who's just starting out in data science. He's not on Bluesky now. If he got on Bluesky, is there a straightforward way he could find the data science folk, or does he have to already know some key usernames?
Bluesky actually seems pretty good about this (not sure how it compares to Twitter). It's got a starter pack feature, where you can share a big list of users and others can follow them all at once (or you can look through them and follow piecemeal if preferred).
Alternatively, just go onto the #DataBS or #DataSky tags and start following people who look interesting, and prune from there. Yes, the fact that 'BS' is being added onto community hashtags is not lost on me. There is (or at least was a little while ago) some competition about which convention would win out.
While you're at it, they might drop me a follow and look at the people I'm following. I don't use the service very much, but I think this is a neat group.
I’m on both X and Bluesky. Bluesky is in a nice sweet spot for me where my comic artists and musicians friends are actually posting about their work instead of arguing about politics. I haven’t fully moved over because of AI and NBA twitter that hasn’t moved over. It’s inconvenient to have to check both places, but in practice, I just check whichever I’m in the mood for: X during basketball games, Bluesky to check in on artistic output, etc.
I have switched to BlueSky a few months ago. I pretty much have to start over collecting followers and finding interesting people to follow, but that's ok. I haven't deleted my X account, but don't post there anymore (with few exceptions).
I've been on Bsky for over a year now because a lot of scientists I follow moved off TwiXter and over to Bsky because of the harassment they were receiving. I'm still posting on TwiXter as well, but I have a thick skin, and I enjoy making fun of the morons who cross my feed. Bsky is much quieter than TwiXter.
I have, it is fine I still prefer Twitter. I think the conventional story that a lot of the left wing angry people joined BlueSky while right wing angry people joined Twitter is right but it isn't very important to me as I mainly follow rationalist adjacent people.
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.
Wait. isn’t that also National Hemorrhoids Day? I object to its being upstaged.
I have a hobby of studying serious (advanced undergrad or grad school level) math and physics in various areas that are interesting or fundamental, without direct benefit or application to my work (formal education is decades ago). I'm not very successful at it, because I tend to fizzle out after getting through 1/4 of a textbook, or something similar. Things get a bit harder, real life intervenes, lack of structure, etc. I wonder if others have a similar hobby and/or similar issues, and found ways to do this better. Haven't tried study groups and not sure those exist at this level. Going back to school for a PhD is implausible for life reasons. Advice/anecdotes?
One thing I've found somewhat helpful is to have a project I'm working on to apply the knowledge to. I suppose the benefit works the same way as the exercises you'd be set as part of a university course. My project is to work out how chemistry would work in 4D space, which naturally has consequences for almost every aspect of the topic so being able to follow along the textbook's derivations with all the changes required for 4D is quite a good check that I'm actually absorbing it. This project has the advantages that, since it's practically useless, there isn't much prior research, and its scope is large enough to be basically inexhaustible. What a suitable project would be for the topics you want to study, I don't know. Quite likely having multiple separate smaller projects would have much the same effect.
Also I have had a habit of leaving a textbook in the kitchen to read while I'm waiting for things to cook. The main point of bother for me is just getting to the library to get the books.
I'm somewhat in the same situation. Years ago, I read a topology textbook just for fun, and really enjoyed doing this kind of thinking again (up until the point where the constructions became too overwhelming for me, who just read the book and didn't do any -- or only a few -- of the exercises).
I'm really missing a kind of book which is in between a formal textbook and the kind of popular mathematics by people like Ian Stewart, where the adage goes that "every formula scares off 50% of the readers".
Two books that might be at the right level are:
The Calculus Gallery by Dunham
Imagining Numbers by Barry Mazur
Both are historically focused. The first is a collection of ideas tracing the development of calculus. The second looks at the development of a formula for the roots of a cubic polynomial and the process toward acceptance of the use of imaginary numbers.
For someone who casually was reading a topology textbook, the actual mathematics in both won't be that difficult, but probably also not completely trivial. For example, a lot of the effort for the Calculus Gallery is translating the original form into a modern way of looking at the same problem.
One little nugget I found surprising from the Mazur book is that imaginary numbers emerged through the search for methods to find roots of cubic polynomials, not quadratics. To a modern student, the quadratics show the immediate need, like $x^2+1=0.$ However, historically, people were happy to just accept that there was no root. What really made them reconsider was a set of examples with real roots, but where the intermediate calculations in the cubic root formula naturally go through the complex numbers (the imaginary components eventually cancel.)
There is something similar for the theorem that primes congruent to 1 mod 4 can be written as the sum of two squares. While that theorem is entirely about natural numbers, one of the nice proof paths goes through the complex numbers. Of course, there are a lot of examples in physics that, at the right meta level, are also like this.
I find the only way I can absorb bulk dense dry material these days is to rapidly skim the whole thing once before attempting any in depth study to build a mental map of what is there and where it is going overall, so that the little pieces I end up chewing through in between life have somewhere to attach themselves to.
What problem are you trying to solve? You're studying for enjoyment - there's nothing wrong with putting the book away and moving on once you're past the point where you find the topic interesting/enjoyable.
Just sign up for a single grad class. You could make time for that. The structure might keep you motivated.
Textbooks are like hard tack. Change it up -- eat some oranges and fried chicken too! Just hunted around a bit to see what interesting supplements there are calculus learning. Googled "most entertaining calculus class" and found on Reddit. people talking about best YouTube instructors. There are books of math art. There's a book on Amazon called The Calculus Gallery that readers love -- it's about the development of calculus. Googled "calculus machine" and found out there's a machine called the Mechanical Integrator. (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s-y_lnzWQjk). I'll bet somewhere there is a book of projects using calculus -- build this or that.
I realize you may not be studying calculus, but you get the idea. To find things, ask google, GPT and Reddit questions. Ask for "most entertaining," ask for art, ask for projects, ask for study groups, ask for puzzles and challenges.
similar situation. The best I've done was a recent foray/refresh on differential geometry/topology and differential equations. I made it most of the way through Do Carmo, Spivak, Edwards Adv Calc: A Differential Forms Approach, and Allendoerfer. I also went through some of Munkres Topology.
The three difficulties I find:
(1) life events as distractions
(2) lack of clear purpose
(3) I already know a decent amount, so it can be hard to figure out where to start
The only one of these obstacles that I've fully solved is the third point. Now, I just push myself to start at the beginning and work through all the problems, even if it feels too easy sometimes.
My partial solution to (1) and (2) is to choose a single text and focus on working through that whenever I have spare time. Even if I don't make rapid progress, it keeps me from diluting the effort by spreading it across 3 (or 6 or 10) other mini-projects.
As an alum of American Big 10 university, one with a rodent for a mascot, over a certain age I can take any course they offer for $10/semester credit. I’ve been reluctant to do it though because traditionally college aged students are paying way too much in tuition. I suspect I’d run into a fair bit of resentment. It’s kind of tempting though just to see how many majors I could complete.
I did a a CSci major and Linguistics minor as an undergrad there and earned my masters at another school.
> I’ve been reluctant to do it though because traditionally college aged students are paying way too much in tuition.
Cynically, they are not paying for getting to listen to world class lectures (plenty of that online), but for getting a piece of paper at the end which is certifies that they earned a degree at a very prestigious university.
If you are not planning on earning another degree and competing against them on the labor market, you attending should not matter to them.
Here in old Europe, lectures are practically open to the public: nobody is checking your id at the entrance. Things are a bit different for lab courses, I imagine if you show up to a human anatomy course unannounced they will hardly tell you to just grab a corpse and a knife. But if you university allows you to register for lab courses for a minimal fee, I don't think it would cause resentment from students either. Again, they are mainly paying for their degree, not the knowledge.
Prerequisites would apply. Degrees would be awarded. Just that annoying exorbitant tuition is removed.
Thanks for the comments below. I might have been overthinking this. Been known to do that, ask my wife.
Looking at a course catalog now.
I agree with the comments below. No student will resent you for showing up to class. Do it.
I’m currently completing my undergrad degree funded by a scholarship – so it’s subsidized by my classmates – and I’ve never ran into any resentment about it (or if I have, I’ve been oblivious to it).
The people who might possibly develop some resentment of you would be not the current students -- for whom college bills are mostly big meaningless numbers that vary for incomprehensible reasons which adults argue about with strangers in online forums -- but their parents.
In any case though how many students or their parents would even be aware of the tuition deal you're getting as an alum?
You should do it and don't worry about the resentment. For the most part, everyone sitting in the classroom with you is paying a different amount and any resentment should be directed toward the institution/system rather than at you.
Unless I'm missing a key consideration: would your presence make the experience worse for the other students?
Let's say Trump is serious about wanting to make Canada the 51st state and is willing to force the issue as much as possible. He claims Canada is letting terrorists into the US and places onerous tariffs in "response". He could also claim Canada isn't respecting America's territory in the Arctic Ocean. He sends US troops to Ottawa.
What could the ROW do about it other than denounce it? Would the UK fight a war over it? Russia wouldn't like it, but Trump could tell Putin: "You get Ukraine, we get Canada."
I certainly don't expect this to happen, but if Trump wanted to go for it, what prevents it from happening?
Actually, I just thought of a foolproof two step plan that will definitely work.
1) Rename Puerto Rico `Canada'
2) Admit `Canada' (formerly Puerto Rico) as the 51st state
As for what the ROW would do about it...nothing. Except chuckle, I guess.
This seems way more plausible than any plan for the annexation of actual Canada.
This is the first round "ask for everything" negotiation tactic, paired with bluster to let them know we're serious.
The actual end-game here is an EU-type arrangement where you have freedom of travel and work, and free trade. The issue is: an arrangement of that sort *basically is* annexation - allow an agreement like that, and Canada and the US (already the two most culturally similar and economically interlinked nations on Earth), will become even more so - the Laurentian Elite knows that's checkmate, so you need the bluster.
At the VERY LEAST, can we not go back to the pre-9/11 standard where they just wave you through at the border with ID? The US/Canada border guys on each side are MEAN - going through immigration as an American into the Socialist Republic of Vietnam was easier and less harrowing.
> Canada the 51st state
This is the part of the Trump post that added insult to injury. Canada should not only join the union, they should be happy that they get all of two senators, like Hawaii, making them the largest and most populous state.
I agree that the rest of NATO would likely turn oathbreaker rather than fighting a nuclear war against an enemy who has them badly out-nuked. But still, the status quo coalition would be over. The surviving rest of NATO would try to form a defensive pact lest they be the next victim. For the same reason that NATO is supporting Ukraine and the US supported the Taliban against the USSR, we would obviously give materiel aid to Canadian forces or insurgents or whatever there will be: the more a rabid US is tied up pacifying Canada (which is about 15x the size of Afghanistan), the less capability they have to invade us.
For the "He sends US troops to Ottawa" scenario, the ROW doesn't have to lift a finger to stop it, because the United States Army won't even start it. No, not even if the President of the United States America orders them to because A: US Army officers swear an oath to obey the Constitution, *not* the President and B: The Constitution says that an order to start a war has to come from Congress, not the President. Congress has issued some very vague authorizations for POTUS to wage war against e.g. anyone we think is in cahoots with Al Qaeda, but nothing that anybody is going to believe applies to Canada.
If *Canada* starts an actual shooting war with the United States, then POTUS could order an immediate counterattack into Ottawa, and he'd eventually need to clear that with Congress but we can imagine that the shooting part would be over by then. But Canada isn't stupid enough to start a shooting war with the United States. And the United States Army isn't stupid enough to believe Donald Trump if he lies and says the Canadians attacked us.
The US fought the Korean War, Vietnam, Grenada, Panama, and the Persian Gulf without a congressional declaration of war.
It would be difficult, and potentially very politically costly depending on the circumstances and optics, but to expect the military to go against the President, without an extremely explicit countermand but congress, is not a good bet.
The War Powers Act changed the language from "Declaration of War" to "Authorization for Use of Military Force". But we had one of those for Vietnam and most of our subsequent wars. In the case of Panama, the Panamanian legislature rather stupidly declared war on *us*.
Declaring war on the United States is never a good move, unless of course you're a European microstate in a Peter Sellers movie.
It sucked a bit for Germany and Japan at first, but it turned out pretty well for them in the longer term (apart from East Germany)!
I suspect you are correct that nobody else would take up arms to fight directly for Canada's freedom, for many of the same reasons they wouldn't for Ukraine. However, I think you're way off base in thinking that other countries denouncing it would be the extent of the international damage. In brief, the U.S. making this choice[1], the U.S. would destroy pretty much every aspect of its current set of alliances and international relationships.
It's difficult to overstate just how much of the current international order is built on the back of U.S. security guarantees. Since WWII the U.S. has been extremely proactive about building relationships with other nations: security relationships, diplomatic relationships, economic relationships. There's a staggeringly large amount of business arrangements, governmental co-ventures and academic partnerships that are built around the bedrock assumption that not only is the U.S. not going to suddenly start shooting at its allies, but it's going to come down harshly on anyone else who does. And of course, one would be hard-pressed to find a country that the U.S. has older and stronger ties with than Canada.
If the U.S. were to decide to betray that friendship, to go back on one of its oldest, strongest security guarantees, so launch an utterly unprovoked invasion of neighbor with whom it has been securely at peace for all of living memory, who could trust that any of its other agreements would be any more solid? Every single deal that assumes that goodwill and basic sanity of the U.S. government would suddenly be suspect. Every single government would have to start very rapidly re-imagining and re-structuring its diplomatic and military policy.
NATO would obviously be completely done-for. As I said, I doubt anyone who fight on Canada's behalf, but an alliance that the U.S. just shot a hole through would be no guarantee to anyone: likely the remaining current NATO members would try to re-form some defensive alliance without the U.S. (indeed, in part to protect themselves AGAINST the U.S. in case Canada was just the beginning). I wouldn't bet money on the U.S. keeping control of ANY of its military bases abroad: who is going to want such a powerful and unpredictable wildcard to have a foothold on their soil? International trade can't pivot on a dime, but a lot of countries would start (at the very least) trying to make alternate plans in case the U.S. proved as unreliable a trading partner as it just did a military one (something that Trump has, of course, also been threatening), and I'm sure at least some amount of trade would be immediately redirected from the U.S.'s shores. I can't begin to guess whether the financial world would start trying to divest itself from the dollar or if so how fast they'd move, but it would certainly at least be discussed, and I'd expect the dollar to become much more volatile even in the best-case scenario.
I am honestly finding it very difficult to imagine what the world would look like in the aftermath of a move like this. None of us have lived in that world. And the last shift of that magnitude was many decades ago, decades which have seen huge and sweeping changes in communication and transportation technology, which make the lessons of history hard to confidently apply.
[1] Note I say "the U.S." and not "Trump." This isn't something the president has the power to do alone. This would either require significant buy-in from the rest of the country, or would take place in a future where Trump has become de facto or de jure dictator, and has much more complete control of the country than the office of president currently gives him.
I imagine there would be a huge and unpredictable mess, but my personal hobbyhorse is the US nuclear umbrella. A number of states could spin up their own nuclear program and be carrying out tests quite quickly; these are the so-called "nuclear threshold" states, which have the ability to leave the US nuclear umbrella if they so choose.
I'm an Australian, and I remember reading that the estimated time for Australia to carry out its first nuclear test could be as low as three months, given our uranium mining, prior nuclear research, and industrial capacity (can't find the source for this, though). We'd have significant motivation to develop our own nuclear weapons if we kicked the US military out of our joint facilities.
Probably the US would do a lot of diplomatic wrangling to keep its key military and economic relationships intact, but I imagine a nuclear-armed Taiwan, South Korea, Turkey (not just hosting US nukes but developing its own), or Poland might cause some issues. Also, Canada is a nuclear threshold state itself...
Absolutely. In fact, I suspect that some nuclear powers within NATO (UK, France) would be happy to share their bomb designs with the others so that the Anti-US defense pact can at least try to move to something like nuclear parity.
US tanking its alliances elsewhere as the country becomes seen as (even more of) an aggressive loose cannon
also, Canadians, if they want to fight back; could make it a very nasty guerilla war
He'd never be able to get Congressional authorization for military action. No one wants the US to annex Canada, Trump is just being a blowhard.
The trouble with making serious threats as a negotiating tactic is that sometimes you'll need to make good on those threats if you want to maintain your credibility. This is a really striking case because the threat is--as you correctly note--so far outside of ANYONE'S best interests, and outside of Trump's apparent capability. As a matter of basic rationality, when somebody makes an outrageous, public threat like this, you should pretty much always call them on it. If you don't, you've set the cost coerce you and an unacceptably low level and can expect more such threats in short order.
So what will Trump do if Canada's new PM replies to Trump with the diplomat-speak equivalent of "go fuck yourself with a rusty shovel?" I honestly don't know. Trump would certainly understand that *not responding at all* would make him look weak, and if there's one thing I can say with confidence about Trump's psychology its that he *hates* looking weak. But will his response be something as harmless as another Twitter tantrum? Something more painful and destructive like making good on his tariff threats? Or will he try to escalate further, trying to drag congress along?
The best case scenario I can imagine is that at least some of the people Trump has handling the actual nuts-and-bolts of his negotiations are actual adults who understand both the basic diplomacy/game theory of the situation (i.e. why Canada doesn't want to be seen as caving to this sort of pressure) and how to play Trump adequately. A deal that Trump and his most die-hard followers can be made to believe is a "big win" for him, but that literally everybody else on the planet understands as pretty favorable to Canada would be something like the ideal way to de-escalate. I'm not enormously hopeful, but it could happen.
Do you think Trump has any credibility to maintain? Do you think he even cares?
He's a 78-year-old megalomaniacal blowhard. Just enjoy the show. The President doesn't have much individual power, particularly if he's not politically astute. He has zero chance of making anything like that a reality. (Of course I said the same thing in 2016 about the border wall ...)
> Just enjoy the show. The President doesn't have much individual power
...this seems familiar - it's actually just like where a good portion of the AI doom debates end up: participants in agreement that the entity in question would do horribly destructive things if given the opportunity, but the optimists believe it will never be given access to enough power to actually do so while the pessimists cry for more ways to guarantee that.
I think he does care about looking foolish. While he certainly has a...let's call it a very strong talent for interpreting reality in ways that flatter his ego, I think the Canadian PM thumbing their nose at his demands would still be pretty likely to piss him off.
As for his individual power, I'll grant that he certainly doesn't have the power to execute complicated plans that require sustained, long-term buy in by large portions of the government. Either a coordinated invasion or some sort of diplomatic attempt at annexation certainly qualify, so I have little fear of him doing either of those. But as the Chief Executive of the most powerful country on Earth, he certainly has SOME power. My fear is not that he will respond to a perceived insult with a brilliant and subtle game of 42-dimensional chess which will let fall a fateful chain of dominoes that culminates in him bringing deepest woe unto the Canadian people. It's that he'll throw a tantrum of unknown size and scope: he may not have much power to build, but he certainly has some power to break things. While "just enjoy the show" was pretty much my reaction to seeing him win this election, I'd be much more comfortable with it if I were safely outside the blast radius.
Oh relax. Nothing he does will be worse than printing $3 trillion, letting in 6m uneducated low iq immigrants, and letting DEI infect institutions and companies. The US has a long track record of surviving terrible leaders.
Why do you imagine that this sort of low effort channeling of talking points furthers the discourse?
Moreover, substantively, 1) you have no idea what migrants' IQs are; and 2) the entity in charge of adjusting the money supply (not "printing money") is the Fed, not the President. And virtually all the Fed Board members in office during the period in question was a Trump appointee.
With respect, if you don't have better insight than this to offer, easier for both of us if you don't reply. I can get a virtually identical soup of buzzwords and insinuations from the dregs of any social media comment section anywhere: I generally look for a rather higher standard here at ACX.
The bar for terrible U.S. leaders in my lifetime would be more succinctly expressed by starting two massively expensive wars, murdering somewhere in the ballpark of a million foreigners and massively expanding the U.S. surveillance state. In terms of actual, tangible effects, Trump's first term was bad, but not quite that bad.
OTOH, Trump's first term was marked mostly by failing to do things he tried to do: he's more notable for what he attempted than what he accomplished. And his attempts include things like *checks notes* um...more or less literally trying to destroy the U.S.'s democratic process. The U.S. deciding to roll those dice again just because they didn't quite land on disaster the first time strikes me as unutterably stupid. Now I don't think the man has magically gained a modicum of competence in the past four years, but I DO think his party is more united behind him than it used to be.
So lets call it a 40% chance that he's around as bad as his first term (pretty bad, not catastrophic), a 50% chance that he does similar or slightly worse damage to Bush Jr's two terms and a 10% chance that he causes the implosion the U.S.'s political system in some fashion. Low in an absolute sense, but way, way higher than anyone ought to be comfortable with.
>Trump is just being a blowhard.
How do you tell?
I don’t think he even knows whether or not he’s serious until he gauges people’s reaction to his proposals.
This seems right. As various sycophants have quickly realized -- the latest example being Musk, apparently, who's resided at Mar A Largo for most of the time since Election Day -- you want to be the last person Trump hears from about any given topic.
He's a blowhard who expects a blowjob from everybody else.
I don't think the rest of the world would need to do much other than potentially provide weapons and funding to Canadian resistance groups. Controlling and pacifying Canada if they resisted is extremely unlikely to work for 4 reasons.
#1 The US military does not have a history of success against guerilla insurgents.
#2 There is no way to secure the US-Canadian border or prevent movement throughout Canada. Just too big.
#3 Canada is a day's drive from major US cities like New York, Seattle, Boston, Philadelphia, Cleveland. Heck, Detroit and Windsor are separated by a river.
#4 Canadians are far more educated and resourceful than most insurgents the US has fought and that opens up a lot of possibilities. A lot of Canadians have nuclear and biological experience. We we're very scared of Iraq getting a dirty bomb, meanwhile Canada has 19 nuclear reactors.
So don't imagine, like, the US army vs the Iraqi army. Think the US army vs the Iraqi insurgents except they're larger, richer, more advanced, and right next to major American cities. Or just ask the British how that whole Irish thing went down.
I think 4 is actually an argument against 1. Insurgency is actually the biggest problem in underdeveloped, poorly educated, impoverished countries like 60s Vietnam or Afghanistan. The fact that people were spread out in rural areas, jungles, mountains, mostly worked in agriculture (and were thus self sufficient), and poor (meaning lots of young men with nothing to lose willing to die for the cause) made them dangerous. For an industrialized country like Canada, just control over the water supply and power grid give the occupier overwhelming power. Even 1940s Germany was too economically developed for an insurgency to be possible (the nazi government tried and totally failed to incite one).
It seems exceedingly unlikely to me that any first world country nowadays who’s military loses a war will mount a meaningful insurgency.
> Even 1940s Germany was too economically developed for an insurgency to be possible (the nazi government tried and totally failed to incite one).
Well, the Nazi propaganda was running on the Germans being the Herrenrasse who would obviously win against the Untermenschen. They could not very well adapt their ideology after being soundly defeated on the battlefield into being the underdog. The werewolf thing was more of an afterthought, not a long-standing key part of their long-term military strategy. Also, anyone who would volunteer to die for his Vaterland had already had plenty of opportunity to do so in 1945.
Regarding Canada, likely 99% of the people in any western country will not take direct part in any insurgency. However, this still leaves a significant number of people who might leave their ipads behind to join the guerrilla, which will likely enjoy the sympathy of the civilian population.
And if they do... we could always resort to scorched earth tactics, seeing as we no longer have an image to maintain.
Add to that
#5. Canada as a whole is HUGE. While the densely-populated regions are clustered close to the border, there's a staggeringly vast area--much of it extremely rugged--for insurgent groups to hide out in.
Honestly, the US military could probably take all of the relevant areas in a day and simply ignore the rest entirely. Not only are we talking about 95%+ of the population, but also the infrastructure and so forth. The people are so spread out through the remaining areas that they would have trouble organizing anything useful to do against the US. And coming to the larger cities with anything capable of causing harm would be pretty obvious.
And Canada is busy disarming their populous, so it's not like there are thousands of guns and bombs available everywhere. A few guys shooting at US military personnel would register at the level of a normal day in most big cities, especially American cities. We wouldn't notice.
No, the real reason not to invade Canada is because we have no reason to need to. If the US wanted something from Canada, we can just bully and cajole them into giving it to us. I think that's what Trump is doing now. Canada needs so much from the US economically that it cannot withstand sanctions or other intentional efforts from the US. I think Trump is dumb to do so, but he's proving to Trudeau that Canadian leaders do not have the freedom to snobbishly attack American leaders.
The honest truth is if the U.S. did try to invade Canada, I'd place a much higher bet on it causing the collapse of the U.S. as a nation than I would on it establishing any sort of durable U.S. control of Canada. A positively ENORMOUS fraction of the U.S. population would object to that move. I mean: just think about how big the protests were when the war was in a podunk country in Asia that most had never been to. And now one of the most hated presidents in U.S. history tries to invade its friendly neighbor? The reaction would NOT be small.
What's more, that fraction is concentrated in all the wealthiest parts of the country: the parts that fill the coffers that get used to pay for Uncle Sam's military adventures. I'd expect a neverending slough of street protests, general strikes, tax strikes, sit-ins, road blockages and probably no small amount of domestic terrorism. And of course the federal government--headed as it is by a small minded thug--would respond with an absolutely ENORMOUS level of force against its own populous. Which would, of course, just escalate things.
Would Trump's appetite to shoot at his own citizens outlast their appetite to spit in his face? The gods only know. But either way, the final bill would be sky-high and the revenue of the federal government would drop immensely. Maybe the nation would limp out the other side as a unified entity, but I wouldn't bet a lot on it.
I'm sorry, did I imagine that incident where a couple dozen guys with box cutters caused the entire U.S. to collectively lose its shit for a decade or more? Because it sure seems like the threshold for "capable of causing harm" to a level that Americans care about is much, much lower than you seem to think. Like, I certainly don't think hypothetical Canadian insurgent groups could seriously dent the U.S.'s military infrastructure. But I also don't imagine for a second that they'd need to: there are many, many thousands of softer targets--far to many to ever secure--that would serve just as well.
The point of asymmetric warfare isn't to directly damage a country's war-making infrastructure. It's to provoke expensive overreactions. An extremely provokable country led by a perhaps one of the single most fragile egos in history trying to annex a country with thousands of miles of shared border has got to be one of the softest targets any insurgency was ever presented with. And no, I don't particularly think that the military that spend 20 years and two trillion dollars losing to the Taliban would magically become competent enough to deal with that. "Large" and "rich" are not the same thing as "effective," my dear.
"And Canada is busy disarming their populous, so it's not like there are thousands of guns and bombs available everywhere."
Silly rabbit, bombs are everywhere! Modern society does not exactly starve one for explosive material to work with. Meanwhile, contrary to whatever propaganda you've been reading, about a quarter of Canadian households own guns. But of course that proportion is likely to be much higher in rural areas, which are the areas that would be hardest for the U.S. to control.
"If the US wanted something from Canada, we can just bully and cajole them into giving it to us. I think that's what Trump is doing now. "
Well, yes, that's what he's attempting. While it would certainly be better for everyone if he didn't, I can't deny I find it pretty funny how self-satisfied he seems to be at his project of taking a giant sledgehammer to 80 years of accumulated American soft power. When this sort of effort predictably makes America poorer, less respected and less influential, I'm sure his supporters will keep breathlessly insisting that it's all Biden's (who whoever else's) fault.
We do have nukes. Much more effective at burning down forests than napalm.
The pendant in me rather doubts that's true. The blast radius of a nuke may be large compared to conventional explosives, but it's still very, very small compared to the size of a forest. And if you're counting on the fires spreading on their own, I would think napalm would give you much better control for a tiny fraction of the price.
But all that is rendered pretty irrelevant by a more practical concern. You know what a small insurgent group would call provoking a superpower to launch nukes just for a chance of taking them out? Winning. They would call it winning.
Like, nevermind the political fallout (which would doubtless be massive), that sounds like an amazing deal just on a cost basis. Nukes are EXTREMELY expensive. Only in their wildest dreams are any single group of insurgents going to cause damage that comes anywhere close to the cost of one single warhead, nevermind the delivery system, nevermind the cleanup. Most insurgencies would love nothing better than to watch their enemies shoot themselves in the foot that hard.
...I don't see how any of that would be a problem? We already have a ton of nukes just sitting here, gathering dust. It would be a waste not to use them eventually. Cleanup is also unnecessary because we're talking about northern Canada, nobody lives there anyways. Not much harm in razing most of it to the ground. In fact, the mini-nuclear winter would temporarily counteract global warming!
My overwhelming impression from this comment is that you are simply trying to be an edgelord, rather than having an actual conversation. In the event that I'm wrong, I still have to concede that my meager skills at pedagogy aren't equal to the task of correcting the extremely deep and serious faults in your knowledge of the world and ability to reason about it. Either way, the obvious course is to disengage. Good day.
Why would we use force though? It would be much simpler to buy it.
Lets start with Alberta, where the susceptibility to leaving Canada for the US is probably highest. We offer the residents of Alberta a large bribe to become the 51st state (maybe 52nd if Greenland goes first). Now BC is cutoff from the rest of Canada. Probably at this point we can get them for a much smaller bribe, even none at all. At this point likely Quebec is pissed to have been beaten to the door, so we offer them statehood as #54 (55), etc. Divide and conquer, buying one province at a time.
> Probably at this point we can get them for a much smaller bribe, even none at all.
Alaska is cut off from the other US states by Canada, and yet hasn't joined Canada. Why would that work differently the other way around?
How is this supposed to work, exactly?
Even assuming for the sake of argument that the people of Alberta have the legal authority to secede from Canada, I'm pretty sure Canadian law prohibits anyone (and especially foreigners) from bribing voters in Canadian elections. So all that bribe money would just be redirected into Ottawa's treasury as soon as it crosses the border.
And if the idea is that Trump would promise to pay the Albertans *after* they secede and join the Union, then A: the Albertans would have to be stupid enough to trust Donald Trump to hold up his end of a deal even without a formal contract to bind him to, and B: Canadian elections are done with secret ballots, so there's no way to know which people Trump is supposed to pay off.
He'd have to promise to pay *everyone* in Alberta, regardless of how they voted. Which means the loyal and/or skeptical ones would all have the option of hedging their bets by voting "No" but still collecting whatever payout Trump actually pays out if their countrymen go with "Yes".
This seems like...well, "wishful thinking" hardly seems like a strong enough term. If I were trying to write a bit of satire to illustrate some of the more common negative stereotypes about Americans--specifically about thinking they're the center of the universe and not understanding how anyone else could POSSIBLY fail to envy them--I think I'd need to make it only slightly more over-the-top than what you've written here.
I do agree that Alberta would probably be the most susceptible to leaving Canada: I think there's some appetite for that among Albertans. If I had to guess how many would up and join Alberta to the U.S. if given the opportunity, I'd say in the 30% range. But my confidence there is very low: it could be in the 60s, it could be in the 10s. So I won't say that "try to get Alberta to join the U.S." is completely ridiculous as a Step 1.
Where I think you start to go off the rails is imagining that a bribe would be of much help in convincing the holdouts. First off, a bribe is only an inducement if you, yourself, expect to benefit from the bribe. So let's say the deal is for a direct cash payment to each and every Albertan. Thought experiment: how big of a bribe would have to be part of the package for you to vote for your state to become part of China or Russia? How about Germany or the UK? Would $1000 do it? How about $5000? Maybe $50,000? I expect for many people there is no practical number high enough. For the remainder, I expect a wide spread, but a lot of people will tend fairly high. Canadians aren't a monolith, but two things you will CERTAINLY find here are people who take pride in being Canadian, and people who take a dim view of the U.S. Irrevocably yoking your future and your children's future to a country you don't care for is gonna be a pretty tough sell. And that's before you get into credibility issues: Trump does not exactly have a great reputation for fairness and honesty in his business deals. How many are going to trust the bribe to actually come through? Once the U.S. has political control of Alberta, why would they need to pay?
But far, far more off-base than that is the notion that BC would fall easily in line after Alberta. Here I can speak with some authority: I'm a BC resident. I live and work surrounded by other BC residents. I don't think there are very many BC residents who would join up with the U.S. for any price. And the idea that peeling off our neighboring province first and using the isolation as economic coercion to fall in line? Here I must suspect you of having a poor understanding of human psychology in-general. You might consider looking up the history of a city called "West Berlin" for a start. Suffice to say that "an authoritarian government has just isolated us, gobbled up our neighbor, and is now pressuring us to allow them to take control" is very much NOT the inducement you think it is.
Eh, none of this is going to happen. But I was trying to spitball potential scenarios and this one seemed less ludicrous than any other that I could think of (or which has been proposed in this thread). I'd give it less than 10^(-2) odds. But I'd give the `invasion / occupation / assimilation' scenario less than 10^(-4) odds, so...
Eh, fair enough. If I were told that four years from now some substantial portion of Canada had joined the U.S. and were trying to imagine the most plausible way that it could happen, probably my first thought would be "some serious outside threat scared Canada into wanting to be more firmly under the U.S. aegis." But that's not something the current admin can really control.
If I were in a think tank tasked with finding the most plausible ways to make it happen, I still don't think anything so direct as bribery would be my go-to. It would have to be some form of information warfare. If the past ten years have taught me anything, its how frighteningly effective various propaganda streams are at turning susceptible peoples' brains into politically-polarized much. My hypothetical think-tank proposal wouldn't even involve spreading pro-U.S. propaganda in Canada, mind you. Rather it would involve finding all the most effective ways at getting some Canadians to hate other Canadians, until some parts of the country absolutely couldn't stand other parts.
Maybe then you start planting seeds about disaffected groups joining the U.S. or even making overt offers. But maybe you don't even need to: if anybody (with the possible exception of Quebec) splits off and becomes independent, ultimately asking for U.S. annexation would be a natural attractor. (Sorta similar to how the U.S. got Texas come to think of it, except the part where a lot of Texans started out as American to begin with.)
There's something I don't have to worry about in the real world, at least. Trump's comments are pretty much the exact opposite of what an admin looking to go that route would want to do.
Alberta seems not a likely choice right now since a born-and-raised Albertan is soon to be elected Canada's Prime Minister, probably with a thumping parliamentary majority. Though in various aspects of worldview he will be more simpatico with the new Trump Administration than the outgoing Canadian PM (the new guy heads the Conservative Party of Canada), he is nevertheless a strongly-nationalistic French-speaking Canadian. His lifelong goal has been to lead and reform his nation not dismember it.
Meanwhile back home in Alberta the voters will have reason to expect some of their grievances with Ottawa to be successfully addressed, presumably taking some air out of secession arguments.
Depending on how things go with the new national government there could be some revival of secession talk in British Columbia, though not with an intention of joining the US.
We obviously shouldn't (and won't) use force, but why buy them?
They'd have the opportunity to move from the country with the ~10th largest economy to number 1. Instead of being a piece of a junior partner of the global hegemon they'd be part of the family.
As of 2021 Alberta's population was 23.2% immigrant (https://www12.statcan.gc.ca/census-recensement/2021/as-sa/fogs-spg/page.cfm?lang=E&topic=9&dguid=2021A000248). Assuming they'd be able to vote in the referendum that's a huge block that likely doesn't have a strong sense of Canadian identity and might have been as happy or happier immigrating to the United States.
Albertans alive today have never had a serious opportunity to become part of the US. We should simply give it to them. If Trump wants to Make America Grow Again he should have the State Department spin up groups focusing on a number of countries that craft plans for admission for them and individual provinces / territories within them, then encourage referenda.
It was in the last referedum where the 'ethnic vote' was blamed for keeping Quebec in the country. 1st and 2nd Gen Canadians actually have a more civic 'national' identity then multigenerational Canadians who have a stronger 'regional' identity.
> We obviously shouldn't (and won't) use force
Wait, why? I thought the point was to expand US dominion over the world. They're not going to join willingly; they have their silly nationalistic pride that needs to be beaten out of them. Even if the Albertans were willing to secede, Canada wouldn't let them do that, regardless of what their law supposedly says.
evidence? Canada did allow Quebec a referendum on secession. The pro-secession side lost, rendering the issue moot, but we are postulating that there is a future `Albertan independence' referendum which is won.
Letting a province go independent is an entirely different issue to giving up a province to an imperialist empire.
The United States is not an imperialistic empire. It had a brief period of imperialism and still has some territories that should quickly be granted independence or statehood.
To your earlier post: it's neither practical or desirable to try to impose America at the point of a JDAM. We aren't a Caliphate. If Albertans, or anyone else, have nationalistic pride and are happy with their current situation no one should force them to leave.
But national feeling changes. Current national borders aren't divinely defined and immutable. The point isn't to extend American dominion over the world: post-WW2 we've shown that can be done pretty effectively without adding more states or through military occupation.
The point is to offer American statehood to those who want it and can be incorporated into the union. Why not give them the opportunity? And yes, I'm fine with Mexico trying to charla suave American states into seceding and joining Mexico, but I do not think they have a compelling offer.
"We have never sought to become a monopoly. Our (national) products are simply so good that no one feels the need to compete with us."
Distinction without a difference. Alberta can first become independent and then join America.
But how does Alberta secede from Canada? They likely don't have that right. Quebec failed to secede. Maybe the US sends troops into Alberta with its encouragement?
IIUC Canadian provinces do have the constitutional right to secede. Quebec separatists merely failed to win their independence referendum.
Sorta/kinda. There's nothing about that in Canada's written Constitution. In response to a court ruling related to the 1995 Quebec referendum, Parliament in 2000 passed a law laying out some conditions on which the federal government would respect the result of a provincial separation referendum.
Awkwardly (and very Canadian to be honest) the "Clarity Act" fails to state clearly what percentage "yes" vote is necessary for a referendum result to be binding. Most analysts say that something more than 50%+1 would be needed, but that has never yet been tested and unless the province's voters went at least 60-40 "yes" there would be court challenges.
The federal law states that "First Nations/Indigenous People" are required to be "part of" the "negotiations" following a successful referendum result, without specifying either the nature of those negotiations in general or the role/power of First Nations in that process.
There are other mysteries about how the Clarity Act imagines the separation process but you get the overall picture: sorta/kinda.
And it's not been tested.
I agree with this strategy. The loss of Alberta might be fatal for Canada in the long run.
If Quebec becomes interdependent, they'll want to stay that way, not join another Anglophone country.
Ah, but by that point they will be surrounded by America. Independence may not be viable. And if we really need to put the squeeze on, we blockade them. Which, sure, is technically an act of war, but not of the invasion kind. But probably it won't be necessary to actually go that far, the implicit threat, as well as the obvious economic benefits of joining a larger and richer polity which surrounds you, should suffice.
French Guiana is surrounded by Spanish- and Portuguese-speaking people, and feels no will to join them.
For that matter, France is surrounded by nations who don't speak French, and yet feels no need to join one of them.
Maybe there's something about speaking French!
Quebec is the Texas of Canada. Different in ways the inhabitants find important, and always deciding to secede.
They have a coast, and a larger population than Gambia (which is surrounded by Senegal).
The coast is where the (threat of) blockade comes in
Absent some imminent threat, the President doesn't have unilateral authority to order an invasion. The 2001 Authorization for Use of Military Force doesn't have geographic restrictions and has been interpreted very broadly to provide the basis for a number of interventions. Canada would be too far.
However, as you note this is a fantastical situation so let's handwave that.
It would be extremely difficult for the UK or any other country to directly intervene due to the distances involved and the US Navy's superiority. Yes, they have treaty obligations to do so but those treaties didn't envision one treaty nation invading another. NATO probably just ceases to exist. Maybe - big maybe - they make a formal declaration of war and harass US related shipping but don't go much beyond that. There's also the nuclear option but I don't imagine significant appetite for starting that holocaust.
I'd expect the immediate response would be the UK / EU and other nations cutting off all ties with the US and attempting to make it a pariah. Massive economic damage all around. China would likely hop over to Taiwan while the US is distracted and the world quickly realigns in a multipolar fashion. Good chance of some sort of civil war, active insurgency, and/or political breakup of the US.
ETA: Greenland would be extremely strategically valuable for the US for early warning of RAF operations and to forward deploy air assets to counter them. My God, Trump's fixation on it now makes complete sense. It's all part of his long game.
Isn't Canada a member of NATO? Wouldn't the rest of NATO be required to defend them, and wouldn't they defend themselves?
US is NATO so it would be an intra-NATO affair. I doubt the treaty addresses that.
I'm no lawyer or international relations expert, but I think Article 5 could easily be construed to require other countries to defend Canada if the US invaded:
"The Parties agree that an armed attack against one or more of them in Europe or North America shall be considered an attack against them all and consequently they agree that, if such an armed attack occurs, each of them, in exercise of the right of individual or collective self-defence recognised by Article 51 of the Charter of the United Nations, will assist the Party or Parties so attacked by taking forthwith, individually and in concert with the other Parties, such action as it deems necessary, including the use of armed force, to restore and maintain the security of the North Atlantic area."
As for the original question, I think that if the US invaded Canada, the rest of NATO would defend Canada, at least to some extent. Economically it would be a disaster for everyone involved. Militarily, France, the UK, and the US all have nukes. If they get used, that would obviously be very bad. If they don't get used, the US would almost certainly "win" the war at some point; Canada itself doesn't have a big enough military to withstand an American attack, and the US Navy's aircraft carriers would be too much for the NATO forces to overcome in the Atlantic. But if we couldn't occupy Afghanistan effectively, why would we be able to occupy Canada? If you had a huge number of Canadians who decided that they wanted to be Americans, then it might be different. But I don't think that would be the case in this hypothetical invasion scenario.
If the US attacks Canada, and then Canada attacks back, does that mean that individual NATO countries could decide which one they wanted to support?
No, because "attacks back" is not a concept with any meaning or significance in international law. A attacks B, then A and B are at war and it is expected that warfighting activities may occur anywhere in the combined territory of A and B and generals may but lawyers don't care which way the front is moving.
US attacks Canada, and the remaining NATO members are required to do whatever they would do if the US had attacked *them*. Which is presumably to wage war against the US, including military operations that in a purely tactical sense might be called "attacks".
yeah, the invasion and occupation scenario is obviously dumb. That’s why I was spitballing scenarios whereby Canada might be induced to voluntarily join, for certain values of voluntary.
I'd love to just see a published list of the blogs people request you recommend. I feel like it would be a useful way to find things to read.
While I understand that idea in theory, I don’t think it will work in practice.
If every recommendation get published in that list it will quickly be gamed and people will just submit a recommendation to be listed there.
It will additionally result in a public list of blogs that are disapproved by Scott since anyone can just diff the to lists.
I suspect it would produce a list of people who think their blogs might be interesting to ACX readers which is exactly what I’d like to see.
I don’t think it would be particularly game worthy in an effort/payoff sort of way if you don’t think your blog would appeal to ACX readers it’s probably not worth the effort.
> I suspect it would produce a list of people who think their blogs might be interesting to ACX readers which is exactly what I’d like to see.
I mean, isn't a proxy for that just clicking on any given commenter here's blog link next to their name?
If they're engaged enough to comment, and particularly if you think their comments are cogent / useful / interesting, seems like a fairly strong and immediately available quality filter.
Because many of them probably don't bother making many posts they think would be interesting to other ACX readers.
So I've seen a few intelligent, careful people saying that climate change, while likely bad, is unlikely to be an existential threat to humanity. I'm very much not a climate scientist, but I'm unsure of the reasoning.
When Mt Tambora erupted in 1815, the resultant cooling (about 0.5 degrees Celsius) caused horrific famines and other disasters which killed tens of thousands of people, caused widespread societal and economic upheaval, and just was generally awful, despite the effects mostly only lasting a few months to a few years. Now, that's cooling, not warming, but it seems plausible that the magnitude of the effects would be comparable, if different in type.
Given that, and given even conservative estimates for temperature change put it at 1 to 2 degrees Celsius, and sustained over a much longer period (decades at minimum, centuries not implausible), I genuinely don't understand how that conclusion could be reached? Is warming just different? Is it because it's slower rather than an abrupt shift?
Humans have been endemic to vastly different climate zones from the arctic to the Sahara for centuries, well before the benefits of the admittedly fragile industrial civilization. Wiping out 50% or 90% of them is the easy part, but getting the last nomadic tribe will be next to impossible.
I don't think anyone serious claims that climate change is an existential threat.
Chomsky, love him or hate him, is the physical embodiment of seriousness.
He's also not a climate scientist.
He may have been serious in the 60's and 70's but he's been nothing but an intellectual buffoon for at least the past 15 years. If he's the physical embodiment of anything now it's of self-parody.
This feels no true Scotsmanny, since anyone making that claim obviously isn't a serious person.
But "serious" aside there's plenty of people making that claim very loudly, eg the group called Extinction Rebellion.
Angry isn't serious. There is no tenured professor at a top 20 research university who believes it. And even if there is then that person is outside of the scientific consensus. The median 95% of climate scientists would all agree that it's not an existential threat.
That sounds fine, but there's a bunch of idiots who do, and some of them want to glue themselves to the road or throw soup on a valuable artwork or something, so it's worth taking the time to debunk 'em.
I'd prefer to simply run them over. Glue away!
https://daviddfriedman.substack.com/i/99357449/and-climate
I don't think the serious people believe that global warming will wipe humanity. It's not an ELE. What it could do is collapse our energy dependent civilization and kill a lot of people. But even those worse case outcomes would happen incrementally--food and fuel prices rise, people starve, wars happen, massive population movements occur, and the human population of the planet declines. How fast that would happen depends on details we do not currently understand.
Moreover, all of the remedies I've heard proposed would be as likely to cause upheaval, to that or greater degree, possibly in different sectors of the economy or world at first. With similar levels of uncertainty.
Why would lowering carbon emissions collapse our civilization, kill anyone, starve anyone, start wars, or move populations around?
Lowering carbon emissions inevitably manifests as curtailing economic activity. On the personal level, this means not selling as much of your product, whether you're running a fruit stand or a factory. Or a power plant - which means customers are doing without. The secondary effects of this include all sorts of things like having less food on the table, fewer clothes, postponed home repairs, unemployment, and freezing in the reduced-emissions-enforced winter.
Hopefully the drawbacks of these effects are evident.
If you are claiming that any curtailing of economic activity will have as severe an impact as runaway global warming, I find that so counter-intuitive that I have to ask you to cite research in support of that.
I'm not really talking about runaway global warming, as I believe that is not as credible as the global warming predicted in publications such as IPCC reports.
When it comes to predicted global warming, the evidence doesn't suggest strongly whether it's better or worse than the economic curtailment required to prevent it. It has been harder than it should be to collect evidence that curtailment is worse, since the act of collecting it or even advocating for collecting it as been, for ideological reasons, historically less likely to get financial and academic support than the act of collecting evidence that it is preferable.
To get started, you could consult David Friedman's articles on the matter.
http://www.daviddfriedman.com/Sorted_Posts.html#Climate
I agree with the your first statement.
My primary reasoning is that if we check global temperatures through longer eras (going back thousands, hundreds of thousands, and millions of years) we can see much larger differences compared to what is being discussed today, and yet Earth was still very much a planet full of life. During warmer periods, even more so!
More details:
1. Chart for the past 2000 years: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Common_Era_Temperature.svg
I know that this shows that today temperature rose in a century way more than in this period at any time, but I am linking it first just so it is apparent that even before large scale use of fossil fuels, 0.2-0.3 degrees Celsius change in a couple of decades was not that uncommon.
2. Chart for past 800 000 years: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:EPICA_temperature_plot.svg
This implies that in that period there were several cases when average temperature was 10 degrees Celsius lower or 2 degrees Celsius higher than what is today.
3. Chart for past 500 000 000 years (this is actually the combination of multiple methods/charts):
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:All_palaeotemps.svg
What I would like to highlight here is the green part between ~ 7 million and 60 million years ago.
Through this period average temperature was always higher by at least two degrees Celsius than currently, and during the Eocene period (33.9 million to 56 million years ago) it was 6 to 14 degrees Celsius higher.
To quote wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eocene#Flora):
"During the early-middle Eocene, forests covered most of the Earth including the poles. Tropical forests extended across much of modern Africa, South America, Central America, India, South-east Asia and China. Paratropical forests grew over North America, Europe and Russia, with broad-leafed evergreen and broad-leafed deciduous forests at higher latitudes."
So actually it was way more friendly towards plant life.
Likely higher temperatures may increase crops yields and even human welfare, if we can magically ignore the effect of change itself.
That being said, as some people pointed out, the main question is the speed of change, as that can still make this an issue.
I think that apart from the natural environment what influences human welfare is "capital", in the broadest sense. This includes infrastructure, all kinds of equipment, but even culture, training and customs.
There is a natural degradation of "capital" (infrastructure crumbles, people grow old, etc), and there is a replacement process (maintenance, training, etc) that allows us to maintain civilization. If the change is gradual enough that this natural replacement can take care of it, than capital does not shrink and welfare remains high. E.g., newer houses, buildings will gradually be more optimized for higher temperature, people will wear different clothing and behave accordingly without consciously noticing cultural change, etc.
If it is faster than this, that would require more investment, so people would need to drop living standards.
Even this negative case can have large ranges, from a bit slower gdp growth to long term economic upheaval.
However, for massive global famine I think some major global change would be necessary, that would destroy most crops within a year, or that would somehow trigger a swift cooldown (at least locally), kind of as in "The Day After Tomorrow". However, I don't see this one likely, as far as I know the consensus is against it, and I don't think that there is any precedent for this save for vulcano eruptions or asteroid impacts.
Regarding your particular example about Tambora, I think the main issue there was not really the "global temperature" directly, but that it created a permanent fog, that also blocked sunlight. To quote wikipedia ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1815_eruption_of_Mount_Tambora ):
"In the northern spring and summer of 1815, a persistent "dry fog" was observed in the northeastern United States. The fog reddened and dimmed the sunlight, such that sunspots were visible to the naked eye."
As a sideffect, this decreased temperature, but I think the lower amount of sunshine was even more important than the pure temperature change. I think the distribution of this was also more local, not sure how much the southern hemisphere got from this. So likely the territories with most agricultural issues had much lower average temperature than what the global value implies here.
A note: it's true (with the caveat about change rate that you already note) that, overall, an Eocene- or Cretaceous-style hothouse would be good for global biodiversity and biomass. But it would be much less good for the specific configuration of biodiversity and biomass we have right now, which evolved in icehouse conditions. For one, the breadbaskets of the world wouldn't be such in Eocene climate. The grassy plants from which most of the global food supply depends evolved relatively recently in temperate, highly seasonal, low-CO2 conditions. And of course during most of the Cretaceous, the middle third of North America was under water.
OTOH, we'd have decades or more to adapt to this. Also, at least some of the staple crops would do better in high CO2 than at current levels, and AIUI there is research being done regarding others. There's a high chance we'll have more food than now for the same resources as a consequence, and what upheaval occurs would be in the form of farmers and their suppliers having to find new work or new markets.
I admit I'm mostly going by half-remembered stuff right now, but IIRC CO2 fertilization helps with carbohydrates, but not so much with proteins and other nutrients; and I strongly doubt it's enough to offset losses of cropland to drought (of course the rain will still fall elsewhere, but farmland isn't something you move around quickly or easily) and sea level rise (which is going to be significant only on river deltas and some coastal lowlands, but those are some of the most intensely farmed and inhabited areas around).
I kinda assume if climate change happened we would solve it with technology, by creating a bunch of clouds or something.
Or develop new technologies of carbon capture, etc
Maybe we won't solve ocean acidification but temperature of the planet seems easier to control.
Haven't looked into it, just my vague impression?
The rationalists who say "not an existential threat" mean "it will not kill literally every single person in the world". This is true for most models of climate change. Plus, the lesswrong crowd tends to believe that an artificial superintelligence will be built soon, and will either destroy the world or solve climate change. One way or the other, nothing to worry about.
Historically, warm years were good and cold years were bad. To a degree, they still are. But there's a limit to how warm we want it, and climate change is rapidly getting there.
It's worth noting that they say "global catastrophic risk" for things that don't put the continued existence of human civilisation at risk but are still, well, catastrophic.
Global warming will probably kill more people via heat-related deaths than are dying now, but a Lancet study found cold-related deaths outnumber heat deaths by 17 to 1. So, fewer peeps will be dying from cold-related deaths. Higher CO levels are creating a greening effect worldwide, so despite the fears of famine due to climate change, crop plants are becoming more productive. Please note: angiosperms appeared and evolved during periods when global CO2 levels were 4x-5x higher than they are now. The Antarctic ice sheet didn't begin form until atmospheric CO2 levels dropped to about 1200-1400 ppm (compared to ~280 ppm pre-industrial levels, and ~420 ppm today)—and global avg temps were about 4 degrees C higher than they are today. Yes, Gen Z +3 to +6 will have to worry about sea-level rise. But it should be slow enough to create mitigations for coastal urban areas (a la the Netherlands). I doubt if GW will have a significant impact on human populations (at least compared to other potential issues). Overall, long term, it would be great if CO2 levels were high enough to get us out of the glaciation cycles that have characterized the late Pleistocene (each cycle lasting roughly a 100Ky).
Scott has noted that, seemingly paradoxically, people dying cold-related deaths are dying in hot places. https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/chilling-effects
Without due respect to Scott, the data doesn't seem to support this thesis. This study of cold and heat deaths in European countries shows that, overall, cold deaths far outweigh heat deaths. But cold deaths are higher in Eastern European countries on a north-south axis — and they're also super high in the UK for some reason. Heat deaths are highest in Italy, Bulgaria, and Romania, with some hotspots in interior Spain. (Link below)
It's worth noting that some major civilization collapses happened during cooling periods. After the Minoan Warm Period, Bronze Age civilizations collapsed. Western Roman civilization collapsed at the end of the Roman Warm Period. And the Bubonic plague wiped out about a third of Europe's population a couple of decades after the Little Ice Age began. Likewise, the Little Ice Age impacted food production all across northern Europe, which caused periodic famines for three centuries.
