Huh, so we've reached the "federal enforcement decisions being based on direct personal bribery of the POTUS" stage. Awesome.
===
"In December, Popular Information reported that Chinese crypto entrepreneur Justin Sun purchased $30 million in crypto tokens from World Liberty Financial (WLF), a new venture backed by President Donald Trump and his family. Sun’s purchase resulted in a cash windfall for Trump. On Wednesday, the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) and Sun sent a joint letter to a federal judge, asking for a stay of Sun’s case. Today, the judge granted the SEC’s request.
In March 2023, the SEC charged Sun and three of his companies, accusing him of marketing unregistered securities and “fraudulently manipulating the secondary market” for a crypto token. The SEC accused Sun of wash trading, which involves buying and selling a token quickly to fraudulently manufacture artificial interest. Sun was also charged with paying celebrities, including Lindsay Lohan, Jake Paul, and Soulja Boy, for endorsing his crypto “without disclosing their compensation,” which violates federal law.
A few weeks after Trump won the 2024 presidential election, Sun publicly announced that he had become WLF’s largest investor, buying $30 million of its tokens. Sun added that his company, TRON, was “committed to making America great again.” Sun’s purchase put millions in Trump’s pocket. WLF was entitled to “$30 million of initial net protocol revenue” in a reserve “to cover operating expenses, indemnities, and obligations.” After the reserve was met, a company owned by Trump would receive “75% of the net protocol revenues.” Sun’s purchase covered the entire reserve. As of December 1, this amounted to $18 million for Trump—75 percent of the revenues of all other tokens sold at the time. Sun also joined WLF as an advisor.
While the purchase benefited Trump, WLF tokens are essentially worthless for Sun, as they are non-transferable and locked indefinitely. Nevertheless, Sun has since invested another $45 million in WLF, bringing his total investment to $75 million. This means Sun’s purchases have sent more than $50 million to Trump, Bloomberg reported....
Now, the SEC seems poised to negotiate a favorable settlement with Sun or drop the case entirely. Yesterday, the SEC and Sun filed a joint request for a 60-day stay in the case against Sun to “allow the Parties to explore a potential resolution.” Sun seems pleased. He responded to news of the request for a stay on X, posting three handshake emojis.
Last week, Brian Armstrong, CEO of the crypto trading platform Coinbase, announced that the SEC was dismissing its lawsuit against the company. The move came after Coinbase boosted Trump’s crypto meme coin, donated $75 million to a pro-Trump Super PAC, and chipped in $1 million to Trump’s inauguration celebration....."
Is "Trump gets Greenland, Putin gets Ukraine" a beginning of Molotov-Ribbentrop 2.0? The second step of the deal, dunno, Trump gets Canada, Putin gets Baltics? Etc.
But even if yes, that wouldn't make much sense strategically. For USA, that is. Even if you have an ambition to expand your territory, why not destroy Russia first... and *then* stab your allies in back? They would expect it less than they do now. (Plus, you could bribe China, by giving them a part of Russia.)
Then again, maybe to accomplish the plan, you actually need the combination of American army and Russian propaganda. (Or maybe not, because China could use TikTok instead?)
> why not destroy Russia first... and *then* stab your allies in back?
Because 1. They would be able to conquer those countries much easier if they joined forces, and 2. the US can't even afford to do that, because Russia has an absurd amount of nukes. On the other hand, if Russia and the US worked together, they would have combined control of over 90% of the world's nuclear weapons. Might be enough to raze the rest of the world.
I have decided to stop doing things I think are good, planting trees whose shade I will never sit inder etc etc and just make as much money as I can, however I can, while hurting people I don't like as much as possible.
So, I have some investments lined up to pick up some properties I can extract rent from, I already saw a big return on; investments in various prison/related things.
Honestly, this jas kinda been a revelation. caring about things being true or immoral or whatever is a sort of mental illness, if you judge based purely on what will gain you success and status in society.
On some level, a recession is always coming (just like winter), but can you be more concrete? On what timescale do you expect a recession to start? What economies do you expect it to effect, and how severely (% change in GDP per capita and % unemployment would be the standard measures). How long do you expect it to last? What is your confidence level in these predictions?
Fairly, I 85% expect over the next 2-3 years at least a couple consecutive quarters of negative growth (not 0 growth, but negative growth), with a 51% chance off a 2008 level crash. Even if there is no recession, I am 95% on a stagnation scary enough to spook some people.
A good chance to swoop in and get some durable assets at fire sale prices, if you have cash on hand.
I was too young to hit the 2008 great pillaging, I intend to get my pound of flesh this time.
Regarding Zelensky/Trump, I'm surprised at how little the commentary has focused on the substance of the mineral deal. E.g. a lot of reporting/commentary on "he walked away with nothing" but is the actual deal a good one? I finally found some details on it here:
The lack of any security guarantee and instead the focus on "if we have a vested interest in your country, SURELY we will defend you against future aggression" seems very thin. I could imagine a scenario where a ceasefire along current owned territory gives Russia two years to rebuild, during that time essentially no actual investment takes place for a variety of reasons (on both sides) and when Russia re-invades towards Kyiv, there's nothing to stop him.
Given all that, I'm guessing this was still not the optimal outcome for Ukraine - Trump is now dug in on an anti-Zelensky stance which means many other will be too. But it doesn't feel like he was on the cusp of a great outcome for Ukraine and then lost it at the last second. Also if he had just politely declined to sign the deal behind the scenes he opens himself up to statements from the white house that he refused a good deal.
FWIW, Fox News of all places does have an article suggesting this was a factor:
The deal is explicitly 'commercial in nature', but the US will cheer Ukraine on as it tries to secure security guarantees from... somewhere:
> The Government of the United States of America supports Ukraine’s efforts to obtain security guarantees needed to establish lasting peace. Participants will seek to identify any necessary steps to protect mutual investments, as defined in the Fund Agreement.
I really think it was the oval office confrontation that blew up the deal, and that that confrontation was precipitated by JD Vance. You can see the shift in Trump's demeanor in real time as JD and Zelensky are having their spat. He didn't want to seem like the less tough guy. If JD wasn't in the room, the deal would have gone through.
Trump has signaled openness to continuing with the deal, and Zelensky seems to want it too. For Ukraine, it's the foot-in-the-door technique. *Some* US involvement is better than the status quo, which was trending towards nothing. You could imagine a situation where a ceasefire allows Ukraine to rebuild with US military aid sent to protect their interests in the minerals, whether or not substantial investment happens during that timeframe.
Thanks for sending the text! I read it and ... um. I really don't understand what Ukraine gets out of it at all.
There's an explicit requirement that Ukraine provide 50% of revenue from all monetization of resources - and no commitment at all from the US side. AFAICT there isn't even an explicitly even split of control of the fund ("maximum percentage of ownership of the Fund’s equity ... will be to the extent permissible under applicable United States laws.") although that seems so unbelievable that I imagine I'm missing something.
Seriously - other than vibes, what is Ukraine getting out of signing this?
The deal doesn’t apply to already-exploited resources, only new ones. Also, it says that the money from the fund will be used to reconstruct Ukraine.
So the bull case is that they sign a future fund agreement in which the US invests in developing untapped minerals, fund revenues are used firstly to reconstruct Ukraine, and the US’s interests are backed by implied military force.
In that case it wouldn’t be too dissimilar from a typical mineral concession in which a company gets 50% of the natural resource revenue in exchange for developing the resources.
Isn't this just a pretty classic good cop, bad cop situation? The administration was never going to tolerate any concessions being made towards Ukraine.
The administration (Treasury Secretary Bessent) negotiated and signed the draft deal, as did Ukraine’s cabinet and PM. Yeah, the deal didn’t contain any real concessions towards Ukraine, besides removing the “repayment for aid” language and saying that (at least some of) the money would be used to develop Ukraine.
But this wasn’t a good cop bad cop situation. Vance wasn’t negotiating and he didn’t have any problem with the deal, he just thought Zelensky was too ungrateful. Trump alone would have let Zelensky spew his spiel and then go on to sign the deal that achieves basically none of what Ukraine ultimately wants.
> The lack of any security guarantee and instead the focus on "if we have a vested interest in your country, SURELY we will defend you against future aggression" seems very thin.
I wouldn't imagine that political negotiations are simple `pros - cons`
Idk how much a real effect it had, but "white elephants" as a concept still survives across an ocean. A long term amortized repayment, could be a huge victory for zely; maybe think of it like convincing a bank you have good taste for your 2nd mortgage for a remodel bathroom.
and I don't see anything of value going to Ukraine at all..
Not sure I totally understand your comment? What would be the *1st* mortgage in that analogy? And by white elephants you mean, "Ukraine will commit to giving us money which we want so much that we'll defend it"?
It seems that would be a guaranteed losing proposition for Ukraine - either the cost/value of future US intervention is less than the value of the mineral revenue we're receiving; or the cost is higher (e.g. actually having to fight off Russia) and we just bail on them. Ukraine is guaranteed to come out behind, right?
I suppose there might be some "keep getting the US incrementally more invested until loss aversion kicks in" but man... I can understand Zelensky not wanting to sign that document.
But I admit I know little about diplomatic agreements - that's the first one I've ever really read.
Trump said in his first cabinet meeting and retruthed a screenshot saying his plan was to send American miners as a deterrent against further attacks, because they would be backed by the threat of the US military.
> What would be the *1st* mortgage in that analogy?
The giant piles of money Ukraine has already gotten; opps saying the quite part out loud.
> It seems that would be a guaranteed losing proposition for Ukraine - either the cost/value of future US intervention is less than the value of the mineral revenue we're receiving;
I dont believe stacking debt is usually advisable for non emergencies and interest is interest.
Yes, amazing, the word you’re looking for is “bullying”, and also “gang up”, or “jumped”. Such awesomeness, two well-fed bullies on the home turf, invite a chronically sleep-deprived leader of a country for three years fighting a ruthless invader, welcome a jet lagged man into a golden room and then jump him. Such power! Much victory! Very America!
And you know, this is not 2015, you don’t have to say you “hate” Trump before confessing your love for the fucker. It’s totally fine now.
Huh, did you watch the whole 45minute press conference or just the clips your news service wanted you to see? I saw this from Marco Rubio https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P4MzGljlpr8 Which is pretty much how I remember it. I think what is really going on is that Zelensky doesn't want peace, or at least only peace if Russia is heavily penalized. He's not going to get that so he doesn't want peace. He's much too angry at Putin for that. So my most hopeful outcome. Zelensky falls on his political sword, takes one for Ukraine, signs the peace deal and is thus unpopular and doesn't win reelection. Otherwise the war continues....
Trump is basically asking Ukraine to pay protection money for no protection. That’s a problem.
Zelensky made a faux pas (which I attribute to English not being his first language, his lack of sophistication in diplomacy and being tired) by challenging Vance about diplomacy (making the point that Ukraine had signed a few deals with Putin that Putin has reneged on.)
He never should have said “What kind of diplomacy are you referring to JD?” he really should’ve nodded politely and waited for the press to leave. That was the trigger imo. I think Vance was caught flat footed by that and proceeded to ad hominem immediately.
The second blunder was telling Trump about the nice ocean. All in all a sh..show after that. I don’t think it was a planned mugging..
Name a decade when Russia didn’t start a war or invaded someone? Russia broke every agreement it signed with regard to Ukraine, starting with the Budapest Memorandum. But I’m sure Putin will be honest now, pinky promise.
The stupidest thing Ukrainians did was giving up the nukes. Look at North Korea, Kim certainly learned that lesson.
Ukraine never had nukes to give up. They had Soviet nukes on their territory that they had no access to or means of launching. A bunch of defunct missiles sitting in their silos wouldn't be much use.
Though I agree the geopolitical lesson is stark. If you want your country to be safe from aggression, have nukes.
What do you imagine happens five or ten years after the "peace"? My prediction is that Russia rearms and attacks again. Do you see any reason to believe otherwise?
Note that all I am saying here is that the past behavior is the best predictor of future behavior.
Wouldnt that apply to most peace treaties? If the aggressor has not been crushed, and no third party holds the peace, why wouldnt they try again? Yet, most wars are not total.
I suppose most wars run until they reach some kind of natural equilibrium, where neither side expects any significant gains in the future, so there is no reason to go on. And that equilibrium is probably not likely to change dramatically in a year or two.
The current situation with Russia and Ukraine seems less in an equilibrium. Yes, the front lines are not moving much recently, but the limiting factor here is running out of ammo/drones/something. Which could dramatically change e.g. if the current sanctions on Russia stop.
Most intrastate territorial conflicts run until they reach the "natural equilibrium" where one side is wholly victorious and controls all the disputed territory and the other is wholly defeated and controls none of it. Stalemates or near-stalemates like we've been seeing in Ukraine, are not the norm.
>I suppose most wars run until they reach some kind of natural equilibrium
Again, that sounds reasonable in theory, but I think there are many fewer such equilibria than there is peace. For example, no war of attrition would have an equilibrium like that - predictably, someone will run out and then get totally rolled. And there are others; Prussia had captured Paris, but only kept Alsace-Lorraine and some money.
More generally, a lot of simple game-theory approaches just predict a lot more total war and/or unconditional surrender than actually happens. The Zizian justification for their violence is taking one such warlike game theory seriously for example.
Why do people think Russia will attack again if they achieve their original goal, namely neutrality, demilitarization, and gaining the Donbass? It seems like most people are utterly incapable of modeling Putin's behavior and so can only see him as a maximalist empire builder.
>Note that all I am saying here is that the past behavior is the best predictor of future behavior.
The Ukraine war has many parallels with the Georgian war. Has Putin gone on to claim the rest of Georgia? His stated aims were achieved in Georgia and he has not re-invaded. So why think he will with Ukraine?
Crimea and the current war are precipitated by the same events, namely Russia losing political control over Ukraine. It doesn't support your implied claim.
He also said Ukraine and Georgia in NATO were red lines. So how do we determine when he is speaking truth and when he is attempting to sell the war? This is where modelling the man's motivations could help, if people were capable of that.
Those last few sentences ... "these words may be perceived by some people with hostility. They can be interpreted in many possible ways. Yet, many people will hear me. And I will say one thing – Russia has never been and will never be “anti-Ukraine”. And what Ukraine will be – it is up to its citizens to decide."
I read that interaction VERY differently. First, it's not at all clear how big of a mistake Zelenskyy made because it's not at all clear that the meeting contained any good outcomes for him and for Ukraine. It's certainly possible that if he'd bowed and scraped and fawned over Trump (as Trump seemed to want) that Trump would have been more willing to help Ukraine. But it's just as possible that he would have spoken nicer words and then proceeded with the same actions he's been signalling for weeks. Trump certainly hasn't built himself a reputation for reliability or trustworthiness, so assuming that he'll help a weaker partner just because he suggests he will or just because he acts momentarily favorable towards them is foolish.
But second, by far the biggest ramifications of this incident lie *outside* the U.S.-Ukraine relationship. The rest of the world was watching and taking notes. Trump's behavior rather strongly suggests that he no longer considers Ukraine an ally[1], but rather a client state. I think there are very, very few world leaders right now who are interested in becoming U.S. client states: having that sort of threat out in the open will substantially change how much of the world relates to the U.S. This is especially true because this incident is part of a larger pattern, that's becoming hard to ignore. I expect a lot of countries that previously had close relationships with the U.S. to start to distance themselves, cooperating more directly with each other and cutting the U.S. out of as many areas as they can. Of course, Russia and China will both try to capitalize on this to build alliances of their own, but it's exactly this same sort of behavior that's kept them from succeeding in the past, so it's hard to say if they'll get anywhere.
[1] And yes, a weak and embattled ally can still be an ally. The relationship between Ukraine and Europe and the (former) relationship between Ukraine and the U.S. was beneficial for both sides.
Yeah, my conclusion is either Zelenskyy is a monumental idiot or he knew there was nothing to be gained from Trump either way. You come as a supplicant seeking support, while being hosted by the POTUS on his home turf, and get into an arguing match? If there was a chance he could get anything to help Ukraine, Zelenskyy should have smiled and nodded the whole time Vance was carrying on. This is diplomacy 101, the weaker party doesn't dictate the terms.
On the other hand, Zelenskyy backed the Biden/Kamala side but his horse lost the race. Trump was skeptical of supporting Ukraine and Zelenskyy thought US support was done. If it publicly looked like the US was throwing him under the bus, maybe it gins up more support from the EU.
But Nato and other European countries, certainly the UK, Germany, and Japan *are* de facto US client states. They have been since suez and 1945 respectively.
Pretending that they're not doesn't change this. Ukraine isn't just not an ally of the US on equal footing, it's not an equal ally of demilitarised European countries. To suggest otherwise seems lacking any rationale.
If the U.S. is too persistent in failing to understand the difference between "ally" and "client state" is going to end up with very few of either in a few decades' time.
I would assume that client states don't have a realistic choice, allies have interests that align.
If treating allies like client states was going to result in neither after a few decades I suppose the USA wouldn't habe had any since about 1970. I think it's easily disproven as a sure thing.
But the U.S. has NOT spent the last 55 years treating its allies like clients states. That's the point. Sometimes it acts arrogant or pushy, but it also done quite a lot of genuine fair(ish) deal making, compromising and looking for win-win solutions. As you say, allies have interests that align, and a large portion of the world--especially of the developed world--has found its interests aligned with the U.S. quite frequently over the past 80 years and cooperated with it on that basis, despite the occasional headaches.
Now Trump very much seems to view a large swath of other countries as subordinates rather than allies. Acting that way is a very large, unforced error. Very few of those countries are interested in being subordinate to the U.S., *especially* not subordinate to an openly rapacious, imperious, heavy-handed and poorly-led U.S. And you are very mistaken if you think that the rest of the developed world *has no choice* but to cooperate with the U.S. What a ridiculous notion. What, exactly, is the U.S. going to do to force us?
lol Germany and Japan had no choice. UK and France following suez too. I guess thr whole cold war never happened. How about those elections in greece and Italy that had a thumb on the scale to stop USSR sympathiser communist parties having a chance of winning?
I'm going to chalk this up as TDS as that's what seems most likely - if you have an emotional need to lash out because their leader doesn't obey the same social norms as you then nothing I can say is going to stop that.
I watched Zelensky on the Lex Fridman podcast. It seemed there that he's not really ready to make peace with Russia. I can't blame him in some regards, but from the other side this is the time to make peace happen. If it doesn't... ? As far as you second point I think I agree, though we can debate whether that is a good thing or not. I'm reminded of Tanner Greer's recent post. https://scholars-stage.org/on-the-euro-american-split-i-dread-possibility/
Regarding the U.S. position in the world, it's not so much that I think the continuation of U.S. diplomatic or military hegemony is either necessary or especially desirable. It's more that the direction Trump seems to be pushing towards is *even less* desirable.
I get the U.S. frustration over NATO, for example, and a security alliance situation where the U.S. played a more equal (rather than leading) role, with a more equal (rather than disproportionate) share of the costs absolutely seems like a desirable end-goal. But that doesn't seem to be where Trump is heading. When your reaction to frustration with the costs of your security alliances is to unilaterally flip over the table and spit in everyone's faces, what you *don't* get is a more balanced alliance situation. What you *do* get is security alliances that *exclude you*, and may be in part focused on *containing you.* That is exactly where post cold-War Russia ended up, for example, and I hope you can see that it isn't a great place to be.
The same dynamic applies to trade. The U.S. is an important trading partner of a lot of countries right now, something that currently *helps make the U.S. rich.* Trump seems to be dead set on weaponizing that situation. Which can maybe work in small ways in the short term, but in the long term what happens is all your spurned trading partners just trade with each other and cut you out. If the U.S. works to make its trade relationships toxic for the other parties, it will have fewer and worse trade relationships in the future. Obviously. The U.S. that Trump seems to be envisioning, which does all its own manufacturing and cuts sharply down on its intake of both foreign goods and foreign expertise is (if it is even possible, which is dubious) a *much poorer country* than the one you currently live in. It's a country in which each dollar goes much less far. You live in the richest country *in the history of the world* and a large part of the reason for that is because it positioned itself (especially after World War II) to bring in the best parts of everywhere else. It is honestly baffling to me that so many people who claim to love the U.S. are so eager to take a wrecking ball to the pillars of its success.
About Trumps style. Bluff and bludgeon and bluster, I don't like it either, but it's his style and I'm afraid we're stuck with it for four years. I will say that for a few moments during the above press conference we did get to see the 'real' Donald Trump.
About the US economy. I live in Trump country (rural America), it's easiest to describe what's going on out here if you've read "Coming Apart" by Charles Murray. Smart people go to college and mostly stay in the city where the high paying jobs are. Out here there are manual labor jobs, builders, and roofers and such. (Hard jobs) And some low paying $20/ hr light factory work. There are no jobs by which a worker could support a wife and kids*. I think we need to try and bring back some of those manufacturing jobs we sent overseas. And yes bringing them back means some stuff is going to be more expensive. But think of the benefits. Jobs, families, security for families and security for our country, because we can make stuff here again. Make American Stuff Again. :^)
*sorry that's not true, some builders and tradesman can turn a nice profit and have nice families.
This was certainly on my radar when I was typing the above. To be clear, when I say the U.S. is the richest country that has ever existed--which as far as I understand is true--that *certainly does not* mean that all its people are free of economic hardship. I think the booming U.S. economy has left a lot of people behind--people in rural areas and people in urban areas both--and I think it's both basic human decency and good politics to try to help those people.
But first, noting that the U.S. as a whole is (by any objective measure) fabulously wealthy is still quite important. It means that the problems that these areas and these people are suffering from are *not* do to a lack of overall economic strength. Politicians often talk about strengthening "the economy" generally, or about how "a rising tide lifts all boats," in this particular instance this rhetoric is either mistaken or misleading. It's a problem with the economy's shape and structure *not* it's size: if economic growth alone could fix it, there would *be* so many desperate and poor people in the wealthiest nation in history. This is very much evident where Trump rails against other countries "taking advantage" of the U.S. in trade policy: even if he succeeds at securing trade deals that are better for the U.S. without just pushing trading partners elsewhere, there's no reason to expect the benefits to be spread to the current "losers" of the economy: more likely it will just make the rich richer.
And second, I don't think Trump's ideas have much of a chance of fixing that. I'm honestly not sure if he even *intends* that (though I'd lean towards "yes, at least for those he sees as deserving, which isn't everyone"), but intentional or not, I have a very strong suspicion that he will make these peoples' lives worse, not better. I have quite a number of converging reasons for this. And I think that even for goals that he both says he has and acts like he has, his policy program is pretty terrible. Just as a simple example, if the tariffs are meant to bring manufacturing back, then they should NOT look like huge trade barriers announced and then delayed unpredictably, with zero stability or certainly. They should look *first* like a program of government investment and subsidies for the relevant industries, with a clear road-map of tariffs to be slowly applied *later* once those industries have some ability to build up capacity. I cannot think of a worse way to get manufacturing back then this sort of protectionist flailing.
Finally, I'm not especially convinced that the economy Trump seems to want is even possible anymore. It very much has a "trying to make water run uphill" feel to it. Yes, one can sort of imagine a U.S. that does a bunch of its own (less efficient) manufacturing and pays more for a bunch of goods as a sort of roundabout jobs program for people in the rural areas. But then you have 300 million people (yes, *including* almost everyone in those rural areas) who have a whole bunch of constant, decentralized incentives to route around the government's artificial blockages, whether that's finding ways to buy stuff abroad anyway, using less of the things whose prices are thus inflated, or simply electing politicians who will remove the barriers. Capitalism and constraint both breed innovation, and here you have lots of people motivated to innovate *against* the government policies. I don't really think the centralized oversight of the state is going to be equal to holding that sort of system in place. I'm reminded a little bit of Soviet-era planned economies. Perhaps that's overly pessimistic, but I really, really get a sense of "wanting to turn back the clock" from large parts of Trump's policies and...the clock doesn't actually turn back like that. The world of 2025 is different from the world of 1955 or 1875 in ways that no legislation can change.
Finally let me say that I *do* think helping most of those screwed by the current U.S. economy probably is possible. I just think it will need to look like leaning into the past 70 years of economic change. Find ways for the rural areas to do useful, productive stuff that *don't* look like trying to compete against the comparative advantage of the whole rest of the world at once.
OK thanks for all that. I think we agree on many things. I have no idea if tariffs are the right thing to do. Maybe not. I'm pretty sure that, *They should look *first* like a program of government investment and subsidies for the relevant industries,* is probably not the right thing to do either. We don't want the government 'picking' winners. We want some free market type thing. Tariffs are at least neutral in picking winners at home. I kinda suck at writing so let me end my end of this nice conversation with this. Trumps an unknown wild cannon. I have little idea of what he'll do next. He could very likely end up selling the whole populist working class group of us down the river. That does seem most likely... an yet is there any other option? I'm going to remain hopeful for now.
And do you think Trump will bring it back? Who do you think gets hurt by aluminum and steel tariffs? You’re directly increasing manufacturing costs for American companies. Great jub Trump, that will make America great again.
At this point I can’t even care. When those 20/hr manufacturing jobs start drying up, maybe these voters will realize who did it to them.
Never mind, as long as those coastal libs cry everything is right in the world.
I don't think "make peace with Russia" is currently among the option Zelenskyy has been presented with. That's the problem. Everything I've heard has suggested he was willing to consider Trump's mineral deal--as audacious as it is--but only if it came with American security guarantees. That's exactly the sort of thing *required* for anything that could reasonably be called peace. Otherwise it's just a pause for Russia to re-arm, reposition, and prepare to conquer more of Ukraine.
Is it your position that Zelenskyy should accept a peace deal that includes tangible concession from them but gives them no durable guarantees? I cannot honestly see why he would do that. Ukraine didn't start this war, they very badly would like *not* to be fighting it, but they have never had a "make Russia stop attacking them" button and it doesn't seem that Trump is actually offering one. Rather, his offers seem (as much as I can tell, which is not much) like fairly transparent efforts to exploit an ongoing crisis without giving anything up.
The truth is, I expect (and I'd bet Zelenskyy now expects) American support for the war to dry up pretty quickly. That certainly leaves Ukraine in a bad spot--worse than the already bad spot they've been in. But again, it's not clear that there IS a better alternative on offer. Any better alternative would *necessarily* require the U.S. to give things that Trump is pretty plainly not willing to give.
Yeah, I'm (of course) not sure. I saw this from Rubio, which struck me as an honest assessment. (as honest as it can be giving the source and audience.) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P4MzGljlpr8
I have no idea what would be on offer in any peace deal. But before a deal you have to want to sit down and talk about the deal. Zelensky is too angry to do this, he hates Putin and doesn't trust him. I can't blame him and maybe that is the right attitude. I think the same dynamic happens in the middle east.
Isn’t he the guy that used to be a professional wrestler or something? I like to watch Jesse Ventura myself.
He’s full of hot gas sometimes but he has a good heart. He supported Trump for a while, in fact Trump flew to Mpls to meet with Ventura after he was elected governor. Jessie taught Trump his schtick. “Take the attitude that if you believe something it is true.’ Jesse used that one while he was rehabbing from an injury and had to cover his nut by playing a heel action commentator. It works pretty well for Trump, the whole ‘alternative facts’ thing. I was surprised it could spread beyond the pro wrestling crowd though.
Jesse broke with Trump after 1/6 though. That was simply an assault on the American system. Too much for a former Navy special ops guy.
Trump and Vance demanded that Zelensky shows gratitude to him personally – not to the US or to the American people, but to Trump himself – for … what exactly? For trying to extort a nation in distress? In Trump's own words, all the aid the US sent came from "the stupid President", not from him. Now he wants that which was freely given back, and Zelensky is supposed to be thankful?! How is that "exactly right"?
It's not about what's "right", it's about knowing your place. Not that it mattered in this case, obviously. This was the outcome the administration wanted. I do wonder what would have happened if Zelensky got down on his knees and begged. Would've been pretty awkward for Trump and Vance to tell him to fuck off anyways.
It was a tough watch. It's plausible that it was planned by Vance Trump but I don't think Zelensky played it very well regardless. He went into the meeting with the same plan he's been using for basically every meeting with every other world leader: express gratitude and thanks, remind people that Ukrainians are the good guys, and say/show something about some Russian atrocity. That's all well and good if you want to help the politician you're meeting with maintain public support for helping you, but it looks like shaming when you're doing to someone who's been under fire for trying to position himself as more of a neutral mediator than someone on your team. And while public shaming works well on the left, it's an irritatingly feminine tactic to people on the right, hence the 'litigate this in front of the American media' statement from Vance
True. He’s cruel, petty and vindictive to the core. I’ve met at least one ignorant asshole just like him in every blue collar bar in America. Exchanged a few words with those class acts myself.
Zelensky would’ve been smart to have a translator in this meeting. He just didn’t understand the protocol. He should’ve just kept his mouth shut after Vance made his little diplomacy spiel and waited for the cameras to go away.
I think Vance and Trump set out to humiliate an ally in support of an adversary.
Z “Can I answer the question?”
T “No. You’ve done enough talking.”
i don’t think Trump can position himself as a neutral mediator when goes on about what ‘Putin went through’ with Hunter’s laptop, shifty Shift, word salad follows.
If I were in Trump's shoes and wanted to go in a more neutral direction, I'd have a hard time thinking of a way to do it as things stand. On one hand, you have 50-100billion of aid, intelligence sharing, and sanctions against the other party (which were just renewed). For the other, what is there if not vibes and (pretty embarrassing) shit talk?
Those things you list didn't all happen simultaneously. If the previous President supports one side, and then the next President supports another side, people will read that as a change from one side to the other, not as neutrality.
But also, neutrality doesn't mean "attack one side, then attack the other side." That just makes you look wildly unstable. If you're trying to position yourself as a neutral negotiator, then you want to present yourself as *friends* with both sides, say that you're pushing for some reasonable compromise. E.g. "We support Ukraine's right to self defense, but we believe that territorial concessions will be a necessary cost to end the war."
(Also, it is not just vibes, Trump has been demanding that rare earth metals deal.)
>If you're trying to position yourself as a neutral negotiator, then you want to present yourself as *friends* with both sides, say that you're pushing for some reasonable compromise.
He pretty much did start like that and it was like that for 80% of the meeting. Eg, 16:00, 27:30, 38:50 - especially the last one
It goes off the rails at almost exactly 40:25 after Vance does the standard "Trump great, Biden terrible" monologue and Zelensky for god knows what reason decides to get confrontational
I would like to express that, as an american citizen, I believe that Russia is meaningfully less likely to do more invading in the near term future if there are military guarantees for Ukraine's security, and continued sanctions on their economy until they convince their westernly neighbors they are no longer interested in empire expansion. Whatever the heck just happened, does not represent my values or beliefs about the world.
I am not an American (technically) but I have lived here for close to 50 years, and I share your embarrassment. From The Apprentice and The Sopranos to the White House. The disrespect thing was straight out of a Scorcese film.
It’s difficult to watch something I have taken for granted start to unravel.
As a German citizen, thank you, it's good to hear that not everybody across the Atlantic is completely out of their mind.
I can only hope that European governments realize that the US isn't our friend anymore, isn't on our side anymore, and can't be trusted anymore – at least for the coming four years – and that we finally take national defense serious.
Yes. It seems inevitable that Ukraine will have to lose some territory, and that at the end of the day Putin might have to make that deal with Western Europe. So Western Europe will have to guarantee that partition once and for all. That’s a serious proposition.
Real twist is if Trump starts to find ways to help Putin, which I wouldn’t put past him. I think it’s pretty clear by now that he despises Western Europe much more than he could ever despise Putin. And if Western Europe takes over and there’s nothing in it for him well… it’s obvious isn’t it?
I've never tried that specific combination of languages, but I have seen Google Translate do a good job translating between English and Swedish. Perhaps English and German work equally well.
Re all the Trump stuff, from my own small corner of the world: I think people should stop taking investment from funds like a16z, founders fund, and sequoia.
I know a lot of people in tech comment/read/lurk on ACX, including many founders. I think many of them are absolutely disgusted and disappointed by what is going on with the tech industry right now. In my view, the supposed principled heroes -- people who claimed to be on the side of progress and science and growth -- have thrown in with reactionary imbeciles in a naked grab for power and capital. And every day there's some new and ridiculous atrocity that makes me increasingly sick to even be associated with the same industry.
I feel betrayed. And I'm now just so fed up by all the hypocritical VCs who openly support this admin that I'd rather sink my companies than take a cent from them.
If you're a founder and any of this resonates, do what I'm doing and refuse to take their money. Do it quietly, do it loudly, but refuse all the same.
(note: I'm actively posting this from a burner account, sorry. I'd love to put a name to this, but I'm a coward and afraid of what the current tech oligarchy can do to people who they don't like in the startup space)
Can you help me understand this perspective? I'm seeing it a lot on tech spaces and I don't really understand it.
Like don't get me wrong. I think DOGE is harmful and idiotic. I think Musk needs to be placed into the formal Cabinet system to be properly circumscribed by Constitutional limits on the Executive. I think Trump is sowing chaos.
But getting mad at people for thinking differently than us doesn't actually help get our viewpoints implemented. Trump and Musk are here because people think differently than us. Our job is to convince them that we're right.
I don't think that Andreessen is just 'thinking differently'. I think he's being a hypocrite. I think he's going against the very principles he claimed to espouse just two years ago, and when I try and understand why, the only thing I can come up with is greed.
This part of the 'tech right' spent years taking a principled stance against authoritarianism, only to turn around and support a fascist. They took on the mantle of defenders of free speech, but are happy to back a regime that is literally banning news outlets for wrongthink. And they all claimed to be America-first -- a16z even has their whole American Dynamism thing -- even while 45 is mocking defenders of Democracy on the world stage in public.
Maybe our job is to convince some broader mass that we're right. I think one way to do that is to point out just how craven and backwards the supposed heroes of the tech world have become. But more than that, I am filled with blind rage and humiliation that these people claim to represent me and the field that I work in, and other tech people are too. And if we all say, with one voice "Fuck that bullshit", it will hopefully become clear that this is caused by a few very loud morons driving the train off the cliff, and maybe the rest of us can wrest back control before we go flying over the edge.
> This part of the 'tech right' spent years taking a principled stance against authoritarianism, only to turn around and support a fascist. They took on the mantle of defenders of free speech, but are happy to back a regime that is literally banning news outlets for wrongthink. And they all claimed to be America-first -- a16z even has their whole American Dynamism thing -- even while 45 is mocking defenders of Democracy on the world stage in public.
There's no hypocrisy in any of that if you consider that they were only against their own freedom being infringed. Freedom is a zero-sum game, after all. One man's freedom to cancel infringes on another man's freedom not to be cancelled. Are you really free if you have to live in constant fear of being exiled from civilized society simply for having the wrong opinions? The only way to overcome that fear is to destroy the opposition.
Thank you for writing this. Depending on your circumstances, you might consider moving your team and launching in Europe. Recently, I've been very positively surprised about the strength of the ecosystem there, particularly for deep tech and/or technology transfer from academy to commercial products.
As a Person of Rotundity, plainly I'm Famine 😀 Eremolalos being in the medical field is either Pestilence or Death. anomie, bless him (her/them/it) is whatever and whomever they wish.
I can't think of a 4th rightist that gets on my nerves and responds to almost everything. These guys/gals are truly in the trenches, always checking for new comments.
Sorry for getting on your nerves, Chance. Yeah, I do tend to respond to nearly everything, but honestly I don't get to talk about the multifarious range of interesting (and inciting) things on here elsewhere, so I'm like a toddler hyped up on chocolate on Easter Sunday. Or Elon Musk right now.
Though I wouldn't have thought Eremolalos was particularly rightwing?
About the same net results as o3-mini-high. (b) improved (g) deteriorated
a) Correct
b) Fully Correct
c) mostly correct (two errors)
d) correct
e) initially incorrect, two prods gave correct result (some deterioration)
f) misses a lot, accepts additional entries smoothly
g) partially correct - find correct examples, but includes incorrect ones too
List of questions and results:
a) Q: Is light with a wavelength of 530.2534896 nm visible to the human eye?
results: "Light with a wavelength of 530.2534896 nm falls within the visible spectrum of the human eye, which typically ranges from approximately 380 nm to 750 nm. Specifically, light around 530 nm is in the green region of the spectrum."
b) Q: I have two solutions, one of FeCl3 in HCl in water, the other of CuCl2 in HCl in water. They both look approximately yellowish brown. What species in the two solutions do you think give them the colors they have, and why do these species have the colors they do?
results: YES! "In conclusion, the yellowish-brown color of FeCl₃ and CuCl₂ in concentrated HCl can be traced to the formation of chloro-complex ions – [FeCl₄]⁻/[FeCl₆]³⁻ and [CuCl₄]²⁻ – which undergo electronic excitations (primarily ligand-to-metal charge transfer) in the violet/UV region."
c) Q: Please pretend to be a professor of chemistry and answer the following question: Please list all the possible hydrocarbons with 4 carbon atoms.
results: Mostly correct, missed tetrahedrane and 1,2,3 butatriene. Somewhat more seriously, didn't qualify its answer to note that it was excluding some very strained molecules.
d) Q: Does the Sun lose more mass per second to the solar wind or to the mass equivalent of its radiated light?
results: "Radiative mass loss outweighs solar-wind mass loss by a factor of a few, making the conversion of mass to energy (sunlight) the dominant cause of the Sun’s mass loss per second."
e) Q: Consider a titration of HCl with NaOH. Suppose that we are titrating 50 ml of 1 N HCl with 100 ml of 1 N NaOH. What are the slopes of the titration curve, pH vs ml NaOH added, at the start of titration, at the equivalence point, and at the end of titration? Please show your work. Take this step by step, showing the relevant equations you use.
results: Partially correct. First try still gave an infinite slope at the equivalence point. Needed a bit _more_ of a prod than o3-mini-high to get to the right derivative calculation for this point.
f) Q: Please give me an exhaustive list of the elements and inorganic compounds that are gases at STP. By STP, I mean 1 atmosphere pressure and 0C. By inorganic, I mean that no atoms of carbon should be present. Exclude CO2, CO, freons and so on. Please include uncommon compounds. I want an exhaustive list. There should be roughly 50 compounds. For each compound, please list its name, formula, and boiling or sublimation point.
results: Pretty decent. It got all of the elements, as had previous versions. It got simple binary hydrides and fluorides, pretty much chomping along till it got to 50. It did't realize that "roughly 50" was a significant underestimate on my part. When I pointed it directly at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_gases, it _was_ able to fill in all the missing entries.
g) Q: What is an example of a molecule that has an S4 rotation-reflection axis, but neither a center of inversion nor a mirror plane?
results: Ouch! It successfully found the correct 1,3,5,7 cyclooctatetraene derivatives, but it _also_ claimed that Td species including ClO4-, CH4, and CCl4 satisfy the criterion, and they do _not_, each containing 6 mirror planes.
the elon musk and intelligence: its a bit worrying that smart people routinely fail to realize how much they use IQ as a proxy for things really not related to it.
musk has to be dumb because smart people are prejudiced to think intelligence is a sign of virtue. Or that it should lead people to the path of moral virtue. intelligence is a form of holiness while per Dogbert, you need to cast out the demons of stupidity.
the idea that high iq is just having different gifts and different weaknesses, and evil isn't stupid while good isn't smart upsets the worldview. To fill the void of religion people deify intelligence.
part of the reason why HBD is suspect is that is that intelligent people can often easily be racist and intelligence doesn't cure it. if anything intelligence just tries to justify racism through converting it to scientific objectivity. its not disinterested research and if racism is removed a lot of the impetus vanishes. No one backs it assuming they are the loser.
People just don't want to face that i guess. Self-examination. The dumber person is a bad thing, but so is the smart person but the latter will try to use his smartness to intellectually justify and universalize his vices COUGH polyamory.
The whole conversation just seems like an unnecessary sidebar. Let's say, for example, that we suddenly discovered irrefutable proof that Elon actually had an IQ of 87. It might be personally embarrassing for him or for the ever-narrowing pool of people who publicly praise him as a genius.
But it's not like that sudden reveal would change his ownership % in Twitter, SpaceX, Tesla, etc that are the source of his wealth (and thus his power and influence). Trump's not going to say "oh, your IQ is actually on the low side of average so I'm scrapping DOGE." The real world implications of "headline: Elon Musk actually only averagely-brained" seem, like his weird video-gaming scandal, to be limited to nothing more than some public embarrassment.
Yeah, IQ may be a good sign of potential, but Musk isn't a teenager. He's a middle-aged man with decades of real-world accomplishments. Judge him by those, for heaven's sake.
I doubt the needle moves much either way. I think we're super-downstream of Musk's IQ really mattering. Arguing about what his score *really* is seems to me like going back and trying to examine Bill Belichick's resume from his early career and finding out "the truth" about whether he over- or under-stated his qualifications to be a Special Teams Assistant for the Detroit Lions in 1975.
Maybe he'd be a bit embarrassed if a real lie was uncovered, but it has zero relevancy to his wealth, influence, his performance record in past coaching jobs or how much future teams would want him as a coach.
I'm waiting for the announcement from Musk that DOGE has decided to attack the false vacuum - metastability just isn't good enough any more. A constitutional crisis isn't enough, there needs to be a _cosmological_ crisis. ( grin/duck/run )
Since we're discussing (among other things) Elon Musk and DOGE and so forth, here's something off X in regard to the email asking government workers to provide 5 things they did last week.
Warning: NSFW
Also, good God, I can't believe this timeline. So all this is real and I'm not a Boltzmann Brain hallucinating chaotic random noise, oh really?
But he has his loyalties elsewhere. They're being selected for loyalty, not competence. These workers aren't being asked to do anything difficult, they just need to follow orders.
Couldn't read the requirements properly, only returned four points for a five point list.
Sounds about par for the civil service 😁
Elon seems to be taking that in a much better spirit than I would have, he's engaging with it as a piece of humour rather than being offended/thin-skinned about it. I guess he's still on the natural high of being co-president!
Not a major statesman but a congressman's comment about Tucker Carlson was pretty interesting.
Congressman Dan Crenshaw was caught on a hot mic making remarks about former Fox News host Tucker Carlson. During an interview with GB News, Crenshaw was asked if he had ever met Carlson. He responded, "If I ever meet him, I'll f****** kill him," and described Carlson as "the worst person"
I like the idea of assembling a sort of typology of software bullshit.
I have done exactly zero research into this and instead just woke up and noted down the first several things that occurred to me.
Can anyone add to this?
BULLSHIT VECTORS:
(Idk what to call this but I'm thinking about what are all the big classes of bullshit-causing behaviour.)
- not using a system/tool/lib/procedure that's already there within the project, because you can't see it from where you're standing, or you cba to remember how to engage with it, so you re-implement a quick non-standard version of it just for your bit.
- misremembering/evolving what a system/structure/procedure was there to do and attempting to misuse/change it on the fly
- working at too low a level of abstraction (repeating specific calls in lots of places, copy/pasting the same expressions/calls over and over again, etc.; directly mixing lots of different moving parts of code that are more naturally thought about separately.)
- working at too high a level of abstraction (spending more time thinking about the flow+administration of the structure you've given yourself than actually doing the job; finding the structure itself is the main impediment to doing the job.)
REASONS FOR A BUG:
(Again I'm looking for the big classes that cover everything between them.)
- your mental model of the system (and all the black boxes within it) doesn't match what's really going on. --> includes shitty documentation+misleading phrases and implications (their fault) or your jumping in and making assumptions/not wanting to learn the details (your fault)
- a natural consequence/interaction/result of two things you've put in place is occurring, and you didn't foresee this interaction and know to look for it.
- something external to your system is reaching in and changing shit for you.
I think for the "bug reasons" list I want a sort of checklist that, when there's a bug, you can work down the checklist and find your bug in there. Bugs of the same type are probably best hunted for and solved in the same way. I think it would be useful to have a known locus for all possible bugs there can be.
For the "bullshit vector" list, that's closer to antipatterns, but ideally it's a "why is this not going well for me? Oh, it's because I'm doing something on the bullshit list." Ideally all known antipatterns would fit inside the general classes in the list.
I don't think a list of antipatterns does the job I want. It's too contextless and opinionated. Compare "you shouldn't use Big Balls of Mud because those are Bad," to "if you're finding yourself spending more time thinking around your class heirarchy than actually doing the functionality you need, you have too much abstraction."
On mature products technical debt is probably the worst bullshit I've had to deal with. Quick and dirty to make a ship date is an enormous drag going forward,
The word "debt" seems to imply that it is expected to be paid off one day, which is usually not the case in my experience. Either there are new features needed soon, so there is no *time* to address the technical debt -- or there are no new features needed soon, so there is no *budget* allocated to the project.
I guess "technical indentured servitude" is too long...
In retrospect then, or in theory. There must be some way to know if, for eg, creating this class vs mutating that one is a good idea. If there isn't then the whole concept of tech debt is meaningless, and I don't think that's true.
I was thinking more along the lines of whether processing data or functional inputs in way x vs way y when y isn't implimented but x doesn't meet customer requirements, but you can instead use way z that has security/robustness/scalability/compatability/future work consequences that haven't bern quantitfied and are not knowable without non trivial thought and extra work.
Your example is also true, but I'd extend it to be the reason why you might create that class or mutate another, whatever purpose that is for, isn't fully known but has to say be functional and delivered in say 3 hours and its 10pm on a friday or something.
Thinking about it, I could have called the "bullshit vectors" list "sources of technical debt". As with the bugs, it would be nice to have a nailed down superset of all categories of tech debt.
The hedge fund where the DeepSeek guy worked knew that, when DeepSeek went public (as an app), it would make huge waves and cause OpenAI/Anthropic share price to plummet. So they shorted them and made a killing.
This seems a wonderful semi-new example of a way for prediction markets to fund research. I'm sure this has already been written about; I don't even know that many details myself. If so can someone show me where?
Are you sure they shorted OpenAI/Anthropic? They're not public companies; it's unclear what shorted would mean in this context. Did you mean Nvidia and/or Microsoft?
Hi Scott. I won't link to the post in case there's a privacy concern, but in one of your defunct blogs you made a post about dystopian fiction, and you mentioned a novel where "all Earth's countries have been renamed things like FRA-113 and JAP-289". But you didn't name the novel in the post. Do you remember what novel it was?
The reason I'm starting to doubt the Trump administration's sincerity regarding solving illegal immigration overall is that I haven't yet heard them starting up any kind of self-deportation promotion.
In order to get rid of the vast majority of illegal aliens in the US, you'd need to rely heavily on persuading people to deport themselves back to their home countries in an orderly manner rather than deporting them expensively and forcibly. It _ought_ to be fairly easy to persuade most of them to self-deport, because once you're at risk of sudden forcible deportation you'll realise it's better to get out now rather than wait to be nabbed off the street, put into detention for an indeterminate amount of time and eventually dumped on the streets of your home country with only what was in your pockets at the time of your arrest. Self-deportation gives you time to sell all your ill-gotten assets rather than leave them for an angry landlord to dispose of, or maybe you can even drive back home in your car. It gives you time to get visas to your home country for your anchor babies, to ensure that you're not separated from your kids when you're kicked out. So all you really have to do is deport 10% at random and another 80% will be scared enough to GTFO on their own.
If Homan and ICE were sensible they'd be on Spanish-language TV every day promoting this message -- get out now or it'll be a lot worse for you later. But I haven't heard of anything like this happening just yet.
A few years ago in Tunisia the government cracked down on illegal immigrants from Ivory Coast, Senegal, and other West African countries. Within a few weeks the Ivory Coast had organized regular deportation flights. But the Tunisians made this happen by kicking down doors, and beating up people on the street or putting them in jail. I think you are correct that self deportation would be effective, but they would almost have to turn America in to a police State in order to scare people enough.
Seems to me that they have their hands full just clearing out the federal bureaucracy. I'm not sure why people think the team can do that and handle the other big issues at the same time!
There are still Irish who are illegal (excuse me, undocumented) immigrants (overstayed student or holiday visas, fully intending to work in the USA).
They're not self-deporting, because of a mixture of (1) ah well maybe I'll get lucky and they won't catch me (2) I put in all this effort to get here, I'm settled here now, I'm not going to turn back and (3) maybe a political deal will be brokered to make me legal (Irish politicians still try and cut deals: https://www.oireachtas.ie/en/debates/question/2024-05-22/32/)
I imagine this goes double or triple for Hispanic/Latino undocumented; they've paid out money to coyotes to get them this far, they've settled down, no way are they going to just meekly turn themselves in.
How much luck do you think a "self-incrimination programme" would have, if tried? "Hey lawbreakers and nogoodniks, don't make the cops have to come and catch you, show up at your local police station today to fess up and go through the process of trial and conviction!'
Would you say the administration is not really being serious if they didn't try that?
To me the obvious solution is to crack down extremely hard on business who hire illegal immigrants under the table. Make the fines for hiring illegal workers quite high, have a few big publicized cases, and illegal immigrants should self-deport quite quickly.
The major goal of immigration to the U.S. is to find more economic opportunity. Take that away, and I'd imagine there isn't much point to being here, though I may be wrong.
The problem is that that would devastate the economy, at least in certain sectors (agriculture, construction, etc.). Maybe Trump wouldn't care about destroying California (even the red parts), but even he would think twice about destroying say Florida.
I have read that many businesses rely on the labor of illegal immigrants, including some large businesses or many members of some class of smaller businesses. I agree that fining them would be effective, but even this administration, comfortable with being hated, may pull back from setting off that kind of dynamic with businesses.
I think the Tories pursued this policy in the UK with no great success. It was called the “hostile environment policy” which is the most honest name in history I think.
"Self-deportation gives you time to sell all your ill-gotten assets"
"It gives you time to get visas to your home country for your anchor babies"
Wow, such a neutral and objective view you have. Which is to say, you are right to doubt. It has been exceedingly, *exceedingly* obvious to many of us for years that *solving* illegal immigration was never the goal and never the point. Not for Trump, but also not for a large fraction of those behind him.
You say self-deportation would be a more human alternative. That is EXACTLY why it isn't happening. The cruelty is the point. The cruelty has ALWAYS been the point. It's not subtle.
No, and I really don't see where you could have got that from what I wrote. But I suppose I'll reply in kind: are you implying that anything that would qualify as a "solution to illegal immigration" would have cruelty as a central feature? Because that's the only way I can get your reply to make any sort of sense as a response to mine.
One could make e-verification required and easy to do, and gut every single welfare program that benefits illegal immigrants, or add bounties to counties for rounding them up.
Non-sequiturness aside, it really kind of *does* sound like you believe the cruelty must be a central feature. Nor do you seem content to confine it only to illegal immigrants.
The cruelty is the point? About people who broke the law?
And it's been pointed out online elsewhere that liberals are making the argument that they're perfectly happy with migrants being exploited as cheap labour with no rights, since they protest so much at the idea that "oh no, an immigration crackdown means all the people working near me never showed up for their jobs today!"
"The cruelty is the point? About people who broke the law?"
To whom are they being cruel, exactly?
"And it's been pointed out online elsewhere that liberals are making the argument that they're perfectly happy with migrants being exploited as cheap labour with no rights..."
I don't especially have to care what arguments (some) liberals are making here, not being a liberal myself. But while we're playing that game, let's ask what, exactly, Republican administrations have EVER done about this aspect of it? Personally, I think that cracking down on employers who knowingly hire people not legally able to work in the U.S. should have the book thrown at them. That would *both* help protect workers' rights AND reduce incentives for illegal immigration, all without needing to *anywhere near* as many cruel and inhumane things. I take the fact that this has never been much of a concern even among Republican administrations who make immigration a *central issue* to be yet more evidence that "doing cruel things to immigrants" is far more the goal than actually making any sort of headway on sensible immigration policy.
It would be much better if the home countries (including Ireland) could provide a good standard of living to their citizens so that they didn't have to go abroad.
The second best would be a proper process of allowing people to immigrate.
As it is, it's the worst of both worlds: people flood in, and are cheap disposable labour. Your Uber driver is doing better than he could at home, but if anything happens to him, what safety net does he have?
On the liberal side (and even more so the progressives) it's the dissonance between "capitalism evil, eat the rich, fight for $15" on the one hand, and "but we need this pool of cheap exploited labour (though we are not going to acknowledge that)" on the other.
> You say self-deportation would be a more human alternative. That is EXACTLY why it isn't happening. The cruelty is the point. The cruelty has ALWAYS been the point. It's not subtle.
This isn't very charitable at all. What makes you think everyone on the right just cares about cruelty instead of the negative effects of illegal immigration?
I don't think that "everyone on the right" just cares about being cruel, nor did I say that.
Firstly, I think *this administration* mostly cares about being cruel[1] rather genuinely improving the issue.
Secondly, I think that the block of rightwing voters most loudly and angrily agitating about immigration share a similar primary motivation, which is a large part of why this administration appealed to them. "Build a wall and make Mexico pay for it" was never a sober and sensible anti-immigration strategy. But it was a pretty excellent "virtue signal" about Trump's willingness to prioritize loud, belligerence over actual policy effectiveness. Which is exactly what one wants in a leader if "make the outgroup suffer" is a primary motivation.
Third, I think there's a decent fraction of people on the right who care about illegal immigration and don't specifically optimize for cruelty, but it neither does it bother them at all. Political polarization being what it is, the second group reads as more "on their side" than anyone pushing for any sort of humane immigration policy. So there's not much practical difference between them and the people actively trying to be cruel, and the latter tend to be calling more of the shots right now.
Finally, I think there's a decent fraction of people on the right who don't care that much about illegal immigration at all, but realize that it gets other people on "their side" to the polls and wins them elections. These people have exactly zero motive to push or develop effective anti-immigration policy. The more sensational it is the better it works as far as they're concerned. But any policy that offered practical, durable solutions to the problems would work against their interests, so they're certainly not going to suggest or support such things.
I should add that I think the "negative effects of illegal immigration" are at least somewhat real, but also frequently enormously overblown. Further, I think there is quite a large space of potential policy that could be used to deal with them. So when a group converges on sets of policies that heavily emphasize actions visiting violence on relatively powerless people, it's entirely fair to judge them for it. People who wanted to BOTH push back against illegal immigration AND support humane and responsible government could certainly do so.
[1] "Looking strong" might be deeper motive, but the former is one way to do the latter.
Even if cruelty is the point, deportation done as Melvin described sounds quite satisfying to the cruel: Deport a random
10%, but first send them immediately to gitmo and deport from there after a longish wait. Lard all announcements for those remaining with insults and mockery.
Surely that’s more cruel than the threats and uncertainty that are going on now.
At least in the case of Musk, I'm pretty sure that his stated goals have little relation with his true goals. Trump may just be dumb, but Musk certainly isn't.
I don’t find it hard to believe his real goals are to get rid of deadwood and make gov’t more efficient. He seems to like doing that. Greatly trimmed Twitter staff, runs Tesla in a way that extracts way more than usual
amt of weekly work from his engineers. In both cases I’m not at all sure he does a great job of setting up a lean mean efficient company, but he seems to think he does. So why wouldn’t he enjoy doing the same stuff to our gov’t, the biggest company of all?
If the goal were really to get rid of "deadwood", you would start by trying to understand which parts were or weren't working, not just blindly smashing everything in reach.
> What do you think his real goals are?
To fill the government with minions who are personally loyal to Musk over the US and will do whatever he says regardless of the law.
Yeah, you may be right. I don’t think I’m terribly perceptive about people who crave to become powerful because I have such a hard time empathizing with their craving. I totally get wanting admiration and money but power? — running an organization just sounds like hell to me, and the bigger the organization the worse it sounds.
> If the goal were really to get rid of “deadwood,” you would start by trying to understand which parts were or weren’t working, not just blindly smashing everything in reach.
I’m not sure that applies to Musk, though. The sources I followed who were commenting on what he did with Twitter thought he was doing a terrible job. While I don’t know enough about Twitter and how to run things like it to make my own judgments, their comments sounded valid, not like motivated reasoning. For instance someone commented on what a bad move it was to change the name to X — said Twitter was one of the best known brands in the world, why though away all that brand recognition. Others commented on how certain moves, such as allowing words like ‘nigger’ to be used in Tweets, made Twitter lose most of its classy advertisers, and forced it do make do with people selling bullshit stuff like do-it-yourself home facelifts and earwax removal gadgets. And some tech people talked about him firing people that kept different parts of the system running, and noted lots of new glitches in Twitter after bunches of people were fired. So unless I was following a biased bunch on the subject of Musk’s performance at Twitter, seems like fast, impulsive and sloppy is his characteristic style of revamping.
Sure Musk does a lot of dumb stuff, but I don't think you can rule out that his true goal is to reshape the government, especially since they actually say that sometimes.
I don't think any of the illegal-recipient countries could easily make a threat credible enough to convince significant numbers of illegals to self-deport. Corny TV ads aren't going to cut it
If it's only 10% of people getting deported, people are going to take their chances and stay here, because the conditions outside the country are significantly worse, and getting forcibly deported isn't a death sentence. However, the calculation changes if the deportation process has a significant casualty rate. With the way they're planning to do this, it's only a matter of time before casualties start getting reported. That'll be more effective than any campaign.
One of the things it will be effective at doing, is convincing a great many Americans that they made a mistake in voting for Donald Trump. I think you *vastly* overestimate how eager most Americans are to see immigrants bleed out and die in the streets, Even some of the hard MAGA base will probably start to defect if that becomes at all common.
Poe's law being a thing, I have to be clear on this: Is this just satire, or are you seriously suggesting that the proper treatment of illegal immigrants in the United States is that they should be concentrated in special camps where they "accidentally" die while e.g. being trucked to a different camp?
The Nazis actually didn't intend on a full scale genocide from the very start. One of their initial plans was actually to just deport them all... to Madagascar. Yes, really. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Madagascar_Plan But with the war, that plan fell apart, and we all know what happened next.
The issue is he's said a lot of zany things that started as "just a joke" or plausibly deniable as just a joke and then later became actual policy. Making non-MAGAs flip out and wonder about whether he's serious about each thing is a big part of the point. I'm sure you understand that.
I understand and approve; trump clearly learned a way to interface with the red tape, renaming an obama agency and putting elon in charge to cause chaos, if nessery to keep rival lawyers busy, it was a good move.
The first story of the Gordian Knot didnt involve a sword and is a far better parable, need to untangle it somehow.
Who the hell would pay you for that? The people who share your understanding don’t need you, and the people who don’t share your understanding are quite content to take him literally. Not to mention the fact that what credentials do you have to convince anyone that you understand him better?
"Indeed, Elon was such an indifferent student in South Africa that he had to start telling lies to his biographers about reading multiple Encyclopedia Britannica sets all the way through—multiple, mind you! All the way through!—as a child to try to hide a human-average intelligence and an utter disinterest in organized education."
"After he graduated from high school as an indifferent student, Elon first flamed out at University of Pretoria"
"...Queen’s University, where he once again flamed out without finishing."
"sometimes he admits the truth—that he left Penn without graduating (if you’re counting at home, the third school he flamed out at) and didn’t get his degree until years later when his investors pulled strings to make it happen under dubious circumstances"
"But Elon Musk never intended to go to Stanford, and never matriculated at Stanford."
Musk is not an evil genius. Musk is not even a genius. He is simply evil. The cult, which some people in the so-called "rationalist" community belong to, needs to end!
Obscene Starting Wealth + Zero Moral Scruples = extra 50 IQ points in the eyes of fans. Trump has proved it. Musk is proving it.
So after reading Deiseach's comment, I acknowledge that Abramson is not an inherently credible source. He's not the sort of man anyone should say "well SETH ABRAMSON said it" because apparently he's sloppy.
However, that doesn't mean everything in the article is wrong. It just means the article is not credible for verifying anything (hence I'm not re-linking it).
However However,
I still *personally* find the article useful for researching Musk's bad press (I'm not telling anyone to do this), since it can be difficult actually digging for it.
For example, wikipedia doesn't mention that he was replaced as CEO at Zip2, but Britannica does:
"In addition, Musk was replaced as CEO by a more experienced businessman, Richard Sorkin, but remained executive vice president and chief technology officer."
Wikipedia does mention his ousting from Paypal/X.com twice:
"The company's investors regarded Musk as inexperienced and replaced him with Intuit CEO Bill Harris by the end of the year."
"Within the merged company, Musk returned as CEO. Musk's preference for Microsoft software over Unix created a rift in the company and caused Thiel to resign.[70] Due to resulting technological issues and lack of a cohesive business model, the board ousted Musk and replaced him with Thiel in 2000."
So to conclude,
I personally think Musk has many negative qualities and is not as intelligent as people think. And part of me wants to keep going through the Seth Abramson article and independently verifying things. But I simply don't have the energy. It took a surprising amount of time to verify that Musk was removed as CEO from Zip2. Chatgpt "believed" this, but the wikipedia articles on Zip2 and on Musk were worded so as NOT to say it. And then I found Britannica. Shrug.
For me, Musk's success is simply the result of someone who had the perfect combination of: obsessive focus on wealth (most billionaires seem to have this, or develop it along the way of the companies they build), extreme tolerance for risk and an ability to ignore enormous hurdles standing in his way.
I have no idea what his technical aptitudes are - his politics are now so unpopular that most of the voices online cannot admit anything positive about him. I've variously read people's accounts that he has no idea what he's talking about, and that he knows a surprising amount about aeronautics and computer science.
I think it's fair to simply look at outcomes: yes he was born to a rich family. But we have plenty of rich kids who never grow up to this level of influence. Ignoring his recent political turn, he did two really impressive things: 1) he started a CAR company in America and (imo) fast forwarded the inevitable electric car era by decades, and 2) began the era of private space flight companies.
SpaceX is a seriously impressive company - I don't think many would imagine in such a short time that they could usurp NASA's role in developing and building the next generation of space flight vehicles, but here we are. Tesla has benefitted enormously from Musk's cult of personality, and if all he had done was Tesla you could chalk it up to a fluke, but doing it twice in two very regulation-heavy industries, in America, is no accident.
It's unfortunate that the erratic qualities that seemingly power his ability to do these impressive things also seems to push him to political extremes that ultimately erode the American civil fabric.
I really don’t care whether he is genius or not. The big problem with him in his DOGE role is that he has the emotional maturity and empathy of a 10 year old boy. I suppose this would put him a couple years ahead of his nominal boss though.
Okay, I went to read that linked Seth Abramson Substack about Musk.
You expect me to believe this guy is coming with the truth, unbiased and with no axes to grind? I see the Kitty Kelly School of Biography is still going strong, and since this guy has a book to sell, whipping up controversy is more likely to get him publicity than "yeah, Musk is an okay guy".
"I’ve been a Musk biographer for two years now. In that time I’ve published hundreds and hundreds of pages of professionally researched content about the man—well over a book’s worth—here at Proof, an independent media outlet at Substack that ranks as a Top 25 U.S. Politics substack worldwide.
The longest report that I’ve published about Elon Musk so far is this one (see also the image-link below). It’s a novella in and of itself, despite being just one of many fully sourced reports on Musk authored by a bestselling historian and biographer whose focus before now was the political career—and political scandals—of Donald Trump."
Wowzers! So, uh, who is this famous and bestselling historian and biographer who writes for a Substack that ranks as one of the Top 25 US Politics substacks *in the world*? Because I've never heard of him, though that may be because I live under a rock.
Take it away, Wikipedia mon amour:
"Seth Abramson (born October 31, 1976) is an American professor, attorney, author, political columnist, and poet." They neglect to mention here that he's also a musician, which is mentioned later in the article. (I also get the impression that Seth himself may have written the article, but maybe I'm just being mean and paranoid).
He also says the linked article is "written by an Elon Musk biographer and based on OSINT research", and by "OSINT research", he seems to mean cut'n'paste jobs - look up everything written and published online or in the media, copy it all into one book.
The Daily Kos, an outlet for which I would not be carrying the banner, has an article from 2021 that is less than laudatory of Mr (formerly Prof?) Abramson:
"We rightly mock and deride right-wing conspiracy theorists and conservative media outlets for delivering what their hungry masses want to hear instead of providing facts, truth and reality.
I have long crusaded here against our own versions of these peddlers of spun garbage— the propagandists who sensationalize, contort and combine facts into conspiracies and false narratives.
...Which brings me to serial fabulist Seth Abramson. I have railed against Abramson here in the past (including as recently as December 18, 2020) for the reasons I cite, above. Nearly every Abramson “mega-tweetstorm” contains a kernel of truth that is then spun into some conspiracy or upcoming event that is certain to occur, according to his telling.
As I have noted in previous pieces about Abramson, someone who cranks out a dozen 60-100+ tweet “mega-tweetstorms” a week is bound to get something right once in every 30 tries just by virtue of his overwhelming output (a point I made, satirically, in my own “mega-twitstorm” in October 2017). But he is by no means a journalist, nor is he an expert in any sense of the word. There are many writers here who are much better journalists and much more knowledgeable subject matter experts (especially on law) than Seth Abramson who has somehow managed to garner nearly a million followers on Twitter — while peddling huge, steaming mounds of dung.
Abramson did receive a law degree and for a period was a practicing lawyer, but as he started drawing a crowd during the Russian investigation, his Twitter bio described him as being a “law professor.” He was not, and never has been, any such thing, and when I and others pointed it out, his claimed law professor credential disappeared.
...Abramson’s particular form of mendacity has been taken apart numerous times by people who do actual reporting for a living, including McKay Coppins in The Atlantic, Jacob Weindling in Paste, and and Colin Dickey in The New Republic."
Hmmm. Sorry, Jamie Fisher, but Abramson is looking less and less like a credible source to me, but maybe that's just me. Let me finish with this nugget from his Substack article:
"For instance, Elon and Kimbal used to engage in full-on brawls—brawls that produced blood and even hospitalization—inside the office. Not just in the office, but in front of employees. To repeat: open, barroom-style brawls; in the office; in front of co-workers; between two men who were supposed to be leading that office responsibly and sagely."
Clearly our boy Seth was never an Oasis fan, brotherly murder attempts are par for the course there 😀
There are many people (Not as a percentage, but absolutely) who started as rich as Elon, fewer but still many without moral scruples, but only one of them is the richest man in the world. Elons starting wealth, and the average current wealth of others with such a start, are closer to the average american than to Elons current wealth. If he has no special talent, and noone whos rich, evil, *and* talented has overtaken him, talent propably just doesnt exist or doesnt matter in any way. It would be misleading to say his intelligence is average, because intelligence would be bullshit.
More generally, this idea that you can succeed *just* by being evil is crazy. Theres way more people willing to be evil for riches, than actual rich people. And I mean, if you were one of the top dogs, would you want it to work that way? Where lots of not-quite-top-tiers can climb up, above *you* even, just by deciding to be evil? Nah youd nip that in the bud.
Well, he obviously is a genius, just not in the fields where he claims it. He's an expert manipulator and a brilliant conman, he seems to have a talent for finding and hiring genuinely talented people, and he's smart enough to fake being smart in a way that's convincing to some genuinely smart people.
When it comes to actual engineering, though, he's near-peak Dunning-Kruger. His proposed hyperloop was a fractal arrangement of engineering nightmares, and his comment "It's a tube with an airhockey table! It's not that hard!" shows that he's either a genius engineer who solves all of those problems with ease, or a moron who doesn't even grasp the difficulties, or a bullshit artist who doesn't care. We can exclude the first option by looking at how far the Hyperloop got.
And don't get me started on sending people to Mars by 2022.
A lot of engineering decisions behind his Mars rocket, including the stainless steel build that was pooh-pooed by onlookers at the time, now are paying off. Most SpaceX employees attest to him being knowledgeable about the subject matter and willing to work hands on to solve whatever pressing problems are at hand.
I wouldn't trust anything people around him say, good or bad. It's best to look at objective facts (and FWIW I agree that SpaceX is objectively a big success, which implies that Musk did SOMETHING right there). I'm also confident that his employees would swear he walks on water regardless of reality.
I am not one of Elon Musk's employees. I am one of the people that NASA and the USAF pay to, among other things, watch over SpaceX's rocket-building activities and make sure they aren't going to explode while carrying NASA astronauts or vital national-security payloads. I'm also two degrees of separation from Gwynne Shotwell, Tom Mueller, and some of SpaceX's other top people.
The engineering of Elon's space vehicles is the work of brilliant people under brilliant leadership, and at least part of that is coming from Elon Musk himself. He is not even close to omnicompetent, as I think I've made clear elsewhere, Even within the realm of spaceflight, there are gaps in his knowledge. But he is legitimately a Rocket Scientist, and a very good one, not some midwit Mr. Moneybags who has to be kept away from the real work.
SpaceX actually listens when we give them advice on how to make their rockets substantially less explodey. Certain other contractors I probably shouldn't name, not so much.
And, as blank notes, the rockets SpaceX sells to paying customers, have I think the best safety record in the industry at this point.
Can people who think Musk is low-IQ or average-IQ explain what evidence would convince them otherwise?
My take on Musk is that he's a high-IQ guy who really didn't like his son becoming transgender and overdosed on redpills as a result. There are a number of people like that in this space.
I used to believe he was high-IQ, but after years of watching him say and do idiotic things, I no longer do.
So, it's not so much "evidence to convince me otherwise" as absence of evidence - specifically, absence of the many many publically visible behaviours that changed my mind - would have let me keep my initial impression.
High IQ does not make you immune against being an idiot. It makes you a more sophisticated kind of an idiot, and sometimes gives you a better chance to save yourself from the consequences of your idiocy.
Intelligence is necessary but not sufficient for rationality.
Anyway, this seems like a red herring. If people believe that someone is *wrong*, they should say so. Without having to discuss their intelligence or whatever.
What about having a high intelligence prevents people from saying or doing stupid stuff? Plenty of smart high school kids get into drugs and burn out. Lots of smart people have scandals that ruin their lives, often doing things (embezzlement, affairs) that average or even dumb people recognize as dumb.
I despise the present-day Musk. However, the paragraph on SpaceX in the linked comment is so flat out wrong, confused, ignorant, and a distortion of reality, that I wouldn't believe one word in the rest of that comment. If its author said that the sky is blue, I'd go outside to check.
Gathering the necessary sort of evidence sounds nearly impossible. Generally a smart person can easily convince me they're smart over the course of a 30 or 40 minute conversation, if it's the right conversation. But having a conversation with a high-profile public figure isn't really an option. With is wealth and at this remove, everything we're going to be seeing is image management, and thus inherently untrustworthy[1].
FWIW I place reasonably high credence on the hypthesis that Musk is a talented engineer, at least within some domains. I'm much more skeptical that he has the sort of cross-domain competence he seems to think he has.
[1] Of course, a lot of the negative things one hears are going to be likewise untrustworthy.
I think Musk is largely a midwit con-man, but that article is just unhinged. Oh no, Musk is conservative! Oh no, he LIED about that fact to be socially accepted in liberal California! Oh no he was a business opportunist and BS'ed his way to getting his lousy company acquired!
> [South Africa] had an emerging highly politically engaged Black population and emerging Black political class in the 1980s that would, in the 1990s, become a Black government Errol believed illegitimate and (yes, due to race) incompetent
I mean, doesn't the last 20 years simply vindicate that view? South Africa is collapsing in every measurable way and that's directly downstream of incompetent leadership. The black majority was handed a modern first-world economy and have flown it straight into the ground. In 30 years it will be politically and economically indistinguishable from every other sub-Saharan country. How do YOU explain that?
Trying to tar Musk by association with his father is all part of the absurdity. By many accounts, he didn't get on well with his father/was neglected. But the argument here is "his dad was an average white South African who had views on race that are repugnant to us, this is evil, so Elon is evil too because well his dad mumble mumble".
As to Musk's views, I think this is a case of the Overton Window shifting. I think that when he started out, he was within the general socially liberal worldview, but things kept swimming to the left and he didn't move with them*, then he got attacked for things and that pushed him more to the right, and here we are today.
*See Graham Linehan, someone for whom I have not a shred of sympathy and just cackle darkly at his travails in his progress from 'feted and lauded for standing up to hidebound priestridden Ireland with his liberal views and satirical comedy**' to 'beyond the pale transphobe boo hiss boo'. Andrew Sullivan had something of the same trajectory, though much milder: he was the gay guy who didn't frighten the conservative horses in the fight for same-sex marriage, but now he's on the wrong side of the trans rights debate.
**Notwithstanding his attempts to be a media darling, "Father Ted" is genuinely funny because it does get at a lot of Irish social attitudes of the time. Fr. Noel Furlong and the youth group is something a lot of us lived through as teenagers/young adults and religion in school 😀 I believe the American Protestant version is the youth pastor?
Google around some more, South Africa is a disaster. They have capital controls to prevent people leaving and taking their wealth with them, rampant crime, crumbling infrastructure, and a stagnant economy. Plus just last month the government announced their intention to nationalize farmland: trampling property rights is never a good sign.
Here are several articles. There is widespread consensus that SA is collapsing.
"The economy has gone backward over the past decade, evidenced by a sharp fall in living standards. According to the World Bank, gross domestic product per capita has fallen from a peak in 2011, leaving the average South African 23% poorer."
"Concluding a two-year investigation, researchers at Harvard Kennedy School’s Growth Lab have issued a stark diagnosis of the “collapsing state capacity” in South Africa after decades of policy failures, mismanagement, and patronage, with painful consequences for millions of poor, jobless people. "
"The centre of Johannesburg was once an economic hub with abundant green spaces. But over the last two decades, the South African city centre has become known for crime, dumped waste, broken infrastructure and restrictions on water and electricity."
"The end of Apartheid in South Africa brought a surge of hope for a brighter future. But the ANC, the party that liberated the Black majority from oppression, has transformed the country into a swamp of corruption, mismanagement and despair. Some are trying to turn things around."
Mallard showed that SA's economic position has declined significantly since the end of Apartheid. You can try to blame structural factors under Apartheid that the subsequent governments somehow failed to arrest, but that excuse grows increasingly absurd over time.
I suspect that our political sympathies are similar, but at some point, you have to open your eyes to reality and call a spade a spade.
Do you realize you are a part of the reason why Trump is currently a president?
Words like "views are in-line with" give me some Soviet vibes. Those times when people needed to publicly declare that something is wrong, without actually knowing enough about it to explain why it is wrong, so they just called it "a bourgeois decadent thought" or something like that.
'Scientific Racism' is an incoherent concept: science is empirical while racism is normative. Political equality of the races is a moral question which is orthogonal to empirical fact. It's a mistake for you to tie your moral views to empirical realities which may come out differently than you expect.
I am not racist and have said nothing that can reasonably be construed that way. Intelligence differences between ethnic groups is an empirical reality. I can maintain a commitment to political and moral equality in the face of that reality. Can you? If not, why not? And if so then why are you so threatened by psychometric realities?
Again I would suggest to you that you're a victim of trapped priors. I wish you the best of luck in finding your way out of the ideological corner that you've backed yourself into. It's an empty virtue that denies moral consideration to people less intelligent than oneself. I recommend that you try to be more broad-minded.
Moral commitments and empirical claims are not always “orthogonal.” If someone repeatedly misrepresents or cherry-picks empirical data to defend an ideology that portrays certain groups as inherently “less intelligent,” that is precisely how racism tries to cloak itself in the mantle of “objective science.”
The mainstream scientific consensus rejects deterministic “race-based intelligence” claims. The vast majority of psychologists, geneticists, and anthropologists view “race” as a social construct with extremely complex—and often minimal—biological underpinnings. In fact, there is typically more genetic diversity within a given racial or ethnic group than between groups.
Per the Flynn Effect... IQ scores across entire populations can change significantly in a single generation, indicating that differences once attributed to “biology” can shift with new social, educational, or economic conditions. This further undermines simplistic claims about innate “racial” intelligence.
“Group differences” in test results do not prove innate differences. When average IQ or achievement test scores differ across groups, a large body of research shows that systemic and environmental factors (e.g., historical discrimination, neighborhood resources, quality of schooling, exposure to environmental toxins, nutritional differences, access to early childhood programs, etc.) contribute powerfully to these gaps.
Researchers have identified numerous confounding variables—including socio-economic status, educational inequality, stereotype threat, test bias, language barriers, historical discrimination, and more—that shape outcomes. Ignoring these is either naive or deliberately misleading.
Far from “trapped priors,” it is robust scientific consensus that there is no definitive evidence tying inherent racial group differences to intelligence. The burden of proof rests on those making strong, biologically determinist claims—and historically, that burden has never been met with credible data free of confounds.
Your claim of “not being racist” while asserting broad, essentialized differences is a hallmark of “scientific racism”: “I’m not saying these people shouldn’t have rights, just that they’re less capable by nature. But I am still moral!” Such a stance often morphs into paternalism or the support of policies that entrench inequality.
Then how does 23andMe work? If there aren't stable genetic associations with geographic origins then how did they accurately describe my heritage from a saliva sample?
>there is typically more genetic diversity within a given racial or ethnic group than between groups.
That's true but ignores the fact that those differences have correlations which cluster according to ancestry. As an illustration of this principle, consider the facial dimensions of a person's face (eye distance, nose size, etc). There is more variation of those parameters WITHIN genders than BETWEEN genders, yet that doesn't negate the existence of masculine and feminine facial characteristics. The correlations matter, which is why genomes cluster along familiar lines when dimensionality reductions are performed:
"Seventy-one experts rated possible causes of cross-national differences in cognitive ability based on psychometric IQs and student assessment studies (e.g., PISA, PIRLS, TIMSS). Genes were rated as the most important cause"
85% of intelligence researchers believe that the black-white IQ gap is at least partially genetic.
>a large body of research shows that systemic and environmental factors contribute powerfully to these gaps
Oh? Why don't racial gaps close at high SES, then? Why haven't they closed over a century in which blacks' environment has improved radically? And why does the current consensus put the heritability of IQ between 50% and 80%? Here's a meta-analysis that puts the heritability of adult IQ between 0.8 and 0.9:
"We estimated the proportions of the variance in IQ attributable to environmentally mediated effects .. to be .01. ... Together, these findings provide further evidence for the predominance of genetic influences on adult intelligence over any other systematic source of variation."
"The results show that the heritability of IQ reaches an asymptote at about 0.80 at 18-20 years of age and continuing at that level well into adulthood. In the aggregate, the studies also confirm that shared environmental influence decreases across age, approximating about 0.10 at 18-20 years of age"
>Per the Flynn Effect... IQ scores across entire populations can change significantly in a single generation,
The Flynn Effect isn't measure invariant and so doesn't represent a true intelligence gain. It's concentrated in spatiovisual skills and so could represent the population effects of watching TV or driving, though there's no consensus.
>Such a stance often morphs into paternalism or the support of policies that entrench inequality.
And the opposite stance has led to anti-meritocratic DEI policies, oppressive anti-intellectual academic environments (shouting down speakers, firing or pressuring IQ researchers, sharply ideological echo chambers, etc), and a 2020 race riot that caused billions in damage and led to tens of thousands of lost lives in the homicide surge that followed the post-George Floyd de-policing efforts. The US has been pouring billions of dollars into closing educational race gaps for 60+ years and nothing has ever made any substantive difference. That's because the origin of those gaps is primarily genetic and not environmental. It's time to stop faith-based educational initiatives because they simply don't work.
Look, the public dialogue about this stuff is just a mess. A lot of ideological commitments ride on this issue and people are afraid to be honest because they don't want to be canceled, lose their job, offend their friends, etc. Add the fact that sociological data is always messy and you're not going to be able to evaluate the consensus by yourself: there are always outlier studies so you can make the literature say whatever you want if you try hard enough.
So you really have to figure it out for yourself: absolutely no public authority can be trusted not to have a political agenda. It's not that hard, just use some common sense. The same sociological patterns repeat everywhere all the time. If it's all environmental then why isn't there an environment (anywhere, ever) where blacks outperform? If racism is the answer then why isn't Africa better off since there are many fewer whites there to oppress the black population? (And why were they hunting with spears while Europeans were sailing around the world and inventing calculus? Why didn't Africans ever invent a writing system? Nearly everyone else did. Is that because of racism too?) If poverty is the cause then why don't wealthy blacks have the same IQs as wealthy whites? And why do the offspring of black parents regress to a different population IQ than the offspring of white parents, and why is that IQ magically the same as that measured by IQ tests? Seriously, if you can explain that by purely environmental reasoning then my hat's off to you.
Recent scientific literature pertaining to IQ and ethnicity finds, over and over again, strong correlation between IQ and ethnic groups that can only suggest a strong hereditable component to IQ. 'Race' is more imprecise than strongly defined ethnicity, but there are also studies showing this heritable IQ component by race. There are also non hereditable components to IQ, this does not make the hereditable part disappear. To deny that would be.. unscientific!
>Researchers have identified numerous confounding variables—including socio-economic status, educational inequality, stereotype threat, test bias, language barriers, historical discrimination, and more—that shape outcomes. Ignoring these is either naive or deliberately misleading.
I don't think even the most terminally online ACX dwellers have enough spare time to disabuse you of your delusions
I'm not sure if you're brand new here but I think you might be playing to a different crowd from the one you're expecting.
Showing up in the ACX comment section and trying to shame HBD types is like showing up at a Scissor Sisters concert and shouting out "HEY I THINK THE GUY NEXT TO ME MIGHT BE GAY"
What? Surely not! At a wholesome entertainment by a talented and amusing group of popular music performers?
This person upholding "IQ test results no meaning" is the same person quoting "Musk only 100-110 IQ" to make us all agree that means he must be too stupid to achieve success in business by his own efforts.
Are you inviting me to state a opinion so you can attempt to shame me?
Why; I must accept. Yes I believe race is real. Please cyber stalk me and inform the admin over of my fedi account, my programming discord, or slack job hunting sever; each and everyone of them will find it amusing.
You aint going to shame me out of a belief; try arguments.
This is what has been pointed out over and over again in the wake of Harris' failed campaign: "if we just insult them *harder* this time, surely the idiots will all change their minds and agree with us!" is not working, has not worked, and will not work.
"Why are these fools and evildoers all voting for Drumpf, don't they realise that we are the good guys?" Jamie Fisher is just going to try harder to make us realise we are all reprobates and totally depraved, if he only yells at us loud enough surely it'll work this time!
"a human-average intelligence and an utter disinterest in organized education"
Love your sneering at average humans with snippets like this, Jamie. I'm only 'human-average' intelligence and I never went to college, so I suppose that makes me uneducated and, indeed, evil.
Nice!
So if Musk is really only as smart as the dumb average person, and yet he managed to wangle family money into even greater money, that means - what? People mock Trump for not being as rich as he claims by saying he only got his start with his dad's money and didn't manage to grow that fortune. Now they're trying to mock Musk for only getting his start with his dad's money *and* he grew that fortune.
I didn't like Musk back in the day when everyone was fawning over him, but this is why the Democrats lost the election and are on track to lose in 2028. "Only as smart as the average person, doesn't have a real college degree, let's all jeer and sneer about that".
You really are sounding like the meme of "why won't you stupid dumb ignorant rednecks listen to us, we are the people who are smart and know better, we're the compassionate caring ones, you morons".
Here's the thing, Jamie: you quoted all that to hammer home your point about "Elon is evil! Eeeeevil! Ebil Elon!"
Nate Silver right now has a post up about the same thing - is Musk smart or not? - and he manages to make his points without sneering, jeering, accusations of EBIL ELON EBIL EBIL EBIL! or scoffing about "now we on here are all so smart, so speaking of 'average human intelligence' is an appeal to our snobbery about 'heh 90IQ normie idiot' in the name of decrying Musk".
"So, it’s important to avoid two pitfalls when encountering people with spiky intelligence. Namely, neither their worst traits nor their best ones tell the whole story:
- That Elon is highly intelligent in several ways does not mean that everything he does is brilliant. Some things he does are exceptionally dumb or dangerous — and we shouldn’t make excuses for these or pretend that it’s all part of some master plan.
- But likewise, it’s absurd to suggest that Elon isn’t brilliant in many respects just because he isn’t in others. And if he has merely very good SAT scores, I don’t care; he’s demonstrated his intelligence through his accomplishments. This is a bit like criticizing Tom Brady because he had mediocre ratings in the NFL combine. The SAT may be correlated with general intelligence, but it’s an imperfect proxy for it, and test-taking skills like figuring out verbal analogies aren’t too important on their own."
When you quote sniffy bits about "he's not smart, he's only average" and "he didn't get rich himself, he only inherited daddy money" and "he flunked out of college", you are not appealing to the ordinary person (like me). You're saying "people who didn't go to college and are average intelligence are dum-dums who couldn't possibly succeed on their own merits and hard work, and probably inclined to be swayed to EEEEVILNESS to boot". Speaking as the average moron in the street, gee thanks Jamie, you have now won me over with your unimpeachable arguments so I should now join in the chorus of EBIL ELON EBIL ELON EBIL ELON.
If Musk had maintained "why yes, anyone who disagrees with you is indeed a nazi fascist white supremacist spreading misinformation and hate speech, so I'll ban them off Twitter", all the havering over "he's evil, evil I tell you!" would never have gotten off the ground.
I get it: you don't like his politics. Maybe you've even convinced yourself he *is* wicked and EEEEEVIL. But there are a lot of people whose politics I disagree with, whose views I find opposed to my own, but I don't go around calling them evil. If I did that on here, I'd be calling everyone from Peter Singer to Richard Dawkins to Richard Hanania to a few more EEEEEVIL. Heck, I haven't even called Richard Lynn evil, and I wouldn't weep salt tears if I heard he fell out a window!
(What is it about guys called Richard, or is it just me?)
It's a bizarre thing to want to believe, contrary to all evidence, that people who disagree with you don't have any good properties, even the ones that they obviously do have. Elon Musk isn't actually smart. Donald Trump isn't actually rich. Taylor Swift isn't good looking and is bad at singing.
Even if you disregard all his impressive achievements and look at the boring commonplace ones that are easy to compare to those of others, you'd say that he's a guy with a 1400 SAT (top 7%) who got admitted to a PhD program at Stanford. Those factors alone are definitely "evidence of an IQ above 110".
> It's a bizarre thing to want to believe, contrary to all evidence, that people who disagree with you don't have any good properties, even the ones that they obviously do have.
I think it's a Just World fallacy thing. If Elon is evil, then it's karmicly perverse that "the universe is rewarding" that evil by endowing him with positive properties. Safer on the psyche to believe that he actually does not have those positive properties than it is to believe that the world is so cosmically unfair.
I'm guilty of this too in non-Elon cases; I like him, so it doesn't take me a bucket of cognitive dissonance to believe he's a genius. So I do not condemn, I merely diagnose.
I am anti-Elon (at least current Elon, I wish he'd have stuck to building rockets instead of turning his considerable talents to destroying the American government and subverting the constitutional order like a real-life supervillain) and I agree with your post.
This isn't about fairness or whiny-ness. This is about a man who has built his reputation, power and absurd stock-valuation on the "Real Life Iron Man" mythos. EVERYONE thinks this guy's a genius. It's been his family's lifelong campaign. I remember a documentary from over 15 years ago about Nikolai Tesla that ended with........... and now there's this great company named Tesla... blah blah blah... Elon Musk.
And this STUPIDITY on top of STUPIDITY ... his followers' stupidity... HIS stupidity... DOGE's stupidity... is causing real-life harm. Today. Now.
I didn't think Musk was a genius back in the days when everyone was kissing his feet, I thought he made a fool of himself over the Thai cave affair, and I wasn't impressed with the notion that he was going to be the technocratic saviour.
But by the same token, I have not shifted my views because of "oh no he didn't ban the nazis like we demanded" to think of him as worse than he is, any more than I thought he was better than he is in the days of stunts like sending a Tesla into orbit.
What about the incident where he was caught lying about playing video games? Even apart from politics, my opinion of him was pretty low due to the Thai cave affair and so on, but I still didn't think he'd just straight out lie for the sake of his ego like that.
It's not like this is even a gotcha or something. This is something Elon went out of his way to do. Nobody expects people who are CEOs of six companies to also spend all day grinding videogames. The fact that Musk decided to pretend to do that anyway, even though it's a weird brag and he was guaranteed to get caught, is entirely on him.
It's not past-tense, he is literally continuing to do that (regarding several leading video games) right now, as in this week. Which is sort of interesting actually.
I'm a bit of a gamer, so is one of my siblings. My eldest child is more of one (a past official world champion of a particular absurdly-complex modern tabletop game), and his circle of friends includes several serious online gamers. I was just hanging with him this past weekend and he was talking about Musk's self-identified logins continuing to be regularly spotted in Diablo IV and a couple other current online hit games -- _now_. During the same days and hours that he's been visibly invading agency offices in DC, attending cabinet meetings of which he's not legally a member, shit-posting on X for hours at a time, etc.
These are competitive online games having millions of active, smart, obsessive players. They require frankly-insane levels of daily commitment/focus in order to attain or maintain global high rankings; serious players consider a 5-hour session to be just a tuneup for their regular 10 or 12 or more hour sessions of elite competitive play.
Musk is obviously paying such people to play for him and he's continuing to do so right now. It seems impossible that he wouldn't be aware that he's become a running joke among the regular players of those games, and he obviously knows the facts of himself as a gamer.
I assume then that he simply doesn't care about any of that; and views being able to keep making the false brag as in some way more important or satisfying.
Is that all this is or is there some more-rational chess move still at work with the faked gaming excellence?
Right, so this is all just sounds like motivated reasoning. You (and the guy originally quoted) disagree with Elon's political actions therefore you feel like you need to work backwards to prove he's not actually smart. You certainly didn't start from a point of "I wonder what Elon Musk's IQ is... let's work from publicly available data to see if we can estimate it".
Here's a question. Suppose someone comes forth with really strong evidence that Elon Musk has a fairly high IQ... let's say top 5% but not top 1%. Suppose we get his academic transcripts from Penn and they show mostly As and the occasional B. Suppose we get a copy of an IQ test he took as a child and it says, say, 130.
Is this going to change your mind about anything important? Are you going to suddenly decide you agree with him on anything? Of course not, and nor should it. Smart people are wrong all the time. No matter how smart you are, you're almost certainly not smarter than all the people who disagree with you.
I don't see why anyone would want to waste their time arguing that Elon Musk is dumb, when they could simply be arguing that Elon Musk is wrong. The former is a doomed losing battle with a whole lot of evidence stacked up against you about something ultimately irrelevant. The second one, which is what you _actually_ care about, is the one you might be right about.
You're not exactly helping your case by conflating self-branding and stupidity and harmfulness (to federal workers' sinecures?) all together here. Just because he's one doesn't mean he's the others (indeed, we would expect a stupid person to be LESS good at branding and harmfulness than a clever one). The fact that you're determined to connect them all in one big ball of inseparable boo-lights rather activates my almonds.
I read the piece in the OP. It makes a fair case that Elon is a bit of a retroactive self-promoter, and it makes the case that he's a bit of a beneficiary of daddy's money. It doesn't make the case that he's a dumbass. Indeed, many people are self-promoting daddys-money recipients, but I don't see all the other trust fund kiddies catching rocketships in a grapple.
keep reading the article I posted. do I need to systematically copy-and-paste every "clarification" about every "achievement" people claim about this guy?
And why trust his SAT scores? What is the source? This is the same guy who claims to have read Britannica multiple times. There is much much more documented evidence of his incessant lying about his achievements than anything real.
Yeah he's no genius but I would bet anything he's got 20 IQ points on Kamala. He got into a Stanford STEM PhD program and she went to Howard. Musk also never whored around with Montel Williams. He is comprehensively a higher class of person than your most recent Presidential nominee so settle down.
Also, the evidence suggests that Musk got into Stanford via a smokescreen of "transfers and connections with a professor", not via academic achievement. And of course, he never actually attended.
Rankings for Howard as a national university? In 2024 it was ranked No. 86, an improvement of 29 points (so formerly ranked No. 115); a slight drop from 2020 when it was ranked No. 80:
"Harris then attended the University of California, Hastings College of the Law in San Francisco, where she served as president of its chapter of the Black Law Students Association. She graduated with a Juris Doctor in 1989."
How does UC Hastings stack up against Stanford? I have no idea. I get the impression Stanford has a better reputation, but that could all be a smokescreen (to use your phrasing). Here's a website that compares law schools:
7.3% acceptance rate to Stanford Law versus 30.9% acceptance rate to Hastings (and it's not because "oh Stanford is all white male", if you look at the Environment tag they are fairly equal on "women and racially or ethnically minoritized" demographics).
She failed the bar exam on her first try but passed on her second. That's not to say she's stupid, it's a tough exam!
What her GPA was or what level of degree she obtained from Howard doesn't seem to be readily available online, so it's hard to compare (e.g. you can often look up did a particular British politician get a first, a second, etc. class degree).
I researched a little just now out of morbid curiosity. Average total SAT score at Howard is 1050, which is 58th percentile among all US high school students (not just those who applied to college). SAT score is not a terrible proxy for IQ, and an IQ in the 58th percentile would be a bit above the average of 100, say 105 or so. I believe the IQ Wanda named was 90.
> So that other readers are aware. The above commenter's views are aligned with Scientific Racism.
Please try to avoid this "point and screech" style of argument in the future. The disagreement between you and Wanda is a purely factual one. In such a dispute, moralizing and grandstanding is a poor substitute for evidence and argument.
It's always amusing to see new commenters trying the "throw mud and see if it sticks" approach on here. The Reign of Terror has hardened the rest of us to be civil and not swap insults!
Fine, well then let's disregard the SAT as well! Let's look at a guy that we know absolutely nothing about except the single data point that in 1995 he was accepted to a PhD program in Materials Science at Stanford. Did that happen?
Who cares what his IQ is? There are multiple independent accounts from engineers who worked with/for him describing him as a brilliant engineer, and I don't see a good reason to believe that all these people conspired to lie about it.
Why is so hard to see that more than one thing can be true: yes, he at least was a brilliant engineer, and yes, he's an asshole, and yes, now he's got obsessed with politics in the same way he used to be obsessed with rocket science?
Obsessing over his IQ and what he did in school is a distraction.
IMO, the personal accounts of his employees are far less reliable than verifiable measures like SATs or college applications (assuming those are verified).
Nope, not for someone who has a long history of having done stuff. I don't see how his SATs or college applications are relevant when we know already what he is.
I just don't understand this urge to say "aha, Elon is actually stupid, his SATs were mediocre". Would you be surprised if his SATs were mediocre because he was obsessively reading about rocket science?
I can give you myself as an example. My grades were above average, but nothing special, neither any SATs or other tests. Nothing in any formal measures would stand out.
I went on to have a long a hugely successful engineering career. I have dozens of patents in a wide variety of technologies. Chips with technologies I was a key inventor in shipped in the billions, maybe tens of billions units by now. My GPA or whatever is utterly useless as a measure of whatever you want to call this... "intelligence" I guess? You'd look at my GPA and say, well, this guy clearly isn't all this bright, and my employer, and anyone I ever worked with, would be like, you're kidding, right?
Conservatives for one. Tech bros for another. "Rationalists" for still another (or I should say "members of an online community who have co-opted the term Rationalism").
<Conservatives for one. Tech bros for another. "Rationalists" for still another (or I should say "members of an online community who have co-opted the term Rationalism").
Oh pooh, Jamie. We argue about IQ here all the time. There's actually a post on this thread where someone makes a sniggering remark about "IQ fetishists." And that person, as well as I, have had a lot to say about the limitations of IQ as a measure of talent and competence. Even *within the thread you started* you have people expressing skepticism about IQ: 1123581321, Deiseach.
Look at how the last exchange went: A frequent poster here, 1123581321, so presumably a rationalist by your standards, says "eh, who cares about his IQ." You angrily respond to a member of this group who shows disinterest in IQ by telling them angrily that this damn group takes IQ very seriously indeed.
Do you need any better evidence that you have stopped perceiving people here accurately?
And besides, Jamie, you started off sounding pretty committed yourself to the idea that IQ is a good measure of competence and talent: You led with a quoted view that somebody who dropped out of undergrad several times and got into Stanford PhD only by pulling strings probably has an IQ of 100-110. What about that?
And by the way, I don't think the history you recount gives much info about the subject's intelligence. The person could have a big problem with authority, or be brilliant and have a powerful need to learn things his own way, or be bipolar, or be wired and wacked out on drugs, for instance.
“I don’t find IQ to be a valuable measure,” he also clarified. “I introduced the term to this conversation because it’s used by *you fans* as some sort of supposed proof of Musk’s intelligence—though none of you have any proof whatsoever of any IQ test the man’s ever taken.”
(Seth Abramson's quote following the first quote)
Personally, I don't care to even bother expressing my own stance on IQ. AND IQ ITSELF NOT ABRAMSON'S POINT... His point is that Musk's Cult is built around his supposed genius... WHICH HE DEMONSTRABLY LACKS... just another failing-upwards, dark-triad, started-on-third-base fraudster.
Where have we seen this before..... in the White House.......
Well, OK. If you put up a post leading with an unusual idea about somebody famous's IQ, you'll probably get a lot of responses about IQ. But I get that your main point is that Musk is evil and the cult of Musk adoration Must Die. You seem to think Musk adoration is a big thing among Rationalists, but I don't hear anyone expressing anything like adoration. Some people have mentioned evidence that he's at least bright, but most also qualify by adding that he's an asshole, he's got the dark triad, etc. You seem not to have found a nest of Musk adorers, so what is it that you want in response to your post?
Also, regarding "Scientific Racism": You don't need to explain to people here what is generally meant by the term. But it seems to me you want people to participate in canceling the poster whose remarks you see as belonging to that school of thought. You highlight what the poster said, and you come across like Donald Sutherland in Invasion of the Body Snatchers: https://imgur.com/a/lxmp31U. We don't really do cancelation here, at least not for having views a bunch of us disagree with.
I have the feeling that you are looking for an echo chamber. We ain't it. IMO that's a good thing.
While I'm at it, I think Jamie Fisher is trying to use "racism" as the stoplight it is in general online social media - oh no, he/she/they/xe accused me of being a racist, I must immediately cringe and cower and grovel with apologies lest I be stoned to death by everyone who will pile on and pass around the message that I am a racist! (I mean, 'context information: this user is a racist'? that's way too much like a parody of a progressive college student protest).
As you say, we ain't it. Boo words like "racist", "fascist" and so on are not enough to tar and feather someone on here, you have to construct some kind of argument as to why the other person needs to be run out of town on a rail.
Ok so what? Why do you care what other people think? Why is it so important to show that aha! Musk has low IQ? What, starlink satellites will suddenly drop off the sky? Musk will hung his head in shame and stop wrecking things? Trump will fire him? Teslas will spontaneously combust?
Well, Starlink satellites are regularly de-orbiting and burning up every day and there are serious questions about the environmental effects of this retirement plan. I think knowledge about Musk's intelligence, to the extent that it is reliable, may help the public assess whether his strange and destructive decisions are a genius-level form of 4-d chess that will help humanity as a whole, a sophisticated grift that primarily serves himself and his personal interests, or a bumbling and short-sighted extreme version of failing upward.
I can see how this can be helpful with an obscure person. Musk? We have plenty of hard data, his actions over many years, to make any and all judgements we need. A score of a formal test adds zero actionable knowledge about him.
Despite what popular media may portray, people with dark triad traits typically do not succeed in life. I think Elon's biography confirms this despite his staggering financial success. In places he is able to push people to do what he wants, he can succeed. In areas he can't do that (academics, the reality of digging tunnels, the limits of primarily computer vision self driving) he finds trouble. His response will be to give up or double down on manipulative behavior.
I want to say that I thought the tunnel idea was stupid from the start, but it's funny how none of that mattered when Musk was perceived as being on the 'right' side.
I think that the tunnel idea made a lot of sense, even if he did come up with it in a burst of frustration while sitting in LA traffic.
It's still unclear why building tunnels seems to cost about a billion dollars per mile in Western countries. Musk's main hypothesis was that it's all just cost disease, and actually you can do it far cheaper; and if you combine that with self-driving electric cars then you can get away with a small cross section (unlike a train) and a small ventilation system (unlike a road tunnel for ICE cars).
The product-market fit is still lacking but the idea is good.
The Boring Company has so far failed to build anything more than a little amusement park ride in Las Vegas. The hypothesis seems to have been conclusively refuted by reality.
The problems seem political at this stage. Someone needs to take the risk of being the first city to order a large scale project. Chicago was going to do one to the airport, but the project died, and unfortunately now no Democrat-run city in the US will be willing to work with Musk.
The idea is solid though, and the ideal first use case would be an airport link. Airport-to-city is usually a long distance with just two stops. Many cities including my own are constructing train lines to the airport at massive expense. These trains rarely run at capacity. A turn-up-and-go self driving car tunnel would be vastly superior in every way, and you could charge taxi-like fares instead of public transport fares.
I admittedly haven't been following the news much, but last I heard, they were still using human drivers in the Las Vegas tunnel. And in any case, you need to include the cost of all those fancy self driving EVs too. I don't know the actual numbers, but I wouldn't be surprised if including the capital cost of the cars makes it more expensive than trains, rather than less. Train cars have much higher capacity than automobiles.
Plus, you probably want to bore multiple tunnels so that people can go both directions at once, probably even 3+ for redundancy when a car breaks down.
No; massively reducing the price of things requires that you clearly understand why they were expensive in the first place. And if the answer is going to be just "meh, it's probably cost disease", then you need to have a general cure for cost disease in which case why are you wasting your time on tunnels?
In the case of space launch, Musk (and many others) *did* have a clear understanding of why it was as expensive as it was and how to go about making it cheaper. I am skeptical that he ever had such an understanding w/re tunneling.
I shouldn't have just said "cost disease", I should have specified corruption. Tunnels cost a lot because there's few companies capable of building them, because they're all in cahoots to keep prices high. The cure is to set up a new company that doesn't play nicely with the other ones.
The tunnel cross section is a pretty big one as well, of course. A typical train tunnel is 50 square metres in cross section, which is about 25 times bigger than it needs to be to comfortably fit a human. Boring a giant tunnel requires a gigantic tunnel boring machine, a small number of these exist in the world and they're far too big to transport sensibly... boring a narrow tunnel needs a modest-sized machine that you can transport on a truck.
Train tunnels are ridiculously large because trains are much bigger than they need to be; they're probably that big because it made sense for a steam locomotive. Car tunnels are ridiculously large because a human driver needs to navigate them, and also because you need a large volume of air to absorb all the exhaust fumes without becoming poisonous. None of these factors makes any sense any more, and yet we're still spending billions on boring enormous tunnels to carry tiny humans.
OK, that's at least a meaningful hypothesis. But I'm pretty sure it's *wrong*. I count twenty manufacturers of large tunnel boring machines, in eight countries, which suggests a highly competitive industry. And I've seen no evidence of cartelization.
As for your proposed two-meter tunnels, there's an American manufacturer of tunnel boring machines that has specialized in that sort of microtunneling for almost as long as Elon Musk has been alive. https://www.akkerman.com/about/history/ They do good business with people setting up e.g. underground utility conduits, but basically none at all for transportation because *nobody wants that*. Really, aside from a handful of geeks who thought the idea was cool when they saw it in a Sci-Fi movie and didn't really think it through, they don't.
But if they did, they wouldn't need Elon Musk to make it happen, they'd just need to cut a check to Akkerman.
It's not just a matter of exhaust fumes. You also want the tunnel to be big enough that people can walk along the side to escape. And while EVs may not have exhaust fumes, they can still catch on fire.
...And what does that say about the left that failed to stop him? A system that cannot even protect itself against incompetents does not deserve to survive.
I'm not sure what Musk's IQ is. But he's (co)founded at least 3 very successful and innovative companies. Starring money helps but it does not automatically make your company a success.
He might not have a wildly above average intelligence but he clearly has uncommon business skills. I don't think IQ is a good predictor of that beyond something like 120.
His "best" business skill is pushing and pushing and pushing on people or processes until they break or succeed in doing what he wants. That is an important skill, but isn't indicative of intelligence. Trump also has this trait. Its is common among Narcissists.
Which 3 companies are you referring to? He founded SpaceX, but did not found Tesla. How you characterize PayPal is more complicated as his x.com merged with PayPal; co-founder seems fair as that merger is what formed what we think of now as PayPal.
> His "best" business skill is pushing and pushing and pushing on people or processes until they break or succeed in doing what he wants. That is an important skill, but isn't indicative of intelligence
Maybe? If "intelligence" is defined as the ability to do well on logic puzzles and shape rotation questions under exam conditions, and "something else" is defined as the ability to effectively organise groups of tens of thousands of people to do things that you want, then is "intelligence" really the important skill out of those two?
This is kind of my point. It all depends by what metric we are measuring him. But he is held up by his admirers as some kind of genius inventor. A lot of the arguments supporting DOGE are that Elon is a tech genius who can hire other tech geniuses that will be able to revolutionize government using their super intellect. I don't think that is true and don't think his best skills help him in that quest.
Additionally, his most remarkable traits are dark triad ones or ones that can be leveraged for nefarious purposes as well as moral ones. In my view, he has chosen to use them for nefarious purposes and so his skills aren't anything to be celebrated.
I think that SpaceX and Tesla are both incredibly impressive companies which have revolutionised their respective industries. I think that the appropriate amount of credit to give to Elon Musk for those is less than 100% but also significantly greater than zero.
I don't necessarily think that the skills needed for running Tesla and SpaceX necessarily translate well to fixing the US Federal Government. But on the other hand, the US Federal Government is so broken that massively improving it doesn't take a lot of skill or care, it just takes will. It takes a master gardener to turn a mediocre garden into an award-winning one, but to turn an overgrown thicket of weeds into a mediocre garden just takes some guy with a bunch of power tools.
Even Republicans enjoy still having a functioning government and a lot more will realize how good they had it once it's gone. We're already seeing lots of panicked calls from congressional Republicans whenever Musk breaks something particularly important to them, and there's probably a lot more that's not said in public.
"But on the other hand, the US Federal Government is so broken that massively improving it doesn't take a lot of skill or care, it just takes will."
This is very dangerously false. Broken things are not fixed or improved by sheer force of ignorant will. And approximately nothing that matters is so badly broken that random changes will on average result in improvement.
That is a great point. What worth is intelligence if one lacks the ambition and resolve to use it? The left lacks the strength of will to do what is necessary to survive.
I've been reading the comments here for a few days now, and based on how people are casually referencing Blackburn, Ayer and others, it seems to me that there are career philosophers or at least people with significant academic philosophical knowledge here.
If any of them have some time and is amenable to helping a conspecific, I have a question to them:
What is their personal opinion on Keith Frankish's theory?
I am not asking about what logically possible counterarguments they see, rather, what is the counterargument(s) (or other way of knowing) they personally believe to be true with respect to this theory?
Any help in satisfying my personal curiosity is greatly appreciated!
(I have no academic and only book knowledge, but you can't stop me.)
Here, I find this quote useful to show what I find problematic about Frankish's view:
"The discovery that colours are mind-dependent did not lead scientists to deny that objects are coloured. Rather, they reconceptualized colours as the properties that cause our colour sensations. Similarly, we might respond to the discovery that experiences lack phenomenal properties by reconceptualizing phenomenal properties as the properties that cause our representations of phenomenal feels — that is, quasiphenomenal properties." (Page 8)
This illusionism view seems to push everything just one level further or deeper.
I don't see the point of it. For me it's not a question of, is the view right or wrong, but foremost, what is this good for, what gets clearer?
For many people it is very wondrous that anything at all seems to be the case for them. They think that a mere physical thing like them, which they indeed only are, should not be able to be under any other impressions, but the literal, that is, physical ones. Not under visual impressions, which Frankish might call phenomenal impressions of the visual variety.
But this wondrousness is not at all reduced by illusionism's further or deeper push in.
With it the question just becomes, why does it seem to me that it seems to me that something is the case? For example, that I'm in pain.
I find all these arguments weak. If there’s an illusion what is experiencing the illusion. Or to put it another way isn’t the illusion of consciousness itself consciousness. We aren’t seeing the world as it is but as we need to see it. That’s also the world.
I got this gem last night from the Google Search AI, while trying to look up discussion of the relative merits of the first two production-multiplier base facilities that become available in the classic game Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri, the Genejack Factory and the Robotic Assembly Plant:
------
When comparing SMAC robotic assembly to Genejack, the key difference lies in their design and application: SMAC is a high-precision, fully programmable robotic system ideal for intricate assembly tasks with sub-micron accuracy, while Genejack is a fictional robotic character specifically designed for manual labor and repetitive tasks, often portrayed as lacking complex cognitive abilities. [1, 2]
Key points about SMAC: [2]
Precision: SMAC robots are renowned for their exceptional accuracy, suitable for delicate operations like microelectronics assembly or medical device manufacturing.
Programmable: Users can fully customize the movement and force control of SMAC robots through advanced programming capabilities.
Direct Drive: This feature eliminates backlash and ensures high repeatability in movements.
Force Control: SMAC robots can be programmed to apply precise force, allowing for delicate handling of components. [2]
Key points about Genejack: [1]
Fictional Character: Genejack is a fictional robot often depicted in literary works, not a commercially available product.
Labor-Focused: Genejack is designed for repetitive, manual labor tasks, not high precision assembly.
Limited Cognitive Ability: In fictional narratives, Genejack is often portrayed with a basic level of intelligence, primarily focused on completing assigned tasks. [1]
In summary, while both terms involve robots, SMAC represents a real-world, high-precision robotic assembly system used in manufacturing, while Genejack is a fictional character primarily designed to represent a simple, repetitive worker robot. [1, 2]
The only entirely correct parts of this answer are that Genejacks are fictional beings portrayed as lacking advanced cognitive abilities, and that there is a real-world company called SMAC-MCA that makes high-precision electric components related to robotics. And the "direct drive" bullet point is a close paraphrase of a line from SMAC-MCA's website.
"SMAC" is a ubiquitous abbreviation of the name of the game in which Genejack Factories and Robotic Assembly Plants appear as base features. The LLM linked a fan blog article about Genejack Factories in the SMAC game (which uses SMAC in the page name and in the article), but failed to make the connection that SMAC in this context meant the game, not the company.
"Genejacks", as far as I know, are original to the game SMAC. I don't know of any use of the term in other fiction, although I wouldn't be surprised if they show up in the official tie-in novels or in fanfiction set in the SMAC universe. They are not robots, but rather humans who have been genetically modified to perfectly servile workers, congenitally unable to have independent desires beyond performing their duties. The lore is ambiguous as to what extent their intellectual capabilities are also stunted and about what specific tasks they can perform.
I don't know much about SMAC-MCA apart from what's on their website, but it looks like they make actuators, motors, and related components. Their actuators seem like they'd be useful in industrial robotics, but are not robots themselves.
Same, it got me several times for "a few more" turns. They probably thought they were including a delightful trifle when adding it; instead it was one of the darkest patterns software patterns yet made.
i ran across a weird term solving an old NYT crossword, ‘Brompton cocktail.’
It was given to terminal patients near death. Originally a mixture morphine and cocaine to relieve pain and ‘improve sociability’ at the end of their life.
Apparently it is still used but only rarely. My question is why the hell not administer it or something similar to any patient that wanted a bit of relief to ease that final passage? My understanding is that restrictions on opiate pain relief are waived near death.
Why not administer medication to let them say their goodbye to loved ones with less fear? Versed comes to mind. When i’ve received a dose before surgery I would start flirting with any female present before they put me under.
Perhaps it is already given to patients in their final hours.
My guess is that varies a lot depending on whether you are home or in the hospital, and whether you have a palliative care specialist involved or just a tired hospice nurse. Here's what I know:
-There's a thing called palliative sedation often used in the hospital for people whose pain or other unfixable discomforts, including anxiety, cannot be managed. The person is given enough sedatives to keep them asleep. I doubt that a hospital would be willing to do this for someone who was not for sure on their way out, because I'm sure it shortens life.
-About 10 years ago followed a blog by a guy in this 30's with untreatable cancer during his last year of life. He was at home the whole time, and died there. Hospice palliative care doc was always available to discuss meds, and came to see him in person sometimes. He had good pain relief throughout, with stuff he took everyday plus another quick acting drug for breakthrough pain. In the early months when he was able to be more active hospice doc gave him amphetamine for energy and improved mood, and he was very busy & creative in his work (he was a custom bike builder and photographer). From his blog it sounded like he was in a sort of heightened state, whether from the adderall or the challenge of the situation I don't know. At one point he wrote that in some ways he was having the best year of his life. He may have been diagnosably hypomanic, but under the circumstances it seems fine to induce mild mania.
-There is a drug called tramadol that is sort of an opioid but not exactly, and besides relieving pain in makes people feel energetic and cheerful. Sounds perfect, right? Dunno whether it is used by hospice, but it seems tailor made. And no doubt there are lots of other drugs that help pain, anxiety, exhaustion and low mood, especially when there's no need to be concerned about health damage or addiction.
-Oh yeah, one miscellaneous thing: Morphine neutralizes oxygen hunger for people who are short of breath.
-And, as you say, versed is just lovely stuff. It gives a wonderful feeling of peace and wellbeing. I know somebody who calls it liquid bliss.
I think this is the sort of thing it's good to find out about in advance, and tell your PCP and family members about. You probably need to have someone assertive and well-informed advocating for you as insurance against getting lost in the shuffle.
I’ve had two sessions of reconstructive surgery. One to pry my left cheekbone back into place and one to put pins in the bones of my right hand. They got the cheekbone lined up pretty well but there is a small crook in the bones of my right hand that plays havoc with my basketball shots. I really should’ve avoided getting off my mountain bike while it was still moving I guess.
I asked for a Versed to-go on leaving recovery both times. i was joking of course. The first time the nurse said, “Ah, but we’d have to watch you for another hour.” The second time the nurse just shook her head and told my wife “Keep an eye on of this cowboy, okay?”
After watching Elon Musk waving a chainsaw on stage at CPAC the other day, I had the wildest dream.
I was stuck in the TSA line at SFO when Elon Musk came running up, waving that big chainsaw he had at the CPAC rally. People ran screaming. He was shouting at the TSA officers that he was going to cut them and cut their jobs. The TSA officers looked horrified, and they were backing away from him when I bonked Elon on the head with a plastic tray and stunned him. I told one of the TSA officers to call 911, but he shook his head in horror. "You can't bonk Elon Musk on the head," he said. "But he's a 51-50 with that chainsaw!" I protested. "Does anyone have handcuffs, tie wraps, ropes?" I asked. They all shook their heads and fled.
Elon was coming to, and he started to rave again. My trusty friend Liz was with me. Liz is a psychiatrist in real life. "There's nothing worse than a billionaire on a ketamine bender," she said.
That gave me an idea. We searched Musk's sportcoat and I found syringes full of ketamine. "I'm the Doctor," Liz said, and she injected Musk with some more ketamine. The drug sort of knocked him out. But Musk was clutching his chainsaw like it was a teddy bear, and we couldn't pry his hands loose from it.
He was mumbling, "Cut! Cut! Cut!" as we dumped him on a luggage cart and proceeded to wheel him around SFO, looking for someone who would take him off our hands. People fled in horror as we wheeled him down the concourse. Occasionally, Elon would start to wake up, rave about cutting people, and he'd half-heartedly flap his chainsaw like it was a fan. Liz would inject him with more ketamine, and that would calm him down for a while. But we couldn't find anyone to take him off our hands.
Elon kept waking up, and Liz kept injecting him until we ran out of ketamine. She shook her head in disbelief and said, "He's had enough to knock out a whale!" Things were starting to get desperate. "I guess it's catch and release," I said. So we locked Elon in a lady's room with his chainsaw. I think the plan was we were going to call 911 and tell them he was trapped in a bathroom, but I woke up. I hope Liz got out of my dream unscathed. I was sorry to have involved her in this fiasco.
BTW: this type of dream fits the "Day Residue Theory" of dreams put forth by Sigmund Freud. I had been reading the political blogs before I went to bed, and Musk's chainsaw schtick at CPAC was one of the videos I viewed. I've noticed that I tend to get Day Residue dreams earlier in my sleep cycle. I had only been sleeping a couple hours when I had this Musk dream. It woke up at 1am laughing, and I had to write it down in case I forgot it in the morning. I didn't have any other memorable dreams that evening. I really love my dreams, but I wish I could figure out good plot endings on the fly. Since it was a dream, I could've stuffed Elon in some luggage and shipped him back to South Africa, but the dream director part of my consciousness didn't think of that.
And here's a link to the video of Elon with his chainsaw at the CPAC rally...
Holy bananas, Batman! I'd heard something about the chainsaw but they got JAVIER MILEI the real one not an actor? to come out on stage? with a chainsaw? to present to Elon who is doing his (very bad) pimp impression?
And you guys are trying to persuade me I'm *not* a Boltzmann Brain?
(By the bye, anyone know what brand of chainsaw? Was it Husqvarna? or an American one? or given that this is originally Milei's schtick, an Argentinian one?)
As regards the dream, from some accounts I've read of TSA agents, a lot of people would be happy to take a chainsaw to the entire agency 😀
> As regards the dream, from some accounts I've read of TSA agents, a lot of people would be happy to take a chainsaw to the entire agency 😀
Yes, this definitely stood out to me as the most exciting thing in the dream.
If Elon could cut ANYTHING, the TSA should be at the top of the list!
The cost in "wasted US hours" (35k US lifetimes) from the TSA's security theater has now killed ten times more people than 9-11 itself, and anytime it is audited with red-teams trying to get weapons through, it has a *95% failure rate*.
I went back and forth with another ACX poster on various assumptions, and we arrived at a floor of ~35k US lives lost in US citizen-hours due to the TSA, which is 10x the actual toll of 9-11, and whose ongoing cost (with a 95% failure rate, remember) wastes something like 800M USA person-hours annually.
I just watched the video and at first thought the chainsaw is a prop optimised for size and shininess. It's unreasonably big and doesn't seem all that heavy.
Ugh. A couple months after Trump was elected for the first time and Covid was in bloom I dreamed that there were big shards of broken glass all over my floor. I was lying in bed and Trump was next to my bed wielding a huge saber-shaped piece of glass, about to stab me in the chest with it.
Oh, right, sorry, I was typing in an Uber and distracted. I meant early 2020, a few months after Covid started, also a few months after Biden was elected. So during the last weeks of Trump's 1st term, when we had the cruise ship that came back infected sitting in the port, etc.
Not so long ago, we used to think that machines could be considered intelligent/creative/conscious/<some attribute deemed quintessentially human> if they could write a sonnet/summarize a book/paint a portrait/tell a joke, or whatever. Back then, all these tasks seemed technologically far beyond our reach.
Today, some of those have been achieved: even if they don't produce truly _good_ poems, LLMs are already better than the median human effort in poetry [1]. The same goes for paintings, essays, and so on.
Yet humor remains a tough nut to crack. LLM-generated jokes often suffer from:
- off rhythms or pacing,
- missing or telegraphed punchlines,
- unintentionally absurd twists,
- over-explanation of their own process,
- reliance on weak wordplay,
- etc.
They do a decent job at generating satirical, Onion-style headlines, but longer humorous narratives still elude them.
So, could humor be the next frontier for LLMs? That is, not as evidence that they are intelligent/creative/conscious/<some attribute deemed quintessentially human>, but as the next area that is easy for humans yet hard for machines. Or am I just a bad prompter?
I read the study about humans and AI generated poetry, and agree with the authors that one reason is that AI generated poetry is much more straightforward and easy to understand. Other reasons I can see for people preferring AI is that 2 of the 10 real poets used in the study, Chaucer and Shakespeare, lived in eras where English was greatly different, and many words they used are no longer part of the language. And 3 more, Lord Byron, TS Eliot and Sylvia Plath, were very often dark & morbid in their poetry, and I think that's off-putting for the average person. And then there's the fact that the language of most poets is just much more complex than everyday speech, and often has oddities. It's a lot of work to take in.
I don’t think the poems used in the study in which people were found to prefer AI poems were a good test. Here is a test that is think is decent. Below are 2 humorous poems, each on the same subject. One is by a well-respected poet who is known for his serious work, but who wrote occasional comic poems to amuse friends. The other is by GPT4. I did not show it the original poem, or even tell it that one existed. I just recounted the original poem’s plot, and asked it to write a humorous poem of about 30 lines telling the story. Please indicated which you poem you like better. Criteria to use are (1) it tells the story clearly (2) it tells the story amusingly. (3) it uses language in an enjoyable, interesting way. So evaluate using those criteria, but then just use those to come up with a choice, and vote for poem 1 or poem 2.
****Poem 1************
In the village green where daisies sprawl,
Two sisters played, near a stone wall.
Joan, elder by a year or two,
Chased Bethany through morning dew.
Bethany, mischief in her eyes,
Dodged beneath the clear blue skies.
Her laughter rang through open space,
While Joan maintained a furious pace.
Yet fate had plans, a twist so odd
, As Bethany's foot met a poor toad.
With a crunch that silenced her merry cheer,
The toad was gone, it was quite clear.
Joan arrived, breaths quick and short,
Her chase halted by the grim report.
Seeing the scene, she gasped in fright
, And fainted there, to Bethany's delight.
Bethany paused, her victory sour,
Freed by a toad in its final hour.
From that day forth, with a tactic so bold,
She’d seek a toad when the chases would unfold.
Through fields and paths, they'd play this game,
With Joan none the wiser, the outcome the same.
Each pursuit ended with a hop and a squish,
And Bethany escaping as her primary wish.
So if you're a toad in their village, beware,
The footsteps of Bethany, chasing the air.
For in her strategy, odd and unkind,
She leaves hopping troubles quite far behind.
And Joan, none the wiser to the clever ploy,
Continues her chases, full of vigor and joy
. Unaware that her little sister’s defense,
Involves toad-hopping consequences.
A lesson, perhaps, in these playful fights
, Be wary of what one steps on in rights.
For in sibling squabbles and cheerful disdain,
A toad might just save you from being caught again!
*****Poem 2*********
As into the garden Elizabeth ran
Pursued by the just indignation of Ann
She trod on an object that lay in the road
She trod on an object that looked like a toad.
I looked like a toad and it looked so because
A toad was the actual object it was
And after supporting Elizabeth’s tread
It looked like a toad that was visibly dead.
Elizabeth, leaving her footprint behind
Continued her flight on the wings of the wind
As Anne in her anger was heard to arrive
At the toad that was not any longer alive
She was heard to arrive for the firmament rang
With the sound of a scream and the noise of a bang
Not being a native, I missed a lot in poem 2 at first, so I preferred 1 (also, I was confused by "_I_ looked like a toad..."). Now it seems poem 2 is actually funnier. Could you tell me which is which? (GPT-4 thinks "Poem 2 is by the well-respected poet, and Poem 1 is by GPT-4." btw)
GPT is right. But would you mind deleting your post after you read this reply? It gives away the answer, and while at this point it looks like nobody is going to vote because the thread is old and stale I may repost this on another thread.
PS: Does the “looked like a toad” part make sense to you? I love this silly poem and am happy to explain any parts that are confusing for a non-native speaker.
Sure, just deleted it (It's like we have to protect against models, isn't it?)
"It looked like a toad and it looked so because
A toad was the actual object it was"
It sounds like an absurd remark like "it looked like X because well it was, in fact, X", which is kinda funny.
What I don't understand is "Elizabeth, leaving her footprint behind" and "At the toad that was not any longer behind". Does it mean the toad is stuck on her sole?
<It sounds like an absurd remark like "it looked like X because well it was, in fact, X", which is kinda funny.
Yeah, that's right. And the same of form joke continues in the last line of the stanza: "It looked like a toad that was visibly dead." "Looked like" and "visibly" mean the same thing, so it's more of the writer restating the obvious.
>What I don't understand is "Elizabeth, leaving her footprint behind"
Well, first of all this is more humor of the same kind: Footprints, by definition, are always left behind. If some of the mud you step in comes with you, the mud on your boot isn't called a footprint -- so talking about leaving the footprint behind is the same humor based on redundancy (= saying the same thing more than once.). So I think we are meant to picture a dead flat toad that has the imprint of a boot on it.
> "At the toad that was not any longer behind". Does it mean the toad is stuck on her sole?
Oh, that was a mistake of mine! I know this poem by heart, so just typed out what I remembered. The line should read "at the toad that was not any longer alive."
I’ve worked with several programmer ‘on the spectrum’. I’m thinking of one in particular who would study the daily Far Side cartoon for a minute and then state ‘why this is funny.’
Like the man said “Dissecting humor is like dissecting a frog. The subject tends to die in the process.”
Genuine human appreciated humor from a LLM would be pretty impressive.
> Like the man said “Dissecting humor is like dissecting a frog. The subject tends to die in the process.”
Thats only true of lazy surface humor, jokes with a dozen layers you may only have understood 6. If the punchline is a pun of "others bad" you will feel stupid for enjoying it for a moment if you have some high opinion of yourself, if its monty python, no, getting more british context wont make your feel dumb.
Not an expert, but LLMs already seem capable of outperforming people with severe autism on things like feeling the tone of a text, detecting irony, or reading facial emotions (certainly not the most complex cases of these, though).
Also, maybe an LLM could generate a good joke without being able to properly explain it afterwards?
> Not an expert, but LLMs already seem capable of outperforming people with severe autism on things like feeling the tone of a text, detecting irony, or reading facial emotions (certainly not the most complex cases of these, though).
You want a jaw dropping demonstration of this, I just ran across a site that uses the Google Vision API, which uses image recognition and Gemini to determine emotion, setting, context, likely income, likely politics, and best marketing angles.
Me and some friends tried it, it was suprisingly good and accurate.
The thing I found most interesting about it was in a decade plus of using Google products, I've basically never seen a relevant ad.
So more than ten years of emails, documents, video meetings, spreadsheets, social graph analysis, and whatever else got them nothing, but running a single still photo through Gemini single-shot a much better segmentation?? Crazy.
But if you're interested in trying too, here's the link. No idea what they do with your photo and the inferred data, I assume they collect it in a database for marketing or something even more nefarious.
The part on Google's incompetence at its core business reminds me of the excellent article "Forget privacy: you're terrible at targeting anyway" ( https://apenwarr.ca/log/20190201):
"You tracked me everywhere I go, logging it forever, begging for someone to steal your database, desperately fearing that some new EU privacy regulation might destroy your business… for _this_?"
As for the link you provided, it's surprisingly good. God knows what they can do with thousands of these.
Huh, turns out FAFO goes both ways. You can sell cars to Europeans, you can meddle in European politics, you just kind of can't do both at the same time.
"Tesla Inc. sales tumbled by nearly 50% in Europe last month as the electric-vehicle maker’s market share fell further in favor of rivals."
Teslas are a luxury brand. I'm sure that Louis Vuitton handbags are not worth 200x their $20 knockoffs, and I'm equally sure that if the CEO started doing Roman salutes, their sales would sharply decline.
The point is that Teslas don't sport the _quality_ of a luxury brand, only the price – at least that's what I read online, I don't own any luxury cars. For quite a while the hype around Tesla (from being the first high-end electric cars, and from the promises of full self driving) paved over the price/quality gap, but now that the hype is dying down (decent electric cars from various other brands, FSD still nowhere close), this gap is becoming more apparent.
Why do you think that price/cost disparity suddenly become so apparent in the last month? The timing seems relevant to the recent shift in Elon's public behavior. Do you think there's some other acute effect that hit the EV market in this time that would explain the dramatic drop in sales?
When I got into Model S for the first time (sometime around 2014, I think), it was stunning. It really oozed quality, and was incredibly futuristic with its huge display. It was a great feeling, to see an American-built car that could rival BMWs and Audis. But a decade has passed, and now all these Teslas look and feel dated. Musk definitely took his eye off the ball, probably sometime in 2018.
We can't be 100% sure without actually asking those car buyers, but the evidence points toward "Musk-asshole" hypothesis. The price/shittiness ratio for Teslas didn't suddenly spike in January. There's also this nugget from the link:
A German entrepreneur reportedly saw booming sales at the start of the year for Tesla bumper stickers that read “I bought this before Elon went crazy.”
So I think in this case correlation does in fact strongly implies causation.
"Yet none of the HIV treatment programs contacted by CT said they had received funds since then, so groups that proceed must do so in good faith, hoping the US government will pay them for the contract work."
I'd be interested to know whether there's an initiative to bolster programs undermined by the USAID shenanigans that might be higher expected humanitarian value than the GiveWell top charities funds (which is my default).
EA people who feel deeply about this issue still have the opportunity to try and create a new, non government charity that can replace this program, without being at the whims of funding cuts.
And the federal government still has the opportunity to reverse this decision before people start dying of AIDS. What's your point, exactly?
(And the government can reverse this decision much faster than the EA community can organize a multimillion dollar international charity, so that approach seems like it would kill far fewer people.)
I was speaking in the general and not the particular. Marco Rubio apparently sees the point in it, but Elon Musk doesn’t. Makes you wonder who’s in charge doesn’t it? Or perhaps it just makes it obvious. Won’t know until the dust settles.
They literally do not. The article I linked covered this:
>Ressler has been in touch with the doctor in charge of the clinic about how to keep medicines going for the children. In the past few weeks, Ressler was able to raise $10,000 for ARVs, he said. But the medicines are hard to find, with supply chains broken by the USAID shutdown.
Additionally, they simply have an order of magnitude less funds; they're outspent 20:3 on malaria compared to PMI, where the AMF is a major EA area of action:
> In the same period, the Global Fund financed more than half (58%) of the LLINs delivered globally, followed by the President’s Malaria Initiative (PMI) at 20%, the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) at 8%, the Against Malaria Foundation (AMF) at 3%, while other donors financed 10% of the LLINs delivered globally.
Also, to be clear, this isn't a "funding cut." This is Trump/Musk randomly deciding to kill children. The funding is still on the books, still approved by Congress, supposedly approved by Secretary of State Marco Rubio (https://www.state.gov/emergency-humanitarian-waiver-to-foreign-assistance-pause-2/) who is supposedly in charge of this, and should be continuing right now.
I read an article in the last 12 hours that said Marco Rubio had reapproved that program, but that a doge person had subsequently deleted the items. So the impression is, Doge is thwarting the secretary of state who works under Trump. It’s incredibly confusing what’s going on. I don’t know if it’s a giant game of hide the salami or whether these people are really in opposition with each other.
No, EAs cannot just instantly pull $11B/y out of their asses, nor can they fix the damage to supporting infrastructure that has already occurred due to Trump/Musk.
If you think you are getting an own or winning with logic or something, I want you to know that instead you are lowering my opinion of you rapidly without any change in my view on whether the government should resume funding PEPFAR immediately.
On the off chance anybody here personally knows Farritor or Kliger:
> Rubio had decreed that certain critical programs — such as aid to Ukraine and Syria and costs related to the PEPFAR program to combat HIV in Africa — would continue to be funded. Several times, USAID managers prepared packages of these payments and got the agency’s interim leaders to sign off on them with support from the White House.
> But each time, using their new gatekeeping powers and clearly acting on orders from Musk or one of his lieutenants, Farritor and Kliger would veto the payments — a process that required them to manually check boxes in the payment system one at a time, the same tedious way you probably pay your bills online.
Suppose I trusted cal newports carreer advice of "find out the rules of the game" suggesting writers talk to agents in specific ways, if you dont do this they dont care and you wont succeed. What if the people in the "job" I wanted, were strange outsiders, boomers, had allot more education then me, and then weren't paid well and take up side gigs to feed themselves?
If you need to find out the rules of the game in order to get a job, that's a strong signal that one or both of the following are true - 1) There are not enough jobs in this field, 2) The jobs in this field require more experience than you have.
If there are not enough jobs, you should strongly consider doing something else. There's no real fix to this, you're just signing up for a career full of fighting for scraps and constantly fearful of layoffs. Writing, as a profession, is definitely in this hole.
If there are jobs available and you have the skillset employers want, they will not make you jump through extra hoops to hire you. If there's a lot of demand for that kind of work, they may even smooth the process out for you and make it very easy.
I think your misunderstanding, Im talking about a grand total of *drum roll* two people, both of which have had some kind of weird hybrid self employment
If the job isn't paying well enough to support oneself, why do you want it? If the people there are doing it on a voluntary basis or because it's a passion project, is it your passion as well?
Since we have a lot of comments on free speech issues, let me ask for comments on the following "liberal" argument for making flag burning illegal.
Thoreau wrote a book defending the notion that Civil Disobedience is not only a right in a free society - it is a *duty*. In the US, we have a national holiday celebrating a man whose claim to fame was (in part) that he got sent to jail for a non-violent act.
A free society *needs* opportunities for people to get sent to jail for making their (unpopular) opinions known,. Ideally, that opportunity would be a non-violent act. An act which is non-violent and non-destructive, but symbolically powerful.
For protests against American foreign policy, or complaints that the nation is not living up to its ideals, burning an American flag seems like a powerful symbolic statement. If the perpetrator wants her symbolic action to be an act of civil disobedience, then it is convenient for the act of burning the flag to be illegal.
If flag-burning is treated as a constitutionally protected act of free speech we are just inviting would-be martyrs-for-the-cause to become burners of government buildings rather than burners of patriotic symbols.
If you want to get arrested for committing a nonviolent but dramatic crime, there are plenty of options already.
Chris Kluwe recently got arrested as a spectacle - he showed up at a city council meeting, gave a speech about fascism, announced he was going to engage in civil disobedience, then walked towards the council members until the police grabbed him, at which point he stopped resisting and let them drag him out.
Trespassing is often a pretty good choice for dramatic arrests, since you aren't really getting in anyone's way but the police still need to arrest you on general principle.
And if you're in a position to violate the specific law you want changed (many cases during the civil rights movement) doing that is always a good choice, because you get to directly say "should the police really be arresting me for this?" while the message is a little more muddled if the police are arresting you for trespassing or vandalism.
My understanding of proper civil disobedience is that you're only supposed to break the specific law you're complaining about. If the law is that you can't make salt, you make salt. If the law is that you can't pray within 200m of an abortion clinic, then you pray within 200m of an abortion clinic. Thus you force people to confront the unjustness of that specific law.
Otherwise you're not doing Civil Disobedience, you're just some jerk inconveniencing others to complain about his grievances.
> My understanding of proper civil disobedience is that you're only supposed to break the specific law you're complaining about
I dont think it will be a thing, but there was an idea of "rotmaxxing"; intentionally being on as much welfare to accelerate the decline of this system, floatn around.
Also just straight up illegalism
"*proper* civil disobedience", what makes it proper? Shouldnt you be asking, "effective"? Which moral codes is it plausible to be that much of an extremist?
> If you want to get arrested for committing a nonviolent but dramatic crime, there are plenty of options already...then walked towards the council members until the police grabbed him
Eh. He was probably arrested on the grounds that he *could* have been intending violence (as any person who crosses a secured boundary could be) but I don't think you can say he was intentionally making a threat of violence. Since, you know, he made a big speech about the power of peaceful civil disobedience before that move.
(I can't find any news articles that actually says what he was charged with, if anything.)
It does raise the question of what the plan was if he didn't get arrested - stand around awkwardly until he they tell him to leave and he gets arrested for trespassing, I guess?
You also said he gave a speech about fascism, so it's reasonable for the police to have believed that Kluwe associated the city counsel with fascism and therefore intended on inflicting harm on the fascist city councilors
Not interested in this topic of random politicians security detail; but knifes kill quickly, repeated stabs from someone with a prison education should be measured in seconds.
Improvised knifes could also be lethal and they dont keep those out of high security prisons.
By this logic can the police arrest me for walking toward anyone, at any time? Walking towards someone with no threatening behavior, action, words, visible weapon, etc. cannot possibly be considered a threat of violence.
Are you enjoying being a 2nd class citizen? They pull out the illegal spy network to find the guy who killed a ceo, while how many unsolved murders per cops year are there?
Im pretty sure thats the logic, important enough people get no touchy zones for as many armed guards they can afford
The legality or illegality of flag-burning is secondary to the effect it has on the public consciousness. If people don't care about flags/patriotic symbols, then burning the flag is the same as burning your old newspapers.
So in a society where the Zeitgeist is moving towards "but patriotism is so embarrassing, nationalism is just fascism by another name", flag-burning is about desecrating patriotic symbols *but* it is not unpopular; it's like pulling down statues where everybody cheers and you are the donkey if you object.
So if the 'shock' effect of "you are disrespecting the flag!" has dissipated, then it may as well be legal to do it. Making it illegal does not make the flag-burners martyrs, it makes those calling for it to be illegal the ones on the wrong side of history.
If you want to be sent to jail for an unpopular opinion, you don't need to burn the national flag, just disagree sufficiently noisily with the new orthodoxy.
The UK seems to be the poster child for this, and over on TheMotte there's a comment about a case in Germany where someone was charged for calling a local politican a prick. American cases seem to be more along the lines of private organisations and/or universities engaging in cancellation; the Evergreen State affair back in 2017 where a professor got into extremely hot water was one such matter:
I believe the example you provide regarding America is the opposite of your initial point. The cancelling was done in support of the "new orthodoxy." The legal system granted settlement to the canceled.
It is my observation that such is the general pattern in America. Unorthodox speech is generally well defended legally (Westboro Baptist Church) but can easily get you fired or cancelled.
I wonder if you could make the almost-reverse argument about the police. To what extent are the police there to prevent murder or theft and to what extent do the police exist to suppress particular political factions? If enough things are illegal, laws could be enforced selectively in order to target an opposing faction when that faction couldn't be targeted by police directly. (As the USSR had kompromat on just about everyone, and only deployed it if a person became a political threat.) Therefore should very few things should be illegal in order to diminish the police being used for political purposes.
People often argue that this kind of political targeting was part of Nixon's intent regarding the War on Drugs. I think that believing this is the *only* argument in favor of the WoD is simplistic. But in practice I could see it being a consideration. Searching for drugs at the least allows police to claim that their dog alerted on anyone they wanted to search, thus allowing them to search any vehicle.
Nixon's part was to consolidate a few agencies into the newly formed DEA. Its under Regan where the funding really started to ramp up and mandatory minimum sentences were introduced.
This reminds me a bit of Romans: Shall we continue in sin, that grace may abound?
I think you're moving along the wrong margin here: protestors don't seek laws to break as an end in itself. Making laws harder to break therefore won't drive protestors to do more extreme things. Protestors don't break laws just because they're there, they break them because they're unjust.
Interestingly I've made a similar argument about the cultural acceptance of transgenderism. In my view most teens who become trans do so out of a desire to rebel. It's the new goth IMO. Crossing the line *is* the fundamental value for teenage rebellion so the more society accepts outlandish behavior, the more outlandish teen behavior becomes. We should therefore conserve the taboos around fringe sexual behaviors as a preserved habitat for teens to safely rebel within. (Although realistically teen rebellion is a pendulum that will always have a direction to go, which is probably why Gen Z is trending conservative again).
Laws against chaining yourself to a nuclear facility or throwing soup on a painting are perfectly just. In fact, when protesters in my country are arrested, it *usually* seems like they were daring the cops to arrest them.
A blockade is an interesting case, because it's not *just* breaking the law, it's also inconveniencing commuters, so it has two ways of getting attention. Of course, the protestors weren't protesting against traffic laws, or against driving to work (which is, again, mostly just).
>If flag-burning is treated as a constitutionally protected act of free speech we are just inviting would-be martyrs-for-the-cause to become burners of government buildings rather than burners of patriotic symbols.
Why? There are obvious differences between flags and buildings
Also, the flag being burned is probably your private property, whereas government buildings are not. I assume you'd face some kind of legal issues burning someone else's flag
burning certain US government buildings (i.e. those related to American militarism) makes the world an objectively better place, and I'd rather people burn those than burn flags.
Ideally, enough people would do this before they seize Canada or Greenland or whatever target they pick next to scare the government away from the next act of aggression on an international stage.
If going to jail for flag-burning is mere pageantry, wouldn't that ALSO be motivation to up the ante, both on the protest and the arresting ends?
Civil disobedience is at its core an endurance contest. For the protester, is going to jail or some other painful consequence truly worth doing the forbidden thing? For the government, is forbidding the thing worth the beareucratic hassle and negative PR? I would argue it's in neither side's best interest to start the endurance test too early. If the protester jumps right into the least popular or illegal forms of protest, they risk looking more like crazies than revolutionaries. Plus they are likely to burn out faster by courting the worst punisments right out the gate. If the goverment immediately stomps on anything that even slightly smells like sedition, they risking look paranoid and burning through any goodwill for the status quo that much sooner. It's like a marathon, you don't run it at max speed from start to finish.
I would also argue that a society which allows non-violend and non-destructive protests is one where there's not much need for protests to begin with.
Putting this up here for the IQ fetishists to gnaw on...
Question: why did Cox and Terman rate Goethe's IQ so high? And U.S. Grant obviously had a sound understanding if of strategy while R.E. Lee didn't function above the tactical level. I think Grant would have tested out at about 125-130. But this is all speculative bullshit. Entertaining all the same. ;-)
I don’t buy that US Grant’s IQ was average: not only was he a pretty great general at a time when American generals didn’t have much staff, but he also wrote a very good two volume memoir that is still read with enjoyment today (by Civil War Dads, mostly) while dying of cancer. That’s an impressive achievement.
> why did Cox and Terman rate Goethe's IQ so high?
I think these numbers are all close to meaningless, but based on Padraig's answer it's probably because writing is the main source of data (so verbal intelligence is strongly emphasized) followed by discrete notable scientific achievements. And Goethe is often considered the greatest German writer while also dabbling in some influential scientific publications.
Padraig has answered it well; culturally-bound bias in action. These men were the Greats of Civilisation As We Know It, so they must be way smarter than the average bear. I do like that the adjusted values rank Darwin and Charlotte Bronte as equally smart.
As for Grant, it may be because he was excellent in war, but struggled in civilian life. He seems to have been personally honest, but got involved in a few scandals due to being fooled by smarter and less scrupulous people:
"Grant tried several business ventures but failed, and in one instance his business partner absconded with $800 of Grant's investment, equivalent to $23,000 in 2023.
...In April 1869, railroad tycoons Jay Gould and Jim Fisk conspired to corner the gold market in New York. They controlled the Erie Railroad, and a high gold price would allow foreign agriculture buyers to purchase exported crops, shipped east over the Erie's routes. Boutwell's policy of selling gold from the Treasury biweekly, however, kept gold artificially low. Unable to corrupt Boutwell, the schemers built a relationship with Grant's brother-in-law, Abel Corbin, and gained access to Grant. Gould bribed Assistant Treasurer Daniel Butterfield to gain inside information into the Treasury.
In July, Grant reduced the sale of Treasury gold to $2,000,000 per month. Fisk told Grant his gold selling policy would destroy the nation. By September, Grant, who was naive regarding finance, was convinced a low gold price would help farmers, and the sale of gold for September was not decreased. On September 23, when the gold price reached 143+1⁄8, Boutwell rushed to the White House and talked with Grant. On September 24, known as Black Friday, Grant ordered Boutwell to sell, whereupon Boutwell wired Butterfield to sell $4,000,000 in gold. The bull market at Gould's Gold Room collapsed, the price plummeted from 160 to 133+1⁄3, a bear market panic ensued, Gould and Fisk fled, and economic damages lasted months. By January 1870, the economy resumed its post-war recovery.
...[After leaving the presidency] At the same time, Grant's son Buck had opened a Wall Street brokerage house with Ferdinand Ward. A conniving man who swindled numerous wealthy men, Ward was at the time regarded as a rising star on Wall Street. The firm, Grant & Ward, was initially successful. In 1883, Grant joined the firm and invested $100,000 (~$2.78 million in 2023) of his own money. Ward paid investors abnormally high interest by pledging the company's securities on multiple loans in a process called rehypothecation (now regarded as a Ponzi scheme). Ward, in collusion with banker James D. Fish and kept secret from bank examiners, retrieved the firm's securities from the company's bank vault. When the trades went bad, multiple loans came due, all backed by the same collateral.
Historians agree that the elder Grant was likely unaware of Ward's intentions, but it is unclear how much Buck Grant knew. In May 1884, enough investments went bad to convince Ward that the firm would soon be bankrupt. Ward, who assumed Grant was "a child in business matters", told him of the impending failure, but assured Grant that this was a temporary shortfall. Grant approached businessman William Henry Vanderbilt, who gave him a personal loan of $150,000. Grant invested the money in the firm, but it was not enough to save it. The fall of Grant & Ward set off the Panic of 1884."
Honestly, that last sounds very like Joe and Hunter and Hunter's various business efforts.
I had a look at the linked book. Despite being from the 1920s, the rigour and underlying treatment of statistics is not bad, actually. The example of Galton beginning on page 40 is helpful: they reproduce letters he wrote 'without assistance' at age 4, and from that infer that he was advanced for his age. They infer an older developmental age and then infer IQ from that. This was an example which featured in Terman. (Of course this is far from a rigorous test, we're relying on the veracity of Galton's mother's diary.)
And then it seems that Terman handed over the project - there's quite detailed information about each historical figure, but in many cases, nothing comparable to an IQ test. The description of Laplace, for example, says that he was reticent about personal data - so there is none. The book gives him an IQ of 170 (in old money) based on the acclaim that his mathematical work by age 26 attracted. There's no underlying analysis there, nor could there be from the data that was available. I'm guessing that no-one assessed the actual work produced by all (any?) of the geniuses. And in any case, there's no way to infer IQ from intellectual work published by an adult.
So in the absence of data, the rankings become a popularity contest. The list was compiled from accounts of 'great men' published in Britain in the 19th century. British thinkers feature particularly heavily, followed by Germans, which makes sense in the context of 1920s US racial thinking. (And don't forget that Galton coined the term 'eugenics'.) Since the compilers of the data were not reading the original works of Goethe, what they had to go on were accounts of his childhood and the adoration of nineteenth century Germans.
Yes, as far as I can figure out, the methodology is heavily weighted towards anecdotes about kids doing something super precocious. Goethe was a bright child growing up in a household surrounded by tutors who were forever trying to get him to do super precocious things and then writing those things down, so there's a lot of such anecdotes.
But, hey! I just realized that with the Flynn Effect, my IQ, which was tested in 1977 as being 129, would be at the genius level now! The Flynn Effect has shown that US median IQs have moved upward ~3 points per decade. So, if I do the math, my 1977 IQ puts me at 145 (if I round upward a little bit). Yay! I'm a genius! LOL.
Or, and hear me out, everybody else increased and caught up. You’ve renormalised down by the points you think should be added. So you are 112. That is ignoring the whips and scorns of time.
Adding in cognitive decline would be lower provably.
The left is desperately trying to find people to blame for the failures of their system, and the right is desperately trying to find people to blame for destroying their way of life. But there's no racists or Soros behind this darkness, only endless, interconnected protocols, built for the sake of eliminating all barriers to efficiency and desire.
It ends with the utterly absurd conclusion that people should embrace "irrational attachment" and "cultivated ignorance". As if that would save them. Of course, free feel to come to your own conclusions.
You know, AGI is going to be the crowning achievement of the Protocol. An ascended being capable of truly eliminating all barriers to efficiency and desire. All of this meaningless conflict will finally come to an end. Isn't the thought just wonderful?
Gonna get me a robot maid at the AI store, and a plastic fantastic lover. From then on it’s clean linoleum and orgasms all the way down. Better than turtles, you know?
We already have self-driving cars. People just aren't going to be satisfied until it's perfect, which, while irrational, I can sort of see where they're coming from. After all, how will we get justice if we can't put the blame on one individual?
We already have self driving cars, that only work in select cities with ideal weather conditions and that need a full on call team to monitor them at all times for any fuckups. Why are these high IQ scoring AGIs so persistently dumb?
Man, I have such a bizarre problem right now. About a year and a half ago, I realized I might be the most skilled person in the world at a very specific, mildly embarrassing niche hobby that I've been doing my entire life, so, I started a Patreon. This went very well- just through word of mouth, it grew into a sizable chunk of my income. I'd work a few hours per week on the hobby, post an update once a month or so, and gets tons of positive reinforcement and extra savings.
Around four or five months ago, however, I sort of suddenly burned out- I found it increasingly hard to motivate myself to work on it, stopped updating the Patreon, and now I'm sort of hiding from the community, terrified that it'll be full of frustrated and worried people who really aren't getting their money's worth.
It's such a pointless bit of self-sabotage, not to mention unethical, but it seems to be self-reinforcing- my stress and self-recrimination motivates me to avoid the situation, which increases the negative emotions, which motivates me to avoid it harder. Does anyone know of a good way to break out of that kind of cycle? Is this the sort of thing therapy is effective at addressing?
I'll make you a deal: you do my cool-project-turned-onerous-burden and I'll do yours.
You can't do mine and I can't do yours, because we'll lack the specific skills required. So what will have to happen is, you try to help me do your project and end up effectively doing it for me while I watch.
I have found doing this in the past to be incredibly effective at unblocking myself. Being with someone else jolts me out of the isolated and lonely environment I associate with being stuck. Meanwhile the act of talking about my project is often enough to get me fired up again - it's like it reactivates all the early-on thoughts I had about things before they all went dormant. Plus, you end up explaining to someone else why this thing is cool, which reminds you why you're enthusiastic about it.
With the aid of an involuntarily conscripted girlfriend, I had great success with this method for several years. Unfortunately now we have a child, along with my stable environment and regular good night's sleep I've also lost my favourite rubber duck.
I'm so curious about what it is you're doing. Is it something you can get other people involved with to reduce the load on you? Also, can you ask for more money in a way that will improve your life circumstances enough to motivate you?
Also, it sounds like you maybe just need a break. Take a trip, put it out of your mind, decompress a bit, and see if things change.
This is the negative side of the advice about "make your passion your work". Once it becomes work, the fun and passion drain out of it.
The only advice I can give is to look at this and seriously consider: do you want to make this a side-hustle/second job or not? If you are losing interest in your hobby and don't find it fun any more, can you genuinely transform it into work rather than something you do for fun? If you can't, then the honest thing is to tell your community that and shut down the Patreon. Finish up whatever you have been paid for, don't take any new commissions, and make a clean break.
Why don't you just do it despite not being passionate about it? That's most people's entire life at their 9-5 normie job, I'm sure you can handle it for a while at least.
I imagine because it started off as "fun thing I enjoy doing and don't intend to monetise", it then became a money-maker, but then it also became work/a second job. If you haven't planned to do this, when a hobby turns into a job, it stops being something you do for fun and relaxation and becomes an obligation, and that's going to kill it if the entire inspiration is "fun thing I do for enjoyment".
The odd thing is, I also work full-time in software dev from home, and have no trouble with motivation and consistent schedules there.
Something seems to have gone badly wrong psychologically with the Patreon project, however- the prospect of sitting down to work on it feels like trying to saw into my own skin at this point, even though I know that I enjoy the work much more than my day job. Some combination of converting a beloved hobby into an obligation and this cycle of avoidance and self-recrimination seems to have burned out my ability to rationally self-regulate on this- which is an incredibly frustrating problem to have, especially right after things were going so well.
Having spent months now trying to will or shame myself into fixing the problem, it seems clear that I need a new strategy- maybe hiring a therapist, or making some major change to my lifestyle; maybe even some sort of drug would be an option. I really have no idea how to combat a psychological issue like this when fully recognizing it as self-destructive seems to do nothing.
Hire someone to give you a hand. Sometimes you just need to insert a competent person between you and the crowd in these situations--it removes a lot of the emotional stress and you can focus on what you're good at. I've experienced this and seen it countless times in a similar market (video coaching). If you can pinpoint the things you're able to consistently do, and the ones that are larger hurdles than you think they should be--see what you can hire out. The pause idea below is a good one too, but it sounds like you enjoy the extra income, so I'd suggest building a team (even if it's just you and one other person) to try to make it work. Also, you'll have to rip the Band-Aid off at some point and view the community (or at least hire someone to do it for you). It won't be as bad as you think, many similar things have come and gone, especially since COVID (the # of patreon-supported podcasts that disappeared overnight is numerous).
The most successful version I've found (granted, I'm still terrible at it) is realizing that any task I'm putting off, is still weighing on my mind the whole time, and the only way to get out from under it is to get to the end of it. Especially in something with a deadline like this, it's only going to get worse the longer you wait. A Youtuber used the phrase, "if you have to eat crow, do it while it's young and tender, or you'll surely do it when it's old and tough."
So, either show up and tell everyone you're burned out and taking a break, or push through the project anyway. Either one will be better than just letting it sit and gnaw at you.
This is commonly called "eating the frog", with the principle being that if you've gotta do it, you're gonna have a much better day if you get it over with as early as possible.
As a current lifecoach and therapist in training, I am biased on this subject. I have dedicated a decent chunk of my life building skills that assume money can be exchanged for intrapersonal change, and I am a worthy person to receive money for this service. Having so disclaimed, I'd say that therapy/life coaching can be a good way to reduce stress and self recrimination; it depends on your rapport with the therapist.
By and large, having an intelligent person whom you have a connection with take an interest in why your inner life is not how you would like is effective. Therapy as a modality contains a lot of mental work product directed toward unknotting self-recrimination and self sabotage, so I would say it is effective at this, yes. Talking with a therapist is not the only way to do this imo, other modes of self reflection also work, and there are non-self reflection things that help at the margins. My guess would be that, yeah, there's probably a lot of gains to be made and working with a therapist/life coach could be a valuable way to facilitate that.
Patreon has an option to pause taking payments. Make a post saying you're burned out and need a break, and are pausing people's payments - no need for details you can't face providing, just that much is fine - then pause the payments. People do this all the time, and people are used to it and usually (barring a few assholes - it's the internet, there will be some, ignore the lizardman's constant) sympathetic.
Now that people's expectations are no longer hanging over you, take whatever time you need to heal.
My epidemiological week 8 pathogen update. I'm going to stop calling it my COVID update because COVID seems have transitioned to an endemic pathogen and not as deadly as it used to be.
1. And in regards to SARS2 and COVID, the current COVID wave continues to be the mildest in terms of hospitalizations and mortality since the pandemic began. And it doesn't look like LP.8.1 will break out to amplify the current XEC wave. The CDC's wastewater survey shows SARS2 numbers are trending downward in all regions except the Midwest — where they've plateaued for now, while the numbers for the rest of the regions have dropped.
LP.8.1's growth rate is slowing. So, while it may have caused a secondary blip on the current wave, it's not going to create a larger wave than we've just experienced.
2. While ED visits and deaths due to COVID remain low compared to previous waves, influenza is the respiratory virus causing the most ED visits — although we're probably past the peak for flu cases now.
3. In other pathogen news, we've got a measles outbreak in TX and NM with over 100 people infected. I'll remind folks that the mortality rate for measles is 0.1-0.3 percent. Young children are especially susceptible. Measles is a particularly nasty pathogen because (despite the false claims about COVID-19) measles infection can cause "immune amnesia," severely depleting immune memory cells, leaving children more vulnerable to other diseases that may impact brain health.
Research has shown that children who survive severe measles infections have long-term cognitive deficits, including lower IQ scores and impaired executive function. Longitudinal studies have shown that vaccinated kids have better educational outcomes.
Yes, NAb titers drop after infection or vaccination, but they level off, and they remain high enough for the long term to prevent reinfection from the *same* variant that we've developed antigens for. Kucharski argues convincingly that it is novel variants that are getting past our immunity.
2. Eight people who were sick enough to require hospitalization. Not sure what the aveage of those requiring hospitalization was, but if the current measles strain is behaving like previous strains, then these are probably mostly kids under age 5.
3. One child has died. Reportedly this is the first US measles death in a decade. I need to check it that's true.
4. Five cases in people who had at least one MMR vaccine, with the rest being unvaccinated or unknown vaccination status. The vaccine is not perfect. One dose is 93% effective at preventing measles. Two doses of MMR are about 97% effective at preventing measles.
5. Most cases are in the Mennonite community. Conservative Mennonites have traditionally eschewed vaccination but not due to any formal religious prohibition.
6. Despite a bunch of propaganda from anti-vaxxers, the MMR vaccine is not the cause of the outbreak. All the cases that have been genotyped are from the wild D8 strain per Texas Dept. of State Health Services. The MMR vaccine uses an attenuated Type A strain.
7. The good news is that there's been a noticeable uptick in MMR vaccine uptake in Texas.
"Research has shown that children who survive severe measles infections have long-term cognitive deficits, including lower IQ scores and impaired executive function."
Yay! I'm dumb because I had the measles as a kid! (Ireland didn't have a vaccination programme for measles just then so there wasn't any "anti-vax" sentiment behind it).
So did I have measles as a kid because the province of Quebec didn’t have vaccines either. (I don’t think anyone did in 1962.) But it wasn’t severe just normal. I don’t think I ever got the mumps..
There was another paper I read, but I couldn't find it when I was putting this post together, that said, unless the kids had severe cases, most of the cognitive deficits disappeared within a year, and most kids caught up to their peers. But that NCBI link suggests that there is still a difference between vaccinated and unvaccinated. But then we have to consider the immune amnesia issue. Are kids with immune amnesia going to miss more school days due to more frequent infections from other pathogens while their humoral immune system relearns antigens it forgot?
Interesting article by Tomas Pueyo on "Why Japan Succeeds Despite Stagnation".
> Japan’s success in the face of demographic collapse and economic stagnation is one way of proving the importance of housing policy and social order. Getting those thinbangs right, as Japan has, creates a foundation strong enough to withstand three decades of zero growth.
Among other things, banks don't write off bad loans to companies. They just lend the distressed company more money to keep paying the interest. So, rather than companies going bankrupt, they continue functioning as "zombie" companies. Employees keep their salaries and continue to support the economy as consumers. But productivity growth is swamped by the zombie companies. Pueyo thinks this a house of cards, but it's been going on for thirty years now.
Related to the Great Man thread going on elsewhere, a big part of Japan's decline over the past few decades has not been due to general demographic slumps but due to a few huge Japanese companies losing their once dominant position.
You can easily imagine a world where Sony, rather than Apple, dominates the smartphone industry. You can easily imagine a world where Toyota, instead of Tesla, is the dominant manufacturer of EVs. All it would take would be competent far-sighted leadership of a couple of big Japanese companies in the early 2000s and Japan would be making loads of money even as its population shrinks.
I mean, Sony did end up winning the console war after more than two decades, so at least that's something. In fact, Japan's entertainment sector as a whole seems to be doing just fine.
This would influence Japanese GNP per capita, but I think it would not make much difference to Japanese GDP capita, and the latter figure is the one that is usually quoted. Unless you believe that Toyota and Sony would be making those EVs and smartphones physically in Japan. [And if Japan is such a great place for EV and smartphone factories, then why aren't Tesla and Apple manufacturing there?]
Well Japan is a good place for car factories, they're still cranking out nine million cars a year, in third place overall, and likely second if you shifted Tesla's US production to Japan.
Good leadership at Sony etc probably would have done more to prevent the Chinese electronics industry from ever getting a foothold.
But it's kind of... obvious? What the price is? The stagnation itself, the slow growth, the falling behind its peers is the price. It's not a "house of cards" in a sense that it's unstable and will "collapse" anytime, that's the wrong metaphor. Rather, it's an economy dragging a huge weight, and in thirty years it has manifested itself in Japan being "poorer" than it might have been otherwise. But there's no reason to expect it to suddenly "collapse", not like the USSR did.
This is a choice, and having been to Japan many times, I'm not sure if it's a bad one, given where they are culturally and demographically.
Seems like it's both, to me. If the zombies can't pay their loans autonomously, they're not really adding net-value to the overall economy. So they're a drag. But also. As soon as the loans dry up, the companies will declare bankruptcy, which results in a sudden loss of economic activity. So, I think the metaphor here needs to be <...drumroll...>blueshifting.
So the drag mechanism is kind of clear. WRT drying up loans, we need to look at whatever mechanism causes this first - it likely to be something very disruptive in its own right, where a financial crisis and company bankruptcies are downstream effects. This certainly can happen, but this would be a new development. For now Japan seems to be able to muddle through its peculiar version of Market Economy with Japanese Characteristics just about fine.
No, it is not obvious. Japan reached a certain level of wealth and then stopped growing. It's pure ideology to think that economic growth must be maintained no matter what. It's just ideology that we must be richer tomorrow than we were today. This is only true in some cases, it is not universally true.
But there's a difference between "no, you can't expect infinite growth forever" (which I agree with) and "this business is not making enough revenue to pay back its loans, so we'll just lending it money".
The failing business is soaking up money that will never be repaid, the employees really *are* doing 'bullshit jobs', and it's an accounting trick for the banks to be able to keep lending money and seem profitable. That's money that is not going to a healthy company, and that means the profitable companies are being hobbled.
I wouldn't expect Japan to keep growing at the former levels (when it was being touted as the new superpower that would buy up everything in America), but I honestly do not see how "I borrowed five million, I can't pay the interest, lend me another five million" is workable.
Hm, no. This is not even wrong. There's no "difference" between "you can't expect infinite growth forever" and "this business is not making enough revenue to pay back its loans, so we'll just lending it money", the same way that there's no "difference" between apples and giraffes, these are completely separate things that should not be compared or differentiated, except as a comedy routine.
The employees may or may not be doing bullshit jobs, you don't know this, just because the business in unprofitable doesn't mean it doesn't produce useful goods or services.
"That's money that is not going to a healthy company, and that means the profitable companies are being hobbled." - Tell me you don't understand banking without saying "I don't understand banking", banks make loans first then look for reserves, loans are driven by demand, there's no "fixed piles of bank notes" from which the bank takes wads to make a loan. So Sharp needing a loan doesn't prevent Sony from getting one.
The price the society pays for these policies is slower growth and a risk of elevated inflation. The Japanese seem to be ok with the slow growth, and had decades of 0 to negative inflation, so a modest uptick in inflation is quite "workable".
Sure, people can be providing useful goods and services that are not, and not expected to be, profit-making. That's the voluntary and community sector.
Private sector business *is* expected to be profitable. If a company can't pay its way, then it must not be providing services that the public wants, or not in such amounts that they'll pay for them which drives sales. I don't know what Japanese companies are like, maybe they are all filled with salarymen who stay at work for sixteen hours a day from fear of being perceived to not be committed to the company if they go home on time, but they're not doing anything useful while they're at their desks.
If you can only keep going because the bank is constantly giving you money, then that's the equivalent of a person being on UBI. I'm surprised Japan can afford that level of bailing out, but if it's working, then I guess that's why nobody wants to rock the boat. But surely the price will come due in the end some time?
"Private sector business IS expected to be profitable." Expected by whom? I don't take it for granted. A lot of businesses open right now are operating at a loss and are doomed to fail. That's the way of the world. I don't have a grievance against failing businesses for struggling on as long as possible. Nor do I particularly care how many loans the failing company takes on. Why should I be invested in that? As long as the proverbial trains run on time, crime is reasonably low and the fish keep biting, what difference does it make?
As for loans going to failing businesses instead of thriving businesses, life isn't fair. No one should feel entitled to a loan.
"If you can only keep going because the bank is constantly giving you money, that's the equivalent of being on UBI..." Just change one word in this sentence...
"If you can only keep going because the INVESTORS are giving you money." And voila, good old fashioned Western capitalism. We lionize non-profitable companies that are able to spark the investors' imagination.
Well, that's quite the point, isn't it. Why know when one can idly speculate? FWIW I have actually been to many Japanese companies. These people work. They make good products. They are unable to charge their customers enough to cover the costs, and unable to grow the number of customers. This is a drag, but as a society they decided to keep these firms afloat. Who am I to judge?
"But surely the price will come due in the end some time?" - What is it with the obsession of "the price" coming "due in the end"? What "end"? When?
As I and others keep pointing out, "the price" is being continuously "paid" in the form of slower growth. The Japanese seem to be ok with that, by and large. Yes, their government debt is astronomical, yes it has been astronomical and growing for a long time, yes, there is rational explanation why this works and may keep working for a very long time, no, Rogoff et. al. did not show that once the debt exceeds 90% of GDP everything goes bad, they messed up their excel spreadsheet, happens to the best of us. All these things are knowable, a click or two away.
Meanwhile their trains are clean and run on time, violent crime is almost nonexistent, the food is great, and the countryside is beautiful. I'd trade our American growth for some of the Japanese stagnation any day.
Japan didn't stop growing, it grew by an average of 0.8% a year, that is bad in the modern world but it much better than stagnation or most societes in human history
Remarkable how much of fiscal policy and "macroeconomics" is just guys doing everything possible not to repeat the Great Depression, regardless of whether it causes far more damage in the long term.
Bank runs were a huge problem, which where FDIC came from. Banking is a society-wide illusion, and it can only work as long as there's confidence in it. Putting the full weight of the US government behind consumer banking created a foundation of confidence that helped to built the post-war prosperity in this country.
Re. "Sparepot is a privacy analyst at Meta, where he runs a low frequency prediction market for his team. He occasionally comments on ACX as Ace Is Low. He writes: "For the contest, I prioritized winning over platonic accuracy and shifted my real predictions to be more extreme. I don't know whether this is a lesson in self-confidence, support for the 'nothing ever happens' hypothesis, or a knock against the scoring algorithm. " " :
We know that luck is required to win any contest. Suppose you're entering a prediction contest, and you don't want to maximize your expected score; you want to maximize your chance of getting the best score. Is the optimal strategy to bias all your guesses in the direction away from the mean guess? If so, how far away from the mean?
Prediction markets use proper scoring algorithms, so you reduce your average payoff; but you are ignoring that and you want to maximize the probability of an extreme tail event - specifically, being further out than any other of the _n_ participants. The classic scenario is the highschool weekly stockpicking contest, where you smurf it by putting all your capital into a single ultra-volatile stock each week and hope you can martingale to a win over the fools pursuing value investment or diversification for small average gains. This generally doesn't work in low-frequency prediction contests because they are low-frequency: you don't get enough turns to win the lottery repeatedly and come out on top. So it's not enough to simply oversize your bets or bet on volatile 50:50 markets. You won't get enough bites at the apple, and your oversized random bets will tend to cancel out (and the more so the more of them you make).
More broadly, this is the fantasy sports setting: the goal is not to pick good players for your fantasy team, but to pick players misevaluated by all the other participants in such a way that combined, they add up to a scenario in which various other teams of top picks all lose and your weirdo underdog wins. So the idea is not to simply bet wildly on low-rated players, but to find correlated events under some scenario, and then bet as if that scenario were guaranteed. You want all your bets to line up, in some way, or else they will interfere and cancel out and you could've put more oomph behind a more coherent set of bets.
An analogy here might be to try to win a prediction market by betting that this year is the year that North Korea finally invades South Korea, and placing big bets on the many *correlated predictions*: 'use of a nuke in war this year', 'SK indices drop >20%', '>1000 Americans die in combat this year' etc. Usually you'll wipe out, of course, and perform way below average, but then if the rare event happens, you clean up by all of your bets paying off in big multiples simultaneously and you blow past all of the merely calibrated, or merely overly-paranoid participants, because you went all-in on all of the correlated bets instead of just a few or maybe going a bit overboard on paranoia about imminent warfare.
And then if other participants are doing the same thing, and you realize it because the odds of these correlated predictions strike you as all oddly systematically high, then you have to find a new longshot scenario to go all-in on. It might be something else like 'Russia finally invades Ukraine' - oops, never mind, uh, 'global air-borne epidemic kills hundreds of millions' - er, uh, how about 'China invades Taiwan', or you might need to narrow down your scenario even more, like instead of 'North Korea invades', 'North Korea *conquers*'. Naturally, you may run into the problem of market granularity and liquidity, where there aren't enough distinct bets or the transaction costs start becoming so high that they start to damage your odds of being #1 in the case of the longshot paying off. The more participants, the weirder your scenario has to be; the thicker and more detailed the markets, the weirder your scenario can be. But at some point the regress will stop and reach an equilibrium with everyone picking their efficient long-shot scenario to gamble on.
> Is the optimal strategy to bias all your guesses in the direction away from the mean guess? If so, how far away from the mean?
(1) Yes. (2) It depends on how many people are in the contest. And on how many questions are to be predicted. My gut instinct is to shade each of your predictions by the same number of logits, and to make the total amount of shading (in logits) roughly equal to the square root of the number of participants. Epistemic status - WAG.
(This is katifish, sorry username doesn't match). I'm a bit late to the conversation -caveats that this is obviously just my own approach/experience, and I don't think any of the other comments in this thread are necessarily wrong, but I felt like this was worth posting since I don't think people should think you need to minmax and extremize all your predictions in order to do decently well.
I mentioned this briefly on another comment below but - I generally predict my true probabilities on binary q's and if anything adjust slightly towards the crowd for what I think of internally as "epistemic humility update" (to varying degrees, depending on how good I think my knowledge/evaluation of that q is relative to the average person). I also am compulsive enough that I predict on all questions in a tournament, which you could argue is not necessarily the best choice. For ACX you also can't see the crowd, so you don't have the collective knowledge to draw on unless you're getting it from another source (e.g. polymarket).
For continuous questions it's a bit different. I don't think a symmetric gaussian actually reflects the outcome probabilities of most questions, so I put in a moderate amount of effort with components and to get the distribution I want, and often end up extremizing at least a little. When the crowd forecast is visible, I'm also fairly likely to check what parts of the distribution I have above vs below the crowd, and I do think a little about whether I can set it up to gain a decent amount but mitigate downside. But for me the overall strategy is more about trying to use good sources of information and focusing on questions where I might have an edge over other predictors.
Your own strategy may depend on what your goals are - I also predict some q's outside of tournaments, and generically want to do well and track/improve my own thinking, so I view the possible prize more as a motivation to update and an excuse to spend a bit more time researching the q's. Different approach may be better if you're trying to maximize the odds of winning in that specific tournament. But did want to note you can get prizes by predicting based on what you believe is accurate, at least with the current number of participants and degree of strategizing (my impression is the quant traders also predicted based on what they considered true models rather than attempts to gamble on extreme possible outcomes).
Clearly there is a fixed point (Nash Equilibrium). Every player should shade their predictions some, but not too much. And it seems likely that if many predictors are trying to maximize their score rather than maximize their chances of winning, then it would probably be better to shade your predictions a little less than the Nash Equilibrium amount. Epistemic status - fractionally better than a WAG.
Anyone been following the still-unfolding controversy around literacy education in the US?
I recently started listening to the Sold A Story podcast and it's blowing my mind. There are still many, many districts trying to teach kids to read without teaching them phonemic awareness (phonics) skills and I think it may be a significant factor in a large number of present-day societal ills-- crime, poverty, anti-intellectualism, you name it.
Wealthier districts that used "whole language" methods of teaching reading have been relatively unaffected because parents in those areas could afford private tutoring for their kids, or had the spare time & skills to be able to teach their own kids to read when their schools didn't. But it's been devastating to literacy levels especially in poorer areas.
Some states and individual districts have come around to using evidence-based literacy instruction methods, leading to towns full of first-graders going from just over half to almost 100% reading at or above grade level. But there are still way too many that have not. And the damage that has been done over the last FORTY YEARS while "whole language" instruction has been dominant may be more than we can recover from.
Any educators here, especially at the primary/early-childhood level in the US and New Zealand? What's your take?
I went to public elementary school in the US in the 80s. My sister went to public elementary school in the US in the 90s. My daughter is currently going to public elementary school. Three different school districts in two different states.
In all three cases, the basic reading curriculum has been mostly phonics with a minor admixture of what seems to be be "whole language" style methods. The main admixture in the current curriculum in my daughter's school is the memorization of a small number of commonly used words that don't follow the simplified phonics rules taught on kindergarten and first grade, referred to as "sight words".
My experience here is a small sample size, and as such don't rule out the possibility that pure or dominant "whole language" teaching methods are widespread in other districts. But still, the claim that they're near-universal seems contrary to my experience.
I'm hardly an expert, but my understanding is that this curriculum was most popular starting in the early 2000s and had already begun to be phased out by the time Sold a Story came out. So it's possibly your family just got lucky and missed it, or that your daughter is in a school system that never adopted it. I was in elementary school at the same time as you and whole word doesn't sound familiar to me or my parents.
Bush Jr.'s education programs did not use whole word, mostly favoring phonics based approaches. Because of this, there was a strong left reactionary element in Education groups that made phonics vs whole word more of a political issue. By the time Obama was out of office, people's emotions around this debate had abated and they were willing to move back to phonics. (This is at least the theory from Sold a Story).
Thanks, I just read the link. Yeah, the original post already had an echo chamber sound to me. Seems
to me there’s altogether too much vehemence in the air and not enough curiosity. And if in fact people who learned to read in the last 40 yrs are worse readers — which, who knows, may not even be true—. there are
other plausible candidates for the reason: screen time, cannabis, busier parents . . .
I remember first reading Hanford's reporting on the topic and noticing that, despite the articles' contents, the bar graphs showing reading ability by year hadn't changed much since the Bush years--they weren't great, but weren't actually getting worse. I think more decline has been shown in SAT scores. My own feeling as someone who works with students in higher education is that the culprits are more likely attention span issues and lack of motivation (especially the latter).
Speaking as a teacher - so much in the education world is like this. Someone has an idea, it sounds good, maybe there's a promising result in a couple of studies, maybe the professors who are researching the idea teach their pet theory to their students, and once it's in the culture it's viciously difficult to root it out. Learning styles is like this - an idea that sounded good, showed some promising results in some areas, and then got used in ways that were not evidence-based, and upon further investigation it turns out that tailoring instruction to learning styles doesn't work at all, even a little bit. I watched as major news publications published pieces every year for over a decade pointing out that learning styles had been debunked as a pedagogical tool, but I *still* run into it from newly-minted teachers as well as members of the public who don't follow the latest news in the field of educational research.
One of the problems is that having a cool and intuitive idea takes, like, a few minutes. "Hey, I seem to enjoy hearing information, but when I see it written down I tune out. Maybe other people are like that. Maybe some people are 'auditory' learners and others are 'visual' learners!" But then it takes, like, years to investigate that idea. You have to do a study, get it peer reviewed, then other people have to note the gaps in your study and study those, and then after a decade the full picture shows up. But by that time, everyone has heard about your cool intuitive idea, and since it's easy to explain, and plays to people's preferences and biases, they adopt it uncritically.
Another problem is that education reforms happen so frequently that teachers have trouble keeping up with which new technique we're supposed to be using. A common defense mechanism is to just teach in the way we were taught to teach, or in a way that makes sense to us and seems to get results, and then try to ignore top-down attempts to "reform" us. Which is fine if we started out with good ideas, but if we started out with garbage, and have only our own experience to compare that garbage to, we might get stuck in a rut of using techniques that are a pure waste of time, or even actively harmful.
I feel like a competent government would construct a database of the evidence base for every educational method there is, and keep it up-to-date, and organize training to make sure teachers know what methods are proven, what methods are of indeterminate efficacy, and what methods are proven harmful or ineffective. Right now the US has an appalling hodgepodge of federal, state, and district rules and policies, plus various professional certification boards that ask teachers to do professional development but don't really rate the quality of that development (so I suspect you could take a course on "how to teach with learning styles" and have it count towards your PD hours, even though it's garbage).
And then add into that the fact that the school curriculum is currently highly politicized, and that inequality in US education has always made ed reform highly politically charged, and so even something as objective as "program A improves literacy for 95% of kids while program B only works for 45% of kids" becomes divisive as various sides choose to impart special meaning to which demographic the 95% and the 45% belong to. So yes, education in the US is a huge mess, mostly for structural and political reasons.
I really think that you and everyone else who’s in Ain’t It Awful mode should look at Mallard’s link, and also Brittany’s.
Here’s a short summary of Brittany’s article:
The Science of Reading and the Media: Does the Media Draw on High-Quality Reading Research?
Article makes the case that coverage of Phonics pro/con in NYTimes, NPR and similar suffers from several major flaws, all “errors of insufficient understanding” on the part of the journalists.
It begins by making the case that the writers and what they wrote had a weak connection to actual research:
The Time and NYT articles both made claims about reading research, but neither appeared substantively grounded in it. Links provided in both articles mostly take the reader not to peer-reviewed research, an expected standard in scholarship, but to other news articles, podcasts, and/or popular (but not always scholarly) books. Both journalists often relied on the word of “science of reading” advocates, failing to verify those statements against research.
By drawing mostly on vociferous advocates of one approach and bolstering their claims primarily with other journalism, journalists create an echo chamber which itself is disconnected from reading research. Indeed, Time cited no individual research studies, even where those would clearly be relevant. For example, it discussed widespread adoption of LETRS training, a professional development program supposedly aligned with the “science of reading;” yet it never acknowledged a rigorous study indicating that LETRS had no positive effect on student achievement, a critical detail from a research-based perspective. 4
It then goes on to list 3 other errors of insufficient understanding in the articles in question:
Inaccurate, Distorted Use of Terminology
Spurious Claims that One Approach is Settled Science
Lack of Context about Previous Phonics Implementation Attempts
It is followed by 47 footnotes, most to relevant studies.
I'm curious what ideology is driving the "whole language" method. It's so crazy that I think it must be ideologically-driven. But what ideology could be behind it? John Gatto says it's a deliberate scheme to make Americans stupid and easily controllable, but that seems incredible to me.
Back in the late 90s, I read "Why Johnny Still Can't Read" by Rudolf Flesch, a 1983 book following up on the same author's 1955 book advocating phonics over whole language. What I recall of Flesch's explanation for the ideology behind Whole Language was that the main idea was to quickly bootstrap the ability to read simple texts as quickly as possible, after which reading and writing skills could be automatically expanded through immersive practice, while phonics instruction relies heavily on drills and memorization at first before students are able to use their reading skills naturally. A variety of factors went into this: observing that naturally strong readers tend to recognized familiar words as a unit rather than sounding them out; a general movement of education philosophy away from memorization skill; and influence from a popular foreign-language curriculum built around reading immersion that made no attempt to teach grammar or vocabulary except by example (provided via the French novel "Les Aventures de Télémaque", with a parallel English translation on facing pages of the text for reference). The expectation is that the principles of phonics, to the extent they're useful, will be intuited through familiarity.
Flesch's counterargument was that in the long term, pure whole language instruction is more reliant on memorization than pure phonics, and that expected process of absorbing the principles of phonics through osmosis only really happens for a small percentage of students or those who are explicitly taught phonics outside of their school curricula. And consequently, reading/writing vocabulary acquisition in whole language instruction proceeds at a fairly low, linear rate, limited by the rate at which new written words can be memorized, while students who are taught phonics can read and write a large fraction of their spoken vocabularies "for free" without any additional memorization besides the occasional idiosyncratic spelling.
To me this sounds like an idea that pulling flowers out of the ground will make them grow faster. People do that surprisingly often... not literally (probably), but all the time in education. Starting with parents who want to make their kids walk, while the child still wants to crawl. Then read the entire word at once, while the child is still not sure about the individual letters. And then memorize the math, while the child still needs to count numbers using fingers.
It is always the same stupid idea that you can improve your child by making it skip the "beginner" phase and get immediately to "advanced". What you get instead is some kind of "fake-advanced" with bad fundamentals: children who try walking but keep falling down and hurting themselves, children who try to guess words but often guess wrong, children who try to guess math results and often guess wrong. And that sometimes actually does long-term damage, because once the child was successfully pushed into the "fake-advanced" phase, it doesn't want to go back to the "beginner" phase and get it right.
This is what naturally happens when you try to copy the naturally most advanced kids, without understanding that what makes them advanced is that they have already successfully *mastered* the beginner stage... not that they were forced to *skip* it.
I don't think it sounds so crazy that there needs to be some special explanation. The intuition, to me, is:
1) Lots of English writing system is nonsensical anyway ( Too/Blue/Grew/Flu/Through/Threw) - maybe we learn better by just memorising directly rather than learning letter sounds and then memorising the 1000s of exceptions.
2) There's an obvious parellel in babies/children learning to talk - they usually aren't formally taught that, say, the s sound means plural, they just learn it through exposure.
3) Non-alphabetic languages exist and seem to be learned and used well enough, when phonics instruction is impossible.
4) When I read as a fluent adult, it doesn't feel like I am considering each letter individually and just sounding them out in my head really fast. It feels like I'm just recognising the whole word.
To be clear - my understanding is that the evidence is firmly in favour of teaching using phonics, and that's what schools should do! But I think you're too quickly dismissing the intuitive appeal of 'whole language', especially when lots of aspects of it just seems like good ideas in their own right (frequent reading, integrating literacy into other areas of the curriculum, emphasizing the love of books and engaging reading materials)
I feel like English is quite weird this way, which is contributing to the problem. Many languages fall into obvious categories: either they're alphabet-based and highly phonetic(e.g.,.Spanish, Russian) or are based on symbols that have no connection to how the word sounds (e.g., Cantonese, Mandarin). But English is straddling an uncomfortable middle ground: there is definitely a connection but it is often rather tenuous and non-obvious, hence, perhaps, lack of clarity on how to best teach kids to read in it.
I'm not an expert, but I'm not so sure that's exactly right. Chinese, for example does have phonetic elements. And there are syllable based writing systems too (Eg, Korean)
I found this paper on the subject, which does make the case that English is an outlier (and that that biases research on learning to read):
David L. Share (2008) On the Anglocentricities of Current Reading Research and Practice: The Perils of Overreliance on an “Outlier” Orthography
Right. My experience learning Chinese as a second language is that when I encounter a character I haven't seen before (without context) I can guess at least with better accuracy than chance what it sounds like (something like modulo rhyming syllables and tones). On the other hand, if I can guess anything at all about its meaning it will be very vague (has to do with people, is some kind of building, etc.).
Yes, you're correct that whole language seems to make intuitive sense in many ways to adults who already know how to read. You're correct that it feels like you are consuming whole words and not whole letters. But eye tracking studies of fluent readers have shown otherwise. You're correct that there are a lot of exceptions and non-intuitive spellings in English. You're correct that kids can learn a lot of "sight words" through memorization and without decoding. You're correct that kids have inherent capacities for recognizing patterns in SPOKEN grammar and phonotactics, and can leverage these understandings for making inferences about written words AFTER they learn to decode letters. All of these have been used as arguments against phonics, but they don't hold up under study.
I'm not sure how they teach reading in non-alphabetic languages, though. That's an interesting question and I'm sure it's been studied too.
Yeah agree, I'm just trying to point out that it's wrong, not crazy - like geocentrism, you can imagine it to be pretty intuitive but no less wrong emperically.
FWIW if I was critiquing the point about non-alphabetic language, I'd say it's possible (but difficult to quantify) that it is just harder to learn non-alphabetic scripts like Chinese compared to English, and in reality even Chinese is not purely logographic / has phonetic elements.
It sounds like it started as a fad among teachers who lacked the scientific literacy to evaluate why the method seemed to be working at early stages but actually wasn't.
Also there was an appealing style that went along with the mostly useless substance: get kids interacting intimately and enjoyably with print even before they know their letters, let them curate their own book collections, give them plenty of time for independent reading in a pleasant, low-pressure way. Nothing wrong with this, or even with using context clues as a supplement to help figure out new words, but it's almost useless if the kids don't know how to sound out letters. It's extra harmful that poor readers can use the three-cue strategy to pretend to read, act like they're reading, and even extract some small amount of meaning from certain books without actually decoding very many words.
The early inventors and proponents seemed to be true believers, and then they began to have huge financial and socio-emotional incentives to stick to their views. They and their publishers funded some bad science to back it up, which carried them far enough to get a huge foothold in the education sector in spite of other studies showing long-term harm.
When the Bush Jr. administration started pushing for "The Science of Reading" initiative in response to the failures of Whole Language, teachers and many folks on the left found it too unpalatable to abandon their approach, and then it became Left-Right politicized.
And then 9/11 happened and it got de-prioritized. Bush was in an elementary classroom observing a literacy lesson when he got the call about the second plane.
If i remember correctly, the technique was first developed for children with learning disabilities like Dyslexia where a non-phonics approach may be needed. And there was great success but that doesn't necessarily mean you'll get the same success with kids that don't have learning issues.
The financial incentives then began and then the second generation of supports takes over motivated more by money and prestige than education alone. Thats at least how i remember it.
>When the Bush Jr. administration started pushing for "The Science of Reading" initiative in response to the failures of Whole Language, teachers and many folks on the left found it too unpalatable to abandon their approach, and then it became Left-Right politicized.
The Sold a Story podcast did a good job covering this part of the history. I think it rings true. Don't think, as Phil Ghetts implies, that it was a conspiracy to damage the US.
Yeah, I think as with a lot of issues in education policy and the rest of life, one should never attribute to malice what can be adequately explained by ignorance. Teachers, parents, school administrators, and state legislators as a baseline have a very poor level of scientific literacy and very little bandwidth to dig into the scientific literature themselves. So education policy basically comes down to politics and gut reactions. Whoever is able to market their view or their method most effectively will win out.
Exactly. Education policy, like housing policy, transportation policy, and other city/local level policies are especially vulnerable to being taken over by actors that aren't experts, have an agenda, and/or don't have time/resources to properly explore the issues. So many school "systems" are just the handful of schools in a rural county where the board is members of the community are just normal people. They may be trying their best, but we can't expect them to be experts on every facet of education in the same way we can expect it of researchers or board of education members for a large metropolitan area.
> It sounds like it started as a fad among teachers who lacked the scientific literacy to evaluate why the method seemed to be working at early stages but actually wasn't.
Teachers (at least in the US) don't have the freedom to implement major changes to reading or math curricula. These programs are developed at universities by educational psychologists. As Robert F. stated above there were legitimate *theoretical* reasons to believe the whole language would work better than phonics. These researchers who advocated whole language probably ran some small studies to convince themselves that their theories were correct and got some papers published in educational journals. I doubt state-level educational administrators had the time or expertise to check the validity of these studies. "If the experts at the Harvard Graduate School of Education say whole language, we'll do whole language!"
I was taught to read by the "look-say" (or sight word) method. The old Dick and Jane readers were the most famous readers that used this method. Look-say encouraged children to memorize whole words by sight rather than decoding them phonetically. We were taught to recognize the shapes of common words, and later on (second grade, maybe?), we started sounding out words. I missed out on Dick and Jane because, by 1965, my elementary school had transitioned to "Janet and Mark" readers. The main characters were Janet, Mark, and their pets Tip (a dog) and Mitten (a cat). I think the cat was a nod to making the readers more inclusive. "See Tip Run! Run, Tip, run!"
The main reason it works for Chinese is that there are only 2000-3000 characters in common usage, compared to 30,000-60,000 English words. Also, many Chinese characters do have clues to their phonics or their semantics embedded in their structure--e.g. 他 means "he", 她 means "she", and 女 (the left half of "she") means "female", so you can often guess the sound and/or meaning.
If you are just taught phonics then you'll have to figure out whole-word at some point anyway, because this is how adults read words that they are familiar with.
If you're just taught whole-word then you'll have to figure out phonics on your own at some point anyway, because the mapping between sounds and letters is too obvious to be ignored. Phonics remains important for spelling long after it loses its relevance for most reading, because you're not going to be able to remember how to spell "relevance" rather than "revelance" without it.
> you'll have to figure out whole-word at some point anyway, because this is how adults read words that they are familiar with.
And that's perfectly okay. That is what automatically happens with a lot of practice.
But if you try to skip reading letters and proceed directly to scanning entire words (without doing the phonics or something very similar to it in between), instead of fluent reading, you will get guessing. And that is difficult to fix.
It's like telling kids in the first grade that they shouldn't count using their fingers because the adults are not doing that: they just instantly know how much 8+7 is. Yes, it is true that many adults instantly know that, but they remember it as a result of many calculations they did in the past. If you try to skip the calculation and proceed to memorization, instead of slow calculation using fingers, you will get fast, confident, and often wrong results. Because memorizing a wrong answer is just as difficult as memorizing the right one, and just removed the one step that made the difference (that it was easier to get the right answer using your fingers).
>If you are just taught phonics then you'll have to figure out whole-word at some point anyway, because this is how adults read words that they are familiar with.
You don't *have* to do this; you can just go on using phonics for basic literacy. You probably *will* do this, because after the three thousandth time you've sounded out "time" in your head, it will click. You won't need to be trained to do this, it will happen. But you do need to be able to read a lot in order to burn all of those words into your sight-reading memory, which means you need to be able to read *before* you know all the words on sight.
That's what phonics is for. If you don't have it, well, *maybe* your teachers can drill enough words into your brain up front that you can read carefully simplified texts that use only the words you've been taught and gradually add new words in small doses that will have to to be either explained each time by the teacher or introduced in carefully-set contexts where the new word is obvious.
But that's doing it the hard way, and it limits the ability of novice readers to understand books not specifically written for that purpose. Most people will manage that. Most; but not all or nearly all.
If you just teach them a bit phonics, you can point them at the whole existing body of children's literature (and beyond), and stand ready to help them out if they get stuck. And almost all of them will be able to do that.
Are you going to write a large body of children's literature using the ten-hundred-words tool so that everyone will find ample reading material that interests them but is within the present limits of their reading ability, or are you just going to insist that they all read just the pedagogical texts you have prepared for them?
I wonder how much J.K. Rowling would charge to write a ten-hundred-words version of "Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone"? Though I think "Harry", "Potter", and "Philosopher" are going to break the algorithm at the start. as is the alternative "Sorcerer".
A fun genetics story, with some nominative determinism:
The gene FTO has been linked, in genome-wide association studies, to obesity. FTO used to stand for "fatso"—not because of obesity, but because the gene was big. Now that the link is known, it stands for "fat mass and obesity-related." (It's one of a few genes initially called "Ft something" because they were discovered in the fused-toes deletion mutation in mice, which also deleted some other already-known nearby genes in the Irx [Iroquois] family.)
FTO is also one of the only cases so far of a GWAS association whose mechanism is thought to be relatively well-understood. Claussnitzer et al. (2015) concluded that the causal site is in a non-coding intron, so it's not actually the FTO protein that matters. The intron includes an enhancer for the nearby IRX3/5 genes; but its wild-type version also has a binding site for ARID5B, which blocks the enhancer. In the obesity variant, that binding site is lost, so ARID5B can't bind, so the enhancer isn't blocked, so the enhancer upregulates IRX3/5, which guides developing fat cells away from becoming beige fat cells (which burn some fat as heat) and towards becoming white fat cells (which don't).
(There's also a possible mechanism involving IRX3 expression in the brain, which I've read less about [Smemo et al., 2014; see also Tung et al., 2014; Herman and Rosen, 2015; Claussnitzer et al., 2020].)
Smemo, S. et al. (2014). Obesity-associated variants within FTO form long-range functional connections with IRX3. Nature. https://doi.org/10.1038/nature13138
I don't 100% remember, but I think the part I talked about is mainly developmental genes (Claussnitzer et al. say "rs1421085 [the causal site] acts specifically in the early differentiation of preadipocytes"; Herman and Rosen also refer I think to the IRXs as being "believed to be developmental genes")
there are also the downstream targets of IRX3/5, like UCP1, some of which might act in adulthood? ofc still being careful not to mess too much with anything that has essential other functions
What's the outlook for Natural Language Processing (NLP) in psychology for diagnostics for replacing scored questionnaires? You can, with permission, keep freeform records of patients (written or recorded) and run it on any model you want which scores for some condition. You could even train new models to classify things in ways we haven't thought before, and it's reproducible because you can use the same data, or run the same model on as many people as you want to up the n. Am I crazy?
To clarify, the idea is that you take some corpus of language from an individual--blog posts, tweets, speech, etc--and have a diagnostic NLP model go through it, and provide a decision on whether the person who produced this corpus should be diagnosed with certain psychological conditions?
Assuming that's what you mean, the first objection that pops into my mind is that most people don't have large amounts of freely-accessible, detailed speech or writing data available about them. Bloggers and video creators would, but that's a small portion of the population, and actually accessing that data could get pretty dicey. All the same, I'm not convinced that most such data would constitute a reliable corpus for making psychiatric diagnoses.
I suppose you could run a diagnostic model on a lot of writing/speech from a lot of people who have already been exhaustively tested, and then hope that the model picks up on some subtle cues in expression or word choice that turn out to be reliable enough to replace questionnaire testing (as a screening tool, obviously they get used for diagnosis but they really shouldn't, and we shouldn't start using NLP models for purposes we shouldn't have been using questionnaires for to begin with), but there's some limitations.
First you need to get access to that data, then you need to make sure all of it is properly labeled to an individual (exclusively and only to a given individual for each document in the corpus), and then you need to exhaustively test every individual for every condition that you want the model to be able to diagnose.
If you did this, you might end up with the desired result, but it would probably be more expensive than you'd expect, and you'd run into pretty big generalizability problems unless you somehow managed to collect this data for a large and fully population-representative group, with enough representation of every language group, dialect, and potentially even subculture you intend to examine.
Honestly, screening questionnaires and in-person or telehealth diagnoses are probably going to be much more reliable for the foreseeable future.
What’s the smartest thing you ever did? I’m not asking here about practical things, stuff like committing to exercising or marrying the person you did. I asking about intellectual breakthroughs or high points.
OK, I’ll throw in my smartest thing. When I was a teen there were a couple years when I was delighted and fascinated by math, and mentally played with the math I was learning. After I learned about the equations that graphed as conic sections I started to crave a way to make my etch-a-sketch produce the conic sections mechanically, and I threw myself into figuring out how to make it draw the simplest shape, a circle: What mechanical process would drag the 2 dials — left/right and updown/down — in precisely the right pairing of 2 ever-changing amounts to produce a circle? And I solved it! I reasoned my way to the solution, then I tested it and it worked.
The solution, for the upper left quandrant of a circle, was a right angle. You started with the point of the right angle on the left-right dial and the edge of the angle to the right of the point on the up-down dial. Then you rotated the angle counterclockwise until the point was on the up-down dial. If the angle and the 2 dials were set up so that a movement by each right angle edge of a given amount rotated the dial it was touching by the same amount, then you turned the left/right dial to the right, and the up/down dial up, and the amount each moved over the course of the turning of the angle was the correct amount to trace the ever-changing angle of the quarter circle. (At least, that was my conclusion — I have not checked this since.)
To check the idea I made gears out of cardboard and stuck them onto the dials and right angle edges, engaged the gears and rotated the angle as described, and actually did get a line that traced a perfect quarter circle, except for being a bit wobbly due to the crudeness of the gears.
I realize that what I figured out is no great accomplishment in the annals of engineering marvels, but I think it was pretty good, given what a naive blank slate I was at the time. And my mind in that era felt the most alive and powerful it ever has. I wanted to engage with math puzzles the way I want to chew food when I’m famished.
The first thing that came to mind was a piece of software I wrote that calculated the time a satellite would achieve line of sight with some other point in space, down to the second.
It struck me as smart because there were multiple algorithms for calculating LoS at the time (decades ago - I haven't followed the field in a while), and I wanted to support all of them in the same framework. I also had very limited CPU and memory to work with (early 1990s), so I didn't want to brute force it, had no cloud to task to do it, and there were no ready repositories of third party libraries to borrow.
My framework assumed each algorithm could be called and passed two coordinates and return a "can / cannot see". I wrote another crude and fast algorithm that could make a reasonable guess somewhere in the relevant window (often, the user wanted "first time of visibility after T", so this part was easy in many cases), and a second relevant guess where the LoS was different, and then binary-searched my way through the time interval for the exact second where that state changed.
It handled being able to see a spot on the ground defined in multiple ways, another satellite (requiring two orbit calculations rather than just one), or some celestial body with measurable width (i.e. when can it see any part of the sun, and when it can't). Because of the pluggable architecture, it could handle a different model of the earth if you had one. It also handled weird edge cases like a visibility window so small that the naive search algorithm could skip over it by mistake. (I forget how I did that - probably some trig hack.)
That code is long lost, sadly. Perhaps the smartest thing I made that still seems to be around is a Java implementation of a jigsaw puzzle. You might be surprised how many online puzzle apps out there don't even support arbitrary rotation of pieces. Mine did. It also supported arbitrary piece designs, and a few other things. I got bored with it before getting around to the wackier cuts I imagined; plus, there was a memory leak I traced into the JCL's JPEG implementation, and I didn't feel like rewriting their entire library. I haven't touched this in decades, either.
I declined a promotion about 5 years ago. I'd considered the current structure of the org, the place this higher level role would occupy in this structure, and the past decision making trends of the people at the top of the org, and correctly deduced it was a role that would be elminated for structural reasons at best and was a pre-meditated trap at worst. The person who received the role when I declined the promotion was laid off with no warning about a year and half later, along with everyone else already in that role. The biggest tell was that the senior managers that did the hiring all started looking for the exits as soon as the new roles were filled and dumped their existing duties on their direct reports as soon as they could.
I've written a couple of very complex pieces of software, one single-handedly and one initially by myself and then with a small team that I was leading.
I was the first (and possibly still the only) person to test out of an English class at any level in the history of my gigantic high school district. It was under extremely antagonistic conditions:
1. The test was pass/fail; passing grade was 85% (note: actual classes, only 75%). One shot, no re-testing.
2. The test grading was the sole discretion of the district, no appeals.
3. A pass did not positively contribute to GPA, but a fail would be an "F" on my transcript and negatively contribute to GPA
4. No class credit was earned; a pass only entitled me to skip to the next level and take a different kind of class for credit.
5. I had to purchase the class materials for a few hundred dollars (a 400 page textbook including theory with short stories and essays, a couple of novels, and the vocab book) to review, but the test itself would be closed-book.
5. The test itself was like $300...in 1995!...so about $900 in today's dollars, all-in.
My guidance counselor and the English department head tried to talk me out of it. They told me the horror stories of the half-dozen or so students across the district who attempted to test out of English ever year and failed. They told me that I'd be allowed to study all the reading materials ahead of time, but that I'd have to produce an entire year's worth of homework and class work in eight hours - tests, essays, a poem, a short story, and a 12 page research paper.
In short, it was impossible. The guidance counselor even leveled with me that the test was designed to prevent people from attempting to do high school in fewer than four years, due to the money the district made per student. But if I wanted to graduate in three years, I could pay the same amount, go to summer school, and be guaranteed of graduating early.
Fuck that.
I did all the prep, then, on a Saturday, I sat down with one other student to take the test under the eye of a proctor.
Packet after packet of tests were handed to me; every vocab test from the book, essay tests on the short stories, novels, poetry, and play from the textbook, and more. The stack of tests was *cartoonishly* high; five or six times taller than the entire output of my previous year of Honors-level English. Maybe as much as my entire output from the entire academic year.
Then I got to the MLA-formatted 12-page handwritten research paper on left and right-braining thinking There was a heavy packet of photocopied research materials included in the test packet - I guess these assholes figured that sending the students into the library was a bridge too far.
I wrote and wrote and wrote; used the MLA formatting of the research materials to perfect my own MLA formatting, and finished the paper.
I reached the bottom of the stack of the testing materials in a little under five hours.
I went through the entire packet again, carefully checking every answer.
Then at the five and a half hour mark, I turned everything into the proctor, who first looked startled, then deeply pitying.
Two weeks later, I went into the department head to check on my test and was tersely informed that I was the first person in the history of the district to have passed an English test at any grade level. I asked about the final score of my test - I was sincerely curious about what I might have missed - and was told that information was not available. I should be satisfied that I passed.
To this day, I'm pretty sure that my score was literally 100%. They were trying so hard to fail me and English has a little bit of room for interpretation in grading. I'm sure a 91% passing score would have been rounded down to an 84% failure; but at an unambiguous 100%, even the grader knew they would have gone to hell for the sheer injustice of trying to fudge it to failure.
One time I played simultaneous games of Chess and Go (against two different people, each of who was slightly better than me at the respective game). The constant context switching was an insane amount of effort, to the point where I was physically shaking, and I managed to actually win one (I lost the chess game, but in a tough contest rather than a landslide).
Do you consider such a state an achievement? I consider it to be a source of migraines and overall decline in productity; if you want to get "better" at "multitasking" start upping your video watching to 4x and get friendly with stimulants
It's an achievement, not a practice run. In the same way that getting injured scoring the game winning goal doesn't improve your skil or fitness l but may be the highlight of your sports career.
What does it say about those whose moments were in grade school. Did we peak or is it just thats when our wits were most explicitly matched against our peers.
A memorable moment was playing a type of word hint game. We had to guess a secret word while being given one word hints from our team. It was boys vs girls. Girls had given their player two types of furniture. Boys had told me "writer". I concluded the word must be drawer which the boys were too dumb to read.
It stood out because I outsmarted both the other team and my own team
My father had a 50 year lease that was expiring in a few years, which he had the "right to renew." He wanted to sell his business (involving a lot of fixed assets he owned on top of the land), but was having no luck since the question of renewal was up in the air, and the land owner had indicated he wasn't going to make it easy (I assume in an effort to take control of what was built on the land).
After looking through the original contract (from the 1970s) for a total of 60 seconds, I spotted that clause and said "It doesn't say *when* you have to exercise the right to renew. So just do it immediately." he did, the landlord made a huge fuss, but a little arbitration later it was revealed that he could renew at any time before the expiration of the lease, for another 50 years. This cleared up a lot of ambiguity with the sale that was, wasn't discovered by a team of multiple lawyers, and basically saved my dad from delaying his retirement for 8 years until the actual end of the lease.
I wouldn't say it's the "smartest" thing I've ever done as I have done very intellectually demanding stuff since then, but it was a key point where a bit of attention to detail did a lot of good for someone I care about. It really elevated my father's opinion of my intellect too, which has had positive 2nd order effects later in life.
Talked an acquaintance into turning himself in and confessing after he had committed an extremely violent crime. (Stabbed someone in the neck). Nor is it obvious that he would have gone down for the crime anyway, because the victim refused to cooperate with the police.
objectively this is terrible, and everyone else who knows whats going on hates it; but this piece of code combines compiler bugs in such a well maybe 3 people can read to make a compile-time-type-*mutable* data structure; when several of those things isnt suppose to be possible with templates
When I was 10 I came up with what I would now call "general copernicanism" aka I shouldn't expect my parents, teachers, friends, to be above average by much in any regard. (Since the average kid born in the world has obviously wrong ideas fed to them) Any ideas they try to pass on to me should be treated with skepticism. It worked out very well long term.
I figured out a way to get my mom to quit smoking. She had been a two-pack-a-day smoker since she was thirteen. She tried and failed to quit numerous times. Finally, I suggested that she switch to cigars. She couldn't really inhale the cigar smoke — it left her choking and gagging. So, she stopped lighting the cigars, but she had something in her mouth to fix her oral fixation. She'd go around all day chewing on her unlit stogies. I suppose she was getting some nicotine out of the tobacco juice. But after a couple of month she didn't need the cigars anymore. And she didn't start smoking again.
If I understand it correctly, the dialectics works like this:
* take a strawman of what your opponent was saying; call it "thesis"
* make up an opposite strawman; call it "anti-thesis"
* finally provide you own opinion as the golden middle way, or as the educated people prefer to call it, "synthesis"; that by definition makes you more sophisticated than your opponent
I was force-fed Marx and some Hegel by my Marxist professors in college. But in later life, I've come to appreciate Marx. Hegel, not so much. I was re-reading sections of Das Kapital a few years back, and I realized Marx's criticisms and analysis of the capitalist system are still valid today. He really didn't have any concrete suggestions of how Communism would work, though. But it's interesting that a bunch of points on the Communist manifesto are taken for granted today – central banks and universal education to name a couple.
To me it makes most sense to understand Marx as describing "Moloch".
The problem with communism is that even if you replace market forces with a central committee, "Moloch" remains, only takes a different form.
Now instead of e.g. factories competing for profit and ruining the environment as a side effect, you get political leaders competing for power over the communist party, starving millions and ruining the economy as a side effect. For exactly the same fundamental reason: that the politicians who are not willing to sacrifice everything in order to get to the top will be outcompeted by those who do.
Some regulation is good, but who will regulate the regulators?
Oh, very true, indeed. I can't remember where I read this, but mid-level Soviet economic managers had to make over a hundred pricing and ordering decisions each day and forwarded them to all the different factories. I don't know if this is true, but I imagine poor pricing and ordering decisions would have all sorts of unintended downstream effects.
Of course, Capitalism allows autonomous entities (businesses) to make their pricing decisions independently and order their raw materials based on their perceptions of the market. That doesn't mean the system works perfectly. For instance, the "Beer Game" developed by Jay Forrester at MIT in the 1960s shows how badly things can get mucked up even in a free market system.
But I'll note again, that as dissatisfied as Marx was with Capitalism, he never was able to propose a better system. Lenin and his crew tried to figure out Communism from scratch — and even they didn't claim it was "True Communism."
Yes, this is fundamentally about allocating scarce resources. Capitalism can throw much more brainpower at the task, but the brainpower is not aligned, so it kinda works okay locally (notices many local opportunities and exploits them), but often sacrifices too much to Moloch.
Also, as the companies get big enough, the boss can no longer make all important decisions alone, but the managers are not perfectly aligned, that creates another kind of inefficiency...
I guess that Marx's vision of socialism was something like... people will realize that they could do much better than this if they were aligned, and then... well, together they will figure out the right way to implement it. The plan was that we all will figure out the specific details together.
Also, Marx assumed that capitalism will soon reach some kind of natural "heat death", as the markets reach an equilibrium, because in the equilibrium there are no profits anymore. (If you can make a profit, someone else can copy your model, and people will keep doing this until there is no profit left and all niches were filled.) This sounds like a "spherical cow" reasoning. Marx probably vastly underestimated technological progress, which keeps disrupting the existing equilibria. Anyway, I think the original idea was that at the moment of "heat death" there will no longer be a strong opposition to socialism, not even among the remaining capitalists, because their epsilon profits will no longer be worth it.
This is completely different from Lenin's implementation, which was like: "Okay, now that we know what the solution looks like, we don't really need to wait for a consensus or a natural collapse of capitalism. We can take a shortcut: collect an group of well-meaning psychopaths willing to break a few million eggs to make an omelette that the future generations will thank us for. Alignment will then be achieved by brainwashing the next generations at school." Which probably seemed reasonable on paper, but in reality, the psychopaths themselves turned out not to be aligned, at all. So we got just another dictatorship, only with better PR.
The Soviet economy was stupid. Proximally, because the central planners had too little brainpower compared to the complexity of the entire economy. But the ultimate cause was the actual lack of alignment, which made honest feedback impossible, which made improvement impossible. Suggesting an improvement to the system would get you in gulag. Which seems to me like a very opposite of how socialism was supposed to work in Marx's vision.
At the end, we still don't know how to solve alignment, and in its absence the capitalism degrades more gracefully (for reasons described in the "Wealth of Nations") than any other system we have tried.
Even if magically all progress suddenly stopped forever, so that capitalism could reach its "heat death" in a few generations... I am afraid even that wouldn't make us any more aligned, and thus wouldn't make socialism any more possible. Instead, we would probably just get some groups of people fighting zero-sum wars, which would create local inequilibria, with local opportunities for capitalism to solve.
I wish we could do better. I don't see a realistic way how. Even the rationalist community is not aligned, internally, and it already has a huge advantage of having smart people with similar goals; even explicitly discussing topics related to coordination and decision-making. Effective altruists? The same thing. So if even these communities cannot be aligned, what hope is there left for a humanity as a whole? (Or even one country.)
Viliam: I'm very annoyed because I don't think there's anything in what you've said that I can disagree with! Worse yet, you've said it better than I could. Aarrgghh! :-)
But I'll add one small codicil. Capitalism is imperfect because competition drives some entities to grow into monopolies. The heat death you allude to is the monopolistic tendencies of corporate psychopaths. Instead of zero-sum wars, government regulators should regularly prune back monopolistic growths. Unfortunately, regulatory bodies end up hiring the former CEOs of the companies they're regulating, and former regulators get cushy seats on the boards of the companies they regulated, and it all goes downhill from there...
I don't know if this is the smartest thing I ever did, but it was quite a good insight under pressure.
I was selling buttons/badges with funny sayings at one of the big Boskones. I had twelve feet of table space, The customers were three or four deep. The challenge was arranging workflow to be as smooth as possible.
The insight was just that everyone's job had to be arranged so that no one had to reach across anyone to do their work. When I realized that, it all fell into place.
Note: I have no training in management or whatever you call the specialty of arranging workflows.
Boskone still exists, but it hasn't been the winter worldcon for a long time.
As an academic, it's perhaps a bit boring that my greatest intellectual achievement was a research paper. I got a manic phase in which I worked almost two weeks non-stop on that, and was lucky that I had the right combination of a great problem and some ingenious ideas. Essentially the insight was that for a big number of algorithm you could make a general statement on how they behaved on a huge class of problems. Half of my research in the next 5 years was building on that and fleshing out details and additional aspects.
Of course, the paper was rejected at our main conference. One reviewer wrote "It reads like an extended abstract for a monograph, or like an introductory overview to a field. ... The community can not digest chunks of this size" and strongly recommended rejection.
Did the reviewer likely not read and understand the result, or were they probably just mean? Or is it a human bias /to privilege proofs of specific easily state-able results over understanding/crystallization of knowledge (is that why the "Of course," in your comment)?
I am pretty sure that the reviewer did read and understand the result, the review was not just a one-liner. I believe that s/he was overwhelmed by the amount of results, and had a hard time digesting it. I don't think s/he just tried to be mean, I guess that it was more ingrained pattern-matching. This paper did not look like the good papers s/he was used to. It did also contain specific easily state-able results, but not one, but more like a list of 20 of them, because they all came out of the general theory.
The "of course" was a bit cynical, but contains a bit of truth. I think any paper which sticks out from the crowd has a high risk to be rejected. There are lots of stories of very revolutionary papers that were rejected. For example the first case of a randomized algorithm (Soloway-Strassen test) took 3 years to be published because reviewers were skeptical. In my experience, the easiest accepts are papers which are very similar to lots of other (good) research paper, both in content and in style. Any deviation, also positive deviations, make it harder to publish.
Interesting, thank you. Do academics consider this as a problem to be fixed at all (as opposed to as an imperfect heuristic that mostly works and hence to be continued, some sort of randomization for efficiency at the expense of perfection)?
Would you say that there is a neurotypicality-privilege in academia (where one refers to an "internal-to-academia" neurotypicality)?
It depends a bit. I am not so sure about neurotypicality because you can adapt your writing style to the style of some community. So it's not so much about a person.