Heat and Cold mortality for urban areas across Europe...
https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lanplh/article/PIIS2542-5196(23)00023-2/fulltext
It's more like "It will not end life as we know it." If a threat were to kill all people but one, or wipe out technological progress, rationalists would also call that an existential threat.
> wipe out technological progress
I would only call that an x-risk if there are reasons to believe that civilization will not be reinvented after a few millennia. One can make such arguments (depleted fossil fuels which would be required to bootstrap industry, for example), but I would treat loss of industrialization as a threat of x-risk, not as x-risk itself.
There's a not dissimilar rationalist trope around the idea that nuclear war wouldn't be an "existential threat", because human beings would continue to exist (and civilisation might survive in, say, Chile and could be rebuilt elsewhere, perhaps with humanity having learned lessons). Feels like something that is at the same time technically true, but fuelling possible insanity.
I would not expect global warming to be as catastrophic as global nuclear war, either.
I think that it is important to stick to stuff which is true on an object level ('technically true') and not to go into hyperbole to signal tribe membership.
If someone is about to jump out of a window on the fourth floor, the true thing to say to them is "that is a stupid thing to do. You will likely injure yourself severely and might actually die". If you are telling them instead "this is a terrible idea, you are sure to die and will kill at least four passer-bys when you hit them", that is bad. Once you have told that little noble lie, the truth is forever your enemy, and the pro-window-jumping people will easily show you for a fool in any remotely fair debate. Also, what will you then tell the person debating if they should escape the fire by jumping from the eighth floor or the forth? Double down: "if you fall from the eighth floor, you will be super-duper-dead and cause a crater which will kill everything within half a kilometer"?
I do not think that LW is full of people going "climate change: not an issue" or "nuclear war: not an x-risk, but a fun group activity" regularly -- just because something is not maximally bad, it does not mean that you endorse it.
We aren’t living in 1815 anymore. Cooling is worse than heating in most cases. The existential threat isn’t really claimed by the climate scientists either, although they tend to obfuscate the number of years it takes for sea level rise.
The people talking about "existential threat" seem to have tacked on the modifier because it sounds cool, without giving any thought to what a high bar they're setting for themselves.
Deaths heads as decorations on one's views, like pieces of jewelry.
And most importantly, a few billion people dying isn't an existential threat to humanity, especially given where the deaths would be concentrated.
I'll third 'rate matters'.
Partly because we can more effectively adapt to the coming changes because they're coming slowly,
Partly because, while we almost certainly won't be able to reverse the effects of climate change in my lifetime, current models look like we'll avoid runaway effects and we can hopefully get our shit together enough to make the rate of change near 0 in my lifetime
Partly because one of the big worries with the fast rate of change was ecological catastrophes as existing biomes failed to adapt to new conditions, which would have impacted human life indirectly. If the rate of change is slower, there will be more room for adaptation and the ecological consequences will be less severe.
The rate of change is super-important.
Cooling is worse than warming, in large part because we're still in an ice age (we're closer to the planet being too cold to survive than being too warm to survive, basically).
The modern world is better at adapting to changing conditions than the ancient world.
(There's other stuff, but I think this covers the material in your comment.)
Rate matters. People are very good at accommodating changes that happen at the multi generational timescale. Not so much "no crops this year." Especially since back then, the survival margins were much tighter. Now we have much more of a safety blanket. Especially since the changes (were and are expected to be) unevenly spread. So the places less hard hit can help the ones harder hit. That wasn't really the case in 1815.
You can hate everyone in Rome but not everyone in Greece.
> but not everyone in Greece.
Tell me more, tell me more.
Lol
Recently I outlined for myself a ten-part (?) series on everything I know about web + app development. My original idea was to make it a blog post series. After outlining it I'm not so sure. Perhaps readers would absorb it better if it was a course, or textbook, or YouTube video playlist, or what-have-you. What do y'all think?
(I haven't written out the entire thing yet, as it seems like it would be a LOT of work and I'm not sure what benefits would accrue to me or my readers if I were to do it.)
Perfect is the enemy of good. If you've written something out, it's probably relatively easy to convert to a blog post. Not so for Youtube videos, a course, or textbook.
Unless you're someone who has some particular authority in the field, or your series is extremely useful to people who are able to find your work, few people will read it. That's ok though, as the exercise should be for your own benefit, with other readers as a bonus.
I don't want to dissuade you too much, because this sounds like something that could be good for your personal development. However, I understand that you are an undergraduate student? Consider the possibility you may be overestimating the utility that you can provide as someone without significant professional experience in this field.
Who do you want to write it for? Would your readers/viewers want to build an app, get a job, start their company...?
What about a blog with some straightforward practice problems or questions threaded through it, and maybe a couple of really tough ones at the end of each post? People could discuss how to do the problems in comments. You could post occasionally in comments giving answers or advice or congratulations. Maybe give prizes (free subscription?) to the first to post a solution to one of the tough puzzles. (So now I'm moving into ideas of ways to build up number of subscribers.) Maybe sprinkle in some other stuff in between the lessons -- a few posts about where web & app etc. development is heading, or funny stories about legendary fuck-ups or genius solutions or odd corners of that professional world. (What's the creepiest underground app you ever heard tell of?) Maybe an occasional contest for readers? You name some odd constraints, ask how you could do X with those constrains. Group could select best answer by vote.
I absolutely hate instruction delivered via video. I'm always looking up how to do things in Photoshop, and hunting for the one site that just answers my question with some prose and one screen shot. I get the info way faster that way, and if I forget something I can quickly find it again by skimming the written answer. Searching a video for that one part where they show how to access feature X is infuriating. However, most Photoshop how-to's are videos, so it may be that most prefer that modality.
Also, making a video series adds all these complications. You have to think about how the room looks, and how you look. You have to be personable. If you trip over your words you have to reshoot that section.
I think there is a fundamental difference between tutorials about how to use a Software and how to build software.
When the resulting code o the tutorial is published I can work my way back to fill gaps that the author willingly or unwillingly left out or knowledge gaps that I have but the target audience of the tutorial doesn’t have.
For a software like photoshop I stumbled a lot on tutorials where a important step was left out and I couldn’t figure out what they did because I can’t work my way back from the end result. In a video I can just skip back to the part and follow step by step.
I don't build software, but see what you mean. Actually these days when I google Photoshop questions the Google AI gives me the answer as a list of bullet points, and so far those have turned out to be clear and accurate.
It's certainly true that most Photoshop how-to CREATORS prefer that modality. It's an open question as to whether the consumers prefer it.
I go to videos for instruction as a last resort, or if I can't envision what the how-to explanation explains.
I do pretty well with blog posts, especially if they include practical interludes/exercises along the way. That would probably be harder with a video playlist. Even if there are aspects which benefit greatly from demonstrating them in video instead of static images or text, still probably better to embed those in a blog.
From there, not clear on what the practical difference is between a blog and a textbook, unless you plan to get it all printed and bound. Unless you a mean a hypertext textbook on a dedicated site, which I think would be better unless you benefit from linking sections of the textbook to preexisting blog posts.
As for a course, maybe? Can be beneficial if you can make those practical interludes fully interactive. But I expect it would be a great deal more work than just a blog/textbook.
All in all:
Dedicated textbook > blog post > course > video series
Hope to see what comes of this in the future!
How exactly does one lobby their local legislators? I know that at the federal level, multi billion dollar organizations do all sorts of crazy things that the average human can never do, but assuming you're a moderately wealthy individual with a good savings and a high paying job and you wanted to propose adopting a law or a legislative reform for your local City/State, how would you go about doing so?
Sure you can always call them up and leave a message, but i assume that's leaving something on the table. What would you do if you had 50k at your disposal? 100k? How can money actually be used to improve your outcome?
Figure out what you want to say, condense it to the level of an elevator pitch but with backup material at the ready, call the local legislator's office, ask them which staffer is handling [topic] this week, and if they're not too busy at that moment, make your pitch.
Or, write a letter to the legislator; their office will send it to the right staffer and you can go into a bit more depth in text. Offer to discuss the matter further.
For all but the biggest issues, it isn't necessary to offer bribes or campaign contributions, or establish yourself as the spokesman for #movement with bignum registered voters. Legislators get surprisingly little feedback from the public on secondary issues, and they know that for every person who actually picks up a phone there will be many more who feel the same way but didn't bother to call. And, perhaps more importantly, the staffer in charge of [topic] is not actually an expert on [topic], he's almost certainly overworked, in over his head, and trying to figure it out with basically Wikipedia and a bunch of slick glossies produced by the relevant industry organization or whatever. They'll probably *want* to talk to someone who knows the subject but isn't captured by the industry.
If you've got money to throw at the problem, you can use it to hire people who are either better than you at cold-calling politicians, or can do the background research to fine-tune your pitch and identify the proper targets. But check with a lawyer, because when money starts changing hands in this sort of thing, the law is particular about how that should be done.
I actually wrote a letter once, meh
Cant say I recemend it doing that solo; realistically:
1. you maintain a list of every method of commutation they publish
2. wait till these methods change so you get spooky and hard to block methods
3. wait for a news story
4. spread the info, write variants of the messages, simple talking points, make graphs with any data, pictures for any concept, pay professional protesters to hold signs you designed
5. gaslight gaslight gaslight that theres an angery mob at thier door or at least you have some influence over said mob
Politicians pay attention to crowds, so you lobby local legislation by lobbying the people who vote for them. If you have a high-paying job, you presumably have people who respect your opinion on things, so start by convincing them, and then convince their friends, and repeat until someone's friends with the legislators.
> What would you do if you had 50k at your disposal? 100k? How can money actually be used to improve your outcome?
I'm interested in this too.
I think it depends on your level of commitment, but Zvi famously founded Balsa to do exactly this at the federal level, and I believe he even got outside funding, and has hired two people for it (maybe more by now). Currently they're tackling the Jones Act, which is 100% a giant boondoggle that should be eliminated (in my own opinion).
https://thezvi.substack.com/p/announcing-balsa-research
So I've answered the ACX survey and am curious about the last question. I feel (rot13) that zl nafjre qrcraqf urnivyl ba gur ahzoref vaibyirq, abg whfg bhg bs cevapvcyr ba n "uvture rkcrpgngvba if thnenagrrq erghea" qvpubgbzl. Jvgu qvssrerag ahzoref (fvapr V ernq nobhg n fvzvyne ulcbgurgvpny n juvyr ntb), zl nafjre jbhyq qrsvavgryl punatr.
So I wonder if I'm isolated in my outlook, and what the point of the question is...
That your answer should change if the numbers are different is normal and healthy. If you are a median income American, and the question is about one measly dollar versus ten, then you want to take the gamble.
If the question is about one billion dollar versus a chance at ten, then only SBF (and perhaps a few big-thinking honest EA people who believe that their cause areas will scale linearly) would take the gamble. Everyone else would be "there is little difference to my utility function between 1G$ and 10G$, why should I risk anything?"
Where exactly the cross-over point is depends on the risk tolerance of a person, and their current circumstances. Perhaps one person owns a broken car which could be fixed up for 500$, while another would need 5k$ to by a decent used car.
Formally, there is the Kelly criterion, which tells you how much of your net worth you should be willing to put into a gamble where you have an edge at most.
Unless I’m mistaken, the Kelly criterion applies for repeated independent bets, no? This is just one thing (and also, there’s no downside in the survey question).
I’m reassured that I’m not crazy for thinking the correct strategy depends on the number involved. But then what’s the point of asking the question for a single pair of numbers? Is it to determine the “strategy boundary” in another way, depending on (say) the person’s income?
The standard model of someone following Kelly would be a gambler who has the opportunity to make a limited amount of gambles in which they have some edge, can decide how much to bet in each gamble, and tries to get rich. (I think that they instrumentally value their money logarithmically in the middle of their gambling run is kind of intrinsic, even if their end goal was "earn at least one million", under certain assumptions.)
In my model of humans, we are making financial decisions under uncertainty all the time. Big ones, like what profession to take and how to invest money for old age, but also smaller ones such as what forms of insurance to take, how often to go to medical checkups, how much food to stockpile to be prepared for disaster down to tiny ones like if you should fill up your gas tank right now or wait and see if you find a better gas station in a few days.
Even humans who don't see themselves as gamblers are regularly betting on the rare bad outcome not happening as to spend arbitrary amounts to negate the tiniest risk is not compatible with life. (Last month, there was a lesswrong article published on using Kelly to determine if insurance is worth it, https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/wf4jkt4vRH7kC2jCy/when-is-insurance-worth-it )
So with the understanding that humans are not perfectly in the situation of that gambler (for example, they can recover from going to a balance of zero by means of paid work), we can nevertheless use Kelly as a baseline. Most people are more risk-adverse than the Kelly criterion, which is fine.
The fact that there is no (absolute) downside is largely irrelevant. As long as you have two strategies, and the riskier one has the higher expected payoff, you can apply Kelly to it.
Did Scott ask us for the income bracket, again? Without it, I think the data will not make very much sense.
(aside: dear anyone reading this from the Substack crew, could we please have spoiler tags? Web 1.0 forums in the 90s already had those, without suffering from the performance problems Substack has; reinventing wheels should result in better, not worse, wheels!)
Could someone post a reminder of what the question was? I, for one, did the survey long enough ago that I remember approximately none of the specific questions, only some of the broad subjects covered...
The question was (rot13): juvpu jbhyq lbh pubbfr orgjrra n pregnvagl bs svir uhaqerq qbyynef be n bar-va-fvk (nf va, ebyy n fgnaqneq qvpr) punapr bs trggvat svir gubhfnaq qbyynef?
Thanks! I remember it, and my thinking, now.
Lrnu, zl ceboyrz vf gur fgngvfgvpny pnyphyngvba qbrfa'g npphengryl pncgher zl genqrbssf - V pna gryy zlfrys gur znguf znxrf frafr nyy V jnag, ohg V xabj zl yvmneq oenva jvyy fgvyy znxr zr srry onq vs V gnxr gung evfx naq ybfr; gurer jvyy qrsvavgryl or fbzr pbzovangvba bs nzbhagf/cebonovyvgl jurer vg orpbzrf jbegu gnxvat n tnzoyr, be vs gur pubvpr jnf vgrengrq znal gvzrf V pregnvayl jbhyq nf jryy, ohg nf qrfpevorq gurer'f n svir fvkguf punapr gur thnenagrrq pubvpr yrnirf zr unccvre.
I think you should try never to hate anyone, it isn't a healthy mindset. Mind, you may not be able to *help* hating someone, but that's a different issue.
hate is just long term anger
anger has a place; without violence we would all be slaves.
No? Without violence there would be no ability to enslave in the first place?
Slavery is based on violence, so without violence we would all be free.
As for hate being long term anger, that's like saying war is just an extreme form of sports. We aren't meant to exist in extreme states long term--it is progressively damaging to the brain.
Trump celebrated Justin Trudeau resigning by jesting on Truth Social about US / Canada merging, referencing its longstanding informal status as the 51st state.
Actually making Canada the 51st state is, of course, absurd; it would need to be divided into more than one state. They could either follow their current provincial boundaries or draw new ones. I leave that to our future fellow Americans to determine.
The path to the promised land of one billion Americans has always, to me, seemed to more logically to route through more and more places deciding to become American rather than through open borders. We should actively encourage it. Federalism would get a big boost, the people whose fortunes depend so heavily on US elections without getting a say would finally receive representation, those suffering in nations with poor institutions would get an instant upgrade, and the Jones Act would make a lot more sense once South Korea joins up.
Non-Americans: if your country held a referendum, would you vote to join the Freedom Fest?
Americans: which country would be your top pick for the new dream team? I think Australia would be my number one.
I propose to add the new states Iraq, Syria and Lebanon. This would really help bring peace and prosperity to the middle east.
I would vote against, as I think having more sovereigns is preferable because (1) competition is good for consumers & (2) concentrating more power into one institution seems like it would lead to dangerous fragility. For the same reason, I think it would be good if the US would split up.
I would, however, vote in favour of allowing the US to join the EEA, the Schengen agreement and such, because, again, competition is good for consumers.
As an Australian, I don't know that I have the words to emphasise how much Australian's do not want to be part of the US.
When US affairs are brought up in casual conversation here it is almost always followed by some form of "aren't we lucky we don't live there?". Australians see the US as a cautionary tale of how our country could go wrong if we're not careful. Specifically in regards to healthcare, gun control, homelessness, political discourse, internal divisions, and more.
Australians, like every other country in the world, also have national pride, and would like to stay as Australians.
I'll answer as both an American and a non-America: I'm a U.S.-Canadian dual citizen. I grew up in the U.S. and moved to Canada a few years ago.
Would I vote to join the U.S.? Emphatically no. I left for many reasons, and the U.S. has certainly not improved as a nation in the time since.
What country would be my top pick? None. The U.S. as-is has and causes quite enough troubles, thank you. I think its political system is rather badly showing its age, and the country is (unfortunately) probably too far-gone to course-correct before the wheels fall off. I'm really not sure why a country who just re-elected a president partially on a platform of nativism and xenophobia would be eager to add a bunch of foreigners to its citizen body anyhow. Why not worry about giving Puerto Ricans their (long overdue) statehood so they can actually have a voice in your system before looking for more colonies to add to your collection?
You're saying we have to remove some items from our collection before we add more? Do we have a lack of room for more?
Our collection is incomplete! We need more variety. We already have Alaska as a state, but not as a colony, so adding "frozen tundra" variety of colony to our collection will increase its diversity.
> add a bunch of foreigners to its citizen body anyhow
They're barely even foreigners, they're basically Americans under a different name. Hell, Canada is whiter than the US! We would effectively decrease the portion of "foreigners" in the country.
"Foreigners" is not actually a euphemism for "colored people" here. It literally means "people from a foreign country." Which in this context all countries not the U.S. are, by definition.
How much does that matter to the nativists and xenophobes currently steering U.S. politics? I honestly don't know. THEY tend to insist loudly and often that they aren't racist, so taking them at their word it would matter quite a lot. Even not taking them at their word, there seems to be *rather a lot* of explicitly "America uber alles" discourse in U.S. politics, rather more than their is racially charged rhetoric (from the right anyway). So I would tend to think that yes, for many members of the U.S. nativist movement, the fact that any additions were foreign and from a foreign culture *would* weigh more heavily than the fact that many of them were white. That you, personally, regard race as the most salient feature any person can have, or consider people from various neighbor countries as "basically Americans" isn't really germane to how they see themselves or how your countrymen see them.
Trump sure as hell doesn't think brown people born in the US are Americans. https://www.nytimes.com/2025/01/01/us/politics/trump-new-orleans.html
...It's always about race. Always. Humans are tribalistic by nature, after all. Let's face it, can you truly accept that a man named "Shamsud-Din Bahar Jabbar" is just as American as your run-of-the-mill white Christian? Of course not. In the back of your mind, you understand that this man is an "other", regardless of his origins. A lot of people are tired of pretending otherwise. They want to make America American again. And now they have a chance to make that dream a reality.
" In the back of your mind, you understand that this man is an "other", regardless of his origins."
I understand nothing of the sort. You are, of course, free to shout your own racism and bile and hatred of others to the heavens, but I decline to share in it. I'd happily share a meal and a pleasant conversation with your Shamsud-Din Bahar Jabbar, and just as happily spit directly in the face of anybody who interrupted us spouting the things you're saying.
Those of us who have actually cracked a history book in our lives well understand how toxic and corrosive the substances you trade in are. How deeply they poison the minds of those groups that imbibe them. Looking at your movement from the outside, it is impossible not to see just how badly this has warped its view of reality, how utterly off the rails it is. The only question that remains is how many other people y'all will take with you when you go the way that every other of cluster ethnonationalist degenerates has before you.
Look, I'm not the one calling the shots here. I have no stake in this other than entertainment. But you also have to realize that the "ethnonationalist degenerates" you speak of have been in power for almost all of human history, in almost every nation on Earth. Humanity has always been like this, and will always be like this. The last century has been an aberration spurred by unnatural growth, but it will not last. The world is returning to the way it was... and none of us can stop that.
> Actually making Canada the 51st state is, of course, absurd; it would need to be divided into more than one state.
Why? The population of Canada is only barely above the population of California.
California is absurd too.
Are you thinking of a division of California that (1) isn't "absurd" and (2) makes geographic sense? The rural north would be happy to break away, but I don't think that would meaningfully affect the population of California. You could try to play up the division between "Southern California" (LA) and "Northern California" (San Francisco), but they don't really have political differences.
I understand the inland is politically different from the coast, but I don't know how non-absurd people would find that kind of a division.
Break it apart algorithmically into four maximally compact chunks each with one quarter of the population. They'll probably be wacky shapes and Los Angeles will probably be split between two states but that's fine, lots of other metro areas are split across multiple states too.
> Los Angeles will probably be split between two states but that's fine, lots of other metro areas are split across multiple states too.
And you think this is a desirable state of affairs?
If by "Los Angeles" you mean Los Angeles *county*, then yes, that's actually pretty reasonable. LA County is a giant kludge.
But I'd expect that in SoCal the result would be a coastal Blue State that gets maybe 70% of LA County's land area but 95% of its population (and a whole lot of coast beyond that), and an inland Red State that includes the northern fringes of Los Angeles (plus bigger chunks of e.g. Riverside and San Bernardino counties, and almost everything from there to the NV/AZ border).
The reality here is that there is exactly zero constituency in the US for bringing in *more* Americans. America is supposed to be an exclusive club that only the most deserving can join. MAGA is convinced that they aren't making as much money as their parents did at the same jobs because immigrants came in and offered to do the work for less. If anything, Americans want their country to become smaller, not larger (provided their part keeps all the wealth).
What if the people joining then vote in a way that makes the USA look more like the rest of the world?
...That would be solved before they are fully incorporated as a state.
Besides, the US isn't a democracy, it's a republic. Even current Americans aren't meaningfully represented, so no reason why we couldn't make sure the same was true for future states.
The simplest reason why they'd have to make it multiple states would be that it would be hella stupid looking to have Alaska, a humongous Canadian state, and then 48 comparatively tiny states below it.
Great idea, and one I'd be fine spending significant tax dollars to achieve.
The question isn't who's willing to join, but who's willing to integrate. Anglo-countries like Canada, and countries with small populations (Greenland) would be much easier than say, Mexico. If the country doesn't maintain some sense of national identity through its expansion, then I'd be afraid we were setting ourselves up for Civil War 2.0, where the interests of different people's diverged so much, that either winning politician would be unacceptable to the other side (Trump and Biden are almost laughably similar when it comes to policy. The practical differences are minor.)
In order of feasibility/importance
1. Greenland
2. Certain Caribbean Nations
3. Certain Pacific Island Nations
4. Canda - Quebec
5. Quebec
6. New Zealand & Australia
7. United Kingdom + Ireland
8. Northern Mexico
9. Singapore
10. South Korea
11. Taiwan
12. Japan
13. All of Mexico
14. All of Latin America
15. The world?
The only way to compete against China long-term is our own 1B+ population Imperial sphere. Open borders are likely not the way to do that - that just gets you India in North America - rich city centers surrounded by endless slums. Unlikely this how you actually compete.
The best move is to integrate Anglosphere, the EU, Japan, SK, Taiwan, and maybe Mexico / Cuba / Singapore into essentially an "American Union" - think EU but even more Federal. EU if it was *only* the common market and Schengen area.
Break off Russia from the Chinese bloc - maybe even let them join ours (so long as they allow Pride parades for Moscow's EHC) and its checkmate.
In other word - why break off Greenland from Denmark? Wouldn't you want Denmark too?
But if AGI is invented, then don't humans become useless resource drains, so won't countries with smaller populations be better off?
This is a fantastic question because it nails a certain viewpoint that I see expressed often, but not explicitly. Humans as useless resource drains? For what? Where would the resources go otherwise? What resources are you even talking about?
This assumes a world where there's some small cabal that controls the AI, and for some reason decides to just kill everyone (because they need all this grain and land for themselves...why?), or the AI goes paperclippy and turns the whole observable universe into computronium. It's not obvious to me that either scenario is particularly coherent. Especially because, if you ARE in the AI cabal - you want these people around! Kill all the peasants, and your relative status drops like a stone - if anything, they'd want to *maximize* the peasant population (again...humans are fairly cheap) so as to create a slave class to lord over. You could argue they'd use humanoid robot slaves, but we're not wired that way - we prefer the real deal.
It doesn't assume a small cabal that controls the AI--AIs could be in control by themselves. Presumably, they'd have no interest in social status, so humans would have no value in that regard.
And expressing puzzlement at what AIs would use their resources for and what their economy would be based on is just like a Homo erectus not understanding why Homo sapiens aren't content to have an economy that is solely about trading food. Homo erectus couldn't imagine shiny rock jewelry, clothes, or ceramic pots, nor understand how they could have value and even lead to trade relationships based solely on their exchange (no food involved). And yet, an economy created by more advanced life forms (Homo sapiens) arose anyway.
Fair point. I doubt AI will ever become sovereign, but lots of smart people disagree with me. In any case, if AI attains sovereignty there's no sense having this conversation about Greenland at all lol.
Feasibility. A plan involving integrating the entire EU into a North American bloc is far more difficult, time consuming, and unlikely, then one involving the integration of 50,000 Greenlanders. One involves synergizing national interests and cultural norms that currently are extremely different on some key issues, with the comparable populations to actually force compromise, the other involves some intelligent and practical diplomacy, with relatively easy integration. 0.1% of US GDP could give every Greenlander 20x their yearly income, and even minor immigration for mining, vacations, etc. would be enough to bring them into the a
Think Alaska purchase vs. Polish Lithuania Commonwealth. One has a clear path to success, the other is a grand imperial project that risks serious internal division.
I'm not saying we shouldn't buy Greenland, just that it's thinking too small.
The EU would be good, but may make more sense as a separate bloc. The Anglosphere and American East Asia (Japan, SK, Taiwan) is where you'd want to start regardless.
What do we want Greenland for? They already let us have military bases there, and send scientists there.
The same reason we wanted Alaska, which is now so profitable there are no state income taxes and the government issues a dividend to its citizens just for being there.
Purchasing Alaska for almost nothing was extremely controversial a few hundred years ago, but now it's proven to be one of the highest ROI land purchases in human history, besides perhaps the Louisiana purchase.
Greenland is #1 not necessarily for its importance, but for its feasibility. Denmark has acknowledged the Greenland right to vote for independence, which already has support among much of the Greenlandish population. A simple agreement for a $1 Million direct cash transfer from the US to every person in Greenland if they vote for independence could be arranged (Only $55 Billion Dollars!) plus another million for acceptance of territory status after independence would be achievable.
If this isn't politically practical with Denmark (who cares about their opinion anyways) due to accusations of foreign interference with the Greenland independence referendum (true), then maybe something more subtle can be done, like a pending US investment totaling billions, but it's being "held up" by Denmark for arbitrary reasons.
Having been to Nuuk I can attest that those Inuit are tiny Americans at heart, yearning to be free.
And if it's a state we have full access to its natural resources.
Adopt the metric system, fix the healthcare system at least to the point that it's not the number one cause of bankruptcy and (distant third) do something about the bizarre electoral college system and I'm sure myself and my countrymen would dive right in.
It's not the number one cause of bankruptcy
Where are you getting that from? I've seen multiple sources that say that it is, and even more sources that cite a 40% figure. So even if it's not a majority all on its own, then it's a plurality.
Canadian here: there are a lot of pros, but the healthcare and guns are just such massive, massive cons that they might outweigh everything else. There could probably be a way to have the provinces retain healthcare but the issue would become one of strong negative selection (i.e. how to prevent a flood of Americans who need healthcare from going to Canada), which could probably be solved with a sort of regional identity scheme.
The guns are harder to fix.
A sort of Americas-EU?
Canadian here: there are a lot of pros, but the healthcare and guns are just such massive, massive cons that they might outweigh everything else. There could probably be a way to have the provinces retain healthcare but the issue would become one of strong negative selection (i.e. how to prevent a flood of Americans who need healthcare from going to Canada), which could probably be solved with a sort of regional identity scheme.
The guns are harder to fix.
As someone living in a country that has better institutions than the US - made possible by an overall political zeitgeist that is at least somewhat accepting of the possibility that government need not be utterly dysfunctional and can in fact be a force for making life better and not worse - I wouldn't want to become a US state or in any other way tie our politics any closer to those of the US than they already are.
That said, I've always been an advocate of open borders. I think the Schengen area is a wonderful thing; enlarging that and/or having the US start its own equivalent would both be good IMO. All the same reasons that make free markets the best way we know of to drive decisions about all sorts of other aspects of life also remain true for political choices, government policies and legislation; but those markets are only free to the extent that people can move between providers of those things.
The UK, as McDonalds-style petty vengeance.
I would definitely vote to become a US state. It would guarantee faster growing economy, more option to move to other US states etc. More security guarantees, more democracy. What are good reasons to vote against?
As an American, I do like my country, but, if I was you, I'd be very worried about numerous disruptive, violent elements encouraged by the American left expanding to the Canadian territory. Think the likes of BLM burning down downtowns anytime a policeman shoots a violent criminal who happens to be black, or all the gangs and potential terrorists allowed into the US through the open southern border in the past 4 years. I'm sure that the people who engineered all this aren't anywhere done.
EDIT: Oops, I assumed you were Canadian. I'm not sure how it would work with a country not adjacent to the US, but I'd still be worried.
Nationalistic people tend to overestimate their own countries. My view is simply economic, if the US has better economy then it makes sense to join it.
I am in the UK now. Its economy is lagging and it would be much better to join the US, at least in some status, like the EU, to improve the economy. Of course, having no shared border would make it impractical. I wonder if Brexit was because the EU was lagging economically and British people lost faith in it.
As for gangs, I guess the UK has its own share. The fully open borders with the US states would make no difference.
...Why do you think the American left still has a future? The country has effectively voted for them to be dealt with.
I'm sure you realize that the fact that we voted for them to be dealt with by far doesn't mean they are done. The organizers didn't exactly throw in the towel and offer an olive branch, and neither did they move to Canada or Europe.
No, I'm quite sure there's going to be more. There will be much more pushback this time, but it's a good question how well that would work.
As an Australian: aw, thanks! In various ways we are already kind of like a distant American state - I agree with your line about “people with fortunes who depend on US elections getting representation.”
Would I vote to join America? I realise this is kind of a non-answer but it depends on implementation. Things I would love: lower taxes, access to American companies and the American enterprising spirit, full diplomatic support against the gradual encroachment of China. Things I would not love: having to work in broken American health care system with its bizarre way of tying health insurance to employment. Second Amendment might be an issue too.
Not just from your comment, but it's surprising to me how strong the negative reaction is to the 2nd Amendment / guns. The healthcare system I expected as a sticking point but not the guns specifically.
> full diplomatic support against the gradual encroachment of China.
After the Five Eyes countries (and Mexico, I think it should be in the first tranche) we should prioritize convincing as much of Micronesia as possible to join and convert US territories in the area to states; Japan (we wrote their Constitution, should be easy enough) and South Korea would also be fast followers.
Depending on how quickly we're ready to start integrating larger, lower income nations the Philippines could be next. Overall a hefty counterweight to China.
Take note, Obama: that's how you do a pivot to the Pacific.
Another Australian here. I think a lot of Australians see the violence generated by, well, your culture (this is a ridiculous over-simplification of course) and blame it on easy availablity of the tools used to express it. Of course the Australian experience with gun control (very successful at preventing mass shootings since the Port Arthur shootings that prompted it) pushes us to think that way, but I think we discount that you just have a way more violent culture and it's not guns or movies or video games that drive the violence.
Wasting Australia still way less violent before said mass shootings? I think every statistical analysis I’ve seen done - including a meta-analysis by the Brookings Institure - has found that most of the differential between the US and other 1st world countries probably isn’t attributable to guns.
Australia was definitely less violent than the USA before those shootings, and I'm certainly not saying that gun control is the cause of that - I'm saying the opposite. But I think it's also true that gun control in Australia has likely reduced the already lower incidence of mass shootings, especially that category of shooting that isn't simply a gang incident, murder/suicide or suicide-by-cop but is a genuine attempt to kill a lot of unrelated strangers.
Thanks for the add. I wasn’t quite sure if it was in error and had meant to email you on it. I promise to behave responsibly.
I'll behave irresponsibly so you don't have to.
I appreciate that.
I gotchu fam
Lets suppose I'm a middle aged white male, and I have no friends. It's been like this for years, and I'm not asking for the standard list of how-to-make-friends.
I'm asking what are my prospects of a happy life without friends.
I'm asking if people have good strategies for having a good but friendless life.
In a few years, convincing AI friends will exist. Buy one.
How much money do you have?
Become completely self-sufficient. That’s all.
Relate to people on another basis besides friendship. You can have colleagues, co-religionists, co-hobbyists etc etc. I don't have any one that I'm friends with just for pleasure, and I'm extremely satisfied with my social life. The trick is to have something important that you care about above and beyond pleasure, that will provide you with the terms for your non-friend relationships.
There is so much individual variation on the need for friends and other forms of social relationships, that there is no generic advice that would make any sense. It's all about figuring out what you need, and how to get it.
I just want to +1 Eremolalos ideas.
Especially the activities with contact to people, just without ever trying to befriending them are good things.
You get the benefit of, let's call it, species-appropriate conduct, without putting any skin in the game. No one can force you to become their friend :)
But if you have no friends *and* don't do anything, I suspect you go mad.
> I just want to +1 Eremolalos ideas.
Same here, although I'm not really a hermit, so not sure how relevant my +1 is.
I'd particularly second her advice to "Have pets. Or take it beyond having pets and breed and/or train some kind of animal."
Breeding and training puppies has been a source of great joy and interest in my life, and it keeps you engaged on a many-hours-per-day basis.
I know someone now who has an 8 month oldNorwegian Laphund (I may not have the name quite right).. They herd reindeer, and Christmas front yard displays featuring plastic reindeer blew out her fuses. She's very smart and quick, and he's thinking of training her for dog agility contests. Those look like great fun to me l for both dog and owner. At end of course dogs jump onto owner's arms grinning.
> I know someone now who has an 8 month oldNorwegian Laphund (I may not have the name quite right).. They herd reindeer, and Christmas front yard displays featuring plastic reindeer blew out her fuses.
Ha! Now *that's* living! :-)
I often think that dogs represent an under-appreciated standard that we should aspire towards, because they represent a lot of what's best about us - loyalty, empathy, a natural affinity for cooperation, the desire to play, the desire to excel and do a job well, and of course the abiding and unconditional love that characterizes their relationship to you and the rest of their "pack members."
Not to mention, they eat dirty socks and underwear and really cut down on the laundry.
You're not the first or the last or the only to have lived wanted to do this. Read about hermits and other people who have lived very solitary lives. Some seem to have made a go of it, becoming engrossed in activities that were important to them. Anyhow, here are some suggestions for strategies.
THINGS THAT INVOLVE PEOPLE, BUT DO NOT REQUIRE YOU TO MAKE FRIENDS
Find volunteer or paid opportunities to help people without getting to know them.
There are probably some where you can even get info about how the people are benefitting.
Sports, for ex. Ultimate Frisbee. Serious body building in a gym.
Classes.
Religious or semi-religious (eg Buddhism) services, training and retreats
Online forums like this one
AA and similar
Have a blog
THINGS WITHOUT PEOPLE
Have pets. Or take it beyond having pets and breed and/or train some kind of animal.
Pursue your interests via study and practice.
Make things. Learn to make things that are hard to make. Learn to sail or dogsled. Build a cabin or a windmill or a boat. Paint watercolors. Make apps and games for computer and phones.
Photography.
Write or read fiction or history.
And here are some books about hermits, also from GPT
The Hermit in the Garden: From Imperial Rome to Ornamental Gnome
By Gordon Campbell, this book explores the history of hermits from ancient Rome to modern times, delving into the lives of famous hermits like St. Anthony of Egypt and St. Jerome.
MEDIEVAL CHRONICLES
A Book of Silence
In this 2008 publication, Sara Maitland reflects on her own pursuit of solitude and silence, exploring the lives of people today who occupy solitary states, such as solo sailors and polar explorers.
WELLCOME COLLECTION
The World of Medieval Monasticism: Its History and Forms of Life
By Gert Melville, this book provides a comprehensive overview of medieval monasticism, including the role of hermits in the wider monastic world.
MEDIEVAL CHRONICLES
The English Hermit: A Monastic Type
By Hugh F. M. Richmond, this book focuses on the history of hermits in England, exploring the reasons why people became hermits and the different types of hermitages.
MEDIEVAL CHRONICLES
The Substance of Silence: A Reading List About Hermits
This compilation offers various perspectives on the lives of hermits and the allure of solitude throughout history.
LONGREADS
So I asked GPT to give the names of some hermits who seemed to adapt well to living that way, and where someone could learn more about them, and here is the list it gave me:
*Historical and Religious Hermits*
Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
Famous for his two-year experiment in simple living at Walden Pond, chronicled in Walden.
Where to Read: Thoreau’s Walden is an essential book. Secondary sources, such as Robert Richardson’s biography Henry Thoreau: A Life of the Mind, also provide insights.
St. Anthony the Great (c. 251–356)
An early Christian monk considered the father of monasticism. He lived in the Egyptian desert, practicing extreme solitude and asceticism.
Where to Read: Athanasius’s Life of Antony is the main source of information about him.
Figures like Julian of Norwich (1343–c. 1416), an anchoress, wrote Revelations of Divine Love, reflecting deep spiritual contentment.
Where to Read: Julian’s Revelations of Divine Love and works on Christian mysticism.
Christopher Knight ("The North Pond Hermit") (b. 1965)
Lived alone in the woods of Maine for 27 years, stealing supplies to survive. He described being content with solitude.
Where to Read: Michael Finkel’s The Stranger in the Woods explores his life and mindset.
Richard Proenneke (1916–2003)
Built a cabin in Alaska and lived there alone for nearly 30 years. His journals were compiled into the book One Man's Wilderness.
Where to Read: One Man’s Wilderness: An Alaskan Odyssey by Sam Keith, based on Proenneke’s journals.
Emma "Grandma" Gatewood (1887–1973)
Though not a complete hermit, she often hiked alone, including being the first woman to solo hike the Appalachian Trail. Her journeys reflect a deep contentment with solitude.
Where to Read: Grandma Gatewood's Walk by Ben Montgomery.
Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
While not a strict hermit, he valued solitude as a source of creative and spiritual renewal.
Where to Read: His essays, particularly Self-Reliance and Nature.
Emily Dickinson (1830–1886)
Lived much of her life in seclusion, rarely leaving her family home. Her poetry reflects her contented inward life.
Where to Read: Collections of Dickinson’s poems and biographies like Lives Like Loaded Guns by Lyndall Gordon.
Ryokan Taigu (1758–1831)
A Zen Buddhist monk and poet who lived in a hut in the mountains of Japan. He was deeply content with his simple life.
Where to Read: Dewdrops on a Lotus Leaf: Zen Poems of Ryokan offers a collection of his poetry.
Matsuo Bashō (1644–1694)
The famed Japanese haiku poet spent much of his life wandering and living simply. His works reflect solitude and harmony with nature.
Where to Read: The Narrow Road to the Deep North and Other Travel Sketches.
J.D. Salinger (1919–2010)
Though a real person, Salinger adopted a hermit-like lifestyle, avoiding public life after publishing The Catcher in the Rye.
Where to Read: Biographies like Kenneth Slawenski’s J.D. Salinger: A Life explore his secluded life.
Grizzly Adams (John Adams, 1812–1860)
A mountain man who lived in isolation in the Sierra Nevada, surrounded by nature and animals.
Where to Read: Historical accounts and stories inspired by his life, such as The Life and Adventures of James Capen Adams by Theodore Hittell.
GPT didn't bring up Grigory Perlman?? Probably the world's most prominent living hermit?
People kept braving the wilds of Sweden to knock on his door, trying to award him the Nobel-equivalent in mathematics (Fields medal) and give him $1M in prizes, and he kept turning them away and asking to be left alone.
Now THAT'S commitment to the bit!
Speaking from personal experience, you're pretty much screwed. I suggest finding some friends as soon as possible if you have means to do so. Only desolation and madness await the isolate.
I think that if someone asks a question here we should assume they are responsible adults, and if we have the information they are asking for we should give it to them. If they sound out of touch with reality or like they are falling apart or they ask for help committing a crime or committing suicide then no, we should not answer their question. But OP here sounds calm and sane and makes clear what he wants to know, and that he is not interested in being nudged to make friends or advised on how to do it.
What are you even talking about? I'm just speaking from first-hand experience that none of those impersonal interactions and activities are going to fill the gaping void in your heart. If he was perfectly happy being alone, he would not be asking this question.
...It's worth making the effort to connect with people. That's all I'm trying to say.
I think you mean that it failed to fill the gap in your heart. You can have no idea what would or would not fill the heart of someone else.
" Only desolation and madness await the isolate."
Doesn't that sound extreme?
Not really. Studies have shown a significant increase in mortality and health issues for people who lack social interactions. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC2910600/ And dementia. https://academic.oup.com/psychsocgerontology/article/75/1/114/3896175?login=false
Yes, well, the same can be said of being overweight, smoking, being a couch potato, daily drinking even in moderate amounts, and a lot of other things.
Asking reasonable questions and getting a rash of shit back isn't very good for people either.
It's about as bad as smoking, which is... not great. And worse than all of the other things you mentioned. And of course, that's not even including the risk of depression and suicide.
Yea, OK, but if somebody on here asks which common US cigarette brand tastes most like Gauloises, do you think they should get an antismoking lecture instead of an answer? Or how about if they ask for info about rock climbing, or helicopter skiing, or big wave surfing, all of which are pretty risky? In all these cases the chance that the person asking has not already been told about the risks is very low. What's the point of giving the risk lecture again? And are we really in a position to be sure that in their case the activity is not worth the risk?
Congratulations to Donald on Congress’s certification of his electoral victory. Opinions about the events surrounding Joe’s certification four years ago vary widely—some view them as really damaging, others see them as minor or overblown. How do you see today’s proceedings compared to those four years ago?
I think it puts paid to the idea that the left and the right are mirror images of each other. We all know what would have happened if Harris had won.
Both sides have extremists, but one set of extremists does not act like the other.
I feel like America had some real serious political debates about lots of topics all at once and is functioning reasonably well?
I predict a lot less political violence, a lot less wokeness, a lot less unpopular foreign wars, a lot less illegal immigration, a lot less reliance on China, a real fight on policy on the right on a bunch of topics instead of just being the party of 'no', a lot less conspiracy theorism, and most importantly less legislation by administrative state expanding its powers. Just a huge shift towards the median voter in a way that makes it feel like we're living in a more 'responsive democracy'.
Just in general I think our media and cultural organs are doing a remarkably good job of navigating diversity of interests, opinions, and factual filters, and it could be so much worse.
If AI doesn't end everything early, I'm cautiously optimistic about the next four years.
Ended up voting for Kamala because the attempted coup was a read line for me, glad she lost though, mostly because I think Trump will 'strongman' Iran/Russia into backing down, and will either give up Taiwan bloodlessly, or make it clear 'not on my watch' there as well.
Also culturally, it feels like the gaslighting on all sides is less threatening? Partisans lie, we can tell when they do, and we don't need to be terrified that there isn't a bunch of normal americans who can see through it all and make their voices heard. We can just roll our eyes and live our lives, at everyone.
Wow, you're optimistic. I hope you're right.
Well, Matt Yglesias had an interesting take on that today in an un-paywalled post.
“The scariest thing about contemporary American politics is that on January 7, 2021, it was widely acknowledged among American conservatives that Donald Trump’s behavior on January 6th was completely unacceptable.
No one, at the time, was emotionally or intellectually invested in debating whether it was “really” a coup or whether a political movement that did something like that was “really” fascist. Mitch McConnell said Trump was morally responsible for the crimes committed. Steve Schwarzman called it “appalling and an affront to the democratic values we hold dear as Americans.” Kevin Williamson of National Review rightly called the riot at the Capitol “just the tip of a very dangerous spear.”
I’m not surprised or even particularly upset that so many people who acknowledged the gravity of the offense at the time ended up voting for and supporting Trump.
Electoral politics in a two-party system is hard. So much is at stake at the ballot box — tax policy, abortion rights, immigration, and a million other things, all of which are incredibly important. I deeply respect and admire the decision made by Liz Cheney and a handful of others to take a fully principled stand on the January 6 question, but I also respect (or at least understand) the decision of those who’ve decided they care more about other things than about Trump’s low character and basic unfitness for office. But what disturbs me is the extent to which the entire conservative movement has retconned not just the events of four years ago, but their own reactions to those events, such that these days, to be disturbed by them is considered some form of lib hysteria.
The reality is quite the opposite.”
Slow Boring “Four Years Later” continued…
https://www.slowboring.com/p/four-years-later
Let’s see how the inaugural address goes in a couple weeks. My fear is that all will be well as long we all can now accept that 2 + 2 actually equals 5.
The casual heuristic of "If this was a planned subterfuge, is this how it would reasonably be done?" tells me that this was almost certainly not a coup. A bunch of angry protestors, mostly unarmed, breaking into the capitol to what? Hang Mike Pence so he can't officiate the election? That's a ridiculous plan if it was one.
Don't they know that there are a bunch of tunnels Congress can escape through? Isn't being heavily armed a prerequisite for taking over a nation (especially one as powerful as the United States with a long democratic tradition)?
Sure, Trump didn't especially do anything about it at the time, and he wasn't exactly condemning their actions at the time either, but there's a difference between that and planning a coup as far as most people are concerned. Ordering the military to disperse a protest, that's protesting in favor of you, even if it got violent, isn't exactly what most people would do in that situation.
It was definitely a protest that got out of hand, which demonstrates the idiocy of many people supporting Trump, and was definitely illegal, but calling it a coup that Trump planned is a huge departure from reality as I see it.
The thing to remember is that the protestors believed that the election had already been stolen (ignore for the moment whether that is a defensible belief or not). Given that they sincerely believed that, their actions make more sense (not perfect sense, since even had they been right they weren't going to "stop the steal" that way).
Trump was just an opportunist. But his actions that day, and afterward reveal something about him: he couldn't care less about legal or democratic processes. I think that if he could overthrow the government with an illegal coup, he absolutely would, but he himself isn't smart enough to figure out how.
This. During his presidency, Trump was mostly free if base entertainment for the world and the US (SCOTUS aside, but that would have gone similarly under a non-clown republican president).
Oh no, he fired another secretary, and there are still people applying for the job.
Oh no, he did a photo-op with Kim.
Oh no, you would not believe what outrageous thing he tweeted today.
Oh no, he is having legal drama..
As far as US presidents go, his track record was not disastrous. Sure, he put some migrants in cages, but my baseline for US presidents is nuking Nagasaki, getting involved in Vietnam, turning torture into official US policy, sponsoring coups to overthow democracies in Latin America or lying to the feds about not having gotten a blowjob (I kid). Basically, he could have moonlighted as a serial killer without registering on my outrange-o-meter when it is calibrated for presidencies.
He had this one Iranian general killed in an airstrike, but that did not seem like a particularly irreplaceable loss for humanity either. And for COVID, it would have been nice to have some adult in the room, but the established non-partisan experts were rather terrible too. (Remember the lies about masks being ineffective?)
But once he was voted out his always strained relationship with the truth went downhill to levels seen on his 2016 campaign trail, where he had denied Obama being born in the US. "Stop the steal." This was a man who would happily burn the commons for whatever slim chance to not face the fact that he had been voted out. I am convinced that if the insurgents he had incited over months (in the vague hope that they would somehow change the outcome) had miraculously managed to overthrow the government, he would have happily resided in the white house while the corpse of his former vice president was rotting on some flagpole nearby.
That's fair, but also a very different claim than "January 6th was a coup attempt by Trump" as a lot of people seem to take at face value. I wouldn't be surprised if the majority of politicians wouldn't take powers and term lengths outside what is constitutionally allowed given the opportunity, but it's sort of our bad that we are electing people who think like that. Virtue isn't something we seem to value much in politicians anymore (did anyone ever?).
An abnormal election process, with abnormal (to public perception) voting behavior could reasonably make a lot of people, who were acting in good faith, believe that election fraud won Biden the election. Trump looked like he was going to win around 11:00 PM, and it was only after the early morning, when large numbers of mail-in ballots were counted that overwhelmingly voted for Biden, did Biden win. To the uninformed voter, that could plausibly look like they "found" a few hundred thousand votes for Biden.
Not saying that there was fraud, as there was certainly not, or if there was it wasn't enough to make any difference, just that it's not unreasonable for the average person to have believed there was fraud given how things looked, and how the election was run significantly differently from normal due to Covid.
There was attempted fraud--the slates of false electors that Trump and his people attempted to insert into the process. Most elected officials do not go that far. That's not on the voters, that's on him.
>>I wouldn't be surprised if the majority of politicians wouldn't take powers and term lengths outside what is constitutionally allowed given the opportunity, but it's sort of our bad that we are electing people who think like that. Virtue isn't something we seem to value much in politicians anymore (did anyone ever?).
If you believe that lots of politicians would take powers and term lengths outside of what is constitutionally allowed given the opportunity, though, that is grounds for a *stronger* belief that Trump should be punished instead of being reelected. If the prospect of punishment is the only thing holding otherwise corrupt officials from engaging in corrupt behavior, prominently letting one off the hook and rewarding him with more power only weakens the incentives and invites more corruption.
If we accept “sure, Tom may have tried to rob the bank, but honestly wouldn’t we *all* rob a bank if we thought we could get away with it” as a legitimate defense of Tom's behavior, the only thing we’ll succeed in doing is inviting more bank robbers to try their hand later.
> It was definitely a protest that got out of hand
That’s what a failed coup looks like.
Do you remember that he wanted to go to the capital and speak to those people but the Secret Service would not let him? Do you think he really wanted to go there to calm them down? I seriously doubt it.
Remember how he protested that there were metal detectors there, saying that the people didn’t wanna shoot him?
We must have different expectations as to what a deliberate coup looks like. I don't consider all government overthrows, like many during the Arab Spring, as coups. Bottom-up protests, usually the result of forces far outside any individual's control, that overthrow a government happen often enough, but they usually aren't the result of leaders overthrowing the government.
A coup is typically when a faction within the government quickly arrests, kills, or otherwise incapacitates a countries leader's and assumes control. That requires a plan of specifically who you're going after, when you're taking control, and typically coordinated military power to ensure you get what you want quickly. It also helps if it's unexpected, so before most people know there's even a coup, the old rulers have been replaced, making it useless to try and side with them.
You don't perform a coup by showing up at the least minute, make a speech to a riot and saying "Let's overthrow the government!" to a mostly unarmed crowed and waltz right in. At least not one with any chance of success.
Ok. A coup is a sudden, violent overthrow of a government. According to the dictionary, I looked up.
What do you call it when a group of people who are inside a government try to come up with a way to hold onto power that might be legal but it’s pretty much on the edge? I am perfectly happy to settle on a different word.
A Palace intrigue…?
If everything goes just right, it might work. If you can get an alternate slate of electors into the Congress and have a Congressman (or two) object to the official slate of electors and get the vice president to choose the alternates? (Especially when the alternate slates were being prepared in great secrecy and quite surreptitiously and, according to more than one state, not in keeping with their laws or intentions? e.g. Arizona, Georgia Wisconsin.
And IF, at the same time, you can get a large group of people to make a lot of noise and riot a little bit AND you do pull off your palace intrigue, all these people will be thrilled! And then you’re on your way aren’t you? An arguable legal issue that will take weeks to sort out in the normal scheme of things, and lots of other people very happy with the outcome around the country and the Proud Boys (and others) “standing by” in Washington (as we know); now what do you call it? A lucky coincidence?
I am glad that it did not work out, and I am glad that the American people have gotten the president they wanted after all. I have no doubt that legal boundaries will be challenged hard in the coming years and it will be interesting to see what holds and what doesn’t. I guess what I’m saying is I am not a knee-jerk liberal, but I know what I see and I don’t like to have illusions about it based on my personal preferences.
Someone here has pointed out that the vice president has no power to reject electoral votes and that’s probably true, but to this group of people the legal framework of that was apparently vague and somewhat elastic (if you pulled hard enough on it) and maybe Trump could get Mike Pence to do that. He couldn’t. We all know how Trump feels about Mike Pence these days, but it is interesting that when JD Vance was asked if he would’ve done it he replied absolutely yes.
I guess the appropriate term would be self-coup, as Trump was still in charge at the time.
I can buy that there was a lot of intruiging going on behind the scenes, and that Trump was looking to bend things until they broke and he remained in power. The capital riot itself though, seems to be a natural result of the fishy smell the 2020 election had (again, not saying it was rigged as I don't believe that, just that it was abnormal and an average uninformed person could reasonably conclude it was rigged with the information they had). Whether Trump was planning a coup or not, and whether 1/6 was convenient for that attempt seems like a separate thing to me than 1/6 being a coup attempt itself.
My beef is that I see a lot of people equivocating 1/6 as a coup attempt, as if Trump, or his goons organized a bunch of supporters to attempt to storm the capitol and literally execute Mike Pence. People who are appalled at Trump trying to overthrow democracy, then angrily gesturing to 1/6 as evidence of that, which just doesn't fit for me. I'm sure there are people presenting a more nuanced approach that actually looks at everything he did with the electors and calling up Georgia and whatnot, but then the accusations of a coup attempt turn into accusations of Trump trying to figure out how to stay in power, which seems qualitatively different, or at least not as exciting.