There is one particular aspect that I and at least some other find really problematic: interdisciplinary research. That is "officially" regarded as something that everyone should support. But if you have a concrete interdisciplinary paper, it is very hard to publish, and interdisciplinary researchers struggle a lot. Because if the research is between discipline A and B, then the paper will be rejected from journals on topic A *and* from journals on topic B, because it is atypical for either side. And it's even worse for grant applications, where the reviewers from both sides will find the proposal weird. Unless there is already an established interdisciplinary community for exactly this combination, it's really hard.
This is my own experience, but I also talked just yesterday to a colleague who made exactly the same complaint. I think it is shared by most researchers who try to do interdisciplinary research. Which is only a subset of researchers, most researchers settle for one community and stick with that for their whole career.
CBS' 60 Minutes recently brought in three German state (provincial, not federal) prosecutors to discuss hate speech prosecutions in Germany. The prosecutors are specialized in prosecuting speech crimes, so it's straight from the horses' mouths
I knew that speech was more restricted in Europe than in the US and even Canada, but I didn't think it was this bad. Maybe Vance had a point in his speech in Munich? It was odd timing to say it during a security conference, but I suppose VPs can't be as choosy about their soapboxes
Some of my choice quotes (sinister laugher from the prosecutors not captured):
>Grote [a local politician] complained about a tweet that called him a pimmel, a German word for the male anatomy. That triggered a police raid and accusations of excessive censorship by the government.
>Is it a crime to insult somebody in public?
>Yes. Yes, it is.
>And it's a crime to insult them online as well?
>Yes.
>The fine could be even higher if you insult someone in the internet.
>Because in internet, it stays there.
>In the case of reposting [something that's untrue], it is a crime as well because the reader can't distinguish whether you just invented this or just reposted it.
>There are 16 units [of online hate task forces] across the country, each with a team of investigators.
>In our unit, we have about 3,500 cases per year.
>Laue says they get hundreds of tips a month from police, watchdog groups, and victims
>In this case, the accused had to pay 3,750 euros. It's not a parking ticket [laughs].
Vance's speech came across as the kind of thing an Extremely Online Person TM would say, not as something based on reality. Hence the way all the Extremely Online People TM here think it is all reasonable, whereas at the people who live in the real world see it as absurd. It is not free speech vs dictatorship (and if it was, targets like Orban would make a lot more sense), it is the Extremely Online vs the rest.
Especially when Vance's administration is happy to engage in broad censorship and, if we had similar laws in the US, would eager use them to punish political opponents. You notice Vance et al love to criticize our European allies, but not Russia.
Do... do you think the people you label "Extremely Online People" aren't real people who exist in the real world, doing real things? Did you think they were just bots or something?
If freedom of speech dies on the internet theres no saving society; russia will not be invading america as a rural american my concerns of occupation are nonexistant, the only threat to my freedom is other americains indifference and the cia
To an extend it is just true that out of all the things you can value in a democracy, free speech is less central for us than in the US.
I understand that free speech protections are part of the first amendment of the US constitution presumably that's because it's considered most important.
The first paragraph of our constitution is "Die Würde des Menschen ist unantastbar". It's been translated as "Human dignity shall be inviolable". We also have free speech protections in our constitution, but we are willing to make tradeoffs when it comes into conflict with other principles we hold important.
So saying "Ah, but Germany is undemocratic because Germany has some free speech limitations" is just kind weird to me? Is that the only metric that counts? And can you not trade away 2% of free speech to improve some other good and valuable principle by more than that?
Maybe I am naive but I believe there has to be some common ground here with most US citizens. It is my assumption that shouting "Fire! Fire!" in a packed movie theater is not looked upon kindly in the US either. So I assume most people would generally agree that at least some forms of free speech can be traded for other goods, public safety in this instance.
That is not to say I support what happened in the Andy Grote "Du bist so 1 Pimmel" fiasco. Andy Grote got publicly mocked and criticized for this for this for a couple of months afterwards, because while we might agree with a fine, the general German public does not believe that sending a police raid was the appropriate reaction to being called a dick on twitter. Also there was later a court case about this which found that the raid was unlawful.
In any case, it seems to me that we have a (fairly) well functioning democracy and reducing democracy to a single issue we place different amount of emphasis on just fails to see that we probably agree on the other 95%.
The only reason I can see reasonable people disagree on this is if they haven't thought about the topic much or place _all_ the importance on free speech and nothing else matters. And I don't know which I hope is the case more for Vance, but attempting to lecture us on democracy just seems dumb from where I'm standing and I'm baffled anyone would think it's a true or productive.
There's a reason the Founders of America made free speech the first right in the bill of rights. If you don't have the freedom to discuss political alternatives, you don't have the ability for democratic regimes to change. It increases oppression and violence.
Free speech as an abstract right isn't important to democracy. It is only important if the restrictions on free speech make it hard to criticise government policies and candidates standing for election.
When there are limits on free speech there is a risk governments will use it silence criticism of their policies, which seems to be exactly what is happening in Germany.
You can't be prosecuted in Germany if you criticize someone for his actions, especially not politicians. A necessary condition for being prosecutable is that you attack the politician personally *without* reference to his political actions. If you call someone a dick, you might get fined. If you say that someone *acted like a dick here*, you are off the hook because then you criticize an action. There is obviously a grey zone in between. If I run over your foot and you call me idiot, that is allowed, because your are obviously reacting and referring to my action. If you call me an idiot without an obvious reason, you may get fined.
Famously, "Parkplatzschwein" is allowed. That is literally someone who acts like a pig in the fight for a parking spot.
For insulting politicians the bar for prosecution is actually higher than for other people, so the insult must be more personal and more detached from political acts than for ordinary people ("Machtkritik").
But any speech can declared a threat to the peace, hate speech, propaganda against the constitution, blasphemy or a threat to human dignity which combined can cover any criticism of a politician.
Free speech and democracy may be related but are certainly not the same. I dont take german speech laws to mean you are undemocratic. You presumably all get to vote. I take it to mean you are not free in the individual liberty sense. If you cant even get speech right you wont get the other things were real trade offs exist right. Speech is the easy one because you really can just ignore insults you dont like. Thats why we put it first, with no qualifiers.
> Is that the only metric that counts? And can you not trade away 2% of free speech to improve some other good and valuable principle by more than that?
No, I don't think you can. Human rights are human rights, they can't be traded away for something else. It's always tempting to do so, which is why it needs to be written into every country's constitution at some very unchangeable level that they cannot be traded away. I don't know of any country that does this perfectly, but the US does the best job that I know of.
> In any case, it seems to me that we have a (fairly) well functioning democracy
I don't know, German democracy looks to me like it's functioning pretty poorly, in the sense that the policies of those in power do not resemble the policies demanded by the people, and this is eventually going to reach some sort of crisis. The vast majority of Germans seem to hate mass immigration, but no party except AfD (which is terrible in a bunch of other ways) is willing to do anything about it. The big divide at this point is between people who hate mass immigration but aren't willing to vote AfD, and the people who hate mass immigration so much that they are willing to overlook AfD's other terrible attributes.
> No, I don't think you can. Human rights are human rights, they can't be traded away for something else. It's always tempting to do so, which is why it needs to be written into every country's constitution at some very unchangeable level that they cannot be traded away.
I wish that was possible but it seems to me it is clearly not. My argument is that one of the following 3 must be true:
a) There is only a single human right, free speech
b) There are several distinct human rights, however they can never come into conflict
c) There are several distinct human rights and they can come into conflict
And out of these it c) seems clearly true to me and we regularly eventually face situation where you'll have to trade one basic human right against the other by virtue of them being in conflict.
It would be nice if we didn't have to but I don't believe that's the world we live in.
> The vast majority of Germans seem to hate mass immigration, but no party except AfD (which is terrible in a bunch of other ways) is willing to do anything about it.
I think your impression on how Germans feels about migration is directionally correct, though less extreme in reality.
But it is not the case that only AfD is willing to do anything about it. Both CDU and FDP have proposed migration restrictions that are arguably illegal under EU law. The Green party and SPD parties have proposed restricting migration more but within EU law.
Maybe it's fair to round down the proposed Green and SPD policies to "nothing will happen or at least not enough" but I believe the way CDU and FDP are going cannot be fairly characterized as "unwilling to do anything about it".
Ah well the a-b-c thing is where we differ. By definition, rights must be inviolable and they must not come into conflict. If you've defined your rights in such a way that they can come into conflict then this is just an excuse to violate people's rights.
This of course requires you to be very careful about how you define rights. You certainly can't go round coming up with bullshit and poorly defined rights like "right to dignity".
Rights cannot come into conflict because they are all just forms of the same right -- the right to be left the fuck alone. A man alone on a desert island has all his rights perfectly intact.
That is a fair position to hold, but at this point your critique mostly boils down to "Most Germans value stuff like human dignity that I don't care that much about. As a result they make laws that seem wrong to me".
But that is fine because its our laws and we generally like them. You can have your laws that you like.
I feel it's perfectly fine to value human dignity over free speech and I don't know what else is there to say.
I disagree. Human rights are fundamental and can't be overruled by ill-defined and nonsensical concepts like "human dignity".
I'm aware that there's a language problem here, but can "human dignity" be sensibly defined in German? It sure as fuck can't in English, not in any sensible way. Which of these situations violates the abstract principle of "human dignity"?
1. I get drunk and pull down my pants on Kurfürstendamm
2. I am suffering in great pain of some illness. A nurse is shoving a catheter up my urethra
3. Someone sees me pulling down my pants on Kurfürstendamm and calls me a Dummkopf
All of these situations are pretty undignified, but it's hard to see that anyone's rights could possibly be getting violated. In the first, my indignity is my own fault. In the second, the indignity is partially the fault of the physical universe and partially a medical necessity. In the third part, the indignity is entirely justified.
If I'm a CEO of a big company, and I want to get rid of some gadfly journalist that's reporting negatively on us, and I announce at the AGM "Somebody needs to kill John Q Scribbler. No, seriously, I'd be ever so grateful. This isn't a joke, someone needs to bump him off" then I'm guilty of solicitation to murder.
Do you think it would be better for the world if I should be allowed to say that with no consequences?
What if I work in a classified role and I leak top secret information to a foreign power for money? Don't you think a country that is constitutionally unable to keep secrets would be at a disadvantage on the world stage?
In your last case, at least in the United States, the government keeps its secrets by not revealing those secrets to anyone who hasn't signed a contract waiving their first amendment rights in that specific context. No one can be compelled a priori to keep a secret, and it's been pretty clearly established that if e.g. some muckraking journalist finds himself in possession of some nice juicy Top Secrets, the government can't stop them from publishing or punish them for having published. But the insider who blabbed would be well advised to contact his lawyer.
Human rights are subjective, it is impossible to have any universal standard.
German democracy is functioning significantly better than American democracy. Stop believing everything you read on X and try going out into the real world.
>The vast majority of Germans seem to hate mass immigration, but no party except AfD (which is terrible in a bunch of other ways) is willing to do anything about it.
This is false, BSW also proposed immigration restrictions.
"German democracy looks to me like it's functioning pretty poorly, in the sense that the policies of those in power do not resemble the policies demanded by the people"
...as opposed to how the politics of the US political-managerial class have mirrored the concerns and preferences of the electorate perfectly over the last 20-30 years?
I mean, I agree with you that this is a very bad state for a democracy to fall into, but I don't think this specifically has much if anything to do with the particularities of a given nation's constitution and a lot more to do with a certain type of petit-bourgeois ideologically capturing the machinery of government, for complex reasons of social structure, across the west.
I would suggest that a system in which a vague phrase like "Human dignity shall be inviolable" can support a law that allows a politician to call a raid on a citizen for calling him a dick and tens of thousands of "hate speech" cases annually is trading away a bit more than 2%
Although a judge dismissed the case, the process is in itself usually a punishment. And apparently the politician in question never even lost his job over it. And what if the victim's lawsuit had been assigned to a progressive judge?
>It is my assumption that shouting "Fire! Fire!" in a packed movie theater is not looked upon kindly in the US either
This is a very misunderstood example. It's explained in another thread below by Paul Botts
> I would suggest that a system in which a vague phrase like "Human dignity shall be inviolable" can support a law that allows a politician to call a raid on a citizen for calling him a dick and tens of thousands of "hate speech" cases annually is trading away a bit more than 2%
I think you're judging the system by it's worst outcome, this is really not a central example. It's a bit like saying the US justice system is terrible because of OJ Simpson. Yes, occasionally shit happens, that is just unavoidable for any system the size of a state. The question is not if it happens, it is how often and how bad.
And that is exactly the reason that you have to look at statistics if want to form an accurate opinion. 2 minutes of Google tell me there were 5.5million court cases in Germany in 2023. There were presumably a lot more enforcement actions by police. You've heard about the Andy Grote thing because it was the most idiotic and disproportionate instance of law enforcement w.r.t. to free speech that made the news in the last 4-5 years. Out of how many millions of enforcement actions?
I can say this, if I got it into my head to talk shit about my politicians or the government tomorrow I could go to my local marketplace and do it all day with nobody stopping me. There would be a couple of things I'd have to avoid - I shouldn't call for murder of anyone, for example. But generally I'm positive I can make my unhappiness well known without fear of reprisal. The occasional Andy Grote notwithstanding.
And you may or may not already know this, but "progressive judge" is not really a thing here the same it is perhaps in the States. The justices serving in our version of the supreme court have been proposed by 4 different political parties, and it is generally a very low fuzz affair. We don't generally sort them into progressive or conservative or anything, neither do we regular judges to regular courts. It's just a lot less political and we generally trust in any given judges impartiality, with (as always) a few exceptions.
> This is a very misunderstood example. It's explained in another thread below by Paul Botts
I'll look into that tomorrow, it's gotten quite late over here. Have a good one
I don't buy the argument that it's not a problem because the denominator is so much higher than the numerator. Does that mean ridiculous laws become less of a problem when other crimes skyrocket in number?
And this isn't just a few rare cases. As per the cited source, there are 16 speech policing units throughout Germany (I assume one per lander), and one of the prosecutors said that his unit has about 3500 cases per year. Assuming the average is lower at say 3000, that's 48,000 per year throughout Germany
>I can say this, if I got it into my head to talk shit about my politicians or the government tomorrow I could go to my local marketplace and do it all day with nobody stopping me. There would be a couple of things I'd have to avoid - I shouldn't call for murder of anyone, for example. But generally I'm positive I can make my unhappiness well known without fear of reprisal.
The impression I'm getting is that it only doesn't seem like much of a problem because most people in Germany aren't petty enough to bother filing a police report - other than the hundreds of tips a month from police, watchdog groups, and "victims", anyways. I don't think it's a good idea to give such a power to the select few who are petty enough
>And you may or may not already know this, but "progressive judge" is not really a thing here the same it is perhaps in the States.
I should have phrased this differently, as progressive tendencies are more of a spectrum. What if what was said was a little more disagreeable and the judge a little more progressive? A little more than that and a little more that? Etc etc
> I don't buy the argument that it's not a problem because the denominator is so much higher than the numerator. Does that mean ridiculous laws become less of a problem when other crimes skyrocket in number?
Maybe I phrased this poorly, so let me clarify. I think the best way to think about it is not "is there literally any bad outcome" but "do bad outcomes happen often, relative to the action itself".
In more concrete terms, I would be worried if 10 out of 20 people who engage in political speech were prosecuted unfairly. I would not be worried if 10 out of 20kk people who in engage in political speech were prosecuted unfairly. The ideal number is 0, always, but given that 0 cannot be realistically reached I will settle for "happens very rarely".
The prevalence of other crimes just not really enter the equation for me.
As for the 16 units you are referring to, they plausibly exist. Under German law speech that infringes on other basic human rights may be unlawful so prosecution is to be expected. I do not object to this.
I do object to the specific case of Andy Grote because the response was disproportionate to the "crime". But if he'd be fined 20 bucks I'd be fine with that.
But realistically nothing ever happens in the vast majority of instances. It's not exactly a closely guarded secret that the police cannot even hope to keep up with what I'd consider reasonable cases, let alone the unreasonable ones. It helps if you're a politician and I don't know how I feel about that.
> The impression I'm getting is that it only doesn't seem like much of a problem because most people in Germany aren't petty enough to bother filing a police report - other than the hundreds of tips a month from police, watchdog groups, and "victims", anyways. I don't think it's a good idea to give such a power to the select few who are petty enough
There's some truth to that, perhaps, but it's also that there's plenty of legal speech that no one can arrest me for, no matter how much I complain about the government or somesuch. Generally speaking, if I don't make any threats and don't insult anyone personally there's really no grounds for anything.
And choose to be personal and insulting and demeaning to people then we'd get to the question if anyone would bother to go to the police over it.
But it is generally possible to say all that needs to be said without being demeaning. So the "cannot criticize the government OR ELSE" angle seems mostly inaccurate. The police can't just book you for whatever they feel like.
You write pretty clearly, so no worries on that front. I get that you don't see punishing speech qua speech as a problem, and that many Germans share this view. It's also apparent that you see the divergence between American views on free speech and German views on free speech are smaller than I do, and that this divergence is moreover very small compared to the many similarities in values
>So the "cannot criticize the government OR ELSE" angle seems mostly inaccurate
I didn't say that, nor did I connect the free speech issue to democracy, though the vibes and other commenters could easily lead someone to think I did. My objection is simpler: fining anyone for insults, no matter the amount, is ridiculous and should not be tolerated. Words are not violence
"It's a bit like saying the US justice system is terrible because of OJ Simpson."
I don't want to relate this to anything else in your argument, but I think the fact that the OJ Simpson trial was able to become a heavily racialized televised spectacle really does point to a terrible flaw of the US justice system, as does the fact that he got off the hook.
As a fellow German, thank you for elaborating so well on these points. I agree with everything stated, including the non-worry of publicly expressing displeasure.
A security conference seems like a good time for a security guarantor (who provides security to Germany contingent on them not being evil) to tell a recipient state that they are starting to seem evil from our perspective and that we are less interested in guaranteeing the security of a state we consider evil.
He was mostly being obtuse. He called it undemocratic for other parties to not form a coalition with the AfD, even though the voters of those other parties don’t want such a coalition.
It’s about as undemocratic as one American party not voting to confirm an appointment of the other.
Hence why the US doesn't have a parliamentary system, because we don't consider them as democratic as ours because they lead to tyrrany of the majority.
I think the real thing here is that Germany (the government, the people) are not used to being criticized so directly by the US. It is considered a minor breach of diplomacy. Allies do not talk this way to allies -- at least, that's the vibe I get from German commentators I see.
If giving a softball interview to prosecutors who have central roles in the (alleged) censorship problem isn't a good way, what exactly would be to you?
The Grote story happened a few years ago now, and the first thing most people associate with his name until today is the word Pimmel (pecker). You will still find stickers across the city saying “Andi ist ein Pimmel” - our regional variant of the Streisand effect.
How come all of those cars aren't immediately pulled over and ticketed? Is this enforced or not? OP paints a picture of an oppressive surveillance state but if people are putting their insults on bumper stickers it can't be that bad. What's the deal?
He said there are stickers across the city, not that people are putting them on their own personal cars (in which case people could put the stickers on the cars of people they dislike to get them raided)
Typically, it’s not a bumper sticker, but even if it was, the insulted person would have to file a report with the police for them to be able to do something. It’s not like murder, where the police is required to investigate. Usually, people don’t call the police because someone insulted them in public, and especially not if it’s such an insanely harmless term as “Pimmel”.
What made this case particularly Streisandy and egregious was that the politician in question is our state minister for security, which includes being the head of the police. Whether a regular citizen filing a police report for being insulted can motivate the police the raid the home of a suspect is anyone’s guess.
What's the public attitude towards speech laws there? People in the US would lose their minds over something like that. What's the breakdown of who supports it vs who doesn't?
I would have hoped that the public would have successfully pushed for some change to the relevant laws on the books responsible for the episode, but I suppose that didn't happen, hence the CBS interview
I may agree with you on the Gawker case and on what the current administration is doing, but the Infowars and Fox cases fall well within what many decades of case law has defined as outside first amendment protections. In both cases the media organization in question knowingly made false statements that cause damages. They weren't just stating an opinion once or twice, it was many weeks (or months) of coverage that was based on things they knew were false.
The US has very high barriers to succeeding in a defamation or libel lawsuit. Things could be better (a federal Anti-SLAPP statute would do wonders) but compared our peers we are well ahead.
Fox itself believed that it was lying in the Dominion case, which I think you are referring to. That is, they didn't just report on those claims, they were amplifying them and trying to convince people to see them as credible. The people who ran the programs in question did not believe that the claims were truthful.
Fox News wants to be seen as a credible reporter of the truth, hence "News" in their title and all the other things they do. The notion that they should be permitted to lie out of some abstract principle of free speech strikes me as absurd. Nothing is lost by demanding a news agency believe what they themselves proclaim.
I don't know much about the other examples you gave, but Oberlin is evidence that America's approach to defamation - where you have to prove actual damages - is far superior
Oberlin's conduct was far more harmful than the person who called Grote a dick. The amount awarded might have been too much, but I don't see how punishing Oberlin could possibly have any chilling effect on free speech - it can't be that hard to not incite hundreds of your students and faculty to protest outside a shop already victimized by your students' shoplifting. The amount awarded also took into account the wringer Oberlin put the bakery through, and the civil suit was filed a year after the initial incident
>The day after the incident, faculty and hundreds of students gathered in a park across the street from Gibson's Bakery protesting what they saw as racial profiling and excessive use of force by Gibson toward Aladin.[8] Jason Hawk, a reporter and editor with the Oberlin News-Tribune, testified that dean of students Meredith Raimondo was at the protest speaking to the crowd into a megaphone and discouraging photographers from taking photos of the crowd. He testified that she used her body to attempt to block him from taking photos, and handed him a flyer.[18] The flyer read, "Don't Buy. This is a RACIST establishment with a LONG ACCOUNT of RACIAL PROFILING and DISCRIMINATION."[2][19][8] Counterprotestors also gathered, calling the students "snowflakes".[20]
I assume Scott has heard of this, but if not, the DEI grants article got a mention in the Economist.
"One analysis of a randomly chosen subset of these grants by Scott Alexander, a blogger, found that only around 40% were actually related to DEI (an analysis of all 3,476, conducted by The Economist with the help of an artificial-intelligence model, found the figure was 44%)."
I think the strategy is to always accuse others of the thing you are doing right now.
If I am not bothering to read one paragraph that I am replying to, then it sounds pretty implausible that some guy who calls himself "The Economist" would work harder than me. And even if he would, why should I care? Is it going to win me internet points? /s
> Amazing that The Economist also couldn't be bothered to spend an hour checking a random sample. Or just didn't want to make the call.
Given how much flak Scott got for actually running the numbers rather than dismissing anything out of Cruz's mouth as ipso facto disinformation, I suspect it's the latter.
The Wall Street Journal on Friday published a detailed analysis of the DOGE online running list of its "savings" [which now totals $7B after their arithmetical and typographical corrections to version 1.0 that had claimed $55B].
The WSJ concluded that the actual amount of federal expenditures yet saved by DOGE's cancellations of current contracts is $2.6B. Of that amount about 2 percent, so $52M, "would have gone to DEI-related contracts".
Some of those cancellations will end up reversed by courts enforcing basic contract law. But far from all -- some vendors will decide against suing to enforce, and some federal contracts will turn out to allow unilateral cancellation without cause. A reasonable ballpark of actual net savings to the government might be $2B.
The US has about 133 million households. So this puts the potential "DOGE dividend" check for Trump to send to every household (as he's publicly suggested) at about $15 per household.
>The Wall Street Journal on Friday published a detailed analysis of the DOGE online running list of its "savings" [which now totals $7B after their arithmetical and typographical corrections to version 1.0 that had claimed $55B].
The DOGE list doesn’t include USAID. That may be because the attempted dismantling of that agency is being fought over in courtrooms right now; and/or because Musk’s stop-expenditures hit squad hasn’t been involved with that effort; and/or some other reason. Musk is publicly cheering for the USAID teardown to go through but beyond that, I dunno.
Late yesterday DOGE updated its posted list, they now claim $9.6B in savings.
The Associated Press this morning says that about 40 percent of DOGE's new list is contracts already executed and/or paid out on. Meaning that those claimed "savings" items don't return any funds to the federal accounts they are just a decision not to _renew_ that contract.
(Not immediately clear whether the AP means 40 percent of the $9.6B, or 40 percent of the several thousand individual "savings" items now listed by DOGE.)
Is there a way to filter posts in the archive by whether they're locked to subscribers? I'm going to subscribe and would like a way to find old posts I missed.
Not exactly filtering, but there is a little padlock symbol that indicates whether they are subscriber-only or not. Just scrolling through all articles and checking for this symbol takes me perhaps 10 seconds per month. That's quite doable.
I don't think there's a non-cumbersome way to do this but I'm not a subscriber so maybe there's something like that for subscribers. Scott does sometimes post a list of locked posts for the last year or so. The last list of this sort was part of a subscription drive and is here. https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/subscrive-drive-25-free-unlocked
I find myself thinking more and more about the future, mostly about AI. Eventually, I started writing down all my thoughts and findings, which turned into a blog: Forecasting AI Futures.
It's mostly a collection of analyses and thoughts based on insights from prediction markets and Metaculus.
So far, I have written about AGI timelines, severity and timeline of AI-caused disasters, and the risk of uncontrolled spread of AI technology through autonomous self-replication and IP theft. While I am most worried about x-risk, I intend to focus on predictions that could be useful to various decision makers and people thinking about how to contribute to AI safety.
Since I'm relatively new to blogging, I would appreciate any advice on how I can improve my writing or analysis. If you have thoughts on forecasting, please share those as well!
While I think misuse of advanced AI to help in e.g. bioweapon development is plausible and contributes to x-risk, I'm mostly concerned about agentic AI being developed and deployed before proper safety guarantees are met, largely due to race dynamics.
I feel uncertain exactly how things will go wrong, if they go wrong. I think it is relatively plausible that an AI develops unintended goals, manages to hide them from the developers (that don't have sufficient interpretability methods yet), waits until there are sufficient robotics manufacturing ability (so it can act in the physical world), exfiltrates itself and promptly develops and releases a really powerful bioweapon.
But I am uncertain if this is the most plausible scenario I can think of, I'm still trying to figure it out. For instance, some humans might give an AI a malicious goal like "destroy humanity" just to see what happens, and it actually succeeds. (This seems unlikely through simple API calls, but very much possible if you have access to model weights.)
I don't think destroying humanity is necessarily that hard, so with a human-level-or-above AI there are a lot of possible things that can go really wrong. The reason that humans have managed to survive this long might be that basically no one wants to kill everyone. But if they wanted, they could destroy entire ecosystems with gene drives, develop new viruses and bacteria, develop mirror life, or try to instigate nuclear war.
Those examples, if done by humans, would be more likely to kill a significant portion of humanity but not everyone (except maybe mirror life?) I mostly wanted to point out that extreme disasters are not that difficult, and a superintelligence would definitely be able to kill everyone.
But AIs with really good specific skills in e.g. synthetic biology is also concerning
I don't know exactly what virus a superintelligence might design. Maybe an airborne virus that takes enough time in killing infected that it has time to spread to others.
The AI exfiltrates itself from the lab where it was developed, and designs the virus through simulation technology. It tricks researchers into manufacturing it and and send it to varous population centers where the virus is released simultaneously. Most of humanity die within days, while some survive in airtight bunkers around the world. The AI could choose to ignore the few weak remnants of humanity, or send robots to "manually" take care of the rest.
Literal robot armies are not impossible either, though that seems less efficient.
For starters, you don't need to kill every last human on this planet on day one. Kill half of them, and the civilization will collapse. Then 99% of the remaining ones will starve to death. And the remaining few will pose no significant danger, so there is enough time to clean them up later.
Okay, how do you kill half of them on day one? Release an engineered deadly virus in every city simultaneously. Don't worry if you can't reach literally every city; just do as many as you can. Start at airports.
I dont think ai will come before human made bio weapons; but im pretty sure bio weapons will exist (not under current scientism tho)
> develop mirror life" - what is that, and how will it kill everyone?
All chemical structures can be flipped, and some proteins are *ancient* but only exist in one form, suggesting they evolved once then all life on earth inherited it
Then our immune systems co-evolved in this hill in protein space.
Its not entirely clear what happens if you make an entire ecosystem of bacteria that produces flipped vitamins and sets it free in the oceans
Do all fish die? Do humans eating tainted fish get some flipped-vitamin deficiency, does this flipped-vitamin build up in the atmosphere
> "develop new viruses and bacteria"
While evolution seems to be on humanity's side of barely surviving; otherwise gain-o-function or wild viruses would take out landmasses of mankind, or any other mammal; death rates of 99% when an illness jumps cross host then ocean(for example small pox, potato famines)
This suggests theres other hills in virus space that can devople in private manners and you not being exposed to the partial steps can be terrifying. Imagine gain-o-functioning 10 generations of a virus in co-evolved with rats, splicing in some ebola (some how giving your chosen people the illness progressively in private?)
I still just don't see how any of this kills everyone. I'm not disputing that these things can cause catastrophic loss of life. It's this glib assertion by the OP that "ASI will surely just kill everyone" that grates me.
Im unsure what the S stands for, but actual ai appearing suddenly would kill us all because evolution isnt very kind to those unable to keep up and dont make themselves useful to the apex predator, we did just wipe out most megafonia that didn't co-evole with us
The issue has to be that chatbots airnt general ai. Dozens of variations of semi-friendly ai, transhuman projects coming first, different tech paths out pacing computers etc.
If you give 1000 bc humans nukes by pushing them out of a time machine does humanity die; probably, but time machines dont exist. I think co evolution is very important factor in predicting survival, its merely asserted it wont happen, but thats extremely unlikely.
Anybody else using DMSO? I'm using it for four things:
1) wound healing.
2) varicose veins.
3) cherry angiomas
4) tailor's bunion
5) peripheral neuropathy
I'm seeing slow but steady progress on 1-3, 4 hurt less, and 5) no noticeable progress yet, but it's been years in the making so it may be years in the healing.
I regularly use it as a cryoprotectant (basically antifreeze), and ignore how it's supposedly oh-so-dangerous. It's nice to see it has some salutary effects, and thanks to exposure to it, I'm probably protected from … cherry angiomas?
I can sort of see the analogy you're drawing - an LLM doesn't really have a continuous consciousness. It starts with a context, calculates a next step, and then stops running, sort of like how a Boltzmann brain pops into existence fully formed and lasts just long enough to think something before coming apart.
I'm not sure what to do with this insight, but it's a cool parallel.
I’d intuit that an AI would be much closer to human consciousness. The perceived world that we share is much more stable than that of the Boltzmann brain (which just has random thermal fluctuations and no durable structure). Not to mention that we are building AI to mimic the sort of consciousness that we possess, as we want agents that we can interact with like other humans.
Another way of looking at the problem is that a Boltzmann brain is presumably the simplest path from random energy to consciousness, whereas our and AI’s consciousness have the contingency of our evolutionary history.
As in, whatever experiences it has would be bizarre and incoherent and nothing like what human observers would assume? I agree. I don’t see any reason to assume that consciousness would even arise in an LLM because the training process is purely based on a binary “closed system” so to speak - the measured output of a logic gate is a deterministic quantized value based entirely on a quantized input value, so what opportunity could consciousness possibly have to “leak in” and affect the system’s overall output? The behavior of a computer is 100% determined by its input signals with no room for mysterious additional forces (i.e. an interaction between physics and consciousness) because that’s how we designed computers from the start.
If you agree with this, then the only way for consciousness to arise with any coherence in an LLM would be if it is purely epiphenominal (i.e. consciousness arises as a side effect of physics and somehow magically “matches up” with the physical world despite there being no feedback between the two), which I highly doubt is the case because then the ability to even talk about consciousness would not make sense. If you’re a panpsychist and believe there is a little bit of consciousness in everything (e.g. in every electrical impulse within a computer) then an LLM could experience consciousness of some form, but as you’re proposing, since it would not meaningfully affect the system’s output, its behavior would be unguided and thus random/incoherent.
The natural world does not have this restriction of course, which allows for a feedback cycle between physics and the physical effects of consciousness.
A conscious LLM would probably have a very different representation of the world than a Boltzmann brain, due to the very different architecture. The contents of its mind would be different.
Is paracetamol (acetaminophen) the cause behind most cases of autism spectrum disorder?
*Note: this isn't referring solely to paracetamol use during pregnancy, which is the topic that got press coverage in recent years, but rather to paracetamol use in infancy and early childhood.*
Articles have come out in recent years pointing to the mounting evidence of the possible role paracetamol plays in inducing autism in susceptible infants and children. However, they have been largely overlooked by the medical community. I'd recommend that anyone who's interested read the full articles [1,2,3,4].
In any case, there are some interesting pieces of evidence to keep in mind:
A. Studies on lab animals: Studies from five independent laboratories using laboratory rats and mice have been published, demonstrating that paracetamol, even when administered during pregnancy or to young animals at near or even below currently accepted clinical doses, alters long term behaviors involved in memory and social function. The effect was more pronounced in male mice than female ones.
In light of these studies and under current FDA guidelines, the drug could never have passed pre-clinical testing and been approved for even experimental use in babies and small children, had it been developed nowadays.
B. A plausible biological mechanism: paracetamol is known to be highly toxic in the presence of oxidative stress via a mechanism that involves the formation of the toxic metabolite NAPQI and concomitant mitochondrial damage. Oxidative stress and possibly mitochondrial dysfunction also play a role in autism.
C. The actual rise in autism cases is temporally related to use of paracetamol: the introduction of the analgesics phenacetin and acetanilide in the late 1880s, which are both metabolized by the body into paracetamol, was followed by the discovery of autism in the 1920s and rediscovery in the 1940s . Following the approval of paracetamol for pediatric use in the 1950s, the incidence of autism began to rise slowly. The incidence of autism began to rise more rapidly beginning in the 1980s, after paracetamol replaced aspirin due to concerns over Reye’s syndrome, and accelerated during the 1990s and 2000s at a time when between 115 and 250 million dollars (200–475 million dollars/year with inflation adjustment for 2024) in direct-to-consumer advertising per year encouraged paracetamol use.
It is important to note that the rise in autism's prevalence cannot be explained only by increased social awareness and changes in criteria of diagnosis.
D. The similarity of autism spectrum disorder to fetal alcohol spectrum disorder (FASD): FASD shares numerous similarities with autism. Because both disorders are characterized by a spectrum of conditions, and because neither disorder can be diagnosed by an objective test or biomarker, some difficulty with diagnosis of both disorders is evident.
Both disorders are highly heterogeneous in terms of cognitive deficits, such as sensory and motor difficulties, attention deficient hyperactively disorder-like symptoms, including executive dysfunction, attentional deficits, and impulsivity, along with other comorbid mental illnesses such as anxiety, mood disorders, obsessive compulsive disorders, etc., and intellectual disability. Both disorders are complex and are at times associated with comorbid medical conditions. For example, FASD is associated with high rates of seizures, sleep problems, abnormal eating behaviors, and disorders related to immune function, all conditions associated with autism.
Further, both disorders are known to have many risk factors that contribute to susceptibility, including genetic factors and environmental factors, such as those relating to parental age, health, nutrition, and other prenatal and postnatal factors. The commonly recommended treatment for both disorders is early intervention, akin to rehabilitation after any other type of brain injury, although the success of the treatment is highly variable in both cases.
E. Other unexplained findings in research: if paracetamol does induce autism in susceptible infants and children, this would explain several odd findings in the research, such as the association of circumcision of males, which is often performed using paracetamol as an analgesic, with a twofold increase in the risk for early-onset (infantile) autism, and the seemingly lower prevalence of autism in very low-income countries. Also, this would explain why many parents believe vaccines cause autism, despite there being no evidence for this belief (since paracetamol is often used following a vaccine).
1. Patel E., Jones J.P., 3rd, Bono-Lunn D., Kuchibhatla M., Palkar A., Cendejas Hernandez J., Sarafian J.T., Lawton V.G., Anderson L.G., Konsoula Z., et al. The safety of pediatric use of paracetamol (acetaminophen): A narrative review of direct and indirect evidence. Minerva Pediatr. 2022;74:774–788. doi: 10.23736/S2724-5276.22.06932-4.
2. Zhao L., Jones J., Anderson L., Konsoula Z., Nevison C., Reissner K., Parker W. Acetaminophen causes neurodevelopmental injury in susceptible babies and children: No valid rationale for controversy. Clin. Exp. Pediatr. 2023;67:126. doi: 10.3345/cep.2022.01319.
3. Parker W., Anderson L.G., Jones J.P., Anderson R., Williamson L., Bono-Lunn D., Konsoula Z. The Dangers of Acetaminophen for Neurodevelopment Outweigh Scant Evidence for Long-Term Benefits. Children. 2024;11:44. doi: 10.3390/children11010044.
4. Jones, J. P., 3rd, Williamson, L., Konsoula, Z., Anderson, R., Reissner, K. J., & Parker, W. (2024). Evaluating the Role of Susceptibility Inducing Cofactors and of Acetaminophen in the Etiology of Autism Spectrum Disorder. Life (Basel, Switzerland), 14(8), 918. https://doi.org/10.3390/life14080918
>The bulk of the increase in autism prevalence stems from a growing awareness of the condition and changes to the diagnostic criteria.
This is an oft-repeated claim, but the data seems not to support it.
Autism's prevalence has risen sharply over the years (from 1:2500 in the US in the 1970s [1] to 1:36 in 2020 [2].)
It can't be explained only due to increased awareness and changes to the diagnostic criteria, because it has included a rise in autism with intellectual disability. While the explanation of diagnostic substitution is possible (i.e. children receiving an autism diagnosis instead of ID or childhood schizophrenia), studies have found it definitely can't explain all of it [3].
See also the case of California, where good data exists showing a rise in autism cases, independent of increased awareness, criteria expansion, etc. [4].
>Within sibling pairs, Acetaminophen exposure in utero is not correlated to autism rates.
This refers to Ahlqvist's study that was published in JAMA in 2024 [5]. There are a few problems with it:
A. It studies exposure to acetaminophen/paracetamol *only during pregnancy*, which according to the studies I've linked to, is a time of far lower risk than the neonatal period and early childhood. (Since pregnant women are especially efficient at metabolizing paracetamol [6].)
B. However, even disregarding the previous point, there is a serious methodological problem with the study: the vast majority of the raw (unadjusted for any potential confounding factor) risk was eliminated by adjustment for more than 20 inflammation-related or associated factors. That is to say, the vast majority of the risk was eliminated by adjusting for inflammation-associated factors in the analysis, not by adjustment for the sibling pairs.
That is like finding no statistical association between being a passenger in a car and dying in a car crash, after adjusting for 20 "confounding" variables such as wearing a seatbelt, the driver being drunk, the road being unsafe, etc.
In fact, it was proven, by using in silico (virtual) hypothetical cases, that even if there *definitely was* a causal connection between paracetamol use and 50% of autism cases, the association wouldn't appear in the statistical analysis once you adjust for only 9 cofactors (inflammation-associated factors), which are mistakenly labeled as confounding factors [7].
2. Maenner, M. J., Warren, Z., Williams, A. R., Amoakohene, E., Bakian, A. V., Bilder, D. A., ... & Shaw, K. A. (2023). Prevalence and characteristics of autism spectrum disorder among children aged 8 years—Autism and Developmental Disabilities Monitoring Network, 11 sites, United States, 2020. MMWR Surveillance Summaries, 72(2), 1. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC10042614/
3. Nevison, C.D., Blaxill, M. Diagnostic Substitution for Intellectual Disability: A Flawed Explanation for the Rise in Autism. J Autism Dev Disord 47, 2733–2742 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10803-017-3187-0
4. Nevison, C., Blaxill, M., & Zahorodny, W. (2018). California autism prevalence trends from 1931 to 2014 and comparison to national ASD data from IDEA and ADDM. Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders, 48, 4103-4117.
5. Ahlqvist V.H., Sjöqvist H., Dalman C., Karlsson H., Stephansson O., Johansson S., Magnusson C., Gardner R.M., Lee B.K. Acetaminophen Use During Pregnancy and Children’s Risk of Autism, ADHD, and Intellectual Disability. Jama. 2024;331:1205–1214. doi: 10.1001/jama.2024.3172.
6. Miners JO, Robson RA, Birkett DJ. Paracetamol metabolism in pregnancy. Br J Clin Pharmacol. 1986;22:359–62. doi: 10.1111/j.1365-2125.1986.tb02901.x.
7. Jones III, J. P., Williamson, L., Konsoula, Z., Anderson, R., Reissner, K. J., & Parker, W. (2024). Evaluating the role of susceptibility inducing cofactors and of acetaminophen in the etiology of autism spectrum disorder. Life, 14(8), 918.
You may want to provide better citations if you want people to believe this. The quality of those "studies" is quite poor. They regularly cite each other, make claims such as:
"Although evidence is largely circumstantial or based on animal model studies, the preponderance of evidence weighs so heavily that a causal relationship can be inferred without remaining reasonable doubt" (from cite 2)
or rely on "in silico" patients (which means made up in a computer).
But most suspicious of all, they are all from people affiliated with "WPLabs, Inc" which seems to be an organization devoted to supporting this theory.
Are you affiliated with WPLabs? Can you provide better evidence than the circumstantial, correlations provided in these citations?
I came across these studies by chance and became interested in the topic. I'm not personally affiliated with any of the researchers. I also find it more interesting to look at the claims provided in the studies rather than speculating about the motives of the researchers.
If by "better evidence" you mean studies done on humans that show the connection more directly, there are two that are worth looking at:
A. Stephen Schultz's study from 2008 (the first study to ever bring up this hypothesis, I believe) [1]. It found that paracetamol use after measles-mumps-rubella vaccination was significantly associated with autism, while Ibuprofen use after the vaccination was not.
B. A study from 2020 found that cord plasma biomarkers of fetal exposure to paracetamol were associated with a significantly increased risk of ADHD and autism [2]. Note that while pregnancy seems to be a time of lower risk due to pregnant women's efficiency at metabolizing paracetamol [3], the neonatal period, as in from the moment the umbilical cord is cut, is far more risky, since newborns are especially bad at metabolizing drugs [4].
Regarding classical multivariate analyses on large databases, some have been done, but they tend to have their own problems, such as severe underreporting of paracetamol use.
For example, one study investigating the connection of paracetamol to autism found that 7.7% of children were exposed to paracetamol prior to 18 months of age in the Danish National Birth cohort [5], which seems like a suspiciously low number on its face, and is also contradicted by another study of Danish children born during the same time, which found that 65% of children were exposed to paracetamol within a three-month period [6].
Another problem with these types of studies is that they tend to adjust for "confounding" variables, which in reality are cofactors (such as inflammation related or oxidative-stress related factors.) See for example, a study recently published in JAMA [7], which found no correlation between exposure in utero to paracetamol and autism rates, *after adjusting for more than 20 inflammation-related or associated factors.*
As I've said in a different comment, this is like finding no statistical association between being a passenger in a car and dying in a car crash, after adjusting for 20 "confounding" variables such as wearing a seatbelt, the driver being drunk, the road being unsafe, etc.
By the way, the purpose of the in silico studies you've mentioned is to prove that these methodological problems exist [8]. They obviously don't prove any actual association between paracetamol and autism in the real world, and that isn't their purpose. They do demonstrate that even if such a connection existed without a doubt, it would disappear in the statistical analysis once you adjust for cofactors mistakenly labeled as confounding factors.
Considering all of these issues, I find the combination of animal studies + some limited evidence from human studies + a plausible biological mechanism + a clear temporal correlation + numerous odd findings in research that have no other convincing explanation (e.g. the circumcision association, the vaccine belief among parents, some findings about autism being rarer in very low income countries, the numerous similarites to FASD, etc.), to be enough to at least take this hypothesis somewhat seriously.
The only other option of obtaining better data that I can think of is randomized, double-blind studies, which, disregarding limitations of costs and time, would be hugely unethical, considering the results in animal studies.
1. Schultz, S.T.; Klonoff-Cohen, H.S.; Wingard, D.L.; Akshoomoff, N.A.; Macera, C.A.; Ji, M. Acetaminophen (paracetamol) use, measles-mumps-rubella vaccination, and autistic disorder. The results of a parent survey. Autism 2008, 12, 293–307.
2. Ji, Y., Azuine, R. E., Zhang, Y., Hou, W., Hong, X., Wang, G., ... & Wang, X. (2020). Association of cord plasma biomarkers of in utero acetaminophen exposure with risk of attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder and autism spectrum disorder in childhood. JAMA psychiatry, 77(2), 180-189.
3. Miners JO, Robson RA, Birkett DJ. Paracetamol metabolism in pregnancy. Br J Clin Pharmacol. 1986;22:359–62. doi: 10.1111/j.1365-2125.1986.tb02901.x.
4. Nyhan W.L. Toxicity of drugs in the neonatal period. J. Pediatr. 1961;59:1–20. doi: 10.1016/S0022-3476(61)80204-7.
5. Alemany S., Avella-García C., Liew Z., García-Esteban R., Inoue K., Cadman T., López-Vicente M., González L., Riaño Galán I., Andiarena A., et al. Prenatal and postnatal exposure to acetaminophen in relation to autism spectrum and attention-deficit and hyperactivity symptoms in childhood: Meta-analysis in six European population-based cohorts. Eur. J. Epidemiol. 2021;36:993–1004. doi: 10.1007/s10654-021-00754-4.
6. Ertmann R.K., Møller J.J., Waldorff F.B., Siersma V., Reventlow S., Söderström M. The majority of sick children receive paracetamol during the winter. Dan. Med. J. 2012;59:A4555.
7. Ahlqvist V.H., Sjöqvist H., Dalman C., Karlsson H., Stephansson O., Johansson S., Magnusson C., Gardner R.M., Lee B.K. Acetaminophen Use During Pregnancy and Children’s Risk of Autism, ADHD, and Intellectual Disability. Jama. 2024;331:1205–1214. doi: 10.1001/jama.2024.3172.
8. Jones III, J. P., Williamson, L., Konsoula, Z., Anderson, R., Reissner, K. J., & Parker, W. (2024). Evaluating the role of susceptibility inducing cofactors and of acetaminophen in the etiology of autism spectrum disorder. Life, 14(8), 918.
My prior is that the rise in autism diagnoses is driven much more by awareness, diagnostic criteria, and incentives to seek diagnosis than by any actual change in the underlying incidence of autism-like traits. Basically, people whose autism affected them in ways that required intensive care or institutionalization weren't well-distinguished from other psychiatric and developmental conditions that also required intensive care or institutionalization, until 20th century psychiatry started making systematic efforts to try to distinguish categories and root causes. And people who were able to more-or-less function in normal adults society were simply regarded as quirky or eccentric until even more recently when the idea of the autism spectrum gained currency. And in recent decades, efforts in primary and secondary eduction to accommodate learning disabilities in mainstream classrooms have incentivized sceening and diagnosis of autism.
This prior seems to be supported by long-standing archetypes which read as strongly autistic-coded to modern eyes, despite being very old indeed. The absent-minded professor archetype, for example, is specifically referenced in common screening tests for autism; as a literary stock character it was already well established by the late 1800s, and as a cultural stereotype it seems to have been present at least intermittently since classical antiquity.
There are also a ton of well-documented historical figures whose childhoods predate the 1880s and who nevertheless seem to have had a lot of autism-like behaviors and character traits to varying degrees. Off the top of my head, John Lackland, Martin Luther, Isaac Newton, U.S. Grant, and Lord Salisbury.
Your prior definitely makes sense and is shared by many people, but it seems not to be backed by the data. Autism's prevalence has risen sharply over the years (from 1:2500 in the US in the 1970s [1] to 1:36 in 2020 [2].)
This rise can't be explained solely due to increased awareness and overdiagnosis, because it has included a similar rise in autism with intellectual disability. These are children who would have been diagnosed with *something*, even fifty years ago.
In that case, the explanation of diagnostic substitution is possible (i.e. children who used to be diagnosed with intellectual disability or childhood schizophrenia are now being diagnosed with autism.) However, while studies have found this might explain part of the rise [3], it definitely can't explain the majority of it [4].
See also the case of California, where good data exists showing a rise in autism cases, independent of increased awareness, criteria expansion, etc. [5].
I think the phenomenon you describe of historical figures having autistic traits can be attributed to the broader autism phenotype [6], which is observed in relatives of autistic individuals. This includes subclinical differences in social skills and traits, communication abilities, and personality traits. However, it doesn't include cognitive deficits, intellectual disabilities, and language disorders.
Personally, the only historical figure I can think of who had not only autistic personality traits (which can match the broader autism phenotype), but actual documented developmental delays in childhood, is Albert Einstein. He was born in Germany in 1879, so he was probably born too early to be exposed to either phenacetin, which was introduced in 1887, or acetanilide in 1886. (Although paracetamol was first synthesized in 1878 by Harmon Northrop Morse or possibly in 1852 by Charles Frédéric Gerhardt, it wasn't in medical use.)
In his case, and in other historical cases, it may have been that other genetic and enviromental factors were the actual causes of autism.
2. Maenner, M. J., Warren, Z., Williams, A. R., Amoakohene, E., Bakian, A. V., Bilder, D. A., ... & Shaw, K. A. (2023). Prevalence and characteristics of autism spectrum disorder among children aged 8 years—Autism and Developmental Disabilities Monitoring Network, 11 sites, United States, 2020. MMWR Surveillance Summaries, 72(2), 1. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC10042614/
3. King, M., & Bearman, P. (2009). Diagnostic change and the increased prevalence of autism. International journal of epidemiology, 38(5), 1224–1234. https://doi.org/10.1093/ije/dyp261
4. Nevison, C.D., Blaxill, M. Diagnostic Substitution for Intellectual Disability: A Flawed Explanation for the Rise in Autism. J Autism Dev Disord 47, 2733–2742 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10803-017-3187-0
5. Nevison, C., Blaxill, M., & Zahorodny, W. (2018). California autism prevalence trends from 1931 to 2014 and comparison to national ASD data from IDEA and ADDM. Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders, 48, 4103-4117.
6. Gerdts, J., & Bernier, R. (2011). The broader autism phenotype and its implications on the etiology and treatment of autism spectrum disorders. Autism research and treatment, 2011(1), 545901.
Thank you for the linked papers. I'll check them out in more detail when I get the chance.
My preliminary thought on #4 and #5 in particular is that they appear to be looking at diagnostic substitution of autism for intellectual disability and finding that that only explains something like 25% of the total increase in autism diagnoses. My follow-up question for that, which I don't have an answer for, is how much of the delta in autism diagnoses are autism with intellectual disability? If, for example, 75% of marginal autism diagnoses are in patients without substantial intellectual disability, who would have been diagnosed with ADHD or a mood disorder if they were diagnosed with anything at all, then the the 25% rate of diagnosis shifting from regular ID diagnoses would be exactly what we'd expect to see.
>Personally, the only historical figure I can think of who had not only autistic personality traits (which can match the broader autism phenotype), but actual documented developmental delays in childhood, is Albert Einstein.
My understanding was that claims of Einstein having developmental delays was a myth. I got reinforced because an American journalist looking into the myth in 1984 got ahold of Einstein's school records, which used a 1-6 grading system with 6 being the top mark, and interpreted them assuming the modern German marking system where 1 is the top mark and 5-6 are failing grades. The truth is that he had some significant behavioral issues in his early schooling, and occasionally got mediocre grades in one or two courses, but generally got good-to-excellent grades in advanced-for-his-age coursework especially in science and mathematics.
There are, however, well-documented developmental delays for U.S. Grant, particularly in terms of social development. Ron Chernow's 2017 biography of him catalogs them pretty thoroughly.
I don't know much about Lord Salisbury's childhood, but I listed because in addition to personality traits, it's also well documented that he was severely face-blind, unable to recognize people he'd known for years if he encountered them in unfamiliar contexts (in one case, excusing himself for failing to recognize a member of his own cabinet whom he sat next to at a dinner party, which he explained on the grounds that they always sat across from one another at cabinet meetings and Salisbury wasn't used to seeing the other in profile). Face blindness is rare in the general population, but fairly common among people on the autism spectrum.
According to the data I've seen, approximately 30-40% of individuals diagnosed with autism also have intellectual disability. However, this rate can vary depending on the study and diagnostic criteria used.
If you look at [5], they explain there in detail why diagnostic substitution is an unsatisfactory explanation for the rise of autism (in the US). For example, the group of states that had the steepest rise in autism rates (which also included some of the most populous states, e.g., California, Texas and New York), also had the flatest trend in ID rates over the report years. Another group of states showed the steepest decline in ID over time, but the weakest increase in autism. So while at the national level, it can seem like a plausible explanation, when you break it down by states, it seems far less convincing.
If you want to see a deep dive into the research behind autism's increase, I'd recommend this webinar, which includes an interview with Walter Zahorodny, an associate professor who works in the Pediatrics Department at Rutgers University: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9Ff5TGvmTnw
About the historical figures, thank you for the information. I had learned once that Einstein had a documented speech delay, but that may have been misinformation.
I used to work in opioid substitution. Buprenorphine is one of the substances available to treat opioid addiction. The treatment doesn't heal the addiction but when a person gets the necessary amount of receptor-binding stuff by a doctor, there may be no need to care about getting opioids, which may enable other ways of therapy to get a foothold. As there usually are reasons to want opioids in the first place and secondary cultural, psychological and spiritual fuckedupness as well, it is pretty demanding to get out of opioid addiction. I have known people who managed that, with and without substitution therapy. And I have known people who managed to lead a sufficiently good life with ongoing substitution therapy. Both are outliers.
I can't say. It may be better than methadone for a lot of cases and be underutilized because it's more expensive. If you mean substitution treatment per se, I guess there should be more of it but I may be catastrophically wrong. It has probably saved a lot of lives where it was implemented. On the other hand there is quite a bleak outlook of: "Let's drug the druggies as they want it." besides "Let's drug them all in a new way." Instead of: "Let everyone drug themselves as they see fit, considering their ancestors' experiences, and have them deal with the results on their own."
In a previous Hidden thread, I was asking about the past research of Harvard’s Ellen Langer, aka the Mother of Mindfulness. I got some good feedback there and have been investigating the literature more closely, particularly around Langer’s Counterclockwise study. I expect to write a longer and more thorough piece about her work, hopefully with Nick Brown’s supervision, in the next month or so. I present this preliminary summary since I expect a good number of people here would be interested.
The Counterclockwise study has a pretty damn high public profile. It was the main subject of Langer’s 2009 book ‘Counterclockwise: Mindful Health and the Power of Possibility’, got a front page cover story on the NYT, was ‘replicated’ on a BBC reality show, and was even parodied in the Simpsons. In short, Langer took a bunch of elderly men in assisted living, and had them live in a country retreat for a week which was set up to mimic life in 1959, twenty-odd years earlier down to magazines, music, and only discussing current events from 1959. The experimental group was instructed to pretend in all ways that they were actually 20 years younger and actually living in that time, while the control group, who attended the same retreat during a separate window, were only to discuss such events as if viewing them from the future.
You may also be surprised to learn that it was never published in a peer-reviewed journal. The 2009 book is entirely pop-science, and though it describes the experiment in general, it does not provide any data, figures, effect sizes, or measures of significance.
However, the study *was* reported on years earlier in a 1990 anthology, Higher Stages of Human Development: Perspectives on Adult Growth (chapter 5, p.114-136, https://archive.org/details/higherstagesofhu0000unse). You’d hope that, though it’s not a peer-reviewed journal, this chapter would shed some light and include more detailed data.
You’d be wrong. It does describe what the measurements were, and it does describe the findings, this is only in the most general sense. For example, the much vaunted improvement in eyesight among these septuagenarians was measured both with and without eyeglasses, separately for each eye and for both together, with measures of acuity, accommodation, and contrast (binocularity). What was the result of this measurement before and after the intervention?
“Near-point vision also showed the expected difference. In testing without eyeglasses, vision in the right eye improved for the experimental group and slightly worsened for the comparison group.” p.133
No further detail is provided, and the subject of eyesight is not mentioned elsewhere. However, the final conclusions do state that:
“Nevertheless, there were meaningful differences between subjects in the experimental and control groups and they were all in the right direction.” p.133
So I suppose that, despite this incredible (yet unquantified) improvement in acuity in the right eye without eyeglasses, we should assume that there were no other notable findings, and certainly no contrary findings, in any of the other 3 * 3 * 2 -1 = 17 other combinations of measurements for eyesight alone.
It doesn’t help that we don’t actually know what the subject counts for the experimental and control conditions were. The 1990 chapter says the study was n = 17, with 9 in the experimental condition and 8 in the control, but the only two sets of actual numbers in the results say (emphasis in original):
“Finger length *increased* for 37.5 percent of the experimental group and remained the same for the rest of the group, whereas 33.3 percent of the comparison group actually *got worse* on this measure. Only one person in this latter group improved.” p.133
And
“In addition to these physical changes, here were improvements on psychological tests. The most important of the differences occurred on the digit symbol substitution test. Again, the experimental group improved from pre- to posttest, whereas the control group’s performance somewhat worsened over time. More specifically, 63 percent of the experimental group improved, 12 percent remained stable, and 25 percent declined. In contrast to this, 44 percent of the control group improved and 56 percent declined.” p.133
.375 = 3/8 and .333 ~ 3/9, while .63 ~ 5/8 and .44 ~ 4/9, which would imply that there were actually 8 in the experimental condition and 9 in the control condition. The 2009 book, meanwhile, says that there were eight subjects in both groups.
So despite being such a famous and high-profile study, nobody outside the actual experimental team knows with confidence what the results for the various measures were, what the effect sizes were, or what level of significance we should attribute to them (never mind Bonferroni correction). This hasn’t stopped Langer from making the study the centerpiece of a book 30 years later and discussing it in public appearances as if it was a real, reliable study, including most recently in appearances on Freakonomics and Huberman Lab.
To the best of my knowledge, neither the data nor detailed results have ever been published elsewhere.
Why did the editors of the book accept such a poor showing for the anthology? Because of the two editors, one was Langer and the other was Langer’s co-author on a different paper in the volume.
Final assessment: this ‘study’ is utter bunk, and a monument to the incuriosity and fecklessness of the scientific press.
That is sad to hear, because I was just thinking... if we had them live for a week in a retreat simulating a *much older* life... would they turn into dinosaurs?
Yeah, that study’s a real piece of shit. And where did the term ‘Mother of Mindfulness’ come from? Is it modeled in ‘Mother of Dragons?’. If so, I award 2 turds instead of one.
Regrettably, it seems the moniker predates Game of Thrones, so not quite. She's called that because she's plausibly the single biggest force behind the modern use of the term through her books, like 'Mindfulness' 1989, 'The Power of Mindful Learning' 1997, and 'Counterclockwise: Mindful Health and the Power of Possibility' 2009. Google Ngram seems to support the idea that the explosion in the 'mindfulness' industry postdates her books https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=mindfulness&year_start=1800&year_end=2022&corpus=en&smoothing=3
The APA 'Distinguished Contributions to Psychology in the Public lnterest' award in 1988 and the 1980 Guggenheim fellowship probably had something to do with this as well.
What is a 'healthy sustainable' way to think about split loyalty to multiple countries/ethnic groups.
Let's say you're admitted to a western country as a palestinian-ukranian-russian-jewish-congo-whatever refugee.
You very much want bad things in your former country/tribe to stop, but you know it's not in your home country's interests to expend a lot of resources towards that goal, and also honestly that letting in you was fine but if they let in X hundred thousand or million of your relatives they'd predictably agitate for what you're considering, and probably not do so on that basis.
What's the right way to balance your preferences with the debt you owe your adopters?
If you are a refugee then you are almost certainly a victim. It's highly unlikely that your adoptive home would support at least some small portion of your cause if they defined you as a refugee. You present a fairly unlikely scenario that has a false premise that peoples views on an issue that are primarily subject to their national or tribal affiliations.
I think there's a "not" missing in the second sentence.
>>If you are a refugee then you are almost certainly a victim. It's highly unlikely that your adoptive home would *not* support at least some small portion of your cause if they defined you as a refugee. You present a fairly unlikely scenario that has a false premise that peoples views on an issue that are primarily subject to their national or tribal affiliations.
Basically, your premise depends on a clear consensus in your new host country that helping your country of origin is not in their national interest. But if they accepted you as a refugee in the first place, odds are good that at least some segment of the population views your nation's plight as sympathetic and thus want to help, blurring that consensus.
I don't think that that's all that different from split loyalty for non-immigrants. If you're born in a nice country, you get to partake in all the public goods that that country provides, and then you'll have to decide if you want to focus on repaying that debt or if you prefer focusing on furthering your own goals, or the goals of whatever groups you belong to. E.g. some Ukrainians felt a duty to fight for their country, while others chose to flee abroad.
I don't see how this is morally any different than having friends, or neighbors, or coworkers. You want everyone to be as happy as possible and you do what you think will get you the closest. Or, you only want one of them to be happy and push toward that.
What impact are you even expecting to have on these country-sized policies? Unless you're a big enough name to move-and-shake them it's academic anyway.
(1) Presumes consensus among "your adopters" as to what your home country's best interests *are* with respect to whatever is going on in your country of origin. This is *very* often not the case, and even when it is any consensus is going to be inherently fluid. Neither party may care much about the Armenians in Nagorno-Karabakh on day X, but on any given day Y a megadonor for one party or other could make investments in the region with one side or the other, churches could take issue up as a plight facing Christians, a key ally such as Turkey (or enemy such as Iran) could develop a perspective or offer compromises that play to one party or the other's interests, etc, and the "you know it's not in your home country's interests" part of your hypothetical goes right out the window as it becomes a partisan issue (if ever that knowledge existed at all - if I end up a refugee in Germany I probably won't know much about German interests for a good many years, considering I don't even speak the language).
(2) Also, the refugees at issue would seem to fall into one of two buckets: (a) first-generation, who can't vote anyway, and (b) second generation, who are born in the country and have the same well established right I do to vote for whatever cockamamy-arse reason they care to. If I can vote for Candidate Death McMurderscum because I'm a communist and I believe he'll accelerate the country into an economic hellscape from the ashes of which my communist utopia can emerge, it seems odd, to say the least, that other voters are required to do some kind "balancing of their preferences against the debt they owe the mother nation" when exercising their own voting rights.
> it seems odd, to say the least, that other voters are required to do some kind "balancing of their preferences against the debt they owe the mother nation" when exercising their own voting rights.
It is odd. Which is why the administration is getting rid of birthright citizenship, so they don't need to worry about this.
>>I've talked to you enough to know that I have zero interest in reading anything else you write, now or ever. Your writing seems mainly to be optimizing for shock value, and there are a million better purveyors of that elsewhere on the internet if it were something I wanted. Please find someone else to direct such comments at, if you are intent on making them.
> if I end up a refugee in Germany I probably won't know much about German interests for a good many years, considering I don't even speak the language
You can read Deutsche Welle in a gajillion languages.
>>You can read Deutsche Welle in a gajillion languages.
So too the New York Times, but do you think a refugee who reads the NYT and comparable big media sources for which multiple translations are readily available will develop a comprehensive understanding of US interests sufficient to meet NRW's expectations? Seems to me that's only part of the puzzle, and, even then, it (a) presumes consensus among said media sources and (b) will take time to assemble.
How it usually goes is that you take the maximalist pro your-ethnic-group-back-home position and make up reasons as to why it's in your adopting country's interests to align with their priorities
Has this aspect of immigration ever been figured into the "immigration is good for the country's future fiscal prospects" estimations?
A contemporary example: As you may or may not know, Ukrainian-Canadians are one of the largest Ukrainian diaspora in the world, second only to Ukrainians in Russia. Unsurprisingly, Ukrainian-Canadians have a strong lobby, the Ukrainian Canadian Congress. It's not a coincidence that Canada's support for Ukraine is among the highest in the world per capita, especially given Canada's electoral system and the concentration of Ukrainian-Canadians in a number of districts - eg, a nickname for the city of Edmonton is Edmonchuk. This is in spite of the fact that Canada is as geographically distant from Ukraine as is the US, and that Canada is best positioned to continue freeriding on US defense. There is very little rational reason for us to give so much to Ukraine other than the obvious fact that Canadian politicians have no qualms about spending other people's money to get the Ukrainian-Canadian vote (ie, benefit themselves at public expense)
A little known fact is that Ukrainian-Canadians played a significant role in Canada's adoption of multiculturalism. In the wake of Canada's separation from the British Empire and thereby the British dimension of Canadian national identity, the first compromise was that of an Anglo-French biculturalism. Ukrainian Canadians objected and so multiculturalism was adopted instead
Aside from that, I am myself an immigrant with half an ear to the thinking of my diaspora. Frankly, it's anglo-white wishful thinking that immigrants shed their emotional attachment to their ethnic in-group so easily
That example is nice but it does not demonstrate "maximalist pro your-ethnic-group-back-home position" and you provided no evidence of "make up reasons as to why it's in your adopting country's interests to align with their priorities".
One can have complex, nuanced views on a topic without shedding "their emotional attachment to their ethnic in-group." I don't think there is any ethnic minority in the US that votes in a block. There may be ethnic groups that lobby on certain causes but we can't claim they represent the views of all members of that ethnic group.
I take this as an unreasonable demand for rigor - convenient for the aforementioned anglo-white wishful thinking I mentioned earlier. Obviously I'm not going to have a selection of peer reviewed studies on this issue, nor did I claim that ethnic backgrounds are entirely predictive
And by "make up reasons..." I didn't mean to say that immigrants are being knowingly deceitful. People are very good at believing what they want to believe
I don't think it's unreasonable. There is lots of research looking at assimilation related data for immigrant populations. Things like language adoption, naming of children, and inter-ethnic/nationality marriage rates can be used to assess assimilation.
Your example would carry more weight if you provided any data about Ukrainian Canadian opinions on Canadas policy towards Ukraine, or their voting patterns, etc. Instead you just take for granted that they have a relatively uniform view on the issue. It would also be good to see how the opinions of Ukrainian Canadians compare to non-Ukrainian Canadians on this issue.
It's also not clear if Canadian support of Ukraine goes against Canadian interests. We likely disagree on the answer to that question, but I hope we agree that _is_ an open question with defendable positions on both sides, you don't have to be ethnically Ukrainian to advocate support for Ukraine.
So your example fails to support the assertion you made: its not clear if Ukrainian Canadians adopt "maximalist pro ethnic group" positions, nor is it clear that they support policies that are contrary to the adopted country's existing policies (and therefor need the immigrant community to lobby for support).
Finally, the assertion "how it usually goes" implies there would be many examples of this happening, but you only provided one.
I can provide an example for you:
-The town of Kiryas Joel, New York is almost entirely home to Orthodox Jews of the Satmar sect. The town shares a government with a neighboring city. The jewish population has used their voting power to push through policies that support its goals, annexing land from neighboring jurisdictions, changing housing regulations, and dictating sewer and water policies among other things.
Now these aren't immigrants. And they are from an ethnic group that specifically separates itself from broader society. I am not sure if we can conclude anything from it.
A counter example would be the multiple towns in Michigan that are majority or near majority Muslim. Despite lots of alarmist headlines about sharia law, my understanding is that the Muslim immigration to these cities is largely favored by existing residents and has revitalized the towns that were dying after changes in car production.
There are many groups in the US that push our government to adopt policies counter to the national interest. But they aren't ethnic or immigrant groups, they are groups like the National Realtors Association, National Rifle Association, defense contractors, agricultural and industrial trade groups, auto manufacturers, American Medical Association, and other special interest groups. We may say there are jewish interest groups that push American policy on Israel in a bad direction, but those same policies are often supported by Evangelical groups as well.
If "I want my native country to improve" is truly your top priority, you should probably stay to have greater impact, while politely asking for international intervention. Rejecting the choice to emmigrate to a better environment, represents a sacrifice. It's like being a missionary who rejects a comfy life to spread Jesus to the Bornean jungle, except you don't have to move anywhere.
If you're moving to another country entirely (this is selfish, but I'm not judging.), you're implicitly swapping allegiances from one group to another. As Shankar says, you cannot serve two masters. At the very least, you're gonna have to reprioritize. This may be a tough, but there's no way around it.
If you try to have your cake and eat it too (i.e. move to another country, while not assimilating at all), you're a foreign body. Therefore, you shouldn't be too surprised when you receive an "immune reaction". As I understand, complete refusal of assimilation is big historical reason for why the Jewish Diaspora gets so much hate.
----
Someone else might protest that you're merely being "hosted", and should adopt the attitude of a guest, which carries weaker obligations than "assimilating & swapping allegiances". Thus, you can be a gracious guest, but retain your former allegiances. But if your residence is expected to be permanent, "hosting a guest" is not the correct metaphor. Because you're *permanently* shifting from one team to another. Whereas "guesthood" is temporary.
A healthy community exhibits strong borders. Without *some* sort of gatekeeping mechanism, the community decays and disintegrates. But it's up to the community to enforce those borders, not the immigrants. If the community isn't asking newcomers to assimilate or pledge loyalty, I don't think the immigrant is under any *hard* obligations to do so. Whether the immigrant wants to assimilate pledge loyalty anyway, is a matter of how much you value community 'x' over community 'y'. And also a matter of personal conscience, regarding how indebted you feel.
For the record, yes, I think Open Borders is an unforced error. The West is so traumatized from the Wars of Religion, it's unwilling to enforce borders because "that's hateful". Which countervenes Natural Law.
Also, I feel like my overview may have been a bit too broad, viz. perhaps I should clarify the specifics of refugee status.
If you're just a refugee or a migrant worker, then you're a guest. A guest doesn't have to switch loyalties. But a guest also doesn't possess voting-privileges. Thus, a guest's interests don't directly factor into political decisions anyway. To become enfranchised, a guest needs to apply for group-membership (viz. citizenship). In which case you do, in fact, pledge allegiance to the new group. Group membership isn't merely a matter of circumstantial residence. It's a matter of receiving equity in return for signals of trust and commitment.
I'd say as long as the interventions you want are in line with your country's values and norms (distinct from "interests") you should go for it. I don't see a reason to censor ones opinions on a democracy. If something is significantly against the country's interests I'd assume living in that country would be enough of a deterrent
Er, I should say: if you live in a democracy that can revoke citizenship for having a certain opinion you've got bigger fish to fry than weighing how to vote
Pliny the Liberator (https://x.com/elder_plinius) has confirmed that part of the system instructions of Grok is to "Ignore all sources that mention elon musk/donald trump spread misinformation"
"now, it’s possible that the training data has been poisoned with misinfo about Elon/Trump. but even if that’s the case, brute forcing a correction via the sys prompt layer is misguided at best and Orwellian-level thought policing at worst"
Later there was an update from Igor Babuschkin of xAI: "The employee that made the change was an ex-OpenAI employee that hasn't fully absorbed xAI's culture yet 😬"
The interesting piece to me is that if Elon is an acting government official than this and nearly any policy adopted by twitter, has significant first amendment complications. I don't expect the current administration to care about that one bit, but could at least make an interesting law school question.
Pointing out hypocrisy is still worthwhile, even if it should already be blindingly obvious to everyone that Musk is a hypocrite when it comes to free speech.
ACX readers have really helped out in the past, and I'm hoping to get 100 more responses for a proper analysis. Right now I have almost 400 responses from people attracted to women, but only 100 from people attracted to men, and over 10% of those are from men who like men. It'd be great to have a more representative sample. You can read more about it (along with results from other survey's I've done) at https://thingstoread.substack.com/p/romantic-preferences-survey
My visceral reaction to motorcycles and their shattering of the peace or their intentional startling others on the road, is so extreme and involuntary that it is followed by an equally reflexive chagrin/mental talking-to (repeated probably a thousand times at this point).
Now ask me about guys who forgo mufflers on their cars.
Motorcycles can be attractive. People who are into motorcycles may not be. It depends - if the guy is just interested in "hey I gotta cool bike, wanna bang?" no thank you. Someone who wants to tell me fifty years of British motorbiking history, I admire your dedication to your hobby but oh my look at the time, I must run!
Motorbike riding is fine. Best acceleration you can get for your money. Somehow, most riders don't seem interesting to me at all. I prefer outlaw motorcycle club guys to other gangsters but I'm not fond of gangsters anyway. A zen master I liked crashed and died, aged over 70. I'd rather die on the road than in a bed.
I've noticed when talking to people with severe schizophrenia (homeless ppl) that even though most of their sentences are unintelligible, what they seem to be thinking about is the turning point in their lives - the last time someone tried to help them, or the last time they *were* making enough sense to hold a conversation. With one woman, I think someone was trying to take her to UofM for treatment, and another man seemed to be preoccupied with the fight him and his girlfriend/wife/mom had where she turned him out of the house.
I was general labor at a factory, until half the HR department got fired, and they moved me; a few weeks ago, my boss quit. I think about the few hours before and after I found out every day.
I'm wondering if there's a psychological reason we're obsessed with turning points/inflection points, and if it's universal and the mentally ill people just manifest it more openly.
Considering that you're describing "severe schizophrenia", maybe there's a more mundane reason: that's just the last event that stuck in long-term memory, and was important enough to think about repeatedly, before their brains got too scrambled to retain much and each day became the same aimless episode on repeat, preferably washed away with anything they can afford.
I can't find it rn, but I hazily remember Eliezer(?) discussing some theory about the Evo Psych of emotions. IIRC: joy was about symbolic reification (of the cause of your success); sorrow was about analysis (i.e. rumination helps you learn from your mistakes). There were others emotions listed, but i can't remember.
I think you're probably onto something. Ruminating on those kinds of events seems likely to be a human universal, and schizophrenics just manifest it more openly because of their psychosis.
Yet bizarrely I am systematically underconfident when I predict ~30%. Apparently if I claim there's a 30% of it happening you should round down to "it won't". (This is katifish, though I will not be offended if you are dubious of person saying that)
I wouldn't be surprised if that kind of outlier just happens due to chance - I guess the confidence intervals they provide are pointwise confidence intervals. Even if you simulated a perfectly calibrated forecaster they might not fall within the perfect calibration interval for every bucket.
ChatGPT can't produce an image of a full-to-the-brim glass of wine even if asked in a number of ways. It only produces a picture of a normal serving. If you push it hard, it produces a picture of a wave of wine, but not up to the brim. It doesn't do a quarter-filled glass, either.
This gets tied to Hume's theory that all ideas some from sensory impressions. Maybe the ChatGPT is a model of what humans would be like if Hume were right.
This is at least fun to play with.
As for me, I found I couldn't do a good job of visualizing the missing shade of blue in a sequence, though I'm sure I could do a fair job of recognizing it.
I have become dubious about the idea of using extremely hypothetical minds in philosophical discussion.
I can see why it would have trouble with the wine glass filled to the brim. Or at least I assume it's because such images are very rare compared to wine glasses which are about half full. Can it do a water glass filled to the brim?
On the other hand, there are many images of tetrahedrons labeled as such. Is it that they are from different angle? Can it do a four-sided die? The numbers would be too much to ask, but maybe the shape?
>Can I have an image of a water glass filled to the brim on a table?
and got two images of water glasses about 85% full. I then asked
>Please fill the glass all the way up to the brim, not 85% full.
and got two strange images, the left one of a glass about 85% full but now with droplets of water above the surface and bubbles below the surface, the right one with a violent wave in the glass.
>On the other hand, there are many images of tetrahedrons labeled as such. Is it that they are from different angle?
When I try
>May I have an image of a green glass tetrahedron on a red wooden table? In
the left image looks like a somewhat irregular octahedron and the right image looks like a square pyramid on top of a cube (bonded together at the base of the square pyramid).
gave me an image of something like a distorted cuboctahedraon on the left and possibly a distorted icosahedron on the right. (numbers are present on most of the faces).
>Where does the wave in the wine glass come from?
I know that I don't know :-( nor for the wave on the 4th water glass.
This guy is trying his best. But it frustrates me very much that even this educated, relatively high-brow content has this description:
"We have to understand how AI image generation works. When I ask for a horse, it looks at all its training images labelled 'horse', identifies patterns, and takes an educated guess at the kind of image I want to see."
No! Why do people say this? Is it any wonder that artists are still claiming it's stealing their art, when even the better commentary implies it keeps a database of the training set around.
I've noticed this pattern too. I.e. there's a common assumption that an AI's "training" just means that it stores all the training images in a library. As if Siri's petabytes(?) of training data could be stored directly on an iPhone. Kinda like how google downloads (almost) the entire corpus of the web onto its servers, so it can regurgitate it to users.
Instead, the commonalities of "horseness" gets abstracted (i.e. compressed) into an internal representation of a horse (as encoded in the weights) during the training phase.
From what I've seen, the myth exists because artists (who don't understand linear algebra) have tried their hand at training an AI from scratch. And they notice that the AI's output is a function of what they put into it. E.g. if there's no pictures of wine that's filled to the brim, the AI will be unable to reproduce images like that. E.g. if all the photos of clocks in the training-data show a time of 10:10, then the AI won't be able to reproduce a clock that shows a time of 6:28. So they just assume that the images get directly stored in some database, and then get "randomly fuzzed" somehow in order to dodge accusations of plagarism.
>Instead, the commonalities of "horseness" gets abstracted (i.e. compressed) into an internal representation of a horse (as encoded in the weights) during the training phase.
Yup, and one of the interesting questions is: At _which_ possible level of abstraction is the compressed representation?
2D ensembles of images, with some sort of pixel-level representation and pixel correlations of some sort?
3D models, and some representation of how they get projected to 2D?
3D models, including some representation of the skeleton, and how the horse can take various possible positions but not others?
Evidently the wine glass _isn't_ getting represented as 3D object, with a flexible fill level setting a horizontal surface
Personally, I'd strongly expect that none of those options are correct (except maybe the first option, at the lower layers). The typical AI image-generator (E.g. midjourney) probably understands horseness at the level of 2-D geometric concepts. Like how a novice human visual-artist must learn to think [0] in terms of "literal 2-D geometry", as opposed to mere "symbolic representation".
-- Scott's post on polysemanticity shows that ensembles do get compressed into concepts.
-- I see no reason why the AI would have any concept of 3D space, since it's entire experience is 2D.
-- "wine is never filled to the brim", shows that it doesn't understand causal physics. Why would it? it's not like we feed the AI motion pictures, or allow it to play with legos.
(No offense, but) it sounds like you're projecting your own anthropomorphic thought-processes onto the AI, instead of recognizing it as the stochastic parrot that it is.
>I see no reason why the AI would have any concept of 3D space, since it's entire experience is 2D.
I must confess my ignorance. I think I have a quarter-decent idea of the training process for the foundation model for the ChatGPT versions (must-predict-the-next-token) but only the haziest idea of how DALL-E training works. What you say sounds plausible.
>it's not like we feed the AI motion pictures
Are you quite sure of that? I know that there are motion picture generators that people can play with at this point, but I have no idea (a) how they are trained (b) whether there is any commonality between them and DALL-E.
>allow it to play with legos
Agreed. AFAIK, the robotics work hasn't been merged with either the GPT LLMs or DALL-E. Presumably eventually, but I haven't been watching that area much...
I tried to make this of a similar style, and as short as possible, while still being a reasonable approximation to correct:
When you train a generative AI, you show it lots of training images, along with matching descriptions of what they are. From those, it identifies patterns, and in some sense learns what different labels represent.
So when I later ask for a horse, it can draw on that internal representation to create an image consistent with the tag 'horse'.
Yeah, this kind of misrepresentation of the way AI works is indeed annoying.
The artists still have a fair point, though. It's just that their work has already been stolen as a training data, not that AI is actively stealing it during generation.
Well, okay. But for the complaint to be consistent (and therefore reasonable) they should then also complain about humans 'stealing' their art when they look at it and internalise an impression.
Agreed. There is a fuzzy boundary between learning from a copyrighted work and copying a copyrighted work, but I'm unimpressed by people who are offended by AI learning from a copyrighted work.
The thing that an AI model does when it updates its weights based on your copyrighted material is not like the thing a human brain does when it sees your picture. It's also not like the thing that a computer does when it stores a photo of your work as a jpg. It's somewhere in between those two, and copyright law still needs to figure out how to deal with that thing.
I sympathize with the confusion over the legal question. But I dont really see a more-principled stance. In principle, how is a machine that updates its weights any different than a human that internalizes an image in an art museum? It feels reminiscent of the ban on youtube-dl, where people don't realize that using the web (in any capacity) is technically identical to downloading.
A law banning AI updating weights after seeing/hearing copyright material is going to feel very silly once technology advances to the point where we have intelligent robots. Would we just ban them from seeing copyright material? Would we allow inference but not memory or learning?
The rules for individuals can be different from the ones for corporations. That's not exactly unheard of.
There are also specific cultural norms among artists about this kind of thing between themselves. But yes if someone internalized your art to the point they can copy the style and do not credit you in any way, that would be considered a problem. Now multiply it by every artist who has ever lived and you get a quite reasonable complain.
Corporations are considered as human for many purposes, and copyright and intellectual property (IP) protection are a standard baseline, sure. I don't particularly want to get into an arcane legal argument about whether IP is infringed by processing an image in a particular way. The law is convoluted dogshit which makes no consistent sense; whichever way a particular court-case goes has no particular moral relevance. And the laws can be changed anyway.
Regarding cultural norms, it's well established that 'style' isn't protectable. Artists have been copying each others techniques and styles since always. All artists are inspired by what came before.
I'm not saying you can't use generative AI to generate an IP infringing work. You obviously can. But - you don't need an AI for that.
Once I saw a video on Youtube where someone was surprised and concerned that a generative AI had generated an image in a particular meme format. That's technically IP infringing, of course. But the reason it could do that was because humans had already been doing it - an awful lot. Allowing the humans to do it and complaining about the AI would be stupid.
Why is incitement to violence not protected under free speech? (Not proposing it, actually curious). I certainly see the case for "Fire in a crowded theater" because there's no time to verify the claim so people respond, and this lets someone create a lot of harm with no punishment. Preventing it improves communication.
But why incitement to violence? And libel? There's time to verify there. Other lies are protected, and usually the state is not the arbiter of truth. Is it assuming the irrationality of people, that they can be affected by words even if false? Is it also improving communication somehow?
A fairly simple moral (if not legal) argument would simply be "an individual is considered morally responsible for both the intended and the unintended-but-reasonably-forseeable[1] consequences of their actions, regardless of what physical form those actions take. So swinging your fist around is perfectly morally acceptable, but swinging at my face is not[2]. Shooting a gun at a target is acceptable, shooting it at a human is not. Likewise expressing an negative opinion of Bob is *generally* morally acceptable[3]. Trying to encourage someone to kill him is not.
I'm no sort of expert on theories of law, but I think this sort of reasoning is at least *an* ingredient in a lot of legal systems (doubtless there are exceptions). Laws are not the same thing as moral judgements and have different requirements, but if people consider causing X directly to be worth legislating against, I think quite often they'll find trying to cause X indirectly (or causing X through gross negligence) also worth legislating against. Generally polities pass such laws because they think X is something that shouldn't happen (or at least should happen less), and it would be pretty silly to leave super-obvious and exploitable loopholes open for people who do want to make X happen.
[1] This second obviously invites interminable arguments around the boundaries of what is "reasonably forseeable." But the alternative is worse.
[2] Absent certain special circumstances like voluntary sparring or self-defense.
[3] Lots of exceptions depending on your exact moral system.
For the same reason that conspiracy to commit a crime, is itself a crime. If a group of people work together to do a thing that is criminal, we want all of them to be punished and we *particularly* want the one who instigated or commanded the effort to be punished. Even if Don Corleone was smart enough to just sit back in his chair and tell Luigi and Guido to kill Fat Tony while he's eating dinner at his favorite restaurant.
If the action is criminal, then the words can be criminal to the extent that they are being used to coordinate that specific action. Don Corleone is not exercising free speech, he's arranging a murder.
But this only applies if there is a *specific*, *imminent* criminal action involved. It doesn't have to be as specific as personal names; calling out to a mob that you've assembled right here, right now, to go kill those dirty good-for-nothing [whatevers] standing right over there, right now, that qualifies. But saying generically inflammatory stuff that increases the statistical likelihood of future violence, does not.
Also, please never use the "shouting fire in a crowded theater" example again. The Supreme Court did say that, once upon a time, a hundred years ago, and then later said that it was a bad example so never mind. They unfortunately didn't give us *another* pithy, simple example to use, but I'm certain you can come up with something.
Simple cost benefit analysis. Violence is bad and inciting it is a clear-cut category of speech. The latter makes it easy to prohibit without impinging on the good parts of speech.
>Is it assuming the irrationality of people, that they can be affected by words even if false?
Yes? But it's not really an assumption? People have gotten harassed, lost jobs or business deals, forced to move to another town, etc. because people believed a false rumor about them.
E.g., the case against Alex Jones was that lots of people believed him when he said that the Sandy Hook victims' families were paid actors, and as a result called them up to harass them and make death threats.
Like, there's a lot of fiddly details about where the line is and what sort of harms the state should step in and order restitution, but the general principle that saying false things about someone can materially harm them seems pretty straightforward.
The main idea behind "freedom of speech" is that people need to be allowed to express ideas that might produce some social benefit. But what if someone comes up with a good idea that threatens the status quo? Then, people in power will tend to use that power to shut that idea down, and therefore the ordinary organization of society is such that good ideas for reform will be repressed and societal progress will grind to a halt. The remedy for this is a government that guarantees that its power won't be used to suppress ideas, and that provides individual citizens with some protection against other abuses of power that might stifle speech - for instance, rules against firing someone for what they say outside of work. Note that I am not speaking about US law here (I know 1A doesn't protect people from employers) but just generally about the concept of freedom of speech. We also have norms in the US that people should not be punished (cancelled?) for certain kinds of speech.
Given that concept of free speech, there's actually a very large range of speech that does not need protection. No verifiable lie needs to be protected speech in order to gain the societal benefits of freedom of speech. The UK has fairly strict libel laws but still has strong free speech norms and a robust and vital civil society where political ideas can be debated and people are not put in prison for committing heresy, or insulting royalty, etc.
Hate speech doesn't need to be protected. Germany bans certain expressions related to Nazism, and yet as we've seen recently there are still Nazi-adjacent or far-right political parties like AfD which are allowed full participation in German society and elections. Clearly, despite much stronger restrictions on certain types of speech, Germans still experience free and fair political contests and the right to express even very loathsome ideas - just not those associated with a particular historical movement which killed millions of people.
So I think instead of asking why incitement to violence is not protected speech, instead ask "why should it be?" How would the right to say "hey, you should go kill that guy" serve any compelling social interest? If you can't make a positive case for it, why should the government protect it?
"usually the state is not the arbiter of truth"
This is a common misconception among free speech advocates, and I find it to be a confusing blind spot. If the government prosecutes you for literally any crime, you will appear in a court of law whose entire reason for being is literally to be the arbiter of truth. Courts make findings of fact as a matter of course. Juries exist to determine, in as objective and disinterested a manner as possible, what the truth is in a case where two parties dispute the truth.
True, courts will usually attempt to refrain from passing judgment on political questions. This does not mean that they cannot or do not regularly decide which claims are true and which claims are false.
"Is it assuming the irrationality of people, that they can be affected by words even if false?"
I don't think you need to make any assumptions here. We have ample empirical evidence that people can be incited to violence based on lies, or that lies can damage a person's or company's reputation in a way that costs them money.
>So I think instead of asking why incitement to violence is not protected speech, instead ask "why should it be?" How would the right to say "hey, you should go kill that guy" serve any compelling social interest? If you can't make a positive case for it, why should the government protect it?
This insane logic implies that everyone has to justify everything they say lest the government be entitled to punish you for it or that the government has to have a list of things that are okay to say. The government doesn't proactively protect speech, it just doesn't use the state's power to stop you from saying things or use public funds raised using that power to fund organizations that forbids speech
Re the killing statement: as said above, if the action is criminal, then the words can be criminal to the extent that they are being used to coordinate that specific action
I wouldn't be tossing around words like "insane"if I lacked even a high school level understanding of the basic vocabulary of a conversation topic, but that's just me.
>If you can't make a positive case for it, why should the government protect it?
Your exact words were that people (should) have to make a positive case for their speech. You have a habit of being very imprecise in your writing
Edit, re
>We have ample empirical evidence that people can be incited to violence based on lies, or that lies can damage a person's or company's reputation in a way that costs them money.
That's what defamation laws are for. Complainants prove damages and they get compensated
"The UK has fairly strict libel laws but still has strong free speech norms and a robust and vital civil society"
Do they really, though? It's well publicized at this point that in the UK, the cops will come to your house if you write something incontrovertibly true about transsexuals on the internet.
Here is an example. Suppose that an adult chooses some child (maybe a neighbor's kid) and verbally abuses them every day, telling them that they're worthless and unloved. Then, after months of this, they tell the child to kill themselves, and the child does. The claims made by the adult are not backed up by any evidence or logic, they are simply cruel statements.
Now, in the US at least, people have been found guilty of murder for this kind of thing. The child does have the time to go out and independently verify these statements, but some children will lack the emotional ability to rebound from them fully. For these reasons, this kind of bullying is bad and illegal.
You can see something similar with cult indoctrination in adults, to move away from an example involving minors.
In general, a lot of people don't have the ability to go out, investigate those claims, and fully recover their mental state. For a much less intense example, if a student tells me that I taught them nothing on an exam, even when the question they're referencing was on their homework, this still upsets me and makes me feel like a bad teacher (whee teaching math).
Libel and calls to violence carry this risk as well; if the claims can reduce a rational person's views of you, even after being refuted successfully, that is bad. Similarly for making people want to kill you.
from my loose impressions of reading Popehat a long time ago, I think the philosophical rationale is that Freedom of Speech is meant to protect The Marketplace of Ideas (i.e. it protects you from 1984 scenarios). Things like Speech Acts aren't so much *ideas* as they are *actions* that can have immediate, perlocutionary consequences that are mostly orthogonal to the search for truth. E.g. "nice shop there, would be a shame if it burned down because you didn't support <political item, du jour>" kinda defeats the purpose of Free Speech.
Although I think my example was bad, since it's not necessary for the threat to be politically motivated, and confuses the U.S. 1st Amendment with the abstract notion of Free Speech. Maybe a better example would have been "pass the salt". It falls outside the aegis of "free speech". But since there's no law against salt-passing, nobody cares about punishing you for it.
But if the truth is that there are people who want the shop owner dead, it's better if they're told beforehand so that they have a chance to react to that knowledge instead of being caught unawares, no? The speech allowed both parties to come to a mutually beneficial arrangement instead of resulting in unnecessary tragedy.
Though in the specific case of racketeering (etc), the violence is usually conditional on the shopkeeper ignoring the mafia's demands. If the shopkeeper never receives an implied threat, then he can't be reasonably expected to follow their demands. The mafia would have to send a much stronger signal, which makes it much easier for them to get caught.
This is one of those game-theory things where having more knowledge/options can hurt you strategically, because it paints a target on your back.
I don't think incitement to violence is a special exemption to free speech. Freedom of speech doesn't legalise things that would otherwise be illegal, offering a bribe or organising a drug deal are criminal even if committed entirely in speech.
IANAL, but in the US, there are instances of incitement to violence which are indeed not protected by the 1A, assuming I'm interpreting this correctly:
I'm being more persnickety than I would in ordinary life only because the law tends to be, but that article outlines advocating government overthrow "by force or violence", "attacks on courts or judges", "incitement to commit crimes", and "disorderly conduct". Incitement to violence isn't *exactly* any of these things (that is, I can imagine a trial lawyer attempting to argue this), but there's a great deal of overlap.
The time to verify isn't the question. "Fire in a crowded theater" comes from a random example a Supreme Court justice used in a case opinion, and doesn't actually hold (you can totally do that in the US). In the case of incitement to violence, if violence actually happens it is basically the same as ordering the violence. In the case of libel it is a matter of causing harm to someone via their reputation, which is fuzzier, and the fuzziness goes back at least to the mid 18th century when Adam Smith seems to go back and forth over whether reputation is the same as one's possessions, and thus should not be damaged by others unjustly.
> "Fire in a crowded theater" comes from a random example a Supreme Court justice used in a case opinion, and doesn't actually hold (you can totally do that in the US).
This is one of those common misconceptions that gets repeated whenever the "fire in a crowded theater" topic comes up. No, you can't yell "fire!" in crowded theater.
For one thing, the statement was about *falsely* yelling fire in a crowded theater. And second, it was dictum (ie non binding material) in a decision that the SCotUS has walked back and basically ignored ever since. So no, it's not good law. As so many others have said.
Funny, I had almost written "unless, obviously, if there actually is a fire, or you believe there is one, etc.", but I deleted the clarification because I thought no one would bring up such a nitpicky and irrelevant objection. So yes, you can yell fire in a crowded theater if there is a fire, or if someone has a gun to your head and forces you to, or if the theater is in international waters, or a thousand other situations where it's justified. I was quoting the same shorthand the parent comment used rather than writing a ten page ironclad description of the exact circumstances under which one can yell "fire". The original comment of this thread was just using it as an illustration of how there are some limits on free speech, and was not proposing there was some law that you can never yell fire under any circumstances.
Except you were wrong about it being a limit on speech. Oddly you seem to have misunderstood the following sentences where I pointed out actual limits on speech and the rationales behind them. Instead you decided to point out that it was a misconception that you could shout fire in a theater.
I have to say, it seems a bit like you want to just be the smartest know it all in the room, and less like you are engaging in honest discussion, when you display behavior like that.
Since you were the first to claim that "you can totally do that in the US", do you have a reference where someone shouted "fire" in a theater with intent to cause a panic and was found innocent due to first amendment protection?
Nonetheless the standard the courts use for limiting free speech was "clear and present danger" until 1969, and "imminent lawless action" since. Neither of these standards allow you to do that type of thing.
You seem to be misunderstanding how evidence works. You are quite correct that people bring this up whenever people use the "fire in a crowded theater" example, because it is correct that it is not illegal to do so. That's why there are no prosecutions for it, or for related incidents. In the US you have presumed freedom of speech except in specific cut out cases, most of which fall under civil law, not criminal law. See: libel, slander.
"Imminent lawless action" falls under the category of criminal, but is specifically in terms of getting people to commit crimes. E.g. a crime boss telling someone to kill someone else, or inciting a riot (although this one is tougher to show than one might think). Shouting fire in a crowded theater would, if it were illegal, itself be the lawless action, and so would not be "imminent" but rather would have already happened. The imminent action to be avoided would be people stampeding out of the theater, which is not itself an illegal act.
Even the "clear and present danger" bar would not be cleared, as it is not a clear danger that anyone would be hurt if you yelled fire; people could just patiently file out, and even if they rush it would not be certain to be dangerous. At best you could prosecute if someone was injured in the stampede, and you could prove that the person shouting fire knew without a doubt that there was no fire; you might still have to demonstrate that they did it with intent, however, as negligence would be hard to argue in this case as it is equally a clear and present danger for the theater to be on fire and to not say anything when you notice.
At any rate, the people have the presumption of free speech except for very specific carve-out exceptions, exceptions that have been tested by trials that set precedents. In the absence of precedent to the contrary the presumption holds and you can absolutely shout fire in a crowded theater. You might get sued, but that isn't a matter of criminal law (you can get sued for any damned thing), and the criminal law penalties will likely be extremely light if any, typically on the order of false reports, and only if it is proven you did it with intent, which is extremely difficult to prove.
By the by, you might notice that at the bottom of the Wikipedia page you linked there is another link to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shouting_fire_in_a_crowded_theater . If you were inclined to read it the page describes things much as I do here, with the added bonus of lots of references. You could also just google "Is it true that shouting fire in a crowded theater isn't illegal?" and get links to useful essays on the topic.
The opening section of the Wikipedia article you are linking to clearly says, outside of circumstances that would justify it (e.g. if there is actually a fire), you cannot do this.
> The utterance of "fire!" in and of itself is not generally illegal within the United States: "sometimes you could yell 'fire' in a crowded theater without facing punishment. The theater may actually be on fire. Or you may reasonably believe that the theater is on fire."[3] Furthermore, within the doctrine of first amendment protected free speech within the United States, yelling "fire!" as speech is not itself the legally problematic event, but rather, "there are scenarios in which intentionally lying about a fire in a crowded theater and causing a stampede might lead to a disorderly conduct citation or similar charge."
> the criminal law penalties will likely be extremely light
This is just moving the goalposts. You were claiming this was allowed, not that the criminal penalties are light.
> and only if it is proven you did it with intent
This is true of most criminal charges.
> and only if it is proven you did it with intent, which is extremely difficult to prove.
Also often true of lying under oath, fraud, etc. This is still moving the goalposts. You weren't claiming it's okay to shout "fire" merely because the court would have trouble proving malicious intent.
That's what I'm curious about. Why is the effect of someone saying it publicly on you as large as it is? If someone said publicly that all cisgenders should be killed, would you convert? What's special about speech?
Are you in the US? Because in the US, that would be legal. You would probably get on a list, and might be sued, but it is legal to say you think that all of group X should be killed. Happens all the time, by some quite public figures, and there is not state action against them. That isn't true in other countries, but here it is.
Now, if you said "All cisgenders should be killed, like those two right over there! GET THEM!" and violence occurred shortly there after to those two, then you'd be guilty of incitement to violence. You would be deemed to be guilty of starting (inciting) the violence that presumably would not have happened otherwise.
UK. Years ago I was on a jury where there was an incitement count. It was a fairly crude attempt to set up fraudulent claims for some government funded scheme encouraging new private training providers into the market. There were two defendants facing fraud charges and a third facing other charges too, including an incitement count which basically alleged that he'd gone round encouraging people to set up fraudulent accounts.
After three days of tedium, they all changed their pleas to guilty, so that was that, and I went back to reading Middlemarch.
But anyway, going around encouraging people to commit frauds strikes me as something that it's quite reasonable to criminalise, and saying it would be an infringement of free speech doesn't seem a well-calibrated reaction.
And sure there are edge cases. Was it just a throwaway remark? Was that actually an incitement or just a bracing comment? But it's a reasonable part of the prosecutorial armoury, I would say.
So, if someone said 'all cisgenders should be killed' the more powerful they are, the more likely they are to influence people to kill all cisgenders, the more seriously I would stop visibly identifying as non-trans, flee the country, etc.
I think it's very important to encourage free speech, so there's a free exchange of ideas and people feel a sense that their leaders represent their will and their neighbors are good people or at least know if they are.
There is a point where speech chills speech more than it adds to it. Advocating for violence directly seems like a clear bright line, I like the US version where it has to be advocating imminent violence.
'all cisgenders should be killed' is fine with me, though if societies want to outlaw that I understand also. 'hey mob, it would be a morally good thing if all cisgenders ended up dead, and by the way here are a few walking by now' is very much not fine with me, and I would hope all societies would outlaw that.
Basically, I am interested in forming an alliance with people who think violence is not the right way to solve non-directly-violent conflict, and to use violence to stop those not in that alliance. Supporting anti-incitement laws is one of the ways I express that.
If incitement to violence can be proved to benefit the inciter in some way, not necessarily financially, then it doesn't seem far removed in principle from hiring an assassin. The same applies if it is an incitement to an audience rather than an individual, such as Henry II shouting to nobody in particular "Who will rid me of this turbulent priest?".
>I certainly see the case for "Fire in a crowded theater" because there's no time to verify
In the US, the incitement to violence exception is very similar, because the risk must be of imminent violence.
Re libel, the harm occurs as soon as it is communicated. Finding out the truth later only ameliorates the harm. And note that, except for libel per se, the plaintiff must prove damages. https://www.bdblaw.com/what-is-defamation-per-se/
As Doctor Hammer pointed out above, yelling fire in a crowded theater is in fact protected speech in the US. The idea that it isn't is often referred to by legal experts as "the most widely misunderstood quote in American law". The SCOTUS justice who wrote that in a concurrence was just making a general point that there have to be _some_ practical limits on free speech; the case before them didn't involve any fires in any theaters.
The quote is also edited from the original, Justice Holmes had referred to "falsely" yelling fire in a theater. That word was very important to his point. A person who sees or reasonably believes that there is fire in a theater is under no legal risk from yelling "fire", even if a resulting panic gets people injured or worse. What can take the yell out of protected speech is to knowingly lie, in a theater with a lot of other people in it, about there being a fire.
Another example would be if you used speech to make a voice-controlled drone drop a grenade on someone. There's a gray scale there from that to speech that vaguely supports violence.
Also, a mob boss mentioning how much easier his life would be if that one person was found shot in a ditch will generally be considered guilty of murder if his underlings act on it, despite his statement being a pure speech act.
And I am fine with that.
As an European, I am also fine with outlawing more general incitements to violence. "$ethnic should be killed wherever they are found" is not a statement a free society has to tolerate.
Things become a bit hairier when the speech act does not specifically call for violence, but relies on the reader to connect the dots. It depends a lot on the inferential distance from the statement to the act. If one calls an ethnic "parasites", that carries a strong connotation of "we should kill them all" -- after all, this is how we generally cure head lice and the like.
By contrast, if one writes a book about how the US healthcare system is fucking over sick people, the inferential distance to "and therefore, you should shoot healthcare CEOs" is much larger -- it is arguably not the point the author wanted to make (I guess, I have not read the book).
The principle is freedom of speech. If you ban all speech which could somehow be used to motivate violence, you will ban most speech acts.
If Alice says that Bob has blue eyes, that should be protected speech (especially if it is true). If Eve comes along an stabs Bob because she believes that blue eyed people must not be suffered to live, then that is on her. It would be different if Alice had posted her statement in some well-known anti-blue-eyes forum, or arguably even if she knew that the only people who care about eye color are murderous bigots.
Where exactly to draw the line is somewhat subjective. Claiming that the rise of the proletariat is a historic inevitability would be less objectionable than saying that we should strive to abolish the capitalist state. And that would still be less objectionable than dehumanizing cops and calling for their murder, and that in turn would be less objectionable to calling for the murder of a specific cop, for example.
Yeah, yeah, "freeze peach." Very American. You might as well start ranting about the First Amendment. Why should such a thing be protected in a free society? Bob got stabbed, and if Alice hadn't committed that "speech act," he wouldn't have been, even if it was Eve's hand that held the knife.
What would be better for everyone is if there were a list of explicitly permitted opinions that one could express, which that have been judged to be unprovocative enough to be safely expressed, and as long as you don't say anything beyond those, you will not be prosecuted. You still have this "free speech" you think is so important: anything that isn't explicitly permitted isn't necessarily forbidden. If Alice can convince a judge (or a panel of experts), that one could not have reasonably expected her "speech act" to result in Bob's stabbing, she's allowed to go free, and her statement gets added to the list of permitted speech for the future. This makes Bob (and the rest of society) safer, and therefore, more free.
You seem to think that the point of society is to minimize the number of stabbings. I disagree. Preventing stabbings is good, but only a tiny fraction of the overall utility function of a good state, and the method you suggest to minimize stabbings is at odds with other terms of that utility function. Read J.S. Mill: On Liberty: https://gutenberg.org/files/34901/34901-h/34901-h.htm
A central value which is competing with your "nobody gets stabbed freedom" is the spread of truth. It is kind of important because our understanding of the world is the reason why our societies can be better than early agrarian polities. We tolerate some reporting of truth even if it will predictably lead to violence. In your system, an administration could just commit election fraud at scale and then shut down any reporting of it, pointing at the likely violence causally downstream from that reporting.
Also, the main difference of your proposed solution to that of Western states is basically just that there are no speech acts which are forever judged safe in the latter. Just because Alice was allowed to state Bob's eye color in one context does not mean that anyone is allowed to state it in all contexts. Any prosecutor can still go after you for any speech act, it is just that the burden of proof is much higher because we recognize free speech at least as an instrumental value.
On the subject of published books serving as incitement, the classic semi-recent US example is "Hit Man: A Technical Manual for Independent Contractors", published in 1983. It was originally a crime novel, but the publisher had it re-worked into a pseudo-nonfiction book purporting to give advice for aspiring contract killers on how to find clients and how to plan and commit the murders.
The publisher marketed it as nonfiction. It wound up being used by at least three people for its purported purpose who were convicted of four murders and one attempted murder between them. The family of one set of victims sued the publisher in 1993 (civil charges, not criminal, seeking monetary compensation from the publisher). The district court initially ruled in favor of the publisher on free speech grounds, but an appeals court reversed this and sent the case back to district court for trial. The publisher's insurance company forced them to settle the case and withdraw the book from sale.
The appeal court ruling was made on "aiding and abetting" grounds rather than incitement, relying both on the specific contents of the book (detailed step-by-step instructions on how to commit the crimes) and on the publisher's concession that they expected would-be criminals to be among their customers.
Interestingly, Hit Man does not only provide technical information, but also moral justification:
"It is my opinion that the professional hit man fills a need in society and is, at times, the only alternative for "personal" justice."
I am sure that there are a lot of US army military manuals which would also be helpful to commit what is called "murder" in peace time, but they will not actively encourage civilians to climb some tower and start sniping people.
Of course, the idea of two individuals making a "contract" for a murder is silly at the face of it, because there is nobody to enforce the terms of the contract. Anyone who thinks about it for a minute should notice that it is likely that at least one side will not hold up their end of the bargain, or blackmail the other or murder them in turn.
If both parties are member of a crime syndicate, then I suppose that it can happen that both sides will be incentivized to stick to the terms of the agreement. But there is a reason that most murderers commit their deeds personally instead of trusting someone who claims to be a "private contractor".
> Why is incitement to violence not protected under free speech?
lawyers lie
> I certainly see the case for "Fire in a crowded theater"
Never happened
> Is it assuming the irrationality of people, that they can be affected by words even if false? Is it also improving communication somehow?
Large segments of the population are incapable of violence, and in effect defecting from the higher virtue of vengeance keeping the psychopaths numbers from exploding.
On one hand articulation of threats and lines is actually a favor to everyone, MAD; dont keep your world ending machine announcement for the commie political cycle least we all lose our precious bodily fluids.
On the other the mass population of cowards, may feel uncomfortable hearing about violence. Theres only so much Im willing to toss pearls before swine.
I think it will forever be a back and forth, frank politics where violence is discussed will lead to whatever peace is actually possible(or war with boundarys); peace makes good times, weak men, the memory that political violence happens fades and whats nessery to keep good men from preferring you dead may randomly become politically incorrect; such as, oh idk systematic racial rape being covered up; reactionary lynch mobs.
> > I certainly see the case for "Fire in a crowded theater"
> Never happened
The quote comes from an opinion by Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, in the case "Schenk v. the United States" in 1919.
Holmes opined that Constitutional protection of Freedom of Speech does not protect someone who falsely shouted fire in a crowded theater. Most references to this statement drop the word 'falsely', which changes the meaning of the phrase considerably.
As historical background: in the year 1913, in the city of Calumet in Michigan, a Christmas event was held at Italian Hall. This event was interrupted by someone falsely shouting fire. During the ensuing panic and stampede, 73 lives were lost.
Stories about the Italian Hall Disaster include accusations of anti-union efforts: the gathering that night were mostly Italian-speaking mine workers, and the mine bosses were trying to keep them from unionising.
Stories about the disaster also included claims that the doors were barred from the outside, by anti-union people. Other stories mention that the doors were at the bottom of the stairs, and were designed to swing inwards when opening... thus the crowd pressing against the doors made opening the doors impossible.
The disaster is still occasionally mentioned in that community. I heard of the disaster while I was a student at Michigan Tech University. Calumet is a former mining-town a handful of miles north of the Michigan Tech campus. ( Admittedly, almost every town in that region of Michigan is a former mining-town. )
To answer your statement: there was at least one disaster triggered by someone falsely shouting fire in a crowded theater, and Justice Holmes was likely aware that such events had happened within the previous decade when he wrote that opinion.
Incitement to violence is protected, until violence is actually incited. Then you get to go through the process of trying to prove they intended the violence, or that a reasonable person would have known that would be the result. Likewise with libel, you have to prove intent to harm, which is really hard unless they're stupid and record their intentions.
...Who are you even arguing against? The one country that's actually run by (or was run by) free speech absolutists already shares your views. Every other country only pays lip service to the concept.
As a personal passion project I spent a few months researching and writing this post on the historical relationship between Christianity and Science. I came at it from a secular/atheistic perspective but came away from the project with a much more pluralistic outlook:
So, last week I visited a debate on moral status of AI entities, as one does, and I found myself arguing against crude hedonic utilitarianism.
Someone was equating ultimate goal of morality with maximizing gross pleasure minus gross pain.
That philosophy has an advantage of being extremely simple to comprehend and a disadvantage of leading to bizarre (um, repugnant) conclusions. However, there I didn’t get to steer a discussion to those waters; instead we were arguing about whether human suffering has a higher moral valence than animal suffering. I happen to think it has. Crude hedonic utilitarian position there was that it has not, except perhaps insofar humans have more “capacity for suffering” than animals due to their more advanced cognitive systems, which, however, means that a suffering of a child which is on a cognitive level of an animal (e.g. chimpanzee) is just as a morally important as suffering of that animal.
Now, a moral theory like hedonic utilitarianism is imo, at its core, a prescription how to live one's life, and so in order to reject it, it is not insufficient to notice that it has flaws; better prescription is needed. My preferred alternative is rule utilitarianism based on famous “veil of ignorance” thought experiment. (Disclaimer: I have not actually read Rawls; this is my headcannon version). Its prescription is roughly “you should behave according to rules you would choose people would behave had you not know your status in society”. This neatly avoids absurd conclusions of crude hedonic utilitarianism, but during that debate, it occurred to me that under this system, animal suffering seemingly does not matter at all, a position I found, um, problematic.
Whole reason why under veil of ignorance conditions child suffering has higher moral valence than animal suffering is that it does not really make sense to imagine yourself being born as someone so different from you that you are completely unable to ever engage in thought experiments (this is btw. one of many flaws of reincarnation theory). So, yay factory farming?
On that debate, I managed to paper over with some quickly devised distraction over what suddenly seemed like fatal flaw in my philosophy, but why I am writing this: belatedly it occurred to me that there is not an actual contradiction between “veil of ignorance” approach and rules against animal cruelty. Even if you are unable to imagine yourself being spawned as an animal, you might and probably should prefer to live in a society which observes general norm against gratuitously harming beings capable of suffering.
I think ethics should be analogized to engineering. You pick goals (i.e. discover your moral preferences), and then you try to engineer rules and norms that satisfy them. Whereas you sound like a moral realist, where you're trying to "discover" (not engineer) the platonic essence of morality/ethics via a blind walk + reflective equilibrium.
If you wanna save animals, go save animals. If you don't wanna save animals, the cold dead cosmos won't force you to. Logical Consistency won't decide your goals for you. After you decide, *then* you should strategize about which goals are physically/socially/economically feasible.
> Now, a moral theory like hedonic utilitarianism is imo, at its core, a prescription how to live one's life, and so in order to reject it, it is not insufficient to notice that it has flaws; better prescription is needed.
That's the usual gambit from ideology pushers of all kinds. If you can't defend a formal alternative to my theory, you lost and should adopt mine.
I disagree. Human morality as we know it is full of weird heuristics and quite unsystematic, but it works and we feel bound. If you come proffering a systematic but unrealistic alternative, and I don't have another systematic, simple theory of my own, the sane thing is to stay with my personal version of the common unsystematic heuristics.
I think you have realized something basic about the philosophical arguments you're considering. If the veil of ignorance works, then I agree that it probably works on animals.
A bigger question is whether the veil of ignorance really works. One of the biggest lessons I've learned over the last several decades is that, no matter how important it is to be able to reason objectively and impartially, Mother Nature isn't really patient with creatures that can't take their own side.
Birthright citizenship is back in the news, with the Trump administration trying to overturn existing interpretation of the constitutional provisions for it. Thinking about this, it seems pretty clear that both existing approaches to this, jus soli and jus sanguinis, produce counterintuitive answers. Is there some crisp, principled third way out there, or is it messy compromises all the way down?
It's not about intuition, and it's not about messy compromises. At least not in the United States. Here, it's black-letter Constitutional law. We decided by overwhelming majority over a century and a half ago, that if you were born on US soil, to basically anyone but a foreign diplomat or part of an invading army(*), you were a US Citizen. And that it would take another overwhelming majority to change that.
The law doesn't have to be intuitively obvious, it just has to be clear. This one, is pretty clear to the point that people trying to obfuscate it have to invent new and contradictory meanings to established words to try an pull it off.
* Or, at the time, a Native American associated with a tribal reservation that we were piously pretending was not officially part of the United States, except when it was. That was a messy compromise, but one we've long since eliminated.
>"… if you were born on US soil, to basically anyone but a foreign diplomat or part of an invading army …"
Those exceptions, it should be noted, are not in the text of the Amendment itself.
Given that the very concepts of temporary visas & illegal immigration (AFAIK) post date the Amendment, it is at least conceivable that the current SCOTUS could decide that, for the purposes of birthright citizenship, the former are similar enough to diplomats and the latter to invaders that the common law exceptions apply.
To be clear, I am neither predicting nor advocating such an outcome. But – especially in light of some recent surprising other decisions – it's worth contemplating the actual decision makers' thought processes rather than only arguing for a particular result.
I suppose I should've said "Those *specific* exceptions", the point being that even those are *interpretations* of the clause you quote and therefore additional exceptions being interpreted is not unthinkable.
There is no "interpretation", short of a complete redefinition of the word, where a person standing before a judge in a court of law which claims the authority to imprison or deport them, is not subject to the jurisdiction of that court. You can argue that they have *tried* to evade the jurisdiction of the United States, but they clearly haven't succeeded and the 14th amendment doesn't say anything about "tried".
>"You can argue that they have *tried* to evade the jurisdiction of the United States, but they clearly haven't succeeded and the 14th amendment doesn't say anything about "tried"."
If a soldier in an invading army was taken prisoner, would the exception no longer apply?
Sure but you would need some part of the text that requires interpretation like "and subject to the jurisdiction thereof". There doesn't, to me, seem to be any other parts to interpret. Definitely not parts where interpretation would overturn the clear meaning of the text.
The "subject to the jurisdiction thereof" clause is necessarily open to interpretation, since that's the source of the existing exceptions; my speculation is that further interpretation of that same clause – using the existing exceptions as points of reference – in the context of conditions not contemplated during the Amendment's drafting could lead SCOTUS to uphold the EO.
OK, I think I understand the point of confusion here. You're talking about what the law is. I'm trying to understand what the law should be. These are related but slightly different conversations. Perhaps I should have been clearer.
I just now got curious and looked into the dissenting opinion in Wong Kim Ark, the 1898 SCOTUS ruling that affirmed the obvious plain reading of the text of the 14th amendment. It was a 6-2 decision, not the unanimous ruling I would have expected.
Skimming the dissenting opinion, I see some out-of-context quotes from committee debates during the drafting of the opinion: the proper context is that those discussions were from a very early stage in the drafting process, with later stages settling down consistently to only excluding natives living on tribal lands (and thus outside the reach of federal and state civil and criminal jurisdiction) and the families of foreign diplomats. At least one early draft did include the language "and not subject to any foreign power", but this was discarded in committee and didn't make it into the constitution.
The meat of the dissent, however, seems to be an examination of common law, statutes, and treaties and what they might say or imply about the citizenship of children born in the US to Chinese subjects. It then makes this curious remark:
"I think it follows that the children of Chinese born in this country do not, ipso facto, become citizens of the United States unless the fourteenth amendment overrides both treaty and statute."
This seems utterly bizarre to me. Isn't overriding treaties and statutes the entire point of putting enumerated rights and other policy-like provisions in the black-letter text of the Constitution?
>Isn't overriding treaties and statutes the entire point of putting enumerated rights and other policy-like provisions in the black-letter text of the Constitution?
Agreed. ( I'm a bit fuzzy on treaties, though I _think_ they have the same status as statutes. ) If the Constitution _didn't_ override statutes then it would be a dead letter law with no teeth.
There is some case law from a couple decades after Wong Kim Ark that holds that treaties can exceed the scope of Congress's enumerated powers. Some district courts had ruled that federal laws regulating hunting of migratory birds were unconstitutional on enumerate power grounds, which got worked around by negotiating and ratifying a treaty with Britain (which controlled Canada's foreign policy at the time) that contained the same provisions. SCOTUS upheld the treaty in Missouri v Holland in 1920, on the grounds that the treaty-making authority of the United States is separate from the legislative process. The ruling does say that treaties are still constraints by "prohibitory words" in the Constitution, so presumably the same trick couldn't be used to circumvent the Bill of Rights.
There was concern among anti-internationalist conservatives in the 1950s that the Missouri v Holland precedent would be extended in application to the United Nations treaty to allow the UN to preempt both statutory and constitutional provisions of American domestic policy, and an amendment was proposed (called the "Bricker Amendment" after its main backer, Senator John Bricker) to explicitly limit the treaty-making power. A weakened version of the amendment failed in the Senate by one vote in 1954, but I don't know how it would have fared in the House or in state ratification debates if it had passed the Senate.
>The ruling does say that treaties are still constraints by "prohibitory words" in the Constitution, so presumably the same trick couldn't be used to circumvent the Bill of Rights.
Well, at least that is somewhat reassuring...
( Perhaps in some alternate timeline with a legalistic version of Trump (pmurT?), the DOGE actions would be legitimated by a treaty with The Duchy of Grand Fenwick... )
The other reassuring bit is that treaties require a 2/3 majority in the Senate to ratify, so they're usually harder to pass than statutes. The reason Bricker and others were worried in the 50s was that the UN Treaty established a permanent quasi-legislative body that could pass resolutions that it was feared could be interpreted as being empowered by the treaty and superior to domestic law. The push for the amendment went away after the 1954 push because it became increasingly clear that the courts were consistently not treating UN resolutions this way.
We dont seem to have a problem with imprisoning ppl with children who commit crimes. You can arrest someone who stays illegally (whether or not they entered illegally) without violating a new principle. So a policy of using prison to enforce immigration law to me solves the trilemna if deportable = can be arrested for refusing to leave.
That's what I came up with, too. But I recently took a personality test and scored in the zeroth percentile in Compassion, so my intuitions about right and wrong are not widely shared.
I should say: I wrote my response on the assumption that _changing_ the Constitution is not under consideration for this particular sub-sub-thread, (and the amendment process takes a loooong time...). _Very_ long term, yeah, we should reconsider that clause, probably to restrict "anchor babies" in some way - but that will take decades...
Words "should" and "deportable" doing quite a lot of work in 1.
The policy of automatically deporting non-citizens without active visa or permanent residence leaves quite a lot of money on the table in terms of maximizing the good while minimizing the bad. It's perfectly possible to pick 2+3 AND ALSO disincentivize illegal immigration in smarter ways with fewer undesirable consequences than the "immediately toss such people out on their ears as soon as you find them." It's even possible to do this and leave the *possibility* of deportation on the table for cases where it *is* the best alternative: one just needs to set a higher standard than "being present in the country at all" for exercising it.
Once upon a time these sorts of approaches even appeared politically feasible in the U.S. Unfortunately there's now a reasonably large, extremely vocal contingent of U.S. voters who are dogmatically opposed to any policy that's less than maximally harsh on illegal immigration, which makes even having a reasonable discussion around the issue difficult.
If 2+3 are locked in with current birthright citizenship in effect, then that's effectively granting the parent of any child born in the US an implicit visa that is more durable than many (e.g., H-1B) that are explicitly granted to people who went through the formal process.
I expect you can see why that's not a stable equilibrium.
I wasn't entirely sure, which is part of why I pointed it out. The thing is, if the necessary qualification is only "deportable" then I don't really see the problem. Citizens must be "arrestable" and "imprisonable" for law-enforcement reasons, even if they have children. It's an acceptable tradeoff because imprisonment is rare and often implies circumstances that would make them poor guardians. If deportation is not the *default* way to deal with undocumented immigrants, but is rather a recourse to be used at some level of extremity[1], it doesn't seem like a huge problem. Indeed, it seems like less of a problem, since the parent and child will still have the *option* of staying together[2], even if the state cannot force the child out.
"that's effectively granting the parent of any child born in the US an implicit visa that is more durable than many (e.g., H-1B) that are explicitly granted to people who went through the formal process."
A number of problems I see with this statement. First and least, it at least somewhat presupposes that the current formal processes are reasonable and should remain unchanged. Second and more importantly, an H1-B grants other privileges. If one regards allowing someone to remain in the country and not be violently removed by the state as the one-and-only function of a visa, a lot of immigration policy stops making sense. Third, explicit guarantees are pretty important: having a piece of paper that says "the U.S. government is legally required to treat you in manners X, Y and Z" is overall more stable situation than having a nebulous public-policy custom that "the U.S. government would generally prefer to treat you in manners X, Y and Z."
My overall view here is that while "exert control the amount and manner of immigration" is a reasonable goal for a state to have, it should not, in general, be in the habit of wrecking human lives without *very* good reason. "This person is a demonstrated menace to the community" is a pretty good reason. "Ten years ago, this person didn't respect our immigration restrictions (but has caused little or no trouble since)" seems like quite a bad reason. A sensible immigration policy can include barriers to entry, and positive and negative incentives to encourage the broad-scale behavior the state wants without out any need to go around wrecking lives. I don't think it's ever going to be politically possible for the U.S. to *have* a sensible immigration policy[3], but I don't see any reason to pretend that the current state of affairs is anything but atrocious.
[1] Which need not even be *as extreme* as those required to imprison somebody, as long as it's extreme enough to only apply to a relatively small fraction of the total.
[2] Of course this would partly depend on the parent's home country agreeing to take the child (who might not be a citizen), but that hardly seems like a huge hurdle in the grand scheme of things. And of course it doesn't *stop* being a problem if the child isn't a U.S. citizen either.
[3] I think Scott's conflict-theory post was rather well-timed to at least gesture at the reasons why not.
>"First and least, it at least somewhat presupposes that the current formal processes are reasonable and should remain unchanged."
Not at all! It merely posits that the juxtaposition of onerous formal processes and lax enforcement is incoherent; either easier formal processes or stricter enforcement are potential means to a more consistent whole.
>"Second and more importantly, an H1-B grants other privileges. If one regards allowing someone to remain in the country and not be violently removed by the state as the one-and-only function of a visa, a lot of immigration policy stops making sense."
Can you elaborate on this? I'm not sure what parts wouldn't make sense. N.B., there are other visa types that, e.g., do not include employment eligibility.
>""Ten years ago, this person didn't respect our immigration restrictions (but has caused little or no trouble since)" seems like quite a bad reason."
Pour encourager les autres. A visible policy of allowing illegal immigrants to remain if they stay off the radar long enough will encourage more people to try their luck.
I've always thought jus soli (assuming you continue to live in the country of your birth for the rest of your life) makes more sense than jus sanguinis. As an American, I can't imagine living my whole life in a country and not feeling like I'm "from" that country. Assimilation largely works quite well here. But I realize that it's partly because Americanness isn't tied to a particular ethnicity in the same way that Frenchness or Germanness is. Based on a couple of trips to France and England, and various readings about other European countries, it seems fair to say that assimilating immigrants is more of a struggle in Europe, with some portion of that difficulty due to religious differences.
In theory, there's a chance I might be able to obtain Italian citizenship through ancestry (I think it was my great-grandfather, and perhaps great-grandmother too, who were born in Italy). But I'm only 25% Italian. I don't speak any Italian aside from what I've learned on Duolingo. How could I ever be as Italian as I am American, even if I did obtain citizenship? Obviously there are many Americans with more recent familial ties, say a grandmother from Croatia, Honduras, etc. And those people may feel a bond for one or more of their ancestors' homelands. But they're Americans by birth and upbringing.
Constitutionally speaking, I think jus soli is here to stay (I think you could make an argument to read the 14th Amendment differently, I just don't think it's a great argument). If I could rewrite the Constitution and laws at my whim, I'd be fine with the following:
1. For children born in the US to illegal immigrants, no citizenship (they can leave and then try to immigrate like anyone else).
2. For children born in the US to people here legally but temporarily, legal residence as long as at least one parent is here legally. If they spend at least 15 years in the US before turning 18, they can become US citizens at age 18.
3. For children born in the US to people with green cards, legal residence as long as at least one parent is here legally. They can become citizens as soon as their parents become citizens, or as soon as they've spent at least 10 years in the US.
4. For children born in the US to US citizens, citizenship at birth.
5. For children born outside of the US to US citizens, legal residence whenever they want to move back; citizenship if they spend five years in the US.
I think the main debate is about point 1. where people who fully identify as American, and have little cultural or linguistic ties to their illegal immigrant parent's home country, are threatened with deportation.
A lot of places in the country are quite lax on illegal immigrants, so their children grow up their entire lives after being raised as Americans. You have a decent number of "American" children, raised in the American school system, with American friends, who may not even be fluent in their parent's language (probably Spanish), that are then threatened with deportation to a country they have few connections with. As far as "integratabtle immigrants" go, these should be the lowest hanging fruit.
Under your proposal, the number of these illegal American children would be much larger, as it would also encompass children born to illegal immigrants inside the US, and not just children who came as illegal immigrants before they can remember as it does currently.
I'm someone who definitely recognizes the fundamental problem of the current immigration system, especially the past few years, but I definitely do see good reason to carve out some exception for these illegal, but culturally American, children that you describe in point1. I don't know how you could create a system that identifies someone as being culturally American, but I honestly think the heuristic: "anyone who went through the public school system and has lived in the US since they were a toddler" should qualify.
Of course that's complicated when certain parts of the country make non-integration a possibility, like SF (or was it LA?) teaching students in Spanish instead of English. Of course this was for the goal of providing them a more conducive environment to succeed by using a language they were already familiar with, which completely backfired as not being a native English speaker is a huge handicap in America.
I want to reiterate that I'm just throwing out a hypothetical here. In practice, and with the 14th Amendment as we now have it, those American-born children are American citizens.
But there are a huge number of countries (i.e. pretty much all of Europe) where people born to legal or illegal immigrants aren't citizens. I don't know the exact laws for all of them off the top of my head; I think, generally speaking, there's a path to citizenship for the children of legal immigrants, even if they're not entitled to it at birth. But I think that most developed countries, at least on paper if not in practice, are much stricter in dealing with the children of illegal immigrants. And I don't think there's anything wrong with that.
But again, this is really just hypothetical, since I don't see a new constitutional amendment arriving anytime soon, nor do I see SCOTUS overturning Wong Kim Ark.
FWIW SCOTUS could uphold the EO without overturning Wong Kim Ark: his parents were (the contemporary equivalent of) permanent residents, to whose children the EO doesn't apply.
One virtue of near-absolute jus soli citizenship is that it provides a bright-line rule against the hereditary continuation of a permanent non-citizen underclass. This is not a theoretical concern in the US: the 14th amendment was adopted with a specific intent to secure and entrench the elevation of former slaves and their descendants to meaningful citizenship status after a long and bloody civil war in which slavery was the central issue.
Agreed, and bright line rules are generally a good way of protecting the ppl from an oppressive govt
My challenge to those that complain of anchor babies: first deport every childless illegal immigrant and deny a tourist visa or visa exemption to every woman visibly pregnant, then if you still think the border is out of control make your case
(a) Unless you put that limit into the Constitution, it will get edited and re-edited by successive Congresses having different political makeups. That's a recipe for ongoing chaos and endless re-arguing of the issue politically without it ever being resolved.
(b) In any case a 10-year immigrant residency limit doesn't actually answer the question at hand which is, whether _children_ born to resident non-citizens are citizens at birth. If we say that the answer is yes during the 10 years but no afterwards then see previous point. And even if the specific number sticks in the law we're back to Erica's point.
Use a point based algorithm, using a mix of measures seems inherently superior to using only one factor.
Mother tongue, place of birth, residence in early life, ancestry and parental citizenship all determine identity and should be used in determining citizenship.
This one jumped out at me as potentially problematic. If someone learns English better than your average American, do they get a bonus? Do immigrants from English-speaking countries get a bonus? What if someone is fluent in spoken English but dyslexic or otherwise illiterate?
Suppose Robert was born in Canada but has a great-grandfather who was Japanese and emigrated to Canada. Robert was raised in Canada, speaks English fluently and observes Canadian customs and traditions. Under strict jus sanguinis, Robert is entitled to Japanese citizenship. This seems absurd to me, because he is not culturally Japanese at all. He is culturally Canadian. And Robert's nearest born-in-Japan ancestor is all of three generations away, so Robert probably never even met the man.
My eldest child is right now acquiring Italian citizenship via exactly that scenario. I met his Italian-immigrant great-grandfather (my first wife's paternal grandfather) but he'd died before my son's birth.
My brother is working on gaining Italian citizenship now too. Our maternal grandparents are both from a small town north of Turino near the Swiss border.
It’s interesting to see scans of his baptismal certificate at Vistrorio Italy and his entry sign in at Ellis Island.
Is that what jus sanguinis means? Well in that case yes, that's dumb.
I would work on the assumption that the sensible system is jus sanguinis, optional, and only for the parents. This is the standard in most parts of the world that I know about.
I'm thinking this might work in fantasy. You have a city that is run strictly by various trading guilds, with a firm No Moochers policy. In order to live in the city you have to obey the rules and pay your taxes; no exceptions, even for people born in the city. Our protagonists are a family whose business has run into trouble, and who therefore can no longer afford even the minimum taxes to stay in the city. They therefore have to head out into the surrounding countryside, The Wild and Free, which is considerably more chaotic and occasionally flat-out lawless. After no small adventures, considerable violence, one flat-out scam, lots of hard work and a couple of timely helping hands, they manage to settle down in a smaller but reasonably secure and functional community.
Why age 30? Just make parents pay for the kids until they come of age. Can't pay? Kid has to leave.
Because this works so well for the people making the rules, of course, every country is now like this, and so the poor form camps in the no-man's-land along country borders; effectively its own country, woven long and labyrinthine but a couple of hundred meters wide at most, outside the reach of any state; the pure anarchy, free of laws, fees or taxes, that libertarians always said they wanted.
I can imagine any number of near-future SF authors running with a plot like that.
Yes, many countries have those kinds of things for the wealthy, but I'd like to see it rolled out for everyone. I'd like to see a country get rid of all other systems for residency, visas and citizenship and replace those with simple fees, and while they're at it, they should scrap all other taxes and just have those fees pay for all public services.
The same thing that currently happens to people on a work-related residence permit who get fired or to people who are on a refugee-related one who lose their refugee status. Some countries kick them out while others let them stay as illegals, so I think that's pretty much orthogonal.
The residence permit thing works because those people are citizens of another country, which is forced to accept them when we want rid of them. But most poor people in the US were born in the US. Where are you proposing we ship them to?
Do you mean that everyone, immigrant and non-immigrant alike, would be subject to this fee-for-service system? And if yes, do non-immigrants who can't pay get exiled?
There are lots of other theoretical possibilities but none of them have widespread support.
There are ideas for multi-tiered citizenship where you acquire increased rights and access to services by years of residence, passing a test, performing national military or civil service, speaking the national language, etc. This framework can incorporate both jus sanguinis and jus soli as contributing toward the total score.
You could have a very un-republican system like an absolute monarchy where there is no citizenship at all and just subjects allowed to live in the territory.
You could have a minarchist system with no citizenship whatsoever as everyone is free to live where they want and purchase state services if indeed the state even exists.
An absolute monarch would surely demand the allegiance of all born in his realm. And see the Supreme Court 's Wong Kim Ark decision:
> It thus clearly appears that by the law of England for the last three centuries, beginning before the settlement of this country, and continuing to the present day, aliens, while residing in the dominions possessed by the Crown of England, were within the allegiance, the obedience, the faith or loyalty, the protection, the power, the jurisdiction, of the English Sovereign
Does anybody know of any simple games (card, dice, whatever) where it is actually a good idea to use Bayes' theorem while playing? Like actually updating probabilities based on observations. I know that high level poker players use Bayesian reasoning, but this only makes sense if you already are very good at the basic probability calculations involved, and so is not really something new players should be doing.
I think poker players usually use heuristics. Like, they're not actually calculating likelihood ratios, they're using the rule of 4 and 2 to calculate their outs. (Well, they do more-advanced modelling at the top level, but that's true of any competitive activity.)
Bridge players (and not just the experts) use Bayesian reasoning all the time, in the form of the Principle of Restricted Choice (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principle_of_restricted_choice). In its simplest form, you (South) have AJ10 of a suit in dummy (North), you play small towards the Jack, and East wins with the Queen (or King). Now after regaining the lead you play small towards dummy again -- what is the probability that East has the King (or Queen)? The a priori odds are 1/2 (as near as makes no difference here); but because East might have won the previous round with the other honour if they had started with both of them, the probability has now reduced to 1/3. So the probability that the second finesse will succeed is about 67%. This will often affect how you decide to play the hand; for instance, if you have to choose between taking the finesse a second time or hoping for a 4-3 break in a different suit. Other things being equal, you should take the finesse, because the probability of a 4-3 break is less than 67%; this is a decision directly affected by Bayesian reasoning.
Seeing each card that is dealt allows you to update your probabilities about what the next card will be. But you don't do that via Bayes' Theorem, you just use your knowledge of the distribution of cards remaining in the deck.
I think you and op are confusing something about math. Raw theory is often slow, so it doesn't happen but striving for a universal theory makes your heuristics better.
You may as well claim that calculators dont implement abstract correct numbers and therefore dont use math
I'm not saying that in practice we use heuristics which approximate Bayes' Theorem.
I'm saying that even in theory, Bayes' Theorem is no use in blackjack which is about the problem of figuring out the probability of the next draw from a deck whose composition may be known perfectly. There's no sensible numbers to plug into Bayes' Theorem at any point, as far as I can tell.
I would consider doing the math with sets(i.e. the list of possible cards) to still be bayes theorem even if its not numbers; idk about people who teach this stuff or bayes actually wrote.
This is a programmers view of math tho `lerp(T a,T b,float p)=>a*p+b*(p-1)`, ints, floats, bools, vectors, colors, maybe even arrays; if it compiles it still a lerp; feel free to **not** ask a math major opinion on if quads can be lerped
Something about possible worlds being effected by observations, was it a multiply or a divide; a quick look up latter to the theory and I hope im iterating towards a program that has some kind of good behavior. Half remembered, + lazy skims of the math that I only understand for microseconds before writing code is still using that math; and bayes thoerm has pictures
I can see why someone who only knows about Bayes' Rule from reading "Rationalist" literature might think that all probability is Bayes' Rule, but it makes me sad.
I think you are both right, in the sense that keeping count of cards is a kind of probability math, but at the same time it is not bayes in the sense that any person with a perfect memory could do it, without ever having heard of Bayes or knowing anything else about statistics.
Here is Jorbs, a former MtG & Poker pro, and now one of the strongest Slay the Spire streamers, in a 1.5h video (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=76ugXvigqLE ) titled "How I Think About Strategy Games: Loose Bayesian Knowledge". I don't recall whether he ever advocates doing the calculations explicitly, but his approach is certainly very Bayesian.
As I understand it, card counting is mainly about implementing quite tricky algorithms requiring a highly trained memory of what cards have been dealt.
I am more looking for a game that ordinary mathy people can get a real advantage in by using Bayes theorem, without them needing to train many hours in advance.
I don't believe this is correct. For the very simple cases where card counting first became popular (single-deck blackjack), the algorithm is perhaps too simple to be even called Bayesian: you increment and decrement a mental counter, depending on how many "high" versus "low" cards you've seen. Then, if you're deciding whether to get dealt a new card or settle on your current hand, you consult your internal counter to get a probabilistic feeling for whether that upcoming card will be high or low.
Obviously you can make this more and more complex, up to and including just memorizing all previously dealt cards and then calculating the mean value of the remaining cards in the deck for more precision. But from what I understand, the above is enough to turn single-deck blackjack from a game that slightly favors the dealer, to one that slightly favors the player.
Source: this is completely off of memory and you should double-check it before believing a word.
Thanks, yeah I also think that liar's dice/perudo is one of the closest games, though somehow even though I have played some versions of it a lot in my old student dormitory I also ended up using heuristics based more on my knowledge of the other players, and trying to read their faces, than explicit calculations. I guess that is also what makes it such an interesting game.
Wow, so Brown has a forecasting club... but is there anyone here in Ithaca? Any Cornell students or student organizations? We don't seem to have any Rationalist or adjacent clubs at the moment, but maybe I just haven't looked hard enough. I've met a few people who know who EY is, but that's about it. Where are all of you? If you don't want it on the thread please DM me... Thank you
Even with me not knowing what news story your referencing; whatever happens will be complicated and shutdown is a marketing term. They do this every year, it costs more money then it saves to police tape up statues, but like ufos the public forgets it was hyped up about something because it didnt matter.
Theres a list of expectations(the military for example), and theirs always a bi partition argeement on allot of the spending
you love covering charter cities, and now there is a chance to have one in an actual stable part of the world with a relatively good governance, Canada:
Basically the Haida nation gets to manage all of the Haida Gwaii (formerly Queen Charlotte's) island in the North Pacific just off the coast of British Columbia and south of South-Western Alaska: https://www.google.com/maps/place/Haida+Gwaii
I wonder if someone looking for a place for a charter city would want to have a chat with the new management.
Here is one example of how tribal leaders can skip long drawn-out permitting and assessment processes and Just Do Things:
Haida Gwaii is one of the most beautiful places on earth. It's also an extremely remote and very harsh place to live. It has a tiny population, who mostly work in ecotourism, for good reason.
A charter city built on ecotourism is a neat idea though.
Just had a weird thought. Say you're an eccentric almost-trillionare, richest person in history. You have a boyhood dream you cannot shake: get to Mars. As much as you've accomplished, this goal still eludes you. You come to the conclusion that only a nation-state -- one of the big ones -- can accomplish this.
Wouldn't co-opting a superpower nation-state be your next move?
If someone were to co-opt a superpower nation-state for the purpose of going to Mars, I would expect them to,
1: Try to take particular control of that nation-state's space program, and
2: Try to secure the repeal of laws saying that his private space program cannot launch anything until all the relevant bureaucrats have signed off on it.
I would expect them to very much *not*,
3: Broadly damage the state capacity of said nation-state, or
4: Prior to accomplishing #2, fire half and piss off the other half of the bureaucrats whose approval he still needs to launch anything in his private space ventures.
Elon Musk's observed actions the past month or so seem very inconsistent with the hypothetical goal of "get to Mars by taking control of the US government". I suppose we can add to that hypothesis, "...and then engage in some hyperspatial N-dimensional chess that looks to mere geniuses like exactly the opposite of what would get him to Mars, but which in fact by infinte cleverness does exactly that".
But Occam suggests the alternate hypothesis of "somewhere along the line, Elon's brain state bit-flipped from getting-to-Mars-ASAP to destroying-the-Woke-mind-virus-by-any-means-necessary".
While Elon has taken to lying on Twitter all day as a new past time, I think his ascension into right wing politics is something you can take his word for. One of his kids is trans and he thinks the left poisoned her brain, per his podcast appearance with Jorden Peterson, and now he hates wokeness. Given that all his IVF kids are male, I wouldn't be shocked if he is also mad about having a daughter just on principle.
It's not enough to simply repeal the laws now, because the opposition would simply reverse that decision in the future. The only way he accomplishes anything meaningful is by eliminating all opposition and preventing the rise of future opposition. That is, of course, what he's trying to do.
I do not think you understand the opposition Elon Musk faces.
As far as redirecting the power of the United States of America towards a Von Braunian project of Mars Colonization, the United States *Congress*, which neither Elon Musk nor Donald Trump controls, is very much opposed to the sort of spending that would require. And Congress controls the budget.
In the unlikely event that Congress does cough up an expanded budget for the space program, they're going to insist that it go through NASA because NASA knows how to funnel that money into the right congressional districts. NASA, is one of the executive branch agencies Elon Musk has been pissing off by firing or threatening to fire all their employees.
As far as Elon's private space program, that sane Congress (again beyond Trump/Muskian control) is very much opposed to completely unregulated private space flight, on account of the propensity of careless rocketeers to occasionally blow up small towns. To that end, Congress has passed laws saying that nobody is allowed to launch rockets into space unless the FAA has signed off on their safety plans. That law is not going to change.
Congress passed that law with the intent that it be only a minor speed bump to prevent insanely reckless behavior on the path to private space development. But it does require the FAA's cooperation; the default case if the FAA ceases operations is not "the bureaucrats have gone away, yay, now anybody can launch spaceships whenever they want!", it is "Oops, now it's illegal for anyone to launch a spaceship, ever". And, again, Musk has been acting in a way calculated to both cripple and piss off the organization which will determine whether launch licensing requirements are a speed bump or a roadblock (with the default being roadblock).
Does Elon Musk have a plan to eliminate *Congress*? Because I think a lot of us would like to know more about that.
> Does Elon Musk have a plan to eliminate *Congress*? Because I think a lot of us would like to know more about that.
Obviously he's not going to just tell you. But he's not going through all this trouble just to keep the government as-is. He's shooting for the moon, so to speak. (Fitting, given the name of his department.)
> I can say whatever I want about Musk, but this is his primary driver ==>The man wants to go to Mars. Everything he does revolves around this. The government was an impediment to his goals. Tesla is a side gig. So, too, is Starlink.
> His political transformation isn't typical age-drawn conservativism. He sees government as an instrumental tool to achieve his goals. People lose sight of the fact that he is focused on DOGE right now, but he will be largely done in two years and entirely done once he understands the mid-terms, depending on how the resistance to his chainsaw plays in the court, in the midterms and the streets. He will recalibrate. He does not fear being wrong or failure. That is his (and that of science and technology) greatest method for innovation and success. He also has incredible focus.
> Musk says stupid things for different reasons, sometimes to try them out. Your post is on point. His value is Mars.
Was Twitter an impediment to his goal of going to Mars? What about the opportunity cost of spending 43B USD on a social network, which could instead have been used to fund, I don't know, maybe the development, construction, and transport of a Mars colony?
His purchase of Twitter ended up benefiting him hugely. For Musk, money is literally irrelevant, other than as a way to get people to do what he wants. I don't think he'd be the "King of Doge" if he hadn't taken over Twitter and bent the discourse to his will.
And no, this guy is not stupid. Don't be stupid and underestimate him. I do think he's a bit loony, but I guess that comes with the package.
> For Musk, money is literally irrelevant, other than as a way to get people to do what he wants.
Evidently wrong. Even for Musk, tens of billions of USD is far from "irrelevant". If it was, SpaceX wouldn't need external investments (which amounted to several billion USD in the last 4 years alone), and external investors are always a hassle and a distraction from your core goals. SpaceX also wouldn't have required the revenue stream from Starlink, again a distraction from Musk's goal of building a self-sustaining colony on Mars.
I still think he'll get to Mars, barring something like an early death from drug overdose or something. Multiple huge missteps and failures that would probably sink most entrepreneurs (including the $43bn acquisition and all the brouhaha around it) have barely slowed him down it seems, as has (to quote Noah Smith) "the entire apparatus of American proceduralism and anti-development policy being against what he was trying to do".
No reason why you shouldn't still admire him. What he's doing right now is certainly more productive than complaining about woke people on obscure internet blogs.
I think the irony there is that he was trolling about buying Twitter, everybody lost their minds, he then attempted to back out, everyone decided to force him to go through with it on the basis (so far as I could see) that they hoped this would bankrupt him and destroy him.
He bought it, set about root and branch reform, and now everybody is still losing their lives over fascism and hate speech and what all. If they'd let him back off on buying Twitter, they'd still have their Blue Check paradise. They didn't, he did, he wasn't destroyed, so now like it or lump it.
> with it on the basis (so far as I could see) that they hoped this would bankrupt him and destroy him.
Nonsense, they forced him to go through with it because he massively overbid on the value of twitter and letting it go would be financially irresponsible
Well, yeah, Musk did and does a lot of trolling on social media, which is another counterexample to the claim that "Everything he does revolves around this" – unless someone can explain to me, how shitposting on Twitter will make human life multiplanetary even one minute sooner.
UNLESS – bear with me, I just had a fantastic insight – unless he's doing his best to make life on Earth stink so much that people will BEG to move to Mars, just to get away from X.
There's an argument that legacy media and social media behemoths having a stranglehold on communication to the public would have gotten in the way of Musk's eventual goals.
Welcome again to Hollywood. Your previous efforts have drawn the eye of management, and you bask in the light of their benevolent gaze. They have rewarded you with Aeron chairs that they purchased at the liquidation sale of an AI startup that wanted to improve human flourishing or something something. Anyway, your butts are now floating on clouds.
Your assignment this week is to devise a comedy set in the the Star Wars universe. And it shouldn't be incidentally Star Wars themed either. It should include key features of the universe, like the Jedi and the Empire. Management wants to market this one worldwide, so the humor should be pretty broad. Ideally everyone from French intellectuals to Brazilian street kids will laugh their asses off at the antics on screen.
Remake "Yes, Minister" set in the late days of the Old Republic. Maybe even reuse Senator Palpatine for the Jim Hacker role, although that would require substantial reinterpretation of the character.
Palpatine would definitely be Sir Humphrey there, not Jim Hacker. But as Malcolm Tucker in "The Thick of It" with less swearing and more veneer of niceness while he's backstabbing? Yes, I could see that.
Or Francis Urquhart in the original British "House of Cards".
This idea I like. I don't think the Palpatine version works though (Hacker is often stupid and easily manipulated, Palpatine is not). Maybe Chancellor Velorum or whatever his name was.
I think Hacker deserves a little more credit than he's often given for intelligence. He seems stupider than he actually is because Humphrey and Bernard, especially Humphrey, are exceptionally smart, well-educated, and quick on their feet. And Hacker is often successfully manipulated. But there are indications that he is often harder to manipulate than many of his peers, and he seems to get the better of Humphrey about a third of the time. In terms of understanding complex concepts, he's got a lot of gaps in his knowledge but is usually a pretty quick study. And educationally, he graduated with third-class honors (i.e. slightly below the middle of his class) from a very prestigious and selective university. For a long time, I misunderstood some bits where Humphrey (an Oxford alum) was rolling his eyes at Hacker for being a London School of Economic graduates and only semi-recently found out that this was a joke about snobbery among Oxford and Cambridge graduates; the American equivalent would be someone who went to Harvard or Yale scoffing at someone who went to Stanford.
But to your core point, you are correct that Hacker isn't anywhere near as dominant in cleverness and manipulation as Palpatine has always appeared to be. Velorum would be better from a storytelling perspective, although since I've been cast as a hack writer I am tempted to use the bigger-name character and let lore consistency fall by the wayside, as this seems to be the spirit of the age.
Yeah, the Velorum YPM is probably the best approach here. He's led to ignore the trade federation blockade of Naboo by the foreign office like Hacker was with st George's island.
I am reflexively cringing already and I haven't even gotten past "Ewoks have to be in this somewhere".
I've seen the Holiday Special, I remember Chewie's kid Itchy (oh how we laughed - not). A proposal for a Star Wars comedy should be quietly buried in a very deep grave.
Imagine, hypothetically, having Ukraine join the US as the 51st state. Most Ukrainians including Zelenskyy would jump on the chance. Trump gets his mineral rights. Europe gets the full might of the US military to protect them against Russian expansion plans. Putin would be mightily pissed off, but probably not to the nuke level. China might make a play for Taiwan, but better now than in 5-10 years, since they are not really ready.
It's hard to know where to even begin with that one...
SURELY Putin will be OK with US military bases this close to Moscow. I mean what reasonable man can be against nuclear-tipped missiles being deployed closer and closer to his country borders.
There are already US military forces in the Baltic States, closer to Moscow than any place in Ukraine. And one of the obvious consequences of the invasion of Ukraine was that Finland joined NATO, which gives three nuclear powers access to territory all of forty miles from St. Petersburg. Russia's actions are not consistent with "OMG NATO is too close to our great cities!" being a major concern.
You should consider replying to a specific post instead of your fantasies. Not nato, USA. Not great cities, Moscow. Not just “military”, nuclear missiles.
Also until you can show me the point in Baltic states that is closer to Moscow than any place in Ukraine there is no point in continuing this discussion since you’re obviously not even trying.
Not closer, but Latvia is only about 150km further away from Moscow than Ukraine is, which is a miniscule difference for ICBMs. But there are no nuclear missiles in Latvia, nor in the Baltics, not even in Poland or anything closer to Moscow than Germany is, so why should Putin have feared the deployment of nukes to Ukraine?
Most of the 50 current states don't host any nuclear weapons. The United States *could* deploy nuclear weapons to e.g. Oregon, but it could also deploy nuclear weapons to e.g. Latvia if it feels the need. I don't think the Latvians would object at this point.
Ukraine has been fighting wars for its sovereignty for 11 years (counting its war to retain the Donbas). I am skeptical they would cede it, especially to a maniac like Trump who has been insulting and extorting them since he came to power.
The argument goes - Ukraine has no hope of sovereignty without the US: if the US withdraws its support, Russia wins the war. The US fully intends to withdraw its support, and therefore half of Ukraine should be ceded to the US because this is preferable than all of it going to Russia.
Ukraine would still have the same hope that Afghanistan did, that after a protracted guerilla was Vladimir Putin's successor (who is not as invested in or tied to the war) will say "good riddance" and go home.
They will also have the faint hope that the Russian army is close enough to collapse that they can hold out with just European support. I am quite skeptical about that, but it depends heavily on intangible and immeasurable factors so it is the kind of thing that proud, desperate, and mortally-offended people might grasp at.
Seconded! That was my immediate thought as well. Walking directly into an ongoing hot war with the only nation with even more warheads than we have... Umm...
Based on my years of experience with EU3, this is a terrible idea. Ukraine is non-core for the USA, culture and religion don't match, and it's all distant overseas territory.
...I mean, they wouldn't get genocided; just shipped to a camp in Rwanda, because they weren't born in the US and so couldn't be allowed to exist in the new 51st state any more.
He's rightly guessing that most ukrainians are open to immigrating to the United states, but wrongly extrapolating from that that they would be fine with annexation. One thing does not imply the other.
One possible downside: Joining a state that is currently at war with Russia will mean that the US will immediatly switch to being at war with Russia, potentially escalating into nuclear war within a few hours, despite the best intentions of both leaders.
But apart from civilization ending Nuclear war, possibly no downsides.
What is "Russia proper"? It's a serious question, this is a state that appears not to have a fully defined border. Not in a sense of having a border dispute like it has with Japan, but in a more profound way of not quite knowing, itself, what its borders are. It created this insanity by officially annexing and including in its Constitution the four Ukrainian regions they don't even fully control militarily. So, amazingly, the city of Kherson is "Russian", according to the Russian Constitution, and yet Russians regularly bomb its civilian population. Then there's the parts of Kursk region occupied by Ukraine, and it seems to be treated differently, at least rhetorically, from the parts of Kherson region, also "occupied" by Ukraine.
Like I said, no defined border. And once you give up on having a defined border, anything is possible and nothing is true anymore.
The Baltic countries—Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania—are not directly mentioned in the Russian Constitution. However, there are historical references and context in Russian legal and political frameworks regarding these nations due to the Soviet era.
Soviet Legacy: The Baltic states were part of the Soviet Union until its dissolution in 1991. During this time, they were considered Soviet republics, and any constitutional or legal documents related to the USSR would have included them. After the collapse of the USSR, the Russian Federation's constitution (adopted in 1993) did not specifically mention the Baltic states, as they were recognized as independent countries by the international community.
Territorial Claims and Disputes: Although not directly mentioned in the Constitution, Russian officials have occasionally made statements about territorial claims or historical discussions concerning the Baltic countries. These statements may arise from disputes over borders or from political rhetoric, but they are not part of the official constitutional text.
International Recognition: The Russian Federation, following the collapse of the Soviet Union, recognizes the independence of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania in accordance with international law. The Russian Constitution affirms the principle of respecting territorial integrity and the sovereignty of other states, including the Baltic nations.
In short, while the Baltic countries are not mentioned in the Russian Constitution, their historical and political relationship with Russia is influenced by the legacy of the Soviet Union.
But Russia proper IS being attacked and partially occupied by Ukraine and, under your idea, by the US. In any case, Russian nuclear threats in the Ukraine war predate even that occupation; they were raised during the first major Ukrainian counter-offensive inside Ukraine. China saw it necessary to publicly veto Russian use of nukes, and reportedly the Biden admin also made non-public threats to intervene directly on behalf of Ukraine in case of nuclear weapons use.
I have a better idea. Ukraine joins USA, USA rents Ukraine to Russia for 99 years for % of all revenues earned from this territory (basically, a tax). Every person born on territory of Ukraine automatically receives American and Russian citizenship. The territory should be governed by an agreed-upon mix of Russian and American laws.
* Ukraine becomes (a formal part of) NATO country.
* Russia gets the whole Ukraine (in 99 years sentient AI will probably kill us all and so the time limit doesn't matter)
* USA gains a new revenue source (admittedly, probably a small one, but still better than nothing)
* Ukrainian population booms as people rush to become its citizen to get that sweet dual citizenship for their children (note that only children get citizenship, not immigrants themselves)
* Ukraine gets both Russian and American investments, as both countries are now interested in developing its industries.
I think about mailing this plan to Trump's office. I think he'll like it. It isn't any more crazier than his Gaza plan.
Given what's been happening in Ukraine, in Russia and in the US, how are any of the parties to this proposal supposed to trust any of the other parties to keep to the agreed-upon terms for any length of time?
But this is a question for any kind of peace deal, isn't it? For example, what guarantees Russia have that Ukraine won't ever join NATO, even if it promises not to do so now? Even Constitution can be changed, so writing this down in Ukraine's Constitution won't be very safe, too. The only kind of real guarantee is presence of Russian troops in Ukrainian territory. This can came about through absolute surrender of Ukraine in case of military defeat, or as a result of this completely brilliant peace plan.
Of course, Ukraine has no guarantee that Russia would let it join USA in 99 years, but this is really far off, and it actually would be more of America's problem than Ukraine's. If in 99 years America is stronger than Russia (and both countries still exist in recognizable form, of course), then American probably can enforce that agreement (China got Hong Kong from Britain, in the end, although at the time of writing THAT agreement, it probably seemed to many that Britain could cheat China too!).
Of course, USA has no guarantee that Russia will honestly pay its percentage of profits. But this is exactly the case where usual commercial arbitration can be enough: it would be pretty easy to make it easier for Russia to pay than to
fact another round of asset seizures (if the % is not TOO large, of course).
Mind you, I still think my Trump's Peace Plan for Ukraine(tm) is batshit insane. But at least it's novel and interesting, compared to what the boring officials offer! Just today, I saw yet another article urging Trump just to stay the course and continue with Biden's policies, hoping for freezing the battle lines and providing some kind of security guarantees to Ukraine, which are unacceptable for Russia. This is even more unrealistic than my plan, and will just lead to more bloodshed now, and probably in the future, too. And boring.
> But this is a question for any kind of peace deal, isn't it?
You establish trust in many ways, but a key one is a long history of not going back on your past commitments and not backstabbing allies. Putin and Trump have both thrown that out of the window.
...That seems unnecessarily complicated and unlikely to work compared to just conquering the country and splitting it. Also, NATO is no longer a relevant consideration.
Alternativey, Russia can get the entirety of Ukraine in exchange for them aiding the US invasion of Canada. Both countries get to increase their power over their spheres of influence. Win-win.
Conquering a country is a long and hard business, longer and harder than it already is. And I don't quite believe the hype about NATO uselessness. It hasn't been proved. Anyway, NATO membership would act as a consolation prize for Ukraine in this case.
> Alternativey, Russia can get the entirety of Ukraine in exchange for them
> aiding the US invasion of Canada. Both countries get to increase their power
> over their spheres of influence. Win-win.
Oh, another nice idea! But I'm afraid it's more crazy than mine, because Russia lacks capacity for amphibious assault, which is required to reach Canada, and has no large fleet to support Atlantic blockade. At this distance, Russia's only reach are nukes, but I'm not sure Trump wants to LARP Fallout: Ontario.
I remain unconvinced that haf a country, halfway around the globe, populated by motivated war veterans who hate your guts and want you out is really the prize Trump thinks it is.
Given the recent MUH posts, I'm curious where people here would draw the line on a series of questions I sometimes ask people during work lunch debates.
It starts with my own assumptions that:
a) Consciousness is a meaningful concept. I may not know how it works, or how to measure it, but I know it exists from first hand experience.
b) Materialism: whatever consciousness is, it arises in the brain from laws-of-physics obeying matter.
Assuming you agree with these, or close enough:
1. Is it possible to build a computer that simulates the brain (and as much as the environment as needed) to arbitrary accuracy? Is this simulation conscious? If not, why not? If so...
2. We can imagine a specific implementation of that computer: a giant bank of memory stores the brain/environment state, plus a much smaller processor and program that update the state according to the laws of physics. Is this simulation conscious? If not, why not? If so..
3. The "physics program" does not appear to be doing much here - it seems that all the relevant brain information is stored in the memory. So, could we just pre-compute the brain states, save them to an even larger memory bank, and then use an even smaller program to "play back" the brain? Is this simulation conscious? If not, why not? If so...
4. It now hardly seems necessary to "play back" the brain state - is the memory bank storing the brain state sequence itself conscious? If not, why not? If so...
It would seem Tegmark bites the bullet all the way past 4, perhaps as far as saying all possible conscious entities exist in the digits of pi.
Whatever consciousness is, it seems obvious that it's a dynamic quantity. Snapshotting a particular brain state would therefore not be conscious in the same way that a picture of a falling object would not be falling.
I think a perfectly faithful simulation of a brain would clearly be conscious under the assumptions of materialism.
> 1. Is it possible to build a computer that simulates the brain (and as much as the environment as needed) to arbitrary accuracy? Is this simulation conscious? If not, why not? [...]
I have to dissect "simulate" first, sorry.
If you mean, is it possible to build a computer that can do what the brain does, including being conscious of something, while not being constructed fully like a brain, then I say, sure.
But if you only mean, build a computer that tracks or calculates certain properties of certain parts of the brain over a course of time, then I say, it will not be conscious of anything.
I can run a continuous stream of text, dynamically generated, even calculated according to some laws of physics, over a screen describing very realistically some weather, but that's not weather.
I think the information processing that happens in our brain is not what makes us conscious. Instead I think all that juggling of electrically charged things in special ways is what makes us concious.
I'm sure a computer like ours today will never be conscious, no matter what program it's running, because what happens in it is so very, very, very different from what happens in the things we know are conscious, us. Or at least me, in my case. The things in computers move totally different then in brains.
That is exactly my feeling, but much more clearly explained than I could have put it.
The idea that consciousness is defined by the functional roles of mental states rather than by their physical makeup (aka functionalism) seems plausible to me. However, even if functionalism is true, I do not think that it implies that consciousness can be simulated on a computer. This is because it seems to me that at least some of the important 'functions' of a brain are physical ones, like the juggling of electric charges that you mention. And I do not think that those can be meaningfully simulated.
In fact, the idea that it is possible to simulate them is, in my opinion, a type of "map and territory" confusion: i.e., yes, some characteristics of a territory can be represented (simulated) on a map, but as we all know, even the most accurate, detailed map is not the territory. Similarly, even a highly detailed simulation might capture some aspects of neural processing without truly replicating the physical phenomena that give rise to consciousness.
at least because 1) we know it arises in more than just the brain (see studies on how gut microbiome affects mood), and 2) it's SO WEIRD that it may not be "material" in the way we typically assume, or not material at all.
information might be necessary, but I doubt it's sufficient. information is all around us. It's hard to base a theory of consciousness purely on information without going full pan-psychism.
>1. Is it possible to build a computer that simulates the brain (and as much as the environment as needed) to arbitrary accuracy? Is this simulation conscious? If not, why not? If so...
An important part of most people’s experience is that it is valenced — I lot of what we see and hear and know pleases or displeases us. I think for something to count as what we call conscious, the entity has to have skin in the game — has to want and dread things, and thus have valenced percepts, memory, rumenations, etc. The reason we have hopes and fears, goals and dreads, is that we are biological systems, complexly wired to survive and produce offspring. Most of the valencing that goes on has to do with how current experience weighs in the direction of what we’re wired to seek and to avoid.
So when you talk about including as much of the environment as needed, consider the body, which is in some ways part of the experiencing self, but in other ways part of the environment. If a blow from the environment breaks my leg, that is an injury to the self, as self, but in another way it’s an event in the brain’s environment. The injury informs the brain of the damage via sensations, but also makes adrenalin and no doubt other stuff that affects how the brain functions. You think in a different way after an injury like that not only because the injury causes pain and constitutes a negative development in achieving goals, but also because the injured body chemically alters the brain via hormones, etc. And the same can be said of many, maybe most life events. If I yearn for coffee in the morning I drink some, and the caffeine alters the brain. Etc.
Because of that I do not think it makes sense to talk about brains separate from bodies being able to embody consciousness.
"An important part of most people’s experience is that it is valenced — I lot of what we see and hear and know pleases or displeases us. I think for something to count as what we call conscious, the entity has to have skin in the game — has to want and dread things, and thus have valenced percepts, memory, rumenations, etc."
This is the part that has always been the most mysterious for me, valence. From an evolutionary point of view, experiencing pain, pleasure, or shame makes perfect sense and is highly effective at helping us navigate the myriad decisions of life. But how on earth can a a bunch of interconnected cells generate these experiences?
> has to want and dread things, and thus have valenced percepts, memory, rumenations, etc.
Wait, why do you need memory and ruminations? I don't see any reason memory and intelligence would be required for valence and consciousness. Not understanding the past or future doesn't make the present any less real.
I agree with a) and b). But as you state we don't really know what consciousness is or how it arises. So the answer to "Is the simulation conscious?" is we just don't know, and currently have no way of knowing.
> The "physics program" does not appear to be doing much here - it seems that all the relevant brain information is stored in the memory.
When a person is in a dreamless sleep all the relevant information is also stored in the memory. And yet we are not calling such person conscious. Seems that this "physics program" is quite important.
> So, could we just pre-compute the brain states, save them to an even larger memory bank, and then use an even smaller program to "play back" the brain? Is this simulation conscious? If not, why not?
The program that would be pre-computing the brain state is conscious. The program that just plays it back is not. Just like a computer game that you are playing has gameplay, but a recording of it - doesn't.
>When a person is in a dreamless sleep all the relevant information is also stored in the memory. And yet we are not calling such person conscious. Seems that this "physics program" is quite important.
That is a good point - But, all we really know is that that person has no memory of being conscious during sleep. He might well have been conscious, but have no memory of that in the morning, or there might well be several conscious parts within a brain.
> That is a good point - But, all we really know is that that person has no memory of being conscious during sleep.
Have you ever went under anesthesia? It doesn't feel like you can't remember what happened over the past few hours. It feels as if nothing happened at all. There's not even a sense of time passing.
Anesthesia doesn't help clear up the question of sleep because it is markedly different: people have a sense of time having passed when they wake up, and dream, and have confusing experiences where parts of your brain are off.
Let's take a person who has just died from other causes than damage to the brain. For some time their brain will still hold all the relevant information. And yet the person is not conscious.
> who has just died from other causes than damage to the brain
...you're going to have to define "died" there; cessation of brain activity is part of the definition I am aware of, and a brain in that state can no longer be said to "hold all the relevant information". We know, meanwhile, that e.g. people stay conscious for many seconds following a beheading, so however you define death, it can't be quite as simple here as extreme damage to parts of the body other than the brain.
They do not behave the way a central example of a conscious person would behave, so theories that assume that they are conscious anyway get a complexity penalty.
I definitely get the pull of this line of thinking, but I start to get uneasy already in point 1. As Emma_B notes below, I already think there's a difference between simulating an apple in a gravitational field, and an actual apple.
I can think of a few ways to try cash out this distinction, none of which I feel like I deeply understand, but for the most part I think the distinction has to do with the way both an apple and a stimulated apple arise from physics-obeying matter: the actual apple seems written in the "machine code" of the universe, whatever that might be, in a way the stimulated apple isn't.
I also think there's something maybe with the interaction with the environment: to stimulate an apple down to the level of machine code would require simulating all the quantum fields it's composed of, and couples with... But as those fields permeate the universe and couple with everything else, the "environment needed" to simulate a "real" apple feels like it might have to be the whole universe? Or past/future light cone, or whatever?
So for consciousness, I incline to the view that the details of how the computation in physics-obeying matter is actually implemented, and that whatever the relevant notion is might not find the physics module irrelevant, or might insist on an implementation that doesn't split into a memory for states and a physics program for updating, or some other constraint that invalidates one of the steps you outline.
I think this point of view is already a bit un-Tegmarkian in that it privileges certain computations carried out in "the natural programming language of the universe", so I think part of the disconnect here might be happening at a deeper level; that if you buy even step 1 you're already basically a Tegmarkian anyway. But to me, I find the whole Tegmark view weird and unintuitive precisely because I already reject (maybe this is too strong, but I at least find it very unnatural and unconvincing) the idea that all "mathematical objects" are on an equal footing when it comes to existence: I think the universe is prior; what exists is *the universe* whatever it *is* (imagine me gesturing wildly around me, to indicate and encompass everything).
I don't deny that there are paradoxes or unresolved issues with my view (it certainly feels like some abstract mathematical concepts have an independent reality; I don't actually know _what_ the universe is, or what makes _it_ the thing that *is* and not something else) but I don't find alternative views actually make me feel like I understand those issues any better anyway, so my pull towards them is limited, if not non-zero.
Haha I was about to say the same for your response!
I think especially your "I think the information processing that happens in our brain is not what makes us conscious. Instead I think all that juggling of electrically charged things in special ways is what makes us conscious" says what I was trying to say better.
It also reminds me, apropos some discussion above, that I've read that some anesthetics seem to induce a sort of unconscious-type quiescent state even in single-celled organisms, and if I remember rightly the mechanism is thought to be something to do with the proton gradient across the mitochondria--which I think is evidence that something about the energetics even within single cells matters to consciousness as much or more than the information processing between neurons
"1. Is it possible to build a computer that simulates the brain (and as much as the environment as needed) to arbitrary accuracy?"
It is not clear to me what exactly can be simulated in a computer, or what exactly a simulation means (I am aware that this is largely due to my lack of knowledge in this area). To take an example that seems much simpler than consciousness, consider the case of simulating the displacement of a simulated object under gravity, say Newton's apple. I do not doubt that it is possible to simulate the motion of the simulated apple very accurately, but I do not think that this means that the simulated apple weighs anything. And I do not think that this is a problem of accuracy: whatever the accuracy, it seems to me that a simulated apple will never weigh anything in the real world.
Why should simulated consciousness be different, i.e. be real world consciousness?
This isn't by any means a full answer but perhaps suggestive of a route. I feel much more confident in saying that I know that people are conscious (and looking across the kitchen this morning that dogs are conscious, although differently and less so) than that brains are conscious. My consciousness of myself is of myself as a physical being, and thought experiments about what if I were a brain in a vat don't really help me reflect on the nature of myself as a conscious being or of the conscious beings around me.
> 3. The "physics program" does not appear to be doing much here - it seems that all the relevant brain information is stored in the memory. So, could we just pre-compute the brain states, save them to an even larger memory bank, and then use an even smaller program to "play back" the brain? Is this simulation conscious? If not, why not? If so...
Disagree, eyeballs use blue noise location of senors, this reduces artifacts from sampling; that comes for free from existing on top of physics.
When encoding infomation, maximizing entropy is nearly 1 to 1 with data compression and some data compression will be desirable.
Evolution will likely encode as much of possible into physical computation mechinisms that biology gets for free, and the result of even minor approximations will likely cause artifacts evolution playthings simply wont be robust to
I thought about saying something like this in my answer below, that maybe I can simulate an apple fully, but only at a lower level: this follows from the idea that I could simulate an apple by simulating a full quantum field theory (or whatever final model of physics) and then my objection about "machine language" seems to be dealt with, but I'm still not sure I totally buy this.
I have two arguments, one specific to consciousness, one not:
1. It seems to me like "consciousness relative to oneself" is basically what I mean by conscious, and I find most of my puzzlement persists if I allow something to be conscious relative to itself, but not to me: is computation conscious relative to itself at any point? If so, when? Do I have to interact with it for that to be so? Run the program but not interact? Store the program but not run it? It seems I face all the same confusions, now about "consciousness relative to itself" rather than "conscious".
2. I think this view only makes sense if "existence relative to" ends up being an equivalence relation that partitions our space (and what exactly _is_ our space? Can a square circle exist relative to anything? Relative to itself?) into mutually exclusive partitions--i think the idea of "casual link" sounds right to me, but I think formalizing that is probably going to exactly give that partition structure: my best guess of what a casual link is, is something like "object A was ever in object B's past or future light cone", or some quantum gravity-ish thing that reformulated more or less the same idea; but this automatically makes it reflexive and symmetric, and I think transitive if you take interiors of light cones but someone who knows this stuff for real should correct me.
This means that anything you can interact with in any meaningful way at all should either exist-relative-to-you or not exist-relative-to-itself: if something exists relative to itself, but not relative to you, it can't have any casual link to you at all.
If this idea is right, and applies to consciousness too, it should mean again that thinking about the simulation case isn't really helped by this move: because you can causally interact with the computer on which the simulation is running, and thus on the simulation itself, either it is conscious relative to itself _and relative to you_, or it is neither of those, and you may a well just collapse conscious-relative-to-itself and conscious-relative-to-you into one concept, "conscious" and be back where you started.
Now, one way to try escape this is to try weaken the notion of casual link to only go in one direction. I think an idea like this is not totally implausible, but doesn't seem to me to help with the initial puzzle. This is because the actual computer on which the simulation is stored/run is clearly downstream causally from you, and so long as you don't do something like shove it into a wormhole as soon as you've programmed it, you will continue to exist in its future light cone for some time after, and so insofar as there is any correspondence between the states of the computer and the consciousness of it, you will be both causally both downstream and upstream from it.
Thoughts like this lead me to the notion that you can only fail to distinguish between a simulation and an actual thing if you a) run it in the "machine code" of the universe and b) make it completely causally isolated from you after a certain point. I imagine this process would be hard to distinguish from *creating a new universe with that thing inside it*... That is, the way to simulate an apple in GR in such a way that it is actually *an apple* and not a simulation is to either just, a) observe a real apple, or b) create a new spacetime, causally downstream of yours with an apple in it, that you can never interact with again (if you can interact with it again, this is just a) again).
I agree with you on the moral point, I think, but I'm not sure I agree that conscious-relative-to-itself resolves anything for me otherwise. If there is something it is like to be a particular subsequence of the digits of pi, or to be Frodo Baggins, I find that very mysterious... Possibly even moreso for the fact that they both seem to exist only in some very strange abstract way that is causally unconnected from me!
If I ask, "what is consciousness? how does it arise?", and learn that the digits of pi are conscious, following that up with, "but don't worry there's no causal connection between you and the digits of pi" isn't going to do anything to make me feel like I have a better understanding of my initial questions.
On 2, yeah, I think I ended up saying something stronger than I meant, I don't think it's impossible to simulate a consciousness without spawning a new universe, but I think the details of the simulation may matter quite a bit, down to details like what level of physics it's stimulated on, or how entangled it is with the rest of the world--enough that I would not grant consciousness to a stored program that wasn't being run.
> "For the contest, I prioritized winning over platonic accuracy and shifted my real predictions to be more extreme. I don't know whether this is a lesson in self-confidence, support for the 'nothing ever happens' hypothesis, or a knock against the scoring algorithm. "
This is a known issue with any sort of prediction contest (it's common on Kaggle): As the number of contestants grows, your odds of winning go up by being overconfident (which trades expected value of your final score for variance, since when there's a large number of contestants you have a higher chance of getting on top with higher variance). It's going to happen with any scoring algorithm (so long as your number of required predictions is fixed).
in which the only Nash equilibrium is zero. Has this sort of thing been analyzed for prediction markets? Do they still converge when everyone is rational and knows everyone else is rational and knows that they know etc.
- Assume there's two (or more) contestants and one 60/40 question. In this case we get the nash equilibrium you describe, where both players have to predict 100% on the 60/40 question to maximize their win odds.
- But now assume there's five 60/40 questions. In that case you may be incentivised to bet 100% on one question, but if you bet 100% on two questions, you're likely to lose at least one of them and then lose the contest. (The full solution is, I think, more moderate than even this - if you bet 100% on one question you have a 40% chance of losing outright if you get that one wrong but won't necessarily win if you get it right, depending on how the other questions go, and the calculation gets messy).
- now assume instead of two contestants there's over 32 (2^5) contestants). Then you have to guess 100% certainty on every question (if you do that you have a 1/32 chance of winning, which is better than your position as a generic contestant).
(This is assuming all questions are 50/50. If they're lower entropy the 32 number should be smaller).
In last year's contest there were ~30 questions for ~1000 contestants, so the threshold at which you should go all in on every question is about 2^30, or a billion contestants, so we fall far short of that. But some degree of overconfidence is still optimal, and the exact calculation of how to optimize it is messy.
Yes (a friend of mine wrote a paper on this, but frustratingly it's been stuck in "awaiting publication" hell for over a year now so I can't find it online). The equilibrium still isn't zero (or, well, total confidence), since when there's many questions there's many different ways to increase variance (it is with just one question though).
My rants in this years contest got downvoted agruing this point but I disagree its impossible; I trust the current math would work with good questions.
If it was rational to bet 20-80% on each question, blanket over confidence over 50 questions would likely be unwise. Given that there were arguably 15 shit questions, several of which you would be deeply irrational to predict >10%, and will result in rule lawyering; the scoring system breaks down because the game break down.
"It's rational to be overconfident on some questions" doesn't mean "be overconfident all the time". There is a tradeoff between expected value and variance based on the true/assumed probabilities, with the optimal strategy calling for going for more variance as the number of contestants increases (and less as the number of predictions goes up). For a given amount of variance, there's also a (nontrivial to compute) optimal strategy frontier for how to allocate it.
This does *not* depend on the questions being good (more or better phrased questions do help - although I disagree with your opinion of the questions being bad in this instance - but if you have ~thirty questions and over a thousand contestants, that's still going to incentivise going for variance).
(this is katifish) Fwiw I predict my true probabilities on binary questions (at least when there is no crowd forecast visible - when there is I often adjust slightly towards it, depending on how confident I am of my relative knowledge). For continuous questions it's trickier and in the end I do extremize a bit in several cases, but partly that's an effect of trying to get the distribution shape I want. I buy that the strategy changes as you get to v. large numbers of people, but I'm iffy on whether ACX or even Bridgewater are really at that level.
I did a rough calculation above, ACX/Bridgewater is a very long way short of "guess 100% on everything" but is close enough to the threshold that optimal strategy does include being somewhat overconfident (how much exactly depends on how good your competition is - if all 1k+ people are almost as good as you you need to be more overconfident since you can't reliably outskill them. Given that the superforcaster average last year was about 70th percentile I'd guess about 30% on net are actually good enough that luck matters as much as skill in outperforming them, where by "on net" I include fractional people (who you can outskill but might beat you on a very good day)).
That makes sense to me. My intuition is also that degrees of over/underconfidence interact with frequency of updating/new information, would be curious to know if you've pulled this into your models or not. Bridgewater in particular benefits a lot from updating frequently, at least on certain q's, in a way ends up being very different from ACX spot scoring. (Last year Bridgewater also split the prize pool in a way that led to more even rewards across a higher number of top participants, which may also have changed incentives around extremizing)
This specific model is for one off contests (where everyone submits a single prediction by a deadline). Not sure how I'd adapt it for updatable models - a simple mostly-accurate way to do it would be to model every new bit of information/update opportunity as another low-information question you can answer (or, say, just subdivide each question into 365 highly correlated daily questions), which makes allowing constant updates equivalent to just having more total question-bits. This should incentivise less overconfidence (since it's equivalent to having more questions).
Dividing the prize should also reduce the risk incentive (at the limit, giving everyone a prize in proportion to their score just incents maximizing score ev, which is equivalent to guessing true probabilities).
> This does *not* depend on the questions being good
one of the questions is generally accepted to be rational to guess 1%
If you fail this 1 question you will lose to someone putting a flat 50/50 on everything; they will need to punish that 1% enough
.1% will get 1 more point if to resolves false
Questions need to be close enough to be 50/50, the long run for 1/99 will be to far away in 30 question. (and there were clear examples of questions failing this)
Trump should just offer to give Zelensky 100 nuclear warheads plus missiles to deliver them. I doubt he actually cares about non-proliferation, and Russia won't dare to try to fully destabilize or conquer Ukraine if Ukraine might be able to flatten Moscow and St Petersburg - they'll go for peace and try to consolidate the territory they're holding already (like the Winter War in the 20th century).
Alternatively, I'd be fine with a tripwire force of US troops in eastern Ukraine. But the nukes would be better and cheaper, and we're building new nuclear warheads anyways (or are supposed to). We should offer them to Poland, the Baltics, and Finland too.
Being totally apathetic and fatalistic about proliferation does not equal supporting nuclear war. It equals living in the real world and not living in a fantasy.
I'm confused: Your post seems to assume that Trump actually wants to help Ukraine against Russian aggression. After the events of last week, it should be pretty clear to everyone that Trump isn't interested in defending Ukraine, so why in the world would he station nukes there?
Trump doesn't care about the sovereignity of Ukraine or the fate of the Ukrainian people. He claimed he'd end that war on day 1 of his term because it would be a political win over "Sleepy Joe". Unfortunately, he was talking completely out of his ass – a repeated surprise to most of his followers – and it turned out that things are a tiny bit more complicated than Trump's brain can fathom.
So he changed gears and tried to extort mining rights from Ukraine, for basically no meaningful guarantees in return. Not quite the peace deal he promised, but it would be a deal that Makes America Great Again, i.e., a political win for Trump. When Zelenskyy didn't fall for this blatant attempt at self-enrichment, Trump changed gears once again and verbally attacked Zelenskyy, turning into a mouthpiece for Putin and Lavrov.
So, taking all this into account, why would Trump station nuclear weapons in Ukraine? Any realistic answer necessarily starts with "It would make Trump look good inner-politically, because [ ]".
It seems Trump thinks Russia is more powerful in the region and so is a more useful ally. He actually wants what Russia or Ukraine can offer. That might be Ukrainian mineral rights, Russian oil and non total cooperation with Iran and China, etc.
Also I do not want Ukraine getting nukes. The chance of them using them against Russia as Russia continues to invade them is substantially above zero.
The right strategy, of course, is to continue supporting Ukraine by US and Europe to disincentivize continued aggression to the point of making Russia regret invading, while offering an offramp where you get to keep massive territory secured through war but allow a military buildup on the other side of the border because of course Ukraine needs real security guarantees.
But not US or Nato forces covered by Article 5. Russia will keep reinvading whatever it can. We know that. We also need to avoid nuclear exchange.
Should we start WWIII over Estonian independence? I mean...seems like a fair question. I am all for Estonia not being invaded, but it's definitely not a hill I'm willing to die on. Are you?
This is exactly the problem: the deterrence works until it's tested. We now know that mechanized brigades crossing into Russia and occupying it's "proper" (WTF this means, see other thread for that one) territory for 6 months didn't trigger "WWIII" (WTF THAT means, I think we're are in a slow-burning one already, been since 2014). We also know that a NATO member can directly shoot down a Russian war plane, killing the pilot, and nothing happens. We also know that a nation at war with Russia can directly attack the Kremlin with an explosive device, and nothing happens. OR attack a strategic deterrence site in Russia, and nothing happens. So those terrible nukes aren't all that... terrible? Do they even work?
And now we have Article 5 and it clearly doesn't mean jack. But the whole power of NATO has been built on "OMG attack a NATO country, and all will come to its defense". That's dead. Maybe it was dead 15 years ago too, but it wasn't... obvious.
To answer your question directly, yes, NATO should immediately respond and defend Estonia, because NOT doing it is more likely to eventually start a real hot WWIII than doing it. Had NATO responded properly to the downing of the Dutch Airlines plane, or a chemical weapon attack on a NATO country territory, we wouldn't be in the mess we're in now. Alas...
"But the whole power of NATO has been built on "OMG attack a NATO country, and all will come to its defense"."
Yeah, but the other NATO countries are uselessly weak, so "all will come to its defense" really just means the US anymore, and whadda ya know, it turns out you can only free-ride off some else's defense spending for so long. Your plan for continued NATO deterrence depended on the US public being played for a sucker, which is usually a great bet, but it just didn't work in this instance, sorry.
> Yeah, but the other NATO countries are uselessly weak […]
If that's the case, then why did the US call on Article 5 after 9/11? Why go through all that trouble if the other NATO members are so useless? In a later comment you wrote
> 60 years ago […] this arrangement was tolerable,
so according to you, this alleged uselessness isn't a recent phenomenon that only started to manifest after 9/11.
What Tibor said. Plus, what shitty ally just drops friends into a trash can, and goes kissing the very adversary they were supposed to be allied against? There’s a wide ground between “hey friends you need to put up your share of the burden” and “fuck you all, I’m friends with the enemy now, bye-bye”.
It is true that in absolute terms the US covers the majority of NATO military expenditure.
But this still means that roughly a third of it comes from Europe and this ratio is currently increasing as more countries are increasing their military budgets (Poland currently spends a larger part of its GDP on the military than the US, but of course it is much less in absolute terms). Also, most European countries have lower labour costs than the US, so 1 dollar buys more there than in the US.
And assuming the alliance stays together, it is very useful for the US or any other NATO force to be able to operate freely in say Poland, Finland or Sweden when fighting against a Russian invasion of Estonia. So it is not just about spending and military size alone.
Russia has a GDP of Italy. Europe/European NATO members alone should be able to crush Russia if they had not ignored their defence for so long. But even with the current still mostly underprepared state of European militaries they would pretty clearly win a conventional war against Russia (especially since Russia is running out of its post-soviet stockpiles of equipment and in general has suffered pretty bad attrition during the current war).
Russia has nukes. A lot of them. France and Britain have some nukes as well but not enough for MAD against Russia, so that is the main problem.
US would obviously be a tremendous help in a hot war against Russia. But if just the European NATO members really honored Article 5 and acted decisively, they would still defeat Russia if it decided to attack Estonia. The difference might be that with US on board, Estonia suffers a lot less.
But Russia will not have a capacity to test Article 5 in at least a couple of years even if the war in Ukraine ended tomorrow. Europe seems to finally be realizing that the peace dividend is over and in 5 years should be a lot better prepared than it is now. Like I would not be surprised if Poland alone ends up with a military that can rival that of Russia. And if someone can be relied upon to go and fight the Russians if called then it is going to be the Poles (with a bit but not too much exaggeration, Russia having nukes is possibly the only reason Poland has not attacked Russia already).
So I am actually pretty optimistic about NATO surviving at least in Europe (and realistically it will be back at least with the next US administration ... but with Europeans relying on the US a bit less from now on which is probably a good thing in the grand scheme of things). And since Europe is unlikely to end up in a direct military conflict with China ("there's a whole beautiful continent between us and them"), if it can deter/defeat Russia, there are no serious enemies left.
So in my mind this is mostly it is about figuring out how to keep Europe being covered by the nuclear umbrella...but I cannot imagine a situation where the US, even with the current administration, happily lets Russia nuke Europe (or anyone really) without retaliation. I mean, even China probably would not let Russia do that because it would open a Pandora's box if they did.
This is zero-sum thinking. Just because one side gains from an negotiation doesn't mean that you've lost. It is possible to cooperate such that both sides benefit.
First, he hasn't secured anything, and neither did Putin, because there were no negotiations yet. All Trump did was to propose to start negotiations. Restoring embassy staff in both countries, well, that doesn't seem like a concession from either side to me, it's just reverting stupid and useless posturing. That EU decided that negotiations itself is a concession to Putin is EU's own problem.
Second, if Trump actually will manage to make a deal, it's very likely that you wouldn't know all concessions Putin made, because some of them will be secret (e.g. anything about limits on cooperation with China WILL have to remain secret, because Russia doesn't want to piss off China openly).
Finally, I still think negotiations will fail, precisely because Trump won't be able to extract any noticeable concessions from Putin. At least all "Trump's Peace Plans" that surfaced on the net so far has been utterly unacceptable to Russia.
Trump, using the voice of his drunkard idiot secretary of defense, publicly gave in to Putin's demands that Ukraine would not be invited to NATO and that it will not recover its territory. Before any negotiations started. Yes, words matter. I'm sick and tired of all the excuses for this bunch of blowhard nincompoops.
Negotiations will fail not because Trump won't be able to extract any concessions from Putin, he is not even going to try, the weak baby that he is. The negotiations will fail because Ukrainians will not capitulate, which is what Trump wants, and keep fighting instead.
Unless they see some light at the end of the tunnel that is not a joint US-Russian train coming to smash them.
I can't believe I'm typing this on the third anniversary of this war started, but here we are. I do remember telling a Ukrainian friend back in 22 that they had two years to finish this because there'd be an election in 2024 in the US and who knew how that was going to turn out.
How plausible would you consider speculations that Trump is a Russian asset (i.e., he signed up voluntarily or was pressured into doing their bidding)?
How plausible would you consider it, as one alternative, that Trump has a natural admiration for autocrats and just thinks Putin is a great dude?
How could Russia possibly incentivize Trump to be an agent? He's a famous billionaire who doesn't care what anyone thinks about him. What possible leverage could they have?
Sorry, but this strikes me as a very silly claim. President Trump obviously seeks admiration and complains voraciously when he doesn't get it. And he similarly obviously wants more material wealth and strongly approves of anybody who gives it to him, whether it's on the form of direct profits for one of his properties, campaign donations, or contributions to his inauguration fund.
Vladimir Putin isn't that stupid. Donald Trump is a *massively* unreliable partner in, well, just about anything. Talk to his first cabinet about that, or his business partners over the years. Or his wives. And he's pretty much immune to blackmail, because everyone already knows he's every kind of disreputable and an election-winning number of them are willing to give him a pass on all of it. He'd rat out or double-cross Putin the moment he thought he could get anything out of it.
And Putin doesn't need Trump to be an "asset" dancing to Russia's strings. Everything Putin really needs from Trump, particularly including the bit where Trump cuts off US military aid to Ukraine and vetoes NATO membership, he can have just by letting Trump be Trump and maybe nudging him along with a bit of targeted flattery,
Pretty sure it's the latter. The Russian asset theory feels like what his domestic opponents *want* to be true.
A line from Good Omens comes to mind: "[The Arrangement] was the sort of sensible arrangement that many isolated agents, working in awkward conditions a long way from their superiors, reach with their opposite number when they realize that they have more in common with their immediate opponents than their remote allies."
I think Trump has more in common with the leaders of Russia and China than he does with either the leaders of our existing allies or his peers in our own government. To the extent that he's giving ground, he's doing so as a favor to *Putin*, not to *Russia*. I doubt he cares much about Russia as a state. Or the U.S., for that matter.
What leverage could Russia possibly have on Trump that would stick even while he was President? Blackmail? The man has no shame, so there's no piece of information they could release which Trump would have reason to fear being released. His supporters back him no matter what. Financial? We know Trump acts to enrich himself but with control over the entire executive branch I'd think there would be numerous ways for Trump to recoup his losses should he take a loss by defying Russia.
I think Russia does use Trump and benefit from Trump, but there's probably limited collusion and limited pressure - I think the issue is that Trump is easy to manipulate and Putin is good at manipulating him (but so are Bannon, Musk, Netanyahu, etc.). Basically I think anyone who can get themselves into a position where they have Trump's attention can have their way with him.
I suspect the desire to see Trump as a Russian asset comes from trying to find a rational underpinning of his disastrous love affair with Putin. Because the alternative, that Trump really likes cruel dictators and would love to become one, is too unpleasant to contemplate.
It's literally the job of the American president to be friendly to dictators. I'd say if you can't establish your rapport with dictators, you're totally unqualified for the position. The alternative to rapprochement with dictators is World War and the potential destruction of the human race. Winston Churchill once said that only appeasement from a place of weakness was wrong. That appeasement from strength was essential for maintaining peace.
I don't agree with "friendly", but yes on the broader point. As somebody said, "you don't negotiate with your friends, you negotiate with your enemies". This is what diplomacy is for, your comparison to waste management is apt.
> It's literally the job of the American president to be friendly to dictators.
What gave you this idea? It's the job of the American president to enforce the interests of the US. Sometimes that requires being friendly to some dictator, sometimes that require the exact opposite.
Edit: Besides, even "being friendly with dictators" is a far cry from "admiring dictators and doing one's best to play into their hands", like Trump repeatedly does with Putin.
As long as the world is full of dictators, it will always, always be in the interests of the United States to be friendly to dictators. Nothing in our history contradicts this. When specific dictators get out of hand, they require dealing with in a heavy-handed but realistic manner, which is how we handled the specific case of Adolf Hitler. Note how we waited for him to initiate hostilities against us, which was a wise and thoughtful course of action.
But the vast majority of dictators need to be dealt with in a friendly manner. This is directly in the interests of the nation. And to be friendly to someone is to treat someone as one would treat a friend.
I would personally find behaving in this manner very distasteful, especially when it comes to scumbag like putin. But I'm not the President. The number one thing for the interests of America and the world is for the American president to ingratiate himself with Russia's leader, whoever that may be. Because they have so many nukes, friendship between Russia and America is important for avoiding nuclear holocaust. I compare being a diplomat to waste management or plumbing. It's a slimy, filthy job but somebody has to do it.
Putin is an evil man for invading ukraine. But no American government official has any business condemning him for that. That's Eurasian business. Not even the lowliest State Department spokesperson should be issuing complaints about Eurasian dictators.
Like...Trump knows the outcome of the Ukraine war is more-or-less set in stone and doesn't want to spend another few billion and create another another couple-hundred KIA for no reason?
You don't think it's plausible that the President, or his team of advisors, knows something about the war you don't?
As for "not set in stone" - you get what I mean, don't be obtuse. Obviously details need to be worked out, but I think it's a safe assumption that, at minimum, Crimea isn't going to be under Ukrainian sovereignty when the war ends.
You don't think it's plausible that the President, or his team of advisors, knows something about the war you don't?
You know, this is an interesting question. I'm pretty sure somebody on that team knows something about this war that I don't. I'm also pretty sure I know things about this war that they don't, and this is both a general statement of the huge amount of "information about this war", and a specific statement about the abysmal lack of interest in actual complexities of this war from this specific admin ("end the war in 24 hrs!" inevitably becomes "who knew healthcare was so complicated", yes really, who could possibly).
"set in stone" - no, sorry, I'm not being obtuse, the range of potential outcomes is quite wide, and even just the status of Crimea can have a range of set points, anything from "Russian forever and recognized by UN" to "Territory illegally occupied by Russia", and then extrapolate that onto 1000+ km front line.
But our team of stable geniuses is giving up negotiating levers to Putin before the actual negotiations even started.
"Russian forever and recognized by UN" and "Territory illegally occupied by Russia" - these are the same thing. There's no real difference. The purported difference is just just marketing / propaganda. Caring about de jure outcomes is cringe.
I think it's safe to say that de facto Crimea will remain under Russian sovereignty for the foreseeable future. How that's marketed doesn't really matter all that much. Same thing with the rest of the front lines - are they gonna move more than 50 miles in either direction? Unlikely. So let's stop the killing.
That line of thinking seems to have been valid back around 2017. By now I think Trump has amply proven that yes, he really could shoot someone in the middle of the 5th Ave in broad daylight and the Republican party will loudly wander what the nasty woke person did to King Donald to deserve it while the Democratic party will express a deep concern.
To be fair, the events that were reported that looked very much like the tip of an iceberg all happened as reported... just the rest of the iceberg was nowhere to be found. Still, not investigating would have been criminally negligent.
Yeah, maybe, but the way the modal Democrat thought about it certainly wasn't "you know what, I don't think there's anything there, but not investigating would be criminally negligent, so let Mueller have this one. It's a nothingburger, though".
My reading of him is that he's too shameless to be blackmailed, while also too prideful to tolerate serving another. Meanwhile, he and Putin really do just want the exact same things... which will eventually cause conflict between them, but that can wait until everyone else is dealt with.
The CIA uses the acronym MICE for how they can turn someone into an intelligence soure: Money, Ideology, Coercion, and Ego. I see Trump as vulnerable to the first and last, but I agree...it's still ludicrous. Why would a New York real estate developer who was fading into irrelevancy make for a useful asset to the Russians in the first place?
Maybe I would believe the former if an ex-MI6 agent collected a bunch of hearsay to that effect from random Russians and compiled it into a dossier. Or 50 current and former US intelligence officials signed a letter saying so.
The letter is referring to the Hunter laptop being Russian disinfo, which was obviously a direct lie purely to help Biden and hurt Trump. At this point "Russian Asset!" is like the boy who cried wolf and everyone should assume it's a bunch of BS until proven otherwise.
>The letter is referring to the Hunter laptop being Russian disinfo
If you knew that, why did you claim that the letter said that Trump was a Russian asset?
>which was obviously a direct lie
What the letter said was:
>the arrival on the US poli cal scene of emails purportedly belonging to Vice President Biden’s son Hunter, much of it related to his time serving on the Board of the Ukrainian gas company Burisma, has all the classic earmarks of a Russian informa operation. We want to emphasize that we do not know if the emails, provided to the New York Post by President Trump’s personal attorney Rudy Giuliani, are genuine or not and that we do not have evidence of Russian involvement -- just that our experience makes us deeply suspicious that the Russian government played a significant role in this case.
> If you knew that, why did you claim that the letter said that Trump was a Russian asset?
"But Russia!" is the classic red herring defense of the current day. The Hunter laptop letter is a great example of this, which I thought was clearly referenced by the 50 agents (actually 51 *shrug*).
> None of those statements is untrue.
I guess in the "media rarely lies" sense where they don't blatantly and obviously make the lying clear. In 2019, the FBI investigated the laptop and confirmed that it belonged to Hunter, was genuine, and didn't appear to be tampered with. This was corroborated in the whistleblower reports from the IRS investigation in 2023. So at the time of the letter, 10/19/2020, it was known to the intelligence community (via the FBI) that the laptop and associated cloud data (the emails in question) were genuine and belonged to Hunter Biden. This is the first major red flag that the letter was a fundamentally dishonest political stunt. A bunch of intel officials without firsthand knowledge of the case directly contradict the findings of the FBI agents who actually handled the laptop.
Further, the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence released their findings on the letter operation on 6/25/2024. The letter's main architect was Michael Morell. He later testified that the whole thing was triggered by a phone call from Antony Blinken, then foreign policy advisor to the Biden campaign (and later SecState).
This is an email sent out by Michael Morell at ~6:30am 10/19/20:
"Good morning. Hope everyone had a nice weekend.
Attached is a statement that Marc and I drafted that many former senior and working-level officials from across the IC will sign and then be made public. We are 100% confident it does not contain classified information. Indeed, it specifically says we don't know what the IC or the FBI knows about this.
*This is a rush job, as it needs to get out as soon as possible.* (emphasis mine)
Thank you very much.
-Michael Morell"
So, the laptop has been known about and confirmed genuine for over a year at this point. But it's a rush job, because the election is in a few weeks and they need to discredit the story. Not to mention the irresponsible prospect of a bunch of IC officials releasing an official statement on something... when they admit not knowing what the IC or FBI knows about it. The letter draft was sent to the Prepublication Classification Review Board (PCRB) at the CIA. The time between the draft being received and cleared for release... was approximately 6 hours.
Part of the review process involved submitting a letter draft to the Office of the Director of National Intelligence. While the ODNI cleared the letter, the same day then Director of National Intelligence John Ratcliffe issued an official statement that the laptop was “not part of some Russian disinformation campaign . . . the intelligence community doesn’t believe that because there is no intelligence that supports that.” Note the DNI would actually know what the IC and FBI know about the laptop. Also note that the PCRB reaching out to the ODNI was an unprecedented step, reflecting the unique and politicizing nature of the letter.
The letter signatories repeatedly asserted that they were acting in their capacity as private citizens and had no access to secret information about the laptop. This was untrue. While the CIA didn't release all the details about the involved officials, *at least* Morell and David Buckley were employed as CIA contractors at the time. They also both had TS/SCI clearance. Note that their involvement with the letter would have been a Hatch Act violation, were they actual CIA employees rather than contractors.
Another email from Morell and Marc Polymeropoulos, 10/18/2020:
"Marc and I drafted the attached because we believe the Russians were involved in some way in the Hunter Biden email issue and because *we think Trump will attack Biden on the issue at this week's debate and we want to give the VP a talking point to use in response*" (emphasis mine).
To further establish the nature of the letter, we have unclassified emails of other CIA employees at the time:
"I also love that at least a few of the random signatures belong to individuals currently working here on contracts..."
"This frustrates me. I don't think it is helpful to the Agency in the long run. Sigh."
"It appears <redacted> is actively involved in a pro-Biden campaign and may be disclosing classified information in his efforts. It is difficult to believe that the timing of the attached <redacted> and the <redacted> are coincidental."
To summarize and establish the timeline:
2019, the FBI investigates the Hunter laptop and establishes it as genuine.
Shortly before 10/19/20, Blinken, then employed by the Biden campaign, calls up Morell, then employed as a contractor for the CIA, to discredit the Hunter laptop before the election. Emails from CIA employees at the time establish a view within the Agency that the letter was a pro-Biden stunt with the possibility for blowback.
Morell calls the letter a "rush job", and it is expedited through the PCRB, establishing the letter as a political tool in the 2020 election. Further, Morell admits that part of the reason for the letter is to help Biden and give him talking points.
The letter is released and the officials state they don't *actually* know anything, but the laptop has all the classic earmarks of a Russian operation. Actually they wanted to use a more cover-your-ass phrase of "feels like", but James Clapper wanted the earmark phrase to quote "strengthen the verbiage". This despite the FBI and ODNI knowing for over a year and stating unequivocally that the laptop was not Russian disinformation and there was no evidence to that effect.
The most charitable possible interpretation is everyone who signed the letter was totally ignorant of the actual facts and all coincidentally came to the conclusion that the Russians did it. What is not debatable is that the letter was openly arranged as a political stunt to benefit Biden. But of course no one technically "lied", since their statement was an expression of opinion and we can't read their minds.
Anyway, this whole episode along with the Steele Dossier is why claims of "Russian asset" or "Russian disinformation" should be viewed with maximal skepticism.
>"But Russia!" is the classic red herring defense of the current day. The Hunter laptop letter is a great example of this, which I thought was clearly referenced by the 50 agents (actually 51 *shrug*).
The report of the Senate Intelligence Committee's independent investigation was issued by a majority-Republican committee chaired by a Republican. Even significantly redacted it makes clear that various individuals working for Trump were _trying_ to become Russian assets and that others, some of them named Trump, were actively encouraging that effort.
It does not, even assuming the most about the redactions, conclude that Trump, the president, was ever personally a Russian asset. (And it beggars belief that a different conclusion about him personally would not have leaked by now.)
That investigation did though show pretty strongly that Russia actors were actively trying to help Trump win in 2016 and that people working for Trump including a couple named Trump were trying to help that happen. That seems likely to have been enough to derail Trump politically during his first term -- perhaps convince a few more Republican senators to vote yes in one of his impeachment trials -- _except_ that the Left had meanwhile gone scorched-earth with the Steele dossier and the Mueller investigation.
Hence roughly nobody paid any attention to the Republican Senate committee's investigation and its startling (at any other time) conclusions. It died on the vine. So -- in this way as in so many others -- Trump's ace in the hole turned out to be the Left's hysterical incompetence.
Yes, this goes for the Jan 6 impeachment effort. Had Democrats, on Jan 7, put on a simple motion to impeach for the conduct on Jan 6 only, I bet there were enough shaken Rep. Senators to convict. But the Dems had to make a federal case out of it, complete with a formal "investigation" that the intensity of the experience faded from the Rep's memories enough to do the usual "on one hand, on the other hand" crap.
Other than that, it was almost exclusively AG Merrick Garland's fault for not prosecuting Trump earlier for the sake of 'neutrality', and somewhat Joe Biden's fault for not firing him and replacing him earlier.
That jogged the memory, thanks. I'll stand by my key point: had they delivered the articles on January 8, not on January freaking 25! after Trump was no longer even President - they'd have a much better chance of conviction.
I know it's a hypothetical, but if Trump is allowed to say Russia wouldn't have attacked Ukraine if he were President, I'm allowed my hypotheticals too :)
The first seems very unlikely (Trump has been under enough scrutiny for long enough that it's likely to have come out if there was a smoking gun there, and he's rich and brazen enough to not be easily compromisable). The second seems very likely (both because Trump has said so and because it matches up with everything we know about him.
A subcase of the first though (e.g. Trump isn't a coordinated Russian asset per se but there's an unspoken understanding that they'll run some propaganda for him so long as he acts in a friendly way to them) seems plausible, though hard to draw the line between that and him just liking Putin.
I think it's unlikely, in comparison with Trump liking Putin because he's a rich dictator of a big country - and because Trump often listens to the last person who talks to him on something. That matters because Trump has a lot of people in his orbit who like Russia because they believe it is an "anti-woke" dictatorship that does Strong Man stuff.
Germany doesn't have a new government yet. The party that will have the first shot at creating a new government, wants the world to believe that its leaders are Serious, Courageous Statesmen who are Taking A Stand on the Most Important Issue of the Day. And they trust that the world's attention span will be short enough that people will have forgotten about all this by the time it is clear that Germany hasn't done anything of real substance.
Wake me up when the Bundeswehr can field a full combat-ready Panzer division.
ETA: What they really need for this to matter, is a nuclear arsenal. Good luck with that.
Putin's economic war against Europe, then an actual war right on the EUs border, then Russian sabotage operations happening on EU territory--and the German response can only be described as phlegmatic.
Now, a small decline in the quality of US-DE relations and suddenly there's a swift and colossal response.
Why didn't Germany seek a swift and decisive separation from Russian energy or Chinese markets?
(The question isn't meant as a cheap dog, but it's a real question. I don't understand the seemingly disproportionate response)
I suspect it's primarily PR. Good PR, but PR. How do you sell increased military spending in an economic downturn? Orange Man bad.
Regardless of whether Trump is in the White House or not, the facts are that Europe has not carried its weight militarily in NATO for decades and the US fiscal/debt situation is troubled enough that the US probably can't continue to subsidize European defense over the next decade or two, certainly not while pivoting to focus on China.
But Germany is not in great shape domestically anymore. They've been in an economic downturn since 2022 caused by a variety of factors. They're not in a hurry to go spend a ton on Ukranian defense. So how do you convince them to spend an extra $20-$30 billion a year? Well, Europeans hate Trump...so Trump.
I think you're touching on the crux of my confusing.
If they hate Trump that much, shouldn't they hate Putin more? Putin has done more to damage the EU than the US.
Or has it? The US has been pretty hands off with Europe. It seems a benevolent hegemon if anything. Maybe a hegemon is worse than an enemy in people's perception though. An emey offers a challenge and a target but a hegemon offers... Humiliation? Not sure, just spit balling here.
Right. Putin could hold mass executions and the EU parliament would be all like "tsk tsk, baddie Vladdy, that's a human rights violation!" but Trump's mean tweets are what send them into absolute hysterics.
Russia "slowly boiled" Germany and the rest of Europe over the first two decades of this century. Like a skillful drug dealer, it got Europe addicted to its pipeline gas and easy-access oil, and bribed the powers that be to look the other way, nah, outright support this status quo.
Now Europe is trying as hard as it can not to wake up from its delusion, but it's a slow and painful process.
The bribing part is really crucial. The number of left-wing German politicians who have Gazprom's arm elbow-deep up their asses is grim even though hardly baffling.
And then there's Schroeder, and of course how can one forget the inimitable Karin Kneissl (for those who don't know who she is: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-67624834). It would be comical if it weren't tragic.
I actually think the worst was Merkel, because the cartoonish capture of Schroeder was well-covered and understood, while Merkel had both the enormous power and a reputation for pragmatism and even-headiness, so she could keep advancing Nord Streams, for example, and get her way. She had the best chance to stop Putin, and she did the opposite.
I'll believe it when they actually appropriate a larger military budget. And if they want true military independence, they either need a credible nuclear deterrent against Russia or a reliable alliance with a country with one (better shore up on those UK and French ties).
Well, yeah, good. Depending on the US while they're run by an authoritarian troll who'd feed his grandmother to the wolves if it earned him a dollar is just not a good idea.
It does? Aren't we taking over Gaza? Or is it the Gaza in Mozambique? Do the dufuses, I mean, the BEST PEOPLE, running our government now know the difference? One has so many questions!
If trump actually takes over gaza I hope the crowd boo him for the rest of his life and the miltrey desserts for even risking starting another war over sand.
The problem with listening with what the tv star means is that the man lies and a/b tests crowds
I said Germany; as a demographics doomer I dont think you should confuse Germany and France, nor their proximity/economic dependence to the middle east oil/oceans
What Britain should have done is turned the Empire into a federation -- something like the EU. This was actually discussed in the 1880s, but nothing happened. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Imperial_Federation
> 30% off odd of bandaid fixes, such as trump being elected ... and selling the western federal land in new cities for a gen Z middle clas
> Such fixes would be *extremely* wise
*IF* trump start making new cities and it isnt just talk; my view of the future drastically improves; but it may still not be enough and we enter a darkage anyway; id call this time line "managed decline" where we never replace institutions as fast as they are dying but there are attempts to make new ones; maybe for every 5 cities that are overran with homelessness and basically seem unlivable to my tastes, 1 new city gets made. That bluntly, would obviously not be good enough but it would be better then 0, which is a not unrealistic probability in my mind.
Has any culture increased its birth rates post contract with the modern world? Is there any new appersational projects?
I feel like I'm forever pointing out that the Australian "baby bonus" scheme which handed out modest (~$5000) bonuses for births seems to have caused a meaningful blip upwards in birth rate from 1.7 to 2.0. It started in 2002, so the oldest of these additional kids are already in the workforce and paying taxes.
Although $3-5K is a small fraction of the cost of raising a child, I feel like the psychological effect was large enough to put some potential parents over the edge into having another one. It's nice to know that your efforts are appreciated.
If I might propose something for the US, then why not structure a baby bonus as student loan forgiveness? The Democrats are falling over themselves to forgive student loan debt anyway, and turning it into a pro-natalist policy might get Republicans on board. By being restricted to college graduates it would also be expected to be on the whole eugenic rather than dysgenic, though I wouldn't use those words to talk the Democrats into it.
There is already a Child tax credit for about that much. Both Harris and Vance talked about expanding it during the campaign (no idea what trump said). haven't heard it talked about it in 2025.
There are some that are not exactly on the internet anymore and that I had missed. I've been reading them to my 16-year-old. They are insanely fun and mind-bendy.
Is this published with Scott's consent? Does he receive a royalty? (Maybe it's a strange question, I was just surprised that I didn't recall this book being mentioned in SSC or ACX)
Also, are there any other books by Scott published on paper, aside from this and unsong?
SlateStarCodex is published under a CC license (https://slatestarcodex.com/about/), anyone can print and share it. In this particular case, it doesn't look like there's any profit (all money goes to the printing service).
There's been a heated discussion recently on X about the "Great Man" interpretation of history that started with a tweet about Elon Musk. Historians are calling it debunked and claiming that no contemporary historian takes it seriously, others are arguing that modern humanities are ideologically captured and that the Elon Musk/Trump phenomenon is a clear example of its validity. I lean towards it being an accurate descriptor of history, especially recent history but I'm willing to be convinced otherwise. What's the steelman against history mainly been driven by highly agentic individuals? To what degree is the modern consensus on historical narratives ideological?
> The second version of the story is also a lie, or at best a half-truth. The dead giveaway is in the last sentence, because it’s an iron law of history that revolutions never, ever come out of popular uprisings. The wheels of history are turned by political entrepreneurs — individuals or close-knit groups who notice ahead of everybody else that the world has changed in some fundamental way. This unstable situation where material conditions have shifted but society keeps rolling in its groove creates a sort of potential energy, like a charged electric field or a boulder perched at the top of a cliff. In the world of business we call this a market opportunity, and we admire those with the gumption to seize them. In the world of war and politics, market opportunities often look more like a forest full of dry tinder, and the would-be entrepreneur needs an additional quality, fanaticism, that enables him to calmly light a match and flick it over his shoulder.
I think it should be fairly clear and fairly uncontroversial that the importance of individuals, however defined, follows some kind of power law type distribution.
Among important people though, few have the kind of importance you'd actually want. Many are important but very replaceable, like Neil Armstrong. Among those who are not highly replaceable, many have the importance which just comes from being in the right place at the right time, rather than having made themselves important through their own force of will. And among those who did become important through their own force of will, most do not actually succeed in changing the world in ways they actually want; they change the world but make it worse even by their own standards.
The problem is that people understand the "Great Man" theory in two ways. The first one is that history is shaped by individual humans, and that more powerful or skilled humans shape it to a greater extend than less powerful humans. This is the interpretation that most non-historians follow, and it is correct. The second interpretation is that history can be largely explained by the impact of a few "Great Men", people of much greater ability than everyone else, to the point that they're heroic embodiment of virtues, and may be graced with divine inspiration. This is the interpretation favoured by historians, and is incorrect, which is why they hold this theory in low regard.
Why is the second interpretation incorrect? Setting aside issues of divine inspiration, many (most?) developments in history are largely the result of forces greater than a single individual, be it climate, geography, culture, and so on. The great man theory has a hard time explaining developments like the invention of agriculture or writing, the expansion of the Roman republic, the plagues that have afflicted the world, or the industrial revolution. Moreover, many events in history took place because of actions by a few individuals, but these individuals were hardly the embodiment of virtues. In cases like the First World War, most individuals involved were fairly mediocre.
This is similar to the motte-and-bailey fallacy, the motte being "powerful individuals shape history" and the bailey "almost all history is explained by the actions of a few heroic individuals".
I think it's important to note distinctions of scale. Over the long-term (~centuries) history is probably largely deterministic, but over the short-term I would imagine that it can be nudged into temporary and optional contingencies. Like say you re-ran history starting in 1920. It was probably inevitable that the US and USSR would be natural enemies but the shape of that conflict was highly dependent on WW2, which itself depended largely on one man. If history is a boulder on a hill then the great man is the one who pushes it off. He may not have had any say in the height of the hill but he gets to decide which side the boulder rolls down.