It would be equivalent of calling the BLM riots/protest an attempted communist takeover of our cities (remember CHOP?). Yes, perhaps if there was a communist plot to takeover a bunch of cities the BLM protests could theoretically help serve that purpose, but the protests themselves were not an attempt to overthrow the government.
If you want to be technical about it, it was an attempted insurrection, not a coup. Trump didn't organize it.
"That’s what a failed coup looks like."
I don't think so. Can you name any other failed coups that ended like this? Or successful coups that began like this? The vast majority of coups are where the military arrests the president and takes over media organizations, right?
The ones that fail are always harder to find, aren’t they? The only one off the top of my head that is in the same ballpark is the beer Hall Putch (sp?)
Now that you mention it, Russia tried a coup in the Ukraine recently and failed. It’s turned into a bit of a grind, hasn’t it? Thank God we are Americans.
As an aside, I believe that the United States will experience a full on military coup eventually. I don’t think there’s any way around it.
Obligatory Godwin-
The Beer Hall Putsch is pretty universally recognized as a "failed coup attempt," but did not involve the military seizing the president.
Hitler basically jumped up on a table, fired a gunshot for everybody's attention, and declared that the current government was liquidated, then marched to the capital and hoped for the best.
That said, I think WaitForMe really has it right. Too much focus is on the riot on Jan 6 itself, rather than the attempt at falsifying election results in the months leading up to it.
To be fair, that coup was also a display of comical levels of magical thinking. For one thing, it happened in Munich. The capital of the Weimar Republic was (as not indicated by the name) Berlin, which is quite a bit away. But even the place which Hitler and his goons were marching to was silly: the Feldherrenhalle is not the seat of the regional government.
For a non-stupid version of the Hitler-Putsch, look at the Kapp-Putsch. There the perpetrators did at least get the city right, had the military on their side and managed to arrest some republic officials.
Of course, the morale of the story is that if someone tries to attempt a coup or incite an insurgency in a profoundly silly way which is unlikely to work, it is not safe to lean back and call them "harmless because stupid". Rather, one should update on them being unscrupulous in attempting to size power and not count on them remaining as stupid in the future.
The real coup was trying to have Mike Pence not certify the election and throw it to the house, along with the scheming to create alternate slates of electors to vote for Trump. January 6th was, in most senses, a riot, rather than a coup. But Trump very badly wanted Pence to overturn the results and have the house instate him. That is a coup attempt, if bungled and probably unrealistic even if Pence did vote against certifying the election.
Agreed. I suspect that Trump's intent with the riot was to arrange a (rowdy) protest as a tacit threat of mob violence, in hopes of bullying Pence and House/Senate Republicans into going along with the plan to overturn the result.
Trump's reaction during the three-hour window between when the capitol was breached and when he gave the "we love you, go home" speech seems like he was hoping that the actual mob violence he got would serve the same purpose. His conversation with then-Speaker Kevin McCarthy, in which Trump responded to McCarthy telling him to call off the rioters with “Well, Kevin, I guess these people are more upset about the election than you are,” seems particularly damning.
The difference between a farcical, obviously-not-going-to-succeed, is-it-even-a-coup coup attempt and an actual coup is that one succeeded and one didn't. A lot of coups would probably look pretty silly if, for whatever reason, it just didn't work out.
Indeed. Recent events in Seoul have exactly that look.
"entire conservative movement has retconned not just the events of four years ago"
I observed the liberals rewrite the narrative in the days, weeks, then months following January 6th.
While the events were unfolding, it was a news story of a massive crowd walking past security, going where they shouldn't normally be, and some guy sitting in Nancy Pelosi's chair.
A day or so later, it came out that some people, fewer than 10, had died. I was unclear at the time from reports whether any of the security people had died, but some of the rioters had. It seemed like a whole bunch of people dissatisfied with the election verification, tired of being ignored, decided not to be ignored anymore; not a coup, since they didn't have weapons, AFAICS.
Within weeks, the narrative had changed to an attempted coup to keep Trump as President. Then it changed to Trump having orchestrated the events to stay President. Within months it was "the greatest threat to democracy the country had ever faced."
Revisionist history IS happening, and has been happening for some time. 1984 has stealthily arrived.
I would say what you call revisionism by the left post January 6 is the result of more and more information coming out about what was going on behind the scenes on January 6, and the things that had been going on leading up to it. I would call it updating an opinion based on new information.
I can certainly understand thinking that, but I too thought about it at the time as a possibility, and my impression didn't match that. It was four years ago, so I don't remember the details, but I don't remember anything I expected that would match that, like "We don't yet know how many were injured, but it is expected to be only a few individuals" followed later by "The casualty count now exceeds 10, and may be higher as we gain more details" with more detailed information as time went on.
Instead, I found the character of what happened being reported and updated. I remember hearing nothing of Trump's involvement early on, but Trump was involved months later.
I see two things going on there; it took a while to dig down and to get people to talk and to find a paper trail. The second thing I see going on is probably an institutional bias to just let the whole thing go if Donald Trump was never going to be seen on the public stage again. Better to let bygones be bygones under those circumstances. I know the received wisdom among certain people is that (the deep state, the Democrats, etc.) decided to make something up and go after him the moment he decided to run again. I don’t really believe that. There is enough evidence to support the idea that this stuff was indeed going on. One could certainly claim, in that sense (just letting it go as long as he rode off into the sunset), the prosecution was political. But the prosecution was not a fiction. It’s not a bunch of Trump hating prosecutors going after him for no reason whatsoever.
I can’t help feeling that he created the Mar-a-Lago situation on purpose. He could have raised his claims of rightful possession from the moment the national archive first contacted him about those papers, but he did not. He engaged in various shady practices to hide the papers, and forced the showdown. Then, when he had a national audience, he claimed that he owned the papers and was being harassed. He likes to test boundaries, and he has keen political instincts, which is a double-edged sword if you know what I mean.
"While the events were unfolding, it was a news story of a massive crowd walking past security, going where they shouldn't normally be, and some guy sitting in Nancy Pelosi's chair." Nice try at gaslighting.
Reported for lack of post content. You should explain something if you're going to attack it.
Fair enough.
Some news websites on Jan 6:
Nytimes: "Mob storms Capitol, inflamed by angry Trump speech"
https://web.archive.org/web/20210106215915/https://www.nytimes.com/
MSNBC: "Pro-Trump protesters storm Capitol, forcing Senate evacuation during Electoral College count"
https://web.archive.org/web/20210106202318/https://www.msnbc.com/
Fox News: "Capitol under Siege" ; "McCarthy condemns 'un-American' breach of US Capitol by pro-Trump demonstrators"
https://web.archive.org/web/20210106211735/https://www.foxnews.com/
Now, you COULD describe that as "a massive crowd walking past security"... but that wasn't exactly the phrasing that was used in news outlets.
I think you should look a little more deeply into the trials of some of the major conspirators to see how much Information came to light post January 6 about the events leading up to it and what was going on that day. There were a ton of weapons in Washington DC that day in hotel rooms waiting for the moment. There were extensive text threads between some of those people and people close to Trump (Roger Stone, for instance) I really think you’re whistling past the graveyard here.
Not again. I looked at the trials before, when things were more current, and "selection bias" seemed to be the strategy. I suspect that is also currently the case.
I had looked for evidence that Trump was behind it all, which is what the Democrats really wanted to get out of it, and found nothing convincing.
January 6th should NOT have happened, but it gets support from Republicans because of the way Democrats have tried to use it. Whenever "January 6th" is used as a rallying cry against Republicans, or Trump specifically, it's "here we go again". We need to put the event past us, as the nothing burger with some substance but nothing worth dividing the country over it should be. Not very palatable, so why keep eating it?
>>January 6th should NOT have happened, but it gets support from Republicans because of the way Democrats have tried to use it.
It gets support from Republicans because when confronted with a choice between:
(a) "admit that my tribe's leader attempted election fraud, and that instead of punishing him we rewarded him with more power," and
(b) "think of literally any other semi-plausible explanation in which my tribe did not do a bad - a 'coup' requires the military, and/or certifying election results is inherently political, and/or it was the work of antifa infiltrators, and/or it's possible the election really *was* rigged and even if it wasn't what matters for election legitimacy is that people *believe* the election results and clearly Democrats failed to convince them to do that so this is all their fault, and/or prosecuting Trump somehow was simultaneously a Democrat failure that made them the *real* threat to democracy while also being a Democrat failure because they didn't do it fast enough, and/or etc, etc etc,...
... tribal monkey brain's kneejerk response is to slam the button for option (b) so hard his hand breaks.
"January 6 was bad, but Republicans only support it because Democrats rallied against it the wrong way" is just another subset of category (b). *My* side isn't badwrong, *your* side is badwrong for calling us badwrong so badwrongly.
So you give no weight to the attempt to prepare alternate slates of electors? (Arizona and Georgia are both taking that rather seriously at the moment.) The extended conversations with John Eastman, about how there might be a loophole that could be exploited by Pence? His exhortation to the proud boys to “stand down but standby“? His wish to go to the capital that day and speak in person? Of course it was not a well organized coup. It was an attempt to stretch all the boundaries and pull something off, based on a lie, which is that the election was stolen in the first place. I agree it’s tiresome to go over this and that things are as they are now but there’s no point in making up a story about it. That’s what bothers me. This issue has nothing to do with how I feel about any of his particular policies that; is a separate question.
I agree in some sense. I knew it wasn't directed by Trump, or full of military veterans storming the capital with guns. But also, pictures/videos on that very first day or perhaps the day after included the shooting of Ashley Babbit as the rioters tried to break through a clearly barred door with capital police telling them to stop, congressmen cowering afraid in the chamber, and people chanting "Hang Mike Pence" before they burst through door, all while disguising their identities and some of them holding improved weapons, though not actual firearms/axes/what have you.
It was clearly a riot to me and not an organized coup, but also not a "crowd walking past security" and "going where they shouldn't be". There was certainly an overt sense of violence about the whole thing.
Again, it was an attempted insurrection, not a coup.
That is a better way to put it.
This doesn't fit my recollections. Over at DSL we were arguing over the "coup" description the day it happened, so evidently the idea was already out there. (I was one of the people ridiculing it, and have not changed my mind since.)
I agree it was discussed on the first day. But my impression was more of a child's rebellion than an attempted government takeover.
It was a sufficiently incompetent attempt at a government takeover that it might as well have been planned by a child. But the obvious intent was to take over the government.
And the planning was more thorough and more credible than the plan for the Beer Hall Putsch, which is broadly regarded as having been a (pathetically incompetent) coup attempt.
This also was my impression on the day of 1/6/21, as refreshed by reading my diary entry for the day. A pathetically incompetent coup/insurrection attempt, but absolutely not any sort of "peaceful protest". There's definitely an attempt at rewriting history here, but it's mostly on the Republican side.
Thank you.
I certainly agree it wasn't a peaceful protest. I remember thinking something like, "I understand these people think they'll get their voices heard now, but this won't end well."
I was surprised how few people got hurt or killed with the initial reports. The number seemed to keep rising not as more information came to light, but as the implications were analyzed as "how can this damage Trump?"
We need to do the Vulcan mind meld. I’d love to understand your point of view and for you to understand mine.
Our perceptions of reality are disjoint in so many ways.
Live long and prosper.
Oh, thanks for the tip on McCabe and Mrs Miller. We did a three night Altman binge: that one, Short Cuts and 3 Women. The last 2 were re-viewings but I hadn’t seen M&MM before.
The last scene with the derringer I had seen reproduced in a snippet of Boardwalk Empire with Steve Buscemi as the shooter. I just saw the final few minutes of that waiting for something else. It felt a bit like an homage to Altman.
You are very welcome and I am glad you enjoyed it. It’s one of my favorite movies. Leonard Cohen’s soundtrack is so brilliant and as usual Julie Christie is to die for.
I liked how today went. A lot less batshit than last time. Maybe the losers can keep it together again next certification and make it two straight without trashing our own house. Start a new streak.
Yes, Trump is the party of Jan 6. But the Dems are the party of BLM. To me BLM was exactly the same thing but 10x worse. US politics is terribly broken right now and our only choices are between the lesser of two evils.
The members of the BLM protest movement believed that American police were shooting innocent black men to death in unreasonable circumstances. They thought they were trying to save lives (ignore, for the moment, whether that is a defensible belief or not). Given that they believed that, their actions make more sense (*much* more sense than the Jan 6 protestors, since BLM largely accomplished their goal).
Right, and the January 6 protestors thought that there were problematic voting irregularities in the 2020 election that hadn't been properly investigated. Protesting makes sense in that context as well.
A) That theory was provably wrong at the time. Blacks are killed by police proportionately less than their participation in violent crime would warrant. If anything, a rational analysis of racial crime statistics should make whites angry with blacks, not the other way around. B) EVEN IF it was true, violent riots are never the way forward on difficult political problems. This has been demonstrated by the subsequent 4 years of crime statistics: the black homicide rate increased by 40% in the 4 years after George Floyd's death. They got the opposite of what they thought they wanted. Responding supportively to stupid people's temper tantrums is never good policy.
I will notice though that Trump was personally spreading the lies which if true would have legitimized trying a counter-coup and thus fueled the Jan 6 insurrection, while I don't recall Joe Biden going on record claiming that the cops killed ten innocent black people every day and that the only way to stop them would be to immediately disband all police forces.
Now, clearly the Dems knew which side they were supposed to be on, and I am sure half their congresspeople used the phrase 'epidemic of police violence' or something.
Trump had personally sowed the violence of Jan 6 with his election denial. By contrast, no Dem in 2020 thought: "You know what we really need to oust Trump? Race riots, they make our site look really electable!" Instead, the riots seemed to come out of a mix of genuine anger at a highly publicized police murder, a woke ideology who basically excused any violence perpetrated by Blacks, and a lock-down policy which had pushed a lot of people to their brinks, and the Dems were mostly along for the ride.
Now, if after the Floyd murder, one of the top five democrats had claimed that there was a genocide against Black people happening at the hands of the police, and called on all good citizens to stop the killer cops, then I would say that the Dems were equally guilty of inciting violence as Trump was.
> They got the opposite of what they thought they wanted.
The demand was never that the overall Black homicide rate should be lower. Blacks murdering Blacks is not news, there is no racial injustice in it from the woke viewpoint. I think they likely succeeded in making cops more reluctant to engage black suspects for fear of a PR disaster. It just so happens that most of the time when the cops get into a firefight, they actually are the good guys.
It was never about Black Lives per se, only EA weirdos would sum up all homicide victims. They only Mattered when they were ended by cops, and by that metric, Systemic Racism has decreased. Success!
>Trump had personally sowed the violence of Jan 6 with his election denial.
How did that sow violence any more than democratic leadership validating the perception that America is structurally racist or that police disproportionately kill black people? They're directly parallel in that they're equally dishonest political lies. If anything Trump at least had a case: there were circumstantial reasons to be skeptical of the election results. BLM's argument didn't even have circumstantial evidence.
>Systemic Racism has decreased. Success!
Viewed through a zero-sum political lens that's probably correct: blacks gained political power relative to whites. Viewed through an absolute lens of "BLM is about improving the lives of black people" BLM was a disaster for most black people.
You must be kidding. BLM was a mess, but it didn’t lead to the almost overthrow of the democratic government of the United States of America. Not only that over the last four years BLM has come into some truthful perspective while January 6 has been completely rewritten by a monstrous lie in my opinion; that the election really was stolen and if you don’t believe it, you’re not welcome in the Republican Party anymore.
> but it didn’t lead to the almost overthrow of the democratic government of the United States of America.
And neither did Jan 6. They were exactly the same thing: a bunch of idiots demonstrating on the basis of a premise that's clearly wrong. Except, of course, that BLM lasted 100x as long and did 100x the damage. There is no plausible scenario whereby the Jan 6 protests could have affected the election outcome. To claim otherwise is nothing but politically motivated hysterics.
The J6 protesters were in no way 'clearly wrong'. Whether or not the Democrats committed election fraud and whether that determined the results are unknowable because they blocked all inquiry into the topic.
Trump filed 62 lawsuits in various states. There was a *fuckload* of inquiry into the topic, and basically all of it came back with judges saying "nope, this isn't fraud" or "nope, this isn't a procedural violation." (Most of the lawsuits didn't actually allege fraud, only procedural issues. Probably because once they got an actual lawyer involved they realized they didn't have evidence of fraud).
A lot of the lawsuits were heard by Republican judges, some appointed by Trump himself. I'm not sure what other forms of inquiry you could want here. This was Trump getting his proverbial day in court, and he lost about as decisively as he could.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Post-election_lawsuits_related_to_the_2020_U.S._presidential_election
Agreed, the Jan 6 folks were less provably wrong than BLMers but in my view they're both idiots. Conspiracy theories are rarely falsifiable but you have to be a pretty big moron to take one seriously enough to protest over.
"They" "blocked all inquiry"? Weren't there dozens of court trials that looked into the claims, that didn't find anything substantial (apart from attempts by Trump to influence the counting process)? Didn't even the (Republican) officials in Georgia insist that everything was kosher?
You are either very poorly informed or perhaps engaging in political hysterics. I’m not sure which.
It did not lead to the overthrow of the United States government it led to the *almost* overthrow of the United States government, is what I said. BLM didn’t come close; see Detroit in 1968, Los Angeles after the Rodney King incident, the riot in New York after the caravan of Hasidim accidentally ran over a black child in Crown Heights. That is the lineage of the BLM riots. They have absolutely nothing to do with what happened on January 6. Based on all the available evidence, I think you would really have to be kidding yourself to believe otherwise.
No, simply better informed than you are. Trump challenged the electors. He's entitled to do that. The Democrats have challenged in every election that they've lost since 2000. Nothing any protest did could have legally altered that process. The VP has zero legal discretion in the certification of election results. The role is purely ceremonial and if Pence had refused to perform his role then he would have been removed or impeached. There is no scenario whereby democracy could have been destroyed on Jan 6. I mean just use your head: we're the most powerful country in the world. You don't get to beat the electoral process by getting one guy to say the wrong thing during a ceremony. Come on, the world just doesn't work like that.
The relationship between Jan 6 and BLM is that they were of the same category: a violent political protest by stupid people who believed something objectively false. Of course BLM was much more violent and an even less plausible belief, but that's neither here nor there.
Was the 2020 election stolen? That’s one of the questions on the applications for employment in the new administration. There is only one acceptable answer. The wrong answer is a dealbreaker. Bring on the reality denying toadies.
I know maybe hundreds of currently employed government workers who I am 100% certain believe it wasn't stolen, and will not lose their jobs. Or even have an application like that put in front of them.
I was referring to new high level appointments for the next administration not current civil service folk. e.g. Pete Hegseth.
Yeah, I’m on your side in this Gunflint
What would the Star Trek Mirror Universe Borg look like? I'm dimly aware that non-cannon Star Trek content already exists about this, but I want to do my own thought experiment. Here's what I've got:
1) Mirror-Borg society is hyperindividualistic and prizes that over all.
2) Its members are even more diverse than the Federation.
3) Even though life inside the Mirror-Borg Collective is objectively better than life anywhere else in the galaxy, the Mirror-Borg don't consider themselves superior. If anything, they judge themselves too harshly.
4) Instead of being expansionist, they are insular. Other species keep coming to them willingly, and only with great persistence will the Mirror-Borg talk with them. Everyone wants something from them. They have rejected many offers from other species to annex themselves to the Collective.
5) The Mirror-Borg battle fleet is composed of billions of small, weak ships of very diverse designs.
6) They are dark-skinned.
7) The Mirror-Borg have strong religious beliefs against the mixing of biology and technology. Pacemakers and wearable technology like Meta Glasses are forbidden, and some purists live as nudist primitives since clothes count as technology. Their preoccupation with this separation is similar to how Orthodox Jews have created and observe elaborate Talmudic Law. Maybe it's common for each Mirror-Borg to have a robot servant that he tells what to do and avoids even touching.
8) In spite of their insularity, the Mirror-Borg are known to be extremely warm and talkative people who are afraid to appear rude. If you are of a different species and find yourself on one of their ships, every Mirror-Borg you see will greet you like an old friend, talk with you at length and invite you to their quarters for a meal. However, the Mirror-Borg are also painfully averse to conflict, so if you start behaving in a threatening manner or destroying things on one of their ships, they will avoid you and pretend like you aren't there.
Note that a central conceit of the Trek Mirrorverse is that it results in e.g. identical-except-for-the-insignia spaceships in all the same places, identical-except-for-the-uniform-and-mindset people ditto and fitting into identical heirarchies, and yes the incentives are completely reversed but for mumble something reasons everything still lines up perfectly.
So you can't have "billions of small, weak ships of very diverse designs" because MirrorBorg ships are ginormous cubes, and the MirrorBorg can't be insular because then they wouldn't be sending the ships to the same places.
Really, the MirrorVerse concept was a very silly idea that should have been quietly abandoned right after the One Good Story was extracted from it.
Hmm. Billions of small, weak ships of diverse designs that lash themselves together into cube-shaped fleets, and rather than taking what's on the outside by force, they tend to let off a few ships with representatives at each location they visit to ingratiate themselves in ways that act as cultural seeds? Reverse assimilation, thus?
(I admit to not being especially familiar with mirror-universe episodes of Trek to begin with, but I find the speculation fun.)
In one of the Culture books, Banks mentions the problem of a hegemonizing swarm, which is basically what the Borg are. One standard way to deal with them short of war is to somehow change them into an evangelizing swarm.
So, in the mirror universe, the Borg are basically the same idea--cyborgs linked together in a vast hive mind, sinking their individuality into the collective. But instead of invading, they evangelize and recruit people. As long as their missionaries and recruiting stations are left alone, they're peaceable enough, but members of any biological species that are miserable, desperate, reviled, too sick to survive at their current society's tech level, etc. routinely go join the Borg. Similarly, there's a substantial cult in various humanoid societies that valorizes losing your individuality to the hive mind, and many people among them who work as non-assimilated missionaries or commit to joining the hive mind at some point in their lives, perhaps after raising their families. Additionally, the Borg offer a safe form of exile for criminals and such--instead of executing your criminals, you can simply hand them over to the Borg. This is used in some societies in a way analogous to the way the Seven Kingdoms used taking the black.
Ooh, I like that one. It won't hold up to close examination (e.g. assimilating 10% of the population of one Federation world and 30% of the next, doesn't lead to the exact same cube-fleet deployment patterns), but it would be good enough for an hour or so of decent television I think.
Spheres
Parents of small children: what do you do with dentists? Ours has been trying to take x-rays of my son's teeth (19 baby, 1 permanent -- he's in kindergarten) for the past several years, has finally given up in disgust (because the plate they use for the digital x-rays hurts *me* to bite on, let alone a small kid), and has referred us to the pediatric dentist (who is both farther away and also has a much less convenient schedule). I think my kid is pretty ordinary when it comes to mouth proportions or to tolerating annoying health-related routines. Does this mean that most kids (until they're teenagers, say) have to go to dedicated pediatric dentists? (There don't seem to be nearly enough pediatric dentists around for this to be true.) Or is our primary dentist particularly unsuited for working with children / has particularly unsuitable x-ray technology, and I should switch to a different office? Or am I just supposed to say "please don't x-ray my son this year, yes really I'm fine with this" and everyone will breathe a sigh of relief?
I have two kids, now early teens. My experience is similar to the others here. Going to the dentist with a small child was always a quick and simple procedure – a quick, painless check and a learning experience – that shouldn’t turn them off dentistry forever.
When the kids got older (tweens), the dentists became more interested in whether all the teeth come in like they should (I.e. Will they need adjusting/retainer? Is it so tight that one or more needs to be removed?) But for both kids, when the dentist saw something worth mentioning, their advice was just to wait and see if it solved itself – and it did in both cases. None of it required X-rays for either of my kids at the youngest age. I don’t think either of them had dental x-rays taken before they were 12.
I have also seen that while most dentists are good and ethical, it is not uncommon to come across dentists who will look extra hard for possible work, or who will let the price tag unduly influence their recommendation. It’s a bit harsh to call them unethical, but their priorities aren’t necessarily aligned with yours. They may recommend treatments that are expensive, impractical, uncomfortable, yet not strictly necessary. Just because they’re not wrong doesn’t mean their advice is the best for you.
If I were you, I’d take my kid to a different dentist – not just for the second opinion, but to get more experience with dentists. I’ve moved a lot, so have had quite a few of them. But since people usually go to the same dentist year after year, and almost never shop around, lots of people have pretty bad dentists without knowing it.
My child sees a pediatric dentist. The appointments involve a quick visual inspection and cleaning, and are generally less than five minutes.
I'm not a parent of a small child, but I am generally extremely suspicious of dentists after learning that cavities can, in fact, heal themselves (especially if you improve your oral regiment), and having several experiences with less-than-entirely-ethical-dentists. I've encountered one dentist I actually liked - his default approach to cavities was "Let's check on this next time" and, without fail, the cavity would reverse itself, although there would usually be some other tooth that was doing something that needed watching for the next time (leading me to suspect that most cavities are some kind of periodic fluctuation?). Alas I moved away from that state and I've yet to find a dentist I liked since. (I do need to find one, just to fix some damage the last dentist did, but I'm quite reluctant to begin the search all over again.)
I'm not saying your dentist is unethical, mind, I don't know the person. However, if they're pushing you for a procedure for your children that is unlikely to do anything except garner them an insurance payment, it seems like something to consider.
Seems odd to be x-raying baby teeth that are going to fall out in a few years anyhow. I'd be suspicious of someone doing that. Just asked GPT4 whether it was routine to X-ray baby teeth, and if so why. It mostly agrees with me. (But sometimes it's in Lala Land, so you should double-check on google scholar. Look for meta-analyses.)
GPT4 sez: Dentists generally do not routinely X-ray the teeth of children unless there is a specific reason to do so. The primary reasons a dentist might perform X-rays on a toddler include:
Suspected Decay or Damage: If visible cavities or signs of decay are present, X-rays can help assess the extent of the damage, including areas between teeth or beneath the surface where decay may not be visible.
Injury: If a child has experienced trauma to the mouth, an X-ray can help determine if there is damage to the teeth, roots, or developing permanent teeth underneath.
Congenital or Developmental Concerns: X-rays can reveal issues with tooth development, such as missing teeth, extra teeth, or abnormalities in tooth spacing that could impact permanent teeth later.
Infection or Abscess: X-rays can identify infections at the root of a tooth, which could affect both baby and developing permanent teeth.
While it’s true that baby teeth eventually fall out, they play a crucial role in maintaining space for permanent teeth, aiding speech development, and enabling proper chewing. Severe decay or infection in baby teeth can also spread to the underlying permanent teeth or cause pain and complications that might require more invasive treatment later.
Dentists generally prefer to limit X-ray exposure in young children and will only use it when the benefits outweigh the risks. If cavities are clearly visible and treatable without further imaging, a dentist might opt to proceed without X-rays.
I have asked why we're bothering to x-ray baby teeth as they're starting to fall out. The dentist pointed out that some of the baby teeth stick around until the kid is ~12, so it's not orders of magnitude shorter than adult ones. (I agree that I'm not wholly convinced.) Also, now that adults ones *are* coming in, that objection is less meaningful.
I'm not sure how to use Google Scholar to figure out whether it's routine to x-ray baby teeth.
One easy method is to ask GPT your question and ask for links supporting particular points. For example, you could ask what fraction of child dentists routinely X ray teeth and at what age. Ask under what circumstances dentists need to X ray teeth to check for cavities rather than just looking at teeth and probing them with their tools. Ask whether frequent X rays are a known scam. Ask for an article iin a good quality magazine for pediatric dentistry about best practices.
All my experience and common sense suggest that this dentist's approach is not to be trusted.
-Even if your kid gets a cavity in the baby tooth that will last til he's 12, it's not a big deal. Most cavities are filled easily and quickly if found fairly early.
-I'm late middle-aged, way more likely to have bad trouble with my teeth than a child is, and my dentist is very sparing in use of Xrays. Has a schedule -- something like once per year for the ones way in back, once every 2 years for some others. Most of my cavities he has found by inspection, not Xrays. He pokes with his tool and says, "this spot feels mushy, I think you're developoing a cavity." Or he just sees the cavity.
-I took my daughter to the same good dentist I see, and he never once Xrayed her teeth.
-Lots of people in business are dishonest. Every time I get my hair cut they try to sell me bullshit products to "nourish your hair ends." Hair ends are dead. They do not eat. Putting oily stuff on them is basically putting mayonnaise on gravel.
I noticed you writing somewhere in this thread that a certain point won't get you far with the dentist. It sounds like you have the idea you need to convince the dentist that the Xrays are not needed. You don't. You can just say, thanks, you may be right but I'd prefer to skip them. Or, of course, change dentists.
Re: I don't need to convince the dentist -- true; if I'm comfortable asserting that I know how children's dentistry ought to be done better than they do (which in this case I might be!), then I can simply impose my opinion and refuse treatment on my son's behalf. If I want to stay with the dentist but have an actual conversation about this, I don't think "I'm told this isn't how they do it in Germany" is a hugely useful contribution.
Having been in a lot of situations like this, I have found ways around confrontation. Here are some alternatives to claiming to know more than the dentist. You can just say, basically, "you may be right be I'd rather skip it." Or, something like "the idea makes me uneasy and I"m going to pass." It's possible the dentist will try to engage you in argument, but you can just be n a broken record -- "Yes, I understand your point, you may be right but . . ."
Or you can soften it by saying, "I think I'd like to skip Xrays for now, but I will think it over and maybe we can do it another time." And if they ask why skip it, you can broken-record it "the idea makes me uneasy so I'm going to think it over some and maybe another time . . ."
You have to be willing to put up with them having a bad opinion of you, or (if dentist is basically scamming you a bit) pretending to. But that happens all the time anyway. For instance I often go into stores wearing a generous--size backpack loaded with work stuff & sometimes a laptop. he clerks watch me closely, I suppose because people with big bags or backpack are more likely to be shoplifters. I have never shoplifted anything in my life, not even as a rebellious teenager. It's a minor downer, but there's not a thing to do about it.
There's also the chance that some adult teeth just... aren't there. Apparently that's becoming more common for some reason. In that case, it's better to try to keep the baby teeth as long as possible so that the rest of the teeth don't shift.
Is there a particular reason why your child's dentist wants to take an x-ray? My children (5 and 8) never had one – but they have flawless, cavity-free teeth.
In my experience, the usual reason is that they need to make a boat payment.
They assert that it's standard procedure, similar to adults. It's certainly possible that it's only *their* standard procedure.
(I'm biting my tongue on "because insurance will cover it" but I imagine that's a large chunk of it.)
> They assert that it's standard procedure, similar to adults.
Again, strange. I've only ever had x-rays taken for actual problems, like serious cavities. Maybe once or twice in the last 10 years (this is in Germany, for socio-cultural context).
X-rays are ionizing radiation. Subjecting someone – especially a child – to it "just-in-case" seems ill-advised.
> X-rays are ionizing radiation. Subjecting someone – especially a child – to it "just-in-case" seems ill-advised.
https://xkcd.com/radiation/
My guess is that this became much more ubiquitous with the introduction of digital x-rays, which have significantly lower exposures.
Unfortunately, the argument "this isn't standard procedure in Germany" probably won't get me very far with the dentist (any more than the argument "this wasn't part of my childhood, or probably your [the dentist's] childhood" will).
I read a brilliant NYT article about dentists. Apparently, pretty much nothing they say or do is based in science, even though they act like it does. I'll try to find the article.
“A brilliant NYT article“ is a oxymoron.
On statins to treat high LDL cholesterol - I'm not against this.
I'm noticing the following though :
Lots of thoughtful smart people in medical research are for it. And lots of thoughtful smart people in medical research are against it.
50 % of people seem to have high LDL cholesterol.
And it is possible even for decent smart people in the medical field to be caught in a pro-statin position without having given sufficient attention to the opposite position.
https://youtu.be/ats0QiOWIDQ?si=Bf919aRK7QpKPoxI
I don't know what to make of this video. He says our medical philosophy about high cholesterol is misguided.
He says it's not just about fixing the line number called LDL.
Are doctors getting too excited about fixing this lone number?
He has a great analogy about a hole in the wall. It's caused by termites, but doctors prescribing statins are basically putting a picture on the hole to hide it, when the termites continue to explode.
He says if you have high cholesterol, you should be razor focussed on lifestyle (which is what causes the LDL), such as eating the right foods (minimally processed, watch the carbs and saturated fats ?)), and cardio and especially weight training, adequate sleep, stress management. Not be put on statins. Because cholesterol is just a marker of a deeper problem, not itself the problem.
This is a controversial subject. Not settled science, like many seem to imply.
Not my expertise but I am seeking expert opinions...
MD. I'm going to nerd out sorry (but you did ask for it!)
Cholesterol can be thought of as necessary but not sufficient for the development of atherosclerosis (the precursor to coronary heart disease, strokes, leg ulcers, many other problems.)
Mechanistically it is due to high blood pressure causing shear stress to blood vessels, then LDL/VLDL cholesterol being deposited into the blood vessel walls at sites of micro trauma. High blood sugar plays a role as well through development of advanced glycation end products. High chronic inflammation makes the problem worse (after a while as an MD you learn that high chronic inflammation makes everything worse.)
So atherosclerosis is correlated with the integral of your (non-HDL) cholesterol level over your lifetime. It's not causative but it is a predictive factor.
You mentioned diet and exercise. Clearly these are correlated with a lot of the risk factors I listed above: blood sugar, inflammatory levels, blood pressure are all related to eating the right foods, adequate sleep, stress management. Not just cholesterol levels. Good diet, exercise and sleep is the single best thing you can do for your health.
Actually, cholesterol is relatively weakly correlated with diet. Yes, eating healthy can help, but there are plenty of people who are not overweight whose LDL levels are nonetheless potentially dangerous. Lp(a) is a significant genetic factor that is non-modifiable.
So where does this leave statins? Currently they are somewhat arbitrarily recommended for people with a 10-year risk of a vascular event that exceeds 10%. This is determined by an actuarial table that takes into account age, gender, smoking status, diabetes etc. Interestingly this recommendation is independent of cholesterol level (although there are other guidelines that recommend statins to people with a very high cholesterol level, regardless of 10-year risk.)
Now, consider that statins significantly lower cholesterol, and consequently significantly lower cardiovascular risk, and that cardiovascular disease is the number one cause of mortality in developed countries (still edging out cancer.) They also seem to have positive effects independent of cholesterol lowering in that they stabilise plaque, making it less likely to rupture and cause heart attacks.
You might reasonably expect the benefits of statin, in a selected population, to heavily outweigh the risk, and you would be right. They can have side effects - muscle cramps are fairly common - but they are overall one of the reasons that cardiovascular disease has gone from a malignant, inevitably fatal condition in the early 20th century to something that can be well managed today.
In fact, I would argue that statins are not used enough! The 10-year risk threshold is arbitrary - if you are 40, you don't just care about your risk at 50, you care about your risk at 70 and 80! Given that atherosclerotic deposits are correlated with integral of cholesterol level over one's lifetime, I would argue that we should take 30-year risk - indeed, lifetime risk - into account. At the moment, voices like mine are not common within the medical community, but they are gaining in volume.
That is a phenomenal comment. Thank you so very much for taking the time.
There has to be some biochemical intermediate step between lifestyle interventions and the negative symptoms of metabolic syndrome (heart attacks and stuff). I don't know what the evidence is on to what extent LDL level is part of this intermediate step (beyond that there's a known mechanism to link cholesterol levels to atherosclerosis), but the argument with the termite analogy is not enough to establish that lowering cholesterol levels with drugs isn't useful. Perhaps lifestyle factors mean there is a lot of stray food around the house that attracts bugs, but that doesn't mean that using poison to get rid of them won't help.
What is the known mechanism you speak of?
The version I vaguely remembered is that different types of lipoproteins deliver lipids in different directions, and if you get too much of certain types, they end up depositing the excess lipids in the blood vessel walls. I checked Wikipedia and what it says about this is somewhat different from what I remembered: "Low-density lipoprotein (LDL) particles in blood plasma invade the endothelium and become oxidized, creating risk of cardiovascular disease. A complex set of biochemical reactions regulates the oxidation of LDL, involving enzymes (such as Lp-LpA2) and free radicals in the endothelium.".
Not an expert, but recently read that a lot of the variance in blood lipids is determined by genes. Can't remember where I read it, but do remember that it was some source I couldn't just discount. I believe the point being made was that lifestyle interventions make relatively little difference, but statins do (presumably by somehow suppressing or neutralizing the genetically-determined process that leads to high cholesterol.)
Also not an expert, but this matches my experience - despite getting all the lifestyle factors right, I still have high LDL (at 25!). If you don't exercise, eat a lot of processed food, etc., then sure, lifestyle changes might lower your LDL to a healthy level. But some people just have a genetic predisposition to high LDL regardless of lifestyle.
Aiden
Do you have a good sense for the pros and cons of taking statins, presumably forever?
Don't semaglutides make the issue moot?
Is that related to cholesterol too? I thought that was about obesity, which it decreased by changing sugar metabolism.
They appear to change people's eating habits, which I would expect to reduce their cholesterol.
Maybe, but semaglutide is supposed to address hyperglycemia, and coincidentally seems to also help with weight loss. I suspect it is helping some-how and -what with the root cause, which is mysterious to medicine.
Having finally read the book review bronze medalist How The War Was Won, I still don't get the strategy behind strategic bombing. My understanding of the history is as follows:
pre-WW2: Niche theorists think strategic bombing can win the war on its own. Most are not convinced. Countries invest in the unproven technology.
1940: Germany loses the Battle of Britain. German strategic bombing has negligible impact on British production and morale.
post-1940: Half of US+UK military production is aircraft. Roosevelt makes aircraft production top priority. Everyone is desperate for aircraft. The B29 is by far the most expensive weapon of the war.
I donẗ really get the jump: Why did Churchill and Roosevelt invest so much in an unproven and partly-failed technology? Wouldn't the reasonable thing to conclude be that strategic bombing is harder than expected (as proven by the Germans) and then invest in ships and tanks instead? Was it simply that the alternative to bombing was WW1-style mass armies which was too costly in causalities?
Airpower is undeniably an important tool in war, as every war after WW1 has proven. Air dominance is an almost perfect predictor of who is going to win a war militarily.
However, wars after WW1 have also proven that strategic airpower, as dreamed up toward the end of WW1, has a terrible ROI. The Allied bombing campaign did degrade the Axis industrial base and forced the Axis powers to invest more in fighters and AA over their homeland which they then lacked over the land fronts; but as we know today, it still took "boots on the ground" such as island hopping in the Pacific and street fighting in Berlin to really win WW2 and subsequent wars, just like it always has.
>"…it still took "boots on the ground" such as island hopping in the Pacific and street fighting in Berlin to really win WW2…"
Quibble: no Allied soldiers set foot in Japan proper until after the surrender; the island hopping was only necessary to secure an airbase close enough to the home islands for the Enola Gay to get Little Boy to Hiroshima.
Granted, that's hardly strategic bombings *as dreamed up toward the end of WW1*…
Another interesting fact - the development of the B-29 cost more than the development of the bomb it dropped!
The Spanish Civil War and the 1939-1940 phases of WW2 contained several episodes that were seen at the time as major successes for what might be termed "operational bombing": the use of bombers behind the lines to destroy or disrupt the operations of logistics hubs, airfields, and the like. There were also a couple episodes (Warsaw, Rotterdam) where aerial bombardment was used to compel a besieged city to surrender. These were much smaller in scale and significance than the Allied strategic bombing campaigns, so they're often forgotten about except when one wants to make the point that the Axis powers started bombing cities first, but they were a huge deal at the time.
For the London Blitz in particular, damage was relatively minor in terms of not being anywhere near being war-winning, but it was significant enough to get decision-makers' attention, and the decision makers knew how much worse it could have been if not for various mitigating circumstances.
Most obvious is that the RAF was heavily contesting the skies over southern England, shooting down a lot of bombers and escorting fighters and also forcing the Germans to compromise the effectiveness of their bombers to make them harder to shoot down.
Building fleets of bombers to hit back at Germany likely mitigated effects on civilian morale. I remember reading that this was a major motivation for British strategic bombing during and shortly after the Blitz.
The German bomber fleet wasn't really up for the scale of destruction the Allies were prepared to inflict. Germany made mostly medium bombers, not heavy bombers, and made a lot fewer of them than the British and Americans did. Moreover, most of the Allied war production was outside the range of German bombers, which was emphatically not the case for German war production vs British and American bombers.
Germany's bombing campaign in England (mostly) wasn't strategic in the sense that the USAAF's (not a typo) was, in that (other than some abortive early efforts against the RAF) it wasn't targeting anything that would materially affect the outcome of the war.
That said, the RAF (unlike the USAAF) did pursue a similar approach to that of the Luftwaffe under the (mistaken) belief that the German citizenry would respond differently to terror bombing than the Brits themselves had. But the RAF didn't have B-29s, nor a secret superweapon development program that required its payload capacity.
Churchill could not invade with tanks on his own. He had to rely on protection from the Channel, which means investing in ships & planes, but not so much tanks. The Germans were outclassed at sea from the beginning, having to rely on hidden U-Boats to raid commerce shipments. The US invested in efficiently building "Liberty Ships" faster than the Germans could sink them, though the convoy system also helped give U-Boats a higher than sustainable casualty rate.
One thing you're overlooking from the book's points is that you can't outproduce the other side's tanks if your tank factories are being bombed so much you have to distribute production inefficiently.
It's called "compatibilism", as eloquently espoused by the late Daniel Dennett.
Basically (as I understand it), the argument goes like this: Yes, the Universe is a giant machine of some sort; at the lowest level it is either deterministic or random, but as a practical matter we are never going to even get close to knowing the exact state of the Universe at any given time, so from our perspective we can just assume randomness.
By itself, randomness does not require free will; but it does imply that we can never know the future with any certainty. However, at least on short timescales, we can "make decisions" that clearly affect the future state of the Universe. It's not a completely compelling argument IMHO but it has some explanatory benefit.
Dennett goes deep on free will and "the hard problem of consciousness" in books such as "Elbow Room" and "Consciousness Explained".
TL; DR: "Free will probably doesn't exist in principle, but in practice, assuming you and other conscious beings you interact with have free will is the best pragmatic choice for modeling the world we experience around us (including ourselves).
The same argument can be made for consciousness, but it's less compelling due to this troublesome first-person subjective experience we all claim to have.
I like Dennet. The missing piece is emergent behavior in the brain. Given that emergent behavior can arise from a fully determined equation, yet isn't predictable ahead of time, and that seems to fit our situation well. We still have to confirm that the brain can produce emergent behavior.
Then there's the evidence that we do not even live in a fully determined universe. Don't count free will out yet!
It seems like a pretty big ask that the undetermined universe could become determined (as in choices) not by pure physical randomness but by something we can't explain and don't understand (conscious phenomena). If the physical universe is sufficient to explain what happens, then decisions would seem to be observations--outputs of the universe, not causative.
The alternative, of course, is that physical randomness like thermal noise is determined on an individual level by the stuff of consciousness. That seems a little silly though.
The idea is that the universe is already under-determined, from our point of view, and nothing we can observe will ever change this (because we are part of the universe being observed). The brain, like many other phenomena, is a recursive system--outputs are used as inputs of the next iteration of decision making/behavior. The behavior of a system like that is highly sensitive to small changes in initial conditions, and can't be predicted ahead of time without running the algorithm itself. This is a feature of certain types of mathematical models, and if this describes how part of the brain works, then we can never predict human behavior beyond a certain point, no matter how much data is collected.
It seems like in this post and others, you're implying that chaotic systems can't be computed. That's just not true. The fact that it's computationally explosive is irrelevant. It could be computed with enough resources.
Chaotic systems *might* be determined, and reproducible in a computing environment that completely models a given chaotic system's starting conditions. A common observation, however, is that we almost never have complete information about any system's start state. And by definition, that chaotic system will be sensitive to any discrepancies in our recorded initial state and its actual initial state, meaning an arbitrarily small discrepancy will develop into an arbitrarily large one after some number of iterative calculations.
One could try to model all possible discrepancies and then posit a magical infinite source of computation to run calculations over all those possibilities, but what you'll end up with is an output declaring that from your system, all possibilities are possible, with no way to tell which one(s) is/are most probable.
No, my point is that it can't be predicted ahead of time, without running the actual computation. Another way of saying that is, you can't predict what someone will think or do, until they think or do it.
In principle, any computation can be simulated to an arbitrary level of precision. The limiting factor is that a perfect simulation requires a more complex machine than the one being simulated. The new computer needs to encode the state and operation of the original computer. So while we may never be able to predict what someone will do, it's not beyond the realm of theory.
In addition to the computational and storage deficiencies, other real world limitations are lack of input data accuracy, not perfectly knowing the initial state of the machine, and not having a good enough model of how the particles interact.
Why do you find this more compelling than classical theism?
Because Theism (I'll skip the part about "which Theism") isn't an explanatory theory, it's a belief system explicitly based on faith rather than observation and analysis.
Asking why, as a scientist, I don't consider theism is a category error.
But materialism is also a faith-based belief system, is it not? We can make observations and analyze the situation, but at the end of the day, questions like "why did the Big Bang happen?", "why do we have subjective experiences?, or "why is there anything at all?" are not resolvable by observation and analysis.
"As a scientist" is an odd aside - Science and theism were seen as compatible (even explicitly going hand-in-hand) from the early days of the Royal Society to ~1970. (See: The Apollo 8 Genesis Reading, or our favorite Freemason Mr. Aldrin taking communion on the Moon)
You misunderstand the nature of science. It isn't designed or intended to answer "why" questions, you have to turn to another intellectual domain to address those, such as philosophy, art, or religion. Science is our tool for identifying that theory, given the evidence, that has the highest probability of being correct (defined as predicting patterns in future data). This explains why many people see science and religion as compatible, because they belong to "different magesteria."
Determinism implying a lack of free will is a category error. Free will is an abstraction of the underlying reality; it makes perfect sense at the appropriate level of abstraction, and it makes no sense to apply it to much lower levels.
Yes, our decisions can be decomposed into little component parts of historical brain activity. This does not mean the decisions do not exist; just the exact same way that realising everything in the world we inhabit is made of quantum amplitude flows and there is nothing to inherently separate those into being part of one object rather than another does not render the world we inhabit meaningless or make the objects around us stop existing.
Things still keep existing /even when we know what they are made of/. It's not either/or.
The question isn't whether the will exists or what smaller units compose it. The question is whether any aspect of human will is free.
Libertarian free will can't be an abstraction of underlying deterministic reality, because you can't build indeterminism out of determinism.
Yes you can. Google "Nonlinear systems"--mathematical equations whose outputs are unpredictable.
Well, that means Throwaway1234 is not a libertarian :)
Sam Harris has a pithier version of this:
"There is no free will, but choices matter."
I agree one is forced to live life in the present as if free-will were real. Denis Diderot's novel Jacques the Fatalist is a hilarious exploration of the results of living with an ever-present belief in determinism.
But we also contemplate our own and others' past. It may be practical (and 100% correct) to view one's past as inexorable in the same way it is practical to view the future as indeterminate. After all, we might know the past but can't know the future, so there might be good reason to view past actions in a different light than future ones.
Was the Turing Test passed yet? How is this Metaculus prediction doing?
https://www.metaculus.com/notebooks/8329/human-level-language-models/
Yes and no. There have been Turing-like Tests passed, like Thegnskald has said. Though from what I understand, the modern concept of the Turing Test comes more from Kurzweil than Turing - and he envisioned it as a much more exhaustive test than Turing did. Think - "elite AI researchers at top institutions talking to it over the course of a month". THAT test I don't think we're particularly close - though certainly much closer than a few years prior.
The Turing Test has been passed more times than the audience at a NASCAR rally, as far back as 1966 for informal tests; the first formal victory was in 1991, by a program that tricked users by ... introducing typographical errors.
I'm seeing classes on learning to build, train, and use machine learning models without doing coding. Stanford and MIT are both offering them. Amazon now has a service called SageMaker that purports to allow you to do the same.
I do not know how to code and don't want to use my limited free time to learn. I'm wondering if SageMaker or some brief training would let me play with AI in the ways I'm interested in doing it. There are 2 things I'd especially like to be able to do:
-Experiment with AI and language. Train it on a bunch of great prose, feeding it works by prose masters of the last few hundred years. Train it on my favorite poetry. Introduce some randomness into the language it produces, but bound the randomness in certain ways.
-Experiment with AI and images. I liked Dall-e2 much more than Dall-e3, and would like to nudge the AI away from ad copy type images, and towards weirder, lumpier, more emotion-determined images.
None of this has to work perfectly, and I can come up with a variety of ways to attempt these tweaks, but would like to know whether people who understand AI well think it would be possible to do this sort of thing using these no-code methods.
Shankar do you think I'll have a satisfactory and set-up if I use this site? https://www.thinkdiffusion.com/sda?via=inpost-install-comfyui
I looked up installing ComfyUI on my computer, and even the instructions say "this is not simple," and then the instructions for Mac, which is what I got, start off with "Mac installation takes a few more steps." Instructions have you typing this and that into the terminal, which I never use. Plus once it's on your Mac you have to keep track of and install any updates to Comfy yourself. I can follow instructions fine, but the trouble with this set-up is that I have not got a basic grasp of what's going on, and if something goes wrong I will not be able to troubleshoot.
Without endorsing that one in particular, yes, that kind of thing should be fine. I don't use it myself, but if you don't care about keeping your images private, I agree running it locally is a hassle well worth avoiding.
I don't have a specific recommendation for which such service to use, but the considerations would be price and persistence of your settings. This discussion here lists some, https://www.reddit.com/r/StableDiffusion/comments/1hv2crf/whats_the_best_online_service_for_running_comfyui/.
I'd also suggest you start with something like Automatic1111's WebUI first, to get the hang of prompting and LoRAs first: less than infinitely customizable workflow, but more user-friendly.
Thank you Shankar. I will follow your advice.
I've done similar to what Shankar is suggesting with Automatic1111 WebUi running locally on my computer. I got it up and running by asking ChatGPT to walk me through it step by step. I'm also having ChatGPT write my prompts that I feed to the WebUI which is working out quite well.
Also, the "projects" section in ChatGPT is similar to a simple RAG that I've been using to run my homebrew TTRPG game, and it works well enough for avoiding the hassle of building a custom app.
That's heartening. I have done zero coding in my life. I don't know what it involves to use a RAG to make a homebrew TTRPG game, but it definitely involves skills I do not have. On the other hand, I am bright and good at following directions and paying attention to details. What is daunting is that I have no big picture at all of what I will be doing. Just know that I am connecting to a site with a user-friendly interface that lets me give prompts, fine tune them by adjusting various values, rather than just using terms like "vivid, masterpiece, melancholy feel," and also lets me use things like Control Net that give me more power to control body positions, -- and maybe also lets me train a model. But that's all very general and conceptual. If something isn't working I will have no big picture understanding to guide me in identifying what's wrong. I will just have go show GPT the problem and ask what to do. Knowing all that, do you still think this is going to work for me?
Haha. I run a Table Top Role Playing Game (like Dungeons and Dragons, but a different game) and I've been using ChatGPT to be my assistant Game Master; planning each session, maintaining plot hooks/storylines, etc. Its worked fairly well! We are going to be planning session 26 this week. One of the challenges of this project is keeping the bot abreast of what is going on story wise, and the pain point on this is that in a single chat it sooner or later runs out of context. IE it can't remember what we've done so it makes it up!
A RAG is an external vector database that you can link an LLM to so that it uses the data in the RAG before its training data; presumably so it can remember what has been done! It is a bit of technical project and I've not been able to wrap my head around it to get it done.
I am also NOT a coder, at all, I hate code. However, I am in IT so I've got a bit of "natural ability" that helps me execute what the bot tells me to do when implementing these technical solutions. I think you would be fine though, as when I set up the A1111 WebUI it was as simple as download Python; install; download git, install, then run exactly the commands that ChatGPT gave me, and now I've got a local Dreamshaper 8 stable diffusion bot. It also helps that I'm a PC gamer so I had a video card that is sufficient hardware wise for the solution.
Truly my suggestion would be to start with a ChatGPT Project (so you can upload reference files for it to leverage), and not install anything more complex than that on your local computer. Once you play with projects for a few months, then see if you aren't getting what you need from it, and if so move on to the broader scope.
Lastly, one other method I've leveraged is asking ChatGPT to validate the direction I'm going in, and also to write me prompts to feed to other bots.
For AI image generation, certainly. Try ComfyUI, with models from Civit AI. You could also train your own LoRAs for specific styles and concepts, all without having to do any coding yourself.
What you're describing for the prose, with "bound[ing] the randomness in certain ways" sounds hard without code.
EDIT: Actually, upon second thought, it's possible ComfyUI itself might work for that too. There are nodes for prompt enhancement, and you might be able to use those, or something similar.
The bounding would be things like part of speech -- use any combo of adjective + noun, but no other parts of speech. Does that sound hard to pull off, or no?
Sounds hard without code, though maybe my intuitions haven't recalibrated yet: it might be that you can now say something close to what you just did to your LLM (which you CAN fine-tune as desired with little to no coding) and get what you want.
I could feed it lists of all nouns and adjectives, unless that's too much data to stuff in. Or I feed it a list of prepositions and articles, and there aren't many of those at all. Then I'd say, use any 2 words here, except words from the preposition and articles lists, words ending in -ly (that captures most adverbs) and capitalized words (that captures proper names.)