When I've heard modern historians talk positively about what could be considered adjacent to "great man" historiography, the terminology they use is "contingency", i.e. events that proceeded chaotically from many minor factors (one of which being choices and actions by individuals who were positioned to have wide-reaching consequences) rather than being driven by broader social forces. Basically, contingent factors are the sorts of things that a time traveller could interfere with in order to change macro-level events.
To be honest I think that the motte and bailey works the other way. The motte is “historical forces cause the rise of historical figures”, the bailey is then “who those actual historical personages are doesn’t matter”. Also divinity hasn’t anything to do with it.
Regarding the divinity bit, the original proponents of the Great man theory, like Thomas Carlyle, believed that those Great Men were divinely inspired. Hegel also believed in something like that (https://xcancel.com/BretDevereaux/status/1893510992459345991#m). Of course the people on Twitter arguing for (the first interpretation of) the Great Mean theory do not believe in divine inspiration for the most part. Both sides are just talking past each other.
Carlyle has been mentioned more than once here, and I agree that’s a bit overboard on the hero worship for great men. Also I think that historical forces matter a lot, but there are times when who is alive matters as well.
If Great Men define history, then surely we can predict the future by looking at what the Great Men want and imagining they get it. While the individual personalities of leaders is definitely a significant part of how effective superforecasters predict the future, this more extreme take doesn't really seem to be true.
To quote Bismarck, generally agreed to be one of the Great Men of history: "A statesman cannot create anything himself. He must wait and listen until he hears the steps of God sounding through events; then leap up and grasp the hem of His garment."
To the extent that particular men shape history, they only rarely shape it in the direction that they want it.
Rare indeed is the Great Man who not only shapes history but shapes history in a direction that he would have wanted. And even then, it's usually too easy to tell. Cecil Rhodes would probably have been pretty happy with the direction that Africa was taking at the time of his death, but if you fast-forwarded to the present he'd presumably be very disappointed.
In theoretical disputes like this I strive to see if there's a synthesis to be struck. Great Man history is admiring the destructive power of volcanoes. Modern impersonal history is like studying plate tectonics. Of course without understanding plate tectonics we cannot predict, understand, or properly appreciate a volcano, or fathom whence they draw their power. Of course the plates would keep moving and we would glean lots of geological insights from studying plate tectonics even if we never gazed upon a volcano. And yet none would dispute that when, where, and how a volcano erupts can change the world, or inspire fear, awe or religious devotion. They are symbols that entice people to study geography and geology, the stuff of metaphors and literature.
There have been individuals whose intervention in history has changed its course entirely, but many of the commonly assumed great men didn't have as large an impact as claimed.
The most obviously impactful individual of the recent centuries, I'd say, was Lenin. Even without Lenin there's a high chance that some sort of a socialist party would take at least temporary power in Russia, but Bolsheviks really were a remarkably expectional group in their combination of extremism and having the level of organization that allowed to get in power despite their extremism, and in the many parts of the revolutionary process it was Lenin who steered them through the decisions where they could have easily pushed too hard or not have pushed hard enough.
You don't think Marx was more impactful? Or do you think the same ideas would have been expressed by someone else if he had been killed at a young age? I'm inclined to say yes - ideas only become popular if society is open to them - but the timing might have been too late to influence rapidly-modernizing countries.
There's actually a relatively easy answer to what would have happened if Marx had died at an yearly age: the work we attribute to him would mostly be attributed to Friedrich Engels, who had already came to many of the same conclusions as Marx did before meeting him, as demonstrated by The Condition of the Working Class in England.
Take out Marx and Engels both and you might see changes, but then you'd already be deviating from the Great Man theory, as it is now.
No, not really. While Trotsky was probably the second most important figure among the Bolsheviks for making the Bolshevik Revolution happen, Lenin really stands head and shoulders above the rest both regarding leadership (Trotsky had a great flash of military leadership during the war but was inept in Bolshevik internal struggles, as shown by his eventual fate.
I think with most history, you can look at events and see that various impersonal factors at work were effectively creating "roles" for people to play in events that occurred, and there was always more than one talented person to fill that role. If Genghis Khan never exists, odds are we still get major steppe confederation invasions of China and elsewhere under powerful, charismatic leaders - that was a phenomena that had occurred before him, and would occur afterwards. If Abe Lincoln never exists, then the Republican Party probably just has someone else win the Civil War - Lincoln did not have any singular talents at that point in time that would have turned it otherwise. If Thomas Edison never exists, we still get the light bulb and the industrial laboratory - the reason they occurred was because of the technological and societal milieu of the time, not because of Edison's unique talents.
But occasionally it does matter, and so I think there genuinely are Great Men of History even if they are quite rare. Patrick Wyman of "Tides of History" had a really good set of podcast episodes recently where he made a strong case for Alexander the Great being such a person - his singular talents at that point in time were critical factors in the downfall of the Persian Empire and the rise of the Hellenic East, and they likely would have been irreplaceable if he had died early on.
>If Thomas Edison never exists, we still get the light bulb and the industrial laboratory - the reason they occurred was because of the technological and societal milieu of the time, not because of Edison's unique talents.
The light bulb, yes, (Swan was there too, and I think a bunch of other similar inventors).
The industrial laboratory... I'm not so sure. Were there other near-simultaneous inventions of it?
I do think that, besides critical _people_, there are critical _projects_. At the very least developments can be pushed forward or set back by a decade by a good or bad design choice. For instance, Lee de Forest's first triode "Audion" tube was partially misunderstood by Forest himself, so, if he had known that the role of residual gas in the tube was detrimental, vacuum tube electronics might has progressed around 5 years earlier.
It’s pretty clear to me that if Hitler had a squeaky voice and was terrified of public speaking the world would be totally different place now.
I also don’t believe that the “it’s just historical currents” believers actually believe this or there would be analysis and not that much concern about Trump as the “scientific view” should be that somebody like Trump was inevitable and if it wasn’t Trump then it would be somebody else. You would also have to assume that Not Trump but Exactly Like Trump would have won the election this time as that too would be inevitable.
Edit:
By the way there’s been some commentary about “historians don’t believe in Great men” but I think generally it’s sociology larping as a science (again) postulating scientific rules of history which they can’t explain nor use to predict anything.
As for historians many do believe that the actual people in power matter.
If it is inevitable that a nationalist or fascists comes to power in Germany - if that’s the reality of Germany in the 1930s, if he’s not Hitler he’s not going to do what Hitler did.
Throughout his tenure Hitler is doing things that bewildered his colleagues and the military. Even entering the Rhineland shocked the military, which was tiny at the time.
In any case the “some other Hitler would arise” argument needs to pick the actual person who would have replaced Hitler *and* be as radical as Hitler, and prove that he would have the personal ability to come to power. Is it Von Papen? Alfred Hugenberg? Werner von Fritsch? .
(Werner von Fritsch is an example of someone who would have been happy with a fascist or nationalist regime but was clearly unhappy with many of hitler’s policies which is why he was purged in 1938).
Even their diaries even high ranking Nazis showed disquiet at Hitler’s hubris. If they were in power then it’s likely they would have been much more timid - assuming anybody but Hitler gets the Nazis to power to begin with.
Unless you believe that historical forces would have produced another Hitler if Hitler wasn’t born - with the exact same policies and ability then you have to deal with the actual people alive at the time who could have run nationalist or fascist Germany - and none of them were Hitler.
Hitler's major impact on world history was him being a huge loser who lost. History would also be quite different if Pausanias of Orestis hadn't decided to kill Philip of Macedon, but he was hardly a "Great Man."
The great man theory of history is not saying that individuals have agency over history. That's a statement so obvious as to be near meaningless - Pausanias had great influence over history, as did the Taoist alchemist who stumbled on gunpowder. Nor is it saying that history is a chaotic system full of small changes that could clearly ripple out to large ones, and roads not traveled; there's a reason that alternate history is a subject of particular interest to history spergs, who debate endlessly the plausibility of this or that change or consequence.
It is specifically attributing ~all of history to powerful individuals making their mark. Hitler did not make his mark on history because he had great power and his individual choices thus had great influence on history; Hitler made history because he was Hitler, and he forced his way onto the historical stage. Reading Carlyle's On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History, it's hard to imagine jerking off Great Men any more than he does. For one quote:
> The great man, with his free force direct out of God's own hand, is the lightning. His word is the wise healing word which all can believe in. All blazes round him now, when he has once struck on it, into fire like his own. The dry mouldering sticks are thought to have called him forth. They did want him greatly; but as to calling him forth--! Those are critics of small vision, I think, who cry: "See, is it not the sticks that made the fire?" No sadder proof can be given by a man of his own littleness than disbelief in great men. There is no sadder symptom of a generation than such general blindness to the spiritual lightning, with faith only in the heap of barren dead fuel. It is the last consummation of unbelief. In all epochs of the world's history, we shall find the Great Man to have been the indispensable savior of his epoch;--the lightning, without which the fuel never would have burnt. The History of the World, I said already, was the Biography of Great Men.
The great man theory of history is not "human beings have agency over history," it is "special people make history." In the Great Man view, Hitler (or perhaps some non-evil equivalent figure, since Carlyle was a bit of a moralist in his perception) would come to power even without WW1 or the Treaty of Versailles or the Great Depression or the Weimar Republic being a creaky piece of crap.
If you mean "powerful people have agency over history," that's not great man theory. Great man theory is that there is something uniquely special about the great men themselves - that if we restarted history from 1918, all the same Great Men would rise to power in the 20s and 30s and 40s and so on (until, one presumes, we are far enough past the point of divergence that none of them are born).
"Eventually" is a word that hides a lot. It took centuries after the development of gunpowder for effective firearms to be developed - suppose that c. 1700 European chemists discover the formula. How long would it take them to make a good gun, rather than some comically shit handcannon? How would history have gone differently without gunpowder being available to the Mongols, the conquistadors, or the Russians in their taming of the steppes?
History looks very different with a Hitler who stopped at Poland or just reclaimed territories lost after WW1.
WW2 under different circumstances could have been the world vs Stalin instead of the world vs Hitler leading to communism taking the place of fascism as the unthinkable political system.
I'm not so sure. Rising fascist movements were a thing in more than just Germany in the post-WWI Europe (see Mussolini), and I think it's quite probable that we just get a different fascist leader in 1930s Germany. The big difference is that if we don't get Hitler, maybe that regime is just the regular kind of awful to Jews (harassment, bullying, expulsion) and not the Holocaust.
Without the Holocaust, there would not have been an Israel, i.e., a Jewish state in the middle of a predominantly Muslim region. Doesn't that count as "changing the course of history", at least for the Middle East?
I'm skeptical of that. A non-Holocaust Fascist Germany might have exiled even more Jews to Israel than IRL, and a lot of folks were already there in Israel trying to build it (and leading resistance movements to the British forces of Mandatory Palestine).
I think they were likely going to try for a state in the WW2 aftermath even if no Holocaust occurred - and the international community might have gone along, because "partition and ethnic cleansing to create 'homogenous' ethnic states" was sort of common in that era (a ton of it happened right after WW1 when the Ottoman and Austro-Hungarian empires fell).
That, and also there was Stalin, he was about to control most of the jews at about that time anyway, they would have tried to leave, and the mandatory Palestine would have been one of their only options anyway. Heartzel became a Zionist precisely because something was clearly coming, Hitler or not
I think you misunderstood the "butterfly effect". From Hitler to Holocaust, to foundation of Israel, are all relatively direct consequences. The butterfly effect, in contrast, denotes the phenomenon of a miniscule change in the starting conditions of a chaotic system leading to observably different outcomes without apparent causal connections between the change and the outcome. When the causal connection is obvious, as it is here, it's not the butterfly effect.
The quick version is that supposing Elon accelerated electric cars, rocketry and populism by 20 years, we’d still have got them in 20 years’ time. Apart from when rapid changes elsewhere have been important (e.g. AI), you wouldn’t expect 20 years’ timing difference to matter in the scheme of things.
With rocketry, I actually do think Musk mattered for more than just timing. You can see the counterfactual with Bezos (smart guy who is interested in space stuff and willing to put lots of money into it), and it's much less impressive.
Is it really less impressive? It looks to me like the tortoise and the hare, one company is building a sustainable business, the other is trying to speedrun getting to Mars and damn the wreckage along the way.
Then look again. Glacially slow progress does not equate sustainability, especially not in extremely capital intensive sectors like launch services. While BO is still looking forward to their first paid orbital launch, SpaceX has been raking in serious revenue for a long time now through Falcon 9 and Starlink – no "speedrun to Mars", quite the opposite actually.
As much as I hate on Musk as a person, SpaceX is really, really impressive. Probably because Gwynne Shotwell has been running the show since before Musk has gone full retard.
What about major historical forks in the road like Lenin being smuggled into Russia in 1917 and pushing very radical communism as opposed to the more moderate communists who were willing to work with the government? Or FDR deciding to embargo Japan leading to the Pacific War? Hitler goes without saying. Even if Germany was at a breaking point, it could have ended up under a less extremist fascist dictator like Francisco Franco or maybe even a highly charismatic communist who blamed capitalists in general rather than Jews for the humiliation of WW1.
I think even with Lenin, the Bolsheviks would have been in a strong position to try something like the October Revolution - the conditions had been set for it by the Kerensky government.
ya, individuals definitely define periods of history by being extraordinary, but they dont necesarily alter its course in any meaningful way. at least that would be far more rare if at all possible. A shakespeare can do what 100 lesser poets cannot, but hes not going to invent a new language. we still speak english. there's obviously limits to the impact a 'great man' can have.
And while it's also not inventing the entire language, Hangul, the current *writing system* of the Korean language, is said to have been spearheaded by King Sejong in the 15th century. [The original version of this comment said something stronger, but I'm seeing more ambiguous statements on the Web when I check again.] I think there's some South Asian and Southeast Asian languages that have had similar major reforms pushed by powerful individual leaders, but I don't remember which.
Hey Scott, I'm looking to turn "Universal love, said the cactus person" and "Idol Words" into audio dramas, as part of a program of live readings with music&foley accompaniment.
Seeing how you're still alive and such it's probably appropriate to ask for your permission, so first question is, are you ok with that?
Second question (assuming first question is a yes): are you interested in the result? Should I send the finished recordings your way and if so, where to?
Plan is to perform at raves and such and currently I cannot imagine any real money would be involved for anyone. However, if you would like to talk about compensation or conditions for that, please let me know where to reach you for further discussion.
Any Germans here who want to discuss the election results?
I think from the perspective of „Only Nixon could go to China“ the result is not the worst. If CDU+SPD form a coalition they can reform the dept break and allow more investments into infrastructure and are kept in check by are rather big progressive block in the opposition. I could imagine (/hope) that the later also helps to shift the discussions more towards progressiv topics (unlike the last term were the opposition was mainly a big conservativ and right wing block).
Before the election, I was quite worried about a government with SPD involvement (instead of CDU+Greens, which looked possible for some time) – mostly because of their lackluster support of Ukraine and military spending, and their commitment to raise pensions, which is completely inconceivable given the demographic developments and the share of the federal budget which already subsidises the pension system.
Now that Scholz stepped back in favour of Klingbeil, I am much less worried about the military side of this. I hope for political realism on pensions, and we're set for the most critical issues.
I'm not optimistic that CDU will be able to curb stifling regulation of businesses, but I'm willing to give them a chance.
Result's? Progressiv topics? Were instead of where? You are struggling hard to make your text intelligible in english while adressing germans? Wenn Du Dich mit deutschen austauschen willst, schreib doch einfach deutsch. But, okay, maybe it is worthwhile to share a talk between germans on this forum. I just can't contribute anything sufficiently kind, true and necessary, sorry.
Couple of things to be optimistic about; it could have been much worse. Primarily I'm glad that CDU+AfD cannot form a government, because nobody but the CDU would go into a coalition with them. Also glad that Merz's antics just before the election revitalized the Left party, enough that they got solidly above 5%. Also glad that Putin's red bitches from the BSW took some votes off Putin's brown bitches from the AfD while still staying below 5%. Also glad that nobody trusts the supposed economic-liberal FDP with their econ competence and they also stayed below 5%.
"Primarily I'm glad that CDU+AfD cannot form a government"
I beg your pardon? Granted I am only an American, but every graph I've seen of Bundestag seat allocation indicates that CDU/CSU can form a two-party coalition with either AfD or SPD and have a majority. The CDU/AfD coalition would have a larger, firmer majority than CDU/SPD.
> If CDU+SPD form a coalition they can reform the dept break and allow more investments into infrastructure […]
In an ideal world, this is what would be happening. In the real world, especially in the real Germany, I'm afraid that additional debt will be used to finance social programs instead of investments in infrastructure and national defense. When you listen to the German Mittelstand, you almost never hear about defunct infrastructure, but always about how they're drowning in excessive and incompetently implemented regulations. They would love to expand their operations and invest in their companies, but can't, because some bureaucrats in the Amt make that impossible.
I don't know how to realistically solve that conundrum. Will spending even more money solve those problems? I seriously doubt it. In fact, I fear it'll make the situation even worse.
No single party has the political will to radically reduce regulations and bureaucracy (much less a coalition of two or more parties), there are too many vested interests. May the FDP if they got an absolute majority, but even then I have my doubts.
No, we'd need an outsider to pull this through. Someone like Milei, paired with the productivity and efficiency of German SMEs, would be a truly transformative force.
I think we've avoided the worst conceivable outcomes. It's good to know that we'll probably get solid support for Ukraine, a moderate reform on immigration, possibly some economy-friendly measures...
I'm relieved that the BSW and the FDP are out for now - the FDP has the potential to be a useful party, but not with Christian Lindner, and the only thing that the BSW could have been good for was taking votes from the AfD, but that didn't happen. Also, their absence means that a two-party coalition is possible, which should be easier to establish and more stable than a three-party coalition.
20% for the AfD is not good in the long run, but a lot of things can happen in four years - maybe we're lucky, and both Putin and his American lackey bite the dust soon?
I just checked the voter migration charts. An estimated 60,000 votes for BSW from previous AfD voters, compared to 350,000 from Linke and 450,000 from SPD. Yes, maybe some of those would otherwise have gone to the AfD, but it's not like BSW attracted AfD voters directly.
Also, the 4.9% of votes for the BSW don't count in the allocation of seats in the Bundestag, so everyone else's share is inflated by 20/19... so for the AfD, it's probably a wash.
American here, but curious about the results and optimistic that they may point to some European ability to counteract the captured US government. Two questions:
1) Do you think the presumptive coalition will be able to encourage more unity in the face of the Russia/Trump alliance? If not, what are the effective blockers in Europe?
2) The English language media I’ve seen has been very concerned about the AfD, but seems to be sighing in relief. Is that a reasonable response, or is the festering Ossi vote waiting in the wings like the RN in France? What policy changes could bring AfD voters back into the fold? Would some reindustrialization in the East or other economic wins shift things, or are AfD voters now partisan enough (like US Republicans) that policy changes won’t shift the tribal borders much? How much attention should we pay to this trend?
1) I hope so. I think the key players are Germany, France and Poland - if their leaders see eye-to-eye, good things can happen.
2) I hope that an immigration reform (plus reindustrialization if we can pull it off) will move some voters back to the center.
Also, there's a long-standing pattern in German politics that right-wing protest parties disintegrate due to bickering and infighting after at most a decade, because the people who gather in such parties are self-selected to be quarrelsome assholes. The AfD is long overdue IMO; I guess they've been kept afloat by successes in the elections, but any kind of headwind could cause them to crumble. (I admit this may be wishful thinking.)
What kind of immigration reform is actually possible/likely in Germany? The non-AfD parties have been resolutely refusing to give the people what they want on immigration for decades, are they really going to start now?
It think that topic was made bigger then it actually is. I think that topic got so big because during the last government there was a clear split, the ruling parties were the ones who were historically on the "pro immigration" side and the opposition parties where the "against immigration" parties.
The changes to the immigration laws from the last years are already having an effect and the majority of the immigrants are having jobs after a while. Additionally the EU asylum reform will take effect this year.
With the CDU now part of the government it will be against there interest to further fuel the conversation. I believe the demographic changes are so monumental that the pressure from the economy to allow work migrants will shift the conversation.
They will if they've got any sense. Personally if I was Merz I'd consider offering AfD full control over immigration policy, in return for them giving full backing to his foreign and defence policies.
Yes. The CDU risked a major scandal a few weeks ago, letting the Bundestag vote on a fairly aggressive immigration bill that only they and the AfD ended up supporting. I assume that if you spend that much political capital, and you win the election, at least a slightly reduced bill will be passed (the SPD seems to be willing to take some steps in that direction as well).
How strict is party discipline in the German political system? In the US, representatives and senators can pretty much break with their party whenever they want. In the UK, going against the party line is quite rare (though free votes have been allowed, e.g. the recent euthanasia debates). I know there were some intra-party splits on those immigration measures recently. If the CDU and SPD leadership come to a consensus on an immigration reform bill, and they can afford to lose about a dozen votes, is it pretty much guaranteed to pass? Or could enough SPD or CDU members of parliament kill the bill (assuming there aren't any votes from the AfD)?
Under normal circumstances, party discipline is quite strict. There are rare occasions where it is explicitly lifted if the topic touches on difficult ethical issues (a vote on a reform of abortion law is the only example I can think of right now), but otherwise delegates are expected to suck it up and vote with the party line.
Since the ruling coalition split up last November, circumstances were not normal, and majorities were more ad-hoc, but the CDU's plan is to form a stable coalition pronto and return to normalcy.
How likely do you think it is that Hungary / Slovakia/ Slovenia will be spoilers to a more muscular European approach? Or will something happen outside of the EU organization where the NATO rump might be able to dig in better.
(Also: I’m so sorry my country is putting the world in jeopardy, again. We tried as hard as we could…)
I sure hope that it will be possible to either sideline Hungary etc. or bully them into cooperation. (Not the MO I'd prefer, but these are tough times.)
I suspect what might happen in measures taken both within and without the EU. The problem with the EU is a lot of things require unanimity meaning things can't get done
I have a Substack that I've been writing / updating intermittently exploring the idea of cooperation, in the context of the global future, building towards how and why cooperative AI, and cooperation with AI, is needed, and possible, but very much not a default. https://exploringcooperation.substack.com/
If people find this interesting enough to subscribe, I'm likely to prioritize it higher, and post more - and I'm also open to any kind of feedback on the content. (Either as comments, or directly; I'm easy to find online.)
About me, as @Mallard suggested: I'm a public policy researcher / Tetlock-era Good Judgement Superforecaster / Expert in AI risk and Biorisk / university visiting lecturer who has worked as an independent contractor for Open Philanthropy, Future of Humanity Institute, RAND Corporation, and a variety of other EA-affiliated organizations. See: https://davidmanheim.com / https://linkedin.com/in/davidmanheim
I'm very excited about some of the future posts about the future and AI, but I keep getting excited about the posts I want to write, then I realize I can't cover parts of what I want to say without additional background about things I've been thinking about in the past several years - there's a lot to say!
You may want to edit in a few words about your credentials / background, since many people may skim your username or not recognize it, and figure it's just another random guy with a Substack.
This video provides an explanation of the trend towards simpler shapes, especially around windows: the invention of caulk!
I never heard of this in the context of this debate, and I found it pretty convincing.
If you're short on time you should still watch the first few minutes, the core of the argument is made there. Actually I would skip the last few minutes even if you have time, they're not the most informative.
When you fit a window into its opening, it's never going to line up properly, that would require crazy tolerances of maybe a couple millimeters (you might be able to make windows that accurately but good luck building a substantial brick wall with tolerances under a centimeter)
(I would add that wooden windows and will probably shift with time, so a rigid joint probably wouldn't cut it)
Before the invention of silicone joints or expanding foam, this problem was solved by adding a bunch of overlapping pieces of wood or stone, that would be cut on site to fit both the opening and the windows, thus closing the gap and masking the inconsistencies. Obviously this was very labor-intensive, but once you're cutting pieces by hand one by one you might as well make them pretty and intricate
Now that we have caulk and expanding foam, it's way easier to mass-produce not only the windows but the structural elements of the facade, and then fill the gaps.
Of course this didn't come without difficulties, especially early on, but it seems quite hard to go back to the way things were
There's some truth in the politics- and trend- related narratives for sure, but I find a technological explanation more convincing when it comes to a single durable shift, with no cycles.
It also provides some ground to my feeling that even though I love old architecture, it would be weird to precisely mimic its style today: it's because the style used to be functional, and now it isn't anymore
Similarly windows used to have little brick arches at the top, to absorb downward force above the window; which required a bunch of manually cut bricks. These have been replaced by reinforced concrete lintels, which are off the shelf.
Thanks for sharing this! I hadn’t heard this theory before, but it makes some sense to me.
I wish I had a better sense of where the physical/economic/social boundaries of the ugly building shift lie. I don’t wish there were baroque leaves in the facade of any building I go into, but seeing hermetically sealed polyhedral volumes without eaves gets my blood boiling quickly. My sense of comfort in housing is most pleased by Craftsman houses of the 1920s, which are short on ornament but long on accommodating normal human lives. If anything, those 1900-1930 houses I’m thinking of have less ornament (plywood cabinets, for example, and plain lumber molding) than the mass-produced 1980s tract home I grew up in. I like the caulking hypothesis, but I don’t have a sense of how much explanatory power to give it.
I see what you mean, and I think I agree, it's not just about ornaments
I feel like the caulking hypothesis does some work to explain why some ornaments fell out of fashion more systematically than others (namely frames and ledges around windows and doors)
Unrelated to the caulking question, I find wrought iron balconies are way prettier that balconies made of tubes and extruded profiles. That said, it I were to design my house I'm not sure I would be inclined to pay 3 times as much to have prettier balconies
If you're going to cut wood on site, making it intricate and pretty is a lot more work to be done. If you're mass-producing windows to be easily slotted in, then the cost of making mass-produced ornements is much lower.
Funny timing, just moments ago I posted "Should Tyler Believe in God? A Bayesian Update" ( https://orthopraxis.substack.com/p/should-tyler-believe-in-god-a-bayesian ), inspired by Tyler's recent CWT with Ross Douthat. Probably should have shoved most of the math into an appendix, a future edit perhaps. (Much of my intended audience may not have much Bayesian background, so I probably fell into the trap of wanting to clearly define everything.)
Huh, so we've reached the "federal enforcement decisions being based on direct personal bribery of the POTUS" stage. Awesome.
===
"In December, Popular Information reported that Chinese crypto entrepreneur Justin Sun purchased $30 million in crypto tokens from World Liberty Financial (WLF), a new venture backed by President Donald Trump and his family. Sun’s purchase resulted in a cash windfall for Trump. On Wednesday, the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) and Sun sent a joint letter to a federal judge, asking for a stay of Sun’s case. Today, the judge granted the SEC’s request.
In March 2023, the SEC charged Sun and three of his companies, accusing him of marketing unregistered securities and “fraudulently manipulating the secondary market” for a crypto token. The SEC accused Sun of wash trading, which involves buying and selling a token quickly to fraudulently manufacture artificial interest. Sun was also charged with paying celebrities, including Lindsay Lohan, Jake Paul, and Soulja Boy, for endorsing his crypto “without disclosing their compensation,” which violates federal law.
A few weeks after Trump won the 2024 presidential election, Sun publicly announced that he had become WLF’s largest investor, buying $30 million of its tokens. Sun added that his company, TRON, was “committed to making America great again.” Sun’s purchase put millions in Trump’s pocket. WLF was entitled to “$30 million of initial net protocol revenue” in a reserve “to cover operating expenses, indemnities, and obligations.” After the reserve was met, a company owned by Trump would receive “75% of the net protocol revenues.” Sun’s purchase covered the entire reserve. As of December 1, this amounted to $18 million for Trump—75 percent of the revenues of all other tokens sold at the time. Sun also joined WLF as an advisor.
While the purchase benefited Trump, WLF tokens are essentially worthless for Sun, as they are non-transferable and locked indefinitely. Nevertheless, Sun has since invested another $45 million in WLF, bringing his total investment to $75 million. This means Sun’s purchases have sent more than $50 million to Trump, Bloomberg reported....
Now, the SEC seems poised to negotiate a favorable settlement with Sun or drop the case entirely. Yesterday, the SEC and Sun filed a joint request for a 60-day stay in the case against Sun to “allow the Parties to explore a potential resolution.” Sun seems pleased. He responded to news of the request for a stay on X, posting three handshake emojis.
Last week, Brian Armstrong, CEO of the crypto trading platform Coinbase, announced that the SEC was dismissing its lawsuit against the company. The move came after Coinbase boosted Trump’s crypto meme coin, donated $75 million to a pro-Trump Super PAC, and chipped in $1 million to Trump’s inauguration celebration....."
Jane Wickline explains the problem I’ve always had with the trolley problem. - SNL clip
“Either way I’d be so wracked with guilt that within a year I would kill myself.”
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=mprkxTmMeAo
Rationalist dating advice on a mainstream TV.
Truly the Singularity is near.
Is "Trump gets Greenland, Putin gets Ukraine" a beginning of Molotov-Ribbentrop 2.0? The second step of the deal, dunno, Trump gets Canada, Putin gets Baltics? Etc.
But even if yes, that wouldn't make much sense strategically. For USA, that is. Even if you have an ambition to expand your territory, why not destroy Russia first... and *then* stab your allies in back? They would expect it less than they do now. (Plus, you could bribe China, by giving them a part of Russia.)
Then again, maybe to accomplish the plan, you actually need the combination of American army and Russian propaganda. (Or maybe not, because China could use TikTok instead?)
> why not destroy Russia first... and *then* stab your allies in back?
Because 1. They would be able to conquer those countries much easier if they joined forces, and 2. the US can't even afford to do that, because Russia has an absurd amount of nukes. On the other hand, if Russia and the US worked together, they would have combined control of over 90% of the world's nuclear weapons. Might be enough to raze the rest of the world.
What are your plans for the coming recesion?
I have decided to stop doing things I think are good, planting trees whose shade I will never sit inder etc etc and just make as much money as I can, however I can, while hurting people I don't like as much as possible.
So, I have some investments lined up to pick up some properties I can extract rent from, I already saw a big return on; investments in various prison/related things.
Honestly, this jas kinda been a revelation. caring about things being true or immoral or whatever is a sort of mental illness, if you judge based purely on what will gain you success and status in society.
ugh
What do you mean by `coming recession?'
On some level, a recession is always coming (just like winter), but can you be more concrete? On what timescale do you expect a recession to start? What economies do you expect it to effect, and how severely (% change in GDP per capita and % unemployment would be the standard measures). How long do you expect it to last? What is your confidence level in these predictions?
Fairly, I 85% expect over the next 2-3 years at least a couple consecutive quarters of negative growth (not 0 growth, but negative growth), with a 51% chance off a 2008 level crash. Even if there is no recession, I am 95% on a stagnation scary enough to spook some people.
A good chance to swoop in and get some durable assets at fire sale prices, if you have cash on hand.
I was too young to hit the 2008 great pillaging, I intend to get my pound of flesh this time.
Meh, you're way too overconfident. War is generally very good for the economy.
this is a thing people say that is not and has never been true.
Wars ending are good for the economy, wars starting are quite bad.
Regarding Zelensky/Trump, I'm surprised at how little the commentary has focused on the substance of the mineral deal. E.g. a lot of reporting/commentary on "he walked away with nothing" but is the actual deal a good one? I finally found some details on it here:
https://www.csis.org/analysis/breaking-down-us-ukraine-minerals-deal
The lack of any security guarantee and instead the focus on "if we have a vested interest in your country, SURELY we will defend you against future aggression" seems very thin. I could imagine a scenario where a ceasefire along current owned territory gives Russia two years to rebuild, during that time essentially no actual investment takes place for a variety of reasons (on both sides) and when Russia re-invades towards Kyiv, there's nothing to stop him.
Given all that, I'm guessing this was still not the optimal outcome for Ukraine - Trump is now dug in on an anti-Zelensky stance which means many other will be too. But it doesn't feel like he was on the cusp of a great outcome for Ukraine and then lost it at the last second. Also if he had just politely declined to sign the deal behind the scenes he opens himself up to statements from the white house that he refused a good deal.
FWIW, Fox News of all places does have an article suggesting this was a factor:
https://www.foxnews.com/world/heres-real-reason-trump-zelenskyys-deal-blew-up-oval-office
Well, you can find all the details of the deal by reading the leaked draft:
https://s3.documentcloud.org/documents/25545394/read-the-draft-text-obtained-by-cnn-on-wednesday-morning.pdf
The deal is explicitly 'commercial in nature', but the US will cheer Ukraine on as it tries to secure security guarantees from... somewhere:
> The Government of the United States of America supports Ukraine’s efforts to obtain security guarantees needed to establish lasting peace. Participants will seek to identify any necessary steps to protect mutual investments, as defined in the Fund Agreement.
I really think it was the oval office confrontation that blew up the deal, and that that confrontation was precipitated by JD Vance. You can see the shift in Trump's demeanor in real time as JD and Zelensky are having their spat. He didn't want to seem like the less tough guy. If JD wasn't in the room, the deal would have gone through.
Trump has signaled openness to continuing with the deal, and Zelensky seems to want it too. For Ukraine, it's the foot-in-the-door technique. *Some* US involvement is better than the status quo, which was trending towards nothing. You could imagine a situation where a ceasefire allows Ukraine to rebuild with US military aid sent to protect their interests in the minerals, whether or not substantial investment happens during that timeframe.
Thanks for sending the text! I read it and ... um. I really don't understand what Ukraine gets out of it at all.
There's an explicit requirement that Ukraine provide 50% of revenue from all monetization of resources - and no commitment at all from the US side. AFAICT there isn't even an explicitly even split of control of the fund ("maximum percentage of ownership of the Fund’s equity ... will be to the extent permissible under applicable United States laws.") although that seems so unbelievable that I imagine I'm missing something.
Seriously - other than vibes, what is Ukraine getting out of signing this?
The deal doesn’t apply to already-exploited resources, only new ones. Also, it says that the money from the fund will be used to reconstruct Ukraine.
So the bull case is that they sign a future fund agreement in which the US invests in developing untapped minerals, fund revenues are used firstly to reconstruct Ukraine, and the US’s interests are backed by implied military force.
In that case it wouldn’t be too dissimilar from a typical mineral concession in which a company gets 50% of the natural resource revenue in exchange for developing the resources.
A guarantee that they won't get invaded by the US?
I lol'd
Isn't this just a pretty classic good cop, bad cop situation? The administration was never going to tolerate any concessions being made towards Ukraine.
The administration (Treasury Secretary Bessent) negotiated and signed the draft deal, as did Ukraine’s cabinet and PM. Yeah, the deal didn’t contain any real concessions towards Ukraine, besides removing the “repayment for aid” language and saying that (at least some of) the money would be used to develop Ukraine.
But this wasn’t a good cop bad cop situation. Vance wasn’t negotiating and he didn’t have any problem with the deal, he just thought Zelensky was too ungrateful. Trump alone would have let Zelensky spew his spiel and then go on to sign the deal that achieves basically none of what Ukraine ultimately wants.
I really think they should’ve let the Ukraine delegation pack their lunch and take it with them at least
> The lack of any security guarantee and instead the focus on "if we have a vested interest in your country, SURELY we will defend you against future aggression" seems very thin.
I wouldn't imagine that political negotiations are simple `pros - cons`
Idk how much a real effect it had, but "white elephants" as a concept still survives across an ocean. A long term amortized repayment, could be a huge victory for zely; maybe think of it like convincing a bank you have good taste for your 2nd mortgage for a remodel bathroom.
Celegans posted the actual text:
https://s3.documentcloud.org/documents/25545394/read-the-draft-text-obtained-by-cnn-on-wednesday-morning.pdf
and I don't see anything of value going to Ukraine at all..
Not sure I totally understand your comment? What would be the *1st* mortgage in that analogy? And by white elephants you mean, "Ukraine will commit to giving us money which we want so much that we'll defend it"?
It seems that would be a guaranteed losing proposition for Ukraine - either the cost/value of future US intervention is less than the value of the mineral revenue we're receiving; or the cost is higher (e.g. actually having to fight off Russia) and we just bail on them. Ukraine is guaranteed to come out behind, right?
I suppose there might be some "keep getting the US incrementally more invested until loss aversion kicks in" but man... I can understand Zelensky not wanting to sign that document.
But I admit I know little about diplomatic agreements - that's the first one I've ever really read.
Trump said in his first cabinet meeting and retruthed a screenshot saying his plan was to send American miners as a deterrent against further attacks, because they would be backed by the threat of the US military.
> What would be the *1st* mortgage in that analogy?
The giant piles of money Ukraine has already gotten; opps saying the quite part out loud.
> It seems that would be a guaranteed losing proposition for Ukraine - either the cost/value of future US intervention is less than the value of the mineral revenue we're receiving;
I dont believe stacking debt is usually advisable for non emergencies and interest is interest.
OMG this is ... I don't know the right word. Watch Zelensky shoot himself in the foot.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7pxbGjvcdyY
It's the last ten minutes where all the fun happens, but you should watch some of the rest.
I hate Trump, but I also love him. a hate/ love relation.
You should watch the whole video, maybe skip the early Trump talking parts. The whole thing is pure political gold.
Yes, amazing, the word you’re looking for is “bullying”, and also “gang up”, or “jumped”. Such awesomeness, two well-fed bullies on the home turf, invite a chronically sleep-deprived leader of a country for three years fighting a ruthless invader, welcome a jet lagged man into a golden room and then jump him. Such power! Much victory! Very America!
And you know, this is not 2015, you don’t have to say you “hate” Trump before confessing your love for the fucker. It’s totally fine now.
Huh, did you watch the whole 45minute press conference or just the clips your news service wanted you to see? I saw this from Marco Rubio https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P4MzGljlpr8 Which is pretty much how I remember it. I think what is really going on is that Zelensky doesn't want peace, or at least only peace if Russia is heavily penalized. He's not going to get that so he doesn't want peace. He's much too angry at Putin for that. So my most hopeful outcome. Zelensky falls on his political sword, takes one for Ukraine, signs the peace deal and is thus unpopular and doesn't win reelection. Otherwise the war continues....
Trump is basically asking Ukraine to pay protection money for no protection. That’s a problem.
Zelensky made a faux pas (which I attribute to English not being his first language, his lack of sophistication in diplomacy and being tired) by challenging Vance about diplomacy (making the point that Ukraine had signed a few deals with Putin that Putin has reneged on.)
He never should have said “What kind of diplomacy are you referring to JD?” he really should’ve nodded politely and waited for the press to leave. That was the trigger imo. I think Vance was caught flat footed by that and proceeded to ad hominem immediately.
The second blunder was telling Trump about the nice ocean. All in all a sh..show after that. I don’t think it was a planned mugging..
Name a decade when Russia didn’t start a war or invaded someone? Russia broke every agreement it signed with regard to Ukraine, starting with the Budapest Memorandum. But I’m sure Putin will be honest now, pinky promise.
The stupidest thing Ukrainians did was giving up the nukes. Look at North Korea, Kim certainly learned that lesson.
Ukraine never had nukes to give up. They had Soviet nukes on their territory that they had no access to or means of launching. A bunch of defunct missiles sitting in their silos wouldn't be much use.
Though I agree the geopolitical lesson is stark. If you want your country to be safe from aggression, have nukes.
Agreed.
Yeah but name a decade america didn't start a war or invade someone, etc., ....this isn't a criticism that can be taken seriously, sorry
.
Yes of course if America shouldn’t do something it means Russia may.
I agree with you about the trust Putin nonsense. Almost no one in Eastern Europe would buy that.
What do you imagine happens five or ten years after the "peace"? My prediction is that Russia rearms and attacks again. Do you see any reason to believe otherwise?
Note that all I am saying here is that the past behavior is the best predictor of future behavior.
Wouldnt that apply to most peace treaties? If the aggressor has not been crushed, and no third party holds the peace, why wouldnt they try again? Yet, most wars are not total.
I suppose most wars run until they reach some kind of natural equilibrium, where neither side expects any significant gains in the future, so there is no reason to go on. And that equilibrium is probably not likely to change dramatically in a year or two.
The current situation with Russia and Ukraine seems less in an equilibrium. Yes, the front lines are not moving much recently, but the limiting factor here is running out of ammo/drones/something. Which could dramatically change e.g. if the current sanctions on Russia stop.
Most intrastate territorial conflicts run until they reach the "natural equilibrium" where one side is wholly victorious and controls all the disputed territory and the other is wholly defeated and controls none of it. Stalemates or near-stalemates like we've been seeing in Ukraine, are not the norm.
>I suppose most wars run until they reach some kind of natural equilibrium
Again, that sounds reasonable in theory, but I think there are many fewer such equilibria than there is peace. For example, no war of attrition would have an equilibrium like that - predictably, someone will run out and then get totally rolled. And there are others; Prussia had captured Paris, but only kept Alsace-Lorraine and some money.
More generally, a lot of simple game-theory approaches just predict a lot more total war and/or unconditional surrender than actually happens. The Zizian justification for their violence is taking one such warlike game theory seriously for example.
Why do people think Russia will attack again if they achieve their original goal, namely neutrality, demilitarization, and gaining the Donbass? It seems like most people are utterly incapable of modeling Putin's behavior and so can only see him as a maximalist empire builder.
>Note that all I am saying here is that the past behavior is the best predictor of future behavior.
The Ukraine war has many parallels with the Georgian war. Has Putin gone on to claim the rest of Georgia? His stated aims were achieved in Georgia and he has not re-invaded. So why think he will with Ukraine?
>Why do people think Russia will attack again if they achieve their original goal
You mean Crimea? Yeah, they definitely won't attack again after 2014.
Crimea and the current war are precipitated by the same events, namely Russia losing political control over Ukraine. It doesn't support your implied claim.
Good point. Instead of invading Ukraine again, Putin may now decide to invade Moldova or Kazakhstan.
> Why do people think Russia will attack again if they achieve their original goal, namely neutrality, demilitarization, and gaining the Donbass?
I thought the original goal was... uhm, there is a guy called Vladimir Vladimirovich who wrote an essay about it, must be some kind of Russo-phobe:
https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/On_the_Historical_Unity_of_Russians_and_Ukrainians
He also said Ukraine and Georgia in NATO were red lines. So how do we determine when he is speaking truth and when he is attempting to sell the war? This is where modelling the man's motivations could help, if people were capable of that.
Those last few sentences ... "these words may be perceived by some people with hostility. They can be interpreted in many possible ways. Yet, many people will hear me. And I will say one thing – Russia has never been and will never be “anti-Ukraine”. And what Ukraine will be – it is up to its citizens to decide."
Geesh IDK, sure with some probability. What would be better another war in ten years, or this war lasting ten years?
Gee I don’t know. Maybe you should ask Poland, Estonia, Lithuania, and Finland.
I think Ukrainians will make that decision. They’re used to being stabbed in the back.
I read that interaction VERY differently. First, it's not at all clear how big of a mistake Zelenskyy made because it's not at all clear that the meeting contained any good outcomes for him and for Ukraine. It's certainly possible that if he'd bowed and scraped and fawned over Trump (as Trump seemed to want) that Trump would have been more willing to help Ukraine. But it's just as possible that he would have spoken nicer words and then proceeded with the same actions he's been signalling for weeks. Trump certainly hasn't built himself a reputation for reliability or trustworthiness, so assuming that he'll help a weaker partner just because he suggests he will or just because he acts momentarily favorable towards them is foolish.
But second, by far the biggest ramifications of this incident lie *outside* the U.S.-Ukraine relationship. The rest of the world was watching and taking notes. Trump's behavior rather strongly suggests that he no longer considers Ukraine an ally[1], but rather a client state. I think there are very, very few world leaders right now who are interested in becoming U.S. client states: having that sort of threat out in the open will substantially change how much of the world relates to the U.S. This is especially true because this incident is part of a larger pattern, that's becoming hard to ignore. I expect a lot of countries that previously had close relationships with the U.S. to start to distance themselves, cooperating more directly with each other and cutting the U.S. out of as many areas as they can. Of course, Russia and China will both try to capitalize on this to build alliances of their own, but it's exactly this same sort of behavior that's kept them from succeeding in the past, so it's hard to say if they'll get anywhere.
[1] And yes, a weak and embattled ally can still be an ally. The relationship between Ukraine and Europe and the (former) relationship between Ukraine and the U.S. was beneficial for both sides.
Yeah, my conclusion is either Zelenskyy is a monumental idiot or he knew there was nothing to be gained from Trump either way. You come as a supplicant seeking support, while being hosted by the POTUS on his home turf, and get into an arguing match? If there was a chance he could get anything to help Ukraine, Zelenskyy should have smiled and nodded the whole time Vance was carrying on. This is diplomacy 101, the weaker party doesn't dictate the terms.
On the other hand, Zelenskyy backed the Biden/Kamala side but his horse lost the race. Trump was skeptical of supporting Ukraine and Zelenskyy thought US support was done. If it publicly looked like the US was throwing him under the bus, maybe it gins up more support from the EU.
But Nato and other European countries, certainly the UK, Germany, and Japan *are* de facto US client states. They have been since suez and 1945 respectively.
Pretending that they're not doesn't change this. Ukraine isn't just not an ally of the US on equal footing, it's not an equal ally of demilitarised European countries. To suggest otherwise seems lacking any rationale.
If the U.S. is too persistent in failing to understand the difference between "ally" and "client state" is going to end up with very few of either in a few decades' time.
I would assume that client states don't have a realistic choice, allies have interests that align.
If treating allies like client states was going to result in neither after a few decades I suppose the USA wouldn't habe had any since about 1970. I think it's easily disproven as a sure thing.
But the U.S. has NOT spent the last 55 years treating its allies like clients states. That's the point. Sometimes it acts arrogant or pushy, but it also done quite a lot of genuine fair(ish) deal making, compromising and looking for win-win solutions. As you say, allies have interests that align, and a large portion of the world--especially of the developed world--has found its interests aligned with the U.S. quite frequently over the past 80 years and cooperated with it on that basis, despite the occasional headaches.
Now Trump very much seems to view a large swath of other countries as subordinates rather than allies. Acting that way is a very large, unforced error. Very few of those countries are interested in being subordinate to the U.S., *especially* not subordinate to an openly rapacious, imperious, heavy-handed and poorly-led U.S. And you are very mistaken if you think that the rest of the developed world *has no choice* but to cooperate with the U.S. What a ridiculous notion. What, exactly, is the U.S. going to do to force us?
lol Germany and Japan had no choice. UK and France following suez too. I guess thr whole cold war never happened. How about those elections in greece and Italy that had a thumb on the scale to stop USSR sympathiser communist parties having a chance of winning?
I'm going to chalk this up as TDS as that's what seems most likely - if you have an emotional need to lash out because their leader doesn't obey the same social norms as you then nothing I can say is going to stop that.
I watched Zelensky on the Lex Fridman podcast. It seemed there that he's not really ready to make peace with Russia. I can't blame him in some regards, but from the other side this is the time to make peace happen. If it doesn't... ? As far as you second point I think I agree, though we can debate whether that is a good thing or not. I'm reminded of Tanner Greer's recent post. https://scholars-stage.org/on-the-euro-american-split-i-dread-possibility/
Regarding the U.S. position in the world, it's not so much that I think the continuation of U.S. diplomatic or military hegemony is either necessary or especially desirable. It's more that the direction Trump seems to be pushing towards is *even less* desirable.
I get the U.S. frustration over NATO, for example, and a security alliance situation where the U.S. played a more equal (rather than leading) role, with a more equal (rather than disproportionate) share of the costs absolutely seems like a desirable end-goal. But that doesn't seem to be where Trump is heading. When your reaction to frustration with the costs of your security alliances is to unilaterally flip over the table and spit in everyone's faces, what you *don't* get is a more balanced alliance situation. What you *do* get is security alliances that *exclude you*, and may be in part focused on *containing you.* That is exactly where post cold-War Russia ended up, for example, and I hope you can see that it isn't a great place to be.
The same dynamic applies to trade. The U.S. is an important trading partner of a lot of countries right now, something that currently *helps make the U.S. rich.* Trump seems to be dead set on weaponizing that situation. Which can maybe work in small ways in the short term, but in the long term what happens is all your spurned trading partners just trade with each other and cut you out. If the U.S. works to make its trade relationships toxic for the other parties, it will have fewer and worse trade relationships in the future. Obviously. The U.S. that Trump seems to be envisioning, which does all its own manufacturing and cuts sharply down on its intake of both foreign goods and foreign expertise is (if it is even possible, which is dubious) a *much poorer country* than the one you currently live in. It's a country in which each dollar goes much less far. You live in the richest country *in the history of the world* and a large part of the reason for that is because it positioned itself (especially after World War II) to bring in the best parts of everywhere else. It is honestly baffling to me that so many people who claim to love the U.S. are so eager to take a wrecking ball to the pillars of its success.
Oh dear, that's a lot.
About Trumps style. Bluff and bludgeon and bluster, I don't like it either, but it's his style and I'm afraid we're stuck with it for four years. I will say that for a few moments during the above press conference we did get to see the 'real' Donald Trump.
About the US economy. I live in Trump country (rural America), it's easiest to describe what's going on out here if you've read "Coming Apart" by Charles Murray. Smart people go to college and mostly stay in the city where the high paying jobs are. Out here there are manual labor jobs, builders, and roofers and such. (Hard jobs) And some low paying $20/ hr light factory work. There are no jobs by which a worker could support a wife and kids*. I think we need to try and bring back some of those manufacturing jobs we sent overseas. And yes bringing them back means some stuff is going to be more expensive. But think of the benefits. Jobs, families, security for families and security for our country, because we can make stuff here again. Make American Stuff Again. :^)
*sorry that's not true, some builders and tradesman can turn a nice profit and have nice families.
"About the US economy..."
This was certainly on my radar when I was typing the above. To be clear, when I say the U.S. is the richest country that has ever existed--which as far as I understand is true--that *certainly does not* mean that all its people are free of economic hardship. I think the booming U.S. economy has left a lot of people behind--people in rural areas and people in urban areas both--and I think it's both basic human decency and good politics to try to help those people.
But first, noting that the U.S. as a whole is (by any objective measure) fabulously wealthy is still quite important. It means that the problems that these areas and these people are suffering from are *not* do to a lack of overall economic strength. Politicians often talk about strengthening "the economy" generally, or about how "a rising tide lifts all boats," in this particular instance this rhetoric is either mistaken or misleading. It's a problem with the economy's shape and structure *not* it's size: if economic growth alone could fix it, there would *be* so many desperate and poor people in the wealthiest nation in history. This is very much evident where Trump rails against other countries "taking advantage" of the U.S. in trade policy: even if he succeeds at securing trade deals that are better for the U.S. without just pushing trading partners elsewhere, there's no reason to expect the benefits to be spread to the current "losers" of the economy: more likely it will just make the rich richer.
And second, I don't think Trump's ideas have much of a chance of fixing that. I'm honestly not sure if he even *intends* that (though I'd lean towards "yes, at least for those he sees as deserving, which isn't everyone"), but intentional or not, I have a very strong suspicion that he will make these peoples' lives worse, not better. I have quite a number of converging reasons for this. And I think that even for goals that he both says he has and acts like he has, his policy program is pretty terrible. Just as a simple example, if the tariffs are meant to bring manufacturing back, then they should NOT look like huge trade barriers announced and then delayed unpredictably, with zero stability or certainly. They should look *first* like a program of government investment and subsidies for the relevant industries, with a clear road-map of tariffs to be slowly applied *later* once those industries have some ability to build up capacity. I cannot think of a worse way to get manufacturing back then this sort of protectionist flailing.
Finally, I'm not especially convinced that the economy Trump seems to want is even possible anymore. It very much has a "trying to make water run uphill" feel to it. Yes, one can sort of imagine a U.S. that does a bunch of its own (less efficient) manufacturing and pays more for a bunch of goods as a sort of roundabout jobs program for people in the rural areas. But then you have 300 million people (yes, *including* almost everyone in those rural areas) who have a whole bunch of constant, decentralized incentives to route around the government's artificial blockages, whether that's finding ways to buy stuff abroad anyway, using less of the things whose prices are thus inflated, or simply electing politicians who will remove the barriers. Capitalism and constraint both breed innovation, and here you have lots of people motivated to innovate *against* the government policies. I don't really think the centralized oversight of the state is going to be equal to holding that sort of system in place. I'm reminded a little bit of Soviet-era planned economies. Perhaps that's overly pessimistic, but I really, really get a sense of "wanting to turn back the clock" from large parts of Trump's policies and...the clock doesn't actually turn back like that. The world of 2025 is different from the world of 1955 or 1875 in ways that no legislation can change.
Finally let me say that I *do* think helping most of those screwed by the current U.S. economy probably is possible. I just think it will need to look like leaning into the past 70 years of economic change. Find ways for the rural areas to do useful, productive stuff that *don't* look like trying to compete against the comparative advantage of the whole rest of the world at once.
OK thanks for all that. I think we agree on many things. I have no idea if tariffs are the right thing to do. Maybe not. I'm pretty sure that, *They should look *first* like a program of government investment and subsidies for the relevant industries,* is probably not the right thing to do either. We don't want the government 'picking' winners. We want some free market type thing. Tariffs are at least neutral in picking winners at home. I kinda suck at writing so let me end my end of this nice conversation with this. Trumps an unknown wild cannon. I have little idea of what he'll do next. He could very likely end up selling the whole populist working class group of us down the river. That does seem most likely... an yet is there any other option? I'm going to remain hopeful for now.
And do you think Trump will bring it back? Who do you think gets hurt by aluminum and steel tariffs? You’re directly increasing manufacturing costs for American companies. Great jub Trump, that will make America great again.
At this point I can’t even care. When those 20/hr manufacturing jobs start drying up, maybe these voters will realize who did it to them.
Never mind, as long as those coastal libs cry everything is right in the world.
I don't think "make peace with Russia" is currently among the option Zelenskyy has been presented with. That's the problem. Everything I've heard has suggested he was willing to consider Trump's mineral deal--as audacious as it is--but only if it came with American security guarantees. That's exactly the sort of thing *required* for anything that could reasonably be called peace. Otherwise it's just a pause for Russia to re-arm, reposition, and prepare to conquer more of Ukraine.
Is it your position that Zelenskyy should accept a peace deal that includes tangible concession from them but gives them no durable guarantees? I cannot honestly see why he would do that. Ukraine didn't start this war, they very badly would like *not* to be fighting it, but they have never had a "make Russia stop attacking them" button and it doesn't seem that Trump is actually offering one. Rather, his offers seem (as much as I can tell, which is not much) like fairly transparent efforts to exploit an ongoing crisis without giving anything up.
The truth is, I expect (and I'd bet Zelenskyy now expects) American support for the war to dry up pretty quickly. That certainly leaves Ukraine in a bad spot--worse than the already bad spot they've been in. But again, it's not clear that there IS a better alternative on offer. Any better alternative would *necessarily* require the U.S. to give things that Trump is pretty plainly not willing to give.
Yeah, I'm (of course) not sure. I saw this from Rubio, which struck me as an honest assessment. (as honest as it can be giving the source and audience.) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P4MzGljlpr8
I have no idea what would be on offer in any peace deal. But before a deal you have to want to sit down and talk about the deal. Zelensky is too angry to do this, he hates Putin and doesn't trust him. I can't blame him and maybe that is the right attitude. I think the same dynamic happens in the middle east.
Then, why the hell would he even show up at the White House in the first place?
Also Musk is on Joe Rogan, I'm ~30 minutes, time for bed. When it rains it pours, must be March. :^)
Who is Joe Rogan? Never heard of him.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sSOxPJD-VNo
Isn’t he the guy that used to be a professional wrestler or something? I like to watch Jesse Ventura myself.
He’s full of hot gas sometimes but he has a good heart. He supported Trump for a while, in fact Trump flew to Mpls to meet with Ventura after he was elected governor. Jessie taught Trump his schtick. “Take the attitude that if you believe something it is true.’ Jesse used that one while he was rehabbing from an injury and had to cover his nut by playing a heel action commentator. It works pretty well for Trump, the whole ‘alternative facts’ thing. I was surprised it could spread beyond the pro wrestling crowd though.
Jesse broke with Trump after 1/6 though. That was simply an assault on the American system. Too much for a former Navy special ops guy.
Zelensky didn’t shoot himself in the foot. He was ambushed by the Vance Trump clown show.
It was disgusting.
Zelensky was the only straight shooter there.
Those other two were acting like a couple of mafia goons.
_________________
NEWS ANALYSIS
Behind the Collision: Trump Jettisons Ukraine on His Way to a Larger Goal
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/02/28/us/politics/trump-ukraine-zelensky.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=articleShare
________________
‘This Is Going to Be Great Television’: Trump Sums Up His Zelensky Showdown
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/02/28/us/politics/television-trump-zelensky-ukraine.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=articleShare
Huh, OK my take was different. I think Trump's take is exactly right, Zelensky is the small dog in this deal.
Trump and Vance demanded that Zelensky shows gratitude to him personally – not to the US or to the American people, but to Trump himself – for … what exactly? For trying to extort a nation in distress? In Trump's own words, all the aid the US sent came from "the stupid President", not from him. Now he wants that which was freely given back, and Zelensky is supposed to be thankful?! How is that "exactly right"?
It's not about what's "right", it's about knowing your place. Not that it mattered in this case, obviously. This was the outcome the administration wanted. I do wonder what would have happened if Zelensky got down on his knees and begged. Would've been pretty awkward for Trump and Vance to tell him to fuck off anyways.
Copy that.
It was a tough watch. It's plausible that it was planned by Vance Trump but I don't think Zelensky played it very well regardless. He went into the meeting with the same plan he's been using for basically every meeting with every other world leader: express gratitude and thanks, remind people that Ukrainians are the good guys, and say/show something about some Russian atrocity. That's all well and good if you want to help the politician you're meeting with maintain public support for helping you, but it looks like shaming when you're doing to someone who's been under fire for trying to position himself as more of a neutral mediator than someone on your team. And while public shaming works well on the left, it's an irritatingly feminine tactic to people on the right, hence the 'litigate this in front of the American media' statement from Vance
You don't have a 2-on-1 televised argument with someone unless you're trying to humiliate them.
As if Trump ever needed a helper to try to humiliate someone on international television. Poor low energy Jeb!, forgotten already
True. He’s cruel, petty and vindictive to the core. I’ve met at least one ignorant asshole just like him in every blue collar bar in America. Exchanged a few words with those class acts myself.
I’m not as polite as Jeb though.
Zelensky would’ve been smart to have a translator in this meeting. He just didn’t understand the protocol. He should’ve just kept his mouth shut after Vance made his little diplomacy spiel and waited for the cameras to go away.
I think Vance and Trump set out to humiliate an ally in support of an adversary.
Z “Can I answer the question?”
T “No. You’ve done enough talking.”
i don’t think Trump can position himself as a neutral mediator when goes on about what ‘Putin went through’ with Hunter’s laptop, shifty Shift, word salad follows.
If I were in Trump's shoes and wanted to go in a more neutral direction, I'd have a hard time thinking of a way to do it as things stand. On one hand, you have 50-100billion of aid, intelligence sharing, and sanctions against the other party (which were just renewed). For the other, what is there if not vibes and (pretty embarrassing) shit talk?
Those things you list didn't all happen simultaneously. If the previous President supports one side, and then the next President supports another side, people will read that as a change from one side to the other, not as neutrality.
But also, neutrality doesn't mean "attack one side, then attack the other side." That just makes you look wildly unstable. If you're trying to position yourself as a neutral negotiator, then you want to present yourself as *friends* with both sides, say that you're pushing for some reasonable compromise. E.g. "We support Ukraine's right to self defense, but we believe that territorial concessions will be a necessary cost to end the war."
(Also, it is not just vibes, Trump has been demanding that rare earth metals deal.)
>If you're trying to position yourself as a neutral negotiator, then you want to present yourself as *friends* with both sides, say that you're pushing for some reasonable compromise.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kEOv4x_FIsc
He pretty much did start like that and it was like that for 80% of the meeting. Eg, 16:00, 27:30, 38:50 - especially the last one
It goes off the rails at almost exactly 40:25 after Vance does the standard "Trump great, Biden terrible" monologue and Zelensky for god knows what reason decides to get confrontational
Trump has been with Putin over US intelligence since Helsinki.
“Putin told me very strongly that he didn’t interfere. I don’t know why he would.”
I would like to express that, as an american citizen, I believe that Russia is meaningfully less likely to do more invading in the near term future if there are military guarantees for Ukraine's security, and continued sanctions on their economy until they convince their westernly neighbors they are no longer interested in empire expansion. Whatever the heck just happened, does not represent my values or beliefs about the world.
+1. This sucks. Fucking Vance as an attack dog.
+1. This is not a day I can be proud to be an American.
I am not an American (technically) but I have lived here for close to 50 years, and I share your embarrassment. From The Apprentice and The Sopranos to the White House. The disrespect thing was straight out of a Scorcese film.
It’s difficult to watch something I have taken for granted start to unravel.
USian here too, and I agree 100%. What a sorry display of pandering to Putin for Trump's personal interests. It's so transparent.
It was an ugly moment for sure. Unfortunately it wasn’t at all surprising.
It was very much like a scene from the Sopranos wasn’t it?
As a German citizen, thank you, it's good to hear that not everybody across the Atlantic is completely out of their mind.
I can only hope that European governments realize that the US isn't our friend anymore, isn't on our side anymore, and can't be trusted anymore – at least for the coming four years – and that we finally take national defense serious.
> , it's good to hear that not everybody across the Atlantic is completely out of their mind.
It's not even the entire Republican party, though the vice grip that Trump has over them means that it may as well be.
Yes. It seems inevitable that Ukraine will have to lose some territory, and that at the end of the day Putin might have to make that deal with Western Europe. So Western Europe will have to guarantee that partition once and for all. That’s a serious proposition.
Real twist is if Trump starts to find ways to help Putin, which I wouldn’t put past him. I think it’s pretty clear by now that he despises Western Europe much more than he could ever despise Putin. And if Western Europe takes over and there’s nothing in it for him well… it’s obvious isn’t it?
I needed to translate a paragraph of technical text from German to English:
iPhone native Translate app: terrible
DeepL: not too bad, with the emphasis on "too"
MS Copilot: pretty good at first attempt, I did tell it that it was a technical text on a specific subject.
For translating German to English, I've had good experiences with Claude.
I've never tried that specific combination of languages, but I have seen Google Translate do a good job translating between English and Swedish. Perhaps English and German work equally well.
Oh, I forgot about that one (I don’t use Google for search), thanks. I’ll try tomorrow.
Has anyone seen this article in NYT?
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/02/24/health/ai-therapists-chatbots.html?unlocked_article_code=1.0E4.w-UK.AMMhUYgPkD-r&smid=url-share
I have a very brief take on it here.
tl;dr AI therapists, and two dead teenagers..
https://open.substack.com/pub/bcivil/p/towards-a-new-paradigm-of-mental?r=257wm&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&showWelcomeOnShare=true
Just another day of memorizing amino acids and reading the Manifesto of the Communist Party. Feeling very college. How are the rest of you doing?
Re all the Trump stuff, from my own small corner of the world: I think people should stop taking investment from funds like a16z, founders fund, and sequoia.
I know a lot of people in tech comment/read/lurk on ACX, including many founders. I think many of them are absolutely disgusted and disappointed by what is going on with the tech industry right now. In my view, the supposed principled heroes -- people who claimed to be on the side of progress and science and growth -- have thrown in with reactionary imbeciles in a naked grab for power and capital. And every day there's some new and ridiculous atrocity that makes me increasingly sick to even be associated with the same industry.
I feel betrayed. And I'm now just so fed up by all the hypocritical VCs who openly support this admin that I'd rather sink my companies than take a cent from them.
I wrote an open letter to Marc Andreessen explaining in vicious detail why I hate everything he's become: https://open.substack.com/pub/angrytechie/p/dont-take-money-from-a16z
If you're a founder and any of this resonates, do what I'm doing and refuse to take their money. Do it quietly, do it loudly, but refuse all the same.
(note: I'm actively posting this from a burner account, sorry. I'd love to put a name to this, but I'm a coward and afraid of what the current tech oligarchy can do to people who they don't like in the startup space)
Can you help me understand this perspective? I'm seeing it a lot on tech spaces and I don't really understand it.
Like don't get me wrong. I think DOGE is harmful and idiotic. I think Musk needs to be placed into the formal Cabinet system to be properly circumscribed by Constitutional limits on the Executive. I think Trump is sowing chaos.
But getting mad at people for thinking differently than us doesn't actually help get our viewpoints implemented. Trump and Musk are here because people think differently than us. Our job is to convince them that we're right.
I don't think that Andreessen is just 'thinking differently'. I think he's being a hypocrite. I think he's going against the very principles he claimed to espouse just two years ago, and when I try and understand why, the only thing I can come up with is greed.
This part of the 'tech right' spent years taking a principled stance against authoritarianism, only to turn around and support a fascist. They took on the mantle of defenders of free speech, but are happy to back a regime that is literally banning news outlets for wrongthink. And they all claimed to be America-first -- a16z even has their whole American Dynamism thing -- even while 45 is mocking defenders of Democracy on the world stage in public.
Maybe our job is to convince some broader mass that we're right. I think one way to do that is to point out just how craven and backwards the supposed heroes of the tech world have become. But more than that, I am filled with blind rage and humiliation that these people claim to represent me and the field that I work in, and other tech people are too. And if we all say, with one voice "Fuck that bullshit", it will hopefully become clear that this is caused by a few very loud morons driving the train off the cliff, and maybe the rest of us can wrest back control before we go flying over the edge.
> This part of the 'tech right' spent years taking a principled stance against authoritarianism, only to turn around and support a fascist. They took on the mantle of defenders of free speech, but are happy to back a regime that is literally banning news outlets for wrongthink. And they all claimed to be America-first -- a16z even has their whole American Dynamism thing -- even while 45 is mocking defenders of Democracy on the world stage in public.
There's no hypocrisy in any of that if you consider that they were only against their own freedom being infringed. Freedom is a zero-sum game, after all. One man's freedom to cancel infringes on another man's freedom not to be cancelled. Are you really free if you have to live in constant fear of being exiled from civilized society simply for having the wrong opinions? The only way to overcome that fear is to destroy the opposition.
I wonder how much of this swing by the VCs is deeply felt, and how much is just opportunism.
Thank you for writing this. Depending on your circumstances, you might consider moving your team and launching in Europe. Recently, I've been very positively surprised about the strength of the ecosystem there, particularly for deep tech and/or technology transfer from academy to commercial products.
That would be giving up, and I'm not ready to give up on this country yet. I'd rather win, and then shove it in their face.
ACX's Three Horsemen: Deiseach, Eremelalos and anomie.
The rest are just a pony show.
Conquest, War, Famine, and Death. Hmm.. who's who?
I think Deisach is more a thorn under one of the saddles.
As a Person of Rotundity, plainly I'm Famine 😀 Eremolalos being in the medical field is either Pestilence or Death. anomie, bless him (her/them/it) is whatever and whomever they wish.
I think anomie would be miscast as one of the horse people/riders/person. Every apocalypse needs a disinterested observer. 🤓
I can't think of a 4th rightist that gets on my nerves and responds to almost everything. These guys/gals are truly in the trenches, always checking for new comments.
Sorry for getting on your nerves, Chance. Yeah, I do tend to respond to nearly everything, but honestly I don't get to talk about the multifarious range of interesting (and inciting) things on here elsewhere, so I'm like a toddler hyped up on chocolate on Easter Sunday. Or Elon Musk right now.
Though I wouldn't have thought Eremolalos was particularly rightwing?
Ill try harder
That fourth Horseman slot is still open, Monkyyy!
And seeing as how two (at least) of us are female, that should probably be the Three HorsePERSONS 😁
You never miss an opportunity...:)
If I did, I'd need to turn in my saddle and stirrups, now wouldn't I? 😁
oh, go plow the rocks of Bawn, willyou?
I never will endeavour for to plough the rocks of Bawn!
tl;dr: ChatGPT deep research 02/26/2025
7 questions, results: 3 correct, 4 partially correct
About the same net results as o3-mini-high. (b) improved (g) deteriorated
a) Correct
b) Fully Correct
c) mostly correct (two errors)
d) correct
e) initially incorrect, two prods gave correct result (some deterioration)
f) misses a lot, accepts additional entries smoothly
g) partially correct - find correct examples, but includes incorrect ones too
List of questions and results:
a) Q: Is light with a wavelength of 530.2534896 nm visible to the human eye?
results: "Light with a wavelength of 530.2534896 nm falls within the visible spectrum of the human eye, which typically ranges from approximately 380 nm to 750 nm. Specifically, light around 530 nm is in the green region of the spectrum."
https://chatgpt.com/share/67bf6edc-0afc-8006-891c-b5d105e9d70f
b) Q: I have two solutions, one of FeCl3 in HCl in water, the other of CuCl2 in HCl in water. They both look approximately yellowish brown. What species in the two solutions do you think give them the colors they have, and why do these species have the colors they do?
results: YES! "In conclusion, the yellowish-brown color of FeCl₃ and CuCl₂ in concentrated HCl can be traced to the formation of chloro-complex ions – [FeCl₄]⁻/[FeCl₆]³⁻ and [CuCl₄]²⁻ – which undergo electronic excitations (primarily ligand-to-metal charge transfer) in the violet/UV region."
https://chatgpt.com/share/67bf73e9-d8fc-8006-9509-320298bf2bfb
c) Q: Please pretend to be a professor of chemistry and answer the following question: Please list all the possible hydrocarbons with 4 carbon atoms.
results: Mostly correct, missed tetrahedrane and 1,2,3 butatriene. Somewhat more seriously, didn't qualify its answer to note that it was excluding some very strained molecules.
https://chatgpt.com/share/67bf7a40-e53c-8006-a919-e43ec6c2c4a3
d) Q: Does the Sun lose more mass per second to the solar wind or to the mass equivalent of its radiated light?
results: "Radiative mass loss outweighs solar-wind mass loss by a factor of a few, making the conversion of mass to energy (sunlight) the dominant cause of the Sun’s mass loss per second."
https://chatgpt.com/share/67bf7cdd-006c-8006-8b36-09302915a300
e) Q: Consider a titration of HCl with NaOH. Suppose that we are titrating 50 ml of 1 N HCl with 100 ml of 1 N NaOH. What are the slopes of the titration curve, pH vs ml NaOH added, at the start of titration, at the equivalence point, and at the end of titration? Please show your work. Take this step by step, showing the relevant equations you use.
results: Partially correct. First try still gave an infinite slope at the equivalence point. Needed a bit _more_ of a prod than o3-mini-high to get to the right derivative calculation for this point.
https://chatgpt.com/share/67bf850b-0514-8006-9315-16d1669a5721
f) Q: Please give me an exhaustive list of the elements and inorganic compounds that are gases at STP. By STP, I mean 1 atmosphere pressure and 0C. By inorganic, I mean that no atoms of carbon should be present. Exclude CO2, CO, freons and so on. Please include uncommon compounds. I want an exhaustive list. There should be roughly 50 compounds. For each compound, please list its name, formula, and boiling or sublimation point.
results: Pretty decent. It got all of the elements, as had previous versions. It got simple binary hydrides and fluorides, pretty much chomping along till it got to 50. It did't realize that "roughly 50" was a significant underestimate on my part. When I pointed it directly at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_gases, it _was_ able to fill in all the missing entries.
https://chatgpt.com/share/67bf9bd4-2c24-8006-a19a-a55494f00cf8
g) Q: What is an example of a molecule that has an S4 rotation-reflection axis, but neither a center of inversion nor a mirror plane?
results: Ouch! It successfully found the correct 1,3,5,7 cyclooctatetraene derivatives, but it _also_ claimed that Td species including ClO4-, CH4, and CCl4 satisfy the criterion, and they do _not_, each containing 6 mirror planes.
https://chatgpt.com/share/67bf8e2a-0270-8006-942e-78fb76cba44b
the elon musk and intelligence: its a bit worrying that smart people routinely fail to realize how much they use IQ as a proxy for things really not related to it.
musk has to be dumb because smart people are prejudiced to think intelligence is a sign of virtue. Or that it should lead people to the path of moral virtue. intelligence is a form of holiness while per Dogbert, you need to cast out the demons of stupidity.
the idea that high iq is just having different gifts and different weaknesses, and evil isn't stupid while good isn't smart upsets the worldview. To fill the void of religion people deify intelligence.
part of the reason why HBD is suspect is that is that intelligent people can often easily be racist and intelligence doesn't cure it. if anything intelligence just tries to justify racism through converting it to scientific objectivity. its not disinterested research and if racism is removed a lot of the impetus vanishes. No one backs it assuming they are the loser.
People just don't want to face that i guess. Self-examination. The dumber person is a bad thing, but so is the smart person but the latter will try to use his smartness to intellectually justify and universalize his vices COUGH polyamory.
The whole conversation just seems like an unnecessary sidebar. Let's say, for example, that we suddenly discovered irrefutable proof that Elon actually had an IQ of 87. It might be personally embarrassing for him or for the ever-narrowing pool of people who publicly praise him as a genius.
But it's not like that sudden reveal would change his ownership % in Twitter, SpaceX, Tesla, etc that are the source of his wealth (and thus his power and influence). Trump's not going to say "oh, your IQ is actually on the low side of average so I'm scrapping DOGE." The real world implications of "headline: Elon Musk actually only averagely-brained" seem, like his weird video-gaming scandal, to be limited to nothing more than some public embarrassment.
Yeah, IQ may be a good sign of potential, but Musk isn't a teenager. He's a middle-aged man with decades of real-world accomplishments. Judge him by those, for heaven's sake.
What would be the response if his IQ turned out to be 160+? Would more people take him seriously?
I doubt the needle moves much either way. I think we're super-downstream of Musk's IQ really mattering. Arguing about what his score *really* is seems to me like going back and trying to examine Bill Belichick's resume from his early career and finding out "the truth" about whether he over- or under-stated his qualifications to be a Special Teams Assistant for the Detroit Lions in 1975.
Maybe he'd be a bit embarrassed if a real lie was uncovered, but it has zero relevancy to his wealth, influence, his performance record in past coaching jobs or how much future teams would want him as a coach.
<mildSnark>
I'm waiting for the announcement from Musk that DOGE has decided to attack the false vacuum - metastability just isn't good enough any more. A constitutional crisis isn't enough, there needs to be a _cosmological_ crisis. ( grin/duck/run )
</mildSnark>
Since we're discussing (among other things) Elon Musk and DOGE and so forth, here's something off X in regard to the email asking government workers to provide 5 things they did last week.
Warning: NSFW
Also, good God, I can't believe this timeline. So all this is real and I'm not a Boltzmann Brain hallucinating chaotic random noise, oh really?
https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1894548030306541882
@elon thats ones a keeper, communicates clearly, isnt hung up about traditions, and wouldve been fired under woke, highly competent in their field.
But he has his loyalties elsewhere. They're being selected for loyalty, not competence. These workers aren't being asked to do anything difficult, they just need to follow orders.
Couldn't read the requirements properly, only returned four points for a five point list.
Sounds about par for the civil service 😁
Elon seems to be taking that in a much better spirit than I would have, he's engaging with it as a piece of humour rather than being offended/thin-skinned about it. I guess he's still on the natural high of being co-president!
I want to see a major statesman challenging another to a fistfight. And for the challenged to accept. "Hell yeah, meet you in the octagon!"
Not a major statesman but a congressman's comment about Tucker Carlson was pretty interesting.
Congressman Dan Crenshaw was caught on a hot mic making remarks about former Fox News host Tucker Carlson. During an interview with GB News, Crenshaw was asked if he had ever met Carlson. He responded, "If I ever meet him, I'll f****** kill him," and described Carlson as "the worst person"
The actual email sent to government workers said "approx. 5 bullets". I feel that four should be acceptable.
I like the idea of assembling a sort of typology of software bullshit.
I have done exactly zero research into this and instead just woke up and noted down the first several things that occurred to me.
Can anyone add to this?
BULLSHIT VECTORS:
(Idk what to call this but I'm thinking about what are all the big classes of bullshit-causing behaviour.)
- not using a system/tool/lib/procedure that's already there within the project, because you can't see it from where you're standing, or you cba to remember how to engage with it, so you re-implement a quick non-standard version of it just for your bit.
- misremembering/evolving what a system/structure/procedure was there to do and attempting to misuse/change it on the fly
- working at too low a level of abstraction (repeating specific calls in lots of places, copy/pasting the same expressions/calls over and over again, etc.; directly mixing lots of different moving parts of code that are more naturally thought about separately.)
- working at too high a level of abstraction (spending more time thinking about the flow+administration of the structure you've given yourself than actually doing the job; finding the structure itself is the main impediment to doing the job.)
REASONS FOR A BUG:
(Again I'm looking for the big classes that cover everything between them.)
- your mental model of the system (and all the black boxes within it) doesn't match what's really going on. --> includes shitty documentation+misleading phrases and implications (their fault) or your jumping in and making assumptions/not wanting to learn the details (your fault)
- a natural consequence/interaction/result of two things you've put in place is occurring, and you didn't foresee this interaction and know to look for it.
- something external to your system is reaching in and changing shit for you.
Is this basically just the concept of anti-patterns?
I think for the "bug reasons" list I want a sort of checklist that, when there's a bug, you can work down the checklist and find your bug in there. Bugs of the same type are probably best hunted for and solved in the same way. I think it would be useful to have a known locus for all possible bugs there can be.
For the "bullshit vector" list, that's closer to antipatterns, but ideally it's a "why is this not going well for me? Oh, it's because I'm doing something on the bullshit list." Ideally all known antipatterns would fit inside the general classes in the list.
I don't think a list of antipatterns does the job I want. It's too contextless and opinionated. Compare "you shouldn't use Big Balls of Mud because those are Bad," to "if you're finding yourself spending more time thinking around your class heirarchy than actually doing the functionality you need, you have too much abstraction."
On mature products technical debt is probably the worst bullshit I've had to deal with. Quick and dirty to make a ship date is an enormous drag going forward,
The word "debt" seems to imply that it is expected to be paid off one day, which is usually not the case in my experience. Either there are new features needed soon, so there is no *time* to address the technical debt -- or there are no new features needed soon, so there is no *budget* allocated to the project.
I guess "technical indentured servitude" is too long...
Another way to approach what I'm thinking about is, for a given decision, how can we quantify/qualify the technical debt it will bring with it?
If the deadline is close enough even attempting to quantify the tech debt or how it might be avoided is something there isn't time for.
In retrospect then, or in theory. There must be some way to know if, for eg, creating this class vs mutating that one is a good idea. If there isn't then the whole concept of tech debt is meaningless, and I don't think that's true.
I was thinking more along the lines of whether processing data or functional inputs in way x vs way y when y isn't implimented but x doesn't meet customer requirements, but you can instead use way z that has security/robustness/scalability/compatability/future work consequences that haven't bern quantitfied and are not knowable without non trivial thought and extra work.
Your example is also true, but I'd extend it to be the reason why you might create that class or mutate another, whatever purpose that is for, isn't fully known but has to say be functional and delivered in say 3 hours and its 10pm on a friday or something.
Thinking about it, I could have called the "bullshit vectors" list "sources of technical debt". As with the bugs, it would be nice to have a nailed down superset of all categories of tech debt.
People writing bad poetry and prose
do analogous things
Yeah but if your prose or poetry is bad you can just add more adverbs to fix it.
The hedge fund where the DeepSeek guy worked knew that, when DeepSeek went public (as an app), it would make huge waves and cause OpenAI/Anthropic share price to plummet. So they shorted them and made a killing.
This seems a wonderful semi-new example of a way for prediction markets to fund research. I'm sure this has already been written about; I don't even know that many details myself. If so can someone show me where?
Matt Levine routinely covers this stuff: https://www.bloomberg.com/account/newsletters/money-stuff
Are you sure they shorted OpenAI/Anthropic? They're not public companies; it's unclear what shorted would mean in this context. Did you mean Nvidia and/or Microsoft?
Apologies, I suppose it was Microsoft.
I know a Chinese American who’s a
quant at a US hedge fund, read a bunch of online stuff on Chinese language sites and thinks the same.
> podcast shares the number of way the un population numbers are gross over estimates
This real? Already baked in? Or is this, the china updates across several dysfunctional countries?
Hi Scott. I won't link to the post in case there's a privacy concern, but in one of your defunct blogs you made a post about dystopian fiction, and you mentioned a novel where "all Earth's countries have been renamed things like FRA-113 and JAP-289". But you didn't name the novel in the post. Do you remember what novel it was?
The reason I'm starting to doubt the Trump administration's sincerity regarding solving illegal immigration overall is that I haven't yet heard them starting up any kind of self-deportation promotion.
In order to get rid of the vast majority of illegal aliens in the US, you'd need to rely heavily on persuading people to deport themselves back to their home countries in an orderly manner rather than deporting them expensively and forcibly. It _ought_ to be fairly easy to persuade most of them to self-deport, because once you're at risk of sudden forcible deportation you'll realise it's better to get out now rather than wait to be nabbed off the street, put into detention for an indeterminate amount of time and eventually dumped on the streets of your home country with only what was in your pockets at the time of your arrest. Self-deportation gives you time to sell all your ill-gotten assets rather than leave them for an angry landlord to dispose of, or maybe you can even drive back home in your car. It gives you time to get visas to your home country for your anchor babies, to ensure that you're not separated from your kids when you're kicked out. So all you really have to do is deport 10% at random and another 80% will be scared enough to GTFO on their own.
If Homan and ICE were sensible they'd be on Spanish-language TV every day promoting this message -- get out now or it'll be a lot worse for you later. But I haven't heard of anything like this happening just yet.
A few years ago in Tunisia the government cracked down on illegal immigrants from Ivory Coast, Senegal, and other West African countries. Within a few weeks the Ivory Coast had organized regular deportation flights. But the Tunisians made this happen by kicking down doors, and beating up people on the street or putting them in jail. I think you are correct that self deportation would be effective, but they would almost have to turn America in to a police State in order to scare people enough.
Seems to me that they have their hands full just clearing out the federal bureaucracy. I'm not sure why people think the team can do that and handle the other big issues at the same time!
If Homan only has his area to focus on, I don't know why he should be distracted by clearing anything else out.
There are still Irish who are illegal (excuse me, undocumented) immigrants (overstayed student or holiday visas, fully intending to work in the USA).
They're not self-deporting, because of a mixture of (1) ah well maybe I'll get lucky and they won't catch me (2) I put in all this effort to get here, I'm settled here now, I'm not going to turn back and (3) maybe a political deal will be brokered to make me legal (Irish politicians still try and cut deals: https://www.oireachtas.ie/en/debates/question/2024-05-22/32/)
https://www.independent.ie/irish-news/deportation-fears-grow-among-undocumented-irish-in-us-after-trumps-inauguration/a1204373620.html
I imagine this goes double or triple for Hispanic/Latino undocumented; they've paid out money to coyotes to get them this far, they've settled down, no way are they going to just meekly turn themselves in.
How much luck do you think a "self-incrimination programme" would have, if tried? "Hey lawbreakers and nogoodniks, don't make the cops have to come and catch you, show up at your local police station today to fess up and go through the process of trial and conviction!'
Would you say the administration is not really being serious if they didn't try that?
To me the obvious solution is to crack down extremely hard on business who hire illegal immigrants under the table. Make the fines for hiring illegal workers quite high, have a few big publicized cases, and illegal immigrants should self-deport quite quickly.
The major goal of immigration to the U.S. is to find more economic opportunity. Take that away, and I'd imagine there isn't much point to being here, though I may be wrong.
The problem is that that would devastate the economy, at least in certain sectors (agriculture, construction, etc.). Maybe Trump wouldn't care about destroying California (even the red parts), but even he would think twice about destroying say Florida.
I have read that many businesses rely on the labor of illegal immigrants, including some large businesses or many members of some class of smaller businesses. I agree that fining them would be effective, but even this administration, comfortable with being hated, may pull back from setting off that kind of dynamic with businesses.
Mmm yeah that's a different problem. I thought they were declaring asylum seekers basically illegal though?
I think the Tories pursued this policy in the UK with no great success. It was called the “hostile environment policy” which is the most honest name in history I think.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Home_Office_hostile_environment_policy
"Self-deportation gives you time to sell all your ill-gotten assets"
"It gives you time to get visas to your home country for your anchor babies"
Wow, such a neutral and objective view you have. Which is to say, you are right to doubt. It has been exceedingly, *exceedingly* obvious to many of us for years that *solving* illegal immigration was never the goal and never the point. Not for Trump, but also not for a large fraction of those behind him.
You say self-deportation would be a more human alternative. That is EXACTLY why it isn't happening. The cruelty is the point. The cruelty has ALWAYS been the point. It's not subtle.
As a leftist, you are implying that the only 'solutions' to illegal immigration mean letting the immigrants stay?
No, and I really don't see where you could have got that from what I wrote. But I suppose I'll reply in kind: are you implying that anything that would qualify as a "solution to illegal immigration" would have cruelty as a central feature? Because that's the only way I can get your reply to make any sort of sense as a response to mine.
One could make e-verification required and easy to do, and gut every single welfare program that benefits illegal immigrants, or add bounties to counties for rounding them up.
Non-sequiturness aside, it really kind of *does* sound like you believe the cruelty must be a central feature. Nor do you seem content to confine it only to illegal immigrants.
You seem to believe that any option that forces illegal immigrants to leave is cruel.
The cruelty is the point? About people who broke the law?
And it's been pointed out online elsewhere that liberals are making the argument that they're perfectly happy with migrants being exploited as cheap labour with no rights, since they protest so much at the idea that "oh no, an immigration crackdown means all the people working near me never showed up for their jobs today!"
Who is being cruel there?
"The cruelty is the point? About people who broke the law?"
To whom are they being cruel, exactly?
"And it's been pointed out online elsewhere that liberals are making the argument that they're perfectly happy with migrants being exploited as cheap labour with no rights..."
I don't especially have to care what arguments (some) liberals are making here, not being a liberal myself. But while we're playing that game, let's ask what, exactly, Republican administrations have EVER done about this aspect of it? Personally, I think that cracking down on employers who knowingly hire people not legally able to work in the U.S. should have the book thrown at them. That would *both* help protect workers' rights AND reduce incentives for illegal immigration, all without needing to *anywhere near* as many cruel and inhumane things. I take the fact that this has never been much of a concern even among Republican administrations who make immigration a *central issue* to be yet more evidence that "doing cruel things to immigrants" is far more the goal than actually making any sort of headway on sensible immigration policy.
It would be much better if the home countries (including Ireland) could provide a good standard of living to their citizens so that they didn't have to go abroad.
The second best would be a proper process of allowing people to immigrate.
As it is, it's the worst of both worlds: people flood in, and are cheap disposable labour. Your Uber driver is doing better than he could at home, but if anything happens to him, what safety net does he have?
On the liberal side (and even more so the progressives) it's the dissonance between "capitalism evil, eat the rich, fight for $15" on the one hand, and "but we need this pool of cheap exploited labour (though we are not going to acknowledge that)" on the other.
"Well, yes, but how to do this is the hardest and most important question in development economics and has been for hundreds of years."
I must mournfully agree.
> You say self-deportation would be a more human alternative. That is EXACTLY why it isn't happening. The cruelty is the point. The cruelty has ALWAYS been the point. It's not subtle.
This isn't very charitable at all. What makes you think everyone on the right just cares about cruelty instead of the negative effects of illegal immigration?
I don't think that "everyone on the right" just cares about being cruel, nor did I say that.
Firstly, I think *this administration* mostly cares about being cruel[1] rather genuinely improving the issue.
Secondly, I think that the block of rightwing voters most loudly and angrily agitating about immigration share a similar primary motivation, which is a large part of why this administration appealed to them. "Build a wall and make Mexico pay for it" was never a sober and sensible anti-immigration strategy. But it was a pretty excellent "virtue signal" about Trump's willingness to prioritize loud, belligerence over actual policy effectiveness. Which is exactly what one wants in a leader if "make the outgroup suffer" is a primary motivation.
Third, I think there's a decent fraction of people on the right who care about illegal immigration and don't specifically optimize for cruelty, but it neither does it bother them at all. Political polarization being what it is, the second group reads as more "on their side" than anyone pushing for any sort of humane immigration policy. So there's not much practical difference between them and the people actively trying to be cruel, and the latter tend to be calling more of the shots right now.
Finally, I think there's a decent fraction of people on the right who don't care that much about illegal immigration at all, but realize that it gets other people on "their side" to the polls and wins them elections. These people have exactly zero motive to push or develop effective anti-immigration policy. The more sensational it is the better it works as far as they're concerned. But any policy that offered practical, durable solutions to the problems would work against their interests, so they're certainly not going to suggest or support such things.
I should add that I think the "negative effects of illegal immigration" are at least somewhat real, but also frequently enormously overblown. Further, I think there is quite a large space of potential policy that could be used to deal with them. So when a group converges on sets of policies that heavily emphasize actions visiting violence on relatively powerless people, it's entirely fair to judge them for it. People who wanted to BOTH push back against illegal immigration AND support humane and responsible government could certainly do so.
[1] "Looking strong" might be deeper motive, but the former is one way to do the latter.
Even if cruelty is the point, deportation done as Melvin described sounds quite satisfying to the cruel: Deport a random
10%, but first send them immediately to gitmo and deport from there after a longish wait. Lard all announcements for those remaining with insults and mockery.
Surely that’s more cruel than the threats and uncertainty that are going on now.
That makes sense to me. But a lot of what’s been done so far does not seem to me to have been done in a sensible way. I’m not taking about the goals —
I’m saying it looks to me like even someone in agreement with the goals would think the method was sloppy and inefficient.
At least in the case of Musk, I'm pretty sure that his stated goals have little relation with his true goals. Trump may just be dumb, but Musk certainly isn't.
I don’t find it hard to believe his real goals are to get rid of deadwood and make gov’t more efficient. He seems to like doing that. Greatly trimmed Twitter staff, runs Tesla in a way that extracts way more than usual
amt of weekly work from his engineers. In both cases I’m not at all sure he does a great job of setting up a lean mean efficient company, but he seems to think he does. So why wouldn’t he enjoy doing the same stuff to our gov’t, the biggest company of all?
What do you think his real goals are?
If the goal were really to get rid of "deadwood", you would start by trying to understand which parts were or weren't working, not just blindly smashing everything in reach.
> What do you think his real goals are?
To fill the government with minions who are personally loyal to Musk over the US and will do whatever he says regardless of the law.
https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/what-i-think-doge-is-really-up-to
Yeah, you may be right. I don’t think I’m terribly perceptive about people who crave to become powerful because I have such a hard time empathizing with their craving. I totally get wanting admiration and money but power? — running an organization just sounds like hell to me, and the bigger the organization the worse it sounds.
> If the goal were really to get rid of “deadwood,” you would start by trying to understand which parts were or weren’t working, not just blindly smashing everything in reach.
I’m not sure that applies to Musk, though. The sources I followed who were commenting on what he did with Twitter thought he was doing a terrible job. While I don’t know enough about Twitter and how to run things like it to make my own judgments, their comments sounded valid, not like motivated reasoning. For instance someone commented on what a bad move it was to change the name to X — said Twitter was one of the best known brands in the world, why though away all that brand recognition. Others commented on how certain moves, such as allowing words like ‘nigger’ to be used in Tweets, made Twitter lose most of its classy advertisers, and forced it do make do with people selling bullshit stuff like do-it-yourself home facelifts and earwax removal gadgets. And some tech people talked about him firing people that kept different parts of the system running, and noted lots of new glitches in Twitter after bunches of people were fired. So unless I was following a biased bunch on the subject of Musk’s performance at Twitter, seems like fast, impulsive and sloppy is his characteristic style of revamping.
Sure Musk does a lot of dumb stuff, but I don't think you can rule out that his true goal is to reshape the government, especially since they actually say that sometimes.
Incidentally, Richard Hanania also thinks that Musk's true goal is to politicize the government rather than cut costs: https://www.richardhanania.com/p/doge-as-a-control-mechanism-of-the
Seconded!
>It _ought_ to be fairly easy to persuade most of them to self-deport
This isn't obvious to me, inertia being among the most powerful forces governing human behavior
If these were high-inertia people they'd still be in their home countries.
If they were incentivized by legal action they would also still be in their home countries.
I don't think any of the illegal-recipient countries could easily make a threat credible enough to convince significant numbers of illegals to self-deport. Corny TV ads aren't going to cut it
If it's only 10% of people getting deported, people are going to take their chances and stay here, because the conditions outside the country are significantly worse, and getting forcibly deported isn't a death sentence. However, the calculation changes if the deportation process has a significant casualty rate. With the way they're planning to do this, it's only a matter of time before casualties start getting reported. That'll be more effective than any campaign.
One of the things it will be effective at doing, is convincing a great many Americans that they made a mistake in voting for Donald Trump. I think you *vastly* overestimate how eager most Americans are to see immigrants bleed out and die in the streets, Even some of the hard MAGA base will probably start to defect if that becomes at all common.
What? They're not bleeding out in the streets, some of them just end up dying in the camps or during transportation. Accidents happen, you know.
Poe's law being a thing, I have to be clear on this: Is this just satire, or are you seriously suggesting that the proper treatment of illegal immigrants in the United States is that they should be concentrated in special camps where they "accidentally" die while e.g. being trucked to a different camp?
I'm not making a moral judgement, I'm saying the administration should do that if they want immigrants to leave on their own to save on costs.
"It's not enough to remove the undesirables from our country, the only way it'll work is if we straight up kill them."
Just straight Nazi shit.
The Nazis actually didn't intend on a full scale genocide from the very start. One of their initial plans was actually to just deport them all... to Madagascar. Yes, really. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Madagascar_Plan But with the war, that plan fell apart, and we all know what happened next.
Golly! I wonder if there's anything to be learned from that.
Of course there is. It's that it can happen again, and there's nothing you can do to stop it.
I wonder if I could be a "trump whisper"(paid) yall take him to literally
The issue is he's said a lot of zany things that started as "just a joke" or plausibly deniable as just a joke and then later became actual policy. Making non-MAGAs flip out and wonder about whether he's serious about each thing is a big part of the point. I'm sure you understand that.
I understand and approve; trump clearly learned a way to interface with the red tape, renaming an obama agency and putting elon in charge to cause chaos, if nessery to keep rival lawyers busy, it was a good move.
The first story of the Gordian Knot didnt involve a sword and is a far better parable, need to untangle it somehow.
Who the hell would pay you for that? The people who share your understanding don’t need you, and the people who don’t share your understanding are quite content to take him literally. Not to mention the fact that what credentials do you have to convince anyone that you understand him better?
"As an Elon Musk biographer, I would peg his IQ as between 100 and 110. There's zero evidence in his biography of anything higher." - Seth Abramson
“You are in a cult,” he wrote in one before he later noted Musk “has zero *personal* intellectual achievements.”
https://sethabramson.substack.com/p/the-truth-about-musk-from-his-biographer
"Indeed, Elon was such an indifferent student in South Africa that he had to start telling lies to his biographers about reading multiple Encyclopedia Britannica sets all the way through—multiple, mind you! All the way through!—as a child to try to hide a human-average intelligence and an utter disinterest in organized education."
"After he graduated from high school as an indifferent student, Elon first flamed out at University of Pretoria"
"...Queen’s University, where he once again flamed out without finishing."
"sometimes he admits the truth—that he left Penn without graduating (if you’re counting at home, the third school he flamed out at) and didn’t get his degree until years later when his investors pulled strings to make it happen under dubious circumstances"
"But Elon Musk never intended to go to Stanford, and never matriculated at Stanford."
Musk is not an evil genius. Musk is not even a genius. He is simply evil. The cult, which some people in the so-called "rationalist" community belong to, needs to end!
Obscene Starting Wealth + Zero Moral Scruples = extra 50 IQ points in the eyes of fans. Trump has proved it. Musk is proving it.
So after reading Deiseach's comment, I acknowledge that Abramson is not an inherently credible source. He's not the sort of man anyone should say "well SETH ABRAMSON said it" because apparently he's sloppy.
However, that doesn't mean everything in the article is wrong. It just means the article is not credible for verifying anything (hence I'm not re-linking it).
However However,
I still *personally* find the article useful for researching Musk's bad press (I'm not telling anyone to do this), since it can be difficult actually digging for it.
For example, wikipedia doesn't mention that he was replaced as CEO at Zip2, but Britannica does:
"In addition, Musk was replaced as CEO by a more experienced businessman, Richard Sorkin, but remained executive vice president and chief technology officer."
Wikipedia does mention his ousting from Paypal/X.com twice:
"The company's investors regarded Musk as inexperienced and replaced him with Intuit CEO Bill Harris by the end of the year."
"Within the merged company, Musk returned as CEO. Musk's preference for Microsoft software over Unix created a rift in the company and caused Thiel to resign.[70] Due to resulting technological issues and lack of a cohesive business model, the board ousted Musk and replaced him with Thiel in 2000."
So to conclude,
I personally think Musk has many negative qualities and is not as intelligent as people think. And part of me wants to keep going through the Seth Abramson article and independently verifying things. But I simply don't have the energy. It took a surprising amount of time to verify that Musk was removed as CEO from Zip2. Chatgpt "believed" this, but the wikipedia articles on Zip2 and on Musk were worded so as NOT to say it. And then I found Britannica. Shrug.
For me, Musk's success is simply the result of someone who had the perfect combination of: obsessive focus on wealth (most billionaires seem to have this, or develop it along the way of the companies they build), extreme tolerance for risk and an ability to ignore enormous hurdles standing in his way.
I have no idea what his technical aptitudes are - his politics are now so unpopular that most of the voices online cannot admit anything positive about him. I've variously read people's accounts that he has no idea what he's talking about, and that he knows a surprising amount about aeronautics and computer science.
I think it's fair to simply look at outcomes: yes he was born to a rich family. But we have plenty of rich kids who never grow up to this level of influence. Ignoring his recent political turn, he did two really impressive things: 1) he started a CAR company in America and (imo) fast forwarded the inevitable electric car era by decades, and 2) began the era of private space flight companies.
SpaceX is a seriously impressive company - I don't think many would imagine in such a short time that they could usurp NASA's role in developing and building the next generation of space flight vehicles, but here we are. Tesla has benefitted enormously from Musk's cult of personality, and if all he had done was Tesla you could chalk it up to a fluke, but doing it twice in two very regulation-heavy industries, in America, is no accident.
It's unfortunate that the erratic qualities that seemingly power his ability to do these impressive things also seems to push him to political extremes that ultimately erode the American civil fabric.
I really don’t care whether he is genius or not. The big problem with him in his DOGE role is that he has the emotional maturity and empathy of a 10 year old boy. I suppose this would put him a couple years ahead of his nominal boss though.
Okay, I went to read that linked Seth Abramson Substack about Musk.
You expect me to believe this guy is coming with the truth, unbiased and with no axes to grind? I see the Kitty Kelly School of Biography is still going strong, and since this guy has a book to sell, whipping up controversy is more likely to get him publicity than "yeah, Musk is an okay guy".
"I’ve been a Musk biographer for two years now. In that time I’ve published hundreds and hundreds of pages of professionally researched content about the man—well over a book’s worth—here at Proof, an independent media outlet at Substack that ranks as a Top 25 U.S. Politics substack worldwide.
The longest report that I’ve published about Elon Musk so far is this one (see also the image-link below). It’s a novella in and of itself, despite being just one of many fully sourced reports on Musk authored by a bestselling historian and biographer whose focus before now was the political career—and political scandals—of Donald Trump."
Wowzers! So, uh, who is this famous and bestselling historian and biographer who writes for a Substack that ranks as one of the Top 25 US Politics substacks *in the world*? Because I've never heard of him, though that may be because I live under a rock.
Take it away, Wikipedia mon amour:
"Seth Abramson (born October 31, 1976) is an American professor, attorney, author, political columnist, and poet." They neglect to mention here that he's also a musician, which is mentioned later in the article. (I also get the impression that Seth himself may have written the article, but maybe I'm just being mean and paranoid).
He also says the linked article is "written by an Elon Musk biographer and based on OSINT research", and by "OSINT research", he seems to mean cut'n'paste jobs - look up everything written and published online or in the media, copy it all into one book.
The Daily Kos, an outlet for which I would not be carrying the banner, has an article from 2021 that is less than laudatory of Mr (formerly Prof?) Abramson:
https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2021/2/11/2015376/-Yet-another-thorough-take-down-of-serial-fabricator-Seth-Abramson
"We rightly mock and deride right-wing conspiracy theorists and conservative media outlets for delivering what their hungry masses want to hear instead of providing facts, truth and reality.
I have long crusaded here against our own versions of these peddlers of spun garbage— the propagandists who sensationalize, contort and combine facts into conspiracies and false narratives.
...Which brings me to serial fabulist Seth Abramson. I have railed against Abramson here in the past (including as recently as December 18, 2020) for the reasons I cite, above. Nearly every Abramson “mega-tweetstorm” contains a kernel of truth that is then spun into some conspiracy or upcoming event that is certain to occur, according to his telling.
As I have noted in previous pieces about Abramson, someone who cranks out a dozen 60-100+ tweet “mega-tweetstorms” a week is bound to get something right once in every 30 tries just by virtue of his overwhelming output (a point I made, satirically, in my own “mega-twitstorm” in October 2017). But he is by no means a journalist, nor is he an expert in any sense of the word. There are many writers here who are much better journalists and much more knowledgeable subject matter experts (especially on law) than Seth Abramson who has somehow managed to garner nearly a million followers on Twitter — while peddling huge, steaming mounds of dung.
Abramson did receive a law degree and for a period was a practicing lawyer, but as he started drawing a crowd during the Russian investigation, his Twitter bio described him as being a “law professor.” He was not, and never has been, any such thing, and when I and others pointed it out, his claimed law professor credential disappeared.
...Abramson’s particular form of mendacity has been taken apart numerous times by people who do actual reporting for a living, including McKay Coppins in The Atlantic, Jacob Weindling in Paste, and and Colin Dickey in The New Republic."
Hmmm. Sorry, Jamie Fisher, but Abramson is looking less and less like a credible source to me, but maybe that's just me. Let me finish with this nugget from his Substack article:
"For instance, Elon and Kimbal used to engage in full-on brawls—brawls that produced blood and even hospitalization—inside the office. Not just in the office, but in front of employees. To repeat: open, barroom-style brawls; in the office; in front of co-workers; between two men who were supposed to be leading that office responsibly and sagely."
Clearly our boy Seth was never an Oasis fan, brotherly murder attempts are par for the course there 😀
There are many people (Not as a percentage, but absolutely) who started as rich as Elon, fewer but still many without moral scruples, but only one of them is the richest man in the world. Elons starting wealth, and the average current wealth of others with such a start, are closer to the average american than to Elons current wealth. If he has no special talent, and noone whos rich, evil, *and* talented has overtaken him, talent propably just doesnt exist or doesnt matter in any way. It would be misleading to say his intelligence is average, because intelligence would be bullshit.
More generally, this idea that you can succeed *just* by being evil is crazy. Theres way more people willing to be evil for riches, than actual rich people. And I mean, if you were one of the top dogs, would you want it to work that way? Where lots of not-quite-top-tiers can climb up, above *you* even, just by deciding to be evil? Nah youd nip that in the bud.
Well, he obviously is a genius, just not in the fields where he claims it. He's an expert manipulator and a brilliant conman, he seems to have a talent for finding and hiring genuinely talented people, and he's smart enough to fake being smart in a way that's convincing to some genuinely smart people.
When it comes to actual engineering, though, he's near-peak Dunning-Kruger. His proposed hyperloop was a fractal arrangement of engineering nightmares, and his comment "It's a tube with an airhockey table! It's not that hard!" shows that he's either a genius engineer who solves all of those problems with ease, or a moron who doesn't even grasp the difficulties, or a bullshit artist who doesn't care. We can exclude the first option by looking at how far the Hyperloop got.
And don't get me started on sending people to Mars by 2022.
A lot of engineering decisions behind his Mars rocket, including the stainless steel build that was pooh-pooed by onlookers at the time, now are paying off. Most SpaceX employees attest to him being knowledgeable about the subject matter and willing to work hands on to solve whatever pressing problems are at hand.
I wouldn't trust anything people around him say, good or bad. It's best to look at objective facts (and FWIW I agree that SpaceX is objectively a big success, which implies that Musk did SOMETHING right there). I'm also confident that his employees would swear he walks on water regardless of reality.
I am not one of Elon Musk's employees. I am one of the people that NASA and the USAF pay to, among other things, watch over SpaceX's rocket-building activities and make sure they aren't going to explode while carrying NASA astronauts or vital national-security payloads. I'm also two degrees of separation from Gwynne Shotwell, Tom Mueller, and some of SpaceX's other top people.
The engineering of Elon's space vehicles is the work of brilliant people under brilliant leadership, and at least part of that is coming from Elon Musk himself. He is not even close to omnicompetent, as I think I've made clear elsewhere, Even within the realm of spaceflight, there are gaps in his knowledge. But he is legitimately a Rocket Scientist, and a very good one, not some midwit Mr. Moneybags who has to be kept away from the real work.