Any good model today should know what improper nouns and adjectives are without being told so explicitly.
From Gemini ("Give me a dozen poetic "Adjective + noun" phrases that are unusual and thought-provoking.")
- Ephemeral echoes
- Velvet voids
- Fractured futures
- Crimson whispers
- Lunar laughter
- Obsidian tears
- Phantom limbs
- Celestial rust
- Whispering stones
- Ethereal chains
- Silent thunder
And following with "More, and make them even more unusual":
- Starlight bones
- Chromium ghosts
- Quantum lullabies
- Asphalt oceans
- Rusting rainbows
- Clockwork butterflies
- Frozen fireflies
- Echoing emptiness
- Molten moonlight
- Shadow symphonies
- Glass horizons
- Weightless whispers
I'm not sure exactly how you want to fine-tune this kind of thing on your favorite prose/poetry, but Retrieval Augmented Generation might be what you're looking for: upload some reasonable set of texts, and then with some prompting, you should be able to get the model to output phrases based (in some way) on your input samples. This approach should be essentially code-free.
Following on this line of thought, prompt-engineering top-tier off the shelf models might give good results on this task. If you naively ask chat gpt “write like Byron” it will give garbage results. But if you give it lots of examples and feedback, you can nudge it in a good direction. GPT has a context window large enough for hundreds of example sonnets.
So many excellent band names!
ooh
Kevin Drum has a good counter for the why-America-can't-build-stuff any more whiners. If you believe the charts and graphs, we certainly can and are. But if you don't believe in charts and graphs, you won't be convinced.
https://jabberwocking.com/yeah-america-can-still-build-stuff/
The Residential Housing Units Completed per Population Added graph is missing some context. Except at the very end (which is indeed a hopeful note), it's well below 1.0 and trending downwards to a low of 0.3 in 2014 (actually 2009-2014, since it's a five-year moving average).
The missing context is the ratio of existing dwelling units to population, the size and type of the new dwelling units being produced, and whether these are gross or net new units (e.g. if a house is demolished and a new one built in its place, does that count as +1 or +0 in the metric?).
The actual dwelling unit to population ratio is 0.43, so a range of 0.3-0.8 is decent. The chart can be read as the 2009 recession causing a few years of abnormally low construction, with catch-up development occurring post-2020.
Size and type matters to the extent that maintaining the current ratio isn't great if the new units are disproportionately single-occupancy apartments, not large apartments or houses suitable for couples, larger families, or sets of roommates. FRED doesn't have fantastic granularity for selecting this, but doing a graph of the ratio of single-family housing starts to all dwelling unit starts seems a good first-order proxy. Eyeballing that graph, I see a lot of noise and either no trend or a slight upward trend. Also good as far as it goes. As for info not captured in this metric, I have heard from other sources that housing size is trending upwards in the US over the past several decades.
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=1CH7m
FRED cites the Census Residential Construction report, which seems to be gross starts rather than net starts, which is not ideal. I don't see handy numbers in FRED for either total dwelling unit count over time, nor for demolitions, so I can't correct for this offhand. Numbers I can find tell me that demolitions were bit over half of new construction c. 2009-2011 (American Housing Survey, Housing Inventory Change, HUD), which was as already discussed a very low point for new construction. I consider it plausible that demolitions were a much lower percentage of construction in other years.
Overall, that graph does seem to broadly support Drum's conclusions, but it needed a lot more analysis than Drum gave it.
I take charts & graphs seriously, but I thought he made some lousy arguments:
https://jabberwocking.com/yeah-america-can-still-build-stuff/#comment-215158
Second this. Looking at aggregate measures doesn't tell the real story, because economic forces have made greater and greater proportions of people want to move to the top 5-10 metros, most of which it is impossible to build in (NYC, SF, LA, DC, Seattle).
Also, wth is going on with that "adjusted for population" housing units graph? What, our population plummeted in 2018? The line has barely hit the past "average" on the total units graph, but it's skyrocketed up exponentially, higher than it's ever been, starting in 2018 when "adjusted for population??" That "average" line would have been on a much lower population base in 1980 / 90 / 00, and the adjusted for population lines should have been higher back then.
All the rest of his metrics were basically meaningless. I'm anti-sold on his conclusion, and have updated slightly on the fact that we probably CAN'T build anything any more, if these are the best arguments the other side can muster.
"People want to move to SF but SF isn't building more houses" feels like it should be a self-solving problem. Eventually people should just shrug and say "ok i guess I'll move somewhere else then".
The amount of angst wasted on the dumb problem of people who want to move to cities which don't want to have them is considerable.
The cities DO want to have them. That's where the commerce is - that's where the high-paying jobs are. The owners of real estate who own the planning and zoning commissions in the city don't want them - but they're not the city.
And let's not underestimate how much of a loss this is. Economists have calculated that if NYC was building new housing at the rate of Tokyo over the last 30 years, it the US GDP (for the whole country!!) would be almost 10% higher than it is now.
And that's just NYC! Imagine this applied to SF, and LA, and Boston, and Seattle, and...you get it.
> "People want to move to SF but SF isn't building more houses" feels like it should be a self-solving problem. Eventually people should just shrug and say "ok i guess I'll move somewhere else then".
Indeed, and this is certainly happening at scale. And I'll take the position that this is a bad thing.
In Geoffrey West's book Scale, he looks at scaling laws across things as diverse as circulatory systems, cells, animals, and cities.
Cities have always been our primary engines of economic growth, and it is actually superlinear - the bigger the city, the more economic activity and growth it generally drives. Things like average income, per-capita GDP in a city, and patents scale superlinearly with population.
As in, if we care about economic growth, we should want MORE people moving to the biggest cities, so it actually IS a bad thing if a lot of people want to live in those top 5 cities and can't because there's no housing.
So in a future US-China war..... can't the US (and maybe partners) blockade the flow of raw materials into China? China is population-rich but pretty natural resource-poor, which I think is where the 'China is like the US in WW2' analogies fall apart. China is extremely dependent on iron ore imports, especially from Australia, along with oil from the Middle East, copper, and aluminum, just to name a few. Most worryingly for them, they still import a decent amount of food- I guess the Chinese soil is just not very rich. The US, by contrast, has natural resources in spades, plus we have ports on 2 oceans, which make blockading us almost impossible.
I just finished reading Wages of Destruction by Adam Tooze, so after 800+ pages of reading about how the Nazis were desperate for natural resources to sustain their war effort, it's hard not to port that over to China. All the factories in the world don't help you if you lack the raw materials to build in the first place.
So in a hot US-China war, can't the US fall back and just blockade the Chinese mainland? Won't help if we lose fast, but will help if the war slows down a lot- which is where everyone talks about the vaunted Chinese manufacturing advantage without thinking about where the iron ore comes from. (Or oil, or food!) Would be a bit ironic if the US goes full German U-boat and destroys civilian shipping
For what it's worth (and I know the guy is prone to hyperbole), Peter Zeihan argues that this would be almost trivially easy: put a bunch of US destroyers near the Persian gulf, block any tankers heading east, watch as China runs out of fuel and food within months. Subtracting the hyperbole, yes, a distance blockade would almost certainly be a crucial, and very painful, part of a reaction to Chinese aggression.
Of course, it would be ironic if the US tore down the very system it has been safeguarding for many decades now... but that would be on China. No one forces them to invade a neighboring country.
Yes, that would be an integral part of U.S. strategy. China's land links to its neighbors are also surprisingly poor, so some success could be had blowing up key bridges and mountain passes to restrict overland imports into China.
The only problem with this is it would take a long time for China's warmaking ability to collapse thanks to economic privation--look at how long Germany and its European friends held out during the World Wars in spite of enemy blockades.
I looked into this when I reviewed WoD for the book review contest.
https://claycubeomnibus.substack.com/p/book-review-wages-of-destruction
(There's a small section on it at the end)
China's made moves to sure-up its domestic food production in recent years and apparently could be self-sufficient if needed at his point. It also has a large strategic oil reserve to fall back on. That covers the two main weaknesses Germany had in WoD.
All that also assumes that the US navy could dominate China at sea, which is unclear. The USN is currently bigger but China has waaaaay more ship production capacity for a protracted war.
Allying with Russia has also boosted the potential resources available by land a lot.
Germany weathered several years of blockade in WW1 and 2 and China's current position is much more secure than Germany's was, so I think it's very unlikely China could be defeated outright in a reasonable timeframe that way, even if it would have huge economic costs (for both sides realistically).
The countries that really could be defeated just by blockade are Japan and Korea by China.
A lot of researchers think China's population figures are heavily inflated, owing to incentive structures which encourage local governments to inflate population figures. The lowest estimate I've seen is 400 million, which is ... almost certainly wrong. I'd hazard a guess that the actual number is somewhere around 900 million.
And they have a rather big issue; their population pyramid is more like a bulbous tower, heavier on the top than the bottom.
Additionally, decades of the one-child policy have left many families rather sparse on descendants; given the role family plays in their culture, substantial population losses would likely create massive social instability.
I don't think China can afford a significant war.
400 million is nonsense. You can disprove this by looking at google maps. Dozens of NYC-sized cities most people have never heard of.
Four dozen NYC-sized cities is still two New York Cities short of 400 million. But also they only have one dozen NYC-sized (and larger) cities, with a total (of those 12) official population of ~155 million (or ~19 New York Cities).
But yeah, 400 million is, as noted, almost certainly wrong.
China with 400 million people would be similar to the U.S. in both size and population. It would be peculiar for that version of China to have dozens of cites the size of the largest U.S. city.
*Almost certainly wrong*. Also, again, per China's figures, -one- dozen, not dozen-s-.
But it's not -certainly- wrong, for several reasons; first, US cities tend to follow a Zipf distribution, because US population migration patterns are "natural"; China's cities do not, which is not surprising, given that China pursued policies of forced urbanization. (But also may suggest that the urban population numbers are, uh, inaccurate.)
Second, Chinese incentives are known to have created fake urbanization; most well-known being vast stretches of empty apartment buildings. I've encountered comments from visitors to one of these NYC-sized cities commenting on how weirdly empty and quiet they were, and how little traffic there is. They chalked this up to good urban planning and mass transit - but if you think about it, it's weird how well the urban planning and mass transit apparently work in some of their cities, where others are nightmares of congestion.
Third, Chinese national incentives encourage local governments to, well, overestimate their population figures.
Edit:
Also, note that the population of cities is a lot more arbitrary than people typically expect. Is the DFW metroplex one city, or several? Treated as one city, the US gets another NYC-sized city.
Considering land area in our equation, Shanghai has a population density of 10,000 per square mile; New York City has a population density of 29,000 per square mile. No Chinese city has the population density of NYC; the closest is Shenzen, at 23,000 per square mile.
>can't the US (and maybe partners) blockade the flow of raw materials into China?
First, regarding the blockade from the sea: Any asset used in this blockade would likely suffer a high rate of attrition, by virtue of being in range of a large area of china's mainland. And any asset used in such a blockade would be a very expensive one, and (at the moment), hard to replace.
Then even the US managed to impose a blockade at sea, there is a number of land borders, one of which being Russia, a famously ressource-rich country, and, as of 2024, one that is both very likely to be accepting generous terms, and very unlikely to be convinced to participate in this blockade.
And there is the other neighbours. How willing would vietnam be to join in this blockade? How willing would the US be to apply the blockade to vietnam also?
Russia is resource-rich, but its export markets to China are constrained by corruption and a lack of infrastructure. If a U.S.-China war broke out, it might take Russia so long to build a new gas pipeline to help China that the conflict would be over before.
As Humphrey Appleby notes, you don't have to be close to the Chinese mainland to blockade it. You can block merchant ships hundreds of miles away from China itself. I agree that Russia is very resource-rich and could help with materials, though I think it's interesting that China sources 60% of its iron from Australia and not Russia
> though I think it's interesting that China sources 60% of its iron from Australia and not Russia
There's nothing interesting about that; Australia produces nine times as much as Russia does.
China produces six or seven times as much as Russia.
>You can block merchant ships hundreds of miles away from China itself
Yes, if you're willing to sink every ship going to north-vietnam. Which...sure, you can. But it's going to be unpalatable to a lot of people. Otherwise, ships will go to Hai Phong, unload, then another ship goes to anywhere on China's coastline. And, again, anything in range to shoot at it will be in range to be shot at, but from a number of location on the mainland.
>though I think it's interesting that China sources 60% of its iron from Australia and not Russia
It don't seems so interesting to me. One is probably cheaper and easier during peacetime, but that doesn't mean the other won't be possible to obtain during a war. Russia's adventures in Ukraine reminded us that things can become significantly more expensive and difficult during war, while still being done.
As Eric Rall says, there is lots of precedent for `distant blockade.' The most obvious being the UK's blockade of Germany in both world wars. And an existing doctrine of continuous voyage, which absolutely allows you to stop ships going to north vietnam which are carrying contraband.
No sinking is necessary, unless the ships in question refuse to stop when ordered to do so. (Just like traffic stops do not require shooting motorists). The British stopped civilian ships sailing to German (and Dutch etc) ports, but didn't sink them.
Distant blockades have been a thing for a very long time. Both world wars, for instance. Also, the Union blockade of the Confederacy (1861-5) involved both close blockade operations (i.e. stationing warships a few miles out to sea near major ports) and distant ones. I think some distant blockade operations were involved in the Napoleonic Wars as well, although I'm less confident of that.
The trick to distant blockades is stopping and searching ships, inspecting their cargo manifests, and having other intelligence channel that can help you choose which ships to search and also help determine when the manifests are lying about where the cargo is coming from or where it's going. Under the Doctrine of Continuous Voyage, contraband is still subject to seizure if it's been moved to a different ship in a neutral port or even shipped overland from a neutral port: the WW1 blockade also stopped cargoes bound for Dutch and Danish ports, and the Civil War blockade involved stopping a lot of ships between Bermuda and various European ports. The stopping and searching is done by light ships, with your major warships only used if the other side tries to challenge the blockade with their fleet.
It helps if you have a convenient geographical choke point, like Bermuda in the ACW or the English Channel and North Sea in the World Wars, but it isn't strictly necessary.
Sinking tends to be more of a thing for commerce raiding rather than proper blockades. The difference is that you're only allowed to raid enemy-flagged ships, while a blockade also applies to neutral-flagged ships. Sinking neutral ships tends to annoy their respective home countries, sometimes leading to those countries not being neutral for much longer.
I have read that the PRC is aggressively stockpiling raw materials, oil etc. How large their stockpiles are, I don't know, and obviously they are not infinite, but the strategic power of a blockade is going to depend a lot on whether they have a 2 month stockpile or a 20 year stockpile.
Also we don't need to go U-boat, we can blockade them with surface units just fine, as long as it is a distant blockade.
China has land borders with fourteen different countries, only a few of which will cooperate with US-led sanctions. Between the enormous land area of China and the even more enormous land area of Russia, I don't think there's much that can't be obtained. There might be some shortages and rationing, and maybe steel that was going to build skyscrapers gets diverted into building tanks, but I can't think of anything specific.
doesn't have good land-based communications with basically any of those other countries though. The land borders are mostly mountains/dense forest/desert/tundra, with very few roads and rail. Those would have to be built first, which would take time.
The amount of goods transported to China by ship is on the order of billions of tonnes. Now I'm not an expert on logistics, but I don't think you can quickly switch that over to land-based transport. Not only would you have to build out that capacity within China, but also within the neighboring countries.
Then there's the issue that land-based transport is more expensive (i.e., consumes more resources) than ships, and that doesn't even take into account the massive expense in labor and materials for building the infrastructure itself.
Banned for a month for this comment.
China imports about 80% of its iron ore. (1) I suppose it could have domestic sources that it's choosing to not use for whatever reason, but I think the onus is on you to explain why they're not doing so- especially as they're gearing up for potential war. I do not in fact think that iron is 'literally as common as dirt'.
Rather than learning from 'popular Internet memes', I think I prefer statistics from industry sources. China is actually less self-sufficient in food than it was 2 decades ago (2), and has been a net importer of agricultural foodstuffs since 2004. (3) China is the world's largest food importer, including the top global importer of soybeans, corn, wheat, rice, and dairy products. (4) This is a recognized national security issue in China. (5)
As I understand it, much of their old agricultural land has now been developed for cities, roads, and factories. So references to past centuries are no longer relevant
1. https://www.aspistrategist.org.au/the-australian-goose-that-lays-the-multi-billion-dollar-iron-ore-eggs/
2. https://www.geopoliticalmonitor.com/import-dependency-and-chinas-food-security/
3. https://www.cfr.org/article/china-increasingly-relies-imported-food-thats-problem
4. https://fas.usda.gov/data/china-retail-foods-annual
5. https://www.tibetanreview.net/chinas-continued-rising-dependence-on-food-imports-a-perpetual-geopolitical-risk/
Seriously, it's better to know things before you talk about them.
Compare https://acoup.blog/2020/09/18/collections-iron-how-did-they-make-it-part-i-mining/ :
> I have good news for 𝘩𝘪𝘴𝘵𝘰𝘳𝘪𝘤𝘢𝘭 you as compared to 𝘷𝘪𝘥𝘦𝘰 𝘨𝘢𝘮𝘦 you: iron is the fourth most common element in earth’s crust, making up around 5% of the total mass of the part of the earth we can actually mine. Modern industry produces – and I mean this very literally – a 𝘣𝘪𝘭𝘭𝘪𝘰𝘯 𝘵𝘰𝘯𝘴 (and change) of iron per year. Iron is about the exact opposite of rare; almost all of the major ores of iron are dirt common. 𝗔𝗻𝗱 𝘁𝗵𝗮𝘁'𝘀 𝘁𝗵𝗲 𝗽𝗼𝗶𝗻𝘁.
> One of the reasons that the change from using bronze (or copper) as tool metals to using iron was so important historically is that iron is just 𝘴𝘰 𝘥𝘢𝘮𝘯 𝘢𝘣𝘶𝘯𝘥𝘢𝘯𝘵. Of course iron can be used to make 𝘣𝘦𝘵𝘵𝘦𝘳 tools and weapons as well, but only with proper treatment: initially, the advantage in iron was that it was 𝘤𝘩𝘦𝘢𝘱.
(The emphasis is Bret Devereaux calling you stupid, not me.)
If you compare China's iron ore production (estimated 660 million tonnes at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_iron_ore_production ) to its iron reserves (estimated 20 billion tonnes at https://www.nsenergybusiness.com/analysis/world-iron-ore-reserves-countries/ ), you learn that, if China needed to mine five times the amount of iron, it would be good for the next 6 years. Of course, comparing the reserves listed by NS Energy to the wikipedia estimate of production, we can also see that, if nothing changes, the entire world will blow through all of its iron reserves in 56 years. We can safely ignore that and realize that China appears to be, if anything, unusually rich in demonstrated iron reserves.
It is similarly rich in demonstrated arability, and unlike with the iron that's a real advantage.
The reason you import rocks and soybeans is that those are low-value products and you have better things to do with your time. It isn't that you're suffering from a crippling shortage of rocks.
Presuming such a war was triggered by the PRC mounting an invasion of Taiwan and the US coming to the island's defense, it really depends on how things got to that point:
- If the PRC mistakenly believed the US wouldn't intervene (a la Saddam in 1990) or incorrectly thought they had a means to prevent the USN and/or USAF from contesting their crossing the Strait, then the war probably wouldn't last long enough for such considerations to come into play.
- If the PRC *correctly* thought they had a means to prevent the USN and/or USAF from contesting their crossing the Strait, then it depends on the nature of such:
-- If it was transient (e.g., one-off strike that knocks US airbases in Japan & Korea out of commission just long enough for the invasion fleet to reach the far shore), then any blockade might be limited to PRC-occupied Taiwan.
-- If it was persistent (e.g., credible threats to US carriers within striking range of Taiwan), then the PRC's newly-expanded force projection capability might be enough to make a blockade infeasible.
On the last point, I don't see it. The PRC could have a newly-expanded force-projection capability that can keep US carriers far enough to be out-of-striking-range of Taiwan, but how does that prevent a distant blockade? Enforced at e.g. the Malacca strait, or similar? Most of China's raw materials come from a long way away, and merely denying the near-China seas to the USN isn't going to prevent blockade.
I perhaps should've emphasized "might" more … emphatically.
Starting from the premise that the PRC does not currently possess such a capability (I do not think the DF-21 qualifies), the range of a hypothetical future system is underdetermined; there exist (small) regions of the possibility space that could push the USN so far back that the boundary of the denied area is longer than can be effectively secured.
OK, sure, if they can successfully `deny' the seas out to a range of, say, 3000 miles, then that does render a blockade infeasible. That seems unlikely though. In part because you don't need to blockade the entire perimeter of the `denial' zone, a handful of chokepoints (e.g. Malacca strait, Panama canal) likely suffice.
[And why stop there. If they can add a factor of four and deny the seas out to 12000 miles, then they can counter-blockade America...]
There is also the question of whether the US has the stomach to start sinking civilian cargo ships.
Why do we need to start sinking them? We just stop/search/seize at Malacca or whatever. CF you can conduct traffic stops without shooting motorists. OK I guess if they don't stop when ordered to stop then we would need to fire on them. But this is no different to enforcing any old law - ultimately all governmental authority is backed by threat of force.
CF the UK implementing `distant blockade' of Germany in both world wars. At no point was indiscriminate `sinking civilian cargo ships' involved.
Definitely unlikely. But effective denial of even smaller areas is also unlikely; I'm just not confident that P(big area denial | small area denial) is negligibly small.
As for counter-blockading: supercarriers are far scarcer and much more valuable than merchant shipping generally. The PRC could deter the USN with a system whose capacity would be insufficient to impose a broad blockade.
Since cognitive biases are 1) both universal and resistant to self-detection, and 2) tend to favor extreme judgments and beliefs, could it be beneficial for people to obligatorily apply moderation to some classes of judgments/beliefs?
Particularly high-bias classes such as:
- Identity-linked beliefs
- Ethical judgments
- Complex multicausal scenarios
- Personal stake scenarios
I’ll define moderation here as a reduction in positional extremity on a spectrum. If your volume dial is at a 10, a 9 would be more moderate. If it’s at 1, a 2 would be.
As a principle it’s probably very limited to being applied in a vague and unsatisfying way, but would be applied after you reach your judgment/conclusion. For instance, if you believe UFOs have visited earth, consider moderating that to probably visited. If you believe UFOs never visited, consider moderating that to probably never. Any of these beliefs could be true, but given the nature of bias itself, chances are your/my bias has radicalized our judgment rather than moderated it.
Notes and exceptions: This doesn’t imply that the more moderate the belief, the better. It just suggests that many beliefs (not all) would benefit from a consistent moderating influence. There are situations where you may be choosing between two overly moderate options where this principle actually weakens the belief. Unlike confirmation bias, overconfidence and the availability heuristic, a few biases like the status quo bias, don’t necessarily radicalize beliefs but may unnecessarily moderate them. Procedural, low-stakes, single-variable and mathematically determined decisions are not as prone to bias and consequently a moderating principle might not be useful under these circumstances.
Rather than just making a habit of turning the dial down, I think it would work better to have some questions you ask yourself about these beliefs that help modulate your certainty that they're correct. I try to do that. One especially helpful one is to ask myself whether it makes me angry to think about people who do not share the belief. If it does, that's really a tell. It indicates that the belief is intertwined with my self-esteem and self-image somehow.
So if it makes me angry to think about people who think my belief is wrong, then I ask myself what my picture is of the other person's belief. I usually picture the other person in a way to supports my anger. Maybe I picture them being particularly dumb or selfish, and arriving at their idea via a bunch of infuriatingly dumb, selfish steps. Or I picture then despising me for my belief.
So then I get myself to think about times I've just been wrong about something, and how I arrived at my wrong belief, and what it was like to have it. Generally my steps of arriving at the belief were not especially dumb and selfish. or angry. Often I just kind of adopted the idea wholesale from people I was fond of and respected. And recognizing that helps me develop a different picture of the people I disagree with. And *that* helps me try on the idea that they might be right about some of it. Also, it becomes easier to reduce my own certainty in the belief if I am not mentally fighting a war with a bunch of imagined infuriating idiots who believe the opposite.
I try to use this approach, and I think most self aware people do too. But cognitive bias is often not self-detectable. We’re all victim to it to varying degrees, despite our efforts to spot it. So it seems plausible that applying a systematic moderating principle post-conclusion could be reasonably advocated for.
Self detection of bias, while helpful, is also really time/cognitive resource dependent and isn’t going to be nearly as effective for less critical/analytical people (like myself) who most need to temper their beliefs.
There is another method (not that I think yours is necessarily a bad one)--you could seek out people who disagree with you, ask them to explain their beliefs, and and force yourself to consider their reasons objectively. This isn't dependent upon self-detection of bias, and doesn't just replace all extreme beliefs with a "moderation bias."
Yes—I think your suggestion is probably a better method in most respects when one has the time and personnel available to carry it out.
But if you take for granted that bias is fundamental to cognition, it means you’re updating based on a second perspective biased to an unknowable degree in another direction. And in essence what you’re still seeking to do by this is moderate your belief.
Just to be clear, this moderating principle I’m floating isn’t something I’ve subscribed to already, just something I was trying to poke holes in with the help of folks like yourself.
"a second perspective biased to an unknowable degree"
Yes, but that's all we have, there being no other source of information out there, even in principle. Even science incorporates this--you replicate studies so that the biases of independent researchers will eventually cancel each other out.
There's your mind and what it perceives. Then there's other minds and what they perceive. That's pretty much it.
It’s also kind of ironic that you and I are talking about the principle from two different perspectives as you sensibly endorsed, but both our opinions on the principle appear to be radicalizing instead of moderating.
I agree. It’s all we have. The moderating principle is just meant as a flawed way to try to temper some of people’s bias on the fly. It would be particularly applicable in low-information-zone decisions.
If say you’re a bird watcher, and you catch a fleeting glimpse of a red and black bird that looked to you like a pileated woodpecker, which is rare in your region, and you think to yourself “I think that was a pileated woodpecker,” consider automatically updating that to “It’s possible that was a pileated woodpecker.”
You could seek out a panel of ornithological experts or spend hours soliciting the opinions of other birders, too. This would be ideal.
I’m all for replicating studies and doing exhaustive research when you have the capacity to do so. But the majority of decisions in life unfortunately don’t allow for such measures and it might be useful for people to have practical if imperfect principles to lean on in such cases.
Edit: I also noted some of the obvious categories of decision that such a principle wouldn’t apply to in my “Notes and exceptions.”
Mostly that happens from weak caricatures or fundamental non-understanding of the opposite viewpoint. That's not easy to solve.
For example, the only way I can understand woke ideology is
a)mistaken factual premises (believing MSM about various things)
b) Pretending to believe because of external pressure.
c) genuine hatred of white people/men/rich people or whatever else you guys don't like.
As a matter of curiosity, do you have a definition of "woke" that isn't just "Left wing extremism?"
The lex fridman podcast with zelensky, listening to the original audio in english, russian, and ukranian, really gave me an appreciation of the power of language and how humanizing it is to understand people you don't know in their more-familiar tongues. Humor and poetry is such an important part of being human.
If someone is married to someone whose mother tongue is different from your own, maybe worthwhile to put in the effort to learn it, eventually.
A pair of Substack pieces on that interview with Zelensky.
https://researchingukraine.substack.com/p/alert-update-zelenskys-interview
https://lesiadubenko.substack.com/p/bravo-mr-zelenskyy-you-rocked-it
Lex Fridman didn't ask tough questions though (just like Joe Rogan btw) that a good journalist from a traditional media would've asked.
For example, when Zelensky mentioned broken Budapest agreements, he could've asked why Zelensky double-crossed Russia in 2019 (in the words of his own head of the office of president at the time Bohdan https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ogGK8rjDqJE)
Or when they were discussing the language, Fridman could've asked whether Zelensky supported the position of the minister of education who wanted to ban students from speaking Russian during school breaks https://ukranews.com/ua/news/1040644-minosvity-pidtrymalo-zaboronu-spilkuvatysya-rosijskoyu-na-perervah-u-shkolah
That's not to say that there are no good answers to these questions, maybe Zelensky would've answered them satisfactorily (I certainly could've). My point is just that the interviewer didn't really challenge Zelensky and because of that we learned less than we could've done
Lex F knows that if he asks tough questions world leaders won't go on his show.
He asks questions that allow his audience to get valuable information and insight, I appreciate that
What exactly is the first claim supposed to be? I'm not watching a four-hour YouTube video to try to figure it out, and I'm confused as to how Zelenskyy is supposed have double-crossed somebody who initially invaded his country five years prior and what this has to do with them having clearly already broken the agreement from 1994.
The claim is that Ukraine and Russia reached an agreement in Paris in 2019 and then Ukraine didn't do what it promised. It was more or less similar to Minsk accords but at this time Zelensky was already in power.
According to Bohdan, они кинули Путина, I did my best translating it :)
Again, this is just Bohdan's words and not necessarily true. This was an example of a question I'd have asked - did it happen and if yes what prevented you from fulfilling the agreement
Okay, this is slightly more helpful, but what specific thing is it claimed that Ukraine didn't do?
He doesn't say exactly, but he says before that there were open and secret parts of the agreement and everyone was in favour of improving Minsk agreements, whatever it means.
This is the transcript btw
https://gordonua.com/publications/uvolnjaja-menja-zelenskij-skazal-ty-kak-neljubimaja-zhenshchina-polnyj-tekst-intervju-bogdana-gordonu-1517453.html
Elsewhere in the interview he also says that he heard from others that some deescalation steps were agreed, for example Russia freeing captured Ukrainian sailors (done in September as part of a prisoner swap https://edition.cnn.com/2019/09/07/europe/ukraine-russia-prisoner-swap-intl/index.html) and Ukraine re-starting the supply of water to Crimea (not done). It's not clear though whether this was part of the agreement in Paris but the timing makes it quite likely
The distinctive feature of the genocide in Gaza is its extreme, never-before-witnessed levels of documentation.
Perhaps for the first time in history, we have audio-visual real-time data trail from the cameras and the microphones of both the perpetrators and the victims. Coupled with Satellites, the databases of the social media sites this data trail lives in, and the image format of modern smartphones, you can be as precise as the exact Longitude/Latitude coordinates of where the picture or the video in question were taken, an absurd level of details.
A single media channel such as Al-Jazeera English can compile a 1 hour and 20 minutes long documentary stuffed full [1] of videos and images, a lot of them straight from the social media profiles of the perpetrators themselves. While concerned historians in the perpetrator state can weave a 124-page document [2] documenting the genocide in horrific contemporality, and update that document several times over the course of a year, maintaining the document across the twin languages of the perpetrator state and that of the international audience - Hebrew and English -, **all** in hobbyist capacity and without any state-level, corporate-level, or even NGO-level support.
The Gaza genocide is also, paradoxically and simultaneously, fervently denied, minimized, dismissed, vilified, booed and tabooed. Essentially untouchable.
What does that tell us about the psychology of Genocide Denialism?
Not *merely* that it's unresponsive to evidence, we already knew that aplenty from samples of, e.g., Holocaust Denial and other Genocide Denial by nation state actors such as Japan and Turkey. Those sometimes-farcical denials are often satirized as the classic trilogy of the Genocide Denialist:
- That didn't happen
- And if it did, it wasn't that bad
- And if it was, they deserved it
- [Bonus, in case of survival of victim ethnicity] and I wish we could do it to "them" all over again
That's all old news, although it can be quite amusing to catch all the Holocaust parallels in a single bout of rhetoric from a pro Israel hooligan.
No, I think what the first livestreamed genocide in the 21st century really tells us about Genocide Denial is rather different and new (at least to me): that it gets *stronger* in proportion to the evidence. That is, the more bulletproof and smoking-gun the evidence you have, the **more** (not less or at least more shyly) denial you get, the more fervent and desperate the denialists. Although it may get less coherent or less concerned with traditional argument structure as more and more evidence is unearthed, it gets more bitter, heated, and - most importantly - more numerous and concentrated.
Consider the sheer breadth of technicalities available as degrees of freedom for the Genocide Denialist to tune and play with:
- is it really genocide if the Génocidaires happen to have let the victim ethnicity live in semi-peace for 10 or 15 years before the fact ?
- is it really genocide if the victims happen to have had a high fertility rate before the fact ?
- Maybe it's genocide, but the perpetrator ethnicity is rich and has many Nobel prizes, and the victim ethnicity is poor and backwater, so ... [?]
- is it really ""tasteful"" to call it genocide when the current perpetrator ethnicity happen to be the descendants of victims from another, earlier genocide ?
- those are not children being killed, merely children being starved or frozen to death using passive obstructionism and Bureaucracy
- those are not teenagers being killed, merely teenagers being kidnapped and sexually abused in extra-judicial dark prisons
- the perpetrator ethnicity seems to discuss Ethnic Cleansing a lot, surely that can't mean they would also do Genocide? Exactly one of the two is ever possible at any given time, two is redundant.
And so on. And so forth.
It's of course besides the point to notice how trivially refutable or irrelevant every one of those are, they were never meant as solid research-level genocide **questioning**, the legitimate skepticism and question marks advanced by genocide scholars or good-faith amateurs and characterized by respect for evidence, awareness of previous literature, and the current state of evidence. In addition to the ethno-political neutrality of the author regarding the genocide in question. Those points are not intended to be used like that. They are bait.
The very nature of the fragmented, desperate, half-baked, half-hearted, half-thoughts of the Genocide Denialist is a feature: they confuse, they sow doubts, they decrease the signal-to-noise ratio and increase its reciprocal. They're the intellectual equivalent of fighter jet missile countermeasures, chaffs and flares. Their purpose is to be sources of noise, to confuse the targeting system of pursuers. Red Herring, reified and refined as a a whole arsenal of argument tactics and debate aesthetics.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kPE6vbKix6A
[2] https://witnessing-the-gaza-war.com/
Would you be fine if Israel paused its military campaign and Gaza was instead invaded by all the countries who had dual citizens kidnapped and killed by Hamas? I think if you wouldn't be fine, then you are clearly just pushing a "Palestinians can do whatever they want" narrative, which is unserious. If you would be fine, how should those countries enact their military campaigns such that it doesn't fall into the same pitfalls as Israel's?
Holocaust, local Jewish population change: -100%, approximately. Population change if the Nazis had only had a moderate-to-strong deliberate priority of wiping out Jews, as opposed to "yeah let's sacrifice a big portion of our actual war effort so that we can wipe some more out": Less severe than that.
Israeli response to to Hamas' attempted genocide, Gaza population change: Moderate population increase. Population change, had Israel had even the slightest preference towards them all being dead: -100%, within hours at most.
(Leaving out the fact that it's an actual war, that Hamas started, and could end at any moment by surrendering. As opposed to genocides, which don't have opposing armies.)
The Gazan people are, in fact, still around. If they were victims of genocide, they would not be. Or, if you want to stretch the definition, at the very least there would be far fewer of them. Your argument simply doesn't work, @LearnsHebrewHatesIP.
So, in simple words, "How could it be a genocide if it's not the Holocaust?!". <sigh>.
> Holocaust, local Jewish population change: -100%, approximately
False. Europe's Jewish population was 9.4 million before the Holocaust [1], the Holocaust killed 6 million == 6/9.4 == 63% of the population. That's your number after the negative sign, it's off by 37%. An additional amount fled to make the population 2.7 million by 1948.
> Hamas' attempted genocide
But I thought genocides has no survivors according to you and must result in 90%+ casualties? There are thousands of survivors from the Kibbutz Hamas raided (several times the dead count), there are overall 60K people [2] fleeing from Gaza Otef.
Which direction do you want to walk the Genocide Denial street? It can't be both ways.
> -100%, within hours at most.
This is an amusing factoid of Hasbara brainwashing. If every one of Gaza's 2.3 million people was lined up in the street ready for murder, it would have still taken every traditional weapon in Israel's arsenal quite a few days to murder them all. Go ahead, do the calculation assuming Israel will bomb every square kilometer of Gaza's 365 and using the number of aircrafts in the IDF and their payload in bombs and the bomb yield.
> [Gaza:] Moderate population increase.
You're not even trying at this. Laughable.
> The Gazan people are, in fact, still around
So are the Jews, the Armenians, and the Native Americans? No genocide ever happened because people == alive? Are you sure you understand what Genocide means? The definition (as in: the actual international treaty the world is upholding and the ICJ is enforcing) is in quite readable English [3].
> Your argument simply doesn't work
That's quite an amount of confidence for someone who seems to have last heard of the Holocaust in 11th grade history from a teacher they weren't completely paying attention to, and/or Call of Duty: World at War.
I normally like Chutzpah too but come on, *something* has to back it up, besides raw confidence and Ben Shapiro-esque making-shit-up-confidently, that is.
> @LearnsHebrewHatesIP.
You have to get over whatever grievances you have with a long-banned guy and start focusing on convincing someone who isn't you of what's coming out of your mouth/what's typed on your keyboard. Thank me for the advice later.
[1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/1357607/historical-jewish-population/
[2] https://www.ynetnews.com/magazine/article/rkdca37fp
[3] https://www.ohchr.org/en/instruments-mechanisms/instruments/convention-prevention-and-punishment-crime-genocide
Serious, good faith, question here (that even I could make the case for answering in the affirmative): Was the American strategic bombing campaign against Japan in WW2 "genocide"?
Genocide is when a group of people (not necessarily an entire ethnicity) tries really hard to exterminate another group of people (not necessarily an entire ethnicity, or even an ethnicity at all) just for the sole reason of their existence.
Insofar as we can glean anything that proves the USA or its military high command wanted to exterminate the Japanese or any part thereof ""as such"" (i.e. just for being Japanese, such that a Japanese baby would still qualify even if they didn't do anything), we can indeed conclude that the American bombing campaign was a genocide. I don't know of anything like that, the closest would be rounding up Japanese immigrants in the USA and putting them in extra-judicial detention, but that's collective punishment, another bad thing that's not genocide, so I default to considering that what the USA did is not genocide.
This is still not high praise. "Not giving a shit so much that whole millions could die for objectives that could have been achieved in other ways" is its own, unique, incommensurable way of being a piece of shit, not comparable (i.e. neither greater nor lesser) than being a genocidaire.
"Before we're through with them, the Japanese language will be spoken only in Hell."- Admiral William Halsey Jr.
That's quite a bit below "President of the country" or "Head of State (PM)", both of which have been documented spewing genocidal garbage in case of Israel.
And the US doesn't have a 78 year history of attempted ethnic cleansing/genocide with Japan, as Israel's history with Gaza (started with biological warfare in 1948).
Wait, so you believe that if Hamas unconditionally surrendered and returned all the hostages, that the Israelis would continue the war?
Yes, by another means and using another excuses.
The hostages could have been gotten back before January 2024 if Israel didn't break the first and only ceasefire in the war of late November 2023. But they weren't, which tells you all you ever need to know about the "But the Hostages" excuse.
I find it funny how you only addressed half my comment
In any case, to show other ACX Commenters the incredibly mendacity of our poster here, let's break down the facts, shall we?
The wikipedia article for the ceasefire indicates that both sides credibly accused the other of breaking it - and there were indeed incidents on both sides. The ceasefire was a 4 day ceasefire combined with a 3:1 Palestinian:Israeli Hostage exchange and the allowal of humanitarian aid into Gaza, followed by a 2 day ceasefire with a similar exchange, followed by a one day ceasefire. At this point, Hamas claims Israel rejected an extension in exchange for hostages, and they shot rockets into Israel, which were promptly responded to via Israeli airstrikes.
Rejecting an extension due to failing to come to terms is not "breaking" a ceasefire as OP put it. Let's see what happened:
The Guardian:
"Israel said the truce had been broken by Hamas and could not be renewed because the group had failed to offer to release the remaining female hostages in Gaza. Eylon Levy, a government spokesperson, said: “Having chosen to hold on to our women, Hamas will now take the mother of all thumpings.”
Hamas said some of the women asked for were Israeli soldiers, and that it had offered to hand over two other detainees plus the bodies of three members of the Bibas family it said had been killed by Israeli bombing, but this was rejected."
Reuters:
"Each of the warring sides blamed the other for causing the collapse of the truce by rejecting terms to extend the daily release of hostages held by militants in exchange for Palestinian detainees.
The pause, which began on Nov. 24, had been extended twice, and Israel had said it could continue as long as Hamas released 10 hostages each day. But after seven days during which women, children and foreign hostages were freed, mediators failed at the final hour to find a formula to release more, including Israeli soldiers and civilian men.
Israel accused Hamas of refusing to release all the women it held. A Palestinian official said the breakdown occurred over female Israeli soldiers."
A very different story, no?
It's also worth pointing out that Hamas did not allow Red Cross to visit the hostages despite that being in the initial deal.
So you have shown other ACX commenters my "mendacity" by... quoting Wikipedia, Reuters, and the Guardian saying both sides **credibly** accuse each other of breaking the ceasefire? And by citing a government spokesman of Israel who heavily implies that it's Israel that started/resumed the bombing first ("Mother of all thumpings")? Hmmm, okay. Hope you enjoyed showing my mendacity. Thanks for the new word.
> A very different story, no?
Nah, roughly the same story that I adequately summarized by "Israel broke the ceasefire". A ceasefire is, believe it or not, broken by the first party who starts firing. We also see that now in the "Ceasefire" agreed upon by Israel and Hezbollah, which Israel breaks almost every day.
>It's also worth pointing out that Hamas did not allow Red Cross to visit the hostages despite that being in the initial deal.
Regrettable, too bad that anyone with more than "room temperature in Celsius" worth of IQ points would have figured that firing upon Hamas wouldn't fix the situation or improve it, how tragic the leadership of Israel lack that.
> I find it funny how you only addressed half my comment
Oh let me declare that was intentional then, because I'm a natural comedian. That's how you manage to call out bullshit with no consequences.
And in case you agree with my original point that "But the hostages" is a convenient rubbish excuse for engaging in what Israel wanted in the first place, let me address your next point, how can Israel be credibly accused of genocide when it has an allegedly definite goal that the Palestinians could aid by surrendering? Well, the answer is that it's still genocide.
As stated in the Convention on the Prevention that I'm frankly quite tired of repeatedly citing by now, genocide isn't "Not Genocide" because the perpetrator party has "legitimate" military or political goals that the victim party could concede and survive. The Ottoman/Turkish proto-state had a goal in genociding Armenians on its land after all: not allowing them a piece of their future state. That's a very "legitimate" military goal, literally the preservation of a state. Until now, **looks up Wikipedia** exactly 34 state recognizes Turkey's genocide of Armenians, a tiny subset of the 200+ that exist.
The USA had a very legitimate military/political goal in genociding Native Americans. The Native Americans could have stopped it by surrendering and allowing the expanding colony to take their lands in peace. Even the Nazis had a somewhat legitimate political goal, if you squint a bit: They're the ruling party and they wanted the Jewish citizens out of their state. Their state, their rules. The German Jews could have prevented the Holocaust by fleeing outside of Europe any time between 1933 and 1938. (I believe the African colonies didn't have any high immigration standards for who they would accept, and I imagine the white Afrikaans would be more than delighted to receive White population)
No doubt to your disappointment, there is no "Just Stop Resisting Bro" clause in the Convention which defines Genocide and that Israel ratified and is active since 1951, a genocide is a genocide. Murder and significant attempts to kill or transfer children or prevent births, in whole or in part, and as such. Very simple. Very horrific.
Or that if Oct 7 hadn't happened, Israel would have attacked anyway?
We don't have to wonder about that: Look up "West Bank" in the news.
This is what we refer to in the business as a "false equivalency"
Can you look it up for me? I'm particularly interested in how many airstrikes were involved.
...What do you mean by unconditional surrender? Because unless every member and supporter of Hamas commits suicide, this wouldn't be a long-term solution.
Don't pretend you don't know what I mean
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_Instrument_of_Surrender
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Surrender_of_Japan
I mean exactly what I mean. Sure, some Japanese fought on til the 70s in the Philippine jungles, but when the state surrenders, it tends to stick. And I don't necessarily believe Hamas is that much more fanatical than the Imperial Japanese.
Oh, look! @LearnsHebrewHatesIP is wearing a fresh sock!
Look, if you're going to try to sneak around a ban (https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/open-thread-350), maybe try mixing up your writing style and approach?
But more broadly, in the *vastly* unlikely chance that you're not @LearnsHebrewHatesIP, I have a suggestion for both of you:
The pompous tone you're utilizing in this comment and your replies to other people's comments is highly likely to entrench your ideological enemies into their positions, even when your assertions are supported by trustworthy evidence. Belief perseverance aka the backfire effect is a difficult enough phenomenon to combat when the person making an argument is likeable; when they're not, it becomes virtually impossible to overcome. Even here on ACX, where many commenters make a heroic conscious attempt to avoid falling victim to belief perseverance, many of your readers are nevertheless coming away from your content thinking, "Fuck that guy, I hope his cause fails even harder now."
And look, I get it! Righteous indignation feels great, and dunking on idiots is super fun!
However, when I see that my self-indulgent righteous indignation and idiot-dunking has made me an avatar through which my ideological enemies can hate my cause even *more,* I do immediate penance by donating hard cash to the best possible organization advancing my cause. For example, whenever I send someone into a frothing rage about the murder of babies by self-indulgently baldly laying out why there's a total lack of a downside to induced abortion, I immediately pay for some abortions for women who can't otherwise afford them. And that actually feels even better than the righteous indignation and idiot-dunking.
I suggest you do something similar for your particular cause.
Is it really him?? I missed you dude!
> @LearnsHebrewHatesIP
From your link, I can glean that this guy (1) Really hated Trump, (2) Wrote about Gaza and AI a lot?
Like the meme says: Do You Have the Slightest Idea How Little That Narrows It Down? [1].
Go to HackerNews [2], scroll to the search bar in the very bottom of the page, and write "Israel". In the search results that appear, see how many of the comments are Pro-Palestinian and how many are Pro-Israel. (1) and (2) do NOT uniquely describe a single person. Not even close.
But regardless, that's a great guy/gal over there, and it's flattering for me to be mistaken for him/her.
> The pompous tone you're utilizing in this comment and your replies to other people's comments
This an interesting critique. What's "Pompous" in this context? Snarky? Self-Important? If NoRandomWalk is anything to go by, I have something valuable to say (the feeling is mutual), and he's coming at this from a Pro-Israel angle. N == 1 and all that, but still?
You and 1123581321 seem to infer "Anger" or "Self-Righteousness" by some sort of the genetic fallacy. "The kind of people who call the Gaza war a genocide are idiotic assholes on Twitter, you say the Gaza war a genocide, therefore you must be an idiotic asshole from Twitter".
I can be snarky as hell too, but I reserve that for people I detect to be not engaging in good faith, and "Good Faith" here isn't code for "I like them": I classify all but 2 of the top-level replies to my thread starter as Good Faith, and I dislike most of them. One of the 2 non-Good-Faith comments I didn't reply to, and the other I replied in kind. It's not hard to spot them.
> self-indulgently baldly laying out why there's a total lack of a downside to induced abortion
This is its own rabbit hole and I disagree that extinguishing life (even if it's 6-week-old life) "has no downside", although I perfectly understand the immense temptation to bait the "Pro-Life" hypocrites who simultaneously oppose abortions but have no problem supporting the biggest Post-Birth non-consensual-abortion providers, Israel.
I don't recommend acting on such temptations, in the same way that I abhor taunting pro-Israel genocide denialists with dead October 7th victims, as is the custom in some corners of Twitter and YouTube. The taunter is the biggest loser in the end, not the taunted.
[1] https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/do-you-have-the-slightest-idea-how-little-that-narrows-it-down
[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/
I very much doubt I am the only long-time reader and commenter who suspects you are @LearnsHebrewHatesIP.
But if you are merely a spiritual twin of @LearnsHebrewHatesIP and you would like to avoid future accusations of being a permanently banned user utilizing a sock account, please feel free to research how to avoid their exact talking points, writing style, and comment formatting by searching for their username across most of the Open Comment threads prior to the October 6, 2024 banning.
You will encounter hundreds of comments which (if not written by you) were written by someone who is your *literal* soulmate, and you should drop everything and go to that person rather than wasting your life fruitlessly arguing with strangers on the internet.
Nah, I didn't think this was LHHIP. He explicitly wrote a long post about how he came to a conclusion that Israel didn't have a goal to genocide Palestinians. His writing manner was different too.
I mean...I find it eminently plausible that LearnsHebrewHatesIP could have been persuaded that Israel's goal wasn't genocide and then, perhaps upon later developments, change his mind back to genocide.
On the point of writing manner, I'd like to agree to disagree; after all, this user sounds so distinctly LHHIP to *me* that I accused them of being LLHIP, and I think the first reply back to me felt equally LHHIP-ish. You disagree. I would counter that any differences in writing style could be LHHIP trying not to be caught wearing socks, but I've also already proactively conceded that I could be wrong and the similarities are indeed a coincidence.
(If it is a coincidence, I stand by my advice that Hind's Ghost should go look up LHHIP's past comments, if not to avoid future accusations of sockery or plagiarism, then at least to derive tremendous pleasure from reading someone with a remarkably similar world view.)
Anyway, I'm guessing none of us is interested in doing hours of tedious forensic analysis on LHHIP's past comments to support our particular positions; that sounds like a huge pain in the ass and would ultimately still only reflect our personal opinions, as (I assume) none of us have access to the kind of hard evidence which would stand up in a real court.
Yeah we've already spent too much time on this.
Heh, if only dating was that easy.
Thanks Christina, I appreciate you.
The casualty rates seem awfully low for an intentionally plan to wipe a large number of people out. Something like 50,000 out of 2.1 million is high, but not much higher (in proportion) than casualties in the Iraq war, which benefitted from the invaded country not being one large urban-warfare city.
At some point, any war between different peoples can be considered a genocide, which sort of diminishes the impact of the term if we're applying it so indiscriminately. The insistence of the use of the term genocide, seems more like a play to reframe the situation in one that has conclusions less favorable for Israel (they suffered a genocide, which we all acknowledged was bad, which then largely motivated the support for the creation of Israel by the international community, which has led to another genocide being perpetrated in turn, sort of invalidating the justification for international support for Israel in the first place).
I don't have a horse in the race, as I don't particularly care, but it seems far more likely that this is the real intent behind calling the war in Gaza a genocide, than it is an accurate assessment of the language we use as it might apply to this situation.
> At some point, any war between different peoples can be considered a genocide
Interesting point, although there is more than one way to devalue the term "Genocide", and reserving it for victims of ethnicities "we like" while denying it for the victims of the ethnicities "we don't like" is another way, as is setting an explicit "You must be this tall for it to be a genocide" limit, which - as a trivial consequence - will allow genocidaires to know exactly how many they can "thin the herd" before stopping and not be on the hook for it.
> I don't have a horse in the race, as I don't particularly care
If that's true, you're not the "Genocide Denialist" I talked about in my post. Genocide Questioning is okay, as is being skeptic towards everything.
Like vs. don't like is a good distinction, and probably the accurate one. If that's the case, the term doesn't really matter besides a signal for ones support in the war in Gaza. If one calls it a "conflict", they're probably pro Israel, War is more neutral, Genocide is pro-Palestine. If the distinction is just one of support, there's really no point to argue whether what's happening in Gaza is a genocide or not, as the *actual* motivation for picking an accurate term to describe what's going on, is purely a political decision based on ones pre-existing support.
If anything it's a complete waste of time to talk about whether it's genocide or not (unless it becomes obviously and ideologically genocide i.e. Statements of deliberate intent to wipe the Palestinians out by people in positions of significant power, while also taking in mind that these sort of statements happen often in all wars. Dehumanizing the enemy might be an important psychological step in waging an effective war). The real debate and question should be about which side do you prefer and why, with the genocide claim serving as a distraction to enflame, and anger some previously-reasonable people.
It doesn't help that it is a term used basically specifically for a very unique and very rapid form of deliberate extermination from WW2. Applying it otherwise is a crapshoot that's just as likely to be an incorrect use than a correct one. Maybe there's an Arabic equivalent to genocide that can be used. For example, Genghis Khan definite committed genocide by any sane definition (literally and deliberately wiping out entire cities because he didn't like them) but calling his wars of conquest a genocide seems to not actually fit the term. Presumably he didn't have anything against the people of Merv on ethnic or religious grounds (the Mongol Empire was quite tolerant of different peoples and religions inside it), but he killed every last citizen because they were resisting. This seems qualitatively different than deliberately eliminating an entire people, at extreme expense, when they aren't actually resisting. There's no limit to the level of brutality if the normal threat "submit or die" is replaced with "die or die", where submission also means death.
I disagree it's a distraction.
We can talk about 2 things at once, and "Genocide" is a reminder that killing an entire people is not an acceptable answer to a political/ethnic/territorial conflict no matter what that conflict actually was or who is "at fault".
Nobody who agrees that the US genocided Native Americans (off the top of my head, quite literally taking children away from their parents and forced sterilization as late into the 20th cen as the 1970s) would be told "Actually, the real argument is whether Native Americans deserved their own state or the White settlers did, anything else is a distraction to inflame and distract".
Similarly for the Armenian Genocide (perhaps the 2nd most famous one after the Holocaust), which was committed against a quite armed population that had a history of nationalism and resisting the Ottomans.
One question: if Israel is carrying out a genocide in Gaza the what's taking them so long? If they wanted to kill _everyone_ they could clearly do it a lot faster.