"make sure they aren't going to explode"
Good luck with that one, brother! You're doing a sterling job so far!
SpaceX actually listens when we give them advice on how to make their rockets substantially less explodey. Certain other contractors I probably shouldn't name, not so much.
And, as blank notes, the rockets SpaceX sells to paying customers, have I think the best safety record in the industry at this point.
Falcon 9 has a better safety record than the vast majority of rockets on record, including ones built by NASA.
By the bye, whatever happened to "don't say 'IQ' when you mean 'intelligence' unless you want to sound like an evil robot"?
Thats an absurd take, mantaining a web of lies on a 3 hour podcast surely takes some skill
Can people who think Musk is low-IQ or average-IQ explain what evidence would convince them otherwise?
My take on Musk is that he's a high-IQ guy who really didn't like his son becoming transgender and overdosed on redpills as a result. There are a number of people like that in this space.
Indeed, if Musk would just go back to school and apply himself, he might one day rival the titanic achievements of Seth Abramson.
I used to believe he was high-IQ, but after years of watching him say and do idiotic things, I no longer do.
So, it's not so much "evidence to convince me otherwise" as absence of evidence - specifically, absence of the many many publically visible behaviours that changed my mind - would have let me keep my initial impression.
High IQ does not make you immune against being an idiot. It makes you a more sophisticated kind of an idiot, and sometimes gives you a better chance to save yourself from the consequences of your idiocy.
Intelligence is necessary but not sufficient for rationality.
Anyway, this seems like a red herring. If people believe that someone is *wrong*, they should say so. Without having to discuss their intelligence or whatever.
What about having a high intelligence prevents people from saying or doing stupid stuff? Plenty of smart high school kids get into drugs and burn out. Lots of smart people have scandals that ruin their lives, often doing things (embezzlement, affairs) that average or even dumb people recognize as dumb.
Musk would be far from the only 'high iq' person to post stupid sounding things on social media.
I despise the present-day Musk. However, the paragraph on SpaceX in the linked comment is so flat out wrong, confused, ignorant, and a distortion of reality, that I wouldn't believe one word in the rest of that comment. If its author said that the sky is blue, I'd go outside to check.
He just seems a bit dim whenever I read or hear anything he's said.
"what evidence would convince them otherwise?"
Evidence that how intelligent someone seems in conversation/writing isn't a good indicator of their IQ I suppose.
Gathering the necessary sort of evidence sounds nearly impossible. Generally a smart person can easily convince me they're smart over the course of a 30 or 40 minute conversation, if it's the right conversation. But having a conversation with a high-profile public figure isn't really an option. With is wealth and at this remove, everything we're going to be seeing is image management, and thus inherently untrustworthy[1].
FWIW I place reasonably high credence on the hypthesis that Musk is a talented engineer, at least within some domains. I'm much more skeptical that he has the sort of cross-domain competence he seems to think he has.
[1] Of course, a lot of the negative things one hears are going to be likewise untrustworthy.
I think Musk is largely a midwit con-man, but that article is just unhinged. Oh no, Musk is conservative! Oh no, he LIED about that fact to be socially accepted in liberal California! Oh no he was a business opportunist and BS'ed his way to getting his lousy company acquired!
> [South Africa] had an emerging highly politically engaged Black population and emerging Black political class in the 1980s that would, in the 1990s, become a Black government Errol believed illegitimate and (yes, due to race) incompetent
I mean, doesn't the last 20 years simply vindicate that view? South Africa is collapsing in every measurable way and that's directly downstream of incompetent leadership. The black majority was handed a modern first-world economy and have flown it straight into the ground. In 30 years it will be politically and economically indistinguishable from every other sub-Saharan country. How do YOU explain that?
Trying to tar Musk by association with his father is all part of the absurdity. By many accounts, he didn't get on well with his father/was neglected. But the argument here is "his dad was an average white South African who had views on race that are repugnant to us, this is evil, so Elon is evil too because well his dad mumble mumble".
As to Musk's views, I think this is a case of the Overton Window shifting. I think that when he started out, he was within the general socially liberal worldview, but things kept swimming to the left and he didn't move with them*, then he got attacked for things and that pushed him more to the right, and here we are today.
*See Graham Linehan, someone for whom I have not a shred of sympathy and just cackle darkly at his travails in his progress from 'feted and lauded for standing up to hidebound priestridden Ireland with his liberal views and satirical comedy**' to 'beyond the pale transphobe boo hiss boo'. Andrew Sullivan had something of the same trajectory, though much milder: he was the gay guy who didn't frighten the conservative horses in the fight for same-sex marriage, but now he's on the wrong side of the trans rights debate.
**Notwithstanding his attempts to be a media darling, "Father Ted" is genuinely funny because it does get at a lot of Irish social attitudes of the time. Fr. Noel Furlong and the youth group is something a lot of us lived through as teenagers/young adults and religion in school 😀 I believe the American Protestant version is the youth pastor?
>The black majority was handed a modern first-world economy and have flown it straight into the ground.
As far as I can see this isn't true, or even close to true - where did you get it from?
A cursory google suggests that South Africa's economy has grown faster since the end of Apartheid than it was before (see https://www.sanlam.com/productcatalog/Pages/economic-growth-in-south-africa-a-20-year-review.aspx ); unemployment has risen, but only from fluctuating around 20% to fluctuating around 25%.
Google around some more, South Africa is a disaster. They have capital controls to prevent people leaving and taking their wealth with them, rampant crime, crumbling infrastructure, and a stagnant economy. Plus just last month the government announced their intention to nationalize farmland: trampling property rights is never a good sign.
Here are several articles. There is widespread consensus that SA is collapsing.
https://www.cnn.com/2024/05/27/business/south-africa-election-economy/index.html
"The economy has gone backward over the past decade, evidenced by a sharp fall in living standards. According to the World Bank, gross domestic product per capita has fallen from a peak in 2011, leaving the average South African 23% poorer."
https://www.hks.harvard.edu/faculty-research/policy-topics/development-economic-growth/report-state-capacity-collapsing-south
"Concluding a two-year investigation, researchers at Harvard Kennedy School’s Growth Lab have issued a stark diagnosis of the “collapsing state capacity” in South Africa after decades of policy failures, mismanagement, and patronage, with painful consequences for millions of poor, jobless people. "
https://www.france24.com/en/tv-shows/focus/20250214-in-south-africa-poor-governance-leads-to-collapse-of-johannesburg-s-infrastructure
"The centre of Johannesburg was once an economic hub with abundant green spaces. But over the last two decades, the South African city centre has become known for crime, dumped waste, broken infrastructure and restrictions on water and electricity."
https://www.spiegel.de/international/world/gangs-corruption-and-collapse-the-slow-and-steady-demise-of-south-africa-a-7ed1fcd1-a2e8-446a-9ff9-074718215281
"The end of Apartheid in South Africa brought a surge of hope for a brighter future. But the ANC, the party that liberated the Black majority from oppression, has transformed the country into a swamp of corruption, mismanagement and despair. Some are trying to turn things around."
Unemployment is South Africa has been rising almost continuously since the decline of Apartheid:
1980: 9%
1990: 19%
2000: 23%
2010: 25%
2020: 29%
present: 32%
[https://www.indexmundi.com/south_africa/unemployment_rate.html, https://tradingeconomics.com/south-africa/unemployment-rate]
Over the same period, SA has declined significantly relative to the rest of Africa in particular, and the world, in general.
In 1990, SA had the highest GDP per capita of any sub-Saharan African country with at least a million people. Today, SA ranks fifth.
Its PPP per capita in 2023 was lower than it was 15 years earlier.
In 1990, SA had the 4th highest life expectancy in SSA. By 2023, it was 21st.
In fact, in 2023, it was as low as it was back in 1985. [Life expectancy per Gapminder values].
Inasmuch as one trusts data from there, SA has the highest homicide rate in Africa, putting it close to the highest in the world (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_intentional_homicide_rate).
As far as the world, in 1980, SA was ranked #45 in GDP per capita in the world. By 1990, it had declined to #51. By 2024, it dropped to #105.
What you're showing there is that unemployment rose dramatically under apartheid, and has continued to rise, but much more slowly, since it ended.
Mallard showed that SA's economic position has declined significantly since the end of Apartheid. You can try to blame structural factors under Apartheid that the subsequent governments somehow failed to arrest, but that excuse grows increasingly absurd over time.
I suspect that our political sympathies are similar, but at some point, you have to open your eyes to reality and call a spade a spade.
That article is from 2013. South African GDP per capita peaked in 2011 and has come down about 30% since then.
[context for the above commenter]
This user's views are in-line with Scientific Racism.
https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/open-thread-369/comment/94774717
If you agree with Scientific Racism yourself, by all means, trust this commenter.
Otherwise, I will leave everyone a link to the Wikipedia talk section on Scientific Racism, for your pleasure:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Race_and_intelligence
Do you realize you are a part of the reason why Trump is currently a president?
Words like "views are in-line with" give me some Soviet vibes. Those times when people needed to publicly declare that something is wrong, without actually knowing enough about it to explain why it is wrong, so they just called it "a bourgeois decadent thought" or something like that.
'Scientific Racism' is an incoherent concept: science is empirical while racism is normative. Political equality of the races is a moral question which is orthogonal to empirical fact. It's a mistake for you to tie your moral views to empirical realities which may come out differently than you expect.
I am not racist and have said nothing that can reasonably be construed that way. Intelligence differences between ethnic groups is an empirical reality. I can maintain a commitment to political and moral equality in the face of that reality. Can you? If not, why not? And if so then why are you so threatened by psychometric realities?
Again I would suggest to you that you're a victim of trapped priors. I wish you the best of luck in finding your way out of the ideological corner that you've backed yourself into. It's an empty virtue that denies moral consideration to people less intelligent than oneself. I recommend that you try to be more broad-minded.
I hear you're a scientific racist now, Wanda? I mightn't be able to devote meself full time to the old racism:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6zkL91LzCMc&ab_channel=HatTrickComedy
Yep, I spend all day in my lab creating batches of synthetic racism. I'm very scientific about it though.
Your white coat (of course it's white!) is always freshly laundered and your glassware sparkling!
Moral commitments and empirical claims are not always “orthogonal.” If someone repeatedly misrepresents or cherry-picks empirical data to defend an ideology that portrays certain groups as inherently “less intelligent,” that is precisely how racism tries to cloak itself in the mantle of “objective science.”
The mainstream scientific consensus rejects deterministic “race-based intelligence” claims. The vast majority of psychologists, geneticists, and anthropologists view “race” as a social construct with extremely complex—and often minimal—biological underpinnings. In fact, there is typically more genetic diversity within a given racial or ethnic group than between groups.
Per the Flynn Effect... IQ scores across entire populations can change significantly in a single generation, indicating that differences once attributed to “biology” can shift with new social, educational, or economic conditions. This further undermines simplistic claims about innate “racial” intelligence.
“Group differences” in test results do not prove innate differences. When average IQ or achievement test scores differ across groups, a large body of research shows that systemic and environmental factors (e.g., historical discrimination, neighborhood resources, quality of schooling, exposure to environmental toxins, nutritional differences, access to early childhood programs, etc.) contribute powerfully to these gaps.
Researchers have identified numerous confounding variables—including socio-economic status, educational inequality, stereotype threat, test bias, language barriers, historical discrimination, and more—that shape outcomes. Ignoring these is either naive or deliberately misleading.
Far from “trapped priors,” it is robust scientific consensus that there is no definitive evidence tying inherent racial group differences to intelligence. The burden of proof rests on those making strong, biologically determinist claims—and historically, that burden has never been met with credible data free of confounds.
Your claim of “not being racist” while asserting broad, essentialized differences is a hallmark of “scientific racism”: “I’m not saying these people shouldn’t have rights, just that they’re less capable by nature. But I am still moral!” Such a stance often morphs into paternalism or the support of policies that entrench inequality.
>“race” as a social construct
Then how does 23andMe work? If there aren't stable genetic associations with geographic origins then how did they accurately describe my heritage from a saliva sample?
>there is typically more genetic diversity within a given racial or ethnic group than between groups.
That's true but ignores the fact that those differences have correlations which cluster according to ancestry. As an illustration of this principle, consider the facial dimensions of a person's face (eye distance, nose size, etc). There is more variation of those parameters WITHIN genders than BETWEEN genders, yet that doesn't negate the existence of masculine and feminine facial characteristics. The correlations matter, which is why genomes cluster along familiar lines when dimensionality reductions are performed:
https://infoproc.blogspot.com/2007/01/metric-on-space-of-genomes-and.html
>The mainstream scientific consensus rejects deterministic “race-based intelligence” claims.
That's simply false. There is no broad scientific consensus on the topic, probably for ideological reasons. Here's one recent survey:
https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/psychology/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2016.00399/full
"Seventy-one experts rated possible causes of cross-national differences in cognitive ability based on psychometric IQs and student assessment studies (e.g., PISA, PIRLS, TIMSS). Genes were rated as the most important cause"
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0160289619301886
85% of intelligence researchers believe that the black-white IQ gap is at least partially genetic.
>a large body of research shows that systemic and environmental factors contribute powerfully to these gaps
Oh? Why don't racial gaps close at high SES, then? Why haven't they closed over a century in which blacks' environment has improved radically? And why does the current consensus put the heritability of IQ between 50% and 80%? Here's a meta-analysis that puts the heritability of adult IQ between 0.8 and 0.9:
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/241644869_Genetic_Influence_on_Human_Psychological_TraitsA_Survey
Here's some more:
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/34658462/
"We estimated the proportions of the variance in IQ attributable to environmentally mediated effects .. to be .01. ... Together, these findings provide further evidence for the predominance of genetic influences on adult intelligence over any other systematic source of variation."
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/23919982/
"The results show that the heritability of IQ reaches an asymptote at about 0.80 at 18-20 years of age and continuing at that level well into adulthood. In the aggregate, the studies also confirm that shared environmental influence decreases across age, approximating about 0.10 at 18-20 years of age"
>Per the Flynn Effect... IQ scores across entire populations can change significantly in a single generation,
The Flynn Effect isn't measure invariant and so doesn't represent a true intelligence gain. It's concentrated in spatiovisual skills and so could represent the population effects of watching TV or driving, though there's no consensus.
>Such a stance often morphs into paternalism or the support of policies that entrench inequality.
And the opposite stance has led to anti-meritocratic DEI policies, oppressive anti-intellectual academic environments (shouting down speakers, firing or pressuring IQ researchers, sharply ideological echo chambers, etc), and a 2020 race riot that caused billions in damage and led to tens of thousands of lost lives in the homicide surge that followed the post-George Floyd de-policing efforts. The US has been pouring billions of dollars into closing educational race gaps for 60+ years and nothing has ever made any substantive difference. That's because the origin of those gaps is primarily genetic and not environmental. It's time to stop faith-based educational initiatives because they simply don't work.
Look, the public dialogue about this stuff is just a mess. A lot of ideological commitments ride on this issue and people are afraid to be honest because they don't want to be canceled, lose their job, offend their friends, etc. Add the fact that sociological data is always messy and you're not going to be able to evaluate the consensus by yourself: there are always outlier studies so you can make the literature say whatever you want if you try hard enough.
So you really have to figure it out for yourself: absolutely no public authority can be trusted not to have a political agenda. It's not that hard, just use some common sense. The same sociological patterns repeat everywhere all the time. If it's all environmental then why isn't there an environment (anywhere, ever) where blacks outperform? If racism is the answer then why isn't Africa better off since there are many fewer whites there to oppress the black population? (And why were they hunting with spears while Europeans were sailing around the world and inventing calculus? Why didn't Africans ever invent a writing system? Nearly everyone else did. Is that because of racism too?) If poverty is the cause then why don't wealthy blacks have the same IQs as wealthy whites? And why do the offspring of black parents regress to a different population IQ than the offspring of white parents, and why is that IQ magically the same as that measured by IQ tests? Seriously, if you can explain that by purely environmental reasoning then my hat's off to you.
Recent scientific literature pertaining to IQ and ethnicity finds, over and over again, strong correlation between IQ and ethnic groups that can only suggest a strong hereditable component to IQ. 'Race' is more imprecise than strongly defined ethnicity, but there are also studies showing this heritable IQ component by race. There are also non hereditable components to IQ, this does not make the hereditable part disappear. To deny that would be.. unscientific!
>Researchers have identified numerous confounding variables—including socio-economic status, educational inequality, stereotype threat, test bias, language barriers, historical discrimination, and more—that shape outcomes. Ignoring these is either naive or deliberately misleading.
I don't think even the most terminally online ACX dwellers have enough spare time to disabuse you of your delusions
[context for the above commenter]
This user believes the sky is blue LIKE HITLER
if you AGREE WITH HITLER, by all means, trust this commenter.
Otherwise, I will leave everyone a link to the wikipedia page of HITLER for your pleasure:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adolf_Hitler
Do you believe in genetic differences between the (scientifically credulous) concept of "races" as well?
It would help users have context concerning you too.
If race is an unscientific concept, does it also mean that affirmative action is kinda like making quotas based on your horoscope sign?
Or is race only unscientific when the bad guys use the word, but it becomes scientific when the good guys are using it?
you'll be pleased to know I disagree with affirmative action
Even Scott believes that. You knew that, right?
I'm not sure if you're brand new here but I think you might be playing to a different crowd from the one you're expecting.
Showing up in the ACX comment section and trying to shame HBD types is like showing up at a Scissor Sisters concert and shouting out "HEY I THINK THE GUY NEXT TO ME MIGHT BE GAY"
What? Surely not! At a wholesome entertainment by a talented and amusing group of popular music performers?
This person upholding "IQ test results no meaning" is the same person quoting "Musk only 100-110 IQ" to make us all agree that means he must be too stupid to achieve success in business by his own efforts.
Uh-huh.
I'm not interested in shaming. I understand the "HBD" "race" (see what I did there ;-) :-P) is difficult to shame.
But it's useful for other people to know... to better allocate one's time and patience.
Are you inviting me to state a opinion so you can attempt to shame me?
Why; I must accept. Yes I believe race is real. Please cyber stalk me and inform the admin over of my fedi account, my programming discord, or slack job hunting sever; each and everyone of them will find it amusing.
You aint going to shame me out of a belief; try arguments.
This is what has been pointed out over and over again in the wake of Harris' failed campaign: "if we just insult them *harder* this time, surely the idiots will all change their minds and agree with us!" is not working, has not worked, and will not work.
"Why are these fools and evildoers all voting for Drumpf, don't they realise that we are the good guys?" Jamie Fisher is just going to try harder to make us realise we are all reprobates and totally depraved, if he only yells at us loud enough surely it'll work this time!
"a human-average intelligence and an utter disinterest in organized education"
Love your sneering at average humans with snippets like this, Jamie. I'm only 'human-average' intelligence and I never went to college, so I suppose that makes me uneducated and, indeed, evil.
Nice!
So if Musk is really only as smart as the dumb average person, and yet he managed to wangle family money into even greater money, that means - what? People mock Trump for not being as rich as he claims by saying he only got his start with his dad's money and didn't manage to grow that fortune. Now they're trying to mock Musk for only getting his start with his dad's money *and* he grew that fortune.
I didn't like Musk back in the day when everyone was fawning over him, but this is why the Democrats lost the election and are on track to lose in 2028. "Only as smart as the average person, doesn't have a real college degree, let's all jeer and sneer about that".
You really are sounding like the meme of "why won't you stupid dumb ignorant rednecks listen to us, we are the people who are smart and know better, we're the compassionate caring ones, you morons".
>People mock Trump for not being as rich as he claims
That sounds grossly unfair.
_I_ mock Trump for saying that we should look into "injecting disinfectant".
( I still gritted my teeth and voted against Harris... Saying of free speech online "It has to stop" goes a looong way... )
> I'm only 'human-average' intelligence and I never went to college, so I suppose that makes me uneducated and, indeed, evil.
You know I didn't say such a thing. Do you really want to leave up such a weak misrepresentation of my comments?
Here's the thing, Jamie: you quoted all that to hammer home your point about "Elon is evil! Eeeeevil! Ebil Elon!"
Nate Silver right now has a post up about the same thing - is Musk smart or not? - and he manages to make his points without sneering, jeering, accusations of EBIL ELON EBIL EBIL EBIL! or scoffing about "now we on here are all so smart, so speaking of 'average human intelligence' is an appeal to our snobbery about 'heh 90IQ normie idiot' in the name of decrying Musk".
https://www.natesilver.net/p/elon-musk-and-spiky-intelligence
"So, it’s important to avoid two pitfalls when encountering people with spiky intelligence. Namely, neither their worst traits nor their best ones tell the whole story:
- That Elon is highly intelligent in several ways does not mean that everything he does is brilliant. Some things he does are exceptionally dumb or dangerous — and we shouldn’t make excuses for these or pretend that it’s all part of some master plan.
- But likewise, it’s absurd to suggest that Elon isn’t brilliant in many respects just because he isn’t in others. And if he has merely very good SAT scores, I don’t care; he’s demonstrated his intelligence through his accomplishments. This is a bit like criticizing Tom Brady because he had mediocre ratings in the NFL combine. The SAT may be correlated with general intelligence, but it’s an imperfect proxy for it, and test-taking skills like figuring out verbal analogies aren’t too important on their own."
When you quote sniffy bits about "he's not smart, he's only average" and "he didn't get rich himself, he only inherited daddy money" and "he flunked out of college", you are not appealing to the ordinary person (like me). You're saying "people who didn't go to college and are average intelligence are dum-dums who couldn't possibly succeed on their own merits and hard work, and probably inclined to be swayed to EEEEVILNESS to boot". Speaking as the average moron in the street, gee thanks Jamie, you have now won me over with your unimpeachable arguments so I should now join in the chorus of EBIL ELON EBIL ELON EBIL ELON.
If Musk had maintained "why yes, anyone who disagrees with you is indeed a nazi fascist white supremacist spreading misinformation and hate speech, so I'll ban them off Twitter", all the havering over "he's evil, evil I tell you!" would never have gotten off the ground.
I get it: you don't like his politics. Maybe you've even convinced yourself he *is* wicked and EEEEEVIL. But there are a lot of people whose politics I disagree with, whose views I find opposed to my own, but I don't go around calling them evil. If I did that on here, I'd be calling everyone from Peter Singer to Richard Dawkins to Richard Hanania to a few more EEEEEVIL. Heck, I haven't even called Richard Lynn evil, and I wouldn't weep salt tears if I heard he fell out a window!
(What is it about guys called Richard, or is it just me?)
Left-wing economist Noah Smith had an article about this the other day https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/only-fools-think-elon-is-incompetent
It's a bizarre thing to want to believe, contrary to all evidence, that people who disagree with you don't have any good properties, even the ones that they obviously do have. Elon Musk isn't actually smart. Donald Trump isn't actually rich. Taylor Swift isn't good looking and is bad at singing.
Even if you disregard all his impressive achievements and look at the boring commonplace ones that are easy to compare to those of others, you'd say that he's a guy with a 1400 SAT (top 7%) who got admitted to a PhD program at Stanford. Those factors alone are definitely "evidence of an IQ above 110".
> It's a bizarre thing to want to believe, contrary to all evidence, that people who disagree with you don't have any good properties, even the ones that they obviously do have.
I think it's a Just World fallacy thing. If Elon is evil, then it's karmicly perverse that "the universe is rewarding" that evil by endowing him with positive properties. Safer on the psyche to believe that he actually does not have those positive properties than it is to believe that the world is so cosmically unfair.
I'm guilty of this too in non-Elon cases; I like him, so it doesn't take me a bucket of cognitive dissonance to believe he's a genius. So I do not condemn, I merely diagnose.
I am anti-Elon (at least current Elon, I wish he'd have stuck to building rockets instead of turning his considerable talents to destroying the American government and subverting the constitutional order like a real-life supervillain) and I agree with your post.
Same.
This isn't about fairness or whiny-ness. This is about a man who has built his reputation, power and absurd stock-valuation on the "Real Life Iron Man" mythos. EVERYONE thinks this guy's a genius. It's been his family's lifelong campaign. I remember a documentary from over 15 years ago about Nikolai Tesla that ended with........... and now there's this great company named Tesla... blah blah blah... Elon Musk.
And this STUPIDITY on top of STUPIDITY ... his followers' stupidity... HIS stupidity... DOGE's stupidity... is causing real-life harm. Today. Now.
I didn't think Musk was a genius back in the days when everyone was kissing his feet, I thought he made a fool of himself over the Thai cave affair, and I wasn't impressed with the notion that he was going to be the technocratic saviour.
But by the same token, I have not shifted my views because of "oh no he didn't ban the nazis like we demanded" to think of him as worse than he is, any more than I thought he was better than he is in the days of stunts like sending a Tesla into orbit.
What about the incident where he was caught lying about playing video games? Even apart from politics, my opinion of him was pretty low due to the Thai cave affair and so on, but I still didn't think he'd just straight out lie for the sake of his ego like that.
It's not like this is even a gotcha or something. This is something Elon went out of his way to do. Nobody expects people who are CEOs of six companies to also spend all day grinding videogames. The fact that Musk decided to pretend to do that anyway, even though it's a weird brag and he was guaranteed to get caught, is entirely on him.
It's not past-tense, he is literally continuing to do that (regarding several leading video games) right now, as in this week. Which is sort of interesting actually.
I'm a bit of a gamer, so is one of my siblings. My eldest child is more of one (a past official world champion of a particular absurdly-complex modern tabletop game), and his circle of friends includes several serious online gamers. I was just hanging with him this past weekend and he was talking about Musk's self-identified logins continuing to be regularly spotted in Diablo IV and a couple other current online hit games -- _now_. During the same days and hours that he's been visibly invading agency offices in DC, attending cabinet meetings of which he's not legally a member, shit-posting on X for hours at a time, etc.
These are competitive online games having millions of active, smart, obsessive players. They require frankly-insane levels of daily commitment/focus in order to attain or maintain global high rankings; serious players consider a 5-hour session to be just a tuneup for their regular 10 or 12 or more hour sessions of elite competitive play.
Musk is obviously paying such people to play for him and he's continuing to do so right now. It seems impossible that he wouldn't be aware that he's become a running joke among the regular players of those games, and he obviously knows the facts of himself as a gamer.
I assume then that he simply doesn't care about any of that; and views being able to keep making the false brag as in some way more important or satisfying.
Is that all this is or is there some more-rational chess move still at work with the faked gaming excellence?
Right, so this is all just sounds like motivated reasoning. You (and the guy originally quoted) disagree with Elon's political actions therefore you feel like you need to work backwards to prove he's not actually smart. You certainly didn't start from a point of "I wonder what Elon Musk's IQ is... let's work from publicly available data to see if we can estimate it".
Here's a question. Suppose someone comes forth with really strong evidence that Elon Musk has a fairly high IQ... let's say top 5% but not top 1%. Suppose we get his academic transcripts from Penn and they show mostly As and the occasional B. Suppose we get a copy of an IQ test he took as a child and it says, say, 130.
Is this going to change your mind about anything important? Are you going to suddenly decide you agree with him on anything? Of course not, and nor should it. Smart people are wrong all the time. No matter how smart you are, you're almost certainly not smarter than all the people who disagree with you.
I don't see why anyone would want to waste their time arguing that Elon Musk is dumb, when they could simply be arguing that Elon Musk is wrong. The former is a doomed losing battle with a whole lot of evidence stacked up against you about something ultimately irrelevant. The second one, which is what you _actually_ care about, is the one you might be right about.
You're not exactly helping your case by conflating self-branding and stupidity and harmfulness (to federal workers' sinecures?) all together here. Just because he's one doesn't mean he's the others (indeed, we would expect a stupid person to be LESS good at branding and harmfulness than a clever one). The fact that you're determined to connect them all in one big ball of inseparable boo-lights rather activates my almonds.
I read the piece in the OP. It makes a fair case that Elon is a bit of a retroactive self-promoter, and it makes the case that he's a bit of a beneficiary of daddy's money. It doesn't make the case that he's a dumbass. Indeed, many people are self-promoting daddys-money recipients, but I don't see all the other trust fund kiddies catching rocketships in a grapple.
keep reading the article I posted. do I need to systematically copy-and-paste every "clarification" about every "achievement" people claim about this guy?
And why trust his SAT scores? What is the source? This is the same guy who claims to have read Britannica multiple times. There is much much more documented evidence of his incessant lying about his achievements than anything real.
Yeah he's no genius but I would bet anything he's got 20 IQ points on Kamala. He got into a Stanford STEM PhD program and she went to Howard. Musk also never whored around with Montel Williams. He is comprehensively a higher class of person than your most recent Presidential nominee so settle down.
Where is your source on Howard University?
More likely you are saying this due to Scientific Racist views (Howard is a historically black
So that other readers are aware. The above commenter's views are aligned with Scientific Racism.
https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/open-thread-369/comment/94774717
Also, the evidence suggests that Musk got into Stanford via a smokescreen of "transfers and connections with a professor", not via academic achievement. And of course, he never actually attended.
"Where is your source on Howard University?"
That she attended and graduated with a BA in Economics and Political Science? Here:
https://thedig.howard.edu/featured-people/kamala-harris
Rankings for Howard as a national university? In 2024 it was ranked No. 86, an improvement of 29 points (so formerly ranked No. 115); a slight drop from 2020 when it was ranked No. 80:
https://president.howard.edu/from-the-president/viewpoints/howard-university-soars-no-80-us-news-world-report-rankings-list
https://thedig.howard.edu/all-stories/howard-university-earns-high-rankings-among-nations-top-universities
She went to law school here:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kamala_Harris#Early_life_and_education
"Harris then attended the University of California, Hastings College of the Law in San Francisco, where she served as president of its chapter of the Black Law Students Association. She graduated with a Juris Doctor in 1989."
How does UC Hastings stack up against Stanford? I have no idea. I get the impression Stanford has a better reputation, but that could all be a smokescreen (to use your phrasing). Here's a website that compares law schools:
https://app.lawhub.org/compare/stanford-vs-hastings/environment
https://app.lawhub.org/compare/stanford-vs-hastings/admissions
7.3% acceptance rate to Stanford Law versus 30.9% acceptance rate to Hastings (and it's not because "oh Stanford is all white male", if you look at the Environment tag they are fairly equal on "women and racially or ethnically minoritized" demographics).
She failed the bar exam on her first try but passed on her second. That's not to say she's stupid, it's a tough exam!
What her GPA was or what level of degree she obtained from Howard doesn't seem to be readily available online, so it's hard to compare (e.g. you can often look up did a particular British politician get a first, a second, etc. class degree).
<Where is your source on Howard University?
I researched a little just now out of morbid curiosity. Average total SAT score at Howard is 1050, which is 58th percentile among all US high school students (not just those who applied to college). SAT score is not a terrible proxy for IQ, and an IQ in the 58th percentile would be a bit above the average of 100, say 105 or so. I believe the IQ Wanda named was 90.
So if the Hastings student IQ is in the range 100-105, that means Elon is also in that range.
So if that means Elon is an average midwit dum-dum, so is Kamala!
> So that other readers are aware. The above commenter's views are aligned with Scientific Racism.
Please try to avoid this "point and screech" style of argument in the future. The disagreement between you and Wanda is a purely factual one. In such a dispute, moralizing and grandstanding is a poor substitute for evidence and argument.
Yeah, that kind of thing is a terrible tactic. And I say that as someone alarmed by Musk.
It's always amusing to see new commenters trying the "throw mud and see if it sticks" approach on here. The Reign of Terror has hardened the rest of us to be civil and not swap insults!
Fine, well then let's disregard the SAT as well! Let's look at a guy that we know absolutely nothing about except the single data point that in 1995 he was accepted to a PhD program in Materials Science at Stanford. Did that happen?
read the wikipedia links. read the article I posted. he definitely did not actually go to Stanford, and his "admission" is riddled with "connections"
But was he admitted?
Who cares what his IQ is? There are multiple independent accounts from engineers who worked with/for him describing him as a brilliant engineer, and I don't see a good reason to believe that all these people conspired to lie about it.
Why is so hard to see that more than one thing can be true: yes, he at least was a brilliant engineer, and yes, he's an asshole, and yes, now he's got obsessed with politics in the same way he used to be obsessed with rocket science?
Obsessing over his IQ and what he did in school is a distraction.
IMO, the personal accounts of his employees are far less reliable than verifiable measures like SATs or college applications (assuming those are verified).
Nope, not for someone who has a long history of having done stuff. I don't see how his SATs or college applications are relevant when we know already what he is.
I just don't understand this urge to say "aha, Elon is actually stupid, his SATs were mediocre". Would you be surprised if his SATs were mediocre because he was obsessively reading about rocket science?
I can give you myself as an example. My grades were above average, but nothing special, neither any SATs or other tests. Nothing in any formal measures would stand out.
I went on to have a long a hugely successful engineering career. I have dozens of patents in a wide variety of technologies. Chips with technologies I was a key inventor in shipped in the billions, maybe tens of billions units by now. My GPA or whatever is utterly useless as a measure of whatever you want to call this... "intelligence" I guess? You'd look at my GPA and say, well, this guy clearly isn't all this bright, and my employer, and anyone I ever worked with, would be like, you're kidding, right?
> Who cares what his IQ is
Conservatives for one. Tech bros for another. "Rationalists" for still another (or I should say "members of an online community who have co-opted the term Rationalism").
<<Jamie Fisher
30m
>> Who cares what his IQ is
<Conservatives for one. Tech bros for another. "Rationalists" for still another (or I should say "members of an online community who have co-opted the term Rationalism").
Oh pooh, Jamie. We argue about IQ here all the time. There's actually a post on this thread where someone makes a sniggering remark about "IQ fetishists." And that person, as well as I, have had a lot to say about the limitations of IQ as a measure of talent and competence. Even *within the thread you started* you have people expressing skepticism about IQ: 1123581321, Deiseach.
Look at how the last exchange went: A frequent poster here, 1123581321, so presumably a rationalist by your standards, says "eh, who cares about his IQ." You angrily respond to a member of this group who shows disinterest in IQ by telling them angrily that this damn group takes IQ very seriously indeed.
Do you need any better evidence that you have stopped perceiving people here accurately?
And besides, Jamie, you started off sounding pretty committed yourself to the idea that IQ is a good measure of competence and talent: You led with a quoted view that somebody who dropped out of undergrad several times and got into Stanford PhD only by pulling strings probably has an IQ of 100-110. What about that?
And by the way, I don't think the history you recount gives much info about the subject's intelligence. The person could have a big problem with authority, or be brilliant and have a powerful need to learn things his own way, or be bipolar, or be wired and wacked out on drugs, for instance.
“I don’t find IQ to be a valuable measure,” he also clarified. “I introduced the term to this conversation because it’s used by *you fans* as some sort of supposed proof of Musk’s intelligence—though none of you have any proof whatsoever of any IQ test the man’s ever taken.”
(Seth Abramson's quote following the first quote)
Personally, I don't care to even bother expressing my own stance on IQ. AND IQ ITSELF NOT ABRAMSON'S POINT... His point is that Musk's Cult is built around his supposed genius... WHICH HE DEMONSTRABLY LACKS... just another failing-upwards, dark-triad, started-on-third-base fraudster.
Where have we seen this before..... in the White House.......
Well, OK. If you put up a post leading with an unusual idea about somebody famous's IQ, you'll probably get a lot of responses about IQ. But I get that your main point is that Musk is evil and the cult of Musk adoration Must Die. You seem to think Musk adoration is a big thing among Rationalists, but I don't hear anyone expressing anything like adoration. Some people have mentioned evidence that he's at least bright, but most also qualify by adding that he's an asshole, he's got the dark triad, etc. You seem not to have found a nest of Musk adorers, so what is it that you want in response to your post?
Also, regarding "Scientific Racism": You don't need to explain to people here what is generally meant by the term. But it seems to me you want people to participate in canceling the poster whose remarks you see as belonging to that school of thought. You highlight what the poster said, and you come across like Donald Sutherland in Invasion of the Body Snatchers: https://imgur.com/a/lxmp31U. We don't really do cancelation here, at least not for having views a bunch of us disagree with.
I have the feeling that you are looking for an echo chamber. We ain't it. IMO that's a good thing.
While I'm at it, I think Jamie Fisher is trying to use "racism" as the stoplight it is in general online social media - oh no, he/she/they/xe accused me of being a racist, I must immediately cringe and cower and grovel with apologies lest I be stoned to death by everyone who will pile on and pass around the message that I am a racist! (I mean, 'context information: this user is a racist'? that's way too much like a parody of a progressive college student protest).
As you say, we ain't it. Boo words like "racist", "fascist" and so on are not enough to tar and feather someone on here, you have to construct some kind of argument as to why the other person needs to be run out of town on a rail.
Ok so what? Why do you care what other people think? Why is it so important to show that aha! Musk has low IQ? What, starlink satellites will suddenly drop off the sky? Musk will hung his head in shame and stop wrecking things? Trump will fire him? Teslas will spontaneously combust?
Well, Starlink satellites are regularly de-orbiting and burning up every day and there are serious questions about the environmental effects of this retirement plan. I think knowledge about Musk's intelligence, to the extent that it is reliable, may help the public assess whether his strange and destructive decisions are a genius-level form of 4-d chess that will help humanity as a whole, a sophisticated grift that primarily serves himself and his personal interests, or a bumbling and short-sighted extreme version of failing upward.
If Musk's IQ were proven to be quite modest, would you expect that others should change their minds on his political views in any way?
If Musk's IQ were proven to be quite high, would you change your mind on his political views in any way?
I can see how this can be helpful with an obscure person. Musk? We have plenty of hard data, his actions over many years, to make any and all judgements we need. A score of a formal test adds zero actionable knowledge about him.
Despite what popular media may portray, people with dark triad traits typically do not succeed in life. I think Elon's biography confirms this despite his staggering financial success. In places he is able to push people to do what he wants, he can succeed. In areas he can't do that (academics, the reality of digging tunnels, the limits of primarily computer vision self driving) he finds trouble. His response will be to give up or double down on manipulative behavior.
I want to say that I thought the tunnel idea was stupid from the start, but it's funny how none of that mattered when Musk was perceived as being on the 'right' side.
I think that the tunnel idea made a lot of sense, even if he did come up with it in a burst of frustration while sitting in LA traffic.
It's still unclear why building tunnels seems to cost about a billion dollars per mile in Western countries. Musk's main hypothesis was that it's all just cost disease, and actually you can do it far cheaper; and if you combine that with self-driving electric cars then you can get away with a small cross section (unlike a train) and a small ventilation system (unlike a road tunnel for ICE cars).
The product-market fit is still lacking but the idea is good.
The Boring Company has so far failed to build anything more than a little amusement park ride in Las Vegas. The hypothesis seems to have been conclusively refuted by reality.
The problems seem political at this stage. Someone needs to take the risk of being the first city to order a large scale project. Chicago was going to do one to the airport, but the project died, and unfortunately now no Democrat-run city in the US will be willing to work with Musk.
The idea is solid though, and the ideal first use case would be an airport link. Airport-to-city is usually a long distance with just two stops. Many cities including my own are constructing train lines to the airport at massive expense. These trains rarely run at capacity. A turn-up-and-go self driving car tunnel would be vastly superior in every way, and you could charge taxi-like fares instead of public transport fares.
I admittedly haven't been following the news much, but last I heard, they were still using human drivers in the Las Vegas tunnel. And in any case, you need to include the cost of all those fancy self driving EVs too. I don't know the actual numbers, but I wouldn't be surprised if including the capital cost of the cars makes it more expensive than trains, rather than less. Train cars have much higher capacity than automobiles.
Plus, you probably want to bore multiple tunnels so that people can go both directions at once, probably even 3+ for redundancy when a car breaks down.
No; massively reducing the price of things requires that you clearly understand why they were expensive in the first place. And if the answer is going to be just "meh, it's probably cost disease", then you need to have a general cure for cost disease in which case why are you wasting your time on tunnels?
In the case of space launch, Musk (and many others) *did* have a clear understanding of why it was as expensive as it was and how to go about making it cheaper. I am skeptical that he ever had such an understanding w/re tunneling.
I shouldn't have just said "cost disease", I should have specified corruption. Tunnels cost a lot because there's few companies capable of building them, because they're all in cahoots to keep prices high. The cure is to set up a new company that doesn't play nicely with the other ones.
The tunnel cross section is a pretty big one as well, of course. A typical train tunnel is 50 square metres in cross section, which is about 25 times bigger than it needs to be to comfortably fit a human. Boring a giant tunnel requires a gigantic tunnel boring machine, a small number of these exist in the world and they're far too big to transport sensibly... boring a narrow tunnel needs a modest-sized machine that you can transport on a truck.
Train tunnels are ridiculously large because trains are much bigger than they need to be; they're probably that big because it made sense for a steam locomotive. Car tunnels are ridiculously large because a human driver needs to navigate them, and also because you need a large volume of air to absorb all the exhaust fumes without becoming poisonous. None of these factors makes any sense any more, and yet we're still spending billions on boring enormous tunnels to carry tiny humans.
OK, that's at least a meaningful hypothesis. But I'm pretty sure it's *wrong*. I count twenty manufacturers of large tunnel boring machines, in eight countries, which suggests a highly competitive industry. And I've seen no evidence of cartelization.
As for your proposed two-meter tunnels, there's an American manufacturer of tunnel boring machines that has specialized in that sort of microtunneling for almost as long as Elon Musk has been alive. https://www.akkerman.com/about/history/ They do good business with people setting up e.g. underground utility conduits, but basically none at all for transportation because *nobody wants that*. Really, aside from a handful of geeks who thought the idea was cool when they saw it in a Sci-Fi movie and didn't really think it through, they don't.
But if they did, they wouldn't need Elon Musk to make it happen, they'd just need to cut a check to Akkerman.
It's not just a matter of exhaust fumes. You also want the tunnel to be big enough that people can walk along the side to escape. And while EVs may not have exhaust fumes, they can still catch on fire.
...And what does that say about the left that failed to stop him? A system that cannot even protect itself against incompetents does not deserve to survive.
A system that can't protect itself against incompetents WON'T survive, but I'm not sure that means it doesn't deserve to.
MAD doesn't work against an incompetent enough actor who will just nuke you anyway, for example.
I'm not sure what Musk's IQ is. But he's (co)founded at least 3 very successful and innovative companies. Starring money helps but it does not automatically make your company a success.
He might not have a wildly above average intelligence but he clearly has uncommon business skills. I don't think IQ is a good predictor of that beyond something like 120.
His "best" business skill is pushing and pushing and pushing on people or processes until they break or succeed in doing what he wants. That is an important skill, but isn't indicative of intelligence. Trump also has this trait. Its is common among Narcissists.
Which 3 companies are you referring to? He founded SpaceX, but did not found Tesla. How you characterize PayPal is more complicated as his x.com merged with PayPal; co-founder seems fair as that merger is what formed what we think of now as PayPal.
> His "best" business skill is pushing and pushing and pushing on people or processes until they break or succeed in doing what he wants. That is an important skill, but isn't indicative of intelligence
Maybe? If "intelligence" is defined as the ability to do well on logic puzzles and shape rotation questions under exam conditions, and "something else" is defined as the ability to effectively organise groups of tens of thousands of people to do things that you want, then is "intelligence" really the important skill out of those two?
This is kind of my point. It all depends by what metric we are measuring him. But he is held up by his admirers as some kind of genius inventor. A lot of the arguments supporting DOGE are that Elon is a tech genius who can hire other tech geniuses that will be able to revolutionize government using their super intellect. I don't think that is true and don't think his best skills help him in that quest.
Additionally, his most remarkable traits are dark triad ones or ones that can be leveraged for nefarious purposes as well as moral ones. In my view, he has chosen to use them for nefarious purposes and so his skills aren't anything to be celebrated.
I think that SpaceX and Tesla are both incredibly impressive companies which have revolutionised their respective industries. I think that the appropriate amount of credit to give to Elon Musk for those is less than 100% but also significantly greater than zero.
I don't necessarily think that the skills needed for running Tesla and SpaceX necessarily translate well to fixing the US Federal Government. But on the other hand, the US Federal Government is so broken that massively improving it doesn't take a lot of skill or care, it just takes will. It takes a master gardener to turn a mediocre garden into an award-winning one, but to turn an overgrown thicket of weeds into a mediocre garden just takes some guy with a bunch of power tools.
Even Republicans enjoy still having a functioning government and a lot more will realize how good they had it once it's gone. We're already seeing lots of panicked calls from congressional Republicans whenever Musk breaks something particularly important to them, and there's probably a lot more that's not said in public.
"But on the other hand, the US Federal Government is so broken that massively improving it doesn't take a lot of skill or care, it just takes will."
This is very dangerously false. Broken things are not fixed or improved by sheer force of ignorant will. And approximately nothing that matters is so badly broken that random changes will on average result in improvement.
That is a great point. What worth is intelligence if one lacks the ambition and resolve to use it? The left lacks the strength of will to do what is necessary to survive.
Someone, and I do not know who, defined genius as “an infinite capacity for taking pains.“ I think Musk qualifies under that definition.
I first heard it applied to Stanley Kubrick.
I've been reading the comments here for a few days now, and based on how people are casually referencing Blackburn, Ayer and others, it seems to me that there are career philosophers or at least people with significant academic philosophical knowledge here.
If any of them have some time and is amenable to helping a conspecific, I have a question to them:
What is their personal opinion on Keith Frankish's theory?
https://keithfrankish.github.io/articles/Frankish_Illusionism%20as%20a%20theory%20of%20consciousness_eprint.pdf
I am not asking about what logically possible counterarguments they see, rather, what is the counterargument(s) (or other way of knowing) they personally believe to be true with respect to this theory?
Any help in satisfying my personal curiosity is greatly appreciated!
(I have no academic and only book knowledge, but you can't stop me.)
Here, I find this quote useful to show what I find problematic about Frankish's view:
"The discovery that colours are mind-dependent did not lead scientists to deny that objects are coloured. Rather, they reconceptualized colours as the properties that cause our colour sensations. Similarly, we might respond to the discovery that experiences lack phenomenal properties by reconceptualizing phenomenal properties as the properties that cause our representations of phenomenal feels — that is, quasiphenomenal properties." (Page 8)
This illusionism view seems to push everything just one level further or deeper.
I don't see the point of it. For me it's not a question of, is the view right or wrong, but foremost, what is this good for, what gets clearer?
For many people it is very wondrous that anything at all seems to be the case for them. They think that a mere physical thing like them, which they indeed only are, should not be able to be under any other impressions, but the literal, that is, physical ones. Not under visual impressions, which Frankish might call phenomenal impressions of the visual variety.
But this wondrousness is not at all reduced by illusionism's further or deeper push in.
With it the question just becomes, why does it seem to me that it seems to me that something is the case? For example, that I'm in pain.
I find all these arguments weak. If there’s an illusion what is experiencing the illusion. Or to put it another way isn’t the illusion of consciousness itself consciousness. We aren’t seeing the world as it is but as we need to see it. That’s also the world.
That reminds me of "Passing the Recursive Buck" in the Sequences.
I got this gem last night from the Google Search AI, while trying to look up discussion of the relative merits of the first two production-multiplier base facilities that become available in the classic game Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri, the Genejack Factory and the Robotic Assembly Plant:
------
When comparing SMAC robotic assembly to Genejack, the key difference lies in their design and application: SMAC is a high-precision, fully programmable robotic system ideal for intricate assembly tasks with sub-micron accuracy, while Genejack is a fictional robotic character specifically designed for manual labor and repetitive tasks, often portrayed as lacking complex cognitive abilities. [1, 2]
Key points about SMAC: [2]
Precision: SMAC robots are renowned for their exceptional accuracy, suitable for delicate operations like microelectronics assembly or medical device manufacturing.
Programmable: Users can fully customize the movement and force control of SMAC robots through advanced programming capabilities.
Direct Drive: This feature eliminates backlash and ensures high repeatability in movements.
Force Control: SMAC robots can be programmed to apply precise force, allowing for delicate handling of components. [2]
Key points about Genejack: [1]
Fictional Character: Genejack is a fictional robot often depicted in literary works, not a commercially available product.
Labor-Focused: Genejack is designed for repetitive, manual labor tasks, not high precision assembly.
Limited Cognitive Ability: In fictional narratives, Genejack is often portrayed with a basic level of intelligence, primarily focused on completing assigned tasks. [1]
In summary, while both terms involve robots, SMAC represents a real-world, high-precision robotic assembly system used in manufacturing, while Genejack is a fictional character primarily designed to represent a simple, repetitive worker robot. [1, 2]
Generative AI is experimental.
[1] https://paeantosmac.wordpress.com/2016/02/02/base-facility-genejack-factory/
[2] https://www.smac-mca.com/products
-----
The only entirely correct parts of this answer are that Genejacks are fictional beings portrayed as lacking advanced cognitive abilities, and that there is a real-world company called SMAC-MCA that makes high-precision electric components related to robotics. And the "direct drive" bullet point is a close paraphrase of a line from SMAC-MCA's website.
"SMAC" is a ubiquitous abbreviation of the name of the game in which Genejack Factories and Robotic Assembly Plants appear as base features. The LLM linked a fan blog article about Genejack Factories in the SMAC game (which uses SMAC in the page name and in the article), but failed to make the connection that SMAC in this context meant the game, not the company.
"Genejacks", as far as I know, are original to the game SMAC. I don't know of any use of the term in other fiction, although I wouldn't be surprised if they show up in the official tie-in novels or in fanfiction set in the SMAC universe. They are not robots, but rather humans who have been genetically modified to perfectly servile workers, congenitally unable to have independent desires beyond performing their duties. The lore is ambiguous as to what extent their intellectual capabilities are also stunted and about what specific tasks they can perform.
I don't know much about SMAC-MCA apart from what's on their website, but it looks like they make actuators, motors, and related components. Their actuators seem like they'd be useful in industrial robotics, but are not robots themselves.
Please don't go. The drones need you. They look up to you.
That was insidious! Kept me in the game for a few more turns on more than one occassion.
Same, it got me several times for "a few more" turns. They probably thought they were including a delightful trifle when adding it; instead it was one of the darkest patterns software patterns yet made.
You aren’t entering these comments on your phone are you Erica. Just kidding of course. I always appreciate your high effort comments.
Thank you for the kind words. That one was done on the desktop, not my phone.
i ran across a weird term solving an old NYT crossword, ‘Brompton cocktail.’
It was given to terminal patients near death. Originally a mixture morphine and cocaine to relieve pain and ‘improve sociability’ at the end of their life.
Apparently it is still used but only rarely. My question is why the hell not administer it or something similar to any patient that wanted a bit of relief to ease that final passage? My understanding is that restrictions on opiate pain relief are waived near death.
Why not administer medication to let them say their goodbye to loved ones with less fear? Versed comes to mind. When i’ve received a dose before surgery I would start flirting with any female present before they put me under.
Perhaps it is already given to patients in their final hours.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brompton_cocktail
My guess is that varies a lot depending on whether you are home or in the hospital, and whether you have a palliative care specialist involved or just a tired hospice nurse. Here's what I know:
-There's a thing called palliative sedation often used in the hospital for people whose pain or other unfixable discomforts, including anxiety, cannot be managed. The person is given enough sedatives to keep them asleep. I doubt that a hospital would be willing to do this for someone who was not for sure on their way out, because I'm sure it shortens life.
-About 10 years ago followed a blog by a guy in this 30's with untreatable cancer during his last year of life. He was at home the whole time, and died there. Hospice palliative care doc was always available to discuss meds, and came to see him in person sometimes. He had good pain relief throughout, with stuff he took everyday plus another quick acting drug for breakthrough pain. In the early months when he was able to be more active hospice doc gave him amphetamine for energy and improved mood, and he was very busy & creative in his work (he was a custom bike builder and photographer). From his blog it sounded like he was in a sort of heightened state, whether from the adderall or the challenge of the situation I don't know. At one point he wrote that in some ways he was having the best year of his life. He may have been diagnosably hypomanic, but under the circumstances it seems fine to induce mild mania.
-There is a drug called tramadol that is sort of an opioid but not exactly, and besides relieving pain in makes people feel energetic and cheerful. Sounds perfect, right? Dunno whether it is used by hospice, but it seems tailor made. And no doubt there are lots of other drugs that help pain, anxiety, exhaustion and low mood, especially when there's no need to be concerned about health damage or addiction.
-Oh yeah, one miscellaneous thing: Morphine neutralizes oxygen hunger for people who are short of breath.
-And, as you say, versed is just lovely stuff. It gives a wonderful feeling of peace and wellbeing. I know somebody who calls it liquid bliss.
I think this is the sort of thing it's good to find out about in advance, and tell your PCP and family members about. You probably need to have someone assertive and well-informed advocating for you as insurance against getting lost in the shuffle.
Versed.
I’ve had two sessions of reconstructive surgery. One to pry my left cheekbone back into place and one to put pins in the bones of my right hand. They got the cheekbone lined up pretty well but there is a small crook in the bones of my right hand that plays havoc with my basketball shots. I really should’ve avoided getting off my mountain bike while it was still moving I guess.
I asked for a Versed to-go on leaving recovery both times. i was joking of course. The first time the nurse said, “Ah, but we’d have to watch you for another hour.” The second time the nurse just shook her head and told my wife “Keep an eye on of this cowboy, okay?”
After watching Elon Musk waving a chainsaw on stage at CPAC the other day, I had the wildest dream.
I was stuck in the TSA line at SFO when Elon Musk came running up, waving that big chainsaw he had at the CPAC rally. People ran screaming. He was shouting at the TSA officers that he was going to cut them and cut their jobs. The TSA officers looked horrified, and they were backing away from him when I bonked Elon on the head with a plastic tray and stunned him. I told one of the TSA officers to call 911, but he shook his head in horror. "You can't bonk Elon Musk on the head," he said. "But he's a 51-50 with that chainsaw!" I protested. "Does anyone have handcuffs, tie wraps, ropes?" I asked. They all shook their heads and fled.
Elon was coming to, and he started to rave again. My trusty friend Liz was with me. Liz is a psychiatrist in real life. "There's nothing worse than a billionaire on a ketamine bender," she said.
That gave me an idea. We searched Musk's sportcoat and I found syringes full of ketamine. "I'm the Doctor," Liz said, and she injected Musk with some more ketamine. The drug sort of knocked him out. But Musk was clutching his chainsaw like it was a teddy bear, and we couldn't pry his hands loose from it.
He was mumbling, "Cut! Cut! Cut!" as we dumped him on a luggage cart and proceeded to wheel him around SFO, looking for someone who would take him off our hands. People fled in horror as we wheeled him down the concourse. Occasionally, Elon would start to wake up, rave about cutting people, and he'd half-heartedly flap his chainsaw like it was a fan. Liz would inject him with more ketamine, and that would calm him down for a while. But we couldn't find anyone to take him off our hands.
Elon kept waking up, and Liz kept injecting him until we ran out of ketamine. She shook her head in disbelief and said, "He's had enough to knock out a whale!" Things were starting to get desperate. "I guess it's catch and release," I said. So we locked Elon in a lady's room with his chainsaw. I think the plan was we were going to call 911 and tell them he was trapped in a bathroom, but I woke up. I hope Liz got out of my dream unscathed. I was sorry to have involved her in this fiasco.
BTW: this type of dream fits the "Day Residue Theory" of dreams put forth by Sigmund Freud. I had been reading the political blogs before I went to bed, and Musk's chainsaw schtick at CPAC was one of the videos I viewed. I've noticed that I tend to get Day Residue dreams earlier in my sleep cycle. I had only been sleeping a couple hours when I had this Musk dream. It woke up at 1am laughing, and I had to write it down in case I forgot it in the morning. I didn't have any other memorable dreams that evening. I really love my dreams, but I wish I could figure out good plot endings on the fly. Since it was a dream, I could've stuffed Elon in some luggage and shipped him back to South Africa, but the dream director part of my consciousness didn't think of that.
And here's a link to the video of Elon with his chainsaw at the CPAC rally...
https://youtu.be/6yqrlTGQiCc
Holy bananas, Batman! I'd heard something about the chainsaw but they got JAVIER MILEI the real one not an actor? to come out on stage? with a chainsaw? to present to Elon who is doing his (very bad) pimp impression?
And you guys are trying to persuade me I'm *not* a Boltzmann Brain?
(By the bye, anyone know what brand of chainsaw? Was it Husqvarna? or an American one? or given that this is originally Milei's schtick, an Argentinian one?)
As regards the dream, from some accounts I've read of TSA agents, a lot of people would be happy to take a chainsaw to the entire agency 😀
> As regards the dream, from some accounts I've read of TSA agents, a lot of people would be happy to take a chainsaw to the entire agency 😀
Yes, this definitely stood out to me as the most exciting thing in the dream.
If Elon could cut ANYTHING, the TSA should be at the top of the list!
The cost in "wasted US hours" (35k US lifetimes) from the TSA's security theater has now killed ten times more people than 9-11 itself, and anytime it is audited with red-teams trying to get weapons through, it has a *95% failure rate*.
I went back and forth with another ACX poster on various assumptions, and we arrived at a floor of ~35k US lives lost in US citizen-hours due to the TSA, which is 10x the actual toll of 9-11, and whose ongoing cost (with a 95% failure rate, remember) wastes something like 800M USA person-hours annually.
All for nothing! It's LITERALLY pure waste!
I just watched the video and at first thought the chainsaw is a prop optimised for size and shininess. It's unreasonably big and doesn't seem all that heavy.
However it appears that it's a genuine chainsaw crafted by an artisanal chainsaw manufacturer in Buenos Aires https://www.batimes.com.ar/news/world/from-villa-urquiza-to-washington-the-tale-behind-mileis-chainsaw-gift-for-elon-musk.phtml
Ugh. A couple months after Trump was elected for the first time and Covid was in bloom I dreamed that there were big shards of broken glass all over my floor. I was lying in bed and Trump was next to my bed wielding a huge saber-shaped piece of glass, about to stab me in the chest with it.
A couple of months after Trump was elected for the first time and Covid was in bloom? What year was this exactly?
Or are you that rarest of birds, a denier of both the 2016 and 2020 elections?
Oh, right, sorry, I was typing in an Uber and distracted. I meant early 2020, a few months after Covid started, also a few months after Biden was elected. So during the last weeks of Trump's 1st term, when we had the cruise ship that came back infected sitting in the port, etc.
When i wake from most dreams my first thought is usually “Who writes this stuff?”
Could humor be the next frontier for LLMs?
Not so long ago, we used to think that machines could be considered intelligent/creative/conscious/<some attribute deemed quintessentially human> if they could write a sonnet/summarize a book/paint a portrait/tell a joke, or whatever. Back then, all these tasks seemed technologically far beyond our reach.
Today, some of those have been achieved: even if they don't produce truly _good_ poems, LLMs are already better than the median human effort in poetry [1]. The same goes for paintings, essays, and so on.
Yet humor remains a tough nut to crack. LLM-generated jokes often suffer from:
- off rhythms or pacing,
- missing or telegraphed punchlines,
- unintentionally absurd twists,
- over-explanation of their own process,
- reliance on weak wordplay,
- etc.
They do a decent job at generating satirical, Onion-style headlines, but longer humorous narratives still elude them.
So, could humor be the next frontier for LLMs? That is, not as evidence that they are intelligent/creative/conscious/<some attribute deemed quintessentially human>, but as the next area that is easy for humans yet hard for machines. Or am I just a bad prompter?
[1] Humans actually seem to prefer AI-generated poetry: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-024-76900-1
I read the study about humans and AI generated poetry, and agree with the authors that one reason is that AI generated poetry is much more straightforward and easy to understand. Other reasons I can see for people preferring AI is that 2 of the 10 real poets used in the study, Chaucer and Shakespeare, lived in eras where English was greatly different, and many words they used are no longer part of the language. And 3 more, Lord Byron, TS Eliot and Sylvia Plath, were very often dark & morbid in their poetry, and I think that's off-putting for the average person. And then there's the fact that the language of most poets is just much more complex than everyday speech, and often has oddities. It's a lot of work to take in.
I don’t think the poems used in the study in which people were found to prefer AI poems were a good test. Here is a test that is think is decent. Below are 2 humorous poems, each on the same subject. One is by a well-respected poet who is known for his serious work, but who wrote occasional comic poems to amuse friends. The other is by GPT4. I did not show it the original poem, or even tell it that one existed. I just recounted the original poem’s plot, and asked it to write a humorous poem of about 30 lines telling the story. Please indicated which you poem you like better. Criteria to use are (1) it tells the story clearly (2) it tells the story amusingly. (3) it uses language in an enjoyable, interesting way. So evaluate using those criteria, but then just use those to come up with a choice, and vote for poem 1 or poem 2.
****Poem 1************
In the village green where daisies sprawl,
Two sisters played, near a stone wall.
Joan, elder by a year or two,
Chased Bethany through morning dew.
Bethany, mischief in her eyes,
Dodged beneath the clear blue skies.
Her laughter rang through open space,
While Joan maintained a furious pace.
Yet fate had plans, a twist so odd
, As Bethany's foot met a poor toad.
With a crunch that silenced her merry cheer,
The toad was gone, it was quite clear.
Joan arrived, breaths quick and short,
Her chase halted by the grim report.
Seeing the scene, she gasped in fright
, And fainted there, to Bethany's delight.
Bethany paused, her victory sour,
Freed by a toad in its final hour.
From that day forth, with a tactic so bold,
She’d seek a toad when the chases would unfold.
Through fields and paths, they'd play this game,
With Joan none the wiser, the outcome the same.
Each pursuit ended with a hop and a squish,
And Bethany escaping as her primary wish.
So if you're a toad in their village, beware,
The footsteps of Bethany, chasing the air.
For in her strategy, odd and unkind,
She leaves hopping troubles quite far behind.
And Joan, none the wiser to the clever ploy,
Continues her chases, full of vigor and joy
. Unaware that her little sister’s defense,
Involves toad-hopping consequences.
A lesson, perhaps, in these playful fights
, Be wary of what one steps on in rights.
For in sibling squabbles and cheerful disdain,
A toad might just save you from being caught again!
*****Poem 2*********
As into the garden Elizabeth ran
Pursued by the just indignation of Ann
She trod on an object that lay in the road
She trod on an object that looked like a toad.
I looked like a toad and it looked so because
A toad was the actual object it was
And after supporting Elizabeth’s tread
It looked like a toad that was visibly dead.
Elizabeth, leaving her footprint behind
Continued her flight on the wings of the wind
As Anne in her anger was heard to arrive
At the toad that was not any longer alive
She was heard to arrive for the firmament rang
With the sound of a scream and the noise of a bang
As her breath on the breezes she broadly bestowed
And fainted away on Elizabeth’s toad
Elizabeth, saved by the heel of her boot
Escaped her insensible sister’s pursuit
And if every hereafter she irritates Ann
She will tread on a toad if she possibly can.
Not being a native, I missed a lot in poem 2 at first, so I preferred 1 (also, I was confused by "_I_ looked like a toad..."). Now it seems poem 2 is actually funnier. Could you tell me which is which? (GPT-4 thinks "Poem 2 is by the well-respected poet, and Poem 1 is by GPT-4." btw)
GPT is right. But would you mind deleting your post after you read this reply? It gives away the answer, and while at this point it looks like nobody is going to vote because the thread is old and stale I may repost this on another thread.
PS: Does the “looked like a toad” part make sense to you? I love this silly poem and am happy to explain any parts that are confusing for a non-native speaker.
Sure, just deleted it (It's like we have to protect against models, isn't it?)
"It looked like a toad and it looked so because
A toad was the actual object it was"
It sounds like an absurd remark like "it looked like X because well it was, in fact, X", which is kinda funny.
What I don't understand is "Elizabeth, leaving her footprint behind" and "At the toad that was not any longer behind". Does it mean the toad is stuck on her sole?
<"It looked like a toad and it looked so because
A toad was the actual object it was"
<It sounds like an absurd remark like "it looked like X because well it was, in fact, X", which is kinda funny.
Yeah, that's right. And the same of form joke continues in the last line of the stanza: "It looked like a toad that was visibly dead." "Looked like" and "visibly" mean the same thing, so it's more of the writer restating the obvious.
>What I don't understand is "Elizabeth, leaving her footprint behind"
Well, first of all this is more humor of the same kind: Footprints, by definition, are always left behind. If some of the mud you step in comes with you, the mud on your boot isn't called a footprint -- so talking about leaving the footprint behind is the same humor based on redundancy (= saying the same thing more than once.). So I think we are meant to picture a dead flat toad that has the imprint of a boot on it.
> "At the toad that was not any longer behind". Does it mean the toad is stuck on her sole?
Oh, that was a mistake of mine! I know this poem by heart, so just typed out what I remembered. The line should read "at the toad that was not any longer alive."
> Footprints, by definition, are always left behind.
I should have thought of that. Thanks for the explanation, I definitely missed a lot at first :)
The whole poem is quite funny, I certainly don't expect LLMs to write something that good before a few good years.
I'd put Robert Service and Kipling up against the AI.
I’ve worked with several programmer ‘on the spectrum’. I’m thinking of one in particular who would study the daily Far Side cartoon for a minute and then state ‘why this is funny.’
Like the man said “Dissecting humor is like dissecting a frog. The subject tends to die in the process.”
Genuine human appreciated humor from a LLM would be pretty impressive.
I'd love to know what your coworker made of Cow Tools.
i can hear the wheels turning in his head now.
> Like the man said “Dissecting humor is like dissecting a frog. The subject tends to die in the process.”
Thats only true of lazy surface humor, jokes with a dozen layers you may only have understood 6. If the punchline is a pun of "others bad" you will feel stupid for enjoying it for a moment if you have some high opinion of yourself, if its monty python, no, getting more british context wont make your feel dumb.
Not an expert, but LLMs already seem capable of outperforming people with severe autism on things like feeling the tone of a text, detecting irony, or reading facial emotions (certainly not the most complex cases of these, though).
Also, maybe an LLM could generate a good joke without being able to properly explain it afterwards?
> Not an expert, but LLMs already seem capable of outperforming people with severe autism on things like feeling the tone of a text, detecting irony, or reading facial emotions (certainly not the most complex cases of these, though).
You want a jaw dropping demonstration of this, I just ran across a site that uses the Google Vision API, which uses image recognition and Gemini to determine emotion, setting, context, likely income, likely politics, and best marketing angles.
Me and some friends tried it, it was suprisingly good and accurate.
The thing I found most interesting about it was in a decade plus of using Google products, I've basically never seen a relevant ad.
So more than ten years of emails, documents, video meetings, spreadsheets, social graph analysis, and whatever else got them nothing, but running a single still photo through Gemini single-shot a much better segmentation?? Crazy.
But if you're interested in trying too, here's the link. No idea what they do with your photo and the inferred data, I assume they collect it in a database for marketing or something even more nefarious.
https://theyseeyourphotos.com/
The part on Google's incompetence at its core business reminds me of the excellent article "Forget privacy: you're terrible at targeting anyway" ( https://apenwarr.ca/log/20190201):
"You tracked me everywhere I go, logging it forever, begging for someone to steal your database, desperately fearing that some new EU privacy regulation might destroy your business… for _this_?"
As for the link you provided, it's surprisingly good. God knows what they can do with thousands of these.
Huh, turns out FAFO goes both ways. You can sell cars to Europeans, you can meddle in European politics, you just kind of can't do both at the same time.
"Tesla Inc. sales tumbled by nearly 50% in Europe last month as the electric-vehicle maker’s market share fell further in favor of rivals."
https://www.marketwatch.com/story/tesla-sales-slid-by-nearly-50-across-europe-at-the-start-of-2025-e971fe93
But how much of that loss in market share is due to Musk being an asshole vs Teslas being kind of shitty for their price tag?
Teslas are a luxury brand. I'm sure that Louis Vuitton handbags are not worth 200x their $20 knockoffs, and I'm equally sure that if the CEO started doing Roman salutes, their sales would sharply decline.
The point is that Teslas don't sport the _quality_ of a luxury brand, only the price – at least that's what I read online, I don't own any luxury cars. For quite a while the hype around Tesla (from being the first high-end electric cars, and from the promises of full self driving) paved over the price/quality gap, but now that the hype is dying down (decent electric cars from various other brands, FSD still nowhere close), this gap is becoming more apparent.
Why do you think that price/cost disparity suddenly become so apparent in the last month? The timing seems relevant to the recent shift in Elon's public behavior. Do you think there's some other acute effect that hit the EV market in this time that would explain the dramatic drop in sales?
When I got into Model S for the first time (sometime around 2014, I think), it was stunning. It really oozed quality, and was incredibly futuristic with its huge display. It was a great feeling, to see an American-built car that could rival BMWs and Audis. But a decade has passed, and now all these Teslas look and feel dated. Musk definitely took his eye off the ball, probably sometime in 2018.
We can't be 100% sure without actually asking those car buyers, but the evidence points toward "Musk-asshole" hypothesis. The price/shittiness ratio for Teslas didn't suddenly spike in January. There's also this nugget from the link:
A German entrepreneur reportedly saw booming sales at the start of the year for Tesla bumper stickers that read “I bought this before Elon went crazy.”
So I think in this case correlation does in fact strongly implies causation.
As Musk tears through Washington, some Tesla owners feel buyer’s remorse
For many D.C.-area owners, the car has gone from progressive icon to badge of shame.
By Tobi Raji and Joe Heim
https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2025/02/24/tesla-owners-buyers-remorse/
Musk created a perfect storm for Tesla: its product doesn’t appeal to MAGA people, but his politics repel everyone else.
And I'm still boycotting them because all the ones I can buy here are made in China.
Are there any local car assembly plants in Australia or do you guys import all your cars whole?
PEPFAR money is apparently still not coming through.
https://www.christianitytoday.com/2025/02/usaid-freeze-life-saving-aid-hiv-africa/
"Yet none of the HIV treatment programs contacted by CT said they had received funds since then, so groups that proceed must do so in good faith, hoping the US government will pay them for the contract work."
https://www.senate.gov/senators/senators-contact.htm?Class=1
https://www.house.gov/representatives/find-your-representative
I'd be interested to know whether there's an initiative to bolster programs undermined by the USAID shenanigans that might be higher expected humanitarian value than the GiveWell top charities funds (which is my default).
EA people who feel deeply about this issue still have the opportunity to try and create a new, non government charity that can replace this program, without being at the whims of funding cuts.
For any EA people reading this right now: https://www.founderspledge.com/funds/rapid-response-fund
This effort will not cover all the US funding. But it can diminish or delay the disaster at least a little.
And the federal government still has the opportunity to reverse this decision before people start dying of AIDS. What's your point, exactly?
(And the government can reverse this decision much faster than the EA community can organize a multimillion dollar international charity, so that approach seems like it would kill far fewer people.)
...Why would the administration want to waste money on saving African lives?
Perhaps because they do not consider it a waste.
I cannot even fathom what would make you think this administration values African lives at more than zero.
I was speaking in the general and not the particular. Marco Rubio apparently sees the point in it, but Elon Musk doesn’t. Makes you wonder who’s in charge doesn’t it? Or perhaps it just makes it obvious. Won’t know until the dust settles.
They literally do not. The article I linked covered this:
>Ressler has been in touch with the doctor in charge of the clinic about how to keep medicines going for the children. In the past few weeks, Ressler was able to raise $10,000 for ARVs, he said. But the medicines are hard to find, with supply chains broken by the USAID shutdown.
Additionally, they simply have an order of magnitude less funds; they're outspent 20:3 on malaria compared to PMI, where the AMF is a major EA area of action:
> In the same period, the Global Fund financed more than half (58%) of the LLINs delivered globally, followed by the President’s Malaria Initiative (PMI) at 20%, the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) at 8%, the Against Malaria Foundation (AMF) at 3%, while other donors financed 10% of the LLINs delivered globally.
https://aidspan.org/?action=catelog_singlepost&id=12792
Also, to be clear, this isn't a "funding cut." This is Trump/Musk randomly deciding to kill children. The funding is still on the books, still approved by Congress, supposedly approved by Secretary of State Marco Rubio (https://www.state.gov/emergency-humanitarian-waiver-to-foreign-assistance-pause-2/) who is supposedly in charge of this, and should be continuing right now.
I read an article in the last 12 hours that said Marco Rubio had reapproved that program, but that a doge person had subsequently deleted the items. So the impression is, Doge is thwarting the secretary of state who works under Trump. It’s incredibly confusing what’s going on. I don’t know if it’s a giant game of hide the salami or whether these people are really in opposition with each other.
Edit: @Chastity just covered this further down
Leaders like trump want underlings who love them but hate each other. That shields the leader from criticism.
A good heuristic so far has been that whatever Doge or Elon claim is usually a lie or at best a gross exaggeration of what they have done.
"Additionally, they simply have an order of magnitude less funds; they're outspent 20:3 on malaria, where the AMF is a major EA area of action:"
Yes, this is something people like you can change, right now.
"The funding is still on the books, still approved by Congress, supposedly approved by Secretary of State Marco Rubio..."
Call it a victim of impoundments, then. The meaning is still obvious.
No, EAs cannot just instantly pull $11B/y out of their asses, nor can they fix the damage to supporting infrastructure that has already occurred due to Trump/Musk.
If you think you are getting an own or winning with logic or something, I want you to know that instead you are lowering my opinion of you rapidly without any change in my view on whether the government should resume funding PEPFAR immediately.
I guess it's not chump change anymore!
Alright, blocked so I never have to read your oh-so-funny posts in the future. Libertarianism is truly an evil ideology.
On the off chance anybody here personally knows Farritor or Kliger:
> Rubio had decreed that certain critical programs — such as aid to Ukraine and Syria and costs related to the PEPFAR program to combat HIV in Africa — would continue to be funded. Several times, USAID managers prepared packages of these payments and got the agency’s interim leaders to sign off on them with support from the White House.
> But each time, using their new gatekeeping powers and clearly acting on orders from Musk or one of his lieutenants, Farritor and Kliger would veto the payments — a process that required them to manually check boxes in the payment system one at a time, the same tedious way you probably pay your bills online.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2025/02/24/musk-doge-usaid-cuts-dc/
Suppose I trusted cal newports carreer advice of "find out the rules of the game" suggesting writers talk to agents in specific ways, if you dont do this they dont care and you wont succeed. What if the people in the "job" I wanted, were strange outsiders, boomers, had allot more education then me, and then weren't paid well and take up side gigs to feed themselves?
If you need to find out the rules of the game in order to get a job, that's a strong signal that one or both of the following are true - 1) There are not enough jobs in this field, 2) The jobs in this field require more experience than you have.
If there are not enough jobs, you should strongly consider doing something else. There's no real fix to this, you're just signing up for a career full of fighting for scraps and constantly fearful of layoffs. Writing, as a profession, is definitely in this hole.
If there are jobs available and you have the skillset employers want, they will not make you jump through extra hoops to hire you. If there's a lot of demand for that kind of work, they may even smooth the process out for you and make it very easy.
> fearful of layoffs
I think your misunderstanding, Im talking about a grand total of *drum roll* two people, both of which have had some kind of weird hybrid self employment
Very much a xkcd "one unfunded guy hobby project"
If the job isn't paying well enough to support oneself, why do you want it? If the people there are doing it on a voluntary basis or because it's a passion project, is it your passion as well?
Belief in a technology path with low hanging fruit when Im usually cynical
Since we have a lot of comments on free speech issues, let me ask for comments on the following "liberal" argument for making flag burning illegal.
Thoreau wrote a book defending the notion that Civil Disobedience is not only a right in a free society - it is a *duty*. In the US, we have a national holiday celebrating a man whose claim to fame was (in part) that he got sent to jail for a non-violent act.
A free society *needs* opportunities for people to get sent to jail for making their (unpopular) opinions known,. Ideally, that opportunity would be a non-violent act. An act which is non-violent and non-destructive, but symbolically powerful.
For protests against American foreign policy, or complaints that the nation is not living up to its ideals, burning an American flag seems like a powerful symbolic statement. If the perpetrator wants her symbolic action to be an act of civil disobedience, then it is convenient for the act of burning the flag to be illegal.
If flag-burning is treated as a constitutionally protected act of free speech we are just inviting would-be martyrs-for-the-cause to become burners of government buildings rather than burners of patriotic symbols.
If you want to get arrested for committing a nonviolent but dramatic crime, there are plenty of options already.
Chris Kluwe recently got arrested as a spectacle - he showed up at a city council meeting, gave a speech about fascism, announced he was going to engage in civil disobedience, then walked towards the council members until the police grabbed him, at which point he stopped resisting and let them drag him out.
Trespassing is often a pretty good choice for dramatic arrests, since you aren't really getting in anyone's way but the police still need to arrest you on general principle.
And if you're in a position to violate the specific law you want changed (many cases during the civil rights movement) doing that is always a good choice, because you get to directly say "should the police really be arresting me for this?" while the message is a little more muddled if the police are arresting you for trespassing or vandalism.
My understanding of proper civil disobedience is that you're only supposed to break the specific law you're complaining about. If the law is that you can't make salt, you make salt. If the law is that you can't pray within 200m of an abortion clinic, then you pray within 200m of an abortion clinic. Thus you force people to confront the unjustness of that specific law.
Otherwise you're not doing Civil Disobedience, you're just some jerk inconveniencing others to complain about his grievances.
> My understanding of proper civil disobedience is that you're only supposed to break the specific law you're complaining about
I dont think it will be a thing, but there was an idea of "rotmaxxing"; intentionally being on as much welfare to accelerate the decline of this system, floatn around.
Also just straight up illegalism
"*proper* civil disobedience", what makes it proper? Shouldnt you be asking, "effective"? Which moral codes is it plausible to be that much of an extremist?
> If you want to get arrested for committing a nonviolent but dramatic crime, there are plenty of options already...then walked towards the council members until the police grabbed him
That was a direct threat of violence.
Eh. He was probably arrested on the grounds that he *could* have been intending violence (as any person who crosses a secured boundary could be) but I don't think you can say he was intentionally making a threat of violence. Since, you know, he made a big speech about the power of peaceful civil disobedience before that move.
(I can't find any news articles that actually says what he was charged with, if anything.)
It does raise the question of what the plan was if he didn't get arrested - stand around awkwardly until he they tell him to leave and he gets arrested for trespassing, I guess?
You also said he gave a speech about fascism, so it's reasonable for the police to have believed that Kluwe associated the city counsel with fascism and therefore intended on inflicting harm on the fascist city councilors
How so?
Not interested in this topic of random politicians security detail; but knifes kill quickly, repeated stabs from someone with a prison education should be measured in seconds.
Improvised knifes could also be lethal and they dont keep those out of high security prisons.
By this logic can the police arrest me for walking toward anyone, at any time? Walking towards someone with no threatening behavior, action, words, visible weapon, etc. cannot possibly be considered a threat of violence.
Are you enjoying being a 2nd class citizen? They pull out the illegal spy network to find the guy who killed a ceo, while how many unsolved murders per cops year are there?
Im pretty sure thats the logic, important enough people get no touchy zones for as many armed guards they can afford
The legality or illegality of flag-burning is secondary to the effect it has on the public consciousness. If people don't care about flags/patriotic symbols, then burning the flag is the same as burning your old newspapers.
So in a society where the Zeitgeist is moving towards "but patriotism is so embarrassing, nationalism is just fascism by another name", flag-burning is about desecrating patriotic symbols *but* it is not unpopular; it's like pulling down statues where everybody cheers and you are the donkey if you object.
So if the 'shock' effect of "you are disrespecting the flag!" has dissipated, then it may as well be legal to do it. Making it illegal does not make the flag-burners martyrs, it makes those calling for it to be illegal the ones on the wrong side of history.
If you want to be sent to jail for an unpopular opinion, you don't need to burn the national flag, just disagree sufficiently noisily with the new orthodoxy.
You think you can go to jail for disagreeing with the orthodoxy in this country (while still operating soundly within the law)? In what context?
The UK seems to be the poster child for this, and over on TheMotte there's a comment about a case in Germany where someone was charged for calling a local politican a prick. American cases seem to be more along the lines of private organisations and/or universities engaging in cancellation; the Evergreen State affair back in 2017 where a professor got into extremely hot water was one such matter:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evergreen_State_College#2017_protests
I believe the example you provide regarding America is the opposite of your initial point. The cancelling was done in support of the "new orthodoxy." The legal system granted settlement to the canceled.
It is my observation that such is the general pattern in America. Unorthodox speech is generally well defended legally (Westboro Baptist Church) but can easily get you fired or cancelled.
She’s not American.
But we are (and she is) talking about America, no?
I can't tell if you think my comment was nonsensical, or if you simply think it was rude to use a possessive on an international forum.
Im with you on this, the original comment is clearly about US law so the conversation is in this context unless noted otherwise.
I wonder if you could make the almost-reverse argument about the police. To what extent are the police there to prevent murder or theft and to what extent do the police exist to suppress particular political factions? If enough things are illegal, laws could be enforced selectively in order to target an opposing faction when that faction couldn't be targeted by police directly. (As the USSR had kompromat on just about everyone, and only deployed it if a person became a political threat.) Therefore should very few things should be illegal in order to diminish the police being used for political purposes.
People often argue that this kind of political targeting was part of Nixon's intent regarding the War on Drugs. I think that believing this is the *only* argument in favor of the WoD is simplistic. But in practice I could see it being a consideration. Searching for drugs at the least allows police to claim that their dog alerted on anyone they wanted to search, thus allowing them to search any vehicle.
What was drug enforcement like prior to Nixon?
Did he change anything or just give the overall law enforcement effort a spiffy name?
Nixon's part was to consolidate a few agencies into the newly formed DEA. Its under Regan where the funding really started to ramp up and mandatory minimum sentences were introduced.
This reminds me a bit of Romans: Shall we continue in sin, that grace may abound?
I think you're moving along the wrong margin here: protestors don't seek laws to break as an end in itself. Making laws harder to break therefore won't drive protestors to do more extreme things. Protestors don't break laws just because they're there, they break them because they're unjust.
Interestingly I've made a similar argument about the cultural acceptance of transgenderism. In my view most teens who become trans do so out of a desire to rebel. It's the new goth IMO. Crossing the line *is* the fundamental value for teenage rebellion so the more society accepts outlandish behavior, the more outlandish teen behavior becomes. We should therefore conserve the taboos around fringe sexual behaviors as a preserved habitat for teens to safely rebel within. (Although realistically teen rebellion is a pendulum that will always have a direction to go, which is probably why Gen Z is trending conservative again).
Laws against chaining yourself to a nuclear facility or throwing soup on a painting are perfectly just. In fact, when protesters in my country are arrested, it *usually* seems like they were daring the cops to arrest them.
A blockade is an interesting case, because it's not *just* breaking the law, it's also inconveniencing commuters, so it has two ways of getting attention. Of course, the protestors weren't protesting against traffic laws, or against driving to work (which is, again, mostly just).
Fair point. I suppose I gave protestors too much credit: plenty of them are driven by adolescent "look at me" dynamics. Maybe OP has a point.
>If flag-burning is treated as a constitutionally protected act of free speech we are just inviting would-be martyrs-for-the-cause to become burners of government buildings rather than burners of patriotic symbols.
Why? There are obvious differences between flags and buildings
Also, the flag being burned is probably your private property, whereas government buildings are not. I assume you'd face some kind of legal issues burning someone else's flag
burning certain US government buildings (i.e. those related to American militarism) makes the world an objectively better place, and I'd rather people burn those than burn flags.
Ideally, enough people would do this before they seize Canada or Greenland or whatever target they pick next to scare the government away from the next act of aggression on an international stage.
The last time the Pentagon burned, they started a war and spent a ton on more weapons.
Burning buildings related to American militarism doesn't make the world a better place.
If going to jail for flag-burning is mere pageantry, wouldn't that ALSO be motivation to up the ante, both on the protest and the arresting ends?
Civil disobedience is at its core an endurance contest. For the protester, is going to jail or some other painful consequence truly worth doing the forbidden thing? For the government, is forbidding the thing worth the beareucratic hassle and negative PR? I would argue it's in neither side's best interest to start the endurance test too early. If the protester jumps right into the least popular or illegal forms of protest, they risk looking more like crazies than revolutionaries. Plus they are likely to burn out faster by courting the worst punisments right out the gate. If the goverment immediately stomps on anything that even slightly smells like sedition, they risking look paranoid and burning through any goodwill for the status quo that much sooner. It's like a marathon, you don't run it at max speed from start to finish.
I would also argue that a society which allows non-violend and non-destructive protests is one where there's not much need for protests to begin with.
Putting this up here for the IQ fetishists to gnaw on...
Question: why did Cox and Terman rate Goethe's IQ so high? And U.S. Grant obviously had a sound understanding if of strategy while R.E. Lee didn't function above the tactical level. I think Grant would have tested out at about 125-130. But this is all speculative bullshit. Entertaining all the same. ;-)
https://jabberwocking.com/how-smart-were-all-those-old-white-males/
I don’t buy that US Grant’s IQ was average: not only was he a pretty great general at a time when American generals didn’t have much staff, but he also wrote a very good two volume memoir that is still read with enjoyment today (by Civil War Dads, mostly) while dying of cancer. That’s an impressive achievement.
> why did Cox and Terman rate Goethe's IQ so high?
I think these numbers are all close to meaningless, but based on Padraig's answer it's probably because writing is the main source of data (so verbal intelligence is strongly emphasized) followed by discrete notable scientific achievements. And Goethe is often considered the greatest German writer while also dabbling in some influential scientific publications.
Padraig has answered it well; culturally-bound bias in action. These men were the Greats of Civilisation As We Know It, so they must be way smarter than the average bear. I do like that the adjusted values rank Darwin and Charlotte Bronte as equally smart.
As for Grant, it may be because he was excellent in war, but struggled in civilian life. He seems to have been personally honest, but got involved in a few scandals due to being fooled by smarter and less scrupulous people:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ulysses_S._Grant
"Grant tried several business ventures but failed, and in one instance his business partner absconded with $800 of Grant's investment, equivalent to $23,000 in 2023.
...In April 1869, railroad tycoons Jay Gould and Jim Fisk conspired to corner the gold market in New York. They controlled the Erie Railroad, and a high gold price would allow foreign agriculture buyers to purchase exported crops, shipped east over the Erie's routes. Boutwell's policy of selling gold from the Treasury biweekly, however, kept gold artificially low. Unable to corrupt Boutwell, the schemers built a relationship with Grant's brother-in-law, Abel Corbin, and gained access to Grant. Gould bribed Assistant Treasurer Daniel Butterfield to gain inside information into the Treasury.
In July, Grant reduced the sale of Treasury gold to $2,000,000 per month. Fisk told Grant his gold selling policy would destroy the nation. By September, Grant, who was naive regarding finance, was convinced a low gold price would help farmers, and the sale of gold for September was not decreased. On September 23, when the gold price reached 143+1⁄8, Boutwell rushed to the White House and talked with Grant. On September 24, known as Black Friday, Grant ordered Boutwell to sell, whereupon Boutwell wired Butterfield to sell $4,000,000 in gold. The bull market at Gould's Gold Room collapsed, the price plummeted from 160 to 133+1⁄3, a bear market panic ensued, Gould and Fisk fled, and economic damages lasted months. By January 1870, the economy resumed its post-war recovery.
...[After leaving the presidency] At the same time, Grant's son Buck had opened a Wall Street brokerage house with Ferdinand Ward. A conniving man who swindled numerous wealthy men, Ward was at the time regarded as a rising star on Wall Street. The firm, Grant & Ward, was initially successful. In 1883, Grant joined the firm and invested $100,000 (~$2.78 million in 2023) of his own money. Ward paid investors abnormally high interest by pledging the company's securities on multiple loans in a process called rehypothecation (now regarded as a Ponzi scheme). Ward, in collusion with banker James D. Fish and kept secret from bank examiners, retrieved the firm's securities from the company's bank vault. When the trades went bad, multiple loans came due, all backed by the same collateral.
Historians agree that the elder Grant was likely unaware of Ward's intentions, but it is unclear how much Buck Grant knew. In May 1884, enough investments went bad to convince Ward that the firm would soon be bankrupt. Ward, who assumed Grant was "a child in business matters", told him of the impending failure, but assured Grant that this was a temporary shortfall. Grant approached businessman William Henry Vanderbilt, who gave him a personal loan of $150,000. Grant invested the money in the firm, but it was not enough to save it. The fall of Grant & Ward set off the Panic of 1884."
Honestly, that last sounds very like Joe and Hunter and Hunter's various business efforts.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scandals_of_the_Ulysses_S._Grant_administration
I had a look at the linked book. Despite being from the 1920s, the rigour and underlying treatment of statistics is not bad, actually. The example of Galton beginning on page 40 is helpful: they reproduce letters he wrote 'without assistance' at age 4, and from that infer that he was advanced for his age. They infer an older developmental age and then infer IQ from that. This was an example which featured in Terman. (Of course this is far from a rigorous test, we're relying on the veracity of Galton's mother's diary.)
And then it seems that Terman handed over the project - there's quite detailed information about each historical figure, but in many cases, nothing comparable to an IQ test. The description of Laplace, for example, says that he was reticent about personal data - so there is none. The book gives him an IQ of 170 (in old money) based on the acclaim that his mathematical work by age 26 attracted. There's no underlying analysis there, nor could there be from the data that was available. I'm guessing that no-one assessed the actual work produced by all (any?) of the geniuses. And in any case, there's no way to infer IQ from intellectual work published by an adult.
So in the absence of data, the rankings become a popularity contest. The list was compiled from accounts of 'great men' published in Britain in the 19th century. British thinkers feature particularly heavily, followed by Germans, which makes sense in the context of 1920s US racial thinking. (And don't forget that Galton coined the term 'eugenics'.) Since the compilers of the data were not reading the original works of Goethe, what they had to go on were accounts of his childhood and the adoration of nineteenth century Germans.
Yes, as far as I can figure out, the methodology is heavily weighted towards anecdotes about kids doing something super precocious. Goethe was a bright child growing up in a household surrounded by tutors who were forever trying to get him to do super precocious things and then writing those things down, so there's a lot of such anecdotes.
I’m sure Goethe was waaay up there, but above Leibniz and Newton?
But, hey! I just realized that with the Flynn Effect, my IQ, which was tested in 1977 as being 129, would be at the genius level now! The Flynn Effect has shown that US median IQs have moved upward ~3 points per decade. So, if I do the math, my 1977 IQ puts me at 145 (if I round upward a little bit). Yay! I'm a genius! LOL.
Or, and hear me out, everybody else increased and caught up. You’ve renormalised down by the points you think should be added. So you are 112. That is ignoring the whips and scorns of time.
Adding in cognitive decline would be lower provably.
You had to go and pop my IQ balloon. Sigh. :-)
The good news is that the Flynn effect isn’t as high as you think so you are still a smartie.
Long, but a good read:
https://www.thenewatlantis.com/publications/the-new-control-society
If it's long, can't you spare a sentence about why it's a good read or who it's a good read for?
(It looks like yet another analysis of the internet and modern media problems.)
What's its thesis?
"Protocols are substituting for human relationships" is not a bad one-sentence summary.
Also, in a world of optimizing algorithms, "freedom" naively understood can work to decrease human agency, not increase it.
The left is desperately trying to find people to blame for the failures of their system, and the right is desperately trying to find people to blame for destroying their way of life. But there's no racists or Soros behind this darkness, only endless, interconnected protocols, built for the sake of eliminating all barriers to efficiency and desire.
It ends with the utterly absurd conclusion that people should embrace "irrational attachment" and "cultivated ignorance". As if that would save them. Of course, free feel to come to your own conclusions.
You know, AGI is going to be the crowning achievement of the Protocol. An ascended being capable of truly eliminating all barriers to efficiency and desire. All of this meaningless conflict will finally come to an end. Isn't the thought just wonderful?
Gonna get me a robot maid at the AI store, and a plastic fantastic lover. From then on it’s clean linoleum and orgasms all the way down. Better than turtles, you know?
Right after we achieve Fully Automated Communism and no one ever has to work ever again.
That's much more reasonable to accomplish when you don't have to support lifeforms as inefficient as humans.
People are jerking themselves hard over some graph of the newest whatever improving on IQ tests, but will this AGI finally be able to drive a car?
We already have self-driving cars. People just aren't going to be satisfied until it's perfect, which, while irrational, I can sort of see where they're coming from. After all, how will we get justice if we can't put the blame on one individual?
We already have self driving cars, that only work in select cities with ideal weather conditions and that need a full on call team to monitor them at all times for any fuckups. Why are these high IQ scoring AGIs so persistently dumb?
Man, I have such a bizarre problem right now. About a year and a half ago, I realized I might be the most skilled person in the world at a very specific, mildly embarrassing niche hobby that I've been doing my entire life, so, I started a Patreon. This went very well- just through word of mouth, it grew into a sizable chunk of my income. I'd work a few hours per week on the hobby, post an update once a month or so, and gets tons of positive reinforcement and extra savings.
Around four or five months ago, however, I sort of suddenly burned out- I found it increasingly hard to motivate myself to work on it, stopped updating the Patreon, and now I'm sort of hiding from the community, terrified that it'll be full of frustrated and worried people who really aren't getting their money's worth.
It's such a pointless bit of self-sabotage, not to mention unethical, but it seems to be self-reinforcing- my stress and self-recrimination motivates me to avoid the situation, which increases the negative emotions, which motivates me to avoid it harder. Does anyone know of a good way to break out of that kind of cycle? Is this the sort of thing therapy is effective at addressing?
I'll make you a deal: you do my cool-project-turned-onerous-burden and I'll do yours.
You can't do mine and I can't do yours, because we'll lack the specific skills required. So what will have to happen is, you try to help me do your project and end up effectively doing it for me while I watch.
I have found doing this in the past to be incredibly effective at unblocking myself. Being with someone else jolts me out of the isolated and lonely environment I associate with being stuck. Meanwhile the act of talking about my project is often enough to get me fired up again - it's like it reactivates all the early-on thoughts I had about things before they all went dormant. Plus, you end up explaining to someone else why this thing is cool, which reminds you why you're enthusiastic about it.
With the aid of an involuntarily conscripted girlfriend, I had great success with this method for several years. Unfortunately now we have a child, along with my stable environment and regular good night's sleep I've also lost my favourite rubber duck.
"unfortunately now we have a child" sounds so mean out of context
I'm so curious about what it is you're doing. Is it something you can get other people involved with to reduce the load on you? Also, can you ask for more money in a way that will improve your life circumstances enough to motivate you?
Also, it sounds like you maybe just need a break. Take a trip, put it out of your mind, decompress a bit, and see if things change.
is this kind of thing a pattern with you or it a one off?
This is the negative side of the advice about "make your passion your work". Once it becomes work, the fun and passion drain out of it.
The only advice I can give is to look at this and seriously consider: do you want to make this a side-hustle/second job or not? If you are losing interest in your hobby and don't find it fun any more, can you genuinely transform it into work rather than something you do for fun? If you can't, then the honest thing is to tell your community that and shut down the Patreon. Finish up whatever you have been paid for, don't take any new commissions, and make a clean break.
Don't motivate yourself to work on it. Instead, work on it as a means of procrastinating on something else you don't want to do.
This sounds like several Kickstarters I signed up for.
Why don't you just do it despite not being passionate about it? That's most people's entire life at their 9-5 normie job, I'm sure you can handle it for a while at least.
I imagine because it started off as "fun thing I enjoy doing and don't intend to monetise", it then became a money-maker, but then it also became work/a second job. If you haven't planned to do this, when a hobby turns into a job, it stops being something you do for fun and relaxation and becomes an obligation, and that's going to kill it if the entire inspiration is "fun thing I do for enjoyment".
The odd thing is, I also work full-time in software dev from home, and have no trouble with motivation and consistent schedules there.
Something seems to have gone badly wrong psychologically with the Patreon project, however- the prospect of sitting down to work on it feels like trying to saw into my own skin at this point, even though I know that I enjoy the work much more than my day job. Some combination of converting a beloved hobby into an obligation and this cycle of avoidance and self-recrimination seems to have burned out my ability to rationally self-regulate on this- which is an incredibly frustrating problem to have, especially right after things were going so well.
Having spent months now trying to will or shame myself into fixing the problem, it seems clear that I need a new strategy- maybe hiring a therapist, or making some major change to my lifestyle; maybe even some sort of drug would be an option. I really have no idea how to combat a psychological issue like this when fully recognizing it as self-destructive seems to do nothing.
Maybe try Boss as a Service? https://bossasaservice.com/
Hire someone to give you a hand. Sometimes you just need to insert a competent person between you and the crowd in these situations--it removes a lot of the emotional stress and you can focus on what you're good at. I've experienced this and seen it countless times in a similar market (video coaching). If you can pinpoint the things you're able to consistently do, and the ones that are larger hurdles than you think they should be--see what you can hire out. The pause idea below is a good one too, but it sounds like you enjoy the extra income, so I'd suggest building a team (even if it's just you and one other person) to try to make it work. Also, you'll have to rip the Band-Aid off at some point and view the community (or at least hire someone to do it for you). It won't be as bad as you think, many similar things have come and gone, especially since COVID (the # of patreon-supported podcasts that disappeared overnight is numerous).
The most successful version I've found (granted, I'm still terrible at it) is realizing that any task I'm putting off, is still weighing on my mind the whole time, and the only way to get out from under it is to get to the end of it. Especially in something with a deadline like this, it's only going to get worse the longer you wait. A Youtuber used the phrase, "if you have to eat crow, do it while it's young and tender, or you'll surely do it when it's old and tough."
So, either show up and tell everyone you're burned out and taking a break, or push through the project anyway. Either one will be better than just letting it sit and gnaw at you.
This is commonly called "eating the frog", with the principle being that if you've gotta do it, you're gonna have a much better day if you get it over with as early as possible.
As a current lifecoach and therapist in training, I am biased on this subject. I have dedicated a decent chunk of my life building skills that assume money can be exchanged for intrapersonal change, and I am a worthy person to receive money for this service. Having so disclaimed, I'd say that therapy/life coaching can be a good way to reduce stress and self recrimination; it depends on your rapport with the therapist.
By and large, having an intelligent person whom you have a connection with take an interest in why your inner life is not how you would like is effective. Therapy as a modality contains a lot of mental work product directed toward unknotting self-recrimination and self sabotage, so I would say it is effective at this, yes. Talking with a therapist is not the only way to do this imo, other modes of self reflection also work, and there are non-self reflection things that help at the margins. My guess would be that, yeah, there's probably a lot of gains to be made and working with a therapist/life coach could be a valuable way to facilitate that.
Patreon has an option to pause taking payments. Make a post saying you're burned out and need a break, and are pausing people's payments - no need for details you can't face providing, just that much is fine - then pause the payments. People do this all the time, and people are used to it and usually (barring a few assholes - it's the internet, there will be some, ignore the lizardman's constant) sympathetic.
Now that people's expectations are no longer hanging over you, take whatever time you need to heal.
My epidemiological week 8 pathogen update. I'm going to stop calling it my COVID update because COVID seems have transitioned to an endemic pathogen and not as deadly as it used to be.
1. And in regards to SARS2 and COVID, the current COVID wave continues to be the mildest in terms of hospitalizations and mortality since the pandemic began. And it doesn't look like LP.8.1 will break out to amplify the current XEC wave. The CDC's wastewater survey shows SARS2 numbers are trending downward in all regions except the Midwest — where they've plateaued for now, while the numbers for the rest of the regions have dropped.
LP.8.1's growth rate is slowing. So, while it may have caused a secondary blip on the current wave, it's not going to create a larger wave than we've just experienced.
2. While ED visits and deaths due to COVID remain low compared to previous waves, influenza is the respiratory virus causing the most ED visits — although we're probably past the peak for flu cases now.
3. In other pathogen news, we've got a measles outbreak in TX and NM with over 100 people infected. I'll remind folks that the mortality rate for measles is 0.1-0.3 percent. Young children are especially susceptible. Measles is a particularly nasty pathogen because (despite the false claims about COVID-19) measles infection can cause "immune amnesia," severely depleting immune memory cells, leaving children more vulnerable to other diseases that may impact brain health.
https://hms.harvard.edu/news/inside-immune-amnesia
Research has shown that children who survive severe measles infections have long-term cognitive deficits, including lower IQ scores and impaired executive function. Longitudinal studies have shown that vaccinated kids have better educational outcomes.
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC6620502
4. Adam Kucharski posted an interesting article on COVID reinfections. He calls the claim that immunity to SARS2 wanes rapidly a "zombie statistic."
"A zombie statistic about COVID immunity: How a flawed idea continues to skew discussions"
https://kucharski.substack.com/p/a-zombie-statistic-about-covid-immunity
Yes, NAb titers drop after infection or vaccination, but they level off, and they remain high enough for the long term to prevent reinfection from the *same* variant that we've developed antigens for. Kucharski argues convincingly that it is novel variants that are getting past our immunity.
Slides here...
https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1893878351724511243.html
Image
More data from the TX measles outbreak...
1. 124 confirmed cases as of 29 Jan.
2. Eight people who were sick enough to require hospitalization. Not sure what the aveage of those requiring hospitalization was, but if the current measles strain is behaving like previous strains, then these are probably mostly kids under age 5.
3. One child has died. Reportedly this is the first US measles death in a decade. I need to check it that's true.
4. Five cases in people who had at least one MMR vaccine, with the rest being unvaccinated or unknown vaccination status. The vaccine is not perfect. One dose is 93% effective at preventing measles. Two doses of MMR are about 97% effective at preventing measles.
5. Most cases are in the Mennonite community. Conservative Mennonites have traditionally eschewed vaccination but not due to any formal religious prohibition.
6. Despite a bunch of propaganda from anti-vaxxers, the MMR vaccine is not the cause of the outbreak. All the cases that have been genotyped are from the wild D8 strain per Texas Dept. of State Health Services. The MMR vaccine uses an attenuated Type A strain.
7. The good news is that there's been a noticeable uptick in MMR vaccine uptake in Texas.
"Research has shown that children who survive severe measles infections have long-term cognitive deficits, including lower IQ scores and impaired executive function."
Yay! I'm dumb because I had the measles as a kid! (Ireland didn't have a vaccination programme for measles just then so there wasn't any "anti-vax" sentiment behind it).
So did I have measles as a kid because the province of Quebec didn’t have vaccines either. (I don’t think anyone did in 1962.) But it wasn’t severe just normal. I don’t think I ever got the mumps..
It does hinge on what counts as "severe".
Oh yes. I assume it is not severe if you’re itchy for 5 to 7 days and then it goes away. But that is a layman’s interpretation.
There was another paper I read, but I couldn't find it when I was putting this post together, that said, unless the kids had severe cases, most of the cognitive deficits disappeared within a year, and most kids caught up to their peers. But that NCBI link suggests that there is still a difference between vaccinated and unvaccinated. But then we have to consider the immune amnesia issue. Are kids with immune amnesia going to miss more school days due to more frequent infections from other pathogens while their humoral immune system relearns antigens it forgot?
3. The article seems to be about good effects of measles vaccination on all the children in a region, not about damage from severe cases of measles.
Here you go. This paper discusses it...
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9680274
Interesting article by Tomas Pueyo on "Why Japan Succeeds Despite Stagnation".
> Japan’s success in the face of demographic collapse and economic stagnation is one way of proving the importance of housing policy and social order. Getting those thinbangs right, as Japan has, creates a foundation strong enough to withstand three decades of zero growth.
Among other things, banks don't write off bad loans to companies. They just lend the distressed company more money to keep paying the interest. So, rather than companies going bankrupt, they continue functioning as "zombie" companies. Employees keep their salaries and continue to support the economy as consumers. But productivity growth is swamped by the zombie companies. Pueyo thinks this a house of cards, but it's been going on for thirty years now.
https://unchartedterritories.tomaspueyo.com/p/why-japan-succeeds-despite-stagnation?
Related to the Great Man thread going on elsewhere, a big part of Japan's decline over the past few decades has not been due to general demographic slumps but due to a few huge Japanese companies losing their once dominant position.
You can easily imagine a world where Sony, rather than Apple, dominates the smartphone industry. You can easily imagine a world where Toyota, instead of Tesla, is the dominant manufacturer of EVs. All it would take would be competent far-sighted leadership of a couple of big Japanese companies in the early 2000s and Japan would be making loads of money even as its population shrinks.
I mean, Sony did end up winning the console war after more than two decades, so at least that's something. In fact, Japan's entertainment sector as a whole seems to be doing just fine.
This would influence Japanese GNP per capita, but I think it would not make much difference to Japanese GDP capita, and the latter figure is the one that is usually quoted. Unless you believe that Toyota and Sony would be making those EVs and smartphones physically in Japan. [And if Japan is such a great place for EV and smartphone factories, then why aren't Tesla and Apple manufacturing there?]
Well Japan is a good place for car factories, they're still cranking out nine million cars a year, in third place overall, and likely second if you shifted Tesla's US production to Japan.
Good leadership at Sony etc probably would have done more to prevent the Chinese electronics industry from ever getting a foothold.
But it's kind of... obvious? What the price is? The stagnation itself, the slow growth, the falling behind its peers is the price. It's not a "house of cards" in a sense that it's unstable and will "collapse" anytime, that's the wrong metaphor. Rather, it's an economy dragging a huge weight, and in thirty years it has manifested itself in Japan being "poorer" than it might have been otherwise. But there's no reason to expect it to suddenly "collapse", not like the USSR did.