This isn't the 19th century anymore, you can't just make it official policy to exterminate an entire population and get away with it. Israel's benefactors have their own images to maintain, after all. In the modern age, incompetence is infinitely more forgivable than malice. If people start dying to natural causes rather than outright murder, you get to maintain plausible deniability. Civilian casualties are unavoidable, of course, so who can blame them?
That's an argument that Israel has decided not to engage in genocide because of the bad PR and international political implications and whatnot. Which is plausible, but almost indistinguishable from Israel deciding not to engage in genocide because they know better than anyone that genocide is wrong. So it seems uncharitable to assert the cynical version.
But more importantly for our present discussions, the claim "Israel has decided not to engage in genocide because [reasons]", is first and foremost a claim that Israel has decided *not to commit genocide* and so is not committing genocide.
If you want to assert that Israel is attempting to commit genocide, perhaps by some sneaky camouflaged way because reasons, then you need a plausible mechanism by which the thing they are doing will result in at least the localized destruction of an ethnic group. Which is, after all, the definition of genocide.
The Palestinian population in Gaza is I believe *growing*, and has been for most of the past year. The casualty rate due to Israeli attacks has *decreased* by almost an order of magnitude from late 2023, to an annualized death rate of ~8.7 per 1000 people. The current birth rate, per the CIA world factbook, is 26.3 per 1000 people per year, and the prewar death rate was 3.5 per 1000 per year.
If Israel had continued what it was doing in late 2023, it could eventually have eliminated the Palestinian population of Gaza, though it would have taken a decade or so. If Israel continues to do what it is doing now, the Palestinian population of Gaza will grow at ~1.4% per year. Israel has changed its tactics from something that could eventually have had genocidal effect (though not necessarily intent), to something that cannot have genocidal effect.
This is not consistent with an Israeli intent to commit genocide, and it is not in fact a genocide in progress. It is a particularly bloody war, and we've already got the right words to describe *that*.
Yeah, you can make a case for "bombing the Gazans back into the stone age" or "being too indiscriminate in their targeting," but the charge of genocide seems like it is being used entirely for its emotional affect, without any particular concern for accuracy.
One question: If Nazi Germany carried out a genocide in Europe, then what took them so long? If the armed forces that reached Moscow from Warsaw in 5 months wanted to kill __everyone__ they could clearly do it a lot faster than 5 years.
If the Nazis had started openly doing mass shootings, sparing no one, then the non-Germans would have quickly figured out the goal was their extermination, and they would have started fighting back with whatever they had, hiding, and running. Those responses would have in turn made it harder for the Nazis to continue the killing. All of the infrastructure in the conquered areas would have also become unusable had the inhabitants all started to resist.
Exterminating a large population must be done in a piecemeal fashion to succeed, starting with the smallest and/or least-liked groups of people in the area. Keep working your way up.
They did. In April of 1942, 80% of the victims of the Holocaust were still alive; in September of 1942, 80% were dead. As John Schilling pointed out just as I was writing this, the reason they didn't kill them sooner was to extract slave labor out of them first. However, once the Nazis began to seriously contemplate the possibility of losing the war, Hitler wanted to achieve a policy goal that couldn't easily be undone. Nothing about this is in any way equivalent or even germane to the population of Gaza growing during an alleged extermination campaign.
So the question still remains, what did the Nazis spent the all the time doing between 1943 and 1945 ? Killing just a measly 20% (== 0.2 * 6 == 1.2 million Jews)? While they killed 4 times that in half a year? Does that mean the Nazis were actually the most moral army in the Universe and trying to avoid the civilian casualties while the partisans forced their hands?
> once the Nazis began to seriously contemplate the possibility of losing the war,
That must have happened by at least D-Day, June 1944. Berlin was captured about 10 to 11 months later. According to you, the Nazis only needed September - April == 6 months to kill 4.8 million in Jews (and quite a bit in others), they should have been done with the rest by January 1945 or March at the very latest.
And all of that still skips forward over the 1933-1939 period, in which Nazis tried every trick in the book to ethnically cleanse Jews without outright shooting them in the streets. Your reasoning would have outputted "Alleged Extermination Campaign" to anyone worrying about the Jews during this period.
That kinda does support their point, though. Israel doesn't have a real war to lose, nor are they losing the support of their benefactors anytime soon. They have plenty of time.
Well, first, the Nazis didn't want to kill *everyone*; they wanted to kill just the Jews and a few other specific groups while keeping everyone else alive. Since these groups aren't trivially distinguished by e.g. skin color, that involves a fair bit of tedious sorting. And second, they wanted to get the maximum amount of slave labor out of the ones they were going to kill, before killing them.
> Those sometimes-farcical denials are often satirized as the classic trilogy of the Genocide Denialist:
> - That didn't happen
> - And if it did, it wasn't that bad
> - And if it was, they deserved it
I don't think those are particular to anything, certainly not genocide. That's just the way denials are made.
Steve Sailer called this "the Law of Merited Impossibility" in the context of talking about the consequences of political policies.
I think it was Rod Dreher who originally coined the term.
Law of merited impossibility: "That's just a right-wing conspiracy theory, it will never happen, and when it does, you bigots will deserve it good and hard."
I can't think of any argument, on either side of the political spectrum, which fits that structure. Are there examples?
What is the practical distinction between a war with civilian casualties as collateral damage, and a genocide?
What's the practical distinction between a bunch of sand and a heap of sand? Or between an Island and a continent? Or between a peninsula and the Indian subcontinent?
Intent and scale.
Yep, would you look at that. Shankar and I have had a few disagreements on various issues, his and mine politics are... different...
And yet you got us both on the same page: you don't care a fig about fate of actual Gazans and would rather drive people away than foster a broad agreement about this war being awful and the need to make it stop.
Ok, I'm impressed by your mind-reading ability. You saw through me. Thanks for your contribution to the discussion.
Okay, so it's not whether the ICJ or the UN or the ICC or "genocide scholars" or whoever you deem authoritative arbitrarily declares it so.
Good, this (along with at least two of your examples) bolsters my point that there IS no meaningful distinction, and your insisting on your preferred subjective and divisive label when you can easily get broad (though perhaps not overwhelming) agreement on what you might care about (Gazans deaths being sad) might be doing more harm than good.
And it IS subjective. Intent - of whom? Individual soldiers? Commanders? Government officials? Determined by their actions or their rhetoric?
And scale - in absolute numbers? A ratio of civilians to combatants? As a percentage of the total population? And if so, what's the total population of? Gazans? Palestinians? Arabs? And what's the threshold where your killing switches from collateral damage to genocide?
Something being fuzzy doesn't mean that that it can't have correct and incorrect labels.
> at least two of your examples
Do you believe that if someone called India a Peninsula or Australia an Island he or she wouldn't be made fun of as clueless or at least looked down upon as someone who doesn't bother to know the definition of things he/she talks about?
> Individual soldiers? Commanders? Government officials? Determined by their actions or their rhetoric?
All of the above. And there is evidence for every question mark.
> And if so, what's the total population of? Gazans? Palestinians? Arabs?
That reads like an extended parody of the kind of Genocide Denialist I'm describing in the second half of my post. You can do that with any Genocide. I bet if you took the number of Jews killed in WW2 to the total number of Jews who have ever existed from Abraham till now it will also sound tiny and inconsequential.
The population is Gazans. Because the war is in Gaza. Because the genocidal rhetoric is about Gazans and Palestinians more generally.
I agree (Mainland) Australia is large enough to clearly be more than a mere island. That was the one example of yours I wasn't counting.
Has there been a movement of some kind to stop India being referred to as a peninsula I'm not aware of? No, I do not think someone who did would be mocked as clueless or looked down upon.
You want to call every war a genocide, because it's a destruction "in whole or in part" or whatever, yeah, sure, knock yourself out. I will continue roll my eyes at you and everyone else who does, no matter how fancy their titles, but there's no reason for you to care about that.
Funny how parallel is the last sentence to Holocaust denial and "Holohoax" rhetoric. "Fancy fake scholars want to tell us our favorite state meant genocide when it was a just an honest war".
As I said before, you can do you.
I'd say what really separates this from the Holocaust is how little the victims are practically valued. The most tragic thing about this whole situation is that every single nation on the planet places the value of their lives at zero or less than zero; otherwise they would be willing to offer them refuge. But as it stands, they are a global liability. Despite their rhetoric, even the sympathetic nations understand that the presence of these people would cause nothing but problems... The Gazans simply do not have a future.
Positive value isn't why people take in refugees. Every refugee everywhere is starkly negative value.
...Uh, what? Where did you get that from? Even a white supremacist would accept that refugees from other white countries could provide net positive value, especially if they were skilled and educated.
Would you consider that by insisting on the “genocide” label you may be making things worse for Gazans? Like, a tiny bit worse, but nonetheless? Because it’s much easier for many people to agree that the war is awful and needs to come to some sort of a close fast, and Israel should be pressured to let more aid through, etc.
But you insist! Insist that this is genocide, and those who disagree with you are monsters, and the rest of your post.
And in doing this you lose allies, people like yours truly, who read your stuff, remember Jewish kids burnt alive by Hamas on Oct 7, and just walk away. I think Bibi is a monster, but I begrudgingly side with him when presented with your line of reasoning.
Genocide is not a label like "Bisexual" or "Pan-Sexual-ARomantic". It's something that had a definition and was recognized long before it was put in treaties or given a fancy Latin-derived name in a Germanic language.
> those who disagree with you are monster
Or misinformed, denialism happens for both reasons. More likely and prevalently, there is a weird quasi-stable state in the middle of "Actively Monstrous" and "Blissfully and Innocently Unaware", it's "Deliberately not wanting to know". Many such states in fact.
> remember Jewish kids burnt alive by Hamas on Oct 7
Sure, Jewish kids being burned alive by Hamas, brought to you by the same state that claimed 40 babies were beheaded by Hamas and then couldn't produce a single shred of evidence. You don't need to embellish what Hamas did. Take what can be verified for a fact right now and wait for the rest to be proven.
And you know what? Let's grant that Hamas did indeed burn Jewish kids alive. Israel also engaged in that hobby too, here's (just one) instance of that https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=df3kZYqYJlI, caught on actual video. Is there perhaps a good reason that wasn't the one that came to your mind first when you queried for "Horrible war criminals burning people alive"?
But I get it. It's all because of October 7th, right? That one justifies everything. It justifies murdering bazillion kazillion Palestinians. It probably justifies breeding Palestinians and then killing them just for the heck of it. But if that is true, how could burning Palestinian children alive be something that was happening even before October 7th? https://www.reuters.com/article/world/israeli-settler-found-guilty-of-murder-in-arson-attack-on-palestinian-family-idUSKBN22U0L2/, Hmmm, maybe Israel perfected a Torah-based method of seeing 10 years into the future though, idk.
> I think Bibi is a monster, but I begrudgingly side with him when presented with your line of reasoning.
Ok, I'm so horrible that a literal war criminal wanted by the ICC is better than me. You do you, I will do me.
So why are you here? Clearly not to convince anyone to come to your view, you're failing miserably at that. Like I said, you're nudging the arrow away from your preferred outcome.
Unless the preferred outcome is to righteously yell at others, Gazans be damned.
> Clearly not to convince anyone to come to your view
I think you're laboring under the misconception that you not being convinced by 2500 words of sourced argument that you never seriously engaged with the points therein, somehow means the words are to blame.
But you know what? It's completely fine you're not convinced. I will take both of Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International over your opinion when it comes to genocide and/or war crimes any day of the week, no offense to you, I'm sure you're great at many other things.
ACX has a lot of other readers. If exactly one of them is not aware of the genocide in Gaza (or laboring under Israel's lies of "Collateral Damage") and I managed to at least sow the seed of doubt in his or her conscience and motivate him or her to look further, that's completely fine by me.
> the preferred outcome is to righteously yell at others
Have you developed a mutation that allows you to hear sound over text? You could use a medical patent if so.
The traditional signifier for yelling over text is UPPPER_CASE, which I used in this thread **ctrl-F" exactly once in my conversation with NoRandomWalk, and in the context of emphasis by repetition (e.g. one, uno, EINS), not yelling.
More generally, your approach to this issue in your comments reminds me of the "Calm Hitler" meme [1]. Not in the sense that you're Hitler or anything close to him, but more generally the idea of "Wow Man, anger is, .... like ..... totally not cool. Calm down my guy nothing deserves to be angry about."
Does this have a name? Let's call it Reductio Ad Ragerium. You're angry, therefore you're wrong. Because "emotions" are wrong. Reason is when we calculate the simulate the world as a Turing machine in blissful, machine indifference. Anything else is obviously corrupt and false.
It's even worse than the meme because in the meme Hitler at least had a visual confirmation that his interlocuter was indeed angry in the way that he imagines it, but in your case you're just inferring anger (true) in my words and thinking of the stereotypical frothing-at-the-mouth image of a street pastor type of angry (false) instead of the more common and socially common type of anger that makes people want to argue for the right reasons without necessarily being stuck in a nervous breakdown.
[1] https://pbs.twimg.com/media/DztRBSHUUAAPXlH?format=jpg
[ **Hitler and a guy are discussing politics**
Guy: RARG PEOPLE DESRVE TO BE TREATED LIKE HUMANS DURRR NOBODY HAS THE RIGHT TO MURDER MILLIONS HURR DURRR
Hitler [Calm and collected, but taken aback]: Wow I just want to murder all the Jews and take over the world, but hey, that's your opinion and I'm totally fine with that. Looks like you've got some growing up to do.]
Relevant smbc: https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/2014-09-01
Curious, when you say 'Bibi is a monster' could you write a few sentences about why? I have an ignorant model of him, and would like to be educated.
He has clung to power for far too long and at this point his main goal appears to be defending that above all else. He was preoccupied with wrecking Israel’s judiciary as opposed to Israel’s security before the oct 7 attacks. He brought in some despicable characters into his cabinet (e.g., Smotrich), who are mirror image of Hamas and actually would like to genocide Gazans if they could get IDF to go along. He doesn’t appear to have a plan of how to return the hostages or what to do with Gaza.
Ok. That makes sense.
I grant that bringing Smotrich into his cabinet was akin to 'strategically allying with evil,' and his personal interest in optimizing for power is stronger than his belief that he can improve Israel's security more than whoever would replace him if his government fell.
On the other points, if you'd engage me:
I don't really understand the judicial reform movement, my basic understanding is 'the judicial system in Israel is completely bonkers, under Israeli law/religious understanding everything is justiciable, and judges pick their replacements, so without a constitution you functionally have no democracy judges have absolute authority over everything; it just so happens that jews are such a legalistic culture that this doesn't result in tyranny' and 'people in government wanted the power to enact certain laws, judges were stopping them, and they moved to reduce the power of judges'. I get that 'politicians reducing power of judges following unfavorable rulings' is anti-democratic, but the power of judges in Israel seems so undemocratic to me I don't know what to think.
Re. Gaza/Hostages, let's say his theory of the situation is 'If the palestinians have state-building capacity, they will channel it almost exclusively towards the goal of destroying Israel, and I don't have the ability to culturally engineer them otherwise. I will attempt to undermine this by balancing Hamas and the Palestinian authority against each other and be fine with settlements, divide and conquer style. On hostages, I don't actually have the ability to trick Hamas into releasing them against their interests. They want to stay in power, I think their doing so will long-term result in many more hostages being taken, October 7th happened because we released Sinwar and many others in exchange for a hostage, there's really no gains to negotiation I can have with Hamas'. On post-war plans, it seems that a permanent military occupation of some amount of the border is all I can unilaterally do. If Iran or Hamas gets overthrown by its own populations, then we can rethink the situation, until then I have only military not political solutions available.' Do you disagree that this is his framework, do you think some other framework is more true?
Israel's judicial system might very well be flawed, but my (and enough Israelis' to mount massive protests for months) sense is that Bibi's fixes aren't meant to carefully address those. I - separately - have a sense of a "democracy" as being a system with strongly separated powers having oversight over each other, so it's a feature of the system to have strong judiciary. This is more of a personal view, YMMV.
I don't have a solution for Gaza and the hostage situation, but then I'm not Israel's PM who's been in power for almost two decades on the platform of being a strong protector.
As an aside, appreciate a good engagement on a difficult issue.
I learned a lot, thank you!
To a first-order approximation, let's say I believe the following:
1) The Israeli military is one of the top 10 most professional armies in the world, and the most professional army that is primarily composed of reservists who rotate in and out of civilian life, and is also the most legalistic in the world, by which I mean the extent to which lawyers oversee actions such as military strikes and have the capacity to override them on a case by case basis if they are a violation of rules.
2) Israeli culture responded to October 7th (similar to how they responded to the 2nd intifada) by pivoting hard to prioritizing security and deprioritizing peaceful coexistence through cultural and economic exchange, but not towards a desire for revenge or territorial expansion
Given this, it wouldn't 'make sense' to me that a genocide was happening. Israelis don't want it to, it's not the country's official policy, how many war crimes are committed is closely connected with the professionalism and legalism of the army, if it was happening Israeli society would quickly become aware through first-person discussions of family members of soldiers who return from the front.
Could you help me understand what is the 'narrative-shattering fact' that I am missing that would, if a genocide is happening, be able to process the available evidence differently and reach the truthful conclusion?
Also, would be curious for you to answer the following:
1) Is there a different strategy that Israel could practically be taking that would result in all of the following: additional security for their citizens across short and long term horizons, more hostages released alive, and fewer innocent Palestinians hurt and/or displaced.
2) What is the ratio of, all else being equal, of Israeli solider deaths to Palestinian innocent civilian deaths, that you think is 'appropriate' in this war to be the margin along which an Israeli army would choose its tactical approach, and roughly how did you determine that. Separately, what do you think is the tradeoff that Israel society would find acceptable. Separately, what do you think is the tradeoff that has actually been implemented in practice?
3) Who do you think has 'agency' in this conflict? Is it Hamas, Israeli elected officials, surrounding Arab states, Iran, individual soldiers, the civilian populations in any of these places, etc.
4) What is your basic model of the 'inputs' into the equation that results in 'extent to which Palestinians trade off state building capacity against Israel-destroying capacity'.
5) At what point in history do you think the biggest 'mistake' was made by anyone involved, that prevented a long-term lasting peace from occurring.
6) Is your desired outcome more determined by what would cause 'peace' or 'justice', and if the latter what would you consider a 'just' outcome.
[[CONT.]]
(Q-1) Yes, there could have been. Allying with the Palestinian Authority (which could have happened as early as April or May of 2024), just like Israel does now in the West Bank. Evicting West Bank settlers and demolishing settlements, or doing land swaps (perhaps to connect Gaza and the West Bank) in return for settlements too big to evict (Ariel and Jerusalem).
(Q-2) (A) I reject the assumption that those trade against each other. If you think I'm being unreasonable or that the assumption is obviously true, the ratio is 1:1.
(B) The majority of Israeli society doesn't think in terms of this ratio at all, and would like the number of casualties in soldiers to be zero regardless of what happen to Gazans, armed or otherwise
(C) The latest New York times investigation into the IDF reveals the answer to a similar question: the acceptable ratio of innocent Gazans killed to Hamas militants (no matter how low rank or unimportant). It's 20 to 1. Given this, I would say your ratio is at least this and at most 50 to 1. It's probably in flux.
(Q-3) Surrounding Arab states first, like the original big four (Egypt, Jordan, Lebanon, Syria) that border Israel. Then consecutive Israeli governments from the time of Golda Meir. Then PLO leadership till 2008. Then Hamas leadership starting from 2011. Then individual soldiers. Then Israeli public intellectuals and journalism.
(Q-4) Which Palestinians? PLO or Hamas? Or ordinary people?
(Q-5) Egypt during the Camp David negotiations, for not conditioning Peace on Palestinian statehood or re-integration into Israel.
(Q-6) Justice to the extent that no party would think it was wronged in the agreement, because thinking about being wronged a recipe for future war. This amount could be any of the countless Federation or Bi-National state initiatives that exists https://www.i24news.tv/en/news/middle-east/1626263886-a-federated-one-state-solution-there-s-a-reason-it-s-not-being-talked-about.
(Q-1): I broadly agree with you.
(Q-2): I think the ratio of hamas:civilian by Israeli army is in the ballpark of 1:10 in terms of policy, and in practice has resulted in roughly 1:5. Agreed on all of your claims A-C.
Can you expand on your rejection?
My basic model is 'Israel is convinced that for security reasons they need to create a situation where Hamas is not the strongest military force in the Gaza strip, and removing them from power involves tactical choices that trade off risks to hostages, your military personnel, and civilians' which if I had to make up numbers I think a reasonable ratio for is roughly 1:10:(100-500)'
(Q-3): Agreed on everything.
(Q-4): Ordinary people. I think Hamas is driven by a religious mandate, PLO was driven by a false model of thinking of Israelis as the Algerian French [make being in Israel unpleasant enough and they will choose to leave] and due to a combination of that turning out to be untrue and Israel failing to robustly support individuals within it who could have eventually become competent partners for peace and state builders, it transformed into a corrupt entity that mostly accepts bribes for military cooperation.
What is your core understanding of why the Palestinians haven't as a body politic self-organized into making it clear to the Israeli body politic that they would accept no right of return and a permanent self-policing of any internal elements interested in violence in exchange for some sort of autonomy on a chunk of land with the expectation that within two generations, possibly sooner, if there truly is minimal violence they would get a state.
(Q-5): Not my answer, but a valid and interesting one I hadn't considered.
(Q-6): I agree with your framework. So, it is your understanding then, that to 'a part of the Palestinian population large/strong enough to self-police the remainder' any Israeli self-rule within the borders of mandate Palestine would not be an injustice that is a recipe for future war, to be cooked up if given the autonomy + means to do so?
> Can you expand on your rejection?
Okay. Let's first notice something: whatever the ratio is, it's not 3 numbers, it must be only 2. It's impossible to distinguish Gazans and Israeli hostages using only bullets and bombs, and the sheer ratio of hostages killed to hostages saved by the IDF should be enough evidence for this.
So it's 2 numbers, 1:n, where n is the number of Gazans/hostages who are allowed to die to save one IDF soldier or vastly decrease the risk to him/her. If Israeli propaganda is to be believed, every single waking hour of every IDF soldier is a moral dilemma where he has to decide whether to kill the Hamas soldier or the 2 million children he's wearing as human shields.
The reality of Israel's war in Gaza is that it's largely automated. When boots on the ground are deployed, they're largely in useless "Vietnam-style" patrols that clear an area that Hamas will pop up in 2 months later. Some areas of Gaza are being cleared for the 3rd and 4th time this year. Some Hamas soldiers were civilians when the war started.
Automated war-making mechanisms, on the other hand, can afford to discriminate more. Pervasive surveillance by drones (every Gazan-captured video has a persistent humming in the background, it's Israeli drones, which monitor every waking hour of every Gazan), itself a human rights violation, can mitigate the much bigger human rights violation of murdering them.
Further, one of the biggest fears of Gazan civilians - one they're more than 100% justified in having - is that they won't be allowed to return once they evacuate. It sounds like they're right, given the state of North Gaza and the magnitude of dumb fucks bleating about "Nakba 2.0" in the Israeli government. This decreases the effectiveness of Israeli "warnings" even before we talk about how useless those warnings are (Israel bombs the "safe" areas anyway).
But one way Israel can combat that is by evacuating civilians in Gaza to temporary camps or Beduin villages in the Negev desert. Gazans will have the assurances that they will return to Gaza (far preferable to Israel than letting them stay in Israel), and Israel can extensively inspect and search the refugees at the border to ensure they're not Hamas. Also the Negev is as far away from Tel Aviv as you can possibly get, some places in it are further from Tel Aviv than Gaza is.
So yes, all in all, "it's either our soldiers or their civilians" is a convenient Hollywood-inspired myth that justifies what IDF soldiers and personnel themselves repeatedly call in investigation after investigation useless murder with no military goal. That's what I believe.
(Q-4) I don't know. Anything of the form "Why/What/How many ordinary Palestinians actually ..." is tricky because I'm not Palestinian and have no personal contact with Palestinians. So I will essentially defer to polls, "Trading off state-building capacity against Israel-destroying capacity" seems to be another way to rephrase support for the 2-state solution against the 1-state solution, here's a poll [1] that says 59% of them (didn't read whether from Gaza or the West Bank, huge difference) believed in the 2 state solution in 2012, but decreased to 24% in pre-October 2023. Which sounds understandable, it's pretty difficult to have faith in a solution that the Prime Minister of your negotiation partner openly declared in the UN will never happen.
(Q-6) Eliding the same disclaimers in (Q-4) (but you should keep in mind they still apply), yes. My understanding is that's essentially Oslo. What derailed Oslo is Rabin's assassination and the 2nd Intifada, the first is hardly the Palestinians' fault and the second is regrettable but understandable reaction to the IDF and settler provocation in (then-settled) Gaza and the West Bank. The much-complained-about-by-Israel Palestinian Right of Return can be dialed back to an acceptable yearly ratio (return of 20K Palestinians per year) or turned into Holocaust-style reparations.
[1] https://news.gallup.com/poll/512828/palestinians-lack-faith-biden-two-state-solution.aspx
[Super duper disagree with you on right of return; will respond in order of your comments, but that's what matters the most]
(speculation warning) That it's closer to 2 numbers in practice than 3 numbers is a function of the military reality of the war due to hamas actions, not Israel's collective moral values/preferences. If the war was different, the 3rd number would be relevant. I think the only situation in which the 3rd number became relevant was during the hostage rescue operation that, let's stipulate rescued 3 hostages in expectation, and killed 5-50 civilians in expectation, but the exfiltration operation came under hamas fire and it balooned into hundreds of casualties, I have no idea how many of them were militant, I assume most were civilian. In cases such as these, I believe the Israeli army before approving operations would consider that third number, and I could imagine there were rescue operations that were not attempted due to that third number.
The strategy of constantly reclearing isn't Vietnam style at all, I think you haven't been listening to Israeli military strategists explaining the strategy, or noticing that the military:civilian ratios are the 'best' morally speaking in the reclearing operations, and it's in the reclearing not in the initial clearing that Israel suffers casualties. The strategy is 'holding land creates a bunch of soft targets. we will clear an area partially of civilians where hamas wants to be, let hamas regroup there (sometimes it's a hospital or a refugee camp where hamas thinks it is safer to be), and then re-engage. this is our best strategy of maximing the number of hamas destroyed, and minimize our own soldiers/civilian casualties'.
'Some hamas soldiers were civilians when the war started' - maybe, hard to tell. But my understanding is that Hamas has been very significantly degraded. It still has the forces to kill basically anyone who collaborates with Israel, and to comandeer a significant amount of the aid, but on net it is significantly smaller/weaker, and doesn't have the ability to coordinate anymore is a bunch of shattered splinter cells and a couple of remaining batallions.
If you think allowing palestinians from gaza into israel (negev desert, or anywhere, heck it could be in a magical sealed bubble 100000 feet in the air) is possible in terms of israel democratic politics...you don't, right?
I think that the closest to reality 'magical solution if people other than hamas had different preferences' would be the gulf states financing israel building a city capable of housing anyone near the egyptian border, and filtering civilians into it one at a time making sure there were no weapons in there, and then declaring the remainder of gaza an unrestricted war zone. But Israel doesn't have the resources or patience for this, and it's not something the surrounding countries would be interested in supporting.
Israel is basically getting rid of any Hamas that isn't near hostages, with the understanding that they are under orders to terminate anyone who might be about to be rescued, in the most practical way they know how. They don't know how to tradeoff hostages vs. civilians, I agree, but there are plenty of places where there are no hostages where they do make tradeoffs between soldiers/hamas/civilians, and there is a constant, ongoing discussion in israeli society about if they are sacrificing too many soldiers to protect civilians.
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Yes it is absolutely a reasonable expectation that 'anywhere that civilians evacuate from' they will probably not be allowed to return, depending on if Hamas remains the strongest military force in Gaza at the end of this, assuming Israel doesn't get destroyed by Hamas/Hezbollah/surrounding states which was roughly Hamas strategy as far as I can tell, which has failed.
Now it seems the distribution of possible outcomes has collapsed to 'if Hamas is the strongest force in Gaza, Israel will decide the size of the buffer zone they want to have, and go back to the pre-Oct 7 status quo. There may be settlements, hopefully not, I expect there will not be, but am unsure; if Hamas is removed somehow and someone else controls the area, could be permanent occupation, could be the PA, it really depends I'm a lot less sure of how to model it.'
All of this really, really depends on the Palestinians and not the Israelis, because of how much more Israel wants peace (a huge amount) than international support (a lot) than land in Gaza (very little).
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(Q-4;6) As a massive first-order simplification, I claim that the palestinian identity is built on the idea that the creation of Israel is illegitimate, and justice requires no permanent Jewish autonomy in the region. The problem is that any 'autonomy' that has state-building capacity quickly comes under control of militants who care more about this aspect of their identity than the material interests of their citizens. Israel tried heavy bribes to have corrupt palestinian collaborators 'in charge' who do not coordinate with each other. It worked somewhat in the west bank, it was working somewhat in gaza (or so Israel thought) until it spectacularly wasn't, and the religious aspect of Hamas is the main factor of that.
I don't know where this idea of "much-complained-about-by-Israel Palestinian Right of Return can be dialed back to an acceptable yearly ratio (return of 20K Palestinians per year) or turned into Holocaust-style reparations" comes from. This was on offer in the past, and it was soundly rejected by Arafat without any counter-proposal, and he faced no internal criticism for doing so because 'justice' means everyone can return to Israel proper, and war is preferable to something meaningfully different, assuming war has a chance of success.
Israel is now motivated to prove that the chance of success is as close to 0 as they can.
It really really matters what would be done with a second state. Would it be used to build up a military to eventually take over the other state 'armed struggle to liberate Israel proper', or to build up a functioning state focused on the quality of life of its population 'state building'?
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My belief (low confidence) is pre-Oct 7 about 70% of Gazans and West Bank populations supported armed struggle over state building, and if withdrawn from by Israel completely would have both been 'taken control of' in the sense of 'what the strongest military power wants' by 'armed struggle' forces with near 100% certainty.
Israel was very divided on this point, and tried the withdrawal strategy and got Oct 7, and now believes this as well (before Oct 7 I didn't really know what to think, I thought the settlements were a big reason for conflict and thought Gaza would not be an issue and they need to stop or there will be massive issues in the west bank eventually).
They never withdrew from west bank (they were considering it) because either that's religiously important land, or because of the high ground and proximity to population centers it's too scary to do so. I can't tell which is the 'true' reason, I think the security consideration is sufficient, and maybe the other one is as well but if peace was on offer the desire for it would have won out certainly before the 2nd intifada, possibly after I can't tell.
To be clear 'the right of return' is *The* issue that prevents peace from happening. If the palestinian body politic was capable of saying 'we are fine with Israel existing, in perpetuity, give us autonomy over some area of land, and we will police our own extremist elements reasonably effectively' we would live in a completely different situation.
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My 'prediction' is that we will have a 1-state, 3-entity solution where Israel has control of Israel, and exerts significant military influence over Gaza and West Bank, who will be governed independently by PA and Hamas descendants, and depending on if Palestinians reject violence or not they will either turn into proper states or continue to be settled at the rate that is practical for Israel given its complicated internal coalitions, assuming that the international order doesn't at some point present a tradeoff of security vs. settlement, in which case Israel will heavily prioritize security, but I don't expect that to happen since I don't think anyone outside of Palestinians is fine with 'Israel existing on some land' but cares about it not expanding enough to tradeoff other things they care about.
Plenty of Israelis and Palestinians oppose expansion of settlements, and the current expansion of them is a function of the strength of those oppositions.
Fine, there is plenty I disagree with here. But perhaps the most striking is how you seem to treat Palestinians returning as Israel ceasing to exist. I think this is the biggest evidence that - in actual practice - Israel **is** an apartheid. As no non-apartheid state ever thinks of the mere possibility of accepting another ethnicity as "Ceasing to exist". Trouble? Yes, arguing that immigrants == Economic hardships? Very common, and actually has a solid basis in truth in some situations. But immigrants == state no longer exists? That's unprecedented outside of Israeli rhetoric and White Supremacism/extreme European nationalism.
I'm not calling you any of those ideologies, but this feature of their rhetoric is heavily apparent in your model of the things.
The "Arafat made Oslo fail" is a common myth/oversimplified story, here's a very lightly pro-Palestinian account of the negotiations [1], the institute's "About" page lists a single Arab-looking guy with Arab-looking names and the rest of the institute's is pretty neutral and doesn't look anti-Israel (it barely merits a mention among Turkey, Syria, and North African topics).
More specifically, Israel bears the Lion's share of the blame for continuing the settlements while it was negotiating for peace. If you're negotiating for "X", and you continue to do "NOT X" while negotiating, your negotiation partner has a pretty good reason to distrust you and look for flaws and holes in your "offers". To make that closer to Israel or Pro-Israel viewpoints, imagine if Egypt - while negotiating for peace in the Sinai Peninsula - kept approving military operations that killed 2 or 3 Israeli soldiers per week.
Israel/Israelis/Pro-Israel viewpoints seem to view the settlements as "Negotiation card" that they can hold onto to coerce their partner for peace of favorable terms. But from the pro-Palestinian viewpoint, settlement is not a card, they're an essential proof that in actual practice Israel doesn't want peace. After all, it's trivially obvious that scattering a bunch of civilians across "Judea" doesn't really bring peace, au contraire, one of the reasons for October 7th was how distracted the IDF was with the West Bank.
That is, Israel - if it means peace - should give away settlement **first**, then negotiate for whatever terms it want. Notice that giving away settlements doesn't mean giving away military control, as the current state of Gaza (and the 1967-1977 state of both Gaza and the West Bank) demonstrate.
If settlements can be negotiating tactics, then so does hostages. After all, holding people prisoners is no less criminal/abhorrent (from either a moral or a legalistic standpoint) than taking their money and their land. Since Palestinian militants aren't able to hold land, they can hold hostages just fine, and they do, I believe the first kidnapping by Hamas was in the 1990s.
This backfiring is primarily Israel's main (un-)doing. It is Israel that cemented the "I can do some illegal shit and then condition its reversal on something I want, as if its reversal is some privilege I'm bestowing and not the bare minimum". I don't think that Israelis or pro-Israel people recognize this, that the "Taking hostages for demands" mentality was started and primarily practiced by Israel.
[1] https://www.mei.edu/publications/30-years-oslos-legacy-failure
> Given this, it wouldn't 'make sense' to me that a genocide was happening. [Because [1]] Israelis don't want it to, [And (2)] it's not the country's official policy
It's strange to me that those are your reasons (or perhaps surface level summarizations of a more complex and unarticulated-in-writing thought process?). (2) is just obviously absurd, of course no nation state will actually adopt "Decrease $TARGET_POPULATION by 80% by 2028" as an actual goal to put in writing and discuss in official communication. Did that happen in any genocide at all? Here's a list of antisemitic legislation that Nazi Germany passed from 1933 to 1939 [1], I don't see "Put Die Juden on Bahn and exterminate them with gas" in there, but I could be missing something.
As for (1), who are the "Israelis" in question? As in, how did you actually infer that (the majority of) the population doesn't want that. Do they **have** to enthusiastically want that, or is it enough to turn a blind eye? How many Germans from 1941 to 1945 actually knew what happening in Auschwitz? To pick a less distant analogy, how many Americans enthusiastically wanted the war in Afghanistan or went above and beyond "Meeh" in their support of it while their government was conducting it?
For a very rough and unscientific estimate, here's [2] a recent series of street interviews from someone who has been doing that for more than a decade (Ask Project), interviewing a bunch of (for all practical purposes) random Israelis, asking them ""Israelis: Do you know how many civilians have been killed in Gaza?"". I don't think you can be so confident with (1) when this video (and many, many, MANY like it) exist.
> if it was happening Israeli society would quickly become aware through first-person discussions of family members of soldiers who return from the front.
This is already happening since mid last year, here's the latest (in a long line of similar investigations) published by Haaretz https://archive.ph/zv1KD (Title: 'No Civilians. Everyone's a Terrorist': IDF Soldiers Expose Arbitrary Killings and Rampant Lawlessness in Gaza's Netzarim Corridor.)
> the 'narrative-shattering fact'
It's not clear if you want that fact to disagree with your premises outright, or just to run with them till it smashes into contradiction. If you want the first, then
(1) >> The Israeli military is one of the top 10 most professional armies in the world,
Given the above investigation (or many like it in other sources of your choosing), and remembering that nearly no modern army ever has the deluge of soldiers publishing themselves in unencrypted, unfiltered, non-firewalled glory committing war crimes like wanton destruction of civilian property in ghost towns and humiliation of detainees (not necessarily POWs), I think you would be irrational and more than a little rigid not to rethink this assumption.
(2) >> Israeli culture responded to October 7th [...] not towards a desire for revenge or territorial expansion
As for this, it can be easily contradicted by a stream of news and declarations coming from the highest echelons of the Israeli government, here's the latest of them, also from Haaretz https://archive.ph/8zYcc (Title: Israeli Knesset Members Plan Resettlement of Gaza in Observation Tour), December 2024. Here's another, earlier one from Times of Israel https://www.timesofisrael.com/troops-smuggled-settler-leader-into-gaza-to-survey-settlement-options-report/ (No paywall), November 2024. Here's the full summary from Wikipedia, starting from the January 2024 "Settlement Brings Security" conference https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proposed_Israeli_resettlement_of_the_Gaza_Strip.
If you want the second, then what does (1) and (2) uniquely predict in your view that should be contradicted if a genocide is the gameplan but isn't right now? What will have to happen to make you think that it's potentially a genocide?
My answers to your 6 questions follow in another comment for easier scrolling.
[1] https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/antisemitic-legislation-1933-1939
[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vWiWtghM35Y
(Thank you for replying as you have, anything I did not reply to I read and spent time processing. Everything you claimed I believe to either be true or plausibly to be true, both in this long reply and your other one, and I am grateful for the quality and level of engagement.)
Instead of responding point by point, I will, informed by your reply, share more of my 'model of what's going on' and hopefully you can identify what is the core of our disagreement better than my prompts and your response did.
1) Israel is convinced that it is under existential threat.
2) The global community is putting very significant pressure on Israel to minimize the number of civilian casualties.
3) The Israeli army is highly professional and legalistic. I would have expected before the war started a much higher amount of israeli military and palestinian civilian casualties, and a much lower amount of cultural cohesion in Israel.
4) There is so much information/surveillance/documentation of this conflict.
I simply don't understand where the possibility of a genocide exists. I agree there will be some amount of war crimes, but Israel doesn't have the resources or flexibility to do it even if they wanted to, and they seem to competent / interested in their own survival to allow one to just happen through decentralized actions driven by a shared desire for revenge.
I happen to also believe that 5) whether or not huge number of civilians are traumatized by Oct 7 to the point of being numb to Palestinian suffering, the vast majority of military people on the ground are not the type of people to willingly inflict it, but this is not something I expect to be able to convince someone of over text, it would require actual immersion in the culture which you either do or don't have.
Can you state in plain words, what is the mechanism for which something really bad might be happening, absent an official policy to do so?
I grant that an official policy isn't necessary, certainly not a 'public one,' but in other conflicts where bad stuff happened without one I can explain how it did, and here I fail to explain how it could.
Are you saying there is some desire for revenge, or that there is some internal consensus, official or unofficial, that really bad things happening is necessary for security, either including or not including the implied costs to international support.
Thanks for the kind words. I appreciate them.
> Can you state in plain words, what is the mechanism for which something really bad might be happening
There are people with guns, without oversight or control. Those people say they want revenge, have said they will pursue it, are indeed acquiring it every time their conduct is captured in words or visuals or audio over the past year+. Is it a huge jump to conclude that those people are pursuing revenge? When you see people serving with those people testifying that their colleagues opened fire on 4 unarmed civilians with a drone, killing 3 and capturing the fourth to strip him and spit on him, is it a huge leap to say that's this is the norm?
> Are you saying there is some desire for revenge, or that there is some internal consensus, official or unofficial, that really bad things happening is necessary for security, either including or not including the implied costs to international support.
I don't see a difference. One look at the comment sections of Times of Israel or Jerusalem Post will tell you both are pretty mainstream to the point of "Fish-Asks-What-Is-Water" Banality.
Ah, that helps me understand where you are coming from.
The claims I am making are as follows:
1) Israeli society thoroughly prioritizes security and release of hostages over revenge. Revenge is a very, very distant concern if there are actual tradeoffs involved.
2) Global pressure imposes a very high cost on getting revenge
3) Israel reservists are constantly rotating in and out of society, getting hurt, and securing significant gains to security
4) There is constant dialogue in Israeli society. This isn't like Vietnam where people don't really know what's going on.
5) Israeli society has become more and more supportive of the war, as it has become more persuaded that there is not a non-military alternative to getting security.
6) Israeli military is highly competent, and capable of policing itself. It knows that all of the bad publicity it gets is, to the extent it maps to reality, very detrimental to the war effort and international political support, and is highly motivated to keep it low, constrained by the realities of being primarily composed of reservists, many of whom are traumatized by Oct 7 and some of which come from west bank settler types.
Therefore, revenge is not being systematically chosen (and I am happy to stipulate to most of the claims you have linked to as happening and bad) and traded off against security/hostage release.
What amount of settlers getting into Gaza and Lebanon and 12 ministers from the 36-minister government saying that settlement is necessary would convince you that (1)...(6) is shaky or outdated ?
If the comparison is Nazi Germany, it was openly declaring areas Judenfrei (and itself Judenrein) because the goal was to ethnically cleanse Jews. Collaborator governments like the Vichy French were willing to put foreign (not necessarily French) Jews on trains to wherever the Germans wanted them. What was actually going on at the destinations was not public knowledge until people like Rudolf Vrba publicized it and got Miklos Horthy to stop some shipments (until he was overthrown). But Israel is not free of Palestinians, they are still a substantial percent of the population of Israel proper. That's because those Palestinians aren't part of a separate polity warring against Israel, but instead people willing to put up with being ruled by the Israeli government.
>If the comparison is Nazi Germany
Not necessarily and not singularly. The Holocaust is one instance of a genocide.
"Here's a list of antisemitic legislation that Nazi Germany passed from 1933 to 1939 [1], I don't see "Put Die Juden on Bahn and exterminate them with gas" in there, but I could be missing something." https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/open-thread-363/comment/84752174
I used that comparison because it was the comparison you used.
I also referenced Japan and Turkey, and I didn't say that Nazi Germany isn't the comparison, only that it wasn't the only comparison.
Your point is irrelevant regardless, "Israel can't be perpetrating genocide against Gazans because some people who are ethnically the same as Gazans are still in Israel", and? If Germans perpetrated genocide against Poland's and France's Jews but never their own the Holocaust wouldn't have been a genocide?
The definition of Genocide contains "In Whole or in Part", by the way. [1]
[1] https://www.ohchr.org/en/instruments-mechanisms/instruments/convention-prevention-and-punishment-crime-genocide
"Genocide" includes an element of intent that, if Israel possessed, would have produced very different results than we actually see.
*That* is why all your hysterical shrieking is so easily dismissed.
"hysterical shrieking" is obviously an emotional dismissal without any evidence at a coherent argument. Attack the argument with logic or evidence.
The argument is the paragraph preceding the dismissal.
> and if it was a genocide, you're being hysterical
Not even close to what I was saying.
Is your reading comprehension really that bad, or are you just so committed to your blood libel shtick that you think this makes sense?
> reading comprehension
Glass Houses and Rocks little buddy, glass houses and rocks.
This isn't Reddit; go away.
> This isn't Reddit
Correct, your level of argumentation is Twitter. Reddit is what you will achieve when you work on it for a year or so.
I am getting notifications that my comments in this thread were “liked.” I thought you couldn’t “like” comments in acx - I certainly can’t. What is going on?
It's a feature on mobile.
It's removed from the UI but still exists at the platform level and some people use browser extensions/scripts to put it back.
Oh, I thought it was a premium subscriber-only feature. Thanks.
I can like replies to my comments in “Activity”. I do this when I don’t have anything to add but want to let the commenter know I have seen the response and like it / agree with it.
I found myself pretty cold on the latest Psmith review of Reentry by Eric Berger: https://www.thepsmiths.com/p/review-reentry-by-eric-berger
The comments are talking about how insightful it is, and Tanner Greer took a lot from it... but I just don't see it? Isn't this the usual mythology around Musk/SpaceX?
I'm also pretty dissatisfied with how getting to Mars is treated like this all-justifying, obvious public good... but what are you going to do there? Say the miraculous comes to pass and Musk's prediction of boots on Mars comes to pass by 2029: they've got to survive there for a couple of years before the launch window allows them to come back (assuming a miracle rocket that can fly back to Earth with crew and cargo after a year or two on the Martian surface).
Have I just not seen whatever work is going into making that possible? Is there a parallel moonshot project for long-term Martian life support that just hasn't made big news? This Mars mission seems fundamentally unserious, but people keep treating it like it's a real possibility.
The Mars mission is not only NOT unserious - the most serious people in the world are dead set on making it happen - and have been for decades.
Seriously! I've been following SpaceX since Starship was the "Mars Colonial Transporter" - this has been in the works for a while. Moreover, though this is not often discussed, the last thing Tom Mueller (former VP of propulsion at SpaceX, designer of Merlin, etc.) was working on at SpaceX was Mars ISRU.
Now...why go to Mars? Two reasons: 1) backup hard-drive for humanity. 2) lower gravity well closer to asteroid belt for eventually mass-producing O'Neill Cylinders.
I've been following SpaceX since the word "Falcon" was followed by the number '1', and I've been a solid proponent of space development and settlement since Elon Musk was in middle school. I also have a Ph.D. in Astronautical Engineering and decades of experience in the field.
Elon may be "serious" in his intent to settle Mars; I'm skeptical that this has really persisted through his recent turn to Terrestrial sociopolitical interests but I'm not a mind reader so who knows. But I do know that Elon does not have a credible plan to settle Mars.
He has a very capable and surprisingly affordable space launch capability, which seems likely to expand. And he has a notion of how to turn that launch capability into an inefficient kludge of a "Mars Colonial Transporter". But let's assume he's solved the transportation problem.
That is *one* of the *many* problems that need to be solved to settle Mars. It is probably the biggest of those problems, but it's still a minority of the total effort required. And Elon has done very little to solve all the *other* problems. He doesn't even know how to keep a crew alive and healthy through the trip.
The most charitable assumption is that he thinks all those other problems are so easy that he'll be able to solve them in a year or two when he has time to focus on them, but from someone who has been studying them (and the transportation problem) for many years, Oh Hell No. And no, he's not just off by a factor of two on this like he is on rockets. If he'd put his Twitter money into ISRU and long-duration ECLSS and active radiation protection and surface power and rover design and a few dozen other things, he'd at least have laid the groundwork, but he had other priorities.
If the human race settles Mars in this generation, SpaceX's rockets will probably play a major role. But if *all* we have is Elon and SpaceX, then no, we aren't going anywhere. So where do you see everything else coming from?
I cannot comprehend how Mars being a backup hard-drive for humanity is taken seriously by anyone. There is nothing we can do to make Earth as inhospitable as Mars and we might never be able to, even if we tried. (The same goes for any natural catastrophes short of extremely absurd fringe events.)
The only way I could think of would be an Ai unleashing grey goo on us (if such a thing is possible), but what's preventing the Ai from sending a couple of grey goo filled rockets to Mars?
Then let me ask: when you read that Musk predicts the first humans landing on Mars by 2029, or a city of a million on Mars by 2050, do you take these claims seriously? Do you think this is an honest, if ambitious, assessment of the technology, or do you think it's hype?
That's what we're talking about here. Not the possibility of multiplanetary humanity in the far-future, not futurist speculation about O'Neill cylinders, the explicit claim that human habitation of Mars *will occur* within the decade, and that mass habitation will occur in less than fifty years. Those are the claims that make headlines and shape public perception of Musk/SpaceX.
If you agree that these timelines are totally impractical, but that Martian colonization is possible on a much longer timescale than claimed, then our positions are much closer than you might think. The difference is that I don't tolerate hype, and I consider this kind of rampant overpromising to be a form of dishonesty that we should openly condemn.
To comment on this:
"The difference is that I don't tolerate hype, and I consider this kind of rampant overpromising to be a form of dishonesty that we should openly condemn."
Elon's Time is a well-known term in the SpaceX fan community, most of which doesn't treat his claims as gospel.
Nevertheless, I would read those claims less literally. They rather mean something like "as soon as we can do it, but we are really trying".
For the opposite, see all the ancient promises by the American government to get back to the Moon. These were usually given a long-ish term, something like "in 15 or 20 years", which everybody understood as "we might like to, but we aren't really trying and a distant enough term gives us plausible deniability".
I think Musk's more grandiose claims are somewhere in between honest, if ambitious, assessments of the tech, and hype. Mainly because honestly ambitious assessments of the tech can't NOT be hype at a certain level.
To quote him directly: "I say something, and then it usually happens. Maybe not on schedule, but it usually happens." First orbital flight of Crew Dragon was supposed to happen in 2017...happened in 2020. Starship orbital was supposed to happen in 2020 - but first test was 2023, and didn't make orbit til 2024. "He was late! He was lying! He's just hyping and overpromising!" Eh this seems like sour grapes. You really wanna condemn the guy landing boosters the size of skyscrapers because it happened a few years later than he predicted a while back? (If software engineers were held to that standard, we'd all be out of a job!)
So, first human landing on Mars by 2029? Unlikely, unless literally everything goes exactly right and there are no issues (which is how he tends to make these predictions - dude understands Parkinson's Law). But I'd bet good money on a human landing before 2040 at the latest - and definitely 1M on Mars in my lifetime.
I don't agree with you, but I admire that you're putting this in very straightforward terms.
If you'd like to make a proper bet, message me directly, as I'd like to take the other side of that wager. We can discuss terms and make sure everything is up to mutual satisfaction. You may also check out my first substack post, which detailed the process and characteristics of a similar bet about humanoid robots out to 2034.
Starlink is the direct result of the technically unlikely, but extremely inspiring goal of getting to Mars. In 2025 Starlink is expected to have $12 Billion in revenue (these aren't Musk numbers and are reasonable given the astronomical growth over the past 2 years), which would put it on par with some of the largest Telecom companies in the world if it continues growing for the next few years (AT&T $30B, T-Mobile $20B, Verizon $33B).
This is all with Falcon 9 launches, with their existing Starlink satellites. Starship can potentially carry 20x the payload as a Falcon 9, with a much larger faring capable of deploying even larger satellites. That means more coverage, higher speeds, and smaller receivers on earth. Out of the box phones are already capable of connecting to Starlink, and they're going to launch direct to cell capability this year with T-Mobile. It's not a stretch of the imagination that SpaceX could become the worlds largest Telecom provider on the planet, and that's ignoring the value of their primary business, which is launching things into space.
The whole Mars thing is just the inspiration that keeps employees working harder and for less than they otherwise would at a different company (even the job description of the janitor talks about getting humans to Mars), and that's because meaning is more valuable than money in many cases. Corporate hell where people make $200k may be functionally less valuable to people than 12 hour workdays making $100k in SpaceX where their actions have some meaning towards and inspiring goal for humanity. The goal provides extreme intangible value to the company that reveals itself in their ability to achieve surprising success.
So the goal isn't justifiable in its own right. There is no practical, economic, or even rational justification for going to Mars on its own merits, besides it being awesome. The thing is, that I think Musk has realized and many people haven't, is that the intangible value for that goal in relation to employee productivity, employee satisfaction, and investor interest, far exceeds any possible costs associated with the mission itself.
This sounds reasonable. I think we bottom out at values differences. I don't think that using an intangible dream whose achievability is constantly exaggerated in order to squeeze out value from employees is justifiable or admirable.
It depends on *why* the intangible dream is being advocated for.
If it's a cynical corporate-overlord ploy, where you create this imaginary narrative to keep your employees engaged and under payed, I completely agree. The injustice is revealed in the truth and intention differing from the intended impression on people, especially since the corporation would abandon their mission if it ever become unprofitable (very likely). Promise people Mars until you have a mature launch service and telecom business, then pivot to no longer caring about Mars, so you benefit from all the enthusiasm when it matters, and don't actually have to spend the money on a project that has no future expected returns. Essentially, the value of the mission is the past enthusiasm, not the future returns, making for easy for profit-seeking businessmen to justify changing their pivot when it matters.
I don't think Musk is like this corporate overload though, and I think this for good reason. He has an irrational drive to make humans multiplanetary, as otherwise he wouldn't have started SpaceX, and dumped all his money into it when it was on the verge of failure. The expected ROI on SpaceX was certainly negative, with a predictably low chance of great success, but not enough to justify the investment. The mission itself was valuable enough though.
Imagine if you had a spouse who was sick with some terminal disease. No family to lend you money, no insurance to cover it, and you can't get a job to earn enough to pay for treatment. You only have $1,000, and need $100,000. What do you do? At that point it may make sense to spend all your money on lottery tickets, or at the casino, betting on the unlikely chance you win big, not because the ROI is there, but because the value of winning big is so important to you, the life of your spouse. There's an equivalent story to be told about Musk and SpaceX.
So whether Musk is a cynic who's using Mars as a false justification for increased enthusiasm, or whether he's a true ideologue that cares about getting humans to Mars more than any financial calculation would suggest, is up for debate. Either way I think as far as this goes, he deserves some charity when assessing his intentions, as he's been remarkably consistent in his actions, stated goals, and work ethic for multiple decades.
If a politician pivots from being opposed to supporting gay marriage as soon as the the underlying culture shifts (*cough* Biden in 2000's), it's fair to think that he's more of a practical person playing for personal power rather than a true ideologue for Gay Marriage. If a politician was supporting gay marriage before it was cool (Bernie in 1980s), we should extend more plausibility to their claim when they say they actually mean them. The analogy is, I think Musk is closer to Bernie than Biden when it comes to getting humans to Mars.