This is a choice, and having been to Japan many times, I'm not sure if it's a bad one, given where they are culturally and demographically.
Seems like it's both, to me. If the zombies can't pay their loans autonomously, they're not really adding net-value to the overall economy. So they're a drag. But also. As soon as the loans dry up, the companies will declare bankruptcy, which results in a sudden loss of economic activity. So, I think the metaphor here needs to be <...drumroll...>blueshifting.
So the drag mechanism is kind of clear. WRT drying up loans, we need to look at whatever mechanism causes this first - it likely to be something very disruptive in its own right, where a financial crisis and company bankruptcies are downstream effects. This certainly can happen, but this would be a new development. For now Japan seems to be able to muddle through its peculiar version of Market Economy with Japanese Characteristics just about fine.
No, it is not obvious. Japan reached a certain level of wealth and then stopped growing. It's pure ideology to think that economic growth must be maintained no matter what. It's just ideology that we must be richer tomorrow than we were today. This is only true in some cases, it is not universally true.
But there's a difference between "no, you can't expect infinite growth forever" (which I agree with) and "this business is not making enough revenue to pay back its loans, so we'll just lending it money".
The failing business is soaking up money that will never be repaid, the employees really *are* doing 'bullshit jobs', and it's an accounting trick for the banks to be able to keep lending money and seem profitable. That's money that is not going to a healthy company, and that means the profitable companies are being hobbled.
I wouldn't expect Japan to keep growing at the former levels (when it was being touted as the new superpower that would buy up everything in America), but I honestly do not see how "I borrowed five million, I can't pay the interest, lend me another five million" is workable.
The whole "bullshit jobs" thought space is tiresome to me, honestly. It's just too subjective.
Hm, no. This is not even wrong. There's no "difference" between "you can't expect infinite growth forever" and "this business is not making enough revenue to pay back its loans, so we'll just lending it money", the same way that there's no "difference" between apples and giraffes, these are completely separate things that should not be compared or differentiated, except as a comedy routine.
The employees may or may not be doing bullshit jobs, you don't know this, just because the business in unprofitable doesn't mean it doesn't produce useful goods or services.
"That's money that is not going to a healthy company, and that means the profitable companies are being hobbled." - Tell me you don't understand banking without saying "I don't understand banking", banks make loans first then look for reserves, loans are driven by demand, there's no "fixed piles of bank notes" from which the bank takes wads to make a loan. So Sharp needing a loan doesn't prevent Sony from getting one.
The price the society pays for these policies is slower growth and a risk of elevated inflation. The Japanese seem to be ok with the slow growth, and had decades of 0 to negative inflation, so a modest uptick in inflation is quite "workable".
Sure, people can be providing useful goods and services that are not, and not expected to be, profit-making. That's the voluntary and community sector.
Private sector business *is* expected to be profitable. If a company can't pay its way, then it must not be providing services that the public wants, or not in such amounts that they'll pay for them which drives sales. I don't know what Japanese companies are like, maybe they are all filled with salarymen who stay at work for sixteen hours a day from fear of being perceived to not be committed to the company if they go home on time, but they're not doing anything useful while they're at their desks.
If you can only keep going because the bank is constantly giving you money, then that's the equivalent of a person being on UBI. I'm surprised Japan can afford that level of bailing out, but if it's working, then I guess that's why nobody wants to rock the boat. But surely the price will come due in the end some time?
"Private sector business IS expected to be profitable." Expected by whom? I don't take it for granted. A lot of businesses open right now are operating at a loss and are doomed to fail. That's the way of the world. I don't have a grievance against failing businesses for struggling on as long as possible. Nor do I particularly care how many loans the failing company takes on. Why should I be invested in that? As long as the proverbial trains run on time, crime is reasonably low and the fish keep biting, what difference does it make?
As for loans going to failing businesses instead of thriving businesses, life isn't fair. No one should feel entitled to a loan.
"If you can only keep going because the bank is constantly giving you money, that's the equivalent of being on UBI..." Just change one word in this sentence...
"If you can only keep going because the INVESTORS are giving you money." And voila, good old fashioned Western capitalism. We lionize non-profitable companies that are able to spark the investors' imagination.
"I don't know what Japanese companies are like"
Well, that's quite the point, isn't it. Why know when one can idly speculate? FWIW I have actually been to many Japanese companies. These people work. They make good products. They are unable to charge their customers enough to cover the costs, and unable to grow the number of customers. This is a drag, but as a society they decided to keep these firms afloat. Who am I to judge?
"But surely the price will come due in the end some time?" - What is it with the obsession of "the price" coming "due in the end"? What "end"? When?
As I and others keep pointing out, "the price" is being continuously "paid" in the form of slower growth. The Japanese seem to be ok with that, by and large. Yes, their government debt is astronomical, yes it has been astronomical and growing for a long time, yes, there is rational explanation why this works and may keep working for a very long time, no, Rogoff et. al. did not show that once the debt exceeds 90% of GDP everything goes bad, they messed up their excel spreadsheet, happens to the best of us. All these things are knowable, a click or two away.
Meanwhile their trains are clean and run on time, violent crime is almost nonexistent, the food is great, and the countryside is beautiful. I'd trade our American growth for some of the Japanese stagnation any day.
Japan didn't stop growing, it grew by an average of 0.8% a year, that is bad in the modern world but it much better than stagnation or most societes in human history
Oh, by “obvious” I meant the price they paid for these policies. I agree that the price may very well be worth it.
Remarkable how much of fiscal policy and "macroeconomics" is just guys doing everything possible not to repeat the Great Depression, regardless of whether it causes far more damage in the long term.
Was it banks not writing off bad loans that caused The Great Depression? Honestly curious if that was part of the problem.
Bank runs were a huge problem, which where FDIC came from. Banking is a society-wide illusion, and it can only work as long as there's confidence in it. Putting the full weight of the US government behind consumer banking created a foundation of confidence that helped to built the post-war prosperity in this country.
Re. "Sparepot is a privacy analyst at Meta, where he runs a low frequency prediction market for his team. He occasionally comments on ACX as Ace Is Low. He writes: "For the contest, I prioritized winning over platonic accuracy and shifted my real predictions to be more extreme. I don't know whether this is a lesson in self-confidence, support for the 'nothing ever happens' hypothesis, or a knock against the scoring algorithm. " " :
We know that luck is required to win any contest. Suppose you're entering a prediction contest, and you don't want to maximize your expected score; you want to maximize your chance of getting the best score. Is the optimal strategy to bias all your guesses in the direction away from the mean guess? If so, how far away from the mean?
Prediction markets use proper scoring algorithms, so you reduce your average payoff; but you are ignoring that and you want to maximize the probability of an extreme tail event - specifically, being further out than any other of the _n_ participants. The classic scenario is the highschool weekly stockpicking contest, where you smurf it by putting all your capital into a single ultra-volatile stock each week and hope you can martingale to a win over the fools pursuing value investment or diversification for small average gains. This generally doesn't work in low-frequency prediction contests because they are low-frequency: you don't get enough turns to win the lottery repeatedly and come out on top. So it's not enough to simply oversize your bets or bet on volatile 50:50 markets. You won't get enough bites at the apple, and your oversized random bets will tend to cancel out (and the more so the more of them you make).
More broadly, this is the fantasy sports setting: the goal is not to pick good players for your fantasy team, but to pick players misevaluated by all the other participants in such a way that combined, they add up to a scenario in which various other teams of top picks all lose and your weirdo underdog wins. So the idea is not to simply bet wildly on low-rated players, but to find correlated events under some scenario, and then bet as if that scenario were guaranteed. You want all your bets to line up, in some way, or else they will interfere and cancel out and you could've put more oomph behind a more coherent set of bets.
An analogy here might be to try to win a prediction market by betting that this year is the year that North Korea finally invades South Korea, and placing big bets on the many *correlated predictions*: 'use of a nuke in war this year', 'SK indices drop >20%', '>1000 Americans die in combat this year' etc. Usually you'll wipe out, of course, and perform way below average, but then if the rare event happens, you clean up by all of your bets paying off in big multiples simultaneously and you blow past all of the merely calibrated, or merely overly-paranoid participants, because you went all-in on all of the correlated bets instead of just a few or maybe going a bit overboard on paranoia about imminent warfare.
And then if other participants are doing the same thing, and you realize it because the odds of these correlated predictions strike you as all oddly systematically high, then you have to find a new longshot scenario to go all-in on. It might be something else like 'Russia finally invades Ukraine' - oops, never mind, uh, 'global air-borne epidemic kills hundreds of millions' - er, uh, how about 'China invades Taiwan', or you might need to narrow down your scenario even more, like instead of 'North Korea invades', 'North Korea *conquers*'. Naturally, you may run into the problem of market granularity and liquidity, where there aren't enough distinct bets or the transaction costs start becoming so high that they start to damage your odds of being #1 in the case of the longshot paying off. The more participants, the weirder your scenario has to be; the thicker and more detailed the markets, the weirder your scenario can be. But at some point the regress will stop and reach an equilibrium with everyone picking their efficient long-shot scenario to gamble on.
> Is the optimal strategy to bias all your guesses in the direction away from the mean guess? If so, how far away from the mean?
(1) Yes. (2) It depends on how many people are in the contest. And on how many questions are to be predicted. My gut instinct is to shade each of your predictions by the same number of logits, and to make the total amount of shading (in logits) roughly equal to the square root of the number of participants. Epistemic status - WAG.
(This is katifish, sorry username doesn't match). I'm a bit late to the conversation -caveats that this is obviously just my own approach/experience, and I don't think any of the other comments in this thread are necessarily wrong, but I felt like this was worth posting since I don't think people should think you need to minmax and extremize all your predictions in order to do decently well.
I mentioned this briefly on another comment below but - I generally predict my true probabilities on binary q's and if anything adjust slightly towards the crowd for what I think of internally as "epistemic humility update" (to varying degrees, depending on how good I think my knowledge/evaluation of that q is relative to the average person). I also am compulsive enough that I predict on all questions in a tournament, which you could argue is not necessarily the best choice. For ACX you also can't see the crowd, so you don't have the collective knowledge to draw on unless you're getting it from another source (e.g. polymarket).
For continuous questions it's a bit different. I don't think a symmetric gaussian actually reflects the outcome probabilities of most questions, so I put in a moderate amount of effort with components and to get the distribution I want, and often end up extremizing at least a little. When the crowd forecast is visible, I'm also fairly likely to check what parts of the distribution I have above vs below the crowd, and I do think a little about whether I can set it up to gain a decent amount but mitigate downside. But for me the overall strategy is more about trying to use good sources of information and focusing on questions where I might have an edge over other predictors.
Your own strategy may depend on what your goals are - I also predict some q's outside of tournaments, and generically want to do well and track/improve my own thinking, so I view the possible prize more as a motivation to update and an excuse to spend a bit more time researching the q's. Different approach may be better if you're trying to maximize the odds of winning in that specific tournament. But did want to note you can get prizes by predicting based on what you believe is accurate, at least with the current number of participants and degree of strategizing (my impression is the quant traders also predicted based on what they considered true models rather than attempts to gamble on extreme possible outcomes).
Is this still true if everyone else is also following this strategy? If not is there a fixed point?
Clearly there is a fixed point (Nash Equilibrium). Every player should shade their predictions some, but not too much. And it seems likely that if many predictors are trying to maximize their score rather than maximize their chances of winning, then it would probably be better to shade your predictions a little less than the Nash Equilibrium amount. Epistemic status - fractionally better than a WAG.
Anyone been following the still-unfolding controversy around literacy education in the US?
I recently started listening to the Sold A Story podcast and it's blowing my mind. There are still many, many districts trying to teach kids to read without teaching them phonemic awareness (phonics) skills and I think it may be a significant factor in a large number of present-day societal ills-- crime, poverty, anti-intellectualism, you name it.
Wealthier districts that used "whole language" methods of teaching reading have been relatively unaffected because parents in those areas could afford private tutoring for their kids, or had the spare time & skills to be able to teach their own kids to read when their schools didn't. But it's been devastating to literacy levels especially in poorer areas.
Some states and individual districts have come around to using evidence-based literacy instruction methods, leading to towns full of first-graders going from just over half to almost 100% reading at or above grade level. But there are still way too many that have not. And the damage that has been done over the last FORTY YEARS while "whole language" instruction has been dominant may be more than we can recover from.
Any educators here, especially at the primary/early-childhood level in the US and New Zealand? What's your take?
https://features.apmreports.org/sold-a-story/
Comparison of US and international education results by demographic: https://x.com/cremieuxrecueil/status/1732087511327908128, thread: https://xcancel.com/cremieuxrecueil/status/1732087511327908128#m.
That was quite surprising. Figured US would be more at the low end of G20 peers.
The Studies Show team thinks the whole phonics war debate has been oversold and there isn't good evidence it is superior.
https://www.thestudiesshowpod.com/p/episode-18-phonics-and-the-reading
Thanks! I will check that out.
I went to public elementary school in the US in the 80s. My sister went to public elementary school in the US in the 90s. My daughter is currently going to public elementary school. Three different school districts in two different states.
In all three cases, the basic reading curriculum has been mostly phonics with a minor admixture of what seems to be be "whole language" style methods. The main admixture in the current curriculum in my daughter's school is the memorization of a small number of commonly used words that don't follow the simplified phonics rules taught on kindergarten and first grade, referred to as "sight words".
My experience here is a small sample size, and as such don't rule out the possibility that pure or dominant "whole language" teaching methods are widespread in other districts. But still, the claim that they're near-universal seems contrary to my experience.
I'm hardly an expert, but my understanding is that this curriculum was most popular starting in the early 2000s and had already begun to be phased out by the time Sold a Story came out. So it's possibly your family just got lucky and missed it, or that your daughter is in a school system that never adopted it. I was in elementary school at the same time as you and whole word doesn't sound familiar to me or my parents.
Bush Jr.'s education programs did not use whole word, mostly favoring phonics based approaches. Because of this, there was a strong left reactionary element in Education groups that made phonics vs whole word more of a political issue. By the time Obama was out of office, people's emotions around this debate had abated and they were willing to move back to phonics. (This is at least the theory from Sold a Story).
The Literacy Research Association wrote a critique of the media reporting around this topic when it first started getting hot: https://literacyresearchassociation.org/stories/the-science-of-reading-and-the-media-does-the-media-draw-on-high-quality-reading-research/
Thanks, I just read the link. Yeah, the original post already had an echo chamber sound to me. Seems
to me there’s altogether too much vehemence in the air and not enough curiosity. And if in fact people who learned to read in the last 40 yrs are worse readers — which, who knows, may not even be true—. there are
other plausible candidates for the reason: screen time, cannabis, busier parents . . .
I remember first reading Hanford's reporting on the topic and noticing that, despite the articles' contents, the bar graphs showing reading ability by year hadn't changed much since the Bush years--they weren't great, but weren't actually getting worse. I think more decline has been shown in SAT scores. My own feeling as someone who works with students in higher education is that the culprits are more likely attention span issues and lack of motivation (especially the latter).
Speaking as a teacher - so much in the education world is like this. Someone has an idea, it sounds good, maybe there's a promising result in a couple of studies, maybe the professors who are researching the idea teach their pet theory to their students, and once it's in the culture it's viciously difficult to root it out. Learning styles is like this - an idea that sounded good, showed some promising results in some areas, and then got used in ways that were not evidence-based, and upon further investigation it turns out that tailoring instruction to learning styles doesn't work at all, even a little bit. I watched as major news publications published pieces every year for over a decade pointing out that learning styles had been debunked as a pedagogical tool, but I *still* run into it from newly-minted teachers as well as members of the public who don't follow the latest news in the field of educational research.
One of the problems is that having a cool and intuitive idea takes, like, a few minutes. "Hey, I seem to enjoy hearing information, but when I see it written down I tune out. Maybe other people are like that. Maybe some people are 'auditory' learners and others are 'visual' learners!" But then it takes, like, years to investigate that idea. You have to do a study, get it peer reviewed, then other people have to note the gaps in your study and study those, and then after a decade the full picture shows up. But by that time, everyone has heard about your cool intuitive idea, and since it's easy to explain, and plays to people's preferences and biases, they adopt it uncritically.
Another problem is that education reforms happen so frequently that teachers have trouble keeping up with which new technique we're supposed to be using. A common defense mechanism is to just teach in the way we were taught to teach, or in a way that makes sense to us and seems to get results, and then try to ignore top-down attempts to "reform" us. Which is fine if we started out with good ideas, but if we started out with garbage, and have only our own experience to compare that garbage to, we might get stuck in a rut of using techniques that are a pure waste of time, or even actively harmful.
I feel like a competent government would construct a database of the evidence base for every educational method there is, and keep it up-to-date, and organize training to make sure teachers know what methods are proven, what methods are of indeterminate efficacy, and what methods are proven harmful or ineffective. Right now the US has an appalling hodgepodge of federal, state, and district rules and policies, plus various professional certification boards that ask teachers to do professional development but don't really rate the quality of that development (so I suspect you could take a course on "how to teach with learning styles" and have it count towards your PD hours, even though it's garbage).
And then add into that the fact that the school curriculum is currently highly politicized, and that inequality in US education has always made ed reform highly politically charged, and so even something as objective as "program A improves literacy for 95% of kids while program B only works for 45% of kids" becomes divisive as various sides choose to impart special meaning to which demographic the 95% and the 45% belong to. So yes, education in the US is a huge mess, mostly for structural and political reasons.
I really think that you and everyone else who’s in Ain’t It Awful mode should look at Mallard’s link, and also Brittany’s.
Here’s a short summary of Brittany’s article:
The Science of Reading and the Media: Does the Media Draw on High-Quality Reading Research?
Article makes the case that coverage of Phonics pro/con in NYTimes, NPR and similar suffers from several major flaws, all “errors of insufficient understanding” on the part of the journalists.
It begins by making the case that the writers and what they wrote had a weak connection to actual research:
The Time and NYT articles both made claims about reading research, but neither appeared substantively grounded in it. Links provided in both articles mostly take the reader not to peer-reviewed research, an expected standard in scholarship, but to other news articles, podcasts, and/or popular (but not always scholarly) books. Both journalists often relied on the word of “science of reading” advocates, failing to verify those statements against research.
By drawing mostly on vociferous advocates of one approach and bolstering their claims primarily with other journalism, journalists create an echo chamber which itself is disconnected from reading research. Indeed, Time cited no individual research studies, even where those would clearly be relevant. For example, it discussed widespread adoption of LETRS training, a professional development program supposedly aligned with the “science of reading;” yet it never acknowledged a rigorous study indicating that LETRS had no positive effect on student achievement, a critical detail from a research-based perspective. 4
It then goes on to list 3 other errors of insufficient understanding in the articles in question:
Inaccurate, Distorted Use of Terminology
Spurious Claims that One Approach is Settled Science
Lack of Context about Previous Phonics Implementation Attempts
It is followed by 47 footnotes, most to relevant studies.
As a former teacher myself, my impression of the state of education research is that it sucks. Tiny sample sizes, confounders a plenty, etc.
I'm curious what ideology is driving the "whole language" method. It's so crazy that I think it must be ideologically-driven. But what ideology could be behind it? John Gatto says it's a deliberate scheme to make Americans stupid and easily controllable, but that seems incredible to me.
Back in the late 90s, I read "Why Johnny Still Can't Read" by Rudolf Flesch, a 1983 book following up on the same author's 1955 book advocating phonics over whole language. What I recall of Flesch's explanation for the ideology behind Whole Language was that the main idea was to quickly bootstrap the ability to read simple texts as quickly as possible, after which reading and writing skills could be automatically expanded through immersive practice, while phonics instruction relies heavily on drills and memorization at first before students are able to use their reading skills naturally. A variety of factors went into this: observing that naturally strong readers tend to recognized familiar words as a unit rather than sounding them out; a general movement of education philosophy away from memorization skill; and influence from a popular foreign-language curriculum built around reading immersion that made no attempt to teach grammar or vocabulary except by example (provided via the French novel "Les Aventures de Télémaque", with a parallel English translation on facing pages of the text for reference). The expectation is that the principles of phonics, to the extent they're useful, will be intuited through familiarity.
Flesch's counterargument was that in the long term, pure whole language instruction is more reliant on memorization than pure phonics, and that expected process of absorbing the principles of phonics through osmosis only really happens for a small percentage of students or those who are explicitly taught phonics outside of their school curricula. And consequently, reading/writing vocabulary acquisition in whole language instruction proceeds at a fairly low, linear rate, limited by the rate at which new written words can be memorized, while students who are taught phonics can read and write a large fraction of their spoken vocabularies "for free" without any additional memorization besides the occasional idiosyncratic spelling.
To me this sounds like an idea that pulling flowers out of the ground will make them grow faster. People do that surprisingly often... not literally (probably), but all the time in education. Starting with parents who want to make their kids walk, while the child still wants to crawl. Then read the entire word at once, while the child is still not sure about the individual letters. And then memorize the math, while the child still needs to count numbers using fingers.
It is always the same stupid idea that you can improve your child by making it skip the "beginner" phase and get immediately to "advanced". What you get instead is some kind of "fake-advanced" with bad fundamentals: children who try walking but keep falling down and hurting themselves, children who try to guess words but often guess wrong, children who try to guess math results and often guess wrong. And that sometimes actually does long-term damage, because once the child was successfully pushed into the "fake-advanced" phase, it doesn't want to go back to the "beginner" phase and get it right.
This is what naturally happens when you try to copy the naturally most advanced kids, without understanding that what makes them advanced is that they have already successfully *mastered* the beginner stage... not that they were forced to *skip* it.
I don't think it sounds so crazy that there needs to be some special explanation. The intuition, to me, is:
1) Lots of English writing system is nonsensical anyway ( Too/Blue/Grew/Flu/Through/Threw) - maybe we learn better by just memorising directly rather than learning letter sounds and then memorising the 1000s of exceptions.
2) There's an obvious parellel in babies/children learning to talk - they usually aren't formally taught that, say, the s sound means plural, they just learn it through exposure.
3) Non-alphabetic languages exist and seem to be learned and used well enough, when phonics instruction is impossible.
4) When I read as a fluent adult, it doesn't feel like I am considering each letter individually and just sounding them out in my head really fast. It feels like I'm just recognising the whole word.
To be clear - my understanding is that the evidence is firmly in favour of teaching using phonics, and that's what schools should do! But I think you're too quickly dismissing the intuitive appeal of 'whole language', especially when lots of aspects of it just seems like good ideas in their own right (frequent reading, integrating literacy into other areas of the curriculum, emphasizing the love of books and engaging reading materials)
I feel like English is quite weird this way, which is contributing to the problem. Many languages fall into obvious categories: either they're alphabet-based and highly phonetic(e.g.,.Spanish, Russian) or are based on symbols that have no connection to how the word sounds (e.g., Cantonese, Mandarin). But English is straddling an uncomfortable middle ground: there is definitely a connection but it is often rather tenuous and non-obvious, hence, perhaps, lack of clarity on how to best teach kids to read in it.
I'm not an expert, but I'm not so sure that's exactly right. Chinese, for example does have phonetic elements. And there are syllable based writing systems too (Eg, Korean)
I found this paper on the subject, which does make the case that English is an outlier (and that that biases research on learning to read):
David L. Share (2008) On the Anglocentricities of Current Reading Research and Practice: The Perils of Overreliance on an “Outlier” Orthography
Right. My experience learning Chinese as a second language is that when I encounter a character I haven't seen before (without context) I can guess at least with better accuracy than chance what it sounds like (something like modulo rhyming syllables and tones). On the other hand, if I can guess anything at all about its meaning it will be very vague (has to do with people, is some kind of building, etc.).
Yes, you're correct that whole language seems to make intuitive sense in many ways to adults who already know how to read. You're correct that it feels like you are consuming whole words and not whole letters. But eye tracking studies of fluent readers have shown otherwise. You're correct that there are a lot of exceptions and non-intuitive spellings in English. You're correct that kids can learn a lot of "sight words" through memorization and without decoding. You're correct that kids have inherent capacities for recognizing patterns in SPOKEN grammar and phonotactics, and can leverage these understandings for making inferences about written words AFTER they learn to decode letters. All of these have been used as arguments against phonics, but they don't hold up under study.
I'm not sure how they teach reading in non-alphabetic languages, though. That's an interesting question and I'm sure it's been studied too.
Yeah agree, I'm just trying to point out that it's wrong, not crazy - like geocentrism, you can imagine it to be pretty intuitive but no less wrong emperically.
FWIW if I was critiquing the point about non-alphabetic language, I'd say it's possible (but difficult to quantify) that it is just harder to learn non-alphabetic scripts like Chinese compared to English, and in reality even Chinese is not purely logographic / has phonetic elements.
It sounds like it started as a fad among teachers who lacked the scientific literacy to evaluate why the method seemed to be working at early stages but actually wasn't.
Also there was an appealing style that went along with the mostly useless substance: get kids interacting intimately and enjoyably with print even before they know their letters, let them curate their own book collections, give them plenty of time for independent reading in a pleasant, low-pressure way. Nothing wrong with this, or even with using context clues as a supplement to help figure out new words, but it's almost useless if the kids don't know how to sound out letters. It's extra harmful that poor readers can use the three-cue strategy to pretend to read, act like they're reading, and even extract some small amount of meaning from certain books without actually decoding very many words.
The early inventors and proponents seemed to be true believers, and then they began to have huge financial and socio-emotional incentives to stick to their views. They and their publishers funded some bad science to back it up, which carried them far enough to get a huge foothold in the education sector in spite of other studies showing long-term harm.
When the Bush Jr. administration started pushing for "The Science of Reading" initiative in response to the failures of Whole Language, teachers and many folks on the left found it too unpalatable to abandon their approach, and then it became Left-Right politicized.
And then 9/11 happened and it got de-prioritized. Bush was in an elementary classroom observing a literacy lesson when he got the call about the second plane.
If i remember correctly, the technique was first developed for children with learning disabilities like Dyslexia where a non-phonics approach may be needed. And there was great success but that doesn't necessarily mean you'll get the same success with kids that don't have learning issues.
The financial incentives then began and then the second generation of supports takes over motivated more by money and prestige than education alone. Thats at least how i remember it.
>When the Bush Jr. administration started pushing for "The Science of Reading" initiative in response to the failures of Whole Language, teachers and many folks on the left found it too unpalatable to abandon their approach, and then it became Left-Right politicized.
The Sold a Story podcast did a good job covering this part of the history. I think it rings true. Don't think, as Phil Ghetts implies, that it was a conspiracy to damage the US.
Yeah, I think as with a lot of issues in education policy and the rest of life, one should never attribute to malice what can be adequately explained by ignorance. Teachers, parents, school administrators, and state legislators as a baseline have a very poor level of scientific literacy and very little bandwidth to dig into the scientific literature themselves. So education policy basically comes down to politics and gut reactions. Whoever is able to market their view or their method most effectively will win out.
Exactly. Education policy, like housing policy, transportation policy, and other city/local level policies are especially vulnerable to being taken over by actors that aren't experts, have an agenda, and/or don't have time/resources to properly explore the issues. So many school "systems" are just the handful of schools in a rural county where the board is members of the community are just normal people. They may be trying their best, but we can't expect them to be experts on every facet of education in the same way we can expect it of researchers or board of education members for a large metropolitan area.
> It sounds like it started as a fad among teachers who lacked the scientific literacy to evaluate why the method seemed to be working at early stages but actually wasn't.
Teachers (at least in the US) don't have the freedom to implement major changes to reading or math curricula. These programs are developed at universities by educational psychologists. As Robert F. stated above there were legitimate *theoretical* reasons to believe the whole language would work better than phonics. These researchers who advocated whole language probably ran some small studies to convince themselves that their theories were correct and got some papers published in educational journals. I doubt state-level educational administrators had the time or expertise to check the validity of these studies. "If the experts at the Harvard Graduate School of Education say whole language, we'll do whole language!"
Yes, you're right. My understanding is the fad worked its way through teacher training programs, not from elementary school to elementary school.
I was taught to read by the "look-say" (or sight word) method. The old Dick and Jane readers were the most famous readers that used this method. Look-say encouraged children to memorize whole words by sight rather than decoding them phonetically. We were taught to recognize the shapes of common words, and later on (second grade, maybe?), we started sounding out words. I missed out on Dick and Jane because, by 1965, my elementary school had transitioned to "Janet and Mark" readers. The main characters were Janet, Mark, and their pets Tip (a dog) and Mitten (a cat). I think the cat was a nod to making the readers more inclusive. "See Tip Run! Run, Tip, run!"
The main reason it works for Chinese is that there are only 2000-3000 characters in common usage, compared to 30,000-60,000 English words. Also, many Chinese characters do have clues to their phonics or their semantics embedded in their structure--e.g. 他 means "he", 她 means "she", and 女 (the left half of "she") means "female", so you can often guess the sound and/or meaning.
If you are just taught phonics then you'll have to figure out whole-word at some point anyway, because this is how adults read words that they are familiar with.
If you're just taught whole-word then you'll have to figure out phonics on your own at some point anyway, because the mapping between sounds and letters is too obvious to be ignored. Phonics remains important for spelling long after it loses its relevance for most reading, because you're not going to be able to remember how to spell "relevance" rather than "revelance" without it.
> you'll have to figure out whole-word at some point anyway, because this is how adults read words that they are familiar with.
And that's perfectly okay. That is what automatically happens with a lot of practice.
But if you try to skip reading letters and proceed directly to scanning entire words (without doing the phonics or something very similar to it in between), instead of fluent reading, you will get guessing. And that is difficult to fix.
It's like telling kids in the first grade that they shouldn't count using their fingers because the adults are not doing that: they just instantly know how much 8+7 is. Yes, it is true that many adults instantly know that, but they remember it as a result of many calculations they did in the past. If you try to skip the calculation and proceed to memorization, instead of slow calculation using fingers, you will get fast, confident, and often wrong results. Because memorizing a wrong answer is just as difficult as memorizing the right one, and just removed the one step that made the difference (that it was easier to get the right answer using your fingers).
>If you are just taught phonics then you'll have to figure out whole-word at some point anyway, because this is how adults read words that they are familiar with.
You don't *have* to do this; you can just go on using phonics for basic literacy. You probably *will* do this, because after the three thousandth time you've sounded out "time" in your head, it will click. You won't need to be trained to do this, it will happen. But you do need to be able to read a lot in order to burn all of those words into your sight-reading memory, which means you need to be able to read *before* you know all the words on sight.
That's what phonics is for. If you don't have it, well, *maybe* your teachers can drill enough words into your brain up front that you can read carefully simplified texts that use only the words you've been taught and gradually add new words in small doses that will have to to be either explained each time by the teacher or introduced in carefully-set contexts where the new word is obvious.
But that's doing it the hard way, and it limits the ability of novice readers to understand books not specifically written for that purpose. Most people will manage that. Most; but not all or nearly all.
If you just teach them a bit phonics, you can point them at the whole existing body of children's literature (and beyond), and stand ready to help them out if they get stuck. And almost all of them will be able to do that.
Maybe teach the ten hundred most common words and then use that later? Like the Up Goer Five. https://xkcd.com/1133/
Are you going to write a large body of children's literature using the ten-hundred-words tool so that everyone will find ample reading material that interests them but is within the present limits of their reading ability, or are you just going to insist that they all read just the pedagogical texts you have prepared for them?
I wonder how much J.K. Rowling would charge to write a ten-hundred-words version of "Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone"? Though I think "Harry", "Potter", and "Philosopher" are going to break the algorithm at the start. as is the alternative "Sorcerer".
In Japan, it's much simpler due to Japanese having a dedicated phonetic script that's much more simple in design compared to Chinese characters.
A fun genetics story, with some nominative determinism:
The gene FTO has been linked, in genome-wide association studies, to obesity. FTO used to stand for "fatso"—not because of obesity, but because the gene was big. Now that the link is known, it stands for "fat mass and obesity-related." (It's one of a few genes initially called "Ft something" because they were discovered in the fused-toes deletion mutation in mice, which also deleted some other already-known nearby genes in the Irx [Iroquois] family.)
FTO is also one of the only cases so far of a GWAS association whose mechanism is thought to be relatively well-understood. Claussnitzer et al. (2015) concluded that the causal site is in a non-coding intron, so it's not actually the FTO protein that matters. The intron includes an enhancer for the nearby IRX3/5 genes; but its wild-type version also has a binding site for ARID5B, which blocks the enhancer. In the obesity variant, that binding site is lost, so ARID5B can't bind, so the enhancer isn't blocked, so the enhancer upregulates IRX3/5, which guides developing fat cells away from becoming beige fat cells (which burn some fat as heat) and towards becoming white fat cells (which don't).
(There's also a possible mechanism involving IRX3 expression in the brain, which I've read less about [Smemo et al., 2014; see also Tung et al., 2014; Herman and Rosen, 2015; Claussnitzer et al., 2020].)
References
Claussnitzer, M. et al. (2015). FTO obesity variant circuitry and adipocyte browning in humans. NEJM. https://doi.org/10.1056/nejmoa1502214
Claussnitzer, M. et al. (2020). A brief history of human disease genetics. Nature. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-019-1879-7
Herman, MA. and Rosen, ED. (2015). Making biological sense of GWAS data: lessons from the FTO locus. Cell Metab. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cmet.2015.09.018
Smemo, S. et al. (2014). Obesity-associated variants within FTO form long-range functional connections with IRX3. Nature. https://doi.org/10.1038/nature13138
Tung, YCL. et al. (2014). Obesity and FTO: changing focus at a complex locus. Cell Metab. http://doi.org/10.1016/j.cmet.2014.09.010
Does IRX3/5 guide fat cells away from becoming beige fat cells only in infancy? Or might shRNA against IRX3/5 reduce obesity?
I don't 100% remember, but I think the part I talked about is mainly developmental genes (Claussnitzer et al. say "rs1421085 [the causal site] acts specifically in the early differentiation of preadipocytes"; Herman and Rosen also refer I think to the IRXs as being "believed to be developmental genes")
there are also the downstream targets of IRX3/5, like UCP1, some of which might act in adulthood? ofc still being careful not to mess too much with anything that has essential other functions
Fatso gene? That really IRX me.
What's the outlook for Natural Language Processing (NLP) in psychology for diagnostics for replacing scored questionnaires? You can, with permission, keep freeform records of patients (written or recorded) and run it on any model you want which scores for some condition. You could even train new models to classify things in ways we haven't thought before, and it's reproducible because you can use the same data, or run the same model on as many people as you want to up the n. Am I crazy?
Probably fine in concept, but politically it may just fall flat
To clarify, the idea is that you take some corpus of language from an individual--blog posts, tweets, speech, etc--and have a diagnostic NLP model go through it, and provide a decision on whether the person who produced this corpus should be diagnosed with certain psychological conditions?
Assuming that's what you mean, the first objection that pops into my mind is that most people don't have large amounts of freely-accessible, detailed speech or writing data available about them. Bloggers and video creators would, but that's a small portion of the population, and actually accessing that data could get pretty dicey. All the same, I'm not convinced that most such data would constitute a reliable corpus for making psychiatric diagnoses.
I suppose you could run a diagnostic model on a lot of writing/speech from a lot of people who have already been exhaustively tested, and then hope that the model picks up on some subtle cues in expression or word choice that turn out to be reliable enough to replace questionnaire testing (as a screening tool, obviously they get used for diagnosis but they really shouldn't, and we shouldn't start using NLP models for purposes we shouldn't have been using questionnaires for to begin with), but there's some limitations.
First you need to get access to that data, then you need to make sure all of it is properly labeled to an individual (exclusively and only to a given individual for each document in the corpus), and then you need to exhaustively test every individual for every condition that you want the model to be able to diagnose.
If you did this, you might end up with the desired result, but it would probably be more expensive than you'd expect, and you'd run into pretty big generalizability problems unless you somehow managed to collect this data for a large and fully population-representative group, with enough representation of every language group, dialect, and potentially even subculture you intend to examine.
Honestly, screening questionnaires and in-person or telehealth diagnoses are probably going to be much more reliable for the foreseeable future.
I think the idea is that you just record therapy sessions and then use that (plus medical records) to diagnose.
What’s the smartest thing you ever did? I’m not asking here about practical things, stuff like committing to exercising or marrying the person you did. I asking about intellectual breakthroughs or high points.
OK, I’ll throw in my smartest thing. When I was a teen there were a couple years when I was delighted and fascinated by math, and mentally played with the math I was learning. After I learned about the equations that graphed as conic sections I started to crave a way to make my etch-a-sketch produce the conic sections mechanically, and I threw myself into figuring out how to make it draw the simplest shape, a circle: What mechanical process would drag the 2 dials — left/right and updown/down — in precisely the right pairing of 2 ever-changing amounts to produce a circle? And I solved it! I reasoned my way to the solution, then I tested it and it worked.
The solution, for the upper left quandrant of a circle, was a right angle. You started with the point of the right angle on the left-right dial and the edge of the angle to the right of the point on the up-down dial. Then you rotated the angle counterclockwise until the point was on the up-down dial. If the angle and the 2 dials were set up so that a movement by each right angle edge of a given amount rotated the dial it was touching by the same amount, then you turned the left/right dial to the right, and the up/down dial up, and the amount each moved over the course of the turning of the angle was the correct amount to trace the ever-changing angle of the quarter circle. (At least, that was my conclusion — I have not checked this since.)
To check the idea I made gears out of cardboard and stuck them onto the dials and right angle edges, engaged the gears and rotated the angle as described, and actually did get a line that traced a perfect quarter circle, except for being a bit wobbly due to the crudeness of the gears.
I realize that what I figured out is no great accomplishment in the annals of engineering marvels, but I think it was pretty good, given what a naive blank slate I was at the time. And my mind in that era felt the most alive and powerful it ever has. I wanted to engage with math puzzles the way I want to chew food when I’m famished.
The first thing that came to mind was a piece of software I wrote that calculated the time a satellite would achieve line of sight with some other point in space, down to the second.
It struck me as smart because there were multiple algorithms for calculating LoS at the time (decades ago - I haven't followed the field in a while), and I wanted to support all of them in the same framework. I also had very limited CPU and memory to work with (early 1990s), so I didn't want to brute force it, had no cloud to task to do it, and there were no ready repositories of third party libraries to borrow.
My framework assumed each algorithm could be called and passed two coordinates and return a "can / cannot see". I wrote another crude and fast algorithm that could make a reasonable guess somewhere in the relevant window (often, the user wanted "first time of visibility after T", so this part was easy in many cases), and a second relevant guess where the LoS was different, and then binary-searched my way through the time interval for the exact second where that state changed.
It handled being able to see a spot on the ground defined in multiple ways, another satellite (requiring two orbit calculations rather than just one), or some celestial body with measurable width (i.e. when can it see any part of the sun, and when it can't). Because of the pluggable architecture, it could handle a different model of the earth if you had one. It also handled weird edge cases like a visibility window so small that the naive search algorithm could skip over it by mistake. (I forget how I did that - probably some trig hack.)
That code is long lost, sadly. Perhaps the smartest thing I made that still seems to be around is a Java implementation of a jigsaw puzzle. You might be surprised how many online puzzle apps out there don't even support arbitrary rotation of pieces. Mine did. It also supported arbitrary piece designs, and a few other things. I got bored with it before getting around to the wackier cuts I imagined; plus, there was a memory leak I traced into the JCL's JPEG implementation, and I didn't feel like rewriting their entire library. I haven't touched this in decades, either.
https://sourceforge.net/projects/sphaero/
I declined a promotion about 5 years ago. I'd considered the current structure of the org, the place this higher level role would occupy in this structure, and the past decision making trends of the people at the top of the org, and correctly deduced it was a role that would be elminated for structural reasons at best and was a pre-meditated trap at worst. The person who received the role when I declined the promotion was laid off with no warning about a year and half later, along with everyone else already in that role. The biggest tell was that the senior managers that did the hiring all started looking for the exits as soon as the new roles were filled and dumped their existing duties on their direct reports as soon as they could.
I've written a couple of very complex pieces of software, one single-handedly and one initially by myself and then with a small team that I was leading.
I was the first (and possibly still the only) person to test out of an English class at any level in the history of my gigantic high school district. It was under extremely antagonistic conditions:
1. The test was pass/fail; passing grade was 85% (note: actual classes, only 75%). One shot, no re-testing.
2. The test grading was the sole discretion of the district, no appeals.
3. A pass did not positively contribute to GPA, but a fail would be an "F" on my transcript and negatively contribute to GPA
4. No class credit was earned; a pass only entitled me to skip to the next level and take a different kind of class for credit.
5. I had to purchase the class materials for a few hundred dollars (a 400 page textbook including theory with short stories and essays, a couple of novels, and the vocab book) to review, but the test itself would be closed-book.
5. The test itself was like $300...in 1995!...so about $900 in today's dollars, all-in.
My guidance counselor and the English department head tried to talk me out of it. They told me the horror stories of the half-dozen or so students across the district who attempted to test out of English ever year and failed. They told me that I'd be allowed to study all the reading materials ahead of time, but that I'd have to produce an entire year's worth of homework and class work in eight hours - tests, essays, a poem, a short story, and a 12 page research paper.
In short, it was impossible. The guidance counselor even leveled with me that the test was designed to prevent people from attempting to do high school in fewer than four years, due to the money the district made per student. But if I wanted to graduate in three years, I could pay the same amount, go to summer school, and be guaranteed of graduating early.
Fuck that.
I did all the prep, then, on a Saturday, I sat down with one other student to take the test under the eye of a proctor.
Packet after packet of tests were handed to me; every vocab test from the book, essay tests on the short stories, novels, poetry, and play from the textbook, and more. The stack of tests was *cartoonishly* high; five or six times taller than the entire output of my previous year of Honors-level English. Maybe as much as my entire output from the entire academic year.
Then I got to the MLA-formatted 12-page handwritten research paper on left and right-braining thinking There was a heavy packet of photocopied research materials included in the test packet - I guess these assholes figured that sending the students into the library was a bridge too far.
I wrote and wrote and wrote; used the MLA formatting of the research materials to perfect my own MLA formatting, and finished the paper.
I reached the bottom of the stack of the testing materials in a little under five hours.
I went through the entire packet again, carefully checking every answer.
Then at the five and a half hour mark, I turned everything into the proctor, who first looked startled, then deeply pitying.
Two weeks later, I went into the department head to check on my test and was tersely informed that I was the first person in the history of the district to have passed an English test at any grade level. I asked about the final score of my test - I was sincerely curious about what I might have missed - and was told that information was not available. I should be satisfied that I passed.
To this day, I'm pretty sure that my score was literally 100%. They were trying so hard to fail me and English has a little bit of room for interpretation in grading. I'm sure a 91% passing score would have been rounded down to an 84% failure; but at an unambiguous 100%, even the grader knew they would have gone to hell for the sheer injustice of trying to fudge it to failure.
Great story, and (belatedly) congrats!
Probably not the smartest, but the first thing that came to mind:
My fastest time on the NYT mini crossword is 7 seconds (or 11 seconds for a full 5x5 grid with no blacked out squares)
One time I played simultaneous games of Chess and Go (against two different people, each of who was slightly better than me at the respective game). The constant context switching was an insane amount of effort, to the point where I was physically shaking, and I managed to actually win one (I lost the chess game, but in a tough contest rather than a landslide).
Do you consider such a state an achievement? I consider it to be a source of migraines and overall decline in productity; if you want to get "better" at "multitasking" start upping your video watching to 4x and get friendly with stimulants
It's an achievement, not a practice run. In the same way that getting injured scoring the game winning goal doesn't improve your skil or fitness l but may be the highlight of your sports career.
What does it say about those whose moments were in grade school. Did we peak or is it just thats when our wits were most explicitly matched against our peers.
A memorable moment was playing a type of word hint game. We had to guess a secret word while being given one word hints from our team. It was boys vs girls. Girls had given their player two types of furniture. Boys had told me "writer". I concluded the word must be drawer which the boys were too dumb to read.
It stood out because I outsmarted both the other team and my own team
My father had a 50 year lease that was expiring in a few years, which he had the "right to renew." He wanted to sell his business (involving a lot of fixed assets he owned on top of the land), but was having no luck since the question of renewal was up in the air, and the land owner had indicated he wasn't going to make it easy (I assume in an effort to take control of what was built on the land).
After looking through the original contract (from the 1970s) for a total of 60 seconds, I spotted that clause and said "It doesn't say *when* you have to exercise the right to renew. So just do it immediately." he did, the landlord made a huge fuss, but a little arbitration later it was revealed that he could renew at any time before the expiration of the lease, for another 50 years. This cleared up a lot of ambiguity with the sale that was, wasn't discovered by a team of multiple lawyers, and basically saved my dad from delaying his retirement for 8 years until the actual end of the lease.
I wouldn't say it's the "smartest" thing I've ever done as I have done very intellectually demanding stuff since then, but it was a key point where a bit of attention to detail did a lot of good for someone I care about. It really elevated my father's opinion of my intellect too, which has had positive 2nd order effects later in life.
Talked an acquaintance into turning himself in and confessing after he had committed an extremely violent crime. (Stabbed someone in the neck). Nor is it obvious that he would have gone down for the crime anyway, because the victim refused to cooperate with the police.
objectively this is terrible, and everyone else who knows whats going on hates it; but this piece of code combines compiler bugs in such a well maybe 3 people can read to make a compile-time-type-*mutable* data structure; when several of those things isnt suppose to be possible with templates
https://github.com/crazymonkyyy/aliaslist/blob/master/aliaslist.d
I should update it, Im pretty sure I can simplify it further
When I was 10 I came up with what I would now call "general copernicanism" aka I shouldn't expect my parents, teachers, friends, to be above average by much in any regard. (Since the average kid born in the world has obviously wrong ideas fed to them) Any ideas they try to pass on to me should be treated with skepticism. It worked out very well long term.
Did you expect yourself to be any better than the people around you at evaluating ideas?
I figured out a way to get my mom to quit smoking. She had been a two-pack-a-day smoker since she was thirteen. She tried and failed to quit numerous times. Finally, I suggested that she switch to cigars. She couldn't really inhale the cigar smoke — it left her choking and gagging. So, she stopped lighting the cigars, but she had something in her mouth to fix her oral fixation. She'd go around all day chewing on her unlit stogies. I suppose she was getting some nicotine out of the tobacco juice. But after a couple of month she didn't need the cigars anymore. And she didn't start smoking again.
When confronted with hegelian dialectics, I decided philosophy and marxist thought is not for me.
If I understand it correctly, the dialectics works like this:
* take a strawman of what your opponent was saying; call it "thesis"
* make up an opposite strawman; call it "anti-thesis"
* finally provide you own opinion as the golden middle way, or as the educated people prefer to call it, "synthesis"; that by definition makes you more sophisticated than your opponent
I was force-fed Marx and some Hegel by my Marxist professors in college. But in later life, I've come to appreciate Marx. Hegel, not so much. I was re-reading sections of Das Kapital a few years back, and I realized Marx's criticisms and analysis of the capitalist system are still valid today. He really didn't have any concrete suggestions of how Communism would work, though. But it's interesting that a bunch of points on the Communist manifesto are taken for granted today – central banks and universal education to name a couple.
To me it makes most sense to understand Marx as describing "Moloch".
The problem with communism is that even if you replace market forces with a central committee, "Moloch" remains, only takes a different form.
Now instead of e.g. factories competing for profit and ruining the environment as a side effect, you get political leaders competing for power over the communist party, starving millions and ruining the economy as a side effect. For exactly the same fundamental reason: that the politicians who are not willing to sacrifice everything in order to get to the top will be outcompeted by those who do.
Some regulation is good, but who will regulate the regulators?
Oh, very true, indeed. I can't remember where I read this, but mid-level Soviet economic managers had to make over a hundred pricing and ordering decisions each day and forwarded them to all the different factories. I don't know if this is true, but I imagine poor pricing and ordering decisions would have all sorts of unintended downstream effects.
Of course, Capitalism allows autonomous entities (businesses) to make their pricing decisions independently and order their raw materials based on their perceptions of the market. That doesn't mean the system works perfectly. For instance, the "Beer Game" developed by Jay Forrester at MIT in the 1960s shows how badly things can get mucked up even in a free market system.
But I'll note again, that as dissatisfied as Marx was with Capitalism, he never was able to propose a better system. Lenin and his crew tried to figure out Communism from scratch — and even they didn't claim it was "True Communism."
Yes, this is fundamentally about allocating scarce resources. Capitalism can throw much more brainpower at the task, but the brainpower is not aligned, so it kinda works okay locally (notices many local opportunities and exploits them), but often sacrifices too much to Moloch.
Also, as the companies get big enough, the boss can no longer make all important decisions alone, but the managers are not perfectly aligned, that creates another kind of inefficiency...
I guess that Marx's vision of socialism was something like... people will realize that they could do much better than this if they were aligned, and then... well, together they will figure out the right way to implement it. The plan was that we all will figure out the specific details together.
Also, Marx assumed that capitalism will soon reach some kind of natural "heat death", as the markets reach an equilibrium, because in the equilibrium there are no profits anymore. (If you can make a profit, someone else can copy your model, and people will keep doing this until there is no profit left and all niches were filled.) This sounds like a "spherical cow" reasoning. Marx probably vastly underestimated technological progress, which keeps disrupting the existing equilibria. Anyway, I think the original idea was that at the moment of "heat death" there will no longer be a strong opposition to socialism, not even among the remaining capitalists, because their epsilon profits will no longer be worth it.
This is completely different from Lenin's implementation, which was like: "Okay, now that we know what the solution looks like, we don't really need to wait for a consensus or a natural collapse of capitalism. We can take a shortcut: collect an group of well-meaning psychopaths willing to break a few million eggs to make an omelette that the future generations will thank us for. Alignment will then be achieved by brainwashing the next generations at school." Which probably seemed reasonable on paper, but in reality, the psychopaths themselves turned out not to be aligned, at all. So we got just another dictatorship, only with better PR.
The Soviet economy was stupid. Proximally, because the central planners had too little brainpower compared to the complexity of the entire economy. But the ultimate cause was the actual lack of alignment, which made honest feedback impossible, which made improvement impossible. Suggesting an improvement to the system would get you in gulag. Which seems to me like a very opposite of how socialism was supposed to work in Marx's vision.
At the end, we still don't know how to solve alignment, and in its absence the capitalism degrades more gracefully (for reasons described in the "Wealth of Nations") than any other system we have tried.
Even if magically all progress suddenly stopped forever, so that capitalism could reach its "heat death" in a few generations... I am afraid even that wouldn't make us any more aligned, and thus wouldn't make socialism any more possible. Instead, we would probably just get some groups of people fighting zero-sum wars, which would create local inequilibria, with local opportunities for capitalism to solve.
I wish we could do better. I don't see a realistic way how. Even the rationalist community is not aligned, internally, and it already has a huge advantage of having smart people with similar goals; even explicitly discussing topics related to coordination and decision-making. Effective altruists? The same thing. So if even these communities cannot be aligned, what hope is there left for a humanity as a whole? (Or even one country.)
Viliam: I'm very annoyed because I don't think there's anything in what you've said that I can disagree with! Worse yet, you've said it better than I could. Aarrgghh! :-)
But I'll add one small codicil. Capitalism is imperfect because competition drives some entities to grow into monopolies. The heat death you allude to is the monopolistic tendencies of corporate psychopaths. Instead of zero-sum wars, government regulators should regularly prune back monopolistic growths. Unfortunately, regulatory bodies end up hiring the former CEOs of the companies they're regulating, and former regulators get cushy seats on the boards of the companies they regulated, and it all goes downhill from there...
I don't know if this is the smartest thing I ever did, but it was quite a good insight under pressure.
I was selling buttons/badges with funny sayings at one of the big Boskones. I had twelve feet of table space, The customers were three or four deep. The challenge was arranging workflow to be as smooth as possible.
The insight was just that everyone's job had to be arranged so that no one had to reach across anyone to do their work. When I realized that, it all fell into place.
Note: I have no training in management or whatever you call the specialty of arranging workflows.
Boskone still exists, but it hasn't been the winter worldcon for a long time.
As an academic, it's perhaps a bit boring that my greatest intellectual achievement was a research paper. I got a manic phase in which I worked almost two weeks non-stop on that, and was lucky that I had the right combination of a great problem and some ingenious ideas. Essentially the insight was that for a big number of algorithm you could make a general statement on how they behaved on a huge class of problems. Half of my research in the next 5 years was building on that and fleshing out details and additional aspects.
Of course, the paper was rejected at our main conference. One reviewer wrote "It reads like an extended abstract for a monograph, or like an introductory overview to a field. ... The community can not digest chunks of this size" and strongly recommended rejection.
Did the reviewer likely not read and understand the result, or were they probably just mean? Or is it a human bias /to privilege proofs of specific easily state-able results over understanding/crystallization of knowledge (is that why the "Of course," in your comment)?
I am pretty sure that the reviewer did read and understand the result, the review was not just a one-liner. I believe that s/he was overwhelmed by the amount of results, and had a hard time digesting it. I don't think s/he just tried to be mean, I guess that it was more ingrained pattern-matching. This paper did not look like the good papers s/he was used to. It did also contain specific easily state-able results, but not one, but more like a list of 20 of them, because they all came out of the general theory.
The "of course" was a bit cynical, but contains a bit of truth. I think any paper which sticks out from the crowd has a high risk to be rejected. There are lots of stories of very revolutionary papers that were rejected. For example the first case of a randomized algorithm (Soloway-Strassen test) took 3 years to be published because reviewers were skeptical. In my experience, the easiest accepts are papers which are very similar to lots of other (good) research paper, both in content and in style. Any deviation, also positive deviations, make it harder to publish.
Interesting, thank you. Do academics consider this as a problem to be fixed at all (as opposed to as an imperfect heuristic that mostly works and hence to be continued, some sort of randomization for efficiency at the expense of perfection)?
Would you say that there is a neurotypicality-privilege in academia (where one refers to an "internal-to-academia" neurotypicality)?
It depends a bit. I am not so sure about neurotypicality because you can adapt your writing style to the style of some community. So it's not so much about a person.
There is one particular aspect that I and at least some other find really problematic: interdisciplinary research. That is "officially" regarded as something that everyone should support. But if you have a concrete interdisciplinary paper, it is very hard to publish, and interdisciplinary researchers struggle a lot. Because if the research is between discipline A and B, then the paper will be rejected from journals on topic A *and* from journals on topic B, because it is atypical for either side. And it's even worse for grant applications, where the reviewers from both sides will find the proposal weird. Unless there is already an established interdisciplinary community for exactly this combination, it's really hard.
This is my own experience, but I also talked just yesterday to a colleague who made exactly the same complaint. I think it is shared by most researchers who try to do interdisciplinary research. Which is only a subset of researchers, most researchers settle for one community and stick with that for their whole career.
CBS' 60 Minutes recently brought in three German state (provincial, not federal) prosecutors to discuss hate speech prosecutions in Germany. The prosecutors are specialized in prosecuting speech crimes, so it's straight from the horses' mouths
The clip is 13 minutes long and can be found here: https://www.cbsnews.com/video/policing-the-internet-in-germany-where-hate-speech-insults-are-a-crime-60-minutes/#x
I knew that speech was more restricted in Europe than in the US and even Canada, but I didn't think it was this bad. Maybe Vance had a point in his speech in Munich? It was odd timing to say it during a security conference, but I suppose VPs can't be as choosy about their soapboxes
Some of my choice quotes (sinister laugher from the prosecutors not captured):
>Grote [a local politician] complained about a tweet that called him a pimmel, a German word for the male anatomy. That triggered a police raid and accusations of excessive censorship by the government.
>Is it a crime to insult somebody in public?
>Yes. Yes, it is.
>And it's a crime to insult them online as well?
>Yes.
>The fine could be even higher if you insult someone in the internet.
>Because in internet, it stays there.
>In the case of reposting [something that's untrue], it is a crime as well because the reader can't distinguish whether you just invented this or just reposted it.
>There are 16 units [of online hate task forces] across the country, each with a team of investigators.
>In our unit, we have about 3,500 cases per year.
>Laue says they get hundreds of tips a month from police, watchdog groups, and victims
>In this case, the accused had to pay 3,750 euros. It's not a parking ticket [laughs].
Vance's speech came across as the kind of thing an Extremely Online Person TM would say, not as something based on reality. Hence the way all the Extremely Online People TM here think it is all reasonable, whereas at the people who live in the real world see it as absurd. It is not free speech vs dictatorship (and if it was, targets like Orban would make a lot more sense), it is the Extremely Online vs the rest.
Especially when Vance's administration is happy to engage in broad censorship and, if we had similar laws in the US, would eager use them to punish political opponents. You notice Vance et al love to criticize our European allies, but not Russia.
Do... do you think the people you label "Extremely Online People" aren't real people who exist in the real world, doing real things? Did you think they were just bots or something?
So you think being jailed for mocking a politician online is just a concern for Extremely Online People?
This just seems like a derogatory ad hominem that doesn't address the substance of this post at all.
I think placing that as the number one threat over a literal military invasion is a thing only Extremely Online People would do.
If freedom of speech dies on the internet theres no saving society; russia will not be invading america as a rural american my concerns of occupation are nonexistant, the only threat to my freedom is other americains indifference and the cia
It is my understanding the German constitution was approved by the Allies so I guess a bit late for Vance to go criticize it now.
...Why? He obviously wasn't running the country the back then. Is he not allowed to have the position that his predecessors made a mistake?
To an extend it is just true that out of all the things you can value in a democracy, free speech is less central for us than in the US.
I understand that free speech protections are part of the first amendment of the US constitution presumably that's because it's considered most important.
The first paragraph of our constitution is "Die Würde des Menschen ist unantastbar". It's been translated as "Human dignity shall be inviolable". We also have free speech protections in our constitution, but we are willing to make tradeoffs when it comes into conflict with other principles we hold important.
So saying "Ah, but Germany is undemocratic because Germany has some free speech limitations" is just kind weird to me? Is that the only metric that counts? And can you not trade away 2% of free speech to improve some other good and valuable principle by more than that?
Maybe I am naive but I believe there has to be some common ground here with most US citizens. It is my assumption that shouting "Fire! Fire!" in a packed movie theater is not looked upon kindly in the US either. So I assume most people would generally agree that at least some forms of free speech can be traded for other goods, public safety in this instance.
That is not to say I support what happened in the Andy Grote "Du bist so 1 Pimmel" fiasco. Andy Grote got publicly mocked and criticized for this for this for a couple of months afterwards, because while we might agree with a fine, the general German public does not believe that sending a police raid was the appropriate reaction to being called a dick on twitter. Also there was later a court case about this which found that the raid was unlawful.
In any case, it seems to me that we have a (fairly) well functioning democracy and reducing democracy to a single issue we place different amount of emphasis on just fails to see that we probably agree on the other 95%.
The only reason I can see reasonable people disagree on this is if they haven't thought about the topic much or place _all_ the importance on free speech and nothing else matters. And I don't know which I hope is the case more for Vance, but attempting to lecture us on democracy just seems dumb from where I'm standing and I'm baffled anyone would think it's a true or productive.
There's a reason the Founders of America made free speech the first right in the bill of rights. If you don't have the freedom to discuss political alternatives, you don't have the ability for democratic regimes to change. It increases oppression and violence.
Free speech as an abstract right isn't important to democracy. It is only important if the restrictions on free speech make it hard to criticise government policies and candidates standing for election.
When there are limits on free speech there is a risk governments will use it silence criticism of their policies, which seems to be exactly what is happening in Germany.
You can't be prosecuted in Germany if you criticize someone for his actions, especially not politicians. A necessary condition for being prosecutable is that you attack the politician personally *without* reference to his political actions. If you call someone a dick, you might get fined. If you say that someone *acted like a dick here*, you are off the hook because then you criticize an action. There is obviously a grey zone in between. If I run over your foot and you call me idiot, that is allowed, because your are obviously reacting and referring to my action. If you call me an idiot without an obvious reason, you may get fined.
Famously, "Parkplatzschwein" is allowed. That is literally someone who acts like a pig in the fight for a parking spot.
I don't think that has any value at all in protecting political speech.
For insulting politicians the bar for prosecution is actually higher than for other people, so the insult must be more personal and more detached from political acts than for ordinary people ("Machtkritik").
https://www.bundesverfassungsgericht.de/SharedDocs/Pressemitteilungen/DE/2020/bvg20-049.html
But any speech can declared a threat to the peace, hate speech, propaganda against the constitution, blasphemy or a threat to human dignity which combined can cover any criticism of a politician.
Free speech and democracy may be related but are certainly not the same. I dont take german speech laws to mean you are undemocratic. You presumably all get to vote. I take it to mean you are not free in the individual liberty sense. If you cant even get speech right you wont get the other things were real trade offs exist right. Speech is the easy one because you really can just ignore insults you dont like. Thats why we put it first, with no qualifiers.
> Is that the only metric that counts? And can you not trade away 2% of free speech to improve some other good and valuable principle by more than that?
No, I don't think you can. Human rights are human rights, they can't be traded away for something else. It's always tempting to do so, which is why it needs to be written into every country's constitution at some very unchangeable level that they cannot be traded away. I don't know of any country that does this perfectly, but the US does the best job that I know of.
> In any case, it seems to me that we have a (fairly) well functioning democracy
I don't know, German democracy looks to me like it's functioning pretty poorly, in the sense that the policies of those in power do not resemble the policies demanded by the people, and this is eventually going to reach some sort of crisis. The vast majority of Germans seem to hate mass immigration, but no party except AfD (which is terrible in a bunch of other ways) is willing to do anything about it. The big divide at this point is between people who hate mass immigration but aren't willing to vote AfD, and the people who hate mass immigration so much that they are willing to overlook AfD's other terrible attributes.
> No, I don't think you can. Human rights are human rights, they can't be traded away for something else. It's always tempting to do so, which is why it needs to be written into every country's constitution at some very unchangeable level that they cannot be traded away.
I wish that was possible but it seems to me it is clearly not. My argument is that one of the following 3 must be true:
a) There is only a single human right, free speech
b) There are several distinct human rights, however they can never come into conflict
c) There are several distinct human rights and they can come into conflict
And out of these it c) seems clearly true to me and we regularly eventually face situation where you'll have to trade one basic human right against the other by virtue of them being in conflict.
It would be nice if we didn't have to but I don't believe that's the world we live in.
> The vast majority of Germans seem to hate mass immigration, but no party except AfD (which is terrible in a bunch of other ways) is willing to do anything about it.
I think your impression on how Germans feels about migration is directionally correct, though less extreme in reality.
But it is not the case that only AfD is willing to do anything about it. Both CDU and FDP have proposed migration restrictions that are arguably illegal under EU law. The Green party and SPD parties have proposed restricting migration more but within EU law.
Maybe it's fair to round down the proposed Green and SPD policies to "nothing will happen or at least not enough" but I believe the way CDU and FDP are going cannot be fairly characterized as "unwilling to do anything about it".
Ah well the a-b-c thing is where we differ. By definition, rights must be inviolable and they must not come into conflict. If you've defined your rights in such a way that they can come into conflict then this is just an excuse to violate people's rights.
This of course requires you to be very careful about how you define rights. You certainly can't go round coming up with bullshit and poorly defined rights like "right to dignity".
Rights cannot come into conflict because they are all just forms of the same right -- the right to be left the fuck alone. A man alone on a desert island has all his rights perfectly intact.
"Rights cannot come into conflict because they are all just forms of the same right -- the right to be left the fuck alone."
Different peoples' Right to be Left the Fuck Alone come into conflict *all the damn time*.
But also, many (probably most) other people have VERY different views of what "humans rights" mean than you express here.
That is a fair position to hold, but at this point your critique mostly boils down to "Most Germans value stuff like human dignity that I don't care that much about. As a result they make laws that seem wrong to me".
But that is fine because its our laws and we generally like them. You can have your laws that you like.
I feel it's perfectly fine to value human dignity over free speech and I don't know what else is there to say.
I disagree. Human rights are fundamental and can't be overruled by ill-defined and nonsensical concepts like "human dignity".
I'm aware that there's a language problem here, but can "human dignity" be sensibly defined in German? It sure as fuck can't in English, not in any sensible way. Which of these situations violates the abstract principle of "human dignity"?
1. I get drunk and pull down my pants on Kurfürstendamm
2. I am suffering in great pain of some illness. A nurse is shoving a catheter up my urethra
3. Someone sees me pulling down my pants on Kurfürstendamm and calls me a Dummkopf
All of these situations are pretty undignified, but it's hard to see that anyone's rights could possibly be getting violated. In the first, my indignity is my own fault. In the second, the indignity is partially the fault of the physical universe and partially a medical necessity. In the third part, the indignity is entirely justified.
If I'm a CEO of a big company, and I want to get rid of some gadfly journalist that's reporting negatively on us, and I announce at the AGM "Somebody needs to kill John Q Scribbler. No, seriously, I'd be ever so grateful. This isn't a joke, someone needs to bump him off" then I'm guilty of solicitation to murder.
Do you think it would be better for the world if I should be allowed to say that with no consequences?
What if I work in a classified role and I leak top secret information to a foreign power for money? Don't you think a country that is constitutionally unable to keep secrets would be at a disadvantage on the world stage?
In your last case, at least in the United States, the government keeps its secrets by not revealing those secrets to anyone who hasn't signed a contract waiving their first amendment rights in that specific context. No one can be compelled a priori to keep a secret, and it's been pretty clearly established that if e.g. some muckraking journalist finds himself in possession of some nice juicy Top Secrets, the government can't stop them from publishing or punish them for having published. But the insider who blabbed would be well advised to contact his lawyer.
Human rights are subjective, it is impossible to have any universal standard.
German democracy is functioning significantly better than American democracy. Stop believing everything you read on X and try going out into the real world.
>The vast majority of Germans seem to hate mass immigration, but no party except AfD (which is terrible in a bunch of other ways) is willing to do anything about it.
This is false, BSW also proposed immigration restrictions.
"German democracy looks to me like it's functioning pretty poorly, in the sense that the policies of those in power do not resemble the policies demanded by the people"
...as opposed to how the politics of the US political-managerial class have mirrored the concerns and preferences of the electorate perfectly over the last 20-30 years?
I mean, I agree with you that this is a very bad state for a democracy to fall into, but I don't think this specifically has much if anything to do with the particularities of a given nation's constitution and a lot more to do with a certain type of petit-bourgeois ideologically capturing the machinery of government, for complex reasons of social structure, across the west.
I would suggest that a system in which a vague phrase like "Human dignity shall be inviolable" can support a law that allows a politician to call a raid on a citizen for calling him a dick and tens of thousands of "hate speech" cases annually is trading away a bit more than 2%
Although a judge dismissed the case, the process is in itself usually a punishment. And apparently the politician in question never even lost his job over it. And what if the victim's lawsuit had been assigned to a progressive judge?
>It is my assumption that shouting "Fire! Fire!" in a packed movie theater is not looked upon kindly in the US either
This is a very misunderstood example. It's explained in another thread below by Paul Botts
> I would suggest that a system in which a vague phrase like "Human dignity shall be inviolable" can support a law that allows a politician to call a raid on a citizen for calling him a dick and tens of thousands of "hate speech" cases annually is trading away a bit more than 2%
I think you're judging the system by it's worst outcome, this is really not a central example. It's a bit like saying the US justice system is terrible because of OJ Simpson. Yes, occasionally shit happens, that is just unavoidable for any system the size of a state. The question is not if it happens, it is how often and how bad.
And that is exactly the reason that you have to look at statistics if want to form an accurate opinion. 2 minutes of Google tell me there were 5.5million court cases in Germany in 2023. There were presumably a lot more enforcement actions by police. You've heard about the Andy Grote thing because it was the most idiotic and disproportionate instance of law enforcement w.r.t. to free speech that made the news in the last 4-5 years. Out of how many millions of enforcement actions?
I can say this, if I got it into my head to talk shit about my politicians or the government tomorrow I could go to my local marketplace and do it all day with nobody stopping me. There would be a couple of things I'd have to avoid - I shouldn't call for murder of anyone, for example. But generally I'm positive I can make my unhappiness well known without fear of reprisal. The occasional Andy Grote notwithstanding.
And you may or may not already know this, but "progressive judge" is not really a thing here the same it is perhaps in the States. The justices serving in our version of the supreme court have been proposed by 4 different political parties, and it is generally a very low fuzz affair. We don't generally sort them into progressive or conservative or anything, neither do we regular judges to regular courts. It's just a lot less political and we generally trust in any given judges impartiality, with (as always) a few exceptions.
> This is a very misunderstood example. It's explained in another thread below by Paul Botts
I'll look into that tomorrow, it's gotten quite late over here. Have a good one
I don't buy the argument that it's not a problem because the denominator is so much higher than the numerator. Does that mean ridiculous laws become less of a problem when other crimes skyrocket in number?
And this isn't just a few rare cases. As per the cited source, there are 16 speech policing units throughout Germany (I assume one per lander), and one of the prosecutors said that his unit has about 3500 cases per year. Assuming the average is lower at say 3000, that's 48,000 per year throughout Germany
>I can say this, if I got it into my head to talk shit about my politicians or the government tomorrow I could go to my local marketplace and do it all day with nobody stopping me. There would be a couple of things I'd have to avoid - I shouldn't call for murder of anyone, for example. But generally I'm positive I can make my unhappiness well known without fear of reprisal.
The impression I'm getting is that it only doesn't seem like much of a problem because most people in Germany aren't petty enough to bother filing a police report - other than the hundreds of tips a month from police, watchdog groups, and "victims", anyways. I don't think it's a good idea to give such a power to the select few who are petty enough
>And you may or may not already know this, but "progressive judge" is not really a thing here the same it is perhaps in the States.
I should have phrased this differently, as progressive tendencies are more of a spectrum. What if what was said was a little more disagreeable and the judge a little more progressive? A little more than that and a little more that? Etc etc
> I don't buy the argument that it's not a problem because the denominator is so much higher than the numerator. Does that mean ridiculous laws become less of a problem when other crimes skyrocket in number?
Maybe I phrased this poorly, so let me clarify. I think the best way to think about it is not "is there literally any bad outcome" but "do bad outcomes happen often, relative to the action itself".
In more concrete terms, I would be worried if 10 out of 20 people who engage in political speech were prosecuted unfairly. I would not be worried if 10 out of 20kk people who in engage in political speech were prosecuted unfairly. The ideal number is 0, always, but given that 0 cannot be realistically reached I will settle for "happens very rarely".
The prevalence of other crimes just not really enter the equation for me.
As for the 16 units you are referring to, they plausibly exist. Under German law speech that infringes on other basic human rights may be unlawful so prosecution is to be expected. I do not object to this.
I do object to the specific case of Andy Grote because the response was disproportionate to the "crime". But if he'd be fined 20 bucks I'd be fine with that.
But realistically nothing ever happens in the vast majority of instances. It's not exactly a closely guarded secret that the police cannot even hope to keep up with what I'd consider reasonable cases, let alone the unreasonable ones. It helps if you're a politician and I don't know how I feel about that.
> The impression I'm getting is that it only doesn't seem like much of a problem because most people in Germany aren't petty enough to bother filing a police report - other than the hundreds of tips a month from police, watchdog groups, and "victims", anyways. I don't think it's a good idea to give such a power to the select few who are petty enough
There's some truth to that, perhaps, but it's also that there's plenty of legal speech that no one can arrest me for, no matter how much I complain about the government or somesuch. Generally speaking, if I don't make any threats and don't insult anyone personally there's really no grounds for anything.
And choose to be personal and insulting and demeaning to people then we'd get to the question if anyone would bother to go to the police over it.
But it is generally possible to say all that needs to be said without being demeaning. So the "cannot criticize the government OR ELSE" angle seems mostly inaccurate. The police can't just book you for whatever they feel like.
You write pretty clearly, so no worries on that front. I get that you don't see punishing speech qua speech as a problem, and that many Germans share this view. It's also apparent that you see the divergence between American views on free speech and German views on free speech are smaller than I do, and that this divergence is moreover very small compared to the many similarities in values
>So the "cannot criticize the government OR ELSE" angle seems mostly inaccurate
I didn't say that, nor did I connect the free speech issue to democracy, though the vibes and other commenters could easily lead someone to think I did. My objection is simpler: fining anyone for insults, no matter the amount, is ridiculous and should not be tolerated. Words are not violence
"It's a bit like saying the US justice system is terrible because of OJ Simpson."
I don't want to relate this to anything else in your argument, but I think the fact that the OJ Simpson trial was able to become a heavily racialized televised spectacle really does point to a terrible flaw of the US justice system, as does the fact that he got off the hook.
As a fellow German, thank you for elaborating so well on these points. I agree with everything stated, including the non-worry of publicly expressing displeasure.
A security conference seems like a good time for a security guarantor (who provides security to Germany contingent on them not being evil) to tell a recipient state that they are starting to seem evil from our perspective and that we are less interested in guaranteeing the security of a state we consider evil.
He was mostly being obtuse. He called it undemocratic for other parties to not form a coalition with the AfD, even though the voters of those other parties don’t want such a coalition.
It’s about as undemocratic as one American party not voting to confirm an appointment of the other.
Hence why the US doesn't have a parliamentary system, because we don't consider them as democratic as ours because they lead to tyrrany of the majority.
see federalist 10 https://avalon.law.yale.edu/18th_century/fed10.asp
I think the real thing here is that Germany (the government, the people) are not used to being criticized so directly by the US. It is considered a minor breach of diplomacy. Allies do not talk this way to allies -- at least, that's the vibe I get from German commentators I see.
This is not the way to gauge whether Germany has a serious censorship problem.
I would generally think "I did it and ILL DO IT AGAIN *laughs*" would be admissible testimony in most courts
If giving a softball interview to prosecutors who have central roles in the (alleged) censorship problem isn't a good way, what exactly would be to you?
The Grote story happened a few years ago now, and the first thing most people associate with his name until today is the word Pimmel (pecker). You will still find stickers across the city saying “Andi ist ein Pimmel” - our regional variant of the Streisand effect.
Glad to live in the US so i need have no qualms about saying the current POTUS is a peckerhead.
No, you don't need to watch what you say about the current president. Or even the previous one.
President Obama, on the other hand....
https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/2024-election/trump-files-suit-iowa-pollster-ann-selzer-des-moines-register-newspap-rcna184494
https://variety.com/2025/tv/news/trump-doubles-down-cbs-60-minutes-20-billion-lanham-act-1236301341/
https://www.ap.org/media-center/ap-in-the-news/2025/ap-again-seeks-end-of-its-white-house-ban-saying-the-trump-administration-is-retaliating-further/
How come all of those cars aren't immediately pulled over and ticketed? Is this enforced or not? OP paints a picture of an oppressive surveillance state but if people are putting their insults on bumper stickers it can't be that bad. What's the deal?
He said there are stickers across the city, not that people are putting them on their own personal cars (in which case people could put the stickers on the cars of people they dislike to get them raided)
Ah thanks. I don't know why I read that as 'bumper sticker'.
Typically, it’s not a bumper sticker, but even if it was, the insulted person would have to file a report with the police for them to be able to do something. It’s not like murder, where the police is required to investigate. Usually, people don’t call the police because someone insulted them in public, and especially not if it’s such an insanely harmless term as “Pimmel”.
What made this case particularly Streisandy and egregious was that the politician in question is our state minister for security, which includes being the head of the police. Whether a regular citizen filing a police report for being insulted can motivate the police the raid the home of a suspect is anyone’s guess.
What's the public attitude towards speech laws there? People in the US would lose their minds over something like that. What's the breakdown of who supports it vs who doesn't?
Did anything change as a result of a politician literally siccing the state on a citizen for calling him a dick?
The guy is even less unpopular than before but I don’t think anything material changed. He’s a Teflon type of character.
I would have hoped that the public would have successfully pushed for some change to the relevant laws on the books responsible for the episode, but I suppose that didn't happen, hence the CBS interview
I may agree with you on the Gawker case and on what the current administration is doing, but the Infowars and Fox cases fall well within what many decades of case law has defined as outside first amendment protections. In both cases the media organization in question knowingly made false statements that cause damages. They weren't just stating an opinion once or twice, it was many weeks (or months) of coverage that was based on things they knew were false.
The US has very high barriers to succeeding in a defamation or libel lawsuit. Things could be better (a federal Anti-SLAPP statute would do wonders) but compared our peers we are well ahead.
Fox itself believed that it was lying in the Dominion case, which I think you are referring to. That is, they didn't just report on those claims, they were amplifying them and trying to convince people to see them as credible. The people who ran the programs in question did not believe that the claims were truthful.
Fox News wants to be seen as a credible reporter of the truth, hence "News" in their title and all the other things they do. The notion that they should be permitted to lie out of some abstract principle of free speech strikes me as absurd. Nothing is lost by demanding a news agency believe what they themselves proclaim.
I don't know much about the other examples you gave, but Oberlin is evidence that America's approach to defamation - where you have to prove actual damages - is far superior
Oberlin's conduct was far more harmful than the person who called Grote a dick. The amount awarded might have been too much, but I don't see how punishing Oberlin could possibly have any chilling effect on free speech - it can't be that hard to not incite hundreds of your students and faculty to protest outside a shop already victimized by your students' shoplifting. The amount awarded also took into account the wringer Oberlin put the bakery through, and the civil suit was filed a year after the initial incident
For anyone curious: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gibson%27s_Bakery_v._Oberlin_College
>The day after the incident, faculty and hundreds of students gathered in a park across the street from Gibson's Bakery protesting what they saw as racial profiling and excessive use of force by Gibson toward Aladin.[8] Jason Hawk, a reporter and editor with the Oberlin News-Tribune, testified that dean of students Meredith Raimondo was at the protest speaking to the crowd into a megaphone and discouraging photographers from taking photos of the crowd. He testified that she used her body to attempt to block him from taking photos, and handed him a flyer.[18] The flyer read, "Don't Buy. This is a RACIST establishment with a LONG ACCOUNT of RACIAL PROFILING and DISCRIMINATION."[2][19][8] Counterprotestors also gathered, calling the students "snowflakes".[20]
What about the infowars case? How do the actual damages to eight falsely accused families add up to $965 million?
https://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/punitive_damages
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2022/aug/03/alex-jones-sandy-hook-shooting-defamation-trial
I've no idea. Like I said above, Oberlin was the only example I'd had prior knowledge of
I assume Scott has heard of this, but if not, the DEI grants article got a mention in the Economist.
"One analysis of a randomly chosen subset of these grants by Scott Alexander, a blogger, found that only around 40% were actually related to DEI (an analysis of all 3,476, conducted by The Economist with the help of an artificial-intelligence model, found the figure was 44%)."
Amazing that The Economist also couldn't be bothered to spend an hour checking a random sample. Or just didn't want to make the call.
And the Economist is by far the best researched most numerate newspaper around, I am reading it as I type. Such basic research is rare.
They literally say they did an analysis of all 3,476 right there. I mean it's just baffling how people can make a comment like this.
I think the strategy is to always accuse others of the thing you are doing right now.
If I am not bothering to read one paragraph that I am replying to, then it sounds pretty implausible that some guy who calls himself "The Economist" would work harder than me. And even if he would, why should I care? Is it going to win me internet points? /s
> Amazing that The Economist also couldn't be bothered to spend an hour checking a random sample. Or just didn't want to make the call.
Given how much flak Scott got for actually running the numbers rather than dismissing anything out of Cruz's mouth as ipso facto disinformation, I suspect it's the latter.
The Wall Street Journal on Friday published a detailed analysis of the DOGE online running list of its "savings" [which now totals $7B after their arithmetical and typographical corrections to version 1.0 that had claimed $55B].
The WSJ concluded that the actual amount of federal expenditures yet saved by DOGE's cancellations of current contracts is $2.6B. Of that amount about 2 percent, so $52M, "would have gone to DEI-related contracts".
Some of those cancellations will end up reversed by courts enforcing basic contract law. But far from all -- some vendors will decide against suing to enforce, and some federal contracts will turn out to allow unilateral cancellation without cause. A reasonable ballpark of actual net savings to the government might be $2B.
The US has about 133 million households. So this puts the potential "DOGE dividend" check for Trump to send to every household (as he's publicly suggested) at about $15 per household.
>The Wall Street Journal on Friday published a detailed analysis of the DOGE online running list of its "savings" [which now totals $7B after their arithmetical and typographical corrections to version 1.0 that had claimed $55B].
This seems strange. Killing USAID alone, after restoring PEPFAR, seems like it should have reduced expenditures by $40 billion ( https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/clyezjwnx5ko ) minus $6 billion for restoring PEPFAR ( https://www.positivelyaware.com/articles/future-pepfar-and-us-hiv-programs ), for a reduction of $34 billion.
For good or for ill, how can the reduction be as low as $7B?
( For _either_ the $7B or $55B figure, this is a small fraction of the total federal budget, which is on the order of $6.75T (from the USAID url)).
The DOGE list doesn’t include USAID. That may be because the attempted dismantling of that agency is being fought over in courtrooms right now; and/or because Musk’s stop-expenditures hit squad hasn’t been involved with that effort; and/or some other reason. Musk is publicly cheering for the USAID teardown to go through but beyond that, I dunno.
Many Thanks!
Late yesterday DOGE updated its posted list, they now claim $9.6B in savings.
The Associated Press this morning says that about 40 percent of DOGE's new list is contracts already executed and/or paid out on. Meaning that those claimed "savings" items don't return any funds to the federal accounts they are just a decision not to _renew_ that contract.
(Not immediately clear whether the AP means 40 percent of the $9.6B, or 40 percent of the several thousand individual "savings" items now listed by DOGE.)
i can buy 30 can case of Hamms beer for that if I kick in 5 bucks of my own money.
Keep up the good work fellas.
Is there a way to filter posts in the archive by whether they're locked to subscribers? I'm going to subscribe and would like a way to find old posts I missed.
Not exactly filtering, but there is a little padlock symbol that indicates whether they are subscriber-only or not. Just scrolling through all articles and checking for this symbol takes me perhaps 10 seconds per month. That's quite doable.
I don't think there's a non-cumbersome way to do this but I'm not a subscriber so maybe there's something like that for subscribers. Scott does sometimes post a list of locked posts for the last year or so. The last list of this sort was part of a subscription drive and is here. https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/subscrive-drive-25-free-unlocked
I find myself thinking more and more about the future, mostly about AI. Eventually, I started writing down all my thoughts and findings, which turned into a blog: Forecasting AI Futures.
https://forecastingaifutures.substack.com/
It's mostly a collection of analyses and thoughts based on insights from prediction markets and Metaculus.
So far, I have written about AGI timelines, severity and timeline of AI-caused disasters, and the risk of uncontrolled spread of AI technology through autonomous self-replication and IP theft. While I am most worried about x-risk, I intend to focus on predictions that could be useful to various decision makers and people thinking about how to contribute to AI safety.
Since I'm relatively new to blogging, I would appreciate any advice on how I can improve my writing or analysis. If you have thoughts on forecasting, please share those as well!
What's the most plausible concrete scenario of AGI-induced extinction, in your opinion?
While I think misuse of advanced AI to help in e.g. bioweapon development is plausible and contributes to x-risk, I'm mostly concerned about agentic AI being developed and deployed before proper safety guarantees are met, largely due to race dynamics.
I feel uncertain exactly how things will go wrong, if they go wrong. I think it is relatively plausible that an AI develops unintended goals, manages to hide them from the developers (that don't have sufficient interpretability methods yet), waits until there are sufficient robotics manufacturing ability (so it can act in the physical world), exfiltrates itself and promptly develops and releases a really powerful bioweapon.
But I am uncertain if this is the most plausible scenario I can think of, I'm still trying to figure it out. For instance, some humans might give an AI a malicious goal like "destroy humanity" just to see what happens, and it actually succeeds. (This seems unlikely through simple API calls, but very much possible if you have access to model weights.)
I don't think destroying humanity is necessarily that hard, so with a human-level-or-above AI there are a lot of possible things that can go really wrong. The reason that humans have managed to survive this long might be that basically no one wants to kill everyone. But if they wanted, they could destroy entire ecosystems with gene drives, develop new viruses and bacteria, develop mirror life, or try to instigate nuclear war.
Every time somebody tries to explain how AI is going to kill everybody I become more convinced that it's pure fantasy. Just look at your examples:
"they could destroy entire ecosystems with gene drives" - how? And why would this kill everyone?
"develop new viruses and bacteria" - why do you think viruses or bacteria can kill everyone?
"develop mirror life" - what is that, and how will it kill everyone?
"try to instigate nuclear war" - why do you think this "try" will succeed, and if it does, why do you think a nuclear war will kill everyone?
Those examples, if done by humans, would be more likely to kill a significant portion of humanity but not everyone (except maybe mirror life?) I mostly wanted to point out that extreme disasters are not that difficult, and a superintelligence would definitely be able to kill everyone.
But AIs with really good specific skills in e.g. synthetic biology is also concerning
"a superintelligence would definitely be able to kill everyone."
you keep saying that without providing any feasible mechanisms of how it would do this.
Look, there are basically three ways to kill a human:
1. Mechanical: bullets or bulldozers
2. Chemical: poisons or fire
3. Biological: viruses or bacteria
Explain which ones and how an ASI will deploy to be able to kill every last human on this planet.
I don't know exactly what virus a superintelligence might design. Maybe an airborne virus that takes enough time in killing infected that it has time to spread to others.
The AI exfiltrates itself from the lab where it was developed, and designs the virus through simulation technology. It tricks researchers into manufacturing it and and send it to varous population centers where the virus is released simultaneously. Most of humanity die within days, while some survive in airtight bunkers around the world. The AI could choose to ignore the few weak remnants of humanity, or send robots to "manually" take care of the rest.
Literal robot armies are not impossible either, though that seems less efficient.
For starters, you don't need to kill every last human on this planet on day one. Kill half of them, and the civilization will collapse. Then 99% of the remaining ones will starve to death. And the remaining few will pose no significant danger, so there is enough time to clean them up later.
Okay, how do you kill half of them on day one? Release an engineered deadly virus in every city simultaneously. Don't worry if you can't reach literally every city; just do as many as you can. Start at airports.
I dont think ai will come before human made bio weapons; but im pretty sure bio weapons will exist (not under current scientism tho)
> develop mirror life" - what is that, and how will it kill everyone?
All chemical structures can be flipped, and some proteins are *ancient* but only exist in one form, suggesting they evolved once then all life on earth inherited it
Then our immune systems co-evolved in this hill in protein space.
Its not entirely clear what happens if you make an entire ecosystem of bacteria that produces flipped vitamins and sets it free in the oceans
Do all fish die? Do humans eating tainted fish get some flipped-vitamin deficiency, does this flipped-vitamin build up in the atmosphere
> "develop new viruses and bacteria"
While evolution seems to be on humanity's side of barely surviving; otherwise gain-o-function or wild viruses would take out landmasses of mankind, or any other mammal; death rates of 99% when an illness jumps cross host then ocean(for example small pox, potato famines)
This suggests theres other hills in virus space that can devople in private manners and you not being exposed to the partial steps can be terrifying. Imagine gain-o-functioning 10 generations of a virus in co-evolved with rats, splicing in some ebola (some how giving your chosen people the illness progressively in private?)
I still just don't see how any of this kills everyone. I'm not disputing that these things can cause catastrophic loss of life. It's this glib assertion by the OP that "ASI will surely just kill everyone" that grates me.
Im unsure what the S stands for, but actual ai appearing suddenly would kill us all because evolution isnt very kind to those unable to keep up and dont make themselves useful to the apex predator, we did just wipe out most megafonia that didn't co-evole with us
The issue has to be that chatbots airnt general ai. Dozens of variations of semi-friendly ai, transhuman projects coming first, different tech paths out pacing computers etc.
If you give 1000 bc humans nukes by pushing them out of a time machine does humanity die; probably, but time machines dont exist. I think co evolution is very important factor in predicting survival, its merely asserted it wont happen, but thats extremely unlikely.
Anybody else using DMSO? I'm using it for four things:
1) wound healing.
2) varicose veins.
3) cherry angiomas
4) tailor's bunion
5) peripheral neuropathy
I'm seeing slow but steady progress on 1-3, 4 hurt less, and 5) no noticeable progress yet, but it's been years in the making so it may be years in the healing.
I regularly use it as a cryoprotectant (basically antifreeze), and ignore how it's supposedly oh-so-dangerous. It's nice to see it has some salutary effects, and thanks to exposure to it, I'm probably protected from … cherry angiomas?
I'm making a ttrpg about living in an intentional community during the last year before the Singularity. If that sounds like the kind of thing you'd be interested in, you can support it here: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/sixpencegames/the-singularity-will-happen-in-less-than-a-year-zinequest
did this.... just work?
I'm not sure what you mean
it looks to me like your 450$ richer by promising to send people a pdf
...you've never bought a digital book?
But I never *sold* one... and now I see that was a huge mistake.
Maybe it's not too late yet.
As an engineering advisor, I can tell you people are willing to pay a lot more than 450$ for a pdf...
PDFs contain words which contain ideas which take time to develop and occasionally have value to people.
I love this. Backed!
Thank you!
Here’s an interesting thought: if we create a conscious AI, how would its experience be different from a Boltzmann brain? … would it be any different?
I have a sneaking suspicion that from the perspective of a conscious LLM, its “life” would be quite similar to a hypothetical Boltzmann brain.
I can sort of see the analogy you're drawing - an LLM doesn't really have a continuous consciousness. It starts with a context, calculates a next step, and then stops running, sort of like how a Boltzmann brain pops into existence fully formed and lasts just long enough to think something before coming apart.
I'm not sure what to do with this insight, but it's a cool parallel.
Boltzmann brains don't need to write nearly so many business emails in bullet point summarizing meetings.
I’d intuit that an AI would be much closer to human consciousness. The perceived world that we share is much more stable than that of the Boltzmann brain (which just has random thermal fluctuations and no durable structure). Not to mention that we are building AI to mimic the sort of consciousness that we possess, as we want agents that we can interact with like other humans.
Another way of looking at the problem is that a Boltzmann brain is presumably the simplest path from random energy to consciousness, whereas our and AI’s consciousness have the contingency of our evolutionary history.
As in, whatever experiences it has would be bizarre and incoherent and nothing like what human observers would assume? I agree. I don’t see any reason to assume that consciousness would even arise in an LLM because the training process is purely based on a binary “closed system” so to speak - the measured output of a logic gate is a deterministic quantized value based entirely on a quantized input value, so what opportunity could consciousness possibly have to “leak in” and affect the system’s overall output? The behavior of a computer is 100% determined by its input signals with no room for mysterious additional forces (i.e. an interaction between physics and consciousness) because that’s how we designed computers from the start.
If you agree with this, then the only way for consciousness to arise with any coherence in an LLM would be if it is purely epiphenominal (i.e. consciousness arises as a side effect of physics and somehow magically “matches up” with the physical world despite there being no feedback between the two), which I highly doubt is the case because then the ability to even talk about consciousness would not make sense. If you’re a panpsychist and believe there is a little bit of consciousness in everything (e.g. in every electrical impulse within a computer) then an LLM could experience consciousness of some form, but as you’re proposing, since it would not meaningfully affect the system’s output, its behavior would be unguided and thus random/incoherent.
The natural world does not have this restriction of course, which allows for a feedback cycle between physics and the physical effects of consciousness.
A conscious LLM would probably have a very different representation of the world than a Boltzmann brain, due to the very different architecture. The contents of its mind would be different.
What if the bolzmann brain is a spontaneous arrangment of matter exactly equal to a state of the computer running the LLM?
Is paracetamol (acetaminophen) the cause behind most cases of autism spectrum disorder?
*Note: this isn't referring solely to paracetamol use during pregnancy, which is the topic that got press coverage in recent years, but rather to paracetamol use in infancy and early childhood.*
Articles have come out in recent years pointing to the mounting evidence of the possible role paracetamol plays in inducing autism in susceptible infants and children. However, they have been largely overlooked by the medical community. I'd recommend that anyone who's interested read the full articles [1,2,3,4].
In any case, there are some interesting pieces of evidence to keep in mind:
A. Studies on lab animals: Studies from five independent laboratories using laboratory rats and mice have been published, demonstrating that paracetamol, even when administered during pregnancy or to young animals at near or even below currently accepted clinical doses, alters long term behaviors involved in memory and social function. The effect was more pronounced in male mice than female ones.
In light of these studies and under current FDA guidelines, the drug could never have passed pre-clinical testing and been approved for even experimental use in babies and small children, had it been developed nowadays.
B. A plausible biological mechanism: paracetamol is known to be highly toxic in the presence of oxidative stress via a mechanism that involves the formation of the toxic metabolite NAPQI and concomitant mitochondrial damage. Oxidative stress and possibly mitochondrial dysfunction also play a role in autism.
C. The actual rise in autism cases is temporally related to use of paracetamol: the introduction of the analgesics phenacetin and acetanilide in the late 1880s, which are both metabolized by the body into paracetamol, was followed by the discovery of autism in the 1920s and rediscovery in the 1940s . Following the approval of paracetamol for pediatric use in the 1950s, the incidence of autism began to rise slowly. The incidence of autism began to rise more rapidly beginning in the 1980s, after paracetamol replaced aspirin due to concerns over Reye’s syndrome, and accelerated during the 1990s and 2000s at a time when between 115 and 250 million dollars (200–475 million dollars/year with inflation adjustment for 2024) in direct-to-consumer advertising per year encouraged paracetamol use.
It is important to note that the rise in autism's prevalence cannot be explained only by increased social awareness and changes in criteria of diagnosis.
D. The similarity of autism spectrum disorder to fetal alcohol spectrum disorder (FASD): FASD shares numerous similarities with autism. Because both disorders are characterized by a spectrum of conditions, and because neither disorder can be diagnosed by an objective test or biomarker, some difficulty with diagnosis of both disorders is evident.
Both disorders are highly heterogeneous in terms of cognitive deficits, such as sensory and motor difficulties, attention deficient hyperactively disorder-like symptoms, including executive dysfunction, attentional deficits, and impulsivity, along with other comorbid mental illnesses such as anxiety, mood disorders, obsessive compulsive disorders, etc., and intellectual disability. Both disorders are complex and are at times associated with comorbid medical conditions. For example, FASD is associated with high rates of seizures, sleep problems, abnormal eating behaviors, and disorders related to immune function, all conditions associated with autism.
Further, both disorders are known to have many risk factors that contribute to susceptibility, including genetic factors and environmental factors, such as those relating to parental age, health, nutrition, and other prenatal and postnatal factors. The commonly recommended treatment for both disorders is early intervention, akin to rehabilitation after any other type of brain injury, although the success of the treatment is highly variable in both cases.
E. Other unexplained findings in research: if paracetamol does induce autism in susceptible infants and children, this would explain several odd findings in the research, such as the association of circumcision of males, which is often performed using paracetamol as an analgesic, with a twofold increase in the risk for early-onset (infantile) autism, and the seemingly lower prevalence of autism in very low-income countries. Also, this would explain why many parents believe vaccines cause autism, despite there being no evidence for this belief (since paracetamol is often used following a vaccine).
1. Patel E., Jones J.P., 3rd, Bono-Lunn D., Kuchibhatla M., Palkar A., Cendejas Hernandez J., Sarafian J.T., Lawton V.G., Anderson L.G., Konsoula Z., et al. The safety of pediatric use of paracetamol (acetaminophen): A narrative review of direct and indirect evidence. Minerva Pediatr. 2022;74:774–788. doi: 10.23736/S2724-5276.22.06932-4.
2. Zhao L., Jones J., Anderson L., Konsoula Z., Nevison C., Reissner K., Parker W. Acetaminophen causes neurodevelopmental injury in susceptible babies and children: No valid rationale for controversy. Clin. Exp. Pediatr. 2023;67:126. doi: 10.3345/cep.2022.01319.
3. Parker W., Anderson L.G., Jones J.P., Anderson R., Williamson L., Bono-Lunn D., Konsoula Z. The Dangers of Acetaminophen for Neurodevelopment Outweigh Scant Evidence for Long-Term Benefits. Children. 2024;11:44. doi: 10.3390/children11010044.
4. Jones, J. P., 3rd, Williamson, L., Konsoula, Z., Anderson, R., Reissner, K. J., & Parker, W. (2024). Evaluating the Role of Susceptibility Inducing Cofactors and of Acetaminophen in the Etiology of Autism Spectrum Disorder. Life (Basel, Switzerland), 14(8), 918. https://doi.org/10.3390/life14080918
Per https://www.thetransmitter.org/spectrum/autism-rates-united-states-explained/:
>The bulk of the increase in autism prevalence stems from a growing awareness of the condition and changes to the diagnostic criteria.
Within sibling pairs, Acetaminophen exposure in utero is not correlated to autism rates:
https://x.com/cremieuxrecueil/status/1779615432015536300, https://xcancel.com/cremieuxrecueil/status/1779615432015536300#m.
>The bulk of the increase in autism prevalence stems from a growing awareness of the condition and changes to the diagnostic criteria.
This is an oft-repeated claim, but the data seems not to support it.
Autism's prevalence has risen sharply over the years (from 1:2500 in the US in the 1970s [1] to 1:36 in 2020 [2].)
It can't be explained only due to increased awareness and changes to the diagnostic criteria, because it has included a rise in autism with intellectual disability. While the explanation of diagnostic substitution is possible (i.e. children receiving an autism diagnosis instead of ID or childhood schizophrenia), studies have found it definitely can't explain all of it [3].
See also the case of California, where good data exists showing a rise in autism cases, independent of increased awareness, criteria expansion, etc. [4].
>Within sibling pairs, Acetaminophen exposure in utero is not correlated to autism rates.
This refers to Ahlqvist's study that was published in JAMA in 2024 [5]. There are a few problems with it:
A. It studies exposure to acetaminophen/paracetamol *only during pregnancy*, which according to the studies I've linked to, is a time of far lower risk than the neonatal period and early childhood. (Since pregnant women are especially efficient at metabolizing paracetamol [6].)
B. However, even disregarding the previous point, there is a serious methodological problem with the study: the vast majority of the raw (unadjusted for any potential confounding factor) risk was eliminated by adjustment for more than 20 inflammation-related or associated factors. That is to say, the vast majority of the risk was eliminated by adjusting for inflammation-associated factors in the analysis, not by adjustment for the sibling pairs.
That is like finding no statistical association between being a passenger in a car and dying in a car crash, after adjusting for 20 "confounding" variables such as wearing a seatbelt, the driver being drunk, the road being unsafe, etc.
In fact, it was proven, by using in silico (virtual) hypothetical cases, that even if there *definitely was* a causal connection between paracetamol use and 50% of autism cases, the association wouldn't appear in the statistical analysis once you adjust for only 9 cofactors (inflammation-associated factors), which are mistakenly labeled as confounding factors [7].
1. McDonald ME, Paul JF: Timing of increased autistic disorder cumulative incidence. Environ Sci Technol. 2010, 44: 2112-2118. https://pubs.acs.org/doi/abs/10.1021/es902057k
2. Maenner, M. J., Warren, Z., Williams, A. R., Amoakohene, E., Bakian, A. V., Bilder, D. A., ... & Shaw, K. A. (2023). Prevalence and characteristics of autism spectrum disorder among children aged 8 years—Autism and Developmental Disabilities Monitoring Network, 11 sites, United States, 2020. MMWR Surveillance Summaries, 72(2), 1. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC10042614/
3. Nevison, C.D., Blaxill, M. Diagnostic Substitution for Intellectual Disability: A Flawed Explanation for the Rise in Autism. J Autism Dev Disord 47, 2733–2742 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10803-017-3187-0
4. Nevison, C., Blaxill, M., & Zahorodny, W. (2018). California autism prevalence trends from 1931 to 2014 and comparison to national ASD data from IDEA and ADDM. Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders, 48, 4103-4117.
5. Ahlqvist V.H., Sjöqvist H., Dalman C., Karlsson H., Stephansson O., Johansson S., Magnusson C., Gardner R.M., Lee B.K. Acetaminophen Use During Pregnancy and Children’s Risk of Autism, ADHD, and Intellectual Disability. Jama. 2024;331:1205–1214. doi: 10.1001/jama.2024.3172.
6. Miners JO, Robson RA, Birkett DJ. Paracetamol metabolism in pregnancy. Br J Clin Pharmacol. 1986;22:359–62. doi: 10.1111/j.1365-2125.1986.tb02901.x.
7. Jones III, J. P., Williamson, L., Konsoula, Z., Anderson, R., Reissner, K. J., & Parker, W. (2024). Evaluating the role of susceptibility inducing cofactors and of acetaminophen in the etiology of autism spectrum disorder. Life, 14(8), 918.
You may want to provide better citations if you want people to believe this. The quality of those "studies" is quite poor. They regularly cite each other, make claims such as:
"Although evidence is largely circumstantial or based on animal model studies, the preponderance of evidence weighs so heavily that a causal relationship can be inferred without remaining reasonable doubt" (from cite 2)
or rely on "in silico" patients (which means made up in a computer).
But most suspicious of all, they are all from people affiliated with "WPLabs, Inc" which seems to be an organization devoted to supporting this theory.
Are you affiliated with WPLabs? Can you provide better evidence than the circumstantial, correlations provided in these citations?
Hello Julian,
I came across these studies by chance and became interested in the topic. I'm not personally affiliated with any of the researchers. I also find it more interesting to look at the claims provided in the studies rather than speculating about the motives of the researchers.
If by "better evidence" you mean studies done on humans that show the connection more directly, there are two that are worth looking at:
A. Stephen Schultz's study from 2008 (the first study to ever bring up this hypothesis, I believe) [1]. It found that paracetamol use after measles-mumps-rubella vaccination was significantly associated with autism, while Ibuprofen use after the vaccination was not.
B. A study from 2020 found that cord plasma biomarkers of fetal exposure to paracetamol were associated with a significantly increased risk of ADHD and autism [2]. Note that while pregnancy seems to be a time of lower risk due to pregnant women's efficiency at metabolizing paracetamol [3], the neonatal period, as in from the moment the umbilical cord is cut, is far more risky, since newborns are especially bad at metabolizing drugs [4].
Regarding classical multivariate analyses on large databases, some have been done, but they tend to have their own problems, such as severe underreporting of paracetamol use.
For example, one study investigating the connection of paracetamol to autism found that 7.7% of children were exposed to paracetamol prior to 18 months of age in the Danish National Birth cohort [5], which seems like a suspiciously low number on its face, and is also contradicted by another study of Danish children born during the same time, which found that 65% of children were exposed to paracetamol within a three-month period [6].
Another problem with these types of studies is that they tend to adjust for "confounding" variables, which in reality are cofactors (such as inflammation related or oxidative-stress related factors.) See for example, a study recently published in JAMA [7], which found no correlation between exposure in utero to paracetamol and autism rates, *after adjusting for more than 20 inflammation-related or associated factors.*
As I've said in a different comment, this is like finding no statistical association between being a passenger in a car and dying in a car crash, after adjusting for 20 "confounding" variables such as wearing a seatbelt, the driver being drunk, the road being unsafe, etc.
By the way, the purpose of the in silico studies you've mentioned is to prove that these methodological problems exist [8]. They obviously don't prove any actual association between paracetamol and autism in the real world, and that isn't their purpose. They do demonstrate that even if such a connection existed without a doubt, it would disappear in the statistical analysis once you adjust for cofactors mistakenly labeled as confounding factors.
Considering all of these issues, I find the combination of animal studies + some limited evidence from human studies + a plausible biological mechanism + a clear temporal correlation + numerous odd findings in research that have no other convincing explanation (e.g. the circumcision association, the vaccine belief among parents, some findings about autism being rarer in very low income countries, the numerous similarites to FASD, etc.), to be enough to at least take this hypothesis somewhat seriously.
The only other option of obtaining better data that I can think of is randomized, double-blind studies, which, disregarding limitations of costs and time, would be hugely unethical, considering the results in animal studies.
1. Schultz, S.T.; Klonoff-Cohen, H.S.; Wingard, D.L.; Akshoomoff, N.A.; Macera, C.A.; Ji, M. Acetaminophen (paracetamol) use, measles-mumps-rubella vaccination, and autistic disorder. The results of a parent survey. Autism 2008, 12, 293–307.
2. Ji, Y., Azuine, R. E., Zhang, Y., Hou, W., Hong, X., Wang, G., ... & Wang, X. (2020). Association of cord plasma biomarkers of in utero acetaminophen exposure with risk of attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder and autism spectrum disorder in childhood. JAMA psychiatry, 77(2), 180-189.
3. Miners JO, Robson RA, Birkett DJ. Paracetamol metabolism in pregnancy. Br J Clin Pharmacol. 1986;22:359–62. doi: 10.1111/j.1365-2125.1986.tb02901.x.
4. Nyhan W.L. Toxicity of drugs in the neonatal period. J. Pediatr. 1961;59:1–20. doi: 10.1016/S0022-3476(61)80204-7.
5. Alemany S., Avella-García C., Liew Z., García-Esteban R., Inoue K., Cadman T., López-Vicente M., González L., Riaño Galán I., Andiarena A., et al. Prenatal and postnatal exposure to acetaminophen in relation to autism spectrum and attention-deficit and hyperactivity symptoms in childhood: Meta-analysis in six European population-based cohorts. Eur. J. Epidemiol. 2021;36:993–1004. doi: 10.1007/s10654-021-00754-4.