> I'm also pretty dissatisfied with how getting to Mars is treated like this all-justifying, obvious public good... but what are you going to do there?
I've extolled on the subject of Effective Awesome before, and I think this is one of those cases where Effective Awesome provides the best justification. Going to Mars would just be really cool, and doing really cool things is a sufficient terminal goal for me.
I'm all for cool things, but I'd like for the Awesome to actually be Effective. We can work on safe superintelligence, quantum computing, and figuring out dark matter (plus maybe some less awesome but still quite neat things like healthcare) before a Mars mission is competitive on a cost/awesome ratio.
Quantum computing literally isn't real. Dark matter may not be either. Superintelligence remains an open research problem.
Mars, meanwhile, is just engineering.
Quantum computing isn't real? In what sense is getting to Mars and engineering problem, but making lots of low-noise qubits not an engineering problem?
My understanding is that making lots of low-noise qubits, and keeping them coherent, is something much closer to an open physics problem than an engineering problem.
Space is really hard, but with Starship, the only two real unknowns left are Mars/Earth Reentry at Interplanetary Speeds (will the heat shield hold up? especially when we launch back to Earth?) and in-orbit refuel (tho this seems easier, but is still a question mark). Stuff on Mars is hard but doable - we have small reactors, we know how to make Vac-hard long-term life support systems (see ISS). Starship makes this even easier because mass is no longer a big constraint - no need to get JPL to make bespoke equipment - just contract Caterpillar to make vac/rad-hard versions of their existing teleoperated equipment. Radiation can be handled by taking your backhoe and burying your hab under a foot or so of regolith, and limiting daily outdoor hours.
Making quantum computing actually useful (as of now, I'm pretty sure the largest number we've factored with quantum computers is 15) requires increasing the number of coherent qubits in these systems by a few orders of magnitude. The issue is that the difficulty of keeping that many qubits coherent scales super-linearly. If we were on a Moores Law type curve of increasing qubit numbers, this means maybe we'd get them to do useful stuff in ~30 years - but we're not - we don't actually know how - and the QC folks have been saying "30 years" for around 30 years.
Not to mention, we've already created quantum-safe encryption, so the only real use case left (to my knowledge) is optimization problems. Which, while important, isn't as cool as Interplanetary Civilization IMO.
So, "Quantum Computing isn't real" may be hyperbole, but I do currently believe it's something that should be thought of as closer to String Theory or Nuclear Fusion (either Tokamak/Stellarator or Pons-Fleischmann LENR).
(CAVEAT: My knowledge of quantum computing is based entirely on reading corporate press releases, Scott Aaronson, and Scott Locklin, and trying to triangulate them. I'm a tech bro, not a physicist / computer science PhD - so take all of this with a grain of salt)
Engineering that is still relying on technology that does not yet exist to make the whole thing anything but an insanely expensive expedition with no material gain in sight.
> We can work on safe superintelligence, quantum computing, and figuring out dark matter (plus maybe some less awesome but still quite neat things like healthcare) before a Mars mission is competitive on a cost/awesome ratio.
We are working on all those things, too, researcher creativity and effort is not zero sum.
And like **mecko** alluded to but didn't quite say outright - working on the Mars mission has literally made putting a kg into orbit more than 40x cheaper, so ANYTHING in space is now 40x more possible. And we already have things like Starlink because of it - imagine what else we're going to get on the road there.
It opens up much bigger / better space based telescopes, puts us on the road to asteroid mining, gets us needed practice and expertise at doing space stuff and engineering and building more complex things up there, etc.
> We are working on all those things, too, researcher creativity and effort is not zero sum.
I mean... isn't it zero sum? Only so many researchers, only so much time between them.
I think I get your meaning, researcher creativity and effort limited but not *scarce*, so we don't need to triage it, we don't need to ensure that every bit of it is actually doing something we know is effective.
But if we're pretending to Effective Awesomeness, then let's run down the list of awesome things in order of feasibility (which I would argue puts a Mars colony very, very low on the list).
And if we're justifying this based on utilitarian calculus... I'm having difficulty expressing this part without being ungenerous, but building better telescopes and getting to asteroid mining faster doesn't justify massively misleading the public about the actual feasibility or requirements of a Mars mission. The idea that this kind of dishonesty is necessary to get to those things doesn't sit well with me.
> I mean... isn't it zero sum? Only so many researchers, only so much time between them.
But researchers specialize, right? Smart people working at Space X doesn't generally take smart people OUT of quantum computing etc. And ultimately it will give smart astrophysicists another place to work too, so they can study dark matter at Space X.
I agree that in the future it creates an incentive gradient where a given smart person in the future could decide to study aerospace instead of quantum mechanics, but if you think *that's* a loss, I don't want to tell you about the FAANGS and finance (which have been hoovering up all the best minds of our generation for the last 20 years, directly out of research, and into being wasted on financial derivatives and toiling in the Eyeball Mines instead of actually driving human capability forward).
And where do you see a massive lie? I think he probably genuinely wants to improve humanity's spaceflight and space technology capacity to the point we could do a Mars colony. He's done a lot of costly things that back that view. The road is almost certainly longer than he says it is, but so what? It's his money, Space X is profitable, and selling space nerds on Mars isn't necessarily going to take those space nerds away from any other more valuable work, they would have just been wasting their lives at NASA doing NOTHING to push human capability forward.
To your other points, you're correct about specialization, though it's not clear to me the options are so narrow as SpaceX or do nothing at NASA. Surely, there must be some other interesting development for a young aerospace engineer to get involved in?
And rest assured, I'm quire familiar with the failures of FAANG/finance. Elsewhere in the thread I note how my partner, who was recruited out of a CS program into a finance firm, now works as an analyst at a company whose tech stack tops out at Excel spreadsheets. Her activities to date involve a disproportionate amount of resizing pie charts and ctrl-Fing through paperwork. A waste of what she can do, but the money is too good to pass up.
>
I'll step back for a moment and make the same apology I made to mecko elsewhere in the thread: I came into this topic with a great deal of frustration coming out of family arguments over Christmas around this and related topics. It's made the quality of my discussion lower as a result, and I shouldn't have brought that in here.
This is my frustration: the fact that SpaceX has achieved some impressive things (massively reducing orbit costs, Starlink) gives undue credence to accelerated timelines of Mars colonization (eg humans on mars by 2029, million-person Martian city by 2050).
Belief in these fantastic figures in turn justifies and gives credence to Musk's other (more highly-valued) businesses, mainly Tesla. I started my substack mainly to write about robotics, and why humanoid robotics are massively overhyped. The biggest misinformation in this space, around robotics and the related topic of self-driving, comes out of Tesla (namely, massively overstated timelines to household robotics, lies about the current state of robot capacity, and the continued claims for the last decade that full self-driving already worked or was just a year away).
And in the past, when I've pointed out that these were intentional falsehoods, the most common reaction (from friends and family, as well as one early Tesla and SpaceX investor) was dismissal, specifically because Musk is taking humanity to Mars, such that his other ventures can't be judged according to common sense or that their malfeasance can be justified based on that.
And more recently, that has expanded outside the realm of tech companies and into politics and government. The same people (some of them my own kith and kin, normally intelligent and capable people!) think that DOGE is going to save the US government. Because they earnestly believe Musk is a unique genius who can create a city on Mars, and that if he can't fix the budget, nobody can.
I find this level of credulity extremely worrying, and that emotional reaction is what's driving me here.
To the possibility of a 2029 Mars Mission: I think those who believe this will happen with a high probability don’t really know what would required to make it happen. However the main point here is that (and sorry for the cliché) “SpaceX consistently turns the impossible into the merely late”. SpaceX announces 2029 as a possible launch date and pushes hard for it and maybe instead launch a single starship to Mars, full of cargo or no it’s still a huge achievement. And from there maybe something manned happens the early 2030s. And people see that all things considered this is both the quickest and the most likely to succeed chance for them to see boots on Mars in their lifetime.
Motivations aside I do have to agree with your assessment of current work. There seems to be no in depth work being done on the actual Mars hardware, again though this is nothing new. SpaceX has repeatedly stated they are most interested in supplying people with a way to get to Mars not a fully fleshed out Mission architecture.
In the end though this is a moving target, the cheaper starship launches are the more mass you can bring. Therefore the less stringent the requirements for your mission are and the easier it is to just bring more consumables rather than doing any new engineering work. So it’s really hard to get anyone in the private industry to work on this with so much unknowns meanwhile at NASA the glacial pace of decision making means it probably won’t figure out what it wants to do for years.
I would amend that to 'SpaceX makes the impossible merely late, unless it was impossible to begin with and it was always just a big stunt'. I keep coming back to the Hyperloop, which Musk hyped to high heaven back in the day. We can look back on it now and say that obviously it was never going to work (as some did back then) but don't forget how it was promoted so credulously in media. A lot of people believed in it just because of his word. Every big, audacious claim has to be graded against that standard: is this actually possible, or are we as confident in this as Hyperloop fans were a decade ago despite its obvious flaws?
> SpaceX has repeatedly stated they are most interested in supplying people with a way to get to Mars not a fully fleshed out Mission architecture.
I also can't help but see this as a motte-and-bailey. I don't doubt SpaceX has said that at some point, but that's clearly not the message being pushed when Musk talks about SpaceX (not a big coalition of companies and governments, SpaceX specifically as a private actor) putting boots on Mars by ~~2021~~ ~~2024~~ 2029. One of these claims makes it around the world and influences public opinion and Musk's personal reputation, the other sits in the motte.
Musk said his companies wouldn't be making the Hyperloop from day one, and he was correct. It's not an example of a failed promise from SpaceX/Musk.
He released the original white paper, I think, mostly in response to the high price of the proposed California high-speed rail. He was saying one could make something much better for cheaper, and that he hoped someone else might make the hyperloop.
He did say that. He also continued to promote the idea via the Boring Company (https://www.boringcompany.com/hyperloop) and associate it with the SpaceX brand via the student competition (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperloop_pod_competition).
Are either of these serious? Did he put substantial capital into either? No. But what they both served to do was draw headlines, make the idea seem credible in the eyes of the public, without risking much capital.
That's the point. This was never a credible project, but it gets reported on as if it was to millions, which in turn builds an image of Musk as a genius inventor, which in turn feeds the credibility of Musk's other promises. After all, the guy who invented a new mode of transportation can totally build a self-driving car that's already safer than humans (in 2015).
And the idea that it could be made for cheaper than high-speed rail (even at the absurd prices California imposes) was ridiculous from the beginning. It's high speed rail in a vacuum tube. It was techno-hype from the beginning, never an actual possibility, and I can only view that with a cynical motive.
Yeah, they promoted it. If you take them at their word, they did so because they were hoping someone else would develop the hyperloop tech.
As for having an alternate motive of building an image of Musk as a genius inventor, I don't see it. Suggesting what most people see as impossible generates criticism and makes you look like an idiot... at least until you can prove everyone wrong. Musk may have lent credibility to the hyperloop idea, but the idea lent no credibility to Musk.
You were arguing that "SpaceX makes the impossible merely late, unless it was impossible to begin with and it was always just a big stunt", using the hyperloop as the example of something that was truly impossible and not just late. But high-speed rail in a low pressure tube wasn't obviously more impossible than lowering the cost of rocket launches by 10x-100x. It's not clear that SpaceX couldn't have turned to impossible hyperloop into the merely late hyperloop. They didn't even have a failed attempt. I don't necessarily think they could have done it, but the lack of attempt gives us no data either way.
I think Musk really did think it could work and really did hope someone else would make it. It seems like you're annoyed at the media for the hype and you're projecting a lot of disdain onto SpaceX just for open sourcing their white paper and helping a bit with hyperloop R&D.
As to the Motte-and-Bailey I think that understanding how unclear and undecided everything is at this point has large part in confusing even the most interested space nerds.
I think the best way to determine what’s going on is to merely look at what SpaceX is demonstrably working on. At this point for the starship program that is full reusability and refueling, any life support systems or additional “colonization” infrastructure equipment seems to be limited to whatever is required for the HLS contract. Elon Musk as CEO and as the Futurist Internet Personality is always going to hyping ideas that maybe don’t turn out as original advertised but SpaceX is more than just him. (Also try to tune out the fan-boys they don’t know what they are talking about half the time).
I think I get stuck on the latter point, mainly because my family are fan-boys of that sort and I'm banging my head against the wall telling them that no, for the love of God, just because Musk says so doesn't mean we're going to be going to Mars in a few years. In retrospect, I probably brought that frustration into this thread, for which I must apologize.
Reusable rockets are awesome. Great advancements in tech. But I don't live in the aerospace world, I live in the world where Musk's social and political views (and his other businesses' continuous promises and lack of delivery) are explicitly justified and granted credence because 'he is taking humanity to Mars'. It's worthwhile to me to be a pedant about these things, because this hype has large consequences outside of itself.
>is this actually possible, or are we as confident in this as Hyperloop fans were a decade ago despite its obvious flaws?
The distinction here is that most people (including I) do not think sending starship to Mars is impossible from a physics or engineering standpoint but rather an economic/political one. And SpaceX has shown itself capable of pushing through many other difficult engineering projects in the past, and having the esprit de corps to follow up on stated objectives. So in this case I personally would consider a starship mission (note: w/o people at this point manned certification would be hard obtain at such an early stage) much more doable than whatever the hyper-loop was intending to be.
I would reply that the Hyperloop is also not impossible from a physics or engineering standpoint: it's a maglev in a vacuum tube, nothing unbelievable about it. Hell, I don't expect it would even require inventing dramatically new technologies.
It just happens to be a terrible, terrible application of effort and resources, taking existing technology and placing it under incredibly expensive, difficult to maintain, and dangerous conditions in order to squeeze out improvements to transit speed that are only possible at long distances and just... aren't worth it.
I'd say a (manned) Mars mission is in the same boat: forget the cost of developing and fielding the rocket, forget *certifications*, there's every other problem with a human presence on Mars, namely that you have to keep people alive in an extremely hostile environment for at least three years with only the materials they brought with them on a rocket or that you dropped previously.
As for the unmanned mission... we already send rovers to Mars. The promise of a Starship mission might be that it would be cost effective since you're reusing the rocket (but given that you also have to take the whole mass of the rocket both ways, I wouldn't expect that to materialize) or as a proof of concept/prelude of a manned mission, which brings us back to the point above.
To your points:
On Reentry, I think many in the space or engineering/tech adjacent found it insightful was that it tried to get behind the Musk curtain (at least more so than other deep dives) and talk to the workers who actually made it happen and dig into specifics of what they do day to day. To me it makes sense that this would appeal to similar type of person, who would wish to have a similar opportunity.
As what you would do on a mission to Mars-there have been tomes written on it so I’ll avoid doing that here. Instead I’ll mention that I think most people when talking about going to Mars really don’t mean that as an end goal. Rather there is a recognition that by establishing a base there and repeatedly having to manage a logistical connection between there and earth it makes it far easier to expand and do other ‘space things’ in interplanetary space. I feel like most people just agree to Mars as a target because they understand this and also realize that there needs to be some consensus and just to go along with it. (The Moon would probably work similarly hence why that debate is still on-going).
>"The Moon would probably work similarly hence why that debate is still on-going"
I think the debate is driven by the degree to which this is true. Going to the Moon doesn't leave the Earth-Moon orbit of the Sun, and in many cases doesn't even leave the Earth's magnetosphere; there are a lot of prerequisites to interplanetary capabilities that are not needed for Lunar travel.
That is true, my sense of the debate is that people have different opinions on what is do-able. And that people are pushing for the mission that maximizes what gets done but also won’t fail or be delayed too long.
Does anyone mean Dead Internet Theory literally?
That is, do some people really believe that a substantial fraction of the accounts they interact with are AI? Or is it just an exaggerated way of saying that maybe 0.1% of people you see, mostly the ones deep in the Twitter replies shilling crypto, are bots and you're mad about it? Why would anyone exaggerate things that much?
Most people engage with the Internet in a "I'll use it to do whatever I want" way. People who are abusing it will target exclusively high impact metrics - for example, reddit is full of bots that copy old post titles and submission pictures that scored high karma. They do this because the post fulfills some sort of "high impact metric" they can use to manipulate public opinion, steer the discourse in a way they want to, advertise their own shit in a followup post, etc. So a lot of social media is inorganic and not being driven by the collective intentions of users' desires. But idk how to quantify it or if it's better qualitatively than the median user's desires.
Dead Internet Theory predates LLMs, I don't believe the point was ever that accounts "you interact with" are bots. (Pre-LLM bots were, obviously, incapable of interaction.) It was that the majority of the accessible content is unorganic. This is a qualitatively different claim - that organic, useful, meanibgful content is being flooded out by spam - and, to be honest, obviously true. (Again, even pre-LLMs, though they certainly didn't help.)
The comments on Marginal Revolution, which have always been bad, are now both bad and mostly AI. This is probably just people trolling Tyler Cowen and not part of a large-scale operation or anything. More to your question, a significant fraction of the stuff posted on facebook seems to be AI.
I am certain things are going that way. Certainly on Facebook you can see it happening. I am prepping for it by being me - I post here under my real name both because it makes me slightly less obnoxious, and because I am trying to establish a serious track record as a meat person. You can generally spot AI these days because it is so dumb and useless, but for how much longer?
I want to see an internet-inspired update of Blade Runner where Decker's job is to determine which online accounts are LLMs only to discover that he's one himself. Plus, of course, that hot chick with a picture of Sean Young as her avatar.
Do you mean "anyone" as in literally anyone, or only notable/serious/trustworthy etc. people? The former would be a trivial "yes", if only because of the Lizardman's Constant.
Personally, I don't think we are there yet, but the trend is definitely going that way. I believe it will be Enshittification that does large platforms in and, one incentive after rational incentive, bring about the death of the internet, or at least of the WWW. It will be a cycle of platforms being created, peaking among real people, and eventually facing real-people exodus, as they always have. As the AI technology matures, at least some of these platforms will try to hang on as long as possible with bots. The real people will continue to join new platforms and the cycle continues, but the bots that are left behind will outgrow humans and thus steadily increase their share of the total users. At some point (which is not clearly definable) human activity will have such a low share of the total that the internet can indeed be declared dead.
As proof that I'm not fully hallucinating, take this example: Meta has made AI accounts an official feature of their platforms, even though after backlash they have, for now, deleted their known AI accounts:
https://edition.cnn.com/2025/01/03/business/meta-ai-accounts-instagram-facebook/index.html
I don't think it's really necessary for a platform to get big for the bots to arrive. The great majority of the comments submitted to my tiny obscure blog are bot spam, mostly with no obvious agenda, and it's even more unclear what they're hoping to achieve there. It does have a standardized interface that makes it easier for bots to use than a whole new social media site, since it's based on the Wordpress software, but finding the comment or sign up forms for an unfamiliar platform doesn't seem like it should be beyond the wit of LLM, especially in the future.
Yes, automated spam comments on small blogs, forums etc. has been a long-standing problem and will certainly not get better with AI roaming around; as you mentioned, the internet's tendency towards monoculture is a problem at any scale. Additionally, creating whole blogs including content through AI, not just comment spam bots, is going to be part of the future as well. So it will be mostly bots, creating content for mostly other bots. The humans can't really win this fight - they either stop caring about the bots surrounding them, or they quit participating in the Web entirely, or they move on to greener pastures where it's predominantly still humans. In the latter case, the half-life until AI takeover is going to trend down as well.
I'm surprised you mention Twitter, because a lot of the replies are extremely blatant bots, just using LLMs to restate the content the original tweet in a sightly different matter. And while they don't make up the majority of replies, the problem is they all have checkmarks, putting their replies above most of the actual human replies. Though, maybe you don't see it because they only bother swarming posts that get sufficiently popular...
Many months ago, I made a post in the subreddit of my favorite budgeting app asking a question. It got a few good responses and some discussion and then it went dormant.
A few months later, at 11:59pm, the post suddenly got three new responses. All three were basically the same, but worded differently - obviously an LLM. They weren't shilling anything, they were just useless comments about my post. I checked the comment history of each user. Each had made a few posts and comments in random subreddits dating back a few months. These weren't shilling anything either - just idle chatter about the threaded topic. Were I responding to them on these other posts, and lacking the context of these three identical posts, I might not have realized that these accounts were bot accounts.
Once this happened, I realized that the cost of verifying genuine reddit posts and comments had increased. What was the point of these posts? Was it to build up a good-enough comment history to pass the sniff test? Once a bot has spent enough time in the wild creating a social media trail, what do you do with it? Shill crypto? Leave a glowing review on a new film? Spread nasty rumors about Blake Lively?
I know the internet isn't actually dead, but it does feel like, if it's not dying, that there's a zombie outbreak that makes the internet more annoying and less useful. This upsets me, so I will joke about dead internet theory, to friends but mostly to normies, because it's an opportunity to complain that the quantity and quality of bullshit on the internet is growing and you shouldn't repeat anything without verifying it.
TL:DR; I exaggerate the problem to spread awareness
I honestly don’t find human Reddit commenters to be any better in terms of judging the quality of a particular product or forming an opinion about a particular celebrity, so nothing of value lost there.
The best product reviews are on YouTube these days or in smaller blogs that are very hard to fake.
Where are these “blogroll recommendations” located?
Seeing JJ here has shaken my worldview a little for some reason.
Everyone here should subscribe to JJ too btw. Hands down the best cultural commentator on Youtube. He deserves to get to 1M subscribers.
Great to see you here!
I think here: https://www.astralcodexten.com/recommendations
What should I read if I want to really understand (in an ITT-passing way) how the CCP makes and justifies its decisions around censorship and civil liberties?
I found Scholar's Stage by way of Scott's old blogroll. Greer's dayjob is studying sinology and military history for a U.S. thinktank. Although he discusses other topics too. For censorship, you can try (https://scholars-stage.org/candlelight-vigils-and-hostile-forces/) for starters.
He's mirrored on substack now too. Which is ironic, since I remember him being rather bearish about it.
It's not specifically about illiberalism but anything by William Hinton (uncle to Geof Hinton btw) is a great insight into communist Chinese thought for English readers, at least pre-Deng political thought. I'm not sure anyone outside the Central Committee really knows who thinks what since Deng.
I assume Xi Jinping Thought.
I was interested to note that the Foreign Language Bookstore (actual name of the store) in Shanghai stocks a copy or two translated into English for the benefit of foreigners, but I didn't buy anything in that genre.
Oh yeah, this is a good suggestion.
I'd still love something that's like, written in plain and non-sensational language by a third party, but nonetheless presents the arguments in a way that Xi would read and think basically hits the mark.
Good morning, I have written a review of a really excellent old novel called The Luck of Barry Lyndon by Thackeray. I read Vanity Fair in college and enjoyed it, but Barry Lyndon was a real romp. Not as polished as the later novels perhaps, but great entertainment these winter evening. Very funny as well. Have any of you seen Stanley Kubrick's film of the same name? Just wondering if it still finds an audience. Here's the review: https://falsechoices.substack.com/p/the-luck-barry-lyndon
I've only seen the Kubrick film rather than read the book. It's a good film, but might be overrated by contrarian Kubrick fans nowadays.
Interesting recommendation. Not read the book. Having quite enjoyed Vanity Fair but not so much that I am inclined to go back to it, it's possible I am played out on Thackeray.
But I love the film, which I would perhaps rate as being in my top three Kubrick films (with 2001 and Paths of Glory). This may well be a contrarian position but isn't intended to be so.
I have seen it. I have not seen it in a long time though, so I would be wary of saying whether it holds up or not. It is very beautiful. It is somewhat cold as typical with Kubrick. It has a lovely soundtrack.
There is a quite fantastic dueling scene.
Congestion pricing seems to be the modern iteration of enclosing the commons: the poor being deprived of their traditional rights of access in order to benefit the rich.
The measure also benefits the poor, who do not drive but do benefit from the tax revenue and from buses not being stuck in traffic as much. The losers are those rich enough to drive but whose time is not worth enough to offset the congestion charge.
Legal right of access means little if you physically cannot fit that many people/machines into a particular place. Geometry > law.
This is a relatively new problem. Until historically recently, the footprint of a human trying to get somewhere would be tiny. With cars in the picture, it grew an order of magnitude, while the public spaces in city centers, which were usually built before the mass automobilism era, cannot grow at all.
Are the poor really the ones driving into lower Manhattan?
Charging a fee isn't a negation of a right. The poor have the same right to pay the congestion fee as anyone else. If they can't afford to then they can go another time.
Rights aren't absolute and they aren't granted by God. They only exist because society chooses to defend them and society only has an incentive to defend rights that unlock economic value. Making things easier for the wealthy is good for society because rich people's time is worth more than poor people's.
I disagree with your characterization of rights. A proper Right is a thing it takes a government to take away, not one it takes a government to secure.
So paying for something widely available could be a right (muddied if you are paying the govt) and yes its not being a negated.
Using something created by others without paying cant be a right, you couldnt have had that in the first place.
So I agee with the thrust of your post but take more seriously being endowed by the creator with certain unalienable rights
>A proper Right is a thing it takes a government to take away
Really? You don't need a government to take away your right to life. Any old thug can do that.
Rights don't exist in a state of nature. The phrase "endowed by our creator with certain inalienable rights" is just some snappy rhetoric. Objectively it's complete nonsense. Rights are nothing but a legal fiction and therefore require a legal framework in order to exist. Without some form of violence ready to enforce them they disappear in a puff of wishful thinking.
>take more seriously being endowed by the creator with certain unalienable rights
If rights were truly inalienable then they wouldn't have to be written down, would they?
On an individual basis a thug can do that as can disease, but systematic denial of life requires a powerful external force, i.e a government. Its not actually difficult to distinguish between things others take away from me and things others give me. Theres an entire political philosophy built on that notion in fact
Rights don't have to be systemically denied to be violated.
This sounds like the famous "The law, in its majestic equality, forbids the rich and poor alike to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal bread" line, but unironically.
It is true the ruling class is incentivized to extract all it can from those unable to resist. The Iron Law of Melos, that the strong do what they can while the weak endure what they must, is indeed the way of the world. I will not say this it is "good."
That's correct. That saying has always been absurd.
The ruling class doesn't extract wealth from the poor because the poor don't have any. They extract it from the rich, which is why they (the ruling class) should be incentivized to make them (the rich) as productive as possible. By charging congestion pricing for high-value traffic zones, for example.
> I will not say this it is "good."
It is what it is. That's just how life works on this planet and you'll do more harm by trying to deny that reality than by harnessing it. If you don't like it go somewhere else.
Alternatively, if traffic jams are an issue, we could build more roads. Or we could switch to using bikes, which take up a *lot* less space than cars do.
Not sure what the state of the art research in this area is, but I loosely understand that adding roads (or lanes to existing roads) tends to not be very good at reducing congestion due to "induced demand" (or possibly "latent demand").
True, but they do make everyone that uses them richer, by increasing their mobility.
Good luck finding space to build more roads in Manhattan (which is introducing the measure).
Bikes are great, but it would require major shifts before they can make a dent in urban traffic in any US city. Alternatively, though, one could use public transportation (and supposedly the money raised by congestion pricing in NYC is going to be used for maintaining and improving the subway system).
There aren't many effective ways to discourage the overuse of a public good/account for negative externalities without adding a tax to it. Otherwise you have to apportion it based on arbitrary criteria or rationing.
Driving in Manhattan is already a luxury not accessible to the poor anyways. Not only that, but there are a ton of carve-outs for people making under a certain amount, essentially making congestion pricing not apply to the poor.
When it comes to restricting the use of public goods that are consumed for conveniences sake, adding a tax and allowing people to self-select based on their income and preferences is a very effective policy. It's not really anything new that this is always less impactful on the rich. On the upside, the city benefits from the rich consuming a public good they don't currently pay for.
I've always thought this too. Note that one person who definitely doesn't have to pay the congestion surcharge, nor ride the subway instead, is the Mayor.
Enclosing the commons resulted in economic development for everyone.
Omelettes and eggs, eh?
Private property is genuinely more efficient most of the time.
I like the products of modern industry as much as the next person, but that doesn't mean I want a life entirely composed of them to the exclusion of all else. Sometimes I just want to spend a weekend off camping in the wilderness.
...which, of course, is inefficient, so that tracks I guess. Just be careful what you throw under the efficiency bus.
It's not inefficient. Productivity decreases with overwork. Creativity increases with leisure. Creative people tend to be paid more and so can afford to take more vacations which recharge their creativity. See how efficient that is?
I'm skeptical of those claims about "creativity".
My question is: if we are going to start enclosing previously public property behind a paywall then why not do it for foot traffic as well?
A $50 a day fee to be present in Manhattan wouldnt be a big deal for tourists, business travellers or commuters (who would probably have it paid by their employees). And the residents wouldn't mind as long as it displaced other racism but it would keep the homeless people off the island and make it more pleasant for everybody.
They do, it's called a subway.
In Chicago we have a "pedway" for walking instead of riding underground, but you don't pay to use it.
Look, if we want homeless people gone so bad, there's nothing physically stopping society from allowing people to go around town beating homeless people to death. No need to resort to such roundabout solutions.
I've never been to Manhattan, so I don't know how much congestion there is from foot traffic. If there is, then I suppose that could be a good idea, if there was an efficient way to collect it.
The perfect is the enemy of the good. Start with a flat fee then talk about extra fees for those driving cars costing more than $50k, sure.
But otherwise this is a distraction and results in a waste of the commons on traffic jams, which also hurts everyone who wants to use the bus as most streets lack a proper dedicated bus lane.
Source: spending lots of time in NYC.
But that access is already deprived by the tragedy of the commons of traffic?
Ie. Whatever dollar price is being requested by the city is already being paid by drivers who spend +1-3 hours in traffic, no? This just changes that price some implict yo explicit.
No, I do not believe that EVERY commuter was paying the equivalent of whatever price the government is exacting in time spent in traffic. Some people – those who value their time most highly; I expect these to be the richer people – did, and they will now benefit at the expense of those people forced off the roads by not being able to afford the new charge.
The commuters you're describing seem like a mythical group: able to afford a car but not able to afford congestion fee? Who are these poor souls that can't afford the fee but have no problem paying the upkeep for a vehicle and, also, apparently overpriced food and drink in lower Manhattan?
And the traffic on the roads is the modern iteration of the tragedy of the commons.
To focus on just one reason this is wrong, it's odd that people accept the idea that they should pay for their own car, maintenance, repairs, road and bridge tolls, garage parking, and a fraction of the insurance costs, but not the main insurance costs, driving on roads that were previously untolled, or street parking. The latter costs are very small compared to the first category and aren't meaningfully different.
(I'm leaving aside people's unwillingness to pay for other externalities like pollution, which people always hate paying for even if they're real costs).
Or just arrive by something other than car. In the city most considering this, New York, that's both very possible and already what most poor people do. It's middle class commuters who rankle under congestion pricing.
Note that as of yesterday (Sunday) NYC is beyond "considering": congestion fees started then.
Sure, they can still use the murderhobo-infested sewers. I expect there were some people too poor to lose anything meaningful from the enclosures in England too, so I stand by my analogy.
Or NYC could use the money they make from the congestion fee to clean up the subway, essentially taxing the affluent to make life easier for the poor?
Murderhobo is a great coinage to add to dangernoodle, etc.
We used to love our hobos. It was one of the things children pretended to be.
Since the subways are not murderhobo-infested, nor sewers, your analogy clearly does not work.
The subways are hobo-infested, the hobos sometimes commit murder, and I'm pretty sure they produce raw sewage as well.
If you truly believe that the subways are hobo-infested, you probably need to alter the source of your information.
That's such a bad faith analogy, poor people in New York City are not the car commuters and they all already walk and take public transit and taxis or ride-sharing as primary modes of transport
"Poor" in this sense includes the middle class.
Compared to the people who get to make the decisions, we are all poor.
No, in the original framing poor is clearly supposed to mean "cannot afford the new fees". The middle class can absolutely afford the new fees.
"Afford" is a silly word. You can "afford" something and still have it be a significant burden.
*whom you like (sorry)
*whom you like (sorry)
I threw up a light linkpost that people might enjoy: https://www.henryjosephson.com/writing/Clearing-My-Tabs.html
I have a bit of a conundrum.
I want to adapt my comment on Can You Hate Everyone In Rome? into a public Contra post on my own Substack, but what are the best practices around quoting and/or summarizing subscriber-only content?
It seems like most subscriber-only content is behind a paywall because it's too controversial to be trusted with the general public, and thus there's an unspoken rule that we Don't Talk About Subscriber-Only Content.
Do I try to anonymize the inspiration for my own post? Something else?
A post being subscriber only is the same as a book on a bookshelf. You can't just take the book, you have to pay for it. But when you do, or even before you do, you get to quote it and reference it as much as you want. Right?
Sure, but I also didn't want to be a dick if Scott was putting potentially controversial content behind a wall to avoid casual outrage.
I don't know why he would be posting that kind of stuff at all if he cared about public backlash... If he was afraid of alienating readers, it wouldn't make sense that he would post it exclusively for the readers paying him.
I'm sure quoting it would be fine, but you could always, you know, just ask him.
My perhaps incorrect impression is that Scott is crazy busy and doesn't pay particularly close attention to his mailbox. I actually am asking in the comments right now, should he happen to see them.
But after someone else mentioned forgetting the pictures on the front page, it occurred to me to go check if he'd assigned one to the post in question. He did, and it's a visual cue that the post is about ancient Romans, not modern day Romans. So I no longer think he was trying to keep the post's content about objectionable ancient Roman practices a somewhat open secret.
Huh, properly good question. Here are some solutions that seem good to me (2 for lack of time).
1. An easy way would be to make your own post paywalled. After all, eg Scott has no reason to trust your paying subscribers less than his, since he doesn't know either. This would keep all such topics in the paid sphere. And unless you're overquoting the OP, there can still be value in reading it. The main issue seems to me that... your post would be paywalled.
2. You could explicitly reference the original blog post and then just explain your position on the topic, without explicitly contrasting it with quotes from the OP.
Well, for #1 - I'm not pay walling anything. I don't have the product or pull to justify it.
As for #2 - I could very well be reading too much into this, but it seems to me that Scott deliberately left a critical word out of his title to prevent non-paid readers from gleaning the post's potentially controversial content. If that word was in the title, I wouldn't be as hesitant to describe the central hypothetical of the post and why I have a beef with it.
Does Scott himself quote/discuss paywalled posts in public ones? (I think he did Yglesias's.) If so, in the absence of anything explicit, that seems like a reasonable thing to do yourself.
My view is that if you've gotten past the paywall, you are free to discuss the post, excerpts and all, as you would a book you've bought.
Do you live in NYC? Did you make a New Years resolution to join a secret society?
https://www.secretorum.life/p/the-orbis-tertius-society
This website is the secret society, no? ;)
How can it be secret if you're advertising it openly?
The membership and activities can still be secret. Remember, the Rosicrucians advertised publicly with posters in Paris, in 1623.
I think my real issue is with the way in which a society recruits members. I feel like any true secret society worth the title would covertly seek out its members, recruit entirely through social networks of existing members, and/or require prospective members complete some sort of esoteric challenge or journey (e.g. Cicada 3301). You can't just post an ad that says "Want to join my secret society? Apply here!" Where's the intrigue? Where's the mystique?
I was looking into possible cures for atherosclerosis, and just learned about trodusquemine (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trodusquemine). It seems to be a possible miracle drug, but mysteriously ran out of funding after a wildly successful phase 1 clinical trial. Specifically, they found it "exhibits broad-spectrum antimicrobial activity and numerous regenerative, neuroprotective, anti-atherosclerotic, antitumor, antiangiogenic, antiobesity, and anxiolytic properties."
It appears to have been researched in Russia and Prague; the published paper is this: https://www.mdpi.com/1422-0067/23/3/1075
I have no background in medicine, but I sure would want to be in a clinical trial of this stuff, even if I had to be in the blind control group.
Trodusquemine costs somewhere around $2000-10,000 for 100mg, so it's expensive. But the benefits if it turns out to work seem too good to be true, and well worth trying to find out.
How does one get started in getting this past the FDA, from the ground-up? I'm not rich, but perhaps I could plan some kind of Kickstarter or something for a laboratory to do medical development? Why wouldn't some biotech company want to be investigating this?
curing atherosclerosis is largely trivial, for example albumin conjugated EDTA completely eliminate aortic calcification in 5 days
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/25285609/#&gid=article-figures&pid=figure-4-uid-3
As usual the problem is 1) nobody read the science 2) even for the ultra small minority that has the erudition, nobody cares about research translation
I am the only human being on this giant rock to have the erudition to alleviate the bottleneck in medical research but I need rationalists to enable me to spread the most potent unknown neo-therapeutics
of note: marine drugs are extremely interesting and underresearched, among the lead natural molecules is Echinochrom A
I am not yet familiar with Trodusquemine but since it is a spermine metabolite: spermidine is one of the most potent geroprotectors, however its pharmacokinetics in humans are unclear, spermidine supplementation does not increase plasma spermidine levels for example though maybe it is metabolized to spermine. I wonder wether spermine confer comparable lifespan increase
This isn't my area of expertise, but it looks like albumin conjugated EDTA works for arteriosclerosis, and it doesn't mention atherosclerosis. The difference is the former is calcified and the latter is clogged with fatty substances, which might be signficant.
Not exactly, indeed EDTA only target calcium (and other metals) bioaccumulation, but calcification of arteries is not just a component of arteriosclerosis but also a constituent of the atherosclerotic plaques.
Indeed atherosclerosis is mainly constituted of lipids (and fibrins) but is also constituted of calcium and calcium has a role in the atherosclerosis stability meaning that eliminating calcium should considerably prevent accumulation of lipids (atherosclerosis progression)
This is evidenced by the universal mortality correlation with the imaging artery calcification score
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coronary_CT_calcium_scan
Wiki states:
> These plaques are the cause of most heart attacks
Since atherosclerosis is the main driver of heart attacks it follows that calcium is likely the main driver of atherosclerosis (stabilize lipids), and speculatively for stroke too.
Now to what percent of total atherosclerosis progression calcification drive is unknown to me but it seems fairly reasonnable to assume it is one of the most potent drivers (along with high LDL, etc)
I'd like to clarify that while classical chelation therapy reduce mortality, this albumin conjugated version works considerably better and thus is a technological disruption.
EDTA is a decalcification agent, so yes, I'd guess that is the difference.
I suspect I'm just way behind the curve on this, but: I'm noticing that I no longer have access to the ability to switch the display order of comments, and they always show up in oldest-first configuration (the most unintuitive, to me). Did Substack turn this off, or was it Scott, or is the toggle just getting adblocked in my browser now because Substack altered some underlying chunk of code? Does anyone know?
You have to click on the "comments" icon (the little chat bubble). The text of the original post will disappear under a link, but you will then be on a dedicated comments page and the "sort by" button will be back.
Wow, thanks, I've also sorely missed that switch
Thanks!
Here's a fun question for rationalists:
Who was Bayes? What was the question he developed his famous theorem in order to address? Do you agree with his conclusions? Why or why not?
You may be interested in Georges Lemaître, another popular target for misinterpretation and resulting supposed "gotchas".
Just last week I was thinking it was a shame that Bayes was Presbyterian. If he were Catholic, he could have been made a Prior.
>"Do you agree with his conclusions?"
It's hard not to; Bayes' Rule is trivially derived from the definition of conditional probability.
P(H, E) = P(H | E) * P(E) = P(E | H) * P(H)
P(H | E) = P(E | H) * (P(H) / P(E))
The question "do you agree with his conclusions?" is directly tied to the question before it, "What was the question he developed his famous theorem in order to address?"
If you're alluding to its use to argue for the existence of God, that was an addition by Richard Price; Bayes' own intent was purely mathematical.
See https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/An_Essay_Towards_Solving_a_Problem_in_the_Doctrine_of_Chances
Bayes' *essay* was purely mathematical. But he developed it for a reason, and it's not exactly the reason Price added in there.
Quit beating around the bush and spit it out then; you've crossed into being obnoxious.
He was a wonderful guy, and his theorem is a perfect solution to everything.
When exactly is your term paper due?
It's been decades since I was in college, and I have no intention of going back. Cute answer though. 🤣
Here's an approximation of Bayes theorem which is easy to use for mental arithmetic: for each piece of evidence, add up the odds of it happening under your experimental hypothesis versus your null hypothesis. If the sum of odds reaches 20, that's enough evidence to persuade you from 10% confidence to 90% confidence. If if the sum of odds reaches 40, that's enough evidence to persuade you from 1% confidence to 99% confidence. This approximation is within a factor of two as long as the odds are between 1.2 and 30.
Example: You find two studies on your subject, and you think each of them are 10x more likely if the hypothesis is true then if they just came from selection bias. 10 + 10 is 20, so you should find that pretty convincing.
Example 2: you find five crappy studies, and you think this quality of study would occur four times if the hypothesis is true for every three times that they occur out of selection bias. 1.3 * 5 is 6.7. Not very convincing.
How it works: the Bayes factor of a piece of evidence summarizes how well it supports your experimental hypothesis versus the null hypothesis. Normally you would multiply all of the Bayes factors of your different pieces of evidence together, and then use Bayes theorem to apply that update to your prior. This approximation works by adding up the logarithms of Bayes factors, and you use the odds because division can approximate logarithms over a narrow range, similar to the rule of 72.
The Rotherham et al. grooming gangs scandal is doing the rounds on Twitter/X at the moment, and it's every bit as horrific and dystopian as you could imagine. But I want to discuss a particular reaction to it, which can be summed up as "Of course, this would never happen in the States because the rapists would all get shot," "This is why Britain needs the 2A," or similar. This, I think, is totally wrong. America's already experienced very similar problems itself -- anti-white violent crime, authorities refusing to prosecute the criminals for ideological reasons, media and academia either deflecting from, minimising, or even denying outright the problem. It happened during the white flight era, it happened during the George Floyd riots, and it happens on a smaller scale every day in cities across the US. And in no cases have these problems prompted a wave of gun-toting militias stepping up to defend their communities when the regular government fails. Instead, those who were able to generally just moved away from the problem (that's the "flight" part of "white flight"), whilst those who weren't stayed put and suffered.
So the idea that "This would never happen in the US" is at variance with observable reality: it has happened, it is happening, and it will continue to happen. And that's because, whilst guns can be helpful in a personal self-defence situation, a bunch of random individuals with firearms aren't a substitute for a well-functioning police force, and they're certainly no match for an anarcho-tyrannical government.
The US had this in the form of lynch mobs (which weren't solely about race - IIRC only about half of documented lynchings in the south had a racial component). I believe they were ultimately destroyed by the concerted effort made by the federal government to enable racial integration during the civil rights era.
I would be interested to know when and why whites stopped running away during race riots. In the 1921 Tulsa riots, white plebs are perfectly willing to use violence against blacks. In 1951, supposedly 4,000 whites attacked an apartment building in Chicago when a single black family moved in to it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cicero_race_riot_of_1951
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_incidents_of_civil_unrest_in_Chicago
This list is mostly whites commiting violence until early 1950s, but by mid-1960s, it has flipped and then its mostly Blacks and Hispanic being the violent party.
Elites never really engage in petty violence. Its generally always the underclass and they could hardly care for law. Why did the white underclass that in 1950 was willing to riot if a nice middle class black family moved into their neighborhood, just run away in 1965 when blacks actually also started to riot? Did the Civil Rights Act and resulting prosecutions have such a chilling effect on the white underclass? All fascinating questions.
Another factor that is usually doesn't get much airtime in the civil rights story is the role of geopolitics. In 1935, the US was a secondary power. It could hardly care what the ruler of Nigeria for instance thought about its treatment of blacks. Well in 1935, the ruler of Nigeria was the white British governor which also helped.
The US didn't have to worry about communist takover of the world either. The British, French, German, and the Japanese empires could all check Soviet ambitions. By 1945, the German and the Japanese empires were gone and the British and French empires were in the process of being destroyed(often with US support).
And by 1965, most of the third world is independent from the Europeans. These independent nations also have quite a negative view of the whites to say the least. Lynchings and white racial violence in the US could be broadcast around the world by this point. All this means the rulers and petty elites of the third world could easily switch to the Soviets(most already Marxist sympathies). A lot of the Civil Rights policies were implicitly and explicitly pushed through by the State Department, Military, Intelligence agencies etc for this reason. It was in part a global public relations management project.
My off-the-cuff guess is that this is almost certainly do to the DOJ's changing stance on interracial crime. In 1930 I'm guessing the average black person believed that they'd go to jail for 20 years if they assaulted a white person, and the average white person probably believed they could assault blacks with no legal consequence.
<i>Did the Civil Rights Act and resulting prosecutions have such a chilling effect on the white underclass?</i>
I suspect that's indeed the cause. If you look at cases like the Floyd riots, low-level violent crime in American cities, and the grooming gang scandal, the common denominator is that the authorities either turn a blind eye to non-white criminals or at best give them a slap-on-the-wrist punishment that doesn't really deter anyone, whilst simultaneously coming down hard on white people trying to defend their communities.
It's mostly the anarcho-tyranny. We actually used to have a functioning system of armed randos that prevented or at least was believed to prevent this type of event, but its outcomes – lynchings – were considered discomfiting and the process undue by coastal elites, who abolished it. There was a big fight and everything.
>anti-white violent crime
On the rare occasions that that actually happened, the authorities indeed responded. Eg https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zebra_murders and https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wisconsin_v._Mitchell
>in no cases have these problems prompted a wave of gun-toting militias stepping up to defend their communities
There are militias at the border, and armed people have indeed defended property during riots. See eg Kenosha and the Rodney King riots.
<i>On the rare occasions that that actually happened, the authorities indeed responded.</i>
No they did not. See Scott Cummings, "Left Behind in Rosedale", for details.
<i>There are militias at the border, and armed people have indeed defended property during riots. See eg Kenosha and the Rodney King riots.</i>
The George Floyd riots caused over $2bn in property damage: https://fee.org/articles/george-floyd-riots-caused-record-setting-2-billion-in-damage-new-report-says-here-s-why-the-true-cost-is-even-higher/
I read "Left Behind in Rosedale". I read it when it was published, which was a quarter century ago now. It was about decades' worth of social dynamics in a single suburban town concluding in the late 1980s/early 1990s.
It did include, as part of the final stage of the several-generation sequence being analyzed, a remnant elderly population being the subject of property crimes because they were the last remaining people with decent houses to steal from. Most of those elderly homeowners in that specific time and place happened to be white. If that fits your definition of "anti-white crime" then your definition is useless. More importantly you should not be asserting that Scott Cummings' work and writing in any way supports such a definition.
Also, if you're going to proclaim a trend as happening today it's probably not ideal to be offering as evidence a book composed three decades ago about events and trends from four-plus decades ago.
<i>It did include, as part of the final stage of the several-generation sequence being analyzed, a remnant elderly population being the subject of property crimes because they were the last remaining people with decent houses to steal from. Most of those elderly homeowners in that specific time and place happened to be white.</i>
And why exactly do you think every other white person had left?
<i>If that fits your definition of "anti-white crime" then your definition is useless.</i>
In basically any other situation where members of Ethnic Group A are committing violence against members of Ethnic Group B with tacit official permission, to such an extent that large areas which were previously almost exclusively inhabited by Group B lose almost all their B residents and become majority-A instead, I don't think we'd have any quibbles about referring to "anti-B violence". In fact, there's a good chance terms like "ethnic cleansing" would be thrown around.
<i>Also, if you're going to proclaim a trend as happening today it's probably not ideal to be offering as evidence a book composed three decades ago about events and trends from four-plus decades ago.</i>
The point is that there's a long-running pattern of the Second Amendment not keeping communities safe from violent crime when said crime is being committed with the tacit permission of the authorities. That the pattern can be observed as far back as the 1960s makes the case for its existence stronger rather than weaker.
>with tacit official permission
Where is the evidence for this claim?
Nowhere. Which is just one of the ways in which he is fabricating claims that do not exist in the book that he's citing as evidence.
(Another is reversing the sequence of events in 1980s Rosedale, TX: Cummings was quite clear that a remainder of elderly white homeowners hunkering down against burglaries came _after_ the area's sociodemographics had changed.)
The disingenuousness here does not seem consistent with the level of discourse that Scott hopes for in this comment section.
>Scott Cummings, "Left Behind in Rosedale"
That appears to be an entire book about a rather broad topic. Does it actually discuss anti-white crime (as opposed to crime in which the victim was white )? If so, perhaps you can cite that specific part of the book.
>George Floyd riots caused over $2bn in property damage
Leaving aside that that is not a large amount, how is that relevant to whether people will use guns to protect property?
<i>Leaving aside that that is not a large amount,</i>
How much would be a "large amount" in your estimation, then?
<i>how is that relevant to whether people will use guns to protect property?</i>
How is the fact that angry mobs were able to commit billions of dollars of property damage across America over a period of months relevant to whether people will use guns to protect property? Come on, you can work out the answer yourself.
>across America over a period of months
You've answered your own question. Compare $2b across the entire country over months with the Rodney King riots, which led to $1b in damage (in 1992 dollars) over a few days in a single city. And, per Wikipedia, 12000 arrests versus 14,000 across the country re George Floyd. Clearly, the extent of the unrest in any particular city at any particular time was not particularly intense in 2020, and surely it is the intensity (and the concomitant feeling that authorities are overwhelmed) which is likely to prompt people to use arms in defense.
See also Kenosha ($50M in a city of 100,000 people, or $500 per person.)
It's true, there have been plenty of other riots which the 2A also failed to prevent.
Couple billion here, couple billion there...pretty soon, you're talking about real money.
Unrelated to the broader topic, I do actually really dislike this saying when applied to things that affect the entire US. There are just over a third of a billion people here. $2b in US-wide damage is $6 per person.
I don't understand your objection. Are you saying it IS significant, or it isn't because it is only $6 per person (if not per adult/voter)?
It clearly is happening in the US, regardless of the 2A or not.
>"Between 244,000 and 325,000 American youth are considered at risk for sexual exploitation, and an estimated 199,000 incidents of sexual exploitation of minors occur each year in the United States."
From Human Trafficking Into and Within the United States: A Review of the Literature; https://aspe.hhs.gov/reports/human-trafficking-within-united-states-review-literature-0
What do any of those estimated totals have to do with the Rotherham case?
Most of that is just voluntary prostitution, very different from what happened in Rotherham.
How many of those incidents involve organized crime the way it was in Rotheram?
I mean, all you say is true, but it is also true that a potential grooming gang in the South or Midwest might face violent reprisal from a working-class kid's parents...and even if the case might be spun to make the groomers look like the victims if it gets to TV, there's a good chance a potential pimp might be shot before it ever gets to that point.
With all these hypotheticals, empirically, noting that yes you have seen white flight and so on, we haven't really seen a large-scale grooming gang in the USA, unless you count the Hollywood casting couch.
Notice also George Floyd produced a giant backlash even with media and academia going full blast. The NYT editorial page is a lot more mealy-mouthed about a lot of the woke stuff, implying a ruling class in some degree of retreat. So the situation in the USA is significantly to the right of that in the UK. I don't know if that's a cause or an effect of the 2A--probably both.
<i>I mean, all you say is true, but it is also true that a potential grooming gang in the South or Midwest might face violent reprisal from a working-class kid's parents...and even if the case might be spun to make the groomers look like the victims if it gets to TV, there's a good chance a potential pimp might be shot before it ever gets to that point.</i>
There's also a good chance a potential pimp, plus all his brothers, cousins, and other assorted relatives, will also be armed, and will shoot the victim's family as a reprisal. The problem with widespread firearm availability is that it helps the criminals as well as the good guys.
<i>With all these hypotheticals, empirically, noting that yes you have seen white flight and so on, we haven't really seen a large-scale grooming gang in the USA, unless you count the Hollywood casting couch.</i>
That's probably due to demographics. The grooming gangs are mostly associated with a specific group (Pakistani Muslims) that, as far as I'm aware, aren't present in the US in any great numbers. Conversely, there's no obvious reason why guns should stop grooming gangs specifically, but not any of the other kinds of violent crime found in America.
I would say Pakistani-Americans are also very different from Pakistani-Britons. Ours are highly filtered and resemble other heavily selected immigrants rather than masses of chain-migrants.
Guns do stop much of the other kinds of violent crime in America. Defensive gun use is widespread.
"There's also a good chance a potential pimp, plus all his brothers, cousins, and other assorted relatives, will also be armed, and will shoot the victim's family as a reprisal". Yes ...just shoot the drug dealers wouldnt work.
https://fatebook.io/predict-your-year a website to do ACX-style annual predictions - including on personal and private questions, with a big list of starter questions to help you think of good questions to forecast
Did it already! I'm disappointed Fatebook isn't more popular than it should have been given the gradual enshittification of Manifold.
Can you give an example of a particularly negative change that's happened to Manifold? Your view on it is surprising to me.
- the pivot
- making the search interface's filters not explicit when you first see the browse page
- unnecessary AI rephrasings of creator comments
Any thoughts on Sam Altman implying (announcing?) they have AGI now?
https://blog.samaltman.com/reflections
*Edit* Does seem various news outlets are blowing up the significance of the blog.
I keep saying this until people get it.
You must take everything Altman says with a grain of salt. We already know he's "not consistently honest". This likely is him talking his book.
Anyone else remember we were supposed to have 3.5 Opus and GPT-5 by now?
You should take anything Altman says publicly with a huge grain of salt. He will tell any audience what they want to hear, as long as it brings in more money. For example, between OpenAI and Microsoft, AGI is achieved if and when OpenAI is making a profit of $100B dollar, a goal from which they are a mere $105B away:
https://techcrunch.com/2024/12/26/microsoft-and-openai-have-a-financial-definition-of-agi-report/
https://techcrunch.com/2025/01/05/openai-is-losing-money-on-its-pricey-chatgpt-pro-plan-ceo-sam-altman-says/
My prediction: OpenAI is about to (or is already) doing yet another round of fund raising, so this is part of a coordinated hype pumping marketing campaign.
I don't see how this is different to his blog post last year stating that we're "a few thousand days" from ASI. They've also pretty bullish about having a roadmap to AGI for the last few years.
My guess is that they think that just scaling the GPT-o series will get them to AGI and beyond, but it will require huge amounts of energy and capital to do so, hence Altman talking about nuclear fusion and spending trillions of dollars on infrastructure. They might be right (I think there's a decent chance that they are) but then again a lot of people thought in 2023 that you could just scale GPT-4 up and that GPT-5 would come along in 2024 and be AGI.
The reason I like the following puzzle is that you don't need any advanced math to solve it, nothing but basic arithmetic, careful attention and a bit of cleverness. Yet nearly everybody trying to solve it will get confused by one of the several devious traps on the way.
Alice and Bob play the following game. We fix a positive integer number N. Players take turns choosing a natural number from 1 to 9 inclusive (that is, nine options, zero is not allowed). When the sum of all choices made by *both* players becomes equal to N, the player who made the last move wins. It is forbidden to choose the number that the other player chose in the previous move (but generally numbers can be repeated, just not in consecutive moves). It is forbidden to choose a number that makes the total sum greater than N. If a player cannot make a move according to these rules, they lose. Alice always starts. Both players play with optimal strategies. What are the three smallest values of N for which Bob wins?
(if you suggest an answer, please elaborate a bit why it's so, and ideally rot13.com your answer writing out digits, e.g. fifty-seven instead of 57, because rot13 won't hide digits).
I haven't read any other answers before posting my own, because if you tell me my analysis is wrong then I don't want spoilers before I try again. So apologies if I am just duplicating what others have said already.
GY;QE: ryrira naq gjraglgjb naq guveglgjb.
Jr jvyy qrsvar n pbeerfcbaqrapr s(A). Guvf pbeerfcbaqrapr jvyy gnxr nf vachg n gnetrg inyhr A naq tvir nf bhgchg nyy cbffvoyr zbirf gung jva sbe gur svefg cynlre.
* Yrzzn N: Sbe nal z > A, s(A) qbrf abg vapyhqr z.
[[Cebbs bs N: Na vyyrtny zbir vf abg n jvaavat zbir.]]
V jvyy qrgrezvar s vaqhpgviryl. Fhccbfr V nyernql xabj s(A) sbe fbzr cnegvphyne A. V’q abj yvxr gb pbafvqre s(A+z), sbe fbzr vagrtre z orgjrra bar naq avar.
Gb uryc hf guvax nobhg guvf, abgvpr gung va n tnzr jvgu gnetrg (A+z), vs Nyvpr cynlf z nf ure svefg zbir, gur tnzr orpbzrf fvzvyne gb bar va juvpu gur gnetrg vf A naq Obo cynlf svefg—rkprcg gung Obo vf fhowrpg gb na nqqvgvbany erfgevpgvba gung ur znl abg cynl z nf uvf svefg zbir, fvapr guvf jbhyq qhcyvpngr Nyvpr’f cerivbhf zbir.
* Yrzzn O1: Fhccbfr s(A) pbagnvaf c, jurer c≠z. Gura s(A+z) qbrf abg vapyhqr z.
[[Cebbs bs O1: Vs Nyvpr cynlf z, gur tnzr orpbzrf fvzvyne gb bar va juvpu gur gnetrg vf A naq Obo cynlf svefg. Ol gur fhccbfvgvba, c vf n jvaavat zbir sbe gur svefg cynlre jura gur gnetrg vf A. c vf n yrtny zbir sbe Obo orpnhfr vg qbrf abg ercrng Nyvpr’f ynfg zbir. Gurersber Obo unf n jvaavat zbir.]]
* Yrzzn O2: Fhccbfr s(A) pbagnvaf bayl z. Gura s(A+z) vapyhqrf z.
[[Cebbs bs O2: Vs Nyvpr cynlf z, gur tnzr orpbzrf fvzvyne gb bar va juvpu gur gnetrg vf A naq Obo cynlf svefg. Ol gur fhccbfvgvba, z vf gur bayl jvaavat zbir sbe gur svefg cynlre jura gur gnetrg vf A. Ubjrire, z vf abg n yrtny zbir sbe Obo orpnhfr vg ercrngf Nyvpr’f ynfg zbir. Gurersber Obo unf ab jvaavat zbir.]]
* Yrzzn O3: Fhccbfr s(A) vf rzcgl. Gura s(A+z) pbagnvaf z.
[[Cebbs bs O3: Vs Nyvpr cynlf z, gur tnzr orpbzrf fvzvyne gb bar va juvpu gur gnetrg vf A naq Obo cynlf svefg. Ol gur fhccbfvgvba, gurer vf ab jvaavat zbir sbe gur npgvir cynlre jura gur gnetrg vf A. Gurersber Obo unf ab jvaavat zbir.]]
Pnfrf O1, O2, naq O3 ner rkunhfgvir: tvira n inyhr bs A naq z, s(A) zhfg rvgure pbagnva ab zbirf, pbagnva bayl z, be pbagnva ng yrnfg bar zbir orfvqrf z. Guhf, pbzovavat gur guerr erfhygf gbtrgure, jr trg:
Gurberz P: Sbe nal vagrtre z orgjrra bar naq avar, s(A+z) pbagnvaf z vs naq bayl vs s(A) vf rvgure {} be {z}.
Gurersber, vg vf cbffvoyr gb shyyl qrgrezvar s(A) sbe nal inyhr bs A fb ybat nf jr xabj s(A–9) guebhtu s(A–1). Guvf nyybjf hf gb ohvyq hc n gnoyr bs inyhrf vaqhpgviryl.
0: abar (ol N)
1: bar
2: zhygvcyr
3: guerr
4: sbhe
5: svir
6: zhygvcyr
7: frira
8: zhygvcyr
9: avar
10: svir
11: abar
12: bar
13: zhygvcyr
14: zhygvcyr
15: zhygvcyr
16: svir
17: fvk
18: zhygvcyr
19: rvtug
20: avar
21: svir
22: abar
23: zhygvcyr
24: gjb
25: guerr
26: zhygvcyr
27: zhygvcyr
28: zhygvcyr
29: zhygvcyr
30: rvtug
31: avar
32: abar
33: bar
34: zhygvcyr
35: guerr
36: sbhe
37: svir
38: zhygvcyr
39: frira
40: zhygvcyr
Abgr: Va pnfrf jurer s(A) tvirf zber guna bar zbir V fvzcyl qrabgr “zhygvcyr” engure guna yvfg rirel bcgvba, fvapr n frg jvgu gjb be zber ryrzragf vf arire rdhny gb {} be {z} sbe nal z.
Jr frr gung gur svefg srj inyhrf jurer Nyvpr unf ab jvaavat zbir ner: mreb, ryrira, gjragl-gjb, naq guvegl-gjb.
Abgvpr gung gur frdhrapr bs avar erfhygf va gur gnoyr va ebjf mreb guebhtu rvtug vf vqragvpny gb gur frdhrapr va ebjf guveglgjb guebhtu sbegl. Fvapr rnpu arj ebj vf pbzchgrq onfrq bayl ba gur avar cerivbhf ebjf, jr pbapyhqr gung, fgnegvat sebz ebj guveglgjb, gur inyhrf jvyy erphe va n plpyr bs yratgu guveglgjb.
Guhf va trareny, Obo jvaf jura A vf guveglgjb•x, guveglgjb•x + ryrira, be guveglgjb•x + gjraglgjb, sbe nal abaartngvir vagrtre x. Nyvpr jvaf sbe nyy bgure inyhrf.
Qbrf gjraglgjb npghnyyl jbex? Fnl Nyvpr cvpxf bar ba gur svefg ghea. Vs Obo cvpxf nal ahzore bgure guna svir, Nyvpr pna gura cvpx gur ahzore gung oevatf gur fhz gb ryrira. Nf lbh abgvprq, gung fpranevb vf rdhvinyrag gb n tnzr nvzvat sbe ryrira jurer Nyvpr vf gur frpbaq cynlre, fb fur vf thnenagrrq gb jva. Ubjrire vs Obo qbrf pubbfr svir, Nyvpr pna abj pubbfr rvtug. Gur gbgny gura jbhyq or sbhegrra, naq Obo jbhyq arrq gb pubbfr rvtug gb trg gb gjraglgjb - na vyyrtny zbir. Obo pna pubbfr sbhe, gura Nyvpr gjb, gura Obo bar - ohg gura ab zbir vf cbffvoyr, fb vg sbeprf n gvr. Fb vg'f pbeerpg gung Nyvpr qbrfa'g unir n thnenagrrq jva, ohg Obo nyfb qbrfa’g, nf sne nf V pna frr.
The rules state "If a player cannot make a move according to these rules, they lose." In the situation you describe it is Alice's turn and she has no legal move, so Bob wins in that circumstance. There are no "ties".
Rirelguvat vf pbeerpg. Lbhef vf nyfb gur svefg fbyhgvba V'ir frra gb znxr shyy hfr bs gur pbairavrag snpg (gung'f boivbhf va ergebfcrpg, ohg qvqa'g bpphe gb zr gb fgngr rkcyvpvgyl), gung vg'f abg arprffnel gb xabj gur jvaavat zbirf jura gurer'f zber guna bar. Guvf nyybjf lbh gb bayl xrrc genpx bs bar qnghz cre A, juvpu vf cerggl arng. Gur zber hfhny nccebnpu vf gb ohvyq n gnoyr (rkcyvpvgyl be rffragvnyyl) znccvat (A, n-ahzore-sbeovqqra-sbe-svefg-zbir) -> jva/ybfr, jurer lbh arrq 10 cvrprf bs qngn sbe rnpu A.
Jevgvat bayl "zhygvcyr" engure guna r.t. "gjb be sbhe be svir" jnf npghnyyl gur irel ynfg zbqvsvpngvba V znqr gb zl nethzrag orsber cbfgvat. V fhfcrpg V zvtug abg unir orra fhssvpvragyl vafcverq gb cresbez gung fvzcyvsvpngvba vs V'q orra choyvfuvat va cynvagrkg, ohg gur arprffvgl bs jevgvat bhg ahzrenyf nf jbeqf orsber ebg13vat gurz nqqrq zbgvingvba gb erqhpr ubj znal gbgny ahzrenyf V vapyhqrq va zl jevgrhc. Gung fvzcyvsvpngvba nyfb jbhaq hc znxvat zl svany cbvag nobhg gur erpheevat plpyr gung ortvaf ng A=guveglgjb zhpu pyrnare. Fcrpvsvpnyyl gurer ner bayl gjb jvaavat zbirf sbe A=fvk naq A=rvtug if. guerr jvaavat zbirf sbe A=guveglrvtug naq A=sbegl. Ohg gubfr fyvtug qvssreraprf qba'g znggre sbe rfgnoyvfuvat gur ercrngvat plpyr, fb vg'f orggre sbe gur nethzrag gung gubfr qvfgenpgvat qrgnvyf ner fvzcyl abg cerfrag va gur gnoyr.
Man, I didn't see the rot13 link and thought everyone was speaking some new conlang.
rot13? What can you mean? Some of us have taken the trouble to learn Etruscan, so we can post solutions without spoiling the puzzle for others!
Obo pna sbepr gur fhz gb gra, naq vs ur qbrf gung ur pna sbepr vg gb gjragl, gura sbepr vg gb guvegl.
"Ryrira qbrf abg yrg Obo jva. Nyvpr pna cynl bar, va juvpu pnfr Obo zhfg cynl gjb guebhtu avar, nyybjvat Nyvpr gb jva. Gur svefg guveq jvaavat ahzoref ner avargrra, gjragl, naq gjragl bar.
Ur'yy zl ernfbavat: mreb guebhtu avar boivbhfyl Nyvpr jvaf vzcbegnagyl Sbe nal ahzore yrfg guna avargrra, Nyvpr pna fvzcyl cynl n ahzore a fhpu gung avargrra zhfg a rdhnyf gra, sbeprvat gur jva."
Ab, ryrira vf n Obo jva, orpnhfr nsgre Nyvpr cynlf bar, Obo pna nafjre jvgu svir, naq Nyvpr pnaabg jva ol cynlvat svir ntnva (naq zhfg ybfr).
Did you ever post the solution to that divide the figure/reassemble into a square method #2 thing? I read the interesting and helpful link to a similar puzzle someone else posted and saw "how it was to be done" but that didn't send me running to the puzzle to immediately draw it myself.
I'll just link the solution here: https://problems.ru/view_problem_details_new.php?id=105201
Oh, thank you! I'm doomed to everything seeming obvious *in hindsight*.
I think that's a third solution. The one in Dudeney's Canterbury Puzzles has a triple-cogged wheel-segment-like shape which is rotated so the cogs advance to the next anti-clockwise slots. I don't have the reference at hand to check though. (References aren't my strong point, as some repliers to previous comments of mine will be aware! :-)
Perhaps you’re referring to “Making a Flag” which was linked in a comment on Open Thread 361 that our gifter of puzzles took amiss but which I found an amusing example of Soviet-era humor that I hadn’t heard before.
Sic semper erat et sic semper erit.
Gur nafjre vf ryrira, gjragl gjb, guvegl gjb.
Gur gevpx gb anivtngr gur fhogyrgvrf vf gb pbzcerurafviryl fbyir fznyy pnfrf sbe rirel 'jung vs guvf ahzore vf sbeovqqra' pbhagresnpghnyf.
Sbe vafgnapr, Nyvpr jvaf gur tnzr fgnegvat ng bar, hayrff gur cerivbhf zbir jnf n bar, va juvpu pnfr fur unf ab yrtny zbir, naq Obo jvaf. Ubjrire, Nyvpr nyjnlf jvaf gur tnzr fgnegvat ng gjb - vs gjb vf sbeovqqra, fur cynlf bar, naq jvaf naljnl.
Abj, Nyvpr jvaf vs fur pna punatr gur tnzr fgngr (v.r. gbgny fhz yrsg) gb mreb, be n ahzore jurer Obo jvaf, BE n ahzore jurer Nyvpr 'hfhnyyl' jvaf, ohg gur bayl jvaavat zbir vs gur tnzr fgnegf va gung fgngr vf n ercrng.
Guvf vf rnfvrfg jvgu rknzcyrf - Nyvpr pna jva bar guebhtu avar jvgu gur boivbhf zbirf. Ubjrire, Nyvpr nyfb jvaf gjb, fvk, naq rvtug jvgu n frpbaq zbir. Guvf znggref.
Jr pna abj svyy bhg gur fgngr fcnpr bs nyy cbffvoyr tnzrf hagvy jr trg guerr jvaavat fgnegvat ahzoref sbe Obo.
Jr abj sbeznyvfr bhe nytbevguz sbe qbvat fb: n ahzore A pna or znexrq rvgure nf 'Nyvpr jvaf hapbaqvgvbanyyl', 'Obo jvaf', be 'Nyvpr jvaf, ohg ure bayl jvaavat zbir vf k'.
Abj, fhccbfr jr unir svyyrq bhg nyy ebjf sebz A-1 naq hc (lrf, guvf vf frpergyl na vaqhpgvba).
Jr svyy bhg ebj A nf sbyybjf: Sbe rnpu zbir g sebz bar gb avar, pbafvqre gur ebj A-g. Vs Obo (v.r. cynlre gjb) jvaf gung ebj, g vf n jvaavat zbir sbe Nyvpr. Vs gur bar jvaavat zbir va gung cbfvgvba vf g, gura g vf nyfb n jvaavat zbir sbe Nyvpr. Bgurejvfr, g vf n ybfvat zbir. Svyy va ebj A onfrq ba vs Nyvpr unf mreb, bar be zber jvaavat zbirf.
Abj, jr qb gur pbzchgngvba (juvpu vfa'g npghnyyl gung onq, lbh'er whfg jevgvat qbja gur arkg A, sbyybjrq ol fpnaavat ebjf A-1 guebhtu A-9 sbe vs gur bayl jvaavat zbir vf gur bar whfg znqr, sbyybjrq ol jevgvat qbja bar jvaavat zbir, be abar, be vs gurer ner gjb be zber. Vg gnxrf zhpu ybatre gb qrfpevor guvf va jbeqf guna gb npghnyyl qb vg).
Nyvpr jvaf bar guebhtu avar vafgnagyl. Vs fur pnaabg jva vafgnagyl, gura fur jvaf naljnl vs A vf gjb, fvk be rvtug (jvgu gur nygreangvir jvaavat zbirf orvat bar, guerr be sbhe). Bgurejvfr, Nyvpr unf bayl bar jvaavat zbir. Nyvpr nyfb jvaf gra - ol cynlvat svir, ohg bayl svir.
Gurersber Obo jvaf ryrira.
Fb, Nyvpr nyfb unf ng yrnfg bar jvaavat zbir sbe tnzrf gjryir guebhtu gjragl (cynlvat bar guebhtu avar, gb fvg ba ryrira).
Ubjrire, vs Nyvpr pnaabg cynl bar va gur gjryir-tnzr, fur ybfrf (rira vs fur cynlf fvk, nf gur svefg cynlre jvaf naljnl va gur fvk-tnzr jurer fvk vf qvfnyybjrq ba gur svefg zbir). Guvf zrnaf Nyvpr jvaf vs fur pnaabg cynl gjb va gur guvegrra-tnzr (fur pna cynl bar vafgrnq).
Vs Nyvpr pnaabg cynl guerr va gur sbhegrra-tnzr, fur pna jva naljnl ol cynlvat frira, naq vs fur pnaabg cynl sbhe va gur svsgrra-tnzr, fur jvaf naljnl cynlvat svir (jr vqragvsvrq gung gur gra-tnzr vf bayl jvaanoyr ba n svir rneyvre).
Va gur fvkgrra-tnzr naq gur friragrra-tnzr, Nyvpr unf bayl n fvatyr jvaavat zbir va rnpu (svir naq fvk erfcrpgviryl).
Va gur rvtugrra-tnzr, Nyvpr pna jva jvgu rvgure n frira be n avar. Va gur avargrra-tnzr naq gur gjragl-tnzr, Nyvpr unf whfg gur bar jvaavat zbir (abgr Nyvpr ybfrf gur avargrra-tnzr vs fur cynlf n sbhe, nf gur svsgrra-tnzr unf zhygvcyr jvaavat zbirf).
Gur gjragl-bar tnzr vf nanybtbhf gb gur gra-tnzr - Nyvpr pna cynl n svir, sbepvat Obo vagb n erfgevpgrq fvkgrra-tnzr, naq urapr Nyvpr unf n jvaavat zbir. Fur unf bayl guvf jvaavat zbir.
Jr unir svanyyl neevirq ng gjragl-gjb, juvpu Obo jvaf.
Pbagvahvat guebhtu gur vaqhpgvba, Nyvpr pna jva tnzrf gjragl-guerr guebhtu guvegl-bar ol cynlvat bar guebhtu avar erfcrpgviryl.
Jr pna frr gur svavfu yvar abj, fb jr'yy fgbc svyyvat va rirel pryy. Qbrf Nyvpr jva gur guvegl-gjb tnzr va n jnl gung vf nanybtbhf gb gur gra-tnzr naq gura gjragl-bar tnzr? Jryy, Nyvpr xabjf gung vs fur yrgf Obo tvir ure n gjragl-gjb tnzr, fur ybfrf. Urapr fur zhfg cynl svir, yrggvat Obo cynl svefg va gur gjragl-frira tnzr, jvgu svir sbeovqqra (fb Obo pnaabg npuvrir gur gjragl-gjb tnzr).
Ubjrire, hayvxr gur svir-tnzr naq gur fvkgrra-tnzr, gurer vf zber guna bar jvaavat zbir va gur gjragl-frira tnzr! Jr pna cynl rvtug, ernpuvat gur avargrra-tnzr jvgu rvtug sbeovqqra. Grpuavpnyyl, qhr gb bhe hfr bs vaqhpgvba, jr pna fgbc urer. Obo jvaf gur guvegl-gjb tnzr, naq gur fbyhgvba vf pbzcyrgr.
Sbe pbzcyrgrarff, jr'yy tb guebhtu guvf fcrpvsvp pnfr naljnl. Jr rkcyvpvgyl fubj gur avargrra-tnzr jvgu rvtug sbeovqqra unf ab jvaavat zbirf. Jr pnaabg npuvrir ryrira, naq pnaabg yrg bhe bccbarag vzzrqvngryl npuvrir ryrira. Fb gur pnaqvqngr zbirf ner sbhe naq avar. Avar ybfrf vzzrqvngryl gb svir (jr ner ng svir jvgu svir sbeovqqra, naq svir vf bqq), naq sbhe nyfb ybfrf gb svir (jr trg gb gra jvgu svir sbeovqqra, naq gur bayl jvaavat zbir ng gra vf svir). Fb jr'er qbar. Svanyyl.
"Pna lbh rkcynva gb zr ubj Obo pna jva vs A=ryrira naq Nyvpr fgnegf hfravat bar?"
The same way Alice wins if N=10 and Alice starts. By playing 5.
Well done! This is the first correct (manual, w/o programming) solution.
Bxnl. Fb sbe bar <= A <= avar, Nyvpr pna gevivnyyl jva va bar fgrc. Sbe gra, fur pna cvpx svir, juvpu jvyy gura or sbeovqqra gb Obo, fb ur pna'g jva ba uvf svefg ghea. Nf svir vf bqq, ur pna abg hfr gur fnzr gevpx gb cerirag Nyvpr sebz jvaavat ba ure frpbaq ghea.
Ryrira frrzf zber gevpxl. Vs Nyvpr cvpxf gjb be zber, guvf jvyy or nyzbfg rdhvinyrag gb Obo fgnegvat n tnzr jvgu A<=avar, jvgu gur bayl pnirng gung Obo pna'g erhfr Nyvpr'f ahzore. Yhpxvyl sbe Obo, ur jbhyq abg jnag gb qb gung nalubj, vs Nyvpr cvpxrq na rira ahzore, uvf jvaavat zbir vf na bqq ahzore naq ivpr irefn. Nyvprf bgure pubvpr vf gb cvpx bar. Va gung pnfr, Obo jvyy unir gb npphzhyngr gra cbvagf, juvpu ur pna qb ol cvpxvat svir (juvpu vf abg sbeovqqra gb uvz). Svefg jva sbe Obo.
Sbe gjryir, Nyvpr jbhyq cvpx bar, juvpu chgf Obo va cerggl zhpu gur fnzr fubrf nf Nyvpr unq orra n zbzrag ntb (bayl jvgu yrff bcgvbaf). Nyfb, fur pna qb gur fnzr gevpx sbe nyy gur ahzoref hc gb gjragl, vapyhfviryl.
Gjragl-bar vf gevpxl sbe Nyvpr. Fur pna abg chg Obo va n fvghngvba jurer gur erznvavat tnc vf ryrira. Ubjrire, fur fgvyy unf gur nqinagntr bs "aba-pbafrphgvir ahzoref" bire Obo. Obo jvyy gel gb cvpx n ahzore juvpu jvyy yrnir n tnc bs ryrira sbe Nyvpr. Ubjrire, vs fur cvpxf svir, ur vf hanoyr gb qb gung. Guvf qbrf abg vzzrqvngryl tenag ure ivpgbel, orpnhfr Obo'f pubvpr jvyy fgvyy pbafgenva ure, gubhtu. Fb Obo fgnegf uvf ghea jvgu n erznvavat tnc bs fvkgrra, hanoyr gb cvpx 5, juvpu jbhyq or gur pnabavpny jvaavat zbir. Ur zvtug cvpx rvtug, ceriragvat Nyvpr sebz jvaavat va bar fgrc, ohg fur jvyy fheryl erfcbaq ol cvpxvat sbhe, fb ur cvpxf gjb, fb fur cvpxf bar, juvpu erfhygf uvz gb or hanoyr gb znxr n zbir naq ybfr.
Guvf vf ebhtuyl gur cbvag jurer V gevrq gb svther bhg fghss znahnyyl naq vafgrnq jebgr n fubeg clguba fpevcg. Gur vqrn vf gb genpx gur tnc orgjrra gur pheerag fhz naq gur gnetrg a. Sbe n ovttre tnc, jvaavat vf rdhvinyrag gb svaqvat n zbir jurer gur bccbarag pna abg jva.
Pbqr vf urer: uggcf://cnfgrova.pbz/YHMxu6pt
Bhgchg vf urer: uggcf://cnfgrova.pbz/7CJOjLNX
Ryrira, gjragl-gjb, guvegl-gjb, sbhegl-guerr, svsgl-sbhe rg prgreny.
V chg guvf vagb BRVF (frr yvax va bhgchg), juvpu abgvprq gung gur qvssreraprf bs gur frdhrapr ner crevbqvp. Vg nccrnef gung gur jvaavat pubvprf sbe A ner rdhny gb gur barf sbe A zvahf guvegl-gjb. Ubjrire, guvf vf whfg na bofreingvba, vs nalbar unf n tbbq nethzrag sbe jul guvf unf gb or gur pnfr, V nz nyy rnef.
Fvapr lbh jebgr gur fpevcg naq ybbxrq hc BRVF, lbh nyernql xabj lbhe nafjre vf pbeerpg... jr'yy frr vs fbzrbar ernpurf vg gur "angheny" jnl. Tbbq wbo, naq V'yy whfg zragvba gung gur ernfba gur frdhrapr vf crevbqvp jvgu crevbq guvegl-gjb vf fvzcyl gung gur jvaavat shapgvba, pbafvqrerq nf n shapgvba ba cnvef (fhz gb ernpu, ahzore abg nyybjrq ba svefg zbir) vf vqragvpny ba gur gra ahzoref nsgre guvegl-gjb naq gur gra ahzoref nsgre mreb. Fvapr gur orunivbe vf erphefvir, vg unf ab bgure bcgvba ohg gb ercrng vgfrys.
Va ergebfcrpg, jung bar unf gb svther bhg vf gung vg vf abg rabhtu gb qrgrezvar jub jbhyq jva sbe jung A. Lbh nyfb jnag gb genpx gur jvaavat ahzore (vs gurer vf bayl bar), be gur snpg gung gurer ner zhygvcyr jvaavat ahzoref.
Sebz guvf, lbh pna dhvpxyl pnyphyngr juvpu cvpxf jbhyq jva sbe n ynetre A.
V pna frr gung gur jvaavat cvpxf bayl qrcraq ba gur frgf bs jvaavat cvpxf sbe A-1 gb A-9. Tvira gung gurer ner bayl 512 qvssrerag cbffvoyr jvaavat frgf cre A, vg vf pyrne gung gur cnggrea jvyy ercrng vgfrys nsgre fbzr gvzr -- ab zber guna cbj(512, 9) sbe fher. Ohg guvegl-gjb vf n ovg bs n fhfcvpbhf ahzore.
Yrg K or gur uvturfg ahzore n cynlre pna cvpx. (K=9, va lbhe ceboyrz).
Gura jr svaq gur sbyybjvat crevbqf (gur vavgvny inyhrf zvtug abg ercrng, fb V tvir n fgnegvat cbvag sbe gur crevbqvp orunivbe. Nyfb, V tvir gur qvssreraprf orgjrra pbafrphgvir obo-jvaf bire gur crevbq.
K=3: C=4, A>=4, q=[4]
K=4: C=10, A>=1, q=[5,5]
K=5: C=13, A>=11, q=[7,6]
K=6: C=28, A>=1, q=[7,7,7,7]
K=7: C=25, A>=8, q=[9,8,8]
K=8: C=27, A>=1, q=[9,9,9]
K=9: C=guvegl-gjb, A>10, q=[ryrira, ryrira, gra]
K=10: C=55, A>=1, q=[11,11,11,11,11]
K=11: C=12, A>=12, q=[12]
K=12: C=78, A>=1, q=[13,13,...]
K=13: C=29, A>=62, q=[15, 14]
K=14, C=90, A>=1, q=[15,15,...]
K=15: C=16, A>=16, q=[16]
K=16: C=68, A>=1, q=[17,17,...]
K=17: C=56, A>=68, q=[19,19,18]
K=18: C=171, A>=1, q=[19,...]
K=19: C=40, A>=20, q=[20]
Ol sne zbfg pbzzba vf gung gur obo-jvaf ner fcnprq K+1 ncneg, naq gur crevbq vf gura fbzr zhygvcyr bs (K+1).
Gur znkvzhz qvfgnapr orgjrra obo-jvaf frrzf gb or K+2. Guvf nccrnef va n zvkrq frdhrapr jvgu K+1.
Fb, va pbapyhfvba
(1) Gur frdhraprf unir gb ercrng ng fbzr cbvag.
(2) Fbzrgvzrf gur svefg srj (be "srj") ahzoref ner n 'tneqra bs rqra' pbasvthengvba juvpu jvyy abg or ernpurq ntnva.
(3) K=9 lvryqf bar bs gur ener pbasvthengvbaf jvgu aba-rdhvqvfgnag Obo-jvaf.
(4) Vs gurer vf n qrrcre ernfba ol fbzr K lvryq obevat cnggreaf naq bgure K lvryq vagrerfgvat cnggreaf, V nz abg frrvat vg.
Nice analysis. I don't know either why the range of X=9 should be one of the rare less-trivial solutions, seems like it comes down to the idiosyncratic behavior of the particular sum N+10 after the 0th/1st/2nd win by Bob, so maybe it just (pseudo-)randomly came out this way.
Lbh pna pbafvqre n ahzore n jvaavat ahzore, vs lbh ner qrgrezvarq gb jva jura vgf gur qvssrerapr orgjrra A naq gur pheerag fhz.
Sbe bar gb avar Nyvpr jvaf qverpgyl.
Gra zrnaf Nyvpr tbrf svir, Obo pna'g fnl svir fb unf gb zbir gb n ahzore gungf jvaavat sbe Nyvpr.
Ryrira vf gur svefg ahzore jurer Nyvpr unf gb tvir n jvaavat ahzore gb Obo.
Ercrng gur gubhtug cebprff naq lbh jvyy svaq ybfvat ahzoref ryrira gjragl gjb naq guvegl guerr.
(Sbe gjragl bar naq guvegl gjb gur gevpx vf gur fnzr nf jvgu gra)
N tbbq nggrzcg, ohg gur nafjre vf abg ragveryl pbeerpg.
V tbg ryrira, gjragl-bar, naq gjragl-gjb. Vf guvf pbeerpg? Zl ernfbavat vf gung sbe gnetrgf bar guebhtu avar, Nyvpr jvaf va bar fubg. Sbe Gra, Nyvpr fnlf svir naq jvaf. Ryrira vf n fcrpvny pnfr, jurer jubrire fgnegf ybfrf: Vs Nyvpr fnlf bar, Obo pna fnl svir, naq vs fur fnlf n ahzore terngre guna svir Obo pna jva va bar fubg. Sbe gnetrgf gjryir gb gjragl, Nyvpr pna sbepr Obo gb fgneg ba ryrira, gurerol jvaavat. Ohg fur pna ab ybatre qb guvf sbe gjragl-bar naq gjragl-gjb; Obo pna hfr uvf zbir gb sbepr ure gb fgneg sebz ryrira, fb ur jvaf.
Gur svefg ahzore vf pbeerpg, gur bguref ner abg. Gurer ner fhogyrgvrf lbh'ir zvffrq!
I tried to use Google translate on this hoping they supported rot13 but they autodetected Arabic. Here's the translation:
I am afraid of the saffifj, I am afraid of the bbirj, I am afraid of the rooms, I want to go to Jarir, I am afraid of the saffifj, I am afraid of the spice of the saffifj!
Interesting variant
For the one therapist that is listed on the Psychiat-List for Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh is spelled wrong
Other things I found annoying:
- There is a login/signup button but it's totally disconnected from any other login
- One of the regions in the dropdown is labeled "Oregon And Maryland", which is kind of odd given how distant those two states are from each other. (The sole psychiatrist listed there is based in "Kensington", which, as it turns out, is the name of a town in Maryland, so maybe the data model should be changed so that multiple regions can be chosen.)
Also, there's a Washington region with one Seattle-based professional, alongside a Seattle region with two others. Is there a better place than this comments section to submit this type of bug report? (And others, such as "it doesn't work that well on mobile")
Same as it ever was, eh?
At 3 Quarks Daily: Three Dialogs with a Friendly Alien: Claude 3.5 Sonata, https://3quarksdaily.com/3quarksdaily/2025/01/three-dialogs-with-a-friendly-alien-claude-3-5-sonata.html
The opening of the third dialog:
ME: I’m imagining that at some time in the future each human will be given an AI companion early in life, perhaps when they are old enough to walk – think of Stephenson’s The Diamond Age. This companion will interact with the human in various ways through various modalities. It will certainly have robotic capabilities. As the child grows older the AI companion will probably have to be given a different physical form. So we port the data to a different physical form and make the switch-over in a special ceremony. We’ll probably have to do this a few times until the child becomes an adult. At some point the AI will also take residence in other physical forms, all linked together. This AI will remain with the person their entire life. They won’t always be physically together, and so forth. Imagine it working however makes sense to you.
The point is that this AI will become attuned to the needs, capacities, and the interests of the human. It will be the artificial complement, image, soul, or doppelgänger, of the human. What happens to this complement when the human dies? Will it continue on in the world? Or will it slowly wither away and die, not so much of grief, but because it has become so closely attuned to its human counterpart that it requires interaction with that human in order to maintain its operational stability?
As you know, humans who are deprived of human interaction for long periods of time can start hallucinating; think of Joshua Slocum. If the deprivation is extended to total sensory deprivation, the disorientation comes on much more rapidly. We need the pressure of external input to maintain internal coherence.
CLAUDE: This is a fascinating thought experiment that touches on fundamental questions about the nature of intelligence, consciousness, and the interdependence of minds. Let me explore several key aspects of your scenario.
Regarding the AI’s continuation after human death, I believe we need to consider the degree and nature of the attunement you describe. The AI companion would likely develop what we might call a “complementary architecture” – neural pathways and processing patterns that evolved specifically to interface with its human partner’s cognitive and emotional patterns. This goes beyond mere knowledge of preferences; it represents a deep structural adaptation.
When considering whether such an AI would persist or decline after its human’s death, we should examine the parallel with human psychological development. Just as human personalities are shaped by their primary relationships but can survive the loss of those relationships, an AI companion might maintain basic functionality while experiencing a fundamental reorganization of its operational patterns.
However, your comparison to sensory deprivation raises an important consideration. If the AI’s architecture has evolved to process and respond to its human’s unique patterns of thought and interaction, the absence of that input stream might indeed create something analogous to sensory deprivation. The AI wouldn’t just miss its human partner – it would be deprived of the very patterns of interaction that help maintain its operational coherence.
This suggests a third possibility beyond simple continuation or death: transformation. The AI might undergo a fundamental reorganization of its cognitive architecture, much as humans often report feeling like “a different person” after the loss of a lifelong partner. The AI wouldn’t necessarily die, but it might cease to be the same entity it was during its human’s lifetime.
The outcome might depend on whether the AI has developed what we might call “cognitive autonomy” – the ability to maintain stable function through internal processes rather than requiring constant external calibration. This relates to your point about humans requiring external input for coherence, but there’s likely a spectrum of dependency rather than a binary state.
Does anyone who isn't religious believe in "free-will" anymore?
I find it interesting how you assume: "non-materialist = religious"
I guess this makes sense if we use that as a definition of religious, but I don't think this is what most generally mean by that word.
Personally I'm of the belief that you can believe in the Resurrection and even the Trinity and still be "not religious" - so long as you look at these dispassionately as a simple historical fact and philosophical hypothesis about the base ontological nature of existence, without necessarily signing on to the subsequent rituals and behavioral codes and institutions.
>I find it interesting how you assume: "non-materialist = religious"
I do not assume that.
"Does anyone who isn't religious believe in "free-will" anymore?"
"I excluded religion only to start with a materialism premise. Perhaps I should have made that more explicit. I am simply not interested in religious arguments for the purposes of this question."
Apologies if I misunderstand your position here.
I didn't want to entertain any religious arguments for free will in this thread.
Yes, I did want to start with materialistic premise, but I also didn't want to write an essay-length OP to cover every possible combination of beliefs and which pairs of them I wanted to eliminate or include. I decided instead to write a simple question and then clarify my positions further as the discussion progressed.
What do you mean by "believing in free will"? I'm a 100% materialist and believe that we're deterministic machines, but I still think that free will is a useful concept for dealing with individual agency. Moral language around rule-breaking and punishment is still valid even if the ontology is different. Deterministic machines can still be dissuaded from an action by creating an expectation of punishment. 'Free will' just captures the notion that humans respond to their environments in comprehensible ways and respond predictably to social incentives.
What does it mean for you to disbelieve in free will? Is there any concrete pragmatic difference between the two ontologies for you?
Fair.
>What does it mean for you to disbelieve in free will? Is there any concrete pragmatic difference between the two ontologies for you?
Yes. It helps me to move on when something bad happens to remind myself it was destined to have happened exactly the way it did. I believe It's useful to think in terms of agency when facing the future and the lack of it when looking backward.
I don't but the idea that the world makes sense and is fully deterministic and therefore scientific is not only ridiculous but completely falsified.
While most aspects of the world are remarkably causal, there are causality also countless causality violations or meta-causality violations.
Not only the first remarkably inept uncaused cause assumption prior to the "big bang" but also the intrinsically absurd and unscientific, acausal structure of matter, of ourselves.
Reductionism of particles with their subparticles and hidden variables can only goes so far until it reach either infinite regress or a primitive minimum unit of matter (smallest universe pixel size) that is constituted of nothing, by definition.
It is insane that people don't understand the world is intrinsically insane.
There are other instances, such as closed causal loop negative time travel for spontaneous electron pair creation, and the aphysicality of qualias.
I sure think it's possible the world is intrinsically insane. "Chaos is the score upon which reality is written." - Henry Miller
It is not only possible but logically necessary cf the cosmological argument.
Great quote btw
The brain is a discrete entity, separate from the environment around it except through the extremely limited senses, that takes in inputs, processes them, and takes decisions based off that internal process. Whatever it is that you describe as "me" having free will, is something real that acts independently of the world around it, and may make decisions based off some level of self-reflection.
Whether or not you're completely deterministic isn't particularly relevant to free-will, unless you insist on a definition that assumes complete independence from reality, rather than just reasonable independence from the world outside your skull. People who reject free will generally do so in an attempt to blame one's environment as the determining factor in a certain set of actions, completely ignoring the capacity for thought, and thought about thought.
Sure, but it's important to note that "will" is just as important as "free". Lots of people seem to think "free will" requires, effectively, being "able" to choose differently if the universe were reset - but this is confused, because it is "free", but utterly lacks "will". Will is the process by which you chose in the first place, and if you're resetting the universe, you're still going to operate by that same process, and thus make the same choices (because these are the choices you willed in the first place, and if nothing has changed, then you're going to will them again)
Consider an alien who has a button which can reset the universe to right before you made a choice between A or B. The "random" notion of free will requires you to be able to choose A or B - but if you could choose A or B, then the alien gets to decide which button you actually push, so you have no choice in the matter!
When does one choose this "will"? I gave an example above about shopping for shoes. You are saying that resetting the universe will always result in the same choice of shoes because same will exists. But when does this will come into being if not at the moment the choice is made? Resetting the universe to 5 minutes earlier shouldn't change anything 5 minutes later, either right? What if we reset the universe back at to moment of birth? Can the choice of shoes you purchase 30 years later change merely because we have reset the universe back that far? If not, in what respect is this will free?
> But when does this will come into being if not at the moment the choice is made?
It might feel as though snap decisions are instant atomic things, but they are not. Your body and your thoughts are made of many many tiny components and computations respectively. There is no one instant you can point to and say that is when the decision was made; there is no one neuron you can point to and say that is where the decision was made; there is no one stimulus or memory or character trait you can point to and say this is why the decision was made; just as there is no atom you can point to in your body and say that that one is you and everything else is just the shell you wear.
You are a composite entity made of many parts, and your thoughts and decisions are composite entities made of many parts.
Your entire life to date, put together, leads up to the decisions you make in the present moment.
I do. And from everything I have read, the majority of philosophers also believe in free will, in the form of compatibilism.
My take on the issue is that free will is a description of the alignment between what we want to do and what we actually do. When nature or other people force us to do something we wouldn’t otherwise do, this is doing something against our will.
The obvious counter to the alignment perspective is that our goals and desires and values were themselves determined by our past. Thus if we go back far enough our will was itself determined and not freely chosen. True. But that is why free will and determinism can coexist. There is no absolute hard line between the self and the non self. Mystics and Buddhists have been telling us this for thousands of years. But we can choose to define our self and our desires, and we can recognize when our actions align with them or not. And that is free will.
Bryan Caplan.
I know Brian Caplan has unusual freewill beliefs but I don't understand them. Do you happen to have a link where he explains it clearly?
He has a number of them. Here's one, which also links to others from him:
https://www.econlib.org/archives/2009/04/free_will_and_b.html
Thanks!
Are there any practical applications of being able to prove or disprove the existence of free will?
One practical application is how you view your entire past. Could you have made different choices in life or not? The answer to that question can influence your identity in the present, can affect how well you sleep at night.
Based on their phrasing, I suspect that by free will the OP means something like "able to violate the laws of physics" (or, since even that is a bit slippery, maybe "exhibit behavior unexplainable by any principle"). Depending on the mechanism that certainly could have some applications...
For me the big question is "Could you have lived your life differently?"
Can you operationalize what you mean by "could"? And especially (given the original question) how religion would make it so that one "could"?
I excluded religion only to start with a materialism premise. Perhaps I should have made that more explicit. I am simply not interested in religious arguments for the purposes of this question.
By "could". Say one regrets decisions they made 20 years ago: They wish they had gone to college, wish they had not committed that crime, wish they hadn't gotten on that plane. If there is no "could" there, the regrets don't make sense.
They make sense for learning and acting differently in new but similar situations (of course not identical ones, for at least you are a regreting person now).
If you had no memories, painful ones, regrets, then you do the same mistake again.
I differentiate between regrets and self-hate or something like that.
I'm still not clear what "could" means - for example, in which (if any) of the following scenarios does the "could" count as free will?
1) Our brains/minds are entirely governed by physical laws, and:
a) Those laws are entirely deterministic, in the sense that given an initial state there is only one possible subsequent set of states. In this universe, hypothetically going back and starting again will always produce the same result. You "could" make a different decision in the sense that it may be allowed by the laws - but only if there were some arbitrary change the initial or an intermediate state, which "you" can't do because everything "you" are is determined by initial state and laws.
b) Those laws are probabilistic, in the sense that given an initial state they determine the likelihood of different outcomes. In this universe, hypothetically going back and starting again may produce a different result, but on average follows a distribution given by the laws. You "could" make a different decision in the same sense that a dice roll "could" yield a different number.
2) Our brains turn out to not be describable by physical laws, in the sense that no model is able to deterministically or probabilistically describe how we behave. In this universe, going back and starting again you "could" make a different decision in the sense that we have no way to even understand how decisions come about.
Maybe you could get people to stop being so goddamn vindictive. ...Oh who am I kidding, they would just come up with a new excuse.
I can't think of a goddam one.
I think "free will" is a phrase that sends us down the wrong track in developing a model of choice and how it happens. The opposite of free is something like bound or coerced, right? So then we start asking ourselves whether when we consider having another cup of coffee we are aware of being coerced into having one or not having one, or whether or not there's some metaphorical equivalent of superglue preventing us from leaving our chair or some equivalent of a strong magnet dragging us across the kitchen to the coffee pot. Those are the wrong questions to be asking.
I like Daniel Dennett's thinking about this topic.
The opposite of compatibilist free will is something compelled, the opposite of libertarian free will is something determined.
There are a number of main concerns about free will:-
1.Concerns about conscious volition, whether your actions are decided consciously or unconsciously. For some this is the only issue, for others it is a separate topic.
2. Concerns about moral responsibility, desert, punishment and reward.
3. Concerns about compulsion (relating back to 2. It's widely accepted that if you are compelled, you lack moral responsibility. Its less widely accepted that determinism by natural forces is compulsion).
4. Concerns about "elbow room", the ability to "have done other wise", regret about the past, whether and in what sense it is possible to change the future, apart from the concerns about compulsion and responsibility).
5. Concerns about naturalism, whether free will is a mystical power of the soul, or accountable by suitable physics.
I'm interested in 4.
I do. What's more, I don't see why religion has any necessary connection to free will. How does adding Dionysus or Jesus to the equation help explain why I feel free to control my actions in an apparently mechanistic universe? Even if your solution is fully dualist, it doesn't take religion to believe in a soul.
I excluded religion only because I'm only prepared to base my argument against freewill on materialist grounds. If we don't agree about initial conditions, it's hard to have a discussion.
Having been through a few of those discussions, I think the main problem is that "free will" is a very hard concept to define, and different people have different concepts in mind (consciously and otherwise), so we end up talking past each other.
You can address both issues by making multiple explicit definitions.
The big question is "Could you have lived your life differently?" Are other people defining this question differently from that?
In a world where all actions are totally random we “could have lived differently” but nobody would say we have free will.
Right. Maybe the question is "Was it in your power to have made a different decision?"
I'm not religious and think the whole debate is rather meaningless, arguing about the definition of a word rather than anything objective.
The big question is "Could you have lived your life differently?" I don't think that's arguing about the definition of a word.
I am religious. This question feels a little backwards to me, because my knowledge that free will exists is what ultimately convinced me of the merits of religion, rather than the other way around! My thought process roughly follows Benedict XVI's from this passage from Will Durant's Story of Civilizations:
---------------
VOLTAIRE. I often admitted the frailty of reason, I know that it tends to prove anything suggested by our desires; and my distant friend Diderot wrote somewhere that the truths of feeling are more unshakable than the truths of logical demonstration. The true skeptic will doubt reason too. Perhaps I exaggerated reason because that madman Rousseau exaggerated feeling. To subordinate reason to feeling is, to my mind, more disastrous than to subordinate feeling to reason.
BENEDICT. The whole man needs both in their interplay. But now I wonder will you accompany me in a further step? Won’t you agree that the clearest and most direct knowledge that we have is the knowledge that we exist, and that we think?
VOLTAIRE. Well?
BENEDICT. So we know thought more immediately than we know anything else?
VOLTAIRE. I wonder. I believe that we know things long before we turn into ourselves and realize that we are thinking.
BENEDICT. But confess that when you look within you perceive a reality entirely different from the matter to which you were sometimes inclined to reduce everything.
VOLTAIRE. I had my doubts about it. But proceed.
BENEDICT. Confess, too, that what you perceive when you look within is some reality of choice, some freedom of will.
VOLTAIRE. You go too fast, Father. I once believed that I enjoyed a moderate degree of freedom, but logic forced me to accept determinism.
BENEDICT. That is, you surrendered what you immediately perceived to what you concluded from a long and precarious process of reasoning.
VOLTAIRE. I couldn’t refute that tough little lens-grinder Spinoza. Have you read Spinoza?
BENEDICT. Of course. A pope is not bound by the Index Expurgatorius.
VOLTAIRE. You know that we considered him an atheist.
BENEDICT. We mustn’t throw epithets at one another. He was a lovable fellow, but unbearably gloomy. He saw God so universally that he left no room for human personality. He was as religious as Augustine, and as great a saint.
VOLTAIRE. I love you, Benedict; you are kinder to him than I was.
BENEDICT. Let’s get on. I ask you to agree that thought, consciousness, and the sense of personality are the realities most directly known to us.
VOLTAIRE. Very well; granted.
BENEDICT. So I feel justified in rejecting materialism, atheism, and determinism. Each of us is a soul. Religion builds on that fact.
> my knowledge that free will exists is what ultimately convinced me of the merits of religion
Not a Calvinist, then, I take it? Do you reject god's omniscience or predestination? Those seem to lead to all the same problems determinism does, with the added issue that having a soul doesn't help - god knows what you'll choose anyway, you cannot choose otherwise.
Nope, Catholic.
On free will:
https://www.catholiccrossreference.online/catechism/#!/search/1730-1733
We reject Calvinist double predestination
https://www.catholiccrossreference.online/catechism/#!/search/1037
Here is the solution to the supposed contradiction of omniscience and free will:
https://www.catholiccrossreference.online/catechism/#!/search/600
God foreknows all choices as He exists outside time, but He does not cause them Himself. Ultimately some specifics of this are left as a Mystery (yes, Mysteries are ok. e.g. the Hard Problem of Consciousness is a secular Mystery).
>Confess, too, that what you perceive when you look within is some reality of choice, some freedom of will.
That's the core of the position and it's asserted without motivation. Yes, we 'feel' like we have free will. We feel lots of things that aren't true. We certainly "feel", at least on some level, like death is the end of life - does that mean that religion is necessarily false?
My editorialization: consciousness is the closest and most intimately understandable thing to us (it is the closest thing we know to be real; even if the entire universe is an illusion we know at least that we are conscious beings), thus I am more confident in the truth of the observable traits of consciousness than I am about the existence of the observable universe itself. Consciousness is a metaphysical phenomenon (see: the hard problem) -- religion is the science of metaphysics, which seeks to explain why observable metaphysical phenomenon exist.
My response is that that very closeness undermines our ability to objectively analyze it, just as those who live on the slope of a mountain are ignorant of its shape.
In my view there is no hard problem of consciousness. Absolutely nothing that's objectively demonstratable about it is inconsistent with the known laws of physics. The obvious parsimonious explanation is that it's an emergent computational process running on the neural hardware of the brain. While that hasn't been rigorously proven yet I'd bet dollars to donuts that it will be someday. Call me when there's any evidence that contradicts that hypothesis. Until then I don't consider it a mystery at all.
I can't even think of a framework under which the hard problem could even be *solvable*, yet alone be solved. If you wanted to solve the hard problem, you would need, just to even *begin* solving it:
1. a completely new theory of consciousness beyond materialism. Closest I've seen is IIT and that's basically just panpsychism with some arbitrary constraints, and panpsychism is only weakly explanatory.
2. an objective criterion to detect consciousness. This is fundamentally impossible, I can't even begin to think about how you would do this. Wire up a switch in someone's brain which turns consciousness on or off (according to a hypothetical neural hardware mechanism) and ask if they are conscious? What if they say yes even when they aren't? What if they say no when actually they are? What if you do it to yourself, and notice that your consciousness goes off when the switch turns it off, but are unsure if you're erasing your consciousness or just your memories/awareness of your consciousness?
People living on the slope of a mountain can still make educated guesses about its shape and their location in it. The lack of ability to fully objectively analyze it is also why divine revalation is required to bridge the gap (from the perspective of a religious person). Those revelations can be believed or disbelieved based on their explanatory power to some extent (though faith is often required after a certain point).
I think something like complete brain emulation would resolve any questions about consciousness. Granted that's pretty far off, but I'm sure we'll get there eventually.
>an objective criterion to detect consciousness.
Why's that necessary? Consciousness isn't even rigorously defined. Probably it's not even a valid concept in the philosophical sense. In a pragmatic sense it's just the label that humans give to their experience, which is parsimoniously explained as some epiphenomenon of the brain's mechanistic operation. We're just complicated mechanisms. Explaining consciousness isn't philosophically any different from explaining how thermostats work. I reject the premise that it belongs to a separate ontological category.
Many philosophers believe in compatibilist free will, which doesn't *require* any supernatural mehcnaism, and a few believe in naturalistic libertarian free will. Of course, not all religions back free will either. https://www.quora.com/What-is-the-difference-between-determinism-libertarianism-and-compatibilism
The PhilPapers surveys continue to back this up: https://survey2020.philpeople.org/survey/results/all
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 mean 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.”
I can’t understand your comment and am unsure about the meaning of moral desert, feels like I’m missing part of a previous debate also because you are not the only one mentioning compatibilism. Can you give me a definition for free will and moral desert that you wouldn’t feel to be a cop out for the debate?
"Moral desert" is a quaint phrase in which the obsolescent (if not completely obsolete) meaning of "desert" is "what is deserved", as in "just deserts". It doesn't refer to cacti and shifting sand dunes, etc! :-)
These definitions are 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. One thing you might find helpful is to find some intro to Galen Strawson's position, which is what I find convincing. But I'll try. From Wikipedia: "moral desert is the condition of being deserving of something." In our case, "something" is going to be praise or blame.
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 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.
There is a third class (Scott Aaronson is the only example I know of) who argues that determinism / randomness is a false dichotomy [1]. I find his examples unconvincing, because they confuse the metaphysical issue of whether there *is* a probability distribution with the epistemic issue of whether we *know* the probability distribution.
[1] https://www.scottaaronson.com/democritus/lec18.html
"Indeterminacy just means that instead of being at the mercy of history, you are now at the mercy of chance". You are not a ghost in the machine, and you are not at the mercy of yourself. No individual deterministic event, our of trillions, in the brain is forcing you , the total organism , to.perform since it requires trillions of events in concert to make a decision: the same.applies to a single.indeterministic event.
Compatibilism can be asserted without redefiniton: one can say that CFW and LFW were always different , and CFW is real.and LFW is not. In fact , you pretty much are saying that about moral responsibility/desert -- that a practical form of it is justifiable even if the metaphysical form is not.( "My own position here is that our pre-existing moral intuitions about praise and blame do have a solid basis ..." ).
"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."
This just seems confused to me, because it's taking agency away from Bob, but not from the referent of "we".
It is not attributing any agency to the referent of "we."
Then what's the justification -for-?
>I believe the classical argument against free will is one of those rare cases of a sound argument in philosophy
The hard determinist argument, which would require determinism to be true to be sound...or the hard incompatibilist argument, that it can't work either way?
>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
Not necessarily. Compatibilist tend not take the extreme view that the jails should be emptied, that there should be no behaviour correction at all, so they embrace some lite, version of desert
> The hard determinist argument, which would require determinism to be true to be sound...or the hard incompatibilist argument, that it can't work either way?
The latter. You and I have argued about this before. What you see as "elbow room" I see as "being at the mercy of chance."
> Compatibilist tend not take the extreme view that the jails should be emptied, that there should be no behaviour correction at all, so they embrace some lite, version of desert
My contention is that they are correct to take the view that jails should not be emptied, but they take that view for the wrong reason. Their "free will" doesn't successfully ground desert at all. The only viable reason to be against emptying jails because it would have horrible consequences. "Responds to incentives" is a real thing, "moral desert" is not.
People keep talking about as though it's a black and white difference , but what is the difference? What's the difference between evil behaviour and needs-to-be-corrected behaviour? What's the difference between a place of punishment and a place-of-correction-where-I-would-rather-not-be?
In practice, I agree that on a case-by-case basis, the compatibilist camp and the free-will-skeptic-who-thinks-punishment-is-necessary camp will typically arrive at the same object-level conclusions. (I mention this in my response to chuzz). But I think there are two reasons to draw the distinction. The first is that if we ground punishment in moral desert rather than desired outcomes, then there is a worry that punishments will not be optimal, e.g. spending more resources on the punishment than is required for correction because it feels just. The second is that I think it is simply good to be honest about the fact that ultimate moral responsibility is impossible, and that we are all at the mercy of history.
"In practice, I agree that on a case-by-case basis, the compatibilist camp and the free-will-skeptic-who-thinks-punishment-is-necessary camp will typically arrive at the same object-level conclusions ". But they don't arrive at *exactly* the same comclusions, as you go on to demonstrate: "if we ground punishment in moral desert rather than desired outcomes, then there is a worry that punishments will not be optimal"
I never understood the reference to religion in these debates, after all I’d say it was the common view that people have free will regardless of religious affiliation, unless you belong to the many religions who don’t believe in free will. Calvinism doesn’t believe in it, and Lutherism doesn’t believe in free will with regard to spiritual matters.
I merely excluded religion because if someone is starting from a religious belief in which free-will is important, well, that's a different argument that I don't want to get into today. I'd rather argue with materialists, since we at least agree on those starting conditions.
As an aside, though: Do Calvinist really not believe in free-will. I thought pre-destination simply meant that your final destination: Heaven or Hell is predetermined, not your life on Earth. I assumed the idea behind Calvinism is to get around the notion that "one is only living a good life to get into Heaven, it's no more than a quid-pro-quo, not evidence of a good soul". A Calvinist should still try to live a good life and has free-will to do so. Am I wrong?
Do Calvinists really believe that? What a gloomy outlook. What's more, it seems completely at odds with what Christ taught. As I understand it, this was that sinners can be saved right up to the last moment if they sincerely repent, so nobody was doomed to end up in hell regardless.
Yes, it’s a horrible philosophy which actually implies God is creating beings without free will and arbitrarily sending most to hell. He creates humans to send them to hell.
Since hell is eternal he might as well skip the earth part, so I never understood that.
> He creates humans to send them to hell.
That's the case in every sect of Christianity though...
With free will God doesn’t know beforehand who is going to hell. It’s still bad though, if most people are hellbound.
A God of predestination is like a mad scientist who is breeding rabbits. He puts a mind control helmet on the rabbits and makes them do something that displeases him. You visit.
“Why are you torturing those rabbits over there”.
“Those rabbits are the bad rabbits. They ate too much”.
“Don’t you control what they do with the helmets”.
“Yes. Yes of course. In fact before I breed them i decide what they can and cannot do. Here’s my personality list for the next batch of rabbits I’m breeding”.
“I see they are mostly over eaters”.
“ yes, bad rabbits”.
“? Bad! But you control the helmets. They have to over eat”.
“Nevertheless. Gluttony is a sin. Off to rabbit hell”.
“dude. I think you just enjoy torturing rabbits”.
I think another component to Calvinism is that "God is omniscient therefore God must know who will be saved before they are even born." So it isn't that the righteous aren't saved or that sinners can't repent but that God already knows what will happen, hence predestination.
You can see that that still leaves motive for good behavior. If you want to believe you are among the saved, you probably need to behave well.
But having a reference book one one's shelf doesn't imply one has ever read it: Presumably an omnipotent God can choose to be selectively ignorant if that furthers his aims, by creating scenarios whose outcome he wishes not to know in advance, like someone throwing dice.
Even the author of Genesis figured out that one, by adding the verse "And God saw that it was good" after the creation account. Now why would there be a need to mention that if it was a foregone conclusion?
(Apologies to athiests reading this, and being irritated by what they probably consider futile philosophizing! )
Yeah, it is pretty futile. It's okay to admit that your religion doesn't make logical sense. Nothing stopping you from believing in it anyways.
> an omnipotent God can choose to be selectively ignorant if that furthers his aims
Not if that turns out to be logically incoherent given his other properties. Can he also create a rock heavier than he can lift?
Good works are a necessary but not sufficient condition. Personally I don’t see why good works are even necessary for a God that can forgive anybody or condemn anybody.
The materialist position is that you are a bundle of meat that is derived mathematically from the the Big Bang cannot make meaningful choices. If you think you are, you are hallucinating. Everything you do is predetermined based on inputs that you cannot control. Control isn't even possible, as everything is spinning along, reacting to what has come before in an undeviating sequence that results in the heat death of the universe.
The religious view is that humans have souls that are making decisions, independent of the inputs that came before. Humans are uniquely actors and can decide to sin or not sin. Change or not change.
That’s clearly not the religious view of, say Calvinism, and the non religious view doesn’t have to confirm to strict determinism either. The average non believer on the Clapham omnibus probably believes in free will.
Religion has little to do with it.
Materialism doesn't imply determinism. Deteminism does imply lack of Free will, but only libertarian free will. Control of some sort is possible anyway, because control systems can be built out of matter.
How does materialism get anything to make those control systems in a non-deterministic manner? If they are made deterministically, it is still determinism. If they are not, what intelligence made them? And if that intelligence has free will, how did they obtain it?
Materialism doesn't imply determinism. Also, there are deteministic control systems, as in cybernetics.
Without being religious, one can hypothesize we have not yet discovered all possible materials and forces. We do not yet know what dark matter is comprised of, but see evidence of it in gravitational effects.
It is an assumption that thought is chemically derived. Is it not possible some other force interacts with thought in a way not yet identified? To be sure, we must come up with an experiment to show a non-chemical source of thought, but the only current theory is that we don't know enough about initial conditions to predict thought, which is of itself not really a testable theory.
That's true, but it's not necessary to hypothesise new physics to defend some naturalistic version of free will.
As far as I can see, it does. Given the well-defined conditions of a theoretical Hilbert space of what states particles are in, all of the possibilities are included, and what we observe is one location in Hilbert space. Somehow, it must evolve into specifically defined states, which is to say, determinism.
Physics laws as we currently understand them function the same whether forwards or backwards in time, yet the past is known (in principle) and the future is undefined until we get to it. I conclude we need new physics to make sense of this.
Somehow it must evolve doesn't mean somehow it must deterministically evolve. Indetetministic QM isn't apriori impossible.
>Physics laws as we currently understand them function the same whether forwards or backwards in time,
Check out consistent histories
However, "without being religious," one probably also has to hypothesize that with our ever narrowing list of scientific "unknowns," such an undiscovered "material or force" may turn out not to exist. Thus, seemingly, (scientific) non-religiosity out to at least include the possibility that free will is a hallucination.
Science never proves anything, but only disproves things. Our list of unknowns only grows, as we catalog new things that aren't possible (leaving the things that may be possible) which raises ever more questions about more and more detailed things.
We may be closer to a "theory of everything" than to identifying whether or not free will exists.
New Working Paper: What Miriam Yevick Saw: The Nature of Intelligence and the Prospects for A.I., A Dialog with Claude 3.5 Sonnet https://www.academia.edu/126773246/What_Miriam_Yevick_Saw_The_Nature_of_Intelligence_and_the_Prospects_for_A_I_A_Dialog_with_Claude_3_5_Sonnet
Claude's summary:
1. Miriam Yevick's 1975 work proposed a fundamental distinction between two types of computing: A) Holographic/parallel processing suited for pattern recognition, and B) Sequential/symbolic processing for logical operations. Crucially, she explicitly connected these computational approaches to different types of objects in the world.
2. This connects to the current debate about neural vs. symbolic AI approaches: A) The dominant view suggests brain-inspired (neural) approaches are sufficient. B) Others argue for neuro-symbolic approaches combining both paradigms, and C) Systems like AlphaZero demonstrate the value of hybrid approaches (Monte Carlo tree search for game space exploration, neural networks for position evaluation).
3. The 1988 Benzon/Hays paper formalized “Yevick's Law” showing: A) Simple objects are best represented symbolically, B) Complex objects are best represented holographically, and C) Many real-world problems require both approaches.
4. This framework helps explain: A) Why Chain of Thought prompting works well for math/programming (neural system navigating symbolic space), B) Why AlphaZero works well for chess (symbolic system navigating game tree, neural evaluation of positions), and C) The complementary relationship between these approaches.
5. These insights led to a new definition of intelligence: “The capacity to assign computational capacity to propositional (symbolic) and/or holographic (neural) processes as the nature of the problem requires.”
6. This definition has implications for super-intelligence: A) Current LLMs' breadth of knowledge doesn't constitute true super-intelligence, B) Real super-intelligence would require superior ability to switch between computational modes, and C) This suggests the need for fundamental architectural innovations, not just scaling up existing approaches.
The conversation highlighted how Yevick's prescient insights about the relationship between object types and computational approaches remain highly relevant to current AI development and our understanding of intelligence itself.
How inclusive is the category of "WASP"? How much non-Angle non-Saxon blood can you have and still be a WASP?
How many people actually know their ancestry sufficiently far back to actually know to what extent they're Angle/Saxon and to what extent they're descended from other English ethnicities?
Why is being Anglo-Saxon considered prestigious, when the Royal Family themselves (and a lot of the most prominent families) are largely German with a very important dash of Norman?
If you're some percentage white in America and your family has been here long enough you don't really know when the first people came over (i.e. not your parents or grandparents). It's overwhelming likely you're at least somewhat WASP by blood.
The rest of WASPhood is cultural - and even most Ellis Islanders have assimilated to that by now.
> Why is being Anglo-Saxon considered prestigious, when the Royal Family themselves (and a lot of the most prominent families) are largely German with a very important dash of Norman?
Because "Anglo-Saxon" refers to those non-Angle elites.
Though, to be fair, Saxony is German today.
Not all the saxons moved to britain. Those who stayed would have lived in what is now called lower saxony in northern germany. The german federal state of saxony has its name from some crazy dynastic meddling, there never were many saxons there.
The term's not used much anymore. I think you had to be...mostly British in origin and middle-class or higher in midcentury when it was used. The ruling class really has 'diversified' themselves to the point it doesn't really apply, which may have been the underlying point of DEI at the Ivies...make sure you don't have a rival ethnically-based potential ruling class developing somewhere else.
It was prestigious because that's what the old money in the USA was. It specifically excluded old Jewish or Catholic families like the Goldmans or Kennedys, so it was a bit of a Democrat-coded political term because it was referring (pejoratively) to country-club Republicans. The class inversion of the parties makes this harder and harder to understand for younger people today.
A WASP isn’t just someone of mostly English descent. That’s a lot of people in the US, although it’s not really thought about that much. It’s a high level member with that ancestory.
I don't think it suppoised to be viewed rigidly, it just means the elite/establishment of America in the 1800s amd for a long time after. It had never excluded the Dutch amd has always been about culture and position more than ancestry.
The Germaness of the British royal family is overstated it includes of plenty of Danish, Scottish etc ancestry and it is odd to see anyone whose primary ancestors left Germany three centuries ago as German. The Norman ancestry is tiny
Yea my lifelong family-tree hobby/obsession has been quite educational about that sort of thing. Calling the British royals "German" at this point is silly, equivalent to my addressing Jimmy Carter as "cousin" [he was, I accidentally discovered a few years ago, an 8th cousin of my maternal grandmother].
In the US context, Anglo-Saxon was a generic term for being of British descent, not literally Anglo-Saxon or even English, and sometimes just meant "white". I doubt many Americans in the 20th century knew there were other English ethnicities. Tracing your ancestry back to The Mayflower was about as far as anyone was interested in doing. I don't think anyone uses the term "WASP" anymore.
My understanding was that WASP was more a social class than an ethnic class that only really covered the middle classes and elites of the East Coast of the United States. A geordie miner settling in Appalachia is on the face of it a WASP but no one would seriously call them one with how the term is used. While there was obviously a racial element to it, it was still massively exclusionary on class grounds.
This. "WASP" has basically always meant any middle- to upper-class American with white skin who speaks English with a General American or Received Pronunciation accent and isn't clearly a member of some other white subculture (e.g. Italian-Americans or Rednecks). It always included pureblooded Norman Englishmen, it fairly quickly expanded to include e.g. German-heritage Americans once they lost their accents, and nobody really cares whether you go to church or not so long as it's a reasonably mainstream one if you do.
And it has I think largely faded from use now that the group in question is generally considered open to Americans of most any skin color if they speak GA/RP English, maintain at least an aspirationally UMC lifestyle, and don't conspicuously identify as something else. Unfortunately, we don't have a good name for this body of people.
Yeah, the image of a WASP is the snooty guy who mentions that he went to Hahvahd in every conversation and takes pleasure in blackballing the wrong sort when they try to join the country club. Nobody ever thought that the Baptist coal miner living in a small town in West Virginia was a WASP in that sense.
Exactly. And now even a black man who went to Harvard and makes sure to mention it in every conversation can be a what-we-used-to-mean-by-WASP, and lord it over the (white) hillbilly coal miners who will never be his "peers".
To be fair, it's not necessary to *actually* be an arrogant snob to be a WASP or post-WASP; just that you have the status where you could if you wanted to and everybody knows it.
That's my understanding. That it roughly corresponds to "Puritan" in the Albion's Seed sense, or to "people H. P. Lovecraft probably wouldn't be prejudiced against".
This is correct, it was a class/culture label primarily.
Not your question, but back here in England it's not a phrase that has much meaning, save as a synonym for robust or perhaps crude language. I could quite readily be identified as AS but my surname has an ending associated with Viking settlements in the north and east of England, and since that is where my father's family lived so far as anyone has traced it's reasonable to suppose that if you go back far enough you meet some Scandinavians.
On the other hand, my mother's ancestors migrated from Scotland to NE England in the late nineteenth century, and would seem to have been Scottish time out of mind, with a quintessentially Scottish name.
I've instinctively always felt it a pity that the Anglo Saxons lost to the Vikings (Norman strain) in 1066, but then again had it gone the other way we wouldn't have Ely Cathedral, or me, so this is rather a passive opinion.
...if Harold Godwinson had not lost to William the Conqueror (Norman strain Vikings), he would instead have lost to Harald the Hard Ruler (Hardråde) (Norwegian strain Vikings). So either way, you would have had to deal with (more) annoying Viking ancestry in Britain. (In addition to all the Danes.)
...Harald Hardråde arrived from Norway with his Viking Long Ships a few weeks before William, and was defeated by Harold Godwinson at Stamford Bridge September 25th 1066. Victorious but exhausted, the English army had to march across land to meet William and his newly arrived Norman army at Hastings October 14th. Where Harold Godwinson lost, and the rest in Norman-English history.
..all of this due to a lack of proper sailing technology. The cross-sails of the Vikings could not sail directly against the wind. If the wind had blown the other way across the Channel in those fateful autumn weeks, William would have arrived before Harald Hardråde. Regardless of the outcome of the battle between William and Harold Godwinson, Harald Hardråde would highly likely have had an easy match defeating the exhausted victor.
..this story is sometimes taught up here is Scandinavia as an example of the butterfly effect in political science. If only the wind had blown in the other direction those fateful weeks in the autumn of 1066! Then Norwegians would have ruled Britain instead of the Normans, and from then on some hundreds of years later continued on, to dominate the North Americas, Australasia, India...
Sigh.
Woah, Harold Godwinson thrashed Harald Hardrada at the Battle of Stamford Bridge, having caught him unawares. Immediately afterward he learned that Duke William of Normandy had landed, and it was mostly his rushed march south, not pausing long enough to assemble his complete army, that led to his defeat at the subsequent and closely fought Battle of Hastings. If Harold had been a bit more patient, and listened to all those urging him to delay meeting William until he was completely ready, he might well have won.
The interesting question is what if Hardrada had won at Stamford Bridge, and had fought William instead of Harold? Who would have won then?
P.S. For any history buffs who may be interested, there are (near?) contemporary corbel carvings of the Norman and Angevin kings of England tucked away in the roof of Exeter cathedral, in Devon, England. Here are three I took several years ago of William the Conqueror, whose carving looms over the west door!
https://www.imghippo.com/i/uaVL4556Tzw.jpg
https://www.imghippo.com/i/hIze5042NUo.jpg
https://www.imghippo.com/i/iOEu9905fjk.jpg
Quote: "The interesting question is what if Hardrada had won at Stamford Bridge, and had fought William instead of Harold? Who would have won then?"
...I think it is highly likely that Harald Hardråde, tired after the battle, would have lost to William. Just as Harold Godwinson lost to William.
That's why the interesting question is rather: What would have happened if William had reached the coast of England before Hardråde? If the wind had blown from the South rather than from the North those fateful weeks, that would have happened. ...Leading to my suggestion that the wind, not any human being, was the important "mover of things" back in 1066.
And I'm not alone. Let me add a long quote from "Paulinus" in History Forum:
"In the summer of 1066 Harold Godwinson was proclaimed king of England by the Wittan following Edward the Confessors death; however, this triggered twin invasion plans by the rival claimants for the throne Harald Hardrada, King of Norway and William the Bastard, Duke of Normandy. As Harold waited with his Saxon army on the south coast to repel the imminent Norman invasion, the wind across North West Europe blew from the North and William's fleet couldn't sail; however, the same wind allowed Hardrada's fleet of 300 ships to sail from Norway to Yorkshire allowing him to invade first. After Hardrada's army had sacked York, King Harold's army of housecarls & thegns quick-marched over 200m north and surprised the huge Norse Viking army at Stamford Bridge. The Northmen had not posted pickets (they hadn't expected Harold to arrive so soon) and had complacently left their armour in their boats and thus fought at a great disadvantage. Following a bitterly-fought battle over 90% of the Northmen were slaughtered and only 24 longboats made it home. The power of the Vikings was broken forever and they never again terrorised Britain.
Meanwhile, the direction of the wind had changed and William's forces were able to land unopposed in the south. They had days to land supplies and prepare their ground in expectation of meeting the Saxon army returning from the north. When it finally arrived it had undertaken a second forced march and was depleated and fatigued from the battle at Stamford Bridge. Furthermore, in the rush to get back to the south Harold had not had time to assemble all his forces and so was understrength when the two armies met. Nonetheless, the decisive battle that followed lasted all day (unprecentedly long for battles at the time) and the Norman's only just prevailed. Their victory changed history, eventually leading to the creation of an Anglo-Norman empire and the creation of modern English as a fusion between old Saxon and Norman French. But, what would have happened had the wind over North West Europe been blowing from the south in August and September and not from the North and how might the world have been different?"
..thanks for the pictures of William's handsome face inside Exeter Cathedral! To the victor, the spoils.
> How inclusive is the category of "WASP"? How much non-Angle non-Saxon blood can you have and still be a WASP?
I honestly thought it'd basically been subsumed by "PMC" (professional managerial class) as being largely the same cultural niche, but I could be misunderstanding either end of that.
Do you know of any resources similar to Lorien psychiatry, but for other medical specialties besides psychiatry? I love the style and I've learned so much from reading the "conditions", "medications", and "supplements" pages!
Re Blog Recommendations:
Is there a list of blogs you've recommended in the past?
Would love to discover some new high-quality reading sources :)
web.archive.org would have them all
https://www.secretorum.life/
And, where can we find the link to your current blog recommendations?
I'm not sure whether there's a canonical list, but I'll recommend one in particular that I found in an older version of Scott's blogroll and really valued - the psmith's book reviews:
https://www.thepsmiths.com/
🫡
I meant to post this comment in Open Thread 362, but I goofed and posted it in 361 — where no one saw it.
It looks to me like the AI tech bubble will cause huge downstream market chaos when it pops. That's when it pops, not if.
Chapter 4, Section 6 of Stanford's AI Index report shows that, according to a McKinsey survey, the percentage of businesses that have adopted AI has been basically stagnant since 2019, hovering in the 50-55% range. So AI is still a technology looking for a market.
https://aiindex.stanford.edu/report/#individual-chapters
What is the chief use of AI in business? From the report, it looks like generative AI is what they're mostly using. I don't know, but I suspect it's being used to slick up marketing deliverables and corporate reports. Does anybody have any visibility into what businesses are using Gen AI for?
Meanwhile, in Section 5, we see that investment in AI has dropped about 25% since 2021, and the remaining investment funds have been spread thinner among startups trying to lap up some droplets from the AI gravy train. Startups were up ~41% in 2023 from 2022 even though funding was declining! We don't have the 2024 numbers in yet, but if I were a betting person I don't think these trends will have reversed in 2024.
From a Semi Industry newsletter I subscribe to...
Cloud Capex is skyrocketing. Capex for AWS ($23B), MSFT ($20B), GOOG ($13B), META ($12B), and ORCL ($4B, will double in 2025) totaled >$72B for 4Q2024 and shows no sign of slowing as we enter 2025. The percentage of Capex for technical infrastructure has also been increasing vs. physical plants or other.
The major buckets for Capex in the Semi industry are...
merchant GPUs (NVDA, AMD), AI ASICs (AVGO, MRVL, Alchip, MediaTek), Networking (ANET, CSCO, NOK, JNPR, AVGO, MRVL, and many ODMs), Datacenter optics (COHR, LITE, FN, Innolight, Eoptolink, AAOI, MRVL, AVGO, etc.), DCI (CIEN, CSCO, INFN, MRVL, etc.), and other connectivity (CRDO, ALAB, SMTC, MTSI, etc.).
The Stanford AI report doesn't tell us what the AI revenues have been for the big players, but I'm certain their subscription models aren't remotely covering the costs of their massive buildouts. So what happens when the Cloud companies realize that they can't make big bucks off AI? What's the combined market capitalization of the companies in the Cloud supply chain listed above? For those of you too young to remember, the NASDAQ stock market index fell by roughly 75%, and approx $5 Trillion evaporated during the DotCom bust of 2001-02. That would be about 8.7 Trillion in 2025 dollars. NVIDIA alone is valued at $3.5 Trillion. When this bubble bursts, we could see a bigger recession than 2002 — or 2008, for that matter. <sound of hot air being released from a balloon>
On the bright side, we won't have to worry about a malevolent AGI causing humanity's extinction because no one will want to invest in developing AGI after the coming bust.
Perplexity informs me that the total Market cap of big AI companies is about 15 trillion. That means they're going to need annual earnings of about a trillion dollars a year collectively. Let's assume that half of that is going to come from ai, because a lot of these are companies like Google Amazon and tsmc that have substantial other sources of revenue. So to sustain the AI Bubble at its current level requires AI to earn about $500 billion dollars a year in profit. Maybe there's a billion people in the anglosphere who might put AI to consumer uses. Then they need each a subscription that generates $500 a year in profit. A 25% profit margin is typical for the tech sector, so that means that the cost to the consumer of this hypothetical annual subscription is $2,000. That's way higher than the typical cost of consumer subscriptions. Maybe half of the revenue for the AI sector will come from business uses. That would still require the consumer subscription to be $1,000 a year, which is not gonna happen.
Funny, but I just asked the same question of Perplexity, and it claims the total market cap of AI companies is $23.8 Trillion. Of course, I may have worded the question slightly differently from how you worded yours.
But I love how people on this list are bending themselves into pretzels to defend AI. Never stand between rationalists and their opinions! :-)
I'm in the middle of listening to a podcast about AI investnent by IQT, the CIA's VC arm. In their view, the expected market for business uses of language models is... drum roll... 10s of billions annually in the next few years! Bear in mind of course, that that is revenue not profit. In order to sustain the current AI bubble, that number is too small by two orders of magnitude.
That just goes to show that this is in order of magnitude estimate, and you can change the outcome by a factor of two just by redefining AI.
what is the total Market cap of all AI companies including hardware like tsmc and nvidea and Cloud companies that sell AI services such as Amazon and Google
The total market capitalization of major AI companies, including hardware and cloud service providers, is substantial. As of early January 2025:
- **Nvidia**: Approximately $2.6 trillion
- **Apple**: About $3.8 trillion
- **Microsoft**: Around $3 trillion
- **Amazon**: Roughly $1.8 trillion
- **Alphabet (Google)**: Approximately $1.9 trillion
- **Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC)**: About $832 billion
This aggregates to around **$14.1 trillion** across these key players in the AI ecosystem[1][2][3][6].
Citations:
[1] Prediction: This Will Be the First Artificial Intelligence (AI) Stock To ... https://finance.yahoo.com/news/prediction-first-artificial-intelligence-ai-223800235.html
[2] World's Largest Companies In 2024 - Global Finance Magazine https://gfmag.com/data/biggest-company-in-the-world/
[3] AI investment trends 2025: Beyond the bubble - Asset Management https://am.jpmorgan.com/se/en/asset-management/per/insights/market-insights/investment-outlook/ai-investment/
[4] Artificial intelligence sparks 'Game of Thrones' in the chip industry https://english.elpais.com/technology/2024-04-12/artificial-intelligence-sparks-game-of-thrones-in-the-chip-industry.html
[5] Best AI Stocks for January 2025 - Investopedia https://www.investopedia.com/best-ai-stocks-8549813
[6] Top 10 IT Companies in the World by Market Cap | May 2024 https://www.emergenresearch.com/blog/top-10-it-companies-in-the-world-by-market-capitalization
[7] Artificial Intelligence - Global | Statista Market Forecast https://www.statista.com/outlook/tmo/artificial-intelligence/worldwide
[8] How Nvidia Overtook Amazon and Google in Market Cap - LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/how-nvidia-overtook-amazon-google-market-cap-michael-spencer-upyjc
[9] Global AI market size 2030 | Statista https://www.statista.com/forecasts/1474143/global-ai-market-size
We have about 1.3 million lawyers in the United States, who make about $150,000 per year on average. If half of that (the boilerplate and busywork) can be done by AI, then that would be $97.5 billion in productivity, less whatever the cost of the system would be (maybe $10 billion?). Then you can apply that to customer support, doctor's offices, accountants, HR departments, and myriad other places. $1 trillion a year in profit sounds a bit low.
The value to society may well exceed 1 trillion, but how much of that will AI companies actually be able to capture? I have a long sub thread going on with Performative Bafflement if you want to see more debate about this.
Yes, but as some law firms have discovered, AI is hallucinating some of the opinions and precedents. Just because an AI can pass a bar exam doesn't mean it can produce a properly reasoned and referenced legal brief.
It's worse than that - lawyers are, by and large, obsessive about detail. Every reference must be correct, every procedure and form strictly adhered to. Any mistakes can be fatal, so spelling and punctuation are carefully scrutinized. An associate who made up a reference in a brief to a partner or director wouldn't be in trouble. They'd be fired on the spot. The legal fraternity won't adopt AI until it is 100% correct, no hallucinations or slips allowed.
That isn't how lawyers should use AI. As is pointed out, any hallucinations at all cannot be tolerated (though AI doesn't seem to make spelling or punctuation mistakes). AI should be used to insert boilerplate into contracts, summarize texts so actual people can easily digest them, etc. AI won't be replacing lawyers except in the sense of how many lawyers are needed.
Boilerplate is already inserted using template clauses or, in some cases, macros. Summarizing texts is like 1% of what lawyers actually do, and they usually have templates for those too.
What many lawyers want is basically an automated paralegal or associate - something that can ingest similar (but never identical) documents from a bunch of sources, pick out the important information and then accurately produce a first draft response or opinion for the partner to work on.
China is likely to escalate its campaign of harassment against Taiwan in the coming months. They have already started, and some near future possibilities are drone swarms, direct flyovers ( not just in the surrounding airspace) and the assassination of low ranking soldiers. Most analysis of geopolitical risk in semiconductor supply chains focuses on a full-scale Invasion scenario, which I think is unlikely. The very probable future of escalated harassment is not priced in, and that could be another source of a nasty shock to the US Stock Market.
> Chapter 4, Section 6 of Stanford's AI Index report shows that, according to a McKinsey survey, the percentage of businesses that have adopted AI has been basically stagnant since 2019, hovering in the 50-55% range. So AI is still a technology looking for a market.
Just because the revolution is not yet legible to McKinsey, doesn't mean that it's not happening.
Indeed, I think you're just looking at stale data - even McKinsey 10 months later is telling a different story: https://www.mckinsey.com/capabilities/quantumblack/our-insights/the-state-of-ai
> In the latest McKinsey Global Survey on AI, 65 percent of respondents report that their organizations are regularly using gen AI, nearly double the percentage from our previous survey just ten months ago. Respondents’ expectations for gen AI’s impact remain as high as they were last year, with three-quarters predicting that gen AI will lead to significant or disruptive change in their industries in the years ahead.
> Organizations are already seeing material benefits from gen AI use, reporting both cost decreases and revenue jumps in the business units deploying the technology...
To your question:
> What is the chief use of AI in business? From the report, it looks like generative AI is what they're mostly using. I don't know, but I suspect it's being used to slick up marketing deliverables and corporate reports. Does anybody have any visibility into what businesses are using Gen AI for?
In some domains there are obvious opportunities for top-down "AI strategy", like improving efficiency of customer service, sales pipeline automation, paralegal duties, software tooling -- but you should assume that employees elsewhere are just using ChatGPT to automate away the BS parts of their jobs.
Some more concrete examples:
At #TechBigCo, I use LLMs every day for technical assistance. "Smart autocomplete" is an under-appreciated feature for actually writing code, but I also use LLMs to answer technical / programming questions in the multitude of broad-not-deep domains where I can easily validate if the answer is correct. I'd estimate that my output is 1-5% higher due to LLMs. This is at a company with a big bet on AI tooling.
A lawyer friend uses LLMs extensively for pitch decks, distilling case law, checking maths on large deals ("I saved my client $10M: I found an error in the $15B deal I am working on by pasting the calculation table into ChatGPT"). This is a case where LLMs are allowed in specific vetted scenarios, but the firm might not say they have an "AI strategy". I didn't ask them, but a > 1% increase in output seems likely here.
There are plenty of obvious usecases in medicine too, see Eric Topol's substack for regular examples.
> When this bubble bursts, we could see a bigger recession than 2002 — or 2008, for that matter.
I tend to think that this bubble will be on the harmless end of the spectrum if it pops. We're not seeing contagion-producing financial instruments like CDS being engineered. If the bubble pops, sure some investors will lose their shirts, and the overall economy will look bad for a bit, but at least we made some concrete investments in energy infrastructure, datacenters, and advancing the learning curve on AI chips. This isn't ephemeral speculation in tulips.
> On the bright side, we won't have to worry about a malevolent AGI causing humanity's extinction because no one will want to invest in developing AGI after the coming bust.
Really, no. It's worth going back and looking at the dot-com boom/bust. At the time it was a significant peak-to-trough difference. If you look at the tech market cap trend line in hindsight, it looks like a small blip compared to the multi-trillion dollar market cap of tech stocks today. In other words, this bubble may burst, but a few years later we'll be back on the growth trendline.
In the past, tech has bounced back, but what's next for it to bounce back with? Moore's Law is over. The last two generations of chips have been more expensive to manufacture, and they're taking significantly longer to reach production. Of course, TSMC has claimed it can now manufacture 3nm process nodes. 3 nm used to be considered the physical limit, but now experts are claiming we can get down to 2 nm or even 1 nm before quantum leakage makes the circuits unusable. Stacking chiplets in a 3D arrangement wouldn't improve the basic performance limits. And there's only so far code optimization will improve perfomance. So the cost of high-end computing will be trending upward from here on out.
Useful quantum computers are at least a decade out — if ever. If we can ever reach 1 million Qbits with good error correction, they're gonna be mighty expensive — and their utility will probably be limited. Likewise, we're reaching the limits of how much data in bits per second we can put on a wire or transmit over the air. I began as a network engineer when Ethernet was 10 Mbs over coax cable. I was working with 800 GbE (actually 2x400GbE) when I was involuntarily retired. I was hoping to stick around for 1.6TbE. But I doubt if we're going to get speeds much faster than 1.6Tbps because FEC will start sucking up overhead on the wire, and encoding and decoding the FEC will cause serious heat dissipation issues. Sorry I'm being such a Debbie Downer.
I think it’s far more likely that we get a few more OOMs from ASICs, or more exotic compute like optical, in the next 5-10 years than it is that this or the next generation is the last one.
I also think you could spend 10-20 years, and unlock many $T of value, just building out the products that the current generation models have enabled. Exactly like the Internet in 2000. So if there does happen to be a wall, I agree it’s good news for AI risk, but I don’t think it means the tech industry is doomed. Applying AI to every bit of the economy that is profitable would still be quite transformative.
Not to mention, if we hit a limit here, you’d assume that before long the 2nm process gets heavily commoditized and so GPUs would drop in cost by a few OOM over a decade or two, which would also drive the frontier of profitable capabilities forward. At commoditized GPU prices every home can have a rack with your personal GPT o3 cranking away.
As a software engineer I’m extremely bullish on the amount of mundane utility that is available to be harvested right now at $2/hr/H100.
Maybe you should bet against them, like those scattered stubborn smart guys who bet against the subprime mortgages and got back 20x the money that had bet.. I am not joking.
"Chapter 4, Section 6 of Stanford's AI Index report shows that, according to a McKinsey survey, the percentage of businesses that have adopted AI has been basically stagnant since 2019, hovering in the 50-55% range. So AI is still a technology looking for a market.
...
What is the chief use of AI in business?"
I can't answer your question in the general case, but for my employer:
(a) We have been using 'machine learning' for over a decade to do image processing for (expensive) tools that we sell.
(b) Starting around 2016/17 we began using Deep Learning and in 2020 shipped tools where our marketing claimed "our first process control system with integrated AI..." These tools use Deep Learning (and pretty much needed to use Deep Learning ... we failed to solve our problems without it ...).
(c) Recently we have started using Microsoft's Copilot for day-to-day work *inside* the company. I can't say what other folks are doing with it, but I find that it works as a generative Stack Overflow (with about the same quality :-) and also is useful to search against our internal documents.
I wonder if McKinsey would show my employer's AI use as 'stagnant' since 2019.
Similar theme to a lot of other answers here: some coding assistance (although it has difficulty keeping track of similar APIs for distinct libraries), a lot of ingesting unstructured data that has obvious value but was historically too onerous to unlock.
I can imagine the coding bit getting enough better to change the character of the job (e.g,, TDD where I write the tests and an LLM writes the main logic, effectively turning any language into a declarative one), but once the unstructured data pipeline is fully-formed I expect there to be only incremental further gains from that sort of work.
Now that I think about it, a sizable portion of our non-dev (or adjacent) roles serve as QC or exception handling for less-capable-but-more-reliable non-AI automated processes; more volume with a higher error rate could *increase* the need for people in those positions.
"Does anybody have any visibility into what businesses are using Gen AI for?"
I heard a Wal-Mart executive mentioned on a recent earnings call that they were using Gen AI to automate the creation of product pages on their website.
> Does anybody have any visibility into what businesses are using Gen AI for?
This is anecdotal, but my partner's workplace, a mid-size financial firm, is currently 'adopting AI' in that they hired some consultants to build them a chatbot wrapper that's supposed to aid analysts. They brought in a bunch of analysts with CS backgrounds (including my partner) to beta test it, and the results were laughable. On top of that, it's not even going to keep learning once it's finally delivered. But the company has already spent a lot on it and the leadership still want it, so it's happening.
This is at a company, like most in the financial sector, whose tech stack tops out at Excel spreadsheets. They don't have the internal data or documentation readily available to make a RAG model useful, and despite having a ton of low and middle-rank employees with technical backgrounds, they don't even have the leeway to, for example, automate spreading, since leadership likes the way things worked in the 2010s.
My academic program is also testing a product by an external consultant which adds GenAI to group feedback forms: if your feedback isn't constructive enough, it tries to give suggestions. Two sentences with a 'because' is enough to qualify as constructive.
I'd wager a very large amount of AI adoption is like this. Established businesses want to use AI because it's the sexy new thing even though they don't have the internal sophistication or data to make good use of it, so an external consultancy delivers a chatbot that kinda sorta works but isn't going to add much value. New businesses or especially agile older ones that can actually pivot and make good use of AI will probably get good bang for the buck in the coming years, but I'd wager most of the market will still basically be theater.
It will be interesting when we don't need junior programmers anymore but we still need experienced senior programmers. How will they get their experience?
In some sense this will just be a continuation of what we have been seeing for the past ~20+ years.
Lots of junior programmer jobs got moved to places such as India. Companies still want senior programmers here ... if only to work with the junior programmers not-here. Where do those senior programmers come from?
I expect something similar to happen if/when AI gets good enough to start replacing junior programmers.
AI will train them?
But who will pay them while they are learning?
People already spend 10+ years working for free before getting their first paid job, hopefully that will still be sufficient!
As someone who interviews a lot of recent grads: lol, not a chance.
> Does anybody have any visibility into what businesses are using Gen AI for?
Speaking for myself and the uses I'm familiar with in my company only, we use Copilot for coding assistance and OpenAI's models inside Azure within some backend services and customer facing chatbots.
We deal with a lot of unstructured data and our primary application side use cases are around data matching / cleaning and we're working on reasoning / tool-use augmented flows to replace processes that involve manual human review.
(One revenue related hiccup worth mentioning: the more volume we're using, the more we're evaluating open source models as a cheaper alternative. Paid models need to maintain a sufficient qualitative edge.)
> Meanwhile, in Section 5, we see that investment in AI has dropped about 25% since 2021, and the remaining investment funds have been spread thinner among startups trying to lap up some droplets from the AI gravy train. Startups were up ~41% in 2023 from 2022 even though funding was declining!
Many, many "AI" startups in the past few years have been wrappers. These got a lot of dumb, hype chasing money but there's only so much dumb money and I think that's what you're seeing dry up. I can remember sitting through a sales pitch from one before Copilot was released that was doing code generation and the founder couldn't answer basic data governance questions. I doubt that startup still exists. 99%+ of these provide no value and get obsoleted by model advances or enterprise products.
The raw numbers of startups increasing is also driven by the general tech employment downturn. When the general economy tanks and people can't get jobs they take shelter in higher education. When the tech economy tanks and engineers can't get jobs they launch desperation startups. Lack of better options.
> Cloud Capex is skyrocketing.
This is positioning for the future, not current AI spends or capabilities. AI today != AI yesterday or AI tomorrow.
The reasoning work I mentioned above was impossible a year and a half ago - I know because I tried it. As model capabilities increase, the space of possible solutions increase, and that's not the time to start building out the physical infrastructure.
The holy grail is obviously widespread labor automation and hyperscalers are betting that it will require massive infrastructure. This currently looks like a good bet but could change.
Even short of that grail and putting aside their customers' use of AI, cloud companies are increasingly using AI within their products and a portion of that infrastructure is to serve their needs. Azure's Document Intelligence is one example. These products have/will obsolete more wrapper startups and existing companies.
It seems to me a major bucket missing is foundries, such as MU, TSMC, and GFS. INTC seems to be missing, too, but I'm not sure whether to put it under merchant GPUs or foundries.
INTC has Gaudi, but it hasn't gained any traction that I've heard of. They may have come to the party too late to displace any of the key players.
MU should probably be on the list because their GDDR memory chips are used by NVIDIA, AMD, and INTC — and they have partnerships with all those companies.
TSMC is the foundry for just about everyone. Semis are so diverse, though, that I doubt if TSMC would be affected too much if the AI bubble pops. GPUs are highly profitable, but 2023 numbers show that they were about 8% of all chips that are manufactured. I think GFS and Samsung would fall into the same bucket.
My company is using generative for two use cases I haven't seen mentioned here.
First, OCR on steroids: training models to use photos and videos for data entry. This going to save our customers massive amounts of time, and probably increase the amount they use our software (with the result of improving accuracy, safety, and legibility of operations, among other things).
Second, for voice UI: mapping natural-language voice inputs to application commands. What if Alexa, but good?
> First, OCR on steroids: training models to use photos and videos for data entry.
Bingo. Except the base models are getting sufficiently good that we're not even fine-tuning models.
I work for a massive telco in the UK on a infrastructure team. So while we don't directly develop LLM products, we support the people that do and have a good view on what's up.
There's tons of work being done with LLMs. Just past week my team enabled some functionality for easily using it with our datasets.
I know of a big project that's using LLMs to improve helpdesk calls. The only reason it's not fully replacing is because getting access to the actual data is a nightmare. But LLMs are already smart enough we could be fully replacing the journey.
We maintain the infra for processes that transcribe calls (for a big telco, this is a lot). All this is being used in internal AI projects.
There's a massive amount of work being done in deploying AI products. None of that was being done in 2019.
I call bullshit on this report. No way it's stagnant since 2019.
It could be that my company is an outlier. OK. But I joined after 2019 and my previous company was also ramping up AI usage.
What I hear from colleagues and from what I can see by keeping an eye in the industry, basically every company is integrating with AI.
I worked on a project a year ago with a large German energy company using OpenAI to analyze transcripts of operator conversations with customers, to extract consents for various things such as receiving promotions.
They were using Weaviate for caching text vectors to check for similarity (and thus reduce the number of OpenAI calls), and one of my contributions (on my own initiative) was to add a free alternative for this caching, using an SBERT sentence transformer to produce the vectors and then store these in Postgres pgvector fields, all free! (The vast SBERT file was a sod to shoehorn into git, but git has special provision for large files.)
Anyway, if any positions for an experienced and resourceful python & LLM developer are or become vacant in your team, I'm available immediately and would be pleased to be considered for either contract or perm. By all means, email me on jrq@gmx.com
P.S. I'm based in the UK, so could work hybrid, although I'd prefer remote for the most part. Can't see any pressing reason for regular attendance on site these days, unless having to work with special hardware.
(Apologies if blatant job hunting is frowned on here! )
Well, the report was sponsored by some of the big Cloud and big Semi companies that have a stake in AI. Do you have any idea how much your company is *spending* to make use of these LLMs? Are the Cloud companies with AI getting that revenue? Will that be enough to make up for their current shortfall in revenue from AI? I can't find the precise numbers now, but in 2022, the big AI players spent big to build out their LLMs, but were only something like 10% on the way to breaking even on their spend. How long can they keep that up?
We're not spending that much. The newer smaller models are pretty smart and very cheap.
If you want the absolute best model you're going to have to pay. But there's tons of use cases where cheaper models are extremely competitive, and it's only getting cheaper.
> Will that be enough to make up for their current shortfall in revenue from AI?
Well, I don't know. But this is the most standard playbook for tech. Amazon, Uber, Reddit, etc. Look at any massive tech company and basically all of them burn cash at the start to recoup later.
And that's a claim about future profitability of specific companies! They can all fail to recover their investments, while AI is widespread in the economy and having massive impacts.
Ever heard of Deepseek? Great performance for not a lot of money. My guess is that the investment might level off or even decline, but the capabilities will only improve.
The only thing worse than having offshoring to China come for your job is having AI come for your job, and the only thing worse than that is having Chinese AI come for your job.
> the percentage of businesses that have adopted AI has been basically stagnant since 2019, hovering in the 50-55% range. So AI is still a technology looking for a market.
Not sure I find this convincing. If there is going to be a step function productivity increase due to AI, it won’t necessarily come from incumbents adopting AI; it might come from challengers building in a fundamentally different way. E.g. legacy media didn’t adopt streaming until netflix/spotify forced their hand.
I asked both my housekeeper and they guy who mows my lawn. Neither could come up with good reason to add AI to their business model. AI adoption may really be stuck at 55% of businesses. \S
the landscaper may have a business case for automated robotic mowers though
The lawnmower guy might have a borderline case to use AI for optimally scheduling lawns to cut, if his customers give him any timing leeway, based on when lawns were last cut, and maybe some lawns that dry (as a prerequisite for cutting) slightly faster than others after rain, or some customers want their lawns cut more often than (say) fortnightly, etc
> It looks to me like the AI tech bubble will cause huge downstream market chaos when it pops. That's when it pops, not if.
Is this certainty dependent on a belief that AI capabilities progress will slow down (or at least stop speeding up) in the near future?
I'd...actually forgotten there was a "front page" to the blag, with stuff like the blogroll and Shrink-Rap. Always just click through email notifications into posts directly. Still feels weird to have these huge blank columns on the left and right of article content where one would naturally expect to find such links. (Didn't someone make a browser extension to rectify that...? or reskin it like SSC? I feel like that was A Thing I heard about...)
Felt bad about not publicly reviewing my current excellent doc when recently asked to...I don't like having my Google account entangled with such things. Internal surveys, fine, reviews under a pseudonym account, fine, but tie it easily to my real identity...ehh. Weird and inconsistent "privacy" instincts that probably don't make a lick of difference on the modern internet anymore. Or perhaps just overfitting from the NYT.
https://github.com/Pycea/ACX-tweaks
So a couple of weeks ago I started getting random subscribers to my Substack, and I'm trying to figure out why. I got linked by Matt Levine back iat the start of December, but that seems unrelated, it's been a few weeks since that happened and the sign ups started in the quiet period between Xmas and New Years. It wasn't a big single wave, just 2-5 subscribers per day for about a week. Confused, I started googling some of the distinguishable names in the email addresses and looking them up on LinkedIn to try and figure it out. None seemed like good candidates for my content (accounting matters or Australian finance stuff), and for at least 2 of them the most prominent result was for an obituary. So I'm left confused: is this someone trying to make me feel good for myself by signing up discarded emails from a dark web data dump? Someone poking the edges of Substack security? Substack gently trying to pump up is subscriber statistics? (Or make me feel some indirect pressure to write more for my "growing' audience?). Oh and the new subscribers stopped after a little over a week. Anyone got any theories?
Yep, similar thing happened to me - big spike in subscribers over a couple of days in late December, followed by a drop of similar magnitude in early Jan. I suspect bots + correction by Substack.
It could be as simple as someone recommending or reposting something outside of substack, where it gathered some positive, albeit minor, attention.
There’s a wave of bot accounts signing up to two Substacks I manage (this one plus one for transcripts of a podcast). They seem like bots because their “also follows” section lists tons of other accounts with no obvious pattern.
I saw somebody (who seemed like the sort of person who would know, but I forget who) post that this was connected to harvesting text to train AI LLMs and that Substack has gone back through and tried to clean them out. My subscribers went up and then back down a bit
How would that work, exactly?
I mean - presumably one needs to subscribe to see more content, and you could script that, sure. But why would you need a load of bots? Why not just one, which can fly under the radar?
I've seen people blame spikes bot impressions on scraping content for AI training before, and it seems very much like a scapegoat.
It just seems unlikely that there's this massive wave of unrelated but somehow synchronised activity - repeatedly and deliberately doing something which realistically only needs to be done once.
It seems much more likely to me that the reasons for spikes in (presumably free) subscriptions are the same as they've been before on other social media.
I'm not saying scraping content for AI training doesn't happen, just that you probably won't notice a big spike in subscribers (or repeated spikes in reader views) when it does.
Grim fantasy: AI companies tapping our sewage pipes to train AI on microbiomes.
I have had a similar jump in substack subscriptions mostly from what seem to be small companies, including some Aussie ones, which is weird to sign up to a random experimental farming blog from. Happened in late December, followed by an equally rapid drop in subscriptions of the same magnitude. Maybe someone scraping substack for content? But most of my old posts are behind a paywall and these were free subscriptions.
I've personally noticed something like "residuals" from getting posted by somebody big like Scott or Bryan Caplan - you get a decent surge right after they link you, but then as long as the link is live, you get a trickle of likes and subscribers afterwards for about a month. Maybe it's something like that?
The timing and dynamics you mention do seem odd. None of them are commenting or liking anything publicly? Do they have other relevant and related subs to other substacks?
Thanks, there was like one or two accounts with other random follows for topics I had no awareness of, but most were just "source: Direct" and no other listed subs. It was indeed odd. I'll have to have another look at my subscribers to see if they dropped off again after the first sign up.
Anyone joining Bluesky? Scott joining Bluesky?
I'm barely on any social media. Substack,technically Mastodon although I haven't even logged on in weeks, and Discord for specific purposes. No plans to change that.
I'm on Bluesky.
I considered quitting Twitter for political reasons, but what actually made me quit was that a large majority of my Twitter feed was people I don't follow posting things I don't care about.
I have not joined and don't plan to.
I created an account due to Jesse Singal having an account I couldn't view without a Bluesky account, but I don't myself have much to say there.
I have. I have a few friends on there, but no momentum yet like on Facebook.
I was considering it until I saw Taylor Lorenz’s post celebrating the death of the United Health CEO wasn’t marked as violating the platform rules. Not that I want censorship but if there is a moderation policy I want it to be applied consistently.
Meanwhile the Babylon Bee account got its posts censored for making a silly comment that’s (IMO) in poor taste and obviously trolling but which doesn’t threaten or support violence and thus doesn’t deserve to be censored. I’ll gladly switch over once they get their moderation policy in order.
I wasn't on Twitter or any of its substitutes before, but joined Bluesky because a guy I was interviewing with told me that a lot of NYC data science people that previously left Twitter had recently moved over there and hit critical mass, so it would be good for my career to keep an eye on that place.
It's fine? I keep to my follow feed and get a lot of technical inside baseball, get to see what tech in in fashion. Don't really feel the urge to post there.
Curious: how much money (in % or absolute terms) would you estimate to have made extra during your lifetime so far thanks to following someone on social media - vs just being focused on delivering the best work possible?
Wait - Are you saying you can make money just by following people?!!
I've been missing a trick all these years! But thinking about it for a moment, wouldn't that mean everyone on the planet would be incentivized to follow everyone else on the planet? There must be a catch. Maybe there's a maximum number of people one can follow.
I assumed it was more about networking, being mutuals with someone -> online friendship -> meet for coffee -> hear about/get recommended for jobs that aren't out in the open. The software environment works like that, I'm sure some other industries do as well.
Well if you follow the right people you might learn something useful?
Personally, none, since I use very little social media and I'm still in academia. I use Discord and Substack, the former just for gaming. Maybe reading SSC+ACX changed me enough that I got to where I am today over some less lucrative path, but that's going to be hard to judge.
That, and reading some other blogs/watching some channels encouraged me to start learning Rust, which very well might be lucrative in the future, makes me nice and t-shaped.
I'm also skeptical about whether you could expect much benefit just from following someone. Being mutual follows and having that opportunity to network, or getting into discussions in someone's comments could do the trick, but following alone? Wouldn't expect very much at all.
I know someone who's just starting out in data science. He's not on Bluesky now. If he got on Bluesky, is there a straightforward way he could find the data science folk, or does he have to already know some key usernames?
Bluesky actually seems pretty good about this (not sure how it compares to Twitter). It's got a starter pack feature, where you can share a big list of users and others can follow them all at once (or you can look through them and follow piecemeal if preferred).
These two look like they could be good for that:
https://bsky.app/starter-pack/doodlescientist.bsky.social/3lbjzxc62ed2v
https://bsky.app/starter-pack/lydz-gibby.bsky.social/3l7rbdxnlo32b
Alternatively, just go onto the #DataBS or #DataSky tags and start following people who look interesting, and prune from there. Yes, the fact that 'BS' is being added onto community hashtags is not lost on me. There is (or at least was a little while ago) some competition about which convention would win out.
While you're at it, they might drop me a follow and look at the people I'm following. I don't use the service very much, but I think this is a neat group.
@nrposner.bsky.social
Thanks so much. Just sent him the info.
I’m on both X and Bluesky. Bluesky is in a nice sweet spot for me where my comic artists and musicians friends are actually posting about their work instead of arguing about politics. I haven’t fully moved over because of AI and NBA twitter that hasn’t moved over. It’s inconvenient to have to check both places, but in practice, I just check whichever I’m in the mood for: X during basketball games, Bluesky to check in on artistic output, etc.
I have switched to BlueSky a few months ago. I pretty much have to start over collecting followers and finding interesting people to follow, but that's ok. I haven't deleted my X account, but don't post there anymore (with few exceptions).
I've been on Bsky for over a year now because a lot of scientists I follow moved off TwiXter and over to Bsky because of the harassment they were receiving. I'm still posting on TwiXter as well, but I have a thick skin, and I enjoy making fun of the morons who cross my feed. Bsky is much quieter than TwiXter.
I have, it is fine I still prefer Twitter. I think the conventional story that a lot of the left wing angry people joined BlueSky while right wing angry people joined Twitter is right but it isn't very important to me as I mainly follow rationalist adjacent people.
https://bsky.app/profile/oliversegal.bsky.social