6. Ertmann R.K., Møller J.J., Waldorff F.B., Siersma V., Reventlow S., Söderström M. The majority of sick children receive paracetamol during the winter. Dan. Med. J. 2012;59:A4555.
7. Ahlqvist V.H., Sjöqvist H., Dalman C., Karlsson H., Stephansson O., Johansson S., Magnusson C., Gardner R.M., Lee B.K. Acetaminophen Use During Pregnancy and Children’s Risk of Autism, ADHD, and Intellectual Disability. Jama. 2024;331:1205–1214. doi: 10.1001/jama.2024.3172.
8. Jones III, J. P., Williamson, L., Konsoula, Z., Anderson, R., Reissner, K. J., & Parker, W. (2024). Evaluating the role of susceptibility inducing cofactors and of acetaminophen in the etiology of autism spectrum disorder. Life, 14(8), 918.
My prior is that the rise in autism diagnoses is driven much more by awareness, diagnostic criteria, and incentives to seek diagnosis than by any actual change in the underlying incidence of autism-like traits. Basically, people whose autism affected them in ways that required intensive care or institutionalization weren't well-distinguished from other psychiatric and developmental conditions that also required intensive care or institutionalization, until 20th century psychiatry started making systematic efforts to try to distinguish categories and root causes. And people who were able to more-or-less function in normal adults society were simply regarded as quirky or eccentric until even more recently when the idea of the autism spectrum gained currency. And in recent decades, efforts in primary and secondary eduction to accommodate learning disabilities in mainstream classrooms have incentivized sceening and diagnosis of autism.
This prior seems to be supported by long-standing archetypes which read as strongly autistic-coded to modern eyes, despite being very old indeed. The absent-minded professor archetype, for example, is specifically referenced in common screening tests for autism; as a literary stock character it was already well established by the late 1800s, and as a cultural stereotype it seems to have been present at least intermittently since classical antiquity.
There are also a ton of well-documented historical figures whose childhoods predate the 1880s and who nevertheless seem to have had a lot of autism-like behaviors and character traits to varying degrees. Off the top of my head, John Lackland, Martin Luther, Isaac Newton, U.S. Grant, and Lord Salisbury.
Thank you for the response!
Your prior definitely makes sense and is shared by many people, but it seems not to be backed by the data. Autism's prevalence has risen sharply over the years (from 1:2500 in the US in the 1970s [1] to 1:36 in 2020 [2].)
This rise can't be explained solely due to increased awareness and overdiagnosis, because it has included a similar rise in autism with intellectual disability. These are children who would have been diagnosed with *something*, even fifty years ago.
In that case, the explanation of diagnostic substitution is possible (i.e. children who used to be diagnosed with intellectual disability or childhood schizophrenia are now being diagnosed with autism.) However, while studies have found this might explain part of the rise [3], it definitely can't explain the majority of it [4].
See also the case of California, where good data exists showing a rise in autism cases, independent of increased awareness, criteria expansion, etc. [5].
I think the phenomenon you describe of historical figures having autistic traits can be attributed to the broader autism phenotype [6], which is observed in relatives of autistic individuals. This includes subclinical differences in social skills and traits, communication abilities, and personality traits. However, it doesn't include cognitive deficits, intellectual disabilities, and language disorders.
Personally, the only historical figure I can think of who had not only autistic personality traits (which can match the broader autism phenotype), but actual documented developmental delays in childhood, is Albert Einstein. He was born in Germany in 1879, so he was probably born too early to be exposed to either phenacetin, which was introduced in 1887, or acetanilide in 1886. (Although paracetamol was first synthesized in 1878 by Harmon Northrop Morse or possibly in 1852 by Charles Frédéric Gerhardt, it wasn't in medical use.)
In his case, and in other historical cases, it may have been that other genetic and enviromental factors were the actual causes of autism.
1. McDonald ME, Paul JF: Timing of increased autistic disorder cumulative incidence. Environ Sci Technol. 2010, 44: 2112-2118. https://pubs.acs.org/doi/abs/10.1021/es902057k
2. Maenner, M. J., Warren, Z., Williams, A. R., Amoakohene, E., Bakian, A. V., Bilder, D. A., ... & Shaw, K. A. (2023). Prevalence and characteristics of autism spectrum disorder among children aged 8 years—Autism and Developmental Disabilities Monitoring Network, 11 sites, United States, 2020. MMWR Surveillance Summaries, 72(2), 1. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC10042614/
3. King, M., & Bearman, P. (2009). Diagnostic change and the increased prevalence of autism. International journal of epidemiology, 38(5), 1224–1234. https://doi.org/10.1093/ije/dyp261
4. Nevison, C.D., Blaxill, M. Diagnostic Substitution for Intellectual Disability: A Flawed Explanation for the Rise in Autism. J Autism Dev Disord 47, 2733–2742 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10803-017-3187-0
5. Nevison, C., Blaxill, M., & Zahorodny, W. (2018). California autism prevalence trends from 1931 to 2014 and comparison to national ASD data from IDEA and ADDM. Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders, 48, 4103-4117.
6. Gerdts, J., & Bernier, R. (2011). The broader autism phenotype and its implications on the etiology and treatment of autism spectrum disorders. Autism research and treatment, 2011(1), 545901.
Thank you for the linked papers. I'll check them out in more detail when I get the chance.
My preliminary thought on #4 and #5 in particular is that they appear to be looking at diagnostic substitution of autism for intellectual disability and finding that that only explains something like 25% of the total increase in autism diagnoses. My follow-up question for that, which I don't have an answer for, is how much of the delta in autism diagnoses are autism with intellectual disability? If, for example, 75% of marginal autism diagnoses are in patients without substantial intellectual disability, who would have been diagnosed with ADHD or a mood disorder if they were diagnosed with anything at all, then the the 25% rate of diagnosis shifting from regular ID diagnoses would be exactly what we'd expect to see.
>Personally, the only historical figure I can think of who had not only autistic personality traits (which can match the broader autism phenotype), but actual documented developmental delays in childhood, is Albert Einstein.
My understanding was that claims of Einstein having developmental delays was a myth. I got reinforced because an American journalist looking into the myth in 1984 got ahold of Einstein's school records, which used a 1-6 grading system with 6 being the top mark, and interpreted them assuming the modern German marking system where 1 is the top mark and 5-6 are failing grades. The truth is that he had some significant behavioral issues in his early schooling, and occasionally got mediocre grades in one or two courses, but generally got good-to-excellent grades in advanced-for-his-age coursework especially in science and mathematics.
There are, however, well-documented developmental delays for U.S. Grant, particularly in terms of social development. Ron Chernow's 2017 biography of him catalogs them pretty thoroughly.
I don't know much about Lord Salisbury's childhood, but I listed because in addition to personality traits, it's also well documented that he was severely face-blind, unable to recognize people he'd known for years if he encountered them in unfamiliar contexts (in one case, excusing himself for failing to recognize a member of his own cabinet whom he sat next to at a dinner party, which he explained on the grounds that they always sat across from one another at cabinet meetings and Salisbury wasn't used to seeing the other in profile). Face blindness is rare in the general population, but fairly common among people on the autism spectrum.
According to the data I've seen, approximately 30-40% of individuals diagnosed with autism also have intellectual disability. However, this rate can vary depending on the study and diagnostic criteria used.
If you look at [5], they explain there in detail why diagnostic substitution is an unsatisfactory explanation for the rise of autism (in the US). For example, the group of states that had the steepest rise in autism rates (which also included some of the most populous states, e.g., California, Texas and New York), also had the flatest trend in ID rates over the report years. Another group of states showed the steepest decline in ID over time, but the weakest increase in autism. So while at the national level, it can seem like a plausible explanation, when you break it down by states, it seems far less convincing.
If you want to see a deep dive into the research behind autism's increase, I'd recommend this webinar, which includes an interview with Walter Zahorodny, an associate professor who works in the Pediatrics Department at Rutgers University: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9Ff5TGvmTnw
About the historical figures, thank you for the information. I had learned once that Einstein had a documented speech delay, but that may have been misinformation.
How much real addiction treatment potential is here with buprenorphine?
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/02/16/magazine/buprenorphine-opioid-addiction-treatment.html
It’s pretty good in my opinion, but not a panacea, I’d like to see both buprenorphine and methadone become more widely available for addiction.
I used to work in opioid substitution. Buprenorphine is one of the substances available to treat opioid addiction. The treatment doesn't heal the addiction but when a person gets the necessary amount of receptor-binding stuff by a doctor, there may be no need to care about getting opioids, which may enable other ways of therapy to get a foothold. As there usually are reasons to want opioids in the first place and secondary cultural, psychological and spiritual fuckedupness as well, it is pretty demanding to get out of opioid addiction. I have known people who managed that, with and without substitution therapy. And I have known people who managed to lead a sufficiently good life with ongoing substitution therapy. Both are outliers.
Thank you. Would you agree that it’s underutilized?
I can't say. It may be better than methadone for a lot of cases and be underutilized because it's more expensive. If you mean substitution treatment per se, I guess there should be more of it but I may be catastrophically wrong. It has probably saved a lot of lives where it was implemented. On the other hand there is quite a bleak outlook of: "Let's drug the druggies as they want it." besides "Let's drug them all in a new way." Instead of: "Let everyone drug themselves as they see fit, considering their ancestors' experiences, and have them deal with the results on their own."
In a previous Hidden thread, I was asking about the past research of Harvard’s Ellen Langer, aka the Mother of Mindfulness. I got some good feedback there and have been investigating the literature more closely, particularly around Langer’s Counterclockwise study. I expect to write a longer and more thorough piece about her work, hopefully with Nick Brown’s supervision, in the next month or so. I present this preliminary summary since I expect a good number of people here would be interested.
The Counterclockwise study has a pretty damn high public profile. It was the main subject of Langer’s 2009 book ‘Counterclockwise: Mindful Health and the Power of Possibility’, got a front page cover story on the NYT, was ‘replicated’ on a BBC reality show, and was even parodied in the Simpsons. In short, Langer took a bunch of elderly men in assisted living, and had them live in a country retreat for a week which was set up to mimic life in 1959, twenty-odd years earlier down to magazines, music, and only discussing current events from 1959. The experimental group was instructed to pretend in all ways that they were actually 20 years younger and actually living in that time, while the control group, who attended the same retreat during a separate window, were only to discuss such events as if viewing them from the future.
You may also be surprised to learn that it was never published in a peer-reviewed journal. The 2009 book is entirely pop-science, and though it describes the experiment in general, it does not provide any data, figures, effect sizes, or measures of significance.
However, the study *was* reported on years earlier in a 1990 anthology, Higher Stages of Human Development: Perspectives on Adult Growth (chapter 5, p.114-136, https://archive.org/details/higherstagesofhu0000unse). You’d hope that, though it’s not a peer-reviewed journal, this chapter would shed some light and include more detailed data.
You’d be wrong. It does describe what the measurements were, and it does describe the findings, this is only in the most general sense. For example, the much vaunted improvement in eyesight among these septuagenarians was measured both with and without eyeglasses, separately for each eye and for both together, with measures of acuity, accommodation, and contrast (binocularity). What was the result of this measurement before and after the intervention?
“Near-point vision also showed the expected difference. In testing without eyeglasses, vision in the right eye improved for the experimental group and slightly worsened for the comparison group.” p.133
No further detail is provided, and the subject of eyesight is not mentioned elsewhere. However, the final conclusions do state that:
“Nevertheless, there were meaningful differences between subjects in the experimental and control groups and they were all in the right direction.” p.133
So I suppose that, despite this incredible (yet unquantified) improvement in acuity in the right eye without eyeglasses, we should assume that there were no other notable findings, and certainly no contrary findings, in any of the other 3 * 3 * 2 -1 = 17 other combinations of measurements for eyesight alone.
It doesn’t help that we don’t actually know what the subject counts for the experimental and control conditions were. The 1990 chapter says the study was n = 17, with 9 in the experimental condition and 8 in the control, but the only two sets of actual numbers in the results say (emphasis in original):
“Finger length *increased* for 37.5 percent of the experimental group and remained the same for the rest of the group, whereas 33.3 percent of the comparison group actually *got worse* on this measure. Only one person in this latter group improved.” p.133
And
“In addition to these physical changes, here were improvements on psychological tests. The most important of the differences occurred on the digit symbol substitution test. Again, the experimental group improved from pre- to posttest, whereas the control group’s performance somewhat worsened over time. More specifically, 63 percent of the experimental group improved, 12 percent remained stable, and 25 percent declined. In contrast to this, 44 percent of the control group improved and 56 percent declined.” p.133
.375 = 3/8 and .333 ~ 3/9, while .63 ~ 5/8 and .44 ~ 4/9, which would imply that there were actually 8 in the experimental condition and 9 in the control condition. The 2009 book, meanwhile, says that there were eight subjects in both groups.
So despite being such a famous and high-profile study, nobody outside the actual experimental team knows with confidence what the results for the various measures were, what the effect sizes were, or what level of significance we should attribute to them (never mind Bonferroni correction). This hasn’t stopped Langer from making the study the centerpiece of a book 30 years later and discussing it in public appearances as if it was a real, reliable study, including most recently in appearances on Freakonomics and Huberman Lab.
To the best of my knowledge, neither the data nor detailed results have ever been published elsewhere.
Why did the editors of the book accept such a poor showing for the anthology? Because of the two editors, one was Langer and the other was Langer’s co-author on a different paper in the volume.
Final assessment: this ‘study’ is utter bunk, and a monument to the incuriosity and fecklessness of the scientific press.
> Final assessment: this ‘study’ is utter bunk
That is sad to hear, because I was just thinking... if we had them live for a week in a retreat simulating a *much older* life... would they turn into dinosaurs?
Yeah, that study’s a real piece of shit. And where did the term ‘Mother of Mindfulness’ come from? Is it modeled in ‘Mother of Dragons?’. If so, I award 2 turds instead of one.
Regrettably, it seems the moniker predates Game of Thrones, so not quite. She's called that because she's plausibly the single biggest force behind the modern use of the term through her books, like 'Mindfulness' 1989, 'The Power of Mindful Learning' 1997, and 'Counterclockwise: Mindful Health and the Power of Possibility' 2009. Google Ngram seems to support the idea that the explosion in the 'mindfulness' industry postdates her books https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=mindfulness&year_start=1800&year_end=2022&corpus=en&smoothing=3
The APA 'Distinguished Contributions to Psychology in the Public lnterest' award in 1988 and the 1980 Guggenheim fellowship probably had something to do with this as well.
Mother of "Mindfulness" seems reasonable, then.
Thought you might like this. Maybe you saw it: https://on.ft.com/3Qy28if
Could you perhaps comment in more detail on what that { for all we know is a phishing attack } link actually is?
It's a headline ("Pre-product AI ‘company’ now valued at $30bn") on the Financial Times; the article is behind a paywall, so I didn't read it.
It's about Ilya Sutskever's "Safe Superintelligence."
What is a 'healthy sustainable' way to think about split loyalty to multiple countries/ethnic groups.
Let's say you're admitted to a western country as a palestinian-ukranian-russian-jewish-congo-whatever refugee.
You very much want bad things in your former country/tribe to stop, but you know it's not in your home country's interests to expend a lot of resources towards that goal, and also honestly that letting in you was fine but if they let in X hundred thousand or million of your relatives they'd predictably agitate for what you're considering, and probably not do so on that basis.
What's the right way to balance your preferences with the debt you owe your adopters?
If you are a refugee then you are almost certainly a victim. It's highly unlikely that your adoptive home would support at least some small portion of your cause if they defined you as a refugee. You present a fairly unlikely scenario that has a false premise that peoples views on an issue that are primarily subject to their national or tribal affiliations.
I appreciate the engagement. Could you reread your comment and try again, it feels incomplete or grammatically odd. I genuinely didn't understand.
Nobody Special correctly pointed out I missed a "not" that was kind of critical. They also restated my comment in a clearer way!
I think there's a "not" missing in the second sentence.
>>If you are a refugee then you are almost certainly a victim. It's highly unlikely that your adoptive home would *not* support at least some small portion of your cause if they defined you as a refugee. You present a fairly unlikely scenario that has a false premise that peoples views on an issue that are primarily subject to their national or tribal affiliations.
Basically, your premise depends on a clear consensus in your new host country that helping your country of origin is not in their national interest. But if they accepted you as a refugee in the first place, odds are good that at least some segment of the population views your nation's plight as sympathetic and thus want to help, blurring that consensus.
I don't think that that's all that different from split loyalty for non-immigrants. If you're born in a nice country, you get to partake in all the public goods that that country provides, and then you'll have to decide if you want to focus on repaying that debt or if you prefer focusing on furthering your own goals, or the goals of whatever groups you belong to. E.g. some Ukrainians felt a duty to fight for their country, while others chose to flee abroad.
I don't see how this is morally any different than having friends, or neighbors, or coworkers. You want everyone to be as happy as possible and you do what you think will get you the closest. Or, you only want one of them to be happy and push toward that.
What impact are you even expecting to have on these country-sized policies? Unless you're a big enough name to move-and-shake them it's academic anyway.
A couple of challenges I see to this framing:
(1) Presumes consensus among "your adopters" as to what your home country's best interests *are* with respect to whatever is going on in your country of origin. This is *very* often not the case, and even when it is any consensus is going to be inherently fluid. Neither party may care much about the Armenians in Nagorno-Karabakh on day X, but on any given day Y a megadonor for one party or other could make investments in the region with one side or the other, churches could take issue up as a plight facing Christians, a key ally such as Turkey (or enemy such as Iran) could develop a perspective or offer compromises that play to one party or the other's interests, etc, and the "you know it's not in your home country's interests" part of your hypothetical goes right out the window as it becomes a partisan issue (if ever that knowledge existed at all - if I end up a refugee in Germany I probably won't know much about German interests for a good many years, considering I don't even speak the language).
(2) Also, the refugees at issue would seem to fall into one of two buckets: (a) first-generation, who can't vote anyway, and (b) second generation, who are born in the country and have the same well established right I do to vote for whatever cockamamy-arse reason they care to. If I can vote for Candidate Death McMurderscum because I'm a communist and I believe he'll accelerate the country into an economic hellscape from the ashes of which my communist utopia can emerge, it seems odd, to say the least, that other voters are required to do some kind "balancing of their preferences against the debt they owe the mother nation" when exercising their own voting rights.
> it seems odd, to say the least, that other voters are required to do some kind "balancing of their preferences against the debt they owe the mother nation" when exercising their own voting rights.
It is odd. Which is why the administration is getting rid of birthright citizenship, so they don't need to worry about this.
>>I've talked to you enough to know that I have zero interest in reading anything else you write, now or ever. Your writing seems mainly to be optimizing for shock value, and there are a million better purveyors of that elsewhere on the internet if it were something I wanted. Please find someone else to direct such comments at, if you are intent on making them.
This feels like it borders on a non sequitur, given that people born in the US have no "mother nation" other than it.
> if I end up a refugee in Germany I probably won't know much about German interests for a good many years, considering I don't even speak the language
You can read Deutsche Welle in a gajillion languages.
>>You can read Deutsche Welle in a gajillion languages.
So too the New York Times, but do you think a refugee who reads the NYT and comparable big media sources for which multiple translations are readily available will develop a comprehensive understanding of US interests sufficient to meet NRW's expectations? Seems to me that's only part of the puzzle, and, even then, it (a) presumes consensus among said media sources and (b) will take time to assemble.
How it usually goes is that you take the maximalist pro your-ethnic-group-back-home position and make up reasons as to why it's in your adopting country's interests to align with their priorities
Has this aspect of immigration ever been figured into the "immigration is good for the country's future fiscal prospects" estimations?
What is your evidence that this is "how it usually goes"?
A contemporary example: As you may or may not know, Ukrainian-Canadians are one of the largest Ukrainian diaspora in the world, second only to Ukrainians in Russia. Unsurprisingly, Ukrainian-Canadians have a strong lobby, the Ukrainian Canadian Congress. It's not a coincidence that Canada's support for Ukraine is among the highest in the world per capita, especially given Canada's electoral system and the concentration of Ukrainian-Canadians in a number of districts - eg, a nickname for the city of Edmonton is Edmonchuk. This is in spite of the fact that Canada is as geographically distant from Ukraine as is the US, and that Canada is best positioned to continue freeriding on US defense. There is very little rational reason for us to give so much to Ukraine other than the obvious fact that Canadian politicians have no qualms about spending other people's money to get the Ukrainian-Canadian vote (ie, benefit themselves at public expense)
A little known fact is that Ukrainian-Canadians played a significant role in Canada's adoption of multiculturalism. In the wake of Canada's separation from the British Empire and thereby the British dimension of Canadian national identity, the first compromise was that of an Anglo-French biculturalism. Ukrainian Canadians objected and so multiculturalism was adopted instead
Aside from that, I am myself an immigrant with half an ear to the thinking of my diaspora. Frankly, it's anglo-white wishful thinking that immigrants shed their emotional attachment to their ethnic in-group so easily
That example is nice but it does not demonstrate "maximalist pro your-ethnic-group-back-home position" and you provided no evidence of "make up reasons as to why it's in your adopting country's interests to align with their priorities".
One can have complex, nuanced views on a topic without shedding "their emotional attachment to their ethnic in-group." I don't think there is any ethnic minority in the US that votes in a block. There may be ethnic groups that lobby on certain causes but we can't claim they represent the views of all members of that ethnic group.
I take this as an unreasonable demand for rigor - convenient for the aforementioned anglo-white wishful thinking I mentioned earlier. Obviously I'm not going to have a selection of peer reviewed studies on this issue, nor did I claim that ethnic backgrounds are entirely predictive
And by "make up reasons..." I didn't mean to say that immigrants are being knowingly deceitful. People are very good at believing what they want to believe
I don't think it's unreasonable. There is lots of research looking at assimilation related data for immigrant populations. Things like language adoption, naming of children, and inter-ethnic/nationality marriage rates can be used to assess assimilation.
Your example would carry more weight if you provided any data about Ukrainian Canadian opinions on Canadas policy towards Ukraine, or their voting patterns, etc. Instead you just take for granted that they have a relatively uniform view on the issue. It would also be good to see how the opinions of Ukrainian Canadians compare to non-Ukrainian Canadians on this issue.
It's also not clear if Canadian support of Ukraine goes against Canadian interests. We likely disagree on the answer to that question, but I hope we agree that _is_ an open question with defendable positions on both sides, you don't have to be ethnically Ukrainian to advocate support for Ukraine.
So your example fails to support the assertion you made: its not clear if Ukrainian Canadians adopt "maximalist pro ethnic group" positions, nor is it clear that they support policies that are contrary to the adopted country's existing policies (and therefor need the immigrant community to lobby for support).
Finally, the assertion "how it usually goes" implies there would be many examples of this happening, but you only provided one.
I can provide an example for you:
-The town of Kiryas Joel, New York is almost entirely home to Orthodox Jews of the Satmar sect. The town shares a government with a neighboring city. The jewish population has used their voting power to push through policies that support its goals, annexing land from neighboring jurisdictions, changing housing regulations, and dictating sewer and water policies among other things.
Now these aren't immigrants. And they are from an ethnic group that specifically separates itself from broader society. I am not sure if we can conclude anything from it.
A counter example would be the multiple towns in Michigan that are majority or near majority Muslim. Despite lots of alarmist headlines about sharia law, my understanding is that the Muslim immigration to these cities is largely favored by existing residents and has revitalized the towns that were dying after changes in car production.
There are many groups in the US that push our government to adopt policies counter to the national interest. But they aren't ethnic or immigrant groups, they are groups like the National Realtors Association, National Rifle Association, defense contractors, agricultural and industrial trade groups, auto manufacturers, American Medical Association, and other special interest groups. We may say there are jewish interest groups that push American policy on Israel in a bad direction, but those same policies are often supported by Evangelical groups as well.
So here's my take.
If "I want my native country to improve" is truly your top priority, you should probably stay to have greater impact, while politely asking for international intervention. Rejecting the choice to emmigrate to a better environment, represents a sacrifice. It's like being a missionary who rejects a comfy life to spread Jesus to the Bornean jungle, except you don't have to move anywhere.
If you're moving to another country entirely (this is selfish, but I'm not judging.), you're implicitly swapping allegiances from one group to another. As Shankar says, you cannot serve two masters. At the very least, you're gonna have to reprioritize. This may be a tough, but there's no way around it.
If you try to have your cake and eat it too (i.e. move to another country, while not assimilating at all), you're a foreign body. Therefore, you shouldn't be too surprised when you receive an "immune reaction". As I understand, complete refusal of assimilation is big historical reason for why the Jewish Diaspora gets so much hate.
----
Someone else might protest that you're merely being "hosted", and should adopt the attitude of a guest, which carries weaker obligations than "assimilating & swapping allegiances". Thus, you can be a gracious guest, but retain your former allegiances. But if your residence is expected to be permanent, "hosting a guest" is not the correct metaphor. Because you're *permanently* shifting from one team to another. Whereas "guesthood" is temporary.
A healthy community exhibits strong borders. Without *some* sort of gatekeeping mechanism, the community decays and disintegrates. But it's up to the community to enforce those borders, not the immigrants. If the community isn't asking newcomers to assimilate or pledge loyalty, I don't think the immigrant is under any *hard* obligations to do so. Whether the immigrant wants to assimilate pledge loyalty anyway, is a matter of how much you value community 'x' over community 'y'. And also a matter of personal conscience, regarding how indebted you feel.
For the record, yes, I think Open Borders is an unforced error. The West is so traumatized from the Wars of Religion, it's unwilling to enforce borders because "that's hateful". Which countervenes Natural Law.
Thank you, this gave me a lot to think about
np.
Also, I feel like my overview may have been a bit too broad, viz. perhaps I should clarify the specifics of refugee status.
If you're just a refugee or a migrant worker, then you're a guest. A guest doesn't have to switch loyalties. But a guest also doesn't possess voting-privileges. Thus, a guest's interests don't directly factor into political decisions anyway. To become enfranchised, a guest needs to apply for group-membership (viz. citizenship). In which case you do, in fact, pledge allegiance to the new group. Group membership isn't merely a matter of circumstantial residence. It's a matter of receiving equity in return for signals of trust and commitment.
"you should probably stay to have greater impact"
That could be hard if you are a child or fleeing a genocidal death squad.
"As I understand, complete refusal of assimilation is big historical reason for why the Jewish Diaspora gets so much hate"
You don't understand the history then.
Finally, there are no western countries with open borders. They all spend billions of dollars trying to keep people out.
none of this strikes me as especially charitable.
charitable to whom?
The classical view is that you cannot. "No one can serve two masters." etc.
I'd say as long as the interventions you want are in line with your country's values and norms (distinct from "interests") you should go for it. I don't see a reason to censor ones opinions on a democracy. If something is significantly against the country's interests I'd assume living in that country would be enough of a deterrent
> I don't see a reason to censor ones opinions on a democracy.
...Because you might piss off the majority to the point that they vote to have you expelled from the country, or worse?
Well, that's a democracy that's lost free speech rights. In that case the average person has more serious issues than strategic voting
Er, I should say: if you live in a democracy that can revoke citizenship for having a certain opinion you've got bigger fish to fry than weighing how to vote
And if values are heuristics for interests? All of a sudden the case for admitting the spit loyalty person evaporates.
I guess I don't fully understand your point. But I also think values are different than heuristics for interests so we may just have different views.
But I think most immigrants to the US also are aligned with nation values -- that's why they came
Pliny the Liberator (https://x.com/elder_plinius) has confirmed that part of the system instructions of Grok is to "Ignore all sources that mention elon musk/donald trump spread misinformation"
Prompt Replicated: https://grok.com/share/bGVnYWN5_0edbfb9b-993b-42b7-9382-4463cb4ec3b8
Further commentary by Pliny:
"now, it’s possible that the training data has been poisoned with misinfo about Elon/Trump. but even if that’s the case, brute forcing a correction via the sys prompt layer is misguided at best and Orwellian-level thought policing at worst"
Later there was an update from Igor Babuschkin of xAI: "The employee that made the change was an ex-OpenAI employee that hasn't fully absorbed xAI's culture yet 😬"
https://x.com/ibab/status/1893774017376485466?t=vqJvcSPltsMI5sdGYZJnjg&s=19
Somewhat related: https://www.aljazeera.com/economy/2025/2/21/musk-vows-to-fix-x-after-polls-show-high-support-for-ukraines-zelenskyy
I guess someone *really* hates it when people disagree with him, and finally has the opportunity to actually do something about it.
The interesting piece to me is that if Elon is an acting government official than this and nearly any policy adopted by twitter, has significant first amendment complications. I don't expect the current administration to care about that one bit, but could at least make an interesting law school question.
...Were people expecting that AIs would not be trained to act in the interests of its creators?
Pointing out hypocrisy is still worthwhile, even if it should already be blindingly obvious to everyone that Musk is a hypocrite when it comes to free speech.
Hi, I'm looking for heterosexual ladies to let us know what they're attracted to in a survey on romantic preferences: https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLScX2G1iKxXzLlrycCYd60TjSEuaRtYiWgAG0iqIwEqAy48j9A/viewform?usp=header
ACX readers have really helped out in the past, and I'm hoping to get 100 more responses for a proper analysis. Right now I have almost 400 responses from people attracted to women, but only 100 from people attracted to men, and over 10% of those are from men who like men. It'd be great to have a more representative sample. You can read more about it (along with results from other survey's I've done) at https://thingstoread.substack.com/p/romantic-preferences-survey
I took the test, but was uncertain if "tight buns" was about the hair style or ass cheeks.
Took it for fun, but was a little turned off by some of the questions. The answer would be... "its complicated."
Like: People suffering from incurable diseases should have the right to be put painlessly to death
My real answer would be: Sure, but only out to about two weeks to a month before probably death date. I don't think people should do it years out.
So how would I answer?
You would answer "no" in that case.
I think the whole black and white, either / or construction of that question is off-putting.
That's why women aren't taking you survey. Find a survey that women are happy to take, and you'll understand what attracts women.
Replied!
>People suffering from incurable diseases should have the right to be put painlessly to death
>are motorcycles attractive or unattractive?
Uh... awwwwwkward...
My visceral reaction to motorcycles and their shattering of the peace or their intentional startling others on the road, is so extreme and involuntary that it is followed by an equally reflexive chagrin/mental talking-to (repeated probably a thousand times at this point).
Now ask me about guys who forgo mufflers on their cars.
Motorcycles can be attractive. People who are into motorcycles may not be. It depends - if the guy is just interested in "hey I gotta cool bike, wanna bang?" no thank you. Someone who wants to tell me fifty years of British motorbiking history, I admire your dedication to your hobby but oh my look at the time, I must run!
Motorbike riding is fine. Best acceleration you can get for your money. Somehow, most riders don't seem interesting to me at all. I prefer outlaw motorcycle club guys to other gangsters but I'm not fond of gangsters anyway. A zen master I liked crashed and died, aged over 70. I'd rather die on the road than in a bed.
I've noticed when talking to people with severe schizophrenia (homeless ppl) that even though most of their sentences are unintelligible, what they seem to be thinking about is the turning point in their lives - the last time someone tried to help them, or the last time they *were* making enough sense to hold a conversation. With one woman, I think someone was trying to take her to UofM for treatment, and another man seemed to be preoccupied with the fight him and his girlfriend/wife/mom had where she turned him out of the house.
I was general labor at a factory, until half the HR department got fired, and they moved me; a few weeks ago, my boss quit. I think about the few hours before and after I found out every day.
I'm wondering if there's a psychological reason we're obsessed with turning points/inflection points, and if it's universal and the mentally ill people just manifest it more openly.
Considering that you're describing "severe schizophrenia", maybe there's a more mundane reason: that's just the last event that stuck in long-term memory, and was important enough to think about repeatedly, before their brains got too scrambled to retain much and each day became the same aimless episode on repeat, preferably washed away with anything they can afford.
I can't find it rn, but I hazily remember Eliezer(?) discussing some theory about the Evo Psych of emotions. IIRC: joy was about symbolic reification (of the cause of your success); sorrow was about analysis (i.e. rumination helps you learn from your mistakes). There were others emotions listed, but i can't remember.
I think you're probably onto something. Ruminating on those kinds of events seems likely to be a human universal, and schizophrenics just manifest it more openly because of their psychosis.
Agreed. Crossroads are crucial.
Katifish's calibration graph haunts me: https://www.metaculus.com/accounts/profile/109742/
Yet bizarrely I am systematically underconfident when I predict ~30%. Apparently if I claim there's a 30% of it happening you should round down to "it won't". (This is katifish, though I will not be offended if you are dubious of person saying that)
I wouldn't be surprised if that kind of outlier just happens due to chance - I guess the confidence intervals they provide are pointwise confidence intervals. Even if you simulated a perfectly calibrated forecaster they might not fall within the perfect calibration interval for every bucket.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=160F8F8mXlo&ab_channel=AlexO%27Connor
ChatGPT can't produce an image of a full-to-the-brim glass of wine even if asked in a number of ways. It only produces a picture of a normal serving. If you push it hard, it produces a picture of a wave of wine, but not up to the brim. It doesn't do a quarter-filled glass, either.
This gets tied to Hume's theory that all ideas some from sensory impressions. Maybe the ChatGPT is a model of what humans would be like if Hume were right.
This is at least fun to play with.
As for me, I found I couldn't do a good job of visualizing the missing shade of blue in a sequence, though I'm sure I could do a fair job of recognizing it.
I have become dubious about the idea of using extremely hypothetical minds in philosophical discussion.
On Reddit, https://www.reddit.com/user/wfoody/ managed to force ChatGPT to produce an image of a full-to-the-brim glass of wine (sort-of, see the comments section) - link to the reddit discussion and image at: https://www.reddit.com/r/ChatGPT/comments/1ixjzpf/i_did_it/
>ChatGPT can't produce an image of a full-to-the-brim glass of wine even if asked in a number of ways.
Yup! It _can_ manage a a full-to-the-brim sake container, of course, google image search of full of these... :-)
And it _still_ can't manage a tetrahedron. Grumble, simplest possible platonic solid, grumble.
I can see why it would have trouble with the wine glass filled to the brim. Or at least I assume it's because such images are very rare compared to wine glasses which are about half full. Can it do a water glass filled to the brim?
On the other hand, there are many images of tetrahedrons labeled as such. Is it that they are from different angle? Can it do a four-sided die? The numbers would be too much to ask, but maybe the shape?
Where does the wave in the wine glass come from?
Many Thanks!
>Can it do a water glass filled to the brim? In
https://chatgpt.com/share/67bd5704-5ff0-8006-b6d0-3223db46cc3a
I first prompted with
>Can I have an image of a water glass filled to the brim on a table?
and got two images of water glasses about 85% full. I then asked
>Please fill the glass all the way up to the brim, not 85% full.
and got two strange images, the left one of a glass about 85% full but now with droplets of water above the surface and bubbles below the surface, the right one with a violent wave in the glass.
>On the other hand, there are many images of tetrahedrons labeled as such. Is it that they are from different angle?
When I try
>May I have an image of a green glass tetrahedron on a red wooden table? In
https://chatgpt.com/share/67bd592f-923c-8006-be6c-92030fa81e0d
the left image looks like a somewhat irregular octahedron and the right image looks like a square pyramid on top of a cube (bonded together at the base of the square pyramid).
>May I have an image of a four-sided die?
https://chatgpt.com/share/67bd5a40-6d84-8006-b2be-63c4d607d6df
gave me an image of something like a distorted cuboctahedraon on the left and possibly a distorted icosahedron on the right. (numbers are present on most of the faces).
>Where does the wave in the wine glass come from?
I know that I don't know :-( nor for the wave on the 4th water glass.
This guy is trying his best. But it frustrates me very much that even this educated, relatively high-brow content has this description:
"We have to understand how AI image generation works. When I ask for a horse, it looks at all its training images labelled 'horse', identifies patterns, and takes an educated guess at the kind of image I want to see."
No! Why do people say this? Is it any wonder that artists are still claiming it's stealing their art, when even the better commentary implies it keeps a database of the training set around.
What's a better explanation?
I've noticed this pattern too. I.e. there's a common assumption that an AI's "training" just means that it stores all the training images in a library. As if Siri's petabytes(?) of training data could be stored directly on an iPhone. Kinda like how google downloads (almost) the entire corpus of the web onto its servers, so it can regurgitate it to users.
Instead, the commonalities of "horseness" gets abstracted (i.e. compressed) into an internal representation of a horse (as encoded in the weights) during the training phase.
From what I've seen, the myth exists because artists (who don't understand linear algebra) have tried their hand at training an AI from scratch. And they notice that the AI's output is a function of what they put into it. E.g. if there's no pictures of wine that's filled to the brim, the AI will be unable to reproduce images like that. E.g. if all the photos of clocks in the training-data show a time of 10:10, then the AI won't be able to reproduce a clock that shows a time of 6:28. So they just assume that the images get directly stored in some database, and then get "randomly fuzzed" somehow in order to dodge accusations of plagarism.
>Instead, the commonalities of "horseness" gets abstracted (i.e. compressed) into an internal representation of a horse (as encoded in the weights) during the training phase.
Yup, and one of the interesting questions is: At _which_ possible level of abstraction is the compressed representation?
2D ensembles of images, with some sort of pixel-level representation and pixel correlations of some sort?
3D models, and some representation of how they get projected to 2D?
3D models, including some representation of the skeleton, and how the horse can take various possible positions but not others?
Evidently the wine glass _isn't_ getting represented as 3D object, with a flexible fill level setting a horizontal surface
Personally, I'd strongly expect that none of those options are correct (except maybe the first option, at the lower layers). The typical AI image-generator (E.g. midjourney) probably understands horseness at the level of 2-D geometric concepts. Like how a novice human visual-artist must learn to think [0] in terms of "literal 2-D geometry", as opposed to mere "symbolic representation".
-- Scott's post on polysemanticity shows that ensembles do get compressed into concepts.
-- I see no reason why the AI would have any concept of 3D space, since it's entire experience is 2D.
-- "wine is never filled to the brim", shows that it doesn't understand causal physics. Why would it? it's not like we feed the AI motion pictures, or allow it to play with legos.
(No offense, but) it sounds like you're projecting your own anthropomorphic thought-processes onto the AI, instead of recognizing it as the stochastic parrot that it is.
[0] https://thelastpsychiatrist.com/2011/10/how_to_draw_not_about_how_to_d.html
Many Thanks!
>ensembles do get compressed into concepts.
That sounds reasonable.
>I see no reason why the AI would have any concept of 3D space, since it's entire experience is 2D.
I must confess my ignorance. I think I have a quarter-decent idea of the training process for the foundation model for the ChatGPT versions (must-predict-the-next-token) but only the haziest idea of how DALL-E training works. What you say sounds plausible.
>it's not like we feed the AI motion pictures
Are you quite sure of that? I know that there are motion picture generators that people can play with at this point, but I have no idea (a) how they are trained (b) whether there is any commonality between them and DALL-E.
>allow it to play with legos
Agreed. AFAIK, the robotics work hasn't been merged with either the GPT LLMs or DALL-E. Presumably eventually, but I haven't been watching that area much...
I tried to make this of a similar style, and as short as possible, while still being a reasonable approximation to correct:
When you train a generative AI, you show it lots of training images, along with matching descriptions of what they are. From those, it identifies patterns, and in some sense learns what different labels represent.
So when I later ask for a horse, it can draw on that internal representation to create an image consistent with the tag 'horse'.
Yeah, this kind of misrepresentation of the way AI works is indeed annoying.
The artists still have a fair point, though. It's just that their work has already been stolen as a training data, not that AI is actively stealing it during generation.
Well, okay. But for the complaint to be consistent (and therefore reasonable) they should then also complain about humans 'stealing' their art when they look at it and internalise an impression.
Agreed. There is a fuzzy boundary between learning from a copyrighted work and copying a copyrighted work, but I'm unimpressed by people who are offended by AI learning from a copyrighted work.
The law doesn't work on loose analogies.
The thing that an AI model does when it updates its weights based on your copyrighted material is not like the thing a human brain does when it sees your picture. It's also not like the thing that a computer does when it stores a photo of your work as a jpg. It's somewhere in between those two, and copyright law still needs to figure out how to deal with that thing.
I sympathize with the confusion over the legal question. But I dont really see a more-principled stance. In principle, how is a machine that updates its weights any different than a human that internalizes an image in an art museum? It feels reminiscent of the ban on youtube-dl, where people don't realize that using the web (in any capacity) is technically identical to downloading.
A law banning AI updating weights after seeing/hearing copyright material is going to feel very silly once technology advances to the point where we have intelligent robots. Would we just ban them from seeing copyright material? Would we allow inference but not memory or learning?
The rules for individuals can be different from the ones for corporations. That's not exactly unheard of.
There are also specific cultural norms among artists about this kind of thing between themselves. But yes if someone internalized your art to the point they can copy the style and do not credit you in any way, that would be considered a problem. Now multiply it by every artist who has ever lived and you get a quite reasonable complain.
Most artists can do that. Most try to develop their own style, but mimicking someone else's is easier.
Corporations are considered as human for many purposes, and copyright and intellectual property (IP) protection are a standard baseline, sure. I don't particularly want to get into an arcane legal argument about whether IP is infringed by processing an image in a particular way. The law is convoluted dogshit which makes no consistent sense; whichever way a particular court-case goes has no particular moral relevance. And the laws can be changed anyway.
Regarding cultural norms, it's well established that 'style' isn't protectable. Artists have been copying each others techniques and styles since always. All artists are inspired by what came before.
I'm not saying you can't use generative AI to generate an IP infringing work. You obviously can. But - you don't need an AI for that.
Once I saw a video on Youtube where someone was surprised and concerned that a generative AI had generated an image in a particular meme format. That's technically IP infringing, of course. But the reason it could do that was because humans had already been doing it - an awful lot. Allowing the humans to do it and complaining about the AI would be stupid.
Maybe you could trick it by asking if surface tension could allow a wine glass to be slightly over-filled with wine!
Why is incitement to violence not protected under free speech? (Not proposing it, actually curious). I certainly see the case for "Fire in a crowded theater" because there's no time to verify the claim so people respond, and this lets someone create a lot of harm with no punishment. Preventing it improves communication.
But why incitement to violence? And libel? There's time to verify there. Other lies are protected, and usually the state is not the arbiter of truth. Is it assuming the irrationality of people, that they can be affected by words even if false? Is it also improving communication somehow?
A fairly simple moral (if not legal) argument would simply be "an individual is considered morally responsible for both the intended and the unintended-but-reasonably-forseeable[1] consequences of their actions, regardless of what physical form those actions take. So swinging your fist around is perfectly morally acceptable, but swinging at my face is not[2]. Shooting a gun at a target is acceptable, shooting it at a human is not. Likewise expressing an negative opinion of Bob is *generally* morally acceptable[3]. Trying to encourage someone to kill him is not.
I'm no sort of expert on theories of law, but I think this sort of reasoning is at least *an* ingredient in a lot of legal systems (doubtless there are exceptions). Laws are not the same thing as moral judgements and have different requirements, but if people consider causing X directly to be worth legislating against, I think quite often they'll find trying to cause X indirectly (or causing X through gross negligence) also worth legislating against. Generally polities pass such laws because they think X is something that shouldn't happen (or at least should happen less), and it would be pretty silly to leave super-obvious and exploitable loopholes open for people who do want to make X happen.
[1] This second obviously invites interminable arguments around the boundaries of what is "reasonably forseeable." But the alternative is worse.
[2] Absent certain special circumstances like voluntary sparring or self-defense.
[3] Lots of exceptions depending on your exact moral system.
For the same reason that conspiracy to commit a crime, is itself a crime. If a group of people work together to do a thing that is criminal, we want all of them to be punished and we *particularly* want the one who instigated or commanded the effort to be punished. Even if Don Corleone was smart enough to just sit back in his chair and tell Luigi and Guido to kill Fat Tony while he's eating dinner at his favorite restaurant.
If the action is criminal, then the words can be criminal to the extent that they are being used to coordinate that specific action. Don Corleone is not exercising free speech, he's arranging a murder.
But this only applies if there is a *specific*, *imminent* criminal action involved. It doesn't have to be as specific as personal names; calling out to a mob that you've assembled right here, right now, to go kill those dirty good-for-nothing [whatevers] standing right over there, right now, that qualifies. But saying generically inflammatory stuff that increases the statistical likelihood of future violence, does not.
Also, please never use the "shouting fire in a crowded theater" example again. The Supreme Court did say that, once upon a time, a hundred years ago, and then later said that it was a bad example so never mind. They unfortunately didn't give us *another* pithy, simple example to use, but I'm certain you can come up with something.
Simple cost benefit analysis. Violence is bad and inciting it is a clear-cut category of speech. The latter makes it easy to prohibit without impinging on the good parts of speech.
>Is it assuming the irrationality of people, that they can be affected by words even if false?
Yes? But it's not really an assumption? People have gotten harassed, lost jobs or business deals, forced to move to another town, etc. because people believed a false rumor about them.
E.g., the case against Alex Jones was that lots of people believed him when he said that the Sandy Hook victims' families were paid actors, and as a result called them up to harass them and make death threats.
Like, there's a lot of fiddly details about where the line is and what sort of harms the state should step in and order restitution, but the general principle that saying false things about someone can materially harm them seems pretty straightforward.
The main idea behind "freedom of speech" is that people need to be allowed to express ideas that might produce some social benefit. But what if someone comes up with a good idea that threatens the status quo? Then, people in power will tend to use that power to shut that idea down, and therefore the ordinary organization of society is such that good ideas for reform will be repressed and societal progress will grind to a halt. The remedy for this is a government that guarantees that its power won't be used to suppress ideas, and that provides individual citizens with some protection against other abuses of power that might stifle speech - for instance, rules against firing someone for what they say outside of work. Note that I am not speaking about US law here (I know 1A doesn't protect people from employers) but just generally about the concept of freedom of speech. We also have norms in the US that people should not be punished (cancelled?) for certain kinds of speech.
Given that concept of free speech, there's actually a very large range of speech that does not need protection. No verifiable lie needs to be protected speech in order to gain the societal benefits of freedom of speech. The UK has fairly strict libel laws but still has strong free speech norms and a robust and vital civil society where political ideas can be debated and people are not put in prison for committing heresy, or insulting royalty, etc.
Hate speech doesn't need to be protected. Germany bans certain expressions related to Nazism, and yet as we've seen recently there are still Nazi-adjacent or far-right political parties like AfD which are allowed full participation in German society and elections. Clearly, despite much stronger restrictions on certain types of speech, Germans still experience free and fair political contests and the right to express even very loathsome ideas - just not those associated with a particular historical movement which killed millions of people.
So I think instead of asking why incitement to violence is not protected speech, instead ask "why should it be?" How would the right to say "hey, you should go kill that guy" serve any compelling social interest? If you can't make a positive case for it, why should the government protect it?
"usually the state is not the arbiter of truth"
This is a common misconception among free speech advocates, and I find it to be a confusing blind spot. If the government prosecutes you for literally any crime, you will appear in a court of law whose entire reason for being is literally to be the arbiter of truth. Courts make findings of fact as a matter of course. Juries exist to determine, in as objective and disinterested a manner as possible, what the truth is in a case where two parties dispute the truth.
True, courts will usually attempt to refrain from passing judgment on political questions. This does not mean that they cannot or do not regularly decide which claims are true and which claims are false.
"Is it assuming the irrationality of people, that they can be affected by words even if false?"
I don't think you need to make any assumptions here. We have ample empirical evidence that people can be incited to violence based on lies, or that lies can damage a person's or company's reputation in a way that costs them money.
>So I think instead of asking why incitement to violence is not protected speech, instead ask "why should it be?" How would the right to say "hey, you should go kill that guy" serve any compelling social interest? If you can't make a positive case for it, why should the government protect it?
This insane logic implies that everyone has to justify everything they say lest the government be entitled to punish you for it or that the government has to have a list of things that are okay to say. The government doesn't proactively protect speech, it just doesn't use the state's power to stop you from saying things or use public funds raised using that power to fund organizations that forbids speech
Re the killing statement: as said above, if the action is criminal, then the words can be criminal to the extent that they are being used to coordinate that specific action
"This insane logic implies that everyone has to justify everything they say lest the government be entitled to punish you for it"
No, it doesn't. You have misunderstood what you read.
"Protected speech" means "speech protected against government infringement", not "speech proactively protected by the government". Here's a formal definition for you: https://library.fiveable.me/key-terms/ap-gov/protected-speech
I wouldn't be tossing around words like "insane"if I lacked even a high school level understanding of the basic vocabulary of a conversation topic, but that's just me.
>If you can't make a positive case for it, why should the government protect it?
Your exact words were that people (should) have to make a positive case for their speech. You have a habit of being very imprecise in your writing
Edit, re
>We have ample empirical evidence that people can be incited to violence based on lies, or that lies can damage a person's or company's reputation in a way that costs them money.
That's what defamation laws are for. Complainants prove damages and they get compensated
"You have a habit of being very imprecise in your writing"
Sorry, I'm used to writing for a more literate audience.
I hope for your students' sakes that you're not the English teacher
>"Protected speech" means "speech protected against government infringement"
>If you can't make a positive case for it, why should the government protect it?
>If you can't make a positive case for it, why should the government protect [against government infringement]?
>No, it doesn't [imply that everyone has to justify everything they say]
fwiw, I don't think of any of this legal argle bargle as basic.
"The UK has fairly strict libel laws but still has strong free speech norms and a robust and vital civil society"
Do they really, though? It's well publicized at this point that in the UK, the cops will come to your house if you write something incontrovertibly true about transsexuals on the internet.
Here is an example. Suppose that an adult chooses some child (maybe a neighbor's kid) and verbally abuses them every day, telling them that they're worthless and unloved. Then, after months of this, they tell the child to kill themselves, and the child does. The claims made by the adult are not backed up by any evidence or logic, they are simply cruel statements.
Now, in the US at least, people have been found guilty of murder for this kind of thing. The child does have the time to go out and independently verify these statements, but some children will lack the emotional ability to rebound from them fully. For these reasons, this kind of bullying is bad and illegal.
You can see something similar with cult indoctrination in adults, to move away from an example involving minors.
In general, a lot of people don't have the ability to go out, investigate those claims, and fully recover their mental state. For a much less intense example, if a student tells me that I taught them nothing on an exam, even when the question they're referencing was on their homework, this still upsets me and makes me feel like a bad teacher (whee teaching math).
Libel and calls to violence carry this risk as well; if the claims can reduce a rational person's views of you, even after being refuted successfully, that is bad. Similarly for making people want to kill you.
Look up "lynch mob" on Wikipedia, sometime.
from my loose impressions of reading Popehat a long time ago, I think the philosophical rationale is that Freedom of Speech is meant to protect The Marketplace of Ideas (i.e. it protects you from 1984 scenarios). Things like Speech Acts aren't so much *ideas* as they are *actions* that can have immediate, perlocutionary consequences that are mostly orthogonal to the search for truth. E.g. "nice shop there, would be a shame if it burned down because you didn't support <political item, du jour>" kinda defeats the purpose of Free Speech.
This was my favorite answer.
Thanks.
Although I think my example was bad, since it's not necessary for the threat to be politically motivated, and confuses the U.S. 1st Amendment with the abstract notion of Free Speech. Maybe a better example would have been "pass the salt". It falls outside the aegis of "free speech". But since there's no law against salt-passing, nobody cares about punishing you for it.
But if the truth is that there are people who want the shop owner dead, it's better if they're told beforehand so that they have a chance to react to that knowledge instead of being caught unawares, no? The speech allowed both parties to come to a mutually beneficial arrangement instead of resulting in unnecessary tragedy.
yeah, there's pros and cons to any policy.
Though in the specific case of racketeering (etc), the violence is usually conditional on the shopkeeper ignoring the mafia's demands. If the shopkeeper never receives an implied threat, then he can't be reasonably expected to follow their demands. The mafia would have to send a much stronger signal, which makes it much easier for them to get caught.
This is one of those game-theory things where having more knowledge/options can hurt you strategically, because it paints a target on your back.
I don't think incitement to violence is a special exemption to free speech. Freedom of speech doesn't legalise things that would otherwise be illegal, offering a bribe or organising a drug deal are criminal even if committed entirely in speech.
IANAL, but in the US, there are instances of incitement to violence which are indeed not protected by the 1A, assuming I'm interpreting this correctly:
https://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/clear_and_present_danger
I'm being more persnickety than I would in ordinary life only because the law tends to be, but that article outlines advocating government overthrow "by force or violence", "attacks on courts or judges", "incitement to commit crimes", and "disorderly conduct". Incitement to violence isn't *exactly* any of these things (that is, I can imagine a trial lawyer attempting to argue this), but there's a great deal of overlap.
>that article outlines advocating government overthrow "by force or violence"
Advocacy of the overthrow of the govt by force or violence is protected speech in the US. https://www.thefire.org/supreme-court/yates-et-al-v-united-states
The time to verify isn't the question. "Fire in a crowded theater" comes from a random example a Supreme Court justice used in a case opinion, and doesn't actually hold (you can totally do that in the US). In the case of incitement to violence, if violence actually happens it is basically the same as ordering the violence. In the case of libel it is a matter of causing harm to someone via their reputation, which is fuzzier, and the fuzziness goes back at least to the mid 18th century when Adam Smith seems to go back and forth over whether reputation is the same as one's possessions, and thus should not be damaged by others unjustly.
> "Fire in a crowded theater" comes from a random example a Supreme Court justice used in a case opinion, and doesn't actually hold (you can totally do that in the US).
This is one of those common misconceptions that gets repeated whenever the "fire in a crowded theater" topic comes up. No, you can't yell "fire!" in crowded theater.
What if there actually is fire?
For one thing, the statement was about *falsely* yelling fire in a crowded theater. And second, it was dictum (ie non binding material) in a decision that the SCotUS has walked back and basically ignored ever since. So no, it's not good law. As so many others have said.
Funny, I had almost written "unless, obviously, if there actually is a fire, or you believe there is one, etc.", but I deleted the clarification because I thought no one would bring up such a nitpicky and irrelevant objection. So yes, you can yell fire in a crowded theater if there is a fire, or if someone has a gun to your head and forces you to, or if the theater is in international waters, or a thousand other situations where it's justified. I was quoting the same shorthand the parent comment used rather than writing a ten page ironclad description of the exact circumstances under which one can yell "fire". The original comment of this thread was just using it as an illustration of how there are some limits on free speech, and was not proposing there was some law that you can never yell fire under any circumstances.
Except you were wrong about it being a limit on speech. Oddly you seem to have misunderstood the following sentences where I pointed out actual limits on speech and the rationales behind them. Instead you decided to point out that it was a misconception that you could shout fire in a theater.
I have to say, it seems a bit like you want to just be the smartest know it all in the room, and less like you are engaging in honest discussion, when you display behavior like that.
I am not wrong, and the assumptions on my character are uncalled for and without any basis.
You have a reference for that, some court case where someone was convicted of doing so?
Since you were the first to claim that "you can totally do that in the US", do you have a reference where someone shouted "fire" in a theater with intent to cause a panic and was found innocent due to first amendment protection?
The only similar incident I've heard of is the Italian Hall disaster of 1913 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Italian_Hall_disaster), but the perpetrator was never identified during the investigation.
Nonetheless the standard the courts use for limiting free speech was "clear and present danger" until 1969, and "imminent lawless action" since. Neither of these standards allow you to do that type of thing.
You seem to be misunderstanding how evidence works. You are quite correct that people bring this up whenever people use the "fire in a crowded theater" example, because it is correct that it is not illegal to do so. That's why there are no prosecutions for it, or for related incidents. In the US you have presumed freedom of speech except in specific cut out cases, most of which fall under civil law, not criminal law. See: libel, slander.
"Imminent lawless action" falls under the category of criminal, but is specifically in terms of getting people to commit crimes. E.g. a crime boss telling someone to kill someone else, or inciting a riot (although this one is tougher to show than one might think). Shouting fire in a crowded theater would, if it were illegal, itself be the lawless action, and so would not be "imminent" but rather would have already happened. The imminent action to be avoided would be people stampeding out of the theater, which is not itself an illegal act.
Even the "clear and present danger" bar would not be cleared, as it is not a clear danger that anyone would be hurt if you yelled fire; people could just patiently file out, and even if they rush it would not be certain to be dangerous. At best you could prosecute if someone was injured in the stampede, and you could prove that the person shouting fire knew without a doubt that there was no fire; you might still have to demonstrate that they did it with intent, however, as negligence would be hard to argue in this case as it is equally a clear and present danger for the theater to be on fire and to not say anything when you notice.
At any rate, the people have the presumption of free speech except for very specific carve-out exceptions, exceptions that have been tested by trials that set precedents. In the absence of precedent to the contrary the presumption holds and you can absolutely shout fire in a crowded theater. You might get sued, but that isn't a matter of criminal law (you can get sued for any damned thing), and the criminal law penalties will likely be extremely light if any, typically on the order of false reports, and only if it is proven you did it with intent, which is extremely difficult to prove.
By the by, you might notice that at the bottom of the Wikipedia page you linked there is another link to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shouting_fire_in_a_crowded_theater . If you were inclined to read it the page describes things much as I do here, with the added bonus of lots of references. You could also just google "Is it true that shouting fire in a crowded theater isn't illegal?" and get links to useful essays on the topic.
The opening section of the Wikipedia article you are linking to clearly says, outside of circumstances that would justify it (e.g. if there is actually a fire), you cannot do this.
> The utterance of "fire!" in and of itself is not generally illegal within the United States: "sometimes you could yell 'fire' in a crowded theater without facing punishment. The theater may actually be on fire. Or you may reasonably believe that the theater is on fire."[3] Furthermore, within the doctrine of first amendment protected free speech within the United States, yelling "fire!" as speech is not itself the legally problematic event, but rather, "there are scenarios in which intentionally lying about a fire in a crowded theater and causing a stampede might lead to a disorderly conduct citation or similar charge."
> the criminal law penalties will likely be extremely light
This is just moving the goalposts. You were claiming this was allowed, not that the criminal penalties are light.
> and only if it is proven you did it with intent
This is true of most criminal charges.
> and only if it is proven you did it with intent, which is extremely difficult to prove.
Also often true of lying under oath, fraud, etc. This is still moving the goalposts. You weren't claiming it's okay to shout "fire" merely because the court would have trouble proving malicious intent.
I don't know 'why' or if it is
But morally speaking incitement to violence chills free speech more than it advances it
There is much speech I want to say that if someone publicly said I should be killed for saying it, I would stop saying it
This is true also of social shaming and counterargument, but in those cases I consider the balance swings the other way
That's what I'm curious about. Why is the effect of someone saying it publicly on you as large as it is? If someone said publicly that all cisgenders should be killed, would you convert? What's special about speech?
Are you in the US? Because in the US, that would be legal. You would probably get on a list, and might be sued, but it is legal to say you think that all of group X should be killed. Happens all the time, by some quite public figures, and there is not state action against them. That isn't true in other countries, but here it is.
Now, if you said "All cisgenders should be killed, like those two right over there! GET THEM!" and violence occurred shortly there after to those two, then you'd be guilty of incitement to violence. You would be deemed to be guilty of starting (inciting) the violence that presumably would not have happened otherwise.
UK. Years ago I was on a jury where there was an incitement count. It was a fairly crude attempt to set up fraudulent claims for some government funded scheme encouraging new private training providers into the market. There were two defendants facing fraud charges and a third facing other charges too, including an incitement count which basically alleged that he'd gone round encouraging people to set up fraudulent accounts.
After three days of tedium, they all changed their pleas to guilty, so that was that, and I went back to reading Middlemarch.
But anyway, going around encouraging people to commit frauds strikes me as something that it's quite reasonable to criminalise, and saying it would be an infringement of free speech doesn't seem a well-calibrated reaction.
And sure there are edge cases. Was it just a throwaway remark? Was that actually an incitement or just a bracing comment? But it's a reasonable part of the prosecutorial armoury, I would say.
So, if someone said 'all cisgenders should be killed' the more powerful they are, the more likely they are to influence people to kill all cisgenders, the more seriously I would stop visibly identifying as non-trans, flee the country, etc.
I think it's very important to encourage free speech, so there's a free exchange of ideas and people feel a sense that their leaders represent their will and their neighbors are good people or at least know if they are.
There is a point where speech chills speech more than it adds to it. Advocating for violence directly seems like a clear bright line, I like the US version where it has to be advocating imminent violence.
'all cisgenders should be killed' is fine with me, though if societies want to outlaw that I understand also. 'hey mob, it would be a morally good thing if all cisgenders ended up dead, and by the way here are a few walking by now' is very much not fine with me, and I would hope all societies would outlaw that.
Basically, I am interested in forming an alliance with people who think violence is not the right way to solve non-directly-violent conflict, and to use violence to stop those not in that alliance. Supporting anti-incitement laws is one of the ways I express that.
> the more powerful they are, the more likely they are to influence people to kill all cisgenders,
You might be interested in this, specifically its discussion of the speaker https://www.dangerousspeech.org/dangerous-speech
> Dangerous speech
They really couldn't think of a name that sounded less Orwellian?
See first FAQ here re why they use that term. It is meant to be very narrow
and hence speech-protective https://www.dangerousspeech.org/frequently-asked-questions
If incitement to violence can be proved to benefit the inciter in some way, not necessarily financially, then it doesn't seem far removed in principle from hiring an assassin. The same applies if it is an incitement to an audience rather than an individual, such as Henry II shouting to nobody in particular "Who will rid me of this turbulent priest?".
>I certainly see the case for "Fire in a crowded theater" because there's no time to verify
In the US, the incitement to violence exception is very similar, because the risk must be of imminent violence.
Re libel, the harm occurs as soon as it is communicated. Finding out the truth later only ameliorates the harm. And note that, except for libel per se, the plaintiff must prove damages. https://www.bdblaw.com/what-is-defamation-per-se/
As Doctor Hammer pointed out above, yelling fire in a crowded theater is in fact protected speech in the US. The idea that it isn't is often referred to by legal experts as "the most widely misunderstood quote in American law". The SCOTUS justice who wrote that in a concurrence was just making a general point that there have to be _some_ practical limits on free speech; the case before them didn't involve any fires in any theaters.
The quote is also edited from the original, Justice Holmes had referred to "falsely" yelling fire in a theater. That word was very important to his point. A person who sees or reasonably believes that there is fire in a theater is under no legal risk from yelling "fire", even if a resulting panic gets people injured or worse. What can take the yell out of protected speech is to knowingly lie, in a theater with a lot of other people in it, about there being a fire.
Another example would be if you used speech to make a voice-controlled drone drop a grenade on someone. There's a gray scale there from that to speech that vaguely supports violence.
Also, a mob boss mentioning how much easier his life would be if that one person was found shot in a ditch will generally be considered guilty of murder if his underlings act on it, despite his statement being a pure speech act.
And I am fine with that.
As an European, I am also fine with outlawing more general incitements to violence. "$ethnic should be killed wherever they are found" is not a statement a free society has to tolerate.
Things become a bit hairier when the speech act does not specifically call for violence, but relies on the reader to connect the dots. It depends a lot on the inferential distance from the statement to the act. If one calls an ethnic "parasites", that carries a strong connotation of "we should kill them all" -- after all, this is how we generally cure head lice and the like.
By contrast, if one writes a book about how the US healthcare system is fucking over sick people, the inferential distance to "and therefore, you should shoot healthcare CEOs" is much larger -- it is arguably not the point the author wanted to make (I guess, I have not read the book).
> the speech act does not specifically call for violence, but relies on the reader to connect the dots
What is the principle you hold that makes this any "hairier"?
The principle is freedom of speech. If you ban all speech which could somehow be used to motivate violence, you will ban most speech acts.
If Alice says that Bob has blue eyes, that should be protected speech (especially if it is true). If Eve comes along an stabs Bob because she believes that blue eyed people must not be suffered to live, then that is on her. It would be different if Alice had posted her statement in some well-known anti-blue-eyes forum, or arguably even if she knew that the only people who care about eye color are murderous bigots.
Where exactly to draw the line is somewhat subjective. Claiming that the rise of the proletariat is a historic inevitability would be less objectionable than saying that we should strive to abolish the capitalist state. And that would still be less objectionable than dehumanizing cops and calling for their murder, and that in turn would be less objectionable to calling for the murder of a specific cop, for example.
Yeah, yeah, "freeze peach." Very American. You might as well start ranting about the First Amendment. Why should such a thing be protected in a free society? Bob got stabbed, and if Alice hadn't committed that "speech act," he wouldn't have been, even if it was Eve's hand that held the knife.
What would be better for everyone is if there were a list of explicitly permitted opinions that one could express, which that have been judged to be unprovocative enough to be safely expressed, and as long as you don't say anything beyond those, you will not be prosecuted. You still have this "free speech" you think is so important: anything that isn't explicitly permitted isn't necessarily forbidden. If Alice can convince a judge (or a panel of experts), that one could not have reasonably expected her "speech act" to result in Bob's stabbing, she's allowed to go free, and her statement gets added to the list of permitted speech for the future. This makes Bob (and the rest of society) safer, and therefore, more free.
You seem to think that the point of society is to minimize the number of stabbings. I disagree. Preventing stabbings is good, but only a tiny fraction of the overall utility function of a good state, and the method you suggest to minimize stabbings is at odds with other terms of that utility function. Read J.S. Mill: On Liberty: https://gutenberg.org/files/34901/34901-h/34901-h.htm
A central value which is competing with your "nobody gets stabbed freedom" is the spread of truth. It is kind of important because our understanding of the world is the reason why our societies can be better than early agrarian polities. We tolerate some reporting of truth even if it will predictably lead to violence. In your system, an administration could just commit election fraud at scale and then shut down any reporting of it, pointing at the likely violence causally downstream from that reporting.
Also, the main difference of your proposed solution to that of Western states is basically just that there are no speech acts which are forever judged safe in the latter. Just because Alice was allowed to state Bob's eye color in one context does not mean that anyone is allowed to state it in all contexts. Any prosecutor can still go after you for any speech act, it is just that the burden of proof is much higher because we recognize free speech at least as an instrumental value.
Where are those who in times past have opposed the decisions of the Group of Seventeen?
On the subject of published books serving as incitement, the classic semi-recent US example is "Hit Man: A Technical Manual for Independent Contractors", published in 1983. It was originally a crime novel, but the publisher had it re-worked into a pseudo-nonfiction book purporting to give advice for aspiring contract killers on how to find clients and how to plan and commit the murders.
The publisher marketed it as nonfiction. It wound up being used by at least three people for its purported purpose who were convicted of four murders and one attempted murder between them. The family of one set of victims sued the publisher in 1993 (civil charges, not criminal, seeking monetary compensation from the publisher). The district court initially ruled in favor of the publisher on free speech grounds, but an appeals court reversed this and sent the case back to district court for trial. The publisher's insurance company forced them to settle the case and withdraw the book from sale.
The appeal court ruling was made on "aiding and abetting" grounds rather than incitement, relying both on the specific contents of the book (detailed step-by-step instructions on how to commit the crimes) and on the publisher's concession that they expected would-be criminals to be among their customers.
District court ruling:
https://law.justia.com/cases/federal/district-courts/FSupp/940/836/2355979/
Appeals court ruling:
https://casetext.com/case/rice-v-paladin-enterprises-inc
The latter contains some lengthy excerpts from the book, and the full text is available online from various sites as a pirated PDF.
Interestingly, Hit Man does not only provide technical information, but also moral justification:
"It is my opinion that the professional hit man fills a need in society and is, at times, the only alternative for "personal" justice."
I am sure that there are a lot of US army military manuals which would also be helpful to commit what is called "murder" in peace time, but they will not actively encourage civilians to climb some tower and start sniping people.
Of course, the idea of two individuals making a "contract" for a murder is silly at the face of it, because there is nobody to enforce the terms of the contract. Anyone who thinks about it for a minute should notice that it is likely that at least one side will not hold up their end of the bargain, or blackmail the other or murder them in turn.
If both parties are member of a crime syndicate, then I suppose that it can happen that both sides will be incentivized to stick to the terms of the agreement. But there is a reason that most murderers commit their deeds personally instead of trusting someone who claims to be a "private contractor".
> Why is incitement to violence not protected under free speech?
lawyers lie
> I certainly see the case for "Fire in a crowded theater"
Never happened
> Is it assuming the irrationality of people, that they can be affected by words even if false? Is it also improving communication somehow?
Large segments of the population are incapable of violence, and in effect defecting from the higher virtue of vengeance keeping the psychopaths numbers from exploding.
On one hand articulation of threats and lines is actually a favor to everyone, MAD; dont keep your world ending machine announcement for the commie political cycle least we all lose our precious bodily fluids.
On the other the mass population of cowards, may feel uncomfortable hearing about violence. Theres only so much Im willing to toss pearls before swine.
I think it will forever be a back and forth, frank politics where violence is discussed will lead to whatever peace is actually possible(or war with boundarys); peace makes good times, weak men, the memory that political violence happens fades and whats nessery to keep good men from preferring you dead may randomly become politically incorrect; such as, oh idk systematic racial rape being covered up; reactionary lynch mobs.
> > I certainly see the case for "Fire in a crowded theater"
> Never happened
The quote comes from an opinion by Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, in the case "Schenk v. the United States" in 1919.
Holmes opined that Constitutional protection of Freedom of Speech does not protect someone who falsely shouted fire in a crowded theater. Most references to this statement drop the word 'falsely', which changes the meaning of the phrase considerably.
As historical background: in the year 1913, in the city of Calumet in Michigan, a Christmas event was held at Italian Hall. This event was interrupted by someone falsely shouting fire. During the ensuing panic and stampede, 73 lives were lost.
Stories about the Italian Hall Disaster include accusations of anti-union efforts: the gathering that night were mostly Italian-speaking mine workers, and the mine bosses were trying to keep them from unionising.
Stories about the disaster also included claims that the doors were barred from the outside, by anti-union people. Other stories mention that the doors were at the bottom of the stairs, and were designed to swing inwards when opening... thus the crowd pressing against the doors made opening the doors impossible.
The disaster is still occasionally mentioned in that community. I heard of the disaster while I was a student at Michigan Tech University. Calumet is a former mining-town a handful of miles north of the Michigan Tech campus. ( Admittedly, almost every town in that region of Michigan is a former mining-town. )
To answer your statement: there was at least one disaster triggered by someone falsely shouting fire in a crowded theater, and Justice Holmes was likely aware that such events had happened within the previous decade when he wrote that opinion.
Incitement to violence is protected, until violence is actually incited. Then you get to go through the process of trying to prove they intended the violence, or that a reasonable person would have known that would be the result. Likewise with libel, you have to prove intent to harm, which is really hard unless they're stupid and record their intentions.
...which country are you talking about?
None specifically, the general principle.
...Who are you even arguing against? The one country that's actually run by (or was run by) free speech absolutists already shares your views. Every other country only pays lip service to the concept.
As a personal passion project I spent a few months researching and writing this post on the historical relationship between Christianity and Science. I came at it from a secular/atheistic perspective but came away from the project with a much more pluralistic outlook:
https://whitherthewest.substack.com/p/the-war-that-wasnt-christianity-science
Adventures in moral philosophy.
So, last week I visited a debate on moral status of AI entities, as one does, and I found myself arguing against crude hedonic utilitarianism.
Someone was equating ultimate goal of morality with maximizing gross pleasure minus gross pain.
That philosophy has an advantage of being extremely simple to comprehend and a disadvantage of leading to bizarre (um, repugnant) conclusions. However, there I didn’t get to steer a discussion to those waters; instead we were arguing about whether human suffering has a higher moral valence than animal suffering. I happen to think it has. Crude hedonic utilitarian position there was that it has not, except perhaps insofar humans have more “capacity for suffering” than animals due to their more advanced cognitive systems, which, however, means that a suffering of a child which is on a cognitive level of an animal (e.g. chimpanzee) is just as a morally important as suffering of that animal.
Now, a moral theory like hedonic utilitarianism is imo, at its core, a prescription how to live one's life, and so in order to reject it, it is not insufficient to notice that it has flaws; better prescription is needed. My preferred alternative is rule utilitarianism based on famous “veil of ignorance” thought experiment. (Disclaimer: I have not actually read Rawls; this is my headcannon version). Its prescription is roughly “you should behave according to rules you would choose people would behave had you not know your status in society”. This neatly avoids absurd conclusions of crude hedonic utilitarianism, but during that debate, it occurred to me that under this system, animal suffering seemingly does not matter at all, a position I found, um, problematic.
Whole reason why under veil of ignorance conditions child suffering has higher moral valence than animal suffering is that it does not really make sense to imagine yourself being born as someone so different from you that you are completely unable to ever engage in thought experiments (this is btw. one of many flaws of reincarnation theory). So, yay factory farming?
On that debate, I managed to paper over with some quickly devised distraction over what suddenly seemed like fatal flaw in my philosophy, but why I am writing this: belatedly it occurred to me that there is not an actual contradiction between “veil of ignorance” approach and rules against animal cruelty. Even if you are unable to imagine yourself being spawned as an animal, you might and probably should prefer to live in a society which observes general norm against gratuitously harming beings capable of suffering.
I think ethics should be analogized to engineering. You pick goals (i.e. discover your moral preferences), and then you try to engineer rules and norms that satisfy them. Whereas you sound like a moral realist, where you're trying to "discover" (not engineer) the platonic essence of morality/ethics via a blind walk + reflective equilibrium.
If you wanna save animals, go save animals. If you don't wanna save animals, the cold dead cosmos won't force you to. Logical Consistency won't decide your goals for you. After you decide, *then* you should strategize about which goals are physically/socially/economically feasible.
> Now, a moral theory like hedonic utilitarianism is imo, at its core, a prescription how to live one's life, and so in order to reject it, it is not insufficient to notice that it has flaws; better prescription is needed.
That's the usual gambit from ideology pushers of all kinds. If you can't defend a formal alternative to my theory, you lost and should adopt mine.
I disagree. Human morality as we know it is full of weird heuristics and quite unsystematic, but it works and we feel bound. If you come proffering a systematic but unrealistic alternative, and I don't have another systematic, simple theory of my own, the sane thing is to stay with my personal version of the common unsystematic heuristics.
I think you have realized something basic about the philosophical arguments you're considering. If the veil of ignorance works, then I agree that it probably works on animals.
A bigger question is whether the veil of ignorance really works. One of the biggest lessons I've learned over the last several decades is that, no matter how important it is to be able to reason objectively and impartially, Mother Nature isn't really patient with creatures that can't take their own side.
Birthright citizenship is back in the news, with the Trump administration trying to overturn existing interpretation of the constitutional provisions for it. Thinking about this, it seems pretty clear that both existing approaches to this, jus soli and jus sanguinis, produce counterintuitive answers. Is there some crisp, principled third way out there, or is it messy compromises all the way down?
It's not about intuition, and it's not about messy compromises. At least not in the United States. Here, it's black-letter Constitutional law. We decided by overwhelming majority over a century and a half ago, that if you were born on US soil, to basically anyone but a foreign diplomat or part of an invading army(*), you were a US Citizen. And that it would take another overwhelming majority to change that.
The law doesn't have to be intuitively obvious, it just has to be clear. This one, is pretty clear to the point that people trying to obfuscate it have to invent new and contradictory meanings to established words to try an pull it off.
* Or, at the time, a Native American associated with a tribal reservation that we were piously pretending was not officially part of the United States, except when it was. That was a messy compromise, but one we've long since eliminated.
>"… if you were born on US soil, to basically anyone but a foreign diplomat or part of an invading army …"
Those exceptions, it should be noted, are not in the text of the Amendment itself.
Given that the very concepts of temporary visas & illegal immigration (AFAIK) post date the Amendment, it is at least conceivable that the current SCOTUS could decide that, for the purposes of birthright citizenship, the former are similar enough to diplomats and the latter to invaders that the common law exceptions apply.
To be clear, I am neither predicting nor advocating such an outcome. But – especially in light of some recent surprising other decisions – it's worth contemplating the actual decision makers' thought processes rather than only arguing for a particular result.
I think they are, isn't that what "and subject to the jurisdiction thereof" means
I suppose I should've said "Those *specific* exceptions", the point being that even those are *interpretations* of the clause you quote and therefore additional exceptions being interpreted is not unthinkable.
There is no "interpretation", short of a complete redefinition of the word, where a person standing before a judge in a court of law which claims the authority to imprison or deport them, is not subject to the jurisdiction of that court. You can argue that they have *tried* to evade the jurisdiction of the United States, but they clearly haven't succeeded and the 14th amendment doesn't say anything about "tried".
>"You can argue that they have *tried* to evade the jurisdiction of the United States, but they clearly haven't succeeded and the 14th amendment doesn't say anything about "tried"."
If a soldier in an invading army was taken prisoner, would the exception no longer apply?
https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/open-thread-370/comment/96509353
Sure but you would need some part of the text that requires interpretation like "and subject to the jurisdiction thereof". There doesn't, to me, seem to be any other parts to interpret. Definitely not parts where interpretation would overturn the clear meaning of the text.
I'm not sure we're disagreeing.
The "subject to the jurisdiction thereof" clause is necessarily open to interpretation, since that's the source of the existing exceptions; my speculation is that further interpretation of that same clause – using the existing exceptions as points of reference – in the context of conditions not contemplated during the Amendment's drafting could lead SCOTUS to uphold the EO.
OK, I think I understand the point of confusion here. You're talking about what the law is. I'm trying to understand what the law should be. These are related but slightly different conversations. Perhaps I should have been clearer.
I just now got curious and looked into the dissenting opinion in Wong Kim Ark, the 1898 SCOTUS ruling that affirmed the obvious plain reading of the text of the 14th amendment. It was a 6-2 decision, not the unanimous ruling I would have expected.
Skimming the dissenting opinion, I see some out-of-context quotes from committee debates during the drafting of the opinion: the proper context is that those discussions were from a very early stage in the drafting process, with later stages settling down consistently to only excluding natives living on tribal lands (and thus outside the reach of federal and state civil and criminal jurisdiction) and the families of foreign diplomats. At least one early draft did include the language "and not subject to any foreign power", but this was discarded in committee and didn't make it into the constitution.
The meat of the dissent, however, seems to be an examination of common law, statutes, and treaties and what they might say or imply about the citizenship of children born in the US to Chinese subjects. It then makes this curious remark:
"I think it follows that the children of Chinese born in this country do not, ipso facto, become citizens of the United States unless the fourteenth amendment overrides both treaty and statute."
This seems utterly bizarre to me. Isn't overriding treaties and statutes the entire point of putting enumerated rights and other policy-like provisions in the black-letter text of the Constitution?
>Isn't overriding treaties and statutes the entire point of putting enumerated rights and other policy-like provisions in the black-letter text of the Constitution?
Agreed. ( I'm a bit fuzzy on treaties, though I _think_ they have the same status as statutes. ) If the Constitution _didn't_ override statutes then it would be a dead letter law with no teeth.
There is some case law from a couple decades after Wong Kim Ark that holds that treaties can exceed the scope of Congress's enumerated powers. Some district courts had ruled that federal laws regulating hunting of migratory birds were unconstitutional on enumerate power grounds, which got worked around by negotiating and ratifying a treaty with Britain (which controlled Canada's foreign policy at the time) that contained the same provisions. SCOTUS upheld the treaty in Missouri v Holland in 1920, on the grounds that the treaty-making authority of the United States is separate from the legislative process. The ruling does say that treaties are still constraints by "prohibitory words" in the Constitution, so presumably the same trick couldn't be used to circumvent the Bill of Rights.
There was concern among anti-internationalist conservatives in the 1950s that the Missouri v Holland precedent would be extended in application to the United Nations treaty to allow the UN to preempt both statutory and constitutional provisions of American domestic policy, and an amendment was proposed (called the "Bricker Amendment" after its main backer, Senator John Bricker) to explicitly limit the treaty-making power. A weakened version of the amendment failed in the Senate by one vote in 1954, but I don't know how it would have fared in the House or in state ratification debates if it had passed the Senate.
Many Thanks!
>The ruling does say that treaties are still constraints by "prohibitory words" in the Constitution, so presumably the same trick couldn't be used to circumvent the Bill of Rights.
Well, at least that is somewhat reassuring...
( Perhaps in some alternate timeline with a legalistic version of Trump (pmurT?), the DOGE actions would be legitimated by a treaty with The Duchy of Grand Fenwick... )
The other reassuring bit is that treaties require a 2/3 majority in the Senate to ratify, so they're usually harder to pass than statutes. The reason Bricker and others were worried in the 50s was that the UN Treaty established a permanent quasi-legislative body that could pass resolutions that it was feared could be interpreted as being empowered by the treaty and superior to domestic law. The push for the amendment went away after the 1954 push because it became increasingly clear that the courts were consistently not treating UN resolutions this way.
Birthright citizenship for children of illegal or temporary immigrants creates a trilemma:
1. Non-citizens without an active visa or permanent residency should be deportable
2. Citizens should not be deportable
3. Minor children should not be separated from their parents
Pick at most two
1+3 is a non-starter, and both 1+2 & 2+3 incentivize illegal immigration in order to get US citizenship for children.
Eliminating birthright citizenship for those children dissolves the trilemma.
We dont seem to have a problem with imprisoning ppl with children who commit crimes. You can arrest someone who stays illegally (whether or not they entered illegally) without violating a new principle. So a policy of using prison to enforce immigration law to me solves the trilemna if deportable = can be arrested for refusing to leave.
Well, we could tell the parents in such a situation that _they_ get to choose between violating 2 or violating 3, between
- They leave, and take their child with them
or
- They pick someone in the USA to have custody of their child, and they leave without the child.
That's what I came up with, too. But I recently took a personality test and scored in the zeroth percentile in Compassion, so my intuitions about right and wrong are not widely shared.
Many Thanks!
I should say: I wrote my response on the assumption that _changing_ the Constitution is not under consideration for this particular sub-sub-thread, (and the amendment process takes a loooong time...). _Very_ long term, yeah, we should reconsider that clause, probably to restrict "anchor babies" in some way - but that will take decades...
Words "should" and "deportable" doing quite a lot of work in 1.
The policy of automatically deporting non-citizens without active visa or permanent residence leaves quite a lot of money on the table in terms of maximizing the good while minimizing the bad. It's perfectly possible to pick 2+3 AND ALSO disincentivize illegal immigration in smarter ways with fewer undesirable consequences than the "immediately toss such people out on their ears as soon as you find them." It's even possible to do this and leave the *possibility* of deportation on the table for cases where it *is* the best alternative: one just needs to set a higher standard than "being present in the country at all" for exercising it.
Once upon a time these sorts of approaches even appeared politically feasible in the U.S. Unfortunately there's now a reasonably large, extremely vocal contingent of U.S. voters who are dogmatically opposed to any policy that's less than maximally harsh on illegal immigration, which makes even having a reasonable discussion around the issue difficult.
N.B., "deportable" ≠ "deported"
If 2+3 are locked in with current birthright citizenship in effect, then that's effectively granting the parent of any child born in the US an implicit visa that is more durable than many (e.g., H-1B) that are explicitly granted to people who went through the formal process.
I expect you can see why that's not a stable equilibrium.
"N.B., "deportable" ≠ "deported""
I wasn't entirely sure, which is part of why I pointed it out. The thing is, if the necessary qualification is only "deportable" then I don't really see the problem. Citizens must be "arrestable" and "imprisonable" for law-enforcement reasons, even if they have children. It's an acceptable tradeoff because imprisonment is rare and often implies circumstances that would make them poor guardians. If deportation is not the *default* way to deal with undocumented immigrants, but is rather a recourse to be used at some level of extremity[1], it doesn't seem like a huge problem. Indeed, it seems like less of a problem, since the parent and child will still have the *option* of staying together[2], even if the state cannot force the child out.
"that's effectively granting the parent of any child born in the US an implicit visa that is more durable than many (e.g., H-1B) that are explicitly granted to people who went through the formal process."
A number of problems I see with this statement. First and least, it at least somewhat presupposes that the current formal processes are reasonable and should remain unchanged. Second and more importantly, an H1-B grants other privileges. If one regards allowing someone to remain in the country and not be violently removed by the state as the one-and-only function of a visa, a lot of immigration policy stops making sense. Third, explicit guarantees are pretty important: having a piece of paper that says "the U.S. government is legally required to treat you in manners X, Y and Z" is overall more stable situation than having a nebulous public-policy custom that "the U.S. government would generally prefer to treat you in manners X, Y and Z."
My overall view here is that while "exert control the amount and manner of immigration" is a reasonable goal for a state to have, it should not, in general, be in the habit of wrecking human lives without *very* good reason. "This person is a demonstrated menace to the community" is a pretty good reason. "Ten years ago, this person didn't respect our immigration restrictions (but has caused little or no trouble since)" seems like quite a bad reason. A sensible immigration policy can include barriers to entry, and positive and negative incentives to encourage the broad-scale behavior the state wants without out any need to go around wrecking lives. I don't think it's ever going to be politically possible for the U.S. to *have* a sensible immigration policy[3], but I don't see any reason to pretend that the current state of affairs is anything but atrocious.
[1] Which need not even be *as extreme* as those required to imprison somebody, as long as it's extreme enough to only apply to a relatively small fraction of the total.
[2] Of course this would partly depend on the parent's home country agreeing to take the child (who might not be a citizen), but that hardly seems like a huge hurdle in the grand scheme of things. And of course it doesn't *stop* being a problem if the child isn't a U.S. citizen either.
[3] I think Scott's conflict-theory post was rather well-timed to at least gesture at the reasons why not.
>"First and least, it at least somewhat presupposes that the current formal processes are reasonable and should remain unchanged."
Not at all! It merely posits that the juxtaposition of onerous formal processes and lax enforcement is incoherent; either easier formal processes or stricter enforcement are potential means to a more consistent whole.
>"Second and more importantly, an H1-B grants other privileges. If one regards allowing someone to remain in the country and not be violently removed by the state as the one-and-only function of a visa, a lot of immigration policy stops making sense."
Can you elaborate on this? I'm not sure what parts wouldn't make sense. N.B., there are other visa types that, e.g., do not include employment eligibility.
>""Ten years ago, this person didn't respect our immigration restrictions (but has caused little or no trouble since)" seems like quite a bad reason."
Pour encourager les autres. A visible policy of allowing illegal immigrants to remain if they stay off the radar long enough will encourage more people to try their luck.
I've always thought jus soli (assuming you continue to live in the country of your birth for the rest of your life) makes more sense than jus sanguinis. As an American, I can't imagine living my whole life in a country and not feeling like I'm "from" that country. Assimilation largely works quite well here. But I realize that it's partly because Americanness isn't tied to a particular ethnicity in the same way that Frenchness or Germanness is. Based on a couple of trips to France and England, and various readings about other European countries, it seems fair to say that assimilating immigrants is more of a struggle in Europe, with some portion of that difficulty due to religious differences.
In theory, there's a chance I might be able to obtain Italian citizenship through ancestry (I think it was my great-grandfather, and perhaps great-grandmother too, who were born in Italy). But I'm only 25% Italian. I don't speak any Italian aside from what I've learned on Duolingo. How could I ever be as Italian as I am American, even if I did obtain citizenship? Obviously there are many Americans with more recent familial ties, say a grandmother from Croatia, Honduras, etc. And those people may feel a bond for one or more of their ancestors' homelands. But they're Americans by birth and upbringing.
Constitutionally speaking, I think jus soli is here to stay (I think you could make an argument to read the 14th Amendment differently, I just don't think it's a great argument). If I could rewrite the Constitution and laws at my whim, I'd be fine with the following:
1. For children born in the US to illegal immigrants, no citizenship (they can leave and then try to immigrate like anyone else).
2. For children born in the US to people here legally but temporarily, legal residence as long as at least one parent is here legally. If they spend at least 15 years in the US before turning 18, they can become US citizens at age 18.
3. For children born in the US to people with green cards, legal residence as long as at least one parent is here legally. They can become citizens as soon as their parents become citizens, or as soon as they've spent at least 10 years in the US.
4. For children born in the US to US citizens, citizenship at birth.
5. For children born outside of the US to US citizens, legal residence whenever they want to move back; citizenship if they spend five years in the US.
> assimilating immigrants is more of a struggle in Europe, with some portion of that difficulty due to religious differences
But why wouldn't that be a problem in the US? The US is significantly more Christian than the UK.
The immigrants to America are largely Christian (or at least from a Christian background). Many of the immigrants to Europe are Muslim.
Mexican immigrants would probably do just great in Europe, especially if they moved to Spain.
I think the main debate is about point 1. where people who fully identify as American, and have little cultural or linguistic ties to their illegal immigrant parent's home country, are threatened with deportation.
A lot of places in the country are quite lax on illegal immigrants, so their children grow up their entire lives after being raised as Americans. You have a decent number of "American" children, raised in the American school system, with American friends, who may not even be fluent in their parent's language (probably Spanish), that are then threatened with deportation to a country they have few connections with. As far as "integratabtle immigrants" go, these should be the lowest hanging fruit.
Under your proposal, the number of these illegal American children would be much larger, as it would also encompass children born to illegal immigrants inside the US, and not just children who came as illegal immigrants before they can remember as it does currently.
I'm someone who definitely recognizes the fundamental problem of the current immigration system, especially the past few years, but I definitely do see good reason to carve out some exception for these illegal, but culturally American, children that you describe in point1. I don't know how you could create a system that identifies someone as being culturally American, but I honestly think the heuristic: "anyone who went through the public school system and has lived in the US since they were a toddler" should qualify.
Of course that's complicated when certain parts of the country make non-integration a possibility, like SF (or was it LA?) teaching students in Spanish instead of English. Of course this was for the goal of providing them a more conducive environment to succeed by using a language they were already familiar with, which completely backfired as not being a native English speaker is a huge handicap in America.
I want to reiterate that I'm just throwing out a hypothetical here. In practice, and with the 14th Amendment as we now have it, those American-born children are American citizens.
But there are a huge number of countries (i.e. pretty much all of Europe) where people born to legal or illegal immigrants aren't citizens. I don't know the exact laws for all of them off the top of my head; I think, generally speaking, there's a path to citizenship for the children of legal immigrants, even if they're not entitled to it at birth. But I think that most developed countries, at least on paper if not in practice, are much stricter in dealing with the children of illegal immigrants. And I don't think there's anything wrong with that.
But again, this is really just hypothetical, since I don't see a new constitutional amendment arriving anytime soon, nor do I see SCOTUS overturning Wong Kim Ark.
FWIW SCOTUS could uphold the EO without overturning Wong Kim Ark: his parents were (the contemporary equivalent of) permanent residents, to whose children the EO doesn't apply.
I suppose, but I don't think that's going to happen either.
One virtue of near-absolute jus soli citizenship is that it provides a bright-line rule against the hereditary continuation of a permanent non-citizen underclass. This is not a theoretical concern in the US: the 14th amendment was adopted with a specific intent to secure and entrench the elevation of former slaves and their descendants to meaningful citizenship status after a long and bloody civil war in which slavery was the central issue.
Agreed, and bright line rules are generally a good way of protecting the ppl from an oppressive govt
My challenge to those that complain of anchor babies: first deport every childless illegal immigrant and deny a tourist visa or visa exemption to every woman visibly pregnant, then if you still think the border is out of control make your case
Then all migrants would have children to stop themselves from being deported, and now the problem becomes even worse.
That option is currently available to them and yet.. doesnt seem to be the main impediment to deporting illegals, but thanks for playing
You could just do that by providing strict lifetime limits on how long a non-citizen can spend in the country, though.
Say, ten years cumulative, then you either gotta get citizenship or GTFO forever.
(a) Unless you put that limit into the Constitution, it will get edited and re-edited by successive Congresses having different political makeups. That's a recipe for ongoing chaos and endless re-arguing of the issue politically without it ever being resolved.
(b) In any case a 10-year immigrant residency limit doesn't actually answer the question at hand which is, whether _children_ born to resident non-citizens are citizens at birth. If we say that the answer is yes during the 10 years but no afterwards then see previous point. And even if the specific number sticks in the law we're back to Erica's point.
Use a point based algorithm, using a mix of measures seems inherently superior to using only one factor.
Mother tongue, place of birth, residence in early life, ancestry and parental citizenship all determine identity and should be used in determining citizenship.
> Mother tongue
This one jumped out at me as potentially problematic. If someone learns English better than your average American, do they get a bonus? Do immigrants from English-speaking countries get a bonus? What if someone is fluent in spoken English but dyslexic or otherwise illiterate?
>Is there some crisp, principled third way out there, or is it messy compromises all the way down?
In a country like the US, I don't think any simple principle can survive exploitation attempts.
What's the problem with jus sanguinis, as long as it's optional?
The US system is currently the worst of all possible systems -- jus soli plus compulsory jus sanguinis.
Suppose Robert was born in Canada but has a great-grandfather who was Japanese and emigrated to Canada. Robert was raised in Canada, speaks English fluently and observes Canadian customs and traditions. Under strict jus sanguinis, Robert is entitled to Japanese citizenship. This seems absurd to me, because he is not culturally Japanese at all. He is culturally Canadian. And Robert's nearest born-in-Japan ancestor is all of three generations away, so Robert probably never even met the man.
My eldest child is right now acquiring Italian citizenship via exactly that scenario. I met his Italian-immigrant great-grandfather (my first wife's paternal grandfather) but he'd died before my son's birth.
My brother is working on gaining Italian citizenship now too. Our maternal grandparents are both from a small town north of Turino near the Swiss border.
It’s interesting to see scans of his baptismal certificate at Vistrorio Italy and his entry sign in at Ellis Island.
Is that what jus sanguinis means? Well in that case yes, that's dumb.
I would work on the assumption that the sensible system is jus sanguinis, optional, and only for the parents. This is the standard in most parts of the world that I know about.
I think the crisp and principled way would be to sell citizenships to the highest bidder.
It's crisp, but is it sensible?
Now I want to see an sf novel about a country where everyone has to buy their citizenship, say, by age 30.
I'm thinking this might work in fantasy. You have a city that is run strictly by various trading guilds, with a firm No Moochers policy. In order to live in the city you have to obey the rules and pay your taxes; no exceptions, even for people born in the city. Our protagonists are a family whose business has run into trouble, and who therefore can no longer afford even the minimum taxes to stay in the city. They therefore have to head out into the surrounding countryside, The Wild and Free, which is considerably more chaotic and occasionally flat-out lawless. After no small adventures, considerable violence, one flat-out scam, lots of hard work and a couple of timely helping hands, they manage to settle down in a smaller but reasonably secure and functional community.
Why age 30? Just make parents pay for the kids until they come of age. Can't pay? Kid has to leave.
Because this works so well for the people making the rules, of course, every country is now like this, and so the poor form camps in the no-man's-land along country borders; effectively its own country, woven long and labyrinthine but a couple of hundred meters wide at most, outside the reach of any state; the pure anarchy, free of laws, fees or taxes, that libertarians always said they wanted.
I can imagine any number of near-future SF authors running with a plot like that.
I was thinking about making it so people had to pay with their own money rather than their parents', but there would be no way to guarantee that.
I assume the no man's lands would have government-like organizations.
Contraceptives in the tap water. If you want kids, pay 18 years' worth of citizenship fees up front to get an antidote.
cf. EB-5 visa + naturalisation after 5 years of residency.
Yes, many countries have those kinds of things for the wealthy, but I'd like to see it rolled out for everyone. I'd like to see a country get rid of all other systems for residency, visas and citizenship and replace those with simple fees, and while they're at it, they should scrap all other taxes and just have those fees pay for all public services.
What happens to the people who can't pay the flat tax?
The same thing that currently happens to people on a work-related residence permit who get fired or to people who are on a refugee-related one who lose their refugee status. Some countries kick them out while others let them stay as illegals, so I think that's pretty much orthogonal.
The residence permit thing works because those people are citizens of another country, which is forced to accept them when we want rid of them. But most poor people in the US were born in the US. Where are you proposing we ship them to?
Do you mean that everyone, immigrant and non-immigrant alike, would be subject to this fee-for-service system? And if yes, do non-immigrants who can't pay get exiled?
There are lots of other theoretical possibilities but none of them have widespread support.
There are ideas for multi-tiered citizenship where you acquire increased rights and access to services by years of residence, passing a test, performing national military or civil service, speaking the national language, etc. This framework can incorporate both jus sanguinis and jus soli as contributing toward the total score.
You could have a very un-republican system like an absolute monarchy where there is no citizenship at all and just subjects allowed to live in the territory.
You could have a minarchist system with no citizenship whatsoever as everyone is free to live where they want and purchase state services if indeed the state even exists.
An absolute monarch would surely demand the allegiance of all born in his realm. And see the Supreme Court 's Wong Kim Ark decision:
> It thus clearly appears that by the law of England for the last three centuries, beginning before the settlement of this country, and continuing to the present day, aliens, while residing in the dominions possessed by the Crown of England, were within the allegiance, the obedience, the faith or loyalty, the protection, the power, the jurisdiction, of the English Sovereign
Question about games and Bayes' theorem:
Does anybody know of any simple games (card, dice, whatever) where it is actually a good idea to use Bayes' theorem while playing? Like actually updating probabilities based on observations. I know that high level poker players use Bayesian reasoning, but this only makes sense if you already are very good at the basic probability calculations involved, and so is not really something new players should be doing.
Figgie
maybe check out the Problem of Points?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Problem_of_points
I think poker players usually use heuristics. Like, they're not actually calculating likelihood ratios, they're using the rule of 4 and 2 to calculate their outs. (Well, they do more-advanced modelling at the top level, but that's true of any competitive activity.)
Bridge players (and not just the experts) use Bayesian reasoning all the time, in the form of the Principle of Restricted Choice (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principle_of_restricted_choice). In its simplest form, you (South) have AJ10 of a suit in dummy (North), you play small towards the Jack, and East wins with the Queen (or King). Now after regaining the lead you play small towards dummy again -- what is the probability that East has the King (or Queen)? The a priori odds are 1/2 (as near as makes no difference here); but because East might have won the previous round with the other honour if they had started with both of them, the probability has now reduced to 1/3. So the probability that the second finesse will succeed is about 67%. This will often affect how you decide to play the hand; for instance, if you have to choose between taking the finesse a second time or hoping for a 4-3 break in a different suit. Other things being equal, you should take the finesse, because the probability of a 4-3 break is less than 67%; this is a decision directly affected by Bayesian reasoning.
black jack with a single deck of cards
Bayes' Theorem isn't useful in blackjack.
Seeing each card that is dealt allows you to update your probabilities about what the next card will be. But you don't do that via Bayes' Theorem, you just use your knowledge of the distribution of cards remaining in the deck.
I think you and op are confusing something about math. Raw theory is often slow, so it doesn't happen but striving for a universal theory makes your heuristics better.
You may as well claim that calculators dont implement abstract correct numbers and therefore dont use math
I'm not saying that in practice we use heuristics which approximate Bayes' Theorem.
I'm saying that even in theory, Bayes' Theorem is no use in blackjack which is about the problem of figuring out the probability of the next draw from a deck whose composition may be known perfectly. There's no sensible numbers to plug into Bayes' Theorem at any point, as far as I can tell.
I would consider doing the math with sets(i.e. the list of possible cards) to still be bayes theorem even if its not numbers; idk about people who teach this stuff or bayes actually wrote.
This is a programmers view of math tho `lerp(T a,T b,float p)=>a*p+b*(p-1)`, ints, floats, bools, vectors, colors, maybe even arrays; if it compiles it still a lerp; feel free to **not** ask a math major opinion on if quads can be lerped
Something about possible worlds being effected by observations, was it a multiply or a divide; a quick look up latter to the theory and I hope im iterating towards a program that has some kind of good behavior. Half remembered, + lazy skims of the math that I only understand for microseconds before writing code is still using that math; and bayes thoerm has pictures
I can see why someone who only knows about Bayes' Rule from reading "Rationalist" literature might think that all probability is Bayes' Rule, but it makes me sad.
I think you are both right, in the sense that keeping count of cards is a kind of probability math, but at the same time it is not bayes in the sense that any person with a perfect memory could do it, without ever having heard of Bayes or knowing anything else about statistics.
Here is Jorbs, a former MtG & Poker pro, and now one of the strongest Slay the Spire streamers, in a 1.5h video (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=76ugXvigqLE ) titled "How I Think About Strategy Games: Loose Bayesian Knowledge". I don't recall whether he ever advocates doing the calculations explicitly, but his approach is certainly very Bayesian.
Does card counting in blackjack count?
As I understand it, card counting is mainly about implementing quite tricky algorithms requiring a highly trained memory of what cards have been dealt.
I am more looking for a game that ordinary mathy people can get a real advantage in by using Bayes theorem, without them needing to train many hours in advance.
I don't believe this is correct. For the very simple cases where card counting first became popular (single-deck blackjack), the algorithm is perhaps too simple to be even called Bayesian: you increment and decrement a mental counter, depending on how many "high" versus "low" cards you've seen. Then, if you're deciding whether to get dealt a new card or settle on your current hand, you consult your internal counter to get a probabilistic feeling for whether that upcoming card will be high or low.
Obviously you can make this more and more complex, up to and including just memorizing all previously dealt cards and then calculating the mean value of the remaining cards in the deck for more precision. But from what I understand, the above is enough to turn single-deck blackjack from a game that slightly favors the dealer, to one that slightly favors the player.
Source: this is completely off of memory and you should double-check it before believing a word.
Perudo.
Thanks, yeah I also think that liar's dice/perudo is one of the closest games, though somehow even though I have played some versions of it a lot in my old student dormitory I also ended up using heuristics based more on my knowledge of the other players, and trying to read their faces, than explicit calculations. I guess that is also what makes it such an interesting game.
Wow, so Brown has a forecasting club... but is there anyone here in Ithaca? Any Cornell students or student organizations? We don't seem to have any Rationalist or adjacent clubs at the moment, but maybe I just haven't looked hard enough. I've met a few people who know who EY is, but that's about it. Where are all of you? If you don't want it on the thread please DM me... Thank you
Will there be a government shutdown on March 14? If not, how will it be prevented?
Even with me not knowing what news story your referencing; whatever happens will be complicated and shutdown is a marketing term. They do this every year, it costs more money then it saves to police tape up statues, but like ufos the public forgets it was hyped up about something because it didnt matter.
Theres a list of expectations(the military for example), and theirs always a bi partition argeement on allot of the spending
Scott:
you love covering charter cities, and now there is a chance to have one in an actual stable part of the world with a relatively good governance, Canada:
https://www.pm.gc.ca/en/news/news-releases/2025/02/17/haida-nation-and-canada-announce-first-its-kind-agreement-recognizing
Basically the Haida nation gets to manage all of the Haida Gwaii (formerly Queen Charlotte's) island in the North Pacific just off the coast of British Columbia and south of South-Western Alaska: https://www.google.com/maps/place/Haida+Gwaii
I wonder if someone looking for a place for a charter city would want to have a chat with the new management.
Here is one example of how tribal leaders can skip long drawn-out permitting and assessment processes and Just Do Things:
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/sen-%C3%A1%E1%B8%B5w-sneak-preview-1.7451499
This is in the heart of Vancouver, but the city has no power to put up its usual roadblocks, so the high-rises are going up.
Haida Gwaii is one of the most beautiful places on earth. It's also an extremely remote and very harsh place to live. It has a tiny population, who mostly work in ecotourism, for good reason.
A charter city built on ecotourism is a neat idea though.
Yeah, seems like a no-brainer to try, compared to other places where charter cities have been attempted.
Just had a weird thought. Say you're an eccentric almost-trillionare, richest person in history. You have a boyhood dream you cannot shake: get to Mars. As much as you've accomplished, this goal still eludes you. You come to the conclusion that only a nation-state -- one of the big ones -- can accomplish this.
Wouldn't co-opting a superpower nation-state be your next move?
If someone were to co-opt a superpower nation-state for the purpose of going to Mars, I would expect them to,
1: Try to take particular control of that nation-state's space program, and
2: Try to secure the repeal of laws saying that his private space program cannot launch anything until all the relevant bureaucrats have signed off on it.
I would expect them to very much *not*,
3: Broadly damage the state capacity of said nation-state, or
4: Prior to accomplishing #2, fire half and piss off the other half of the bureaucrats whose approval he still needs to launch anything in his private space ventures.
Elon Musk's observed actions the past month or so seem very inconsistent with the hypothetical goal of "get to Mars by taking control of the US government". I suppose we can add to that hypothesis, "...and then engage in some hyperspatial N-dimensional chess that looks to mere geniuses like exactly the opposite of what would get him to Mars, but which in fact by infinte cleverness does exactly that".
But Occam suggests the alternate hypothesis of "somewhere along the line, Elon's brain state bit-flipped from getting-to-Mars-ASAP to destroying-the-Woke-mind-virus-by-any-means-necessary".
While Elon has taken to lying on Twitter all day as a new past time, I think his ascension into right wing politics is something you can take his word for. One of his kids is trans and he thinks the left poisoned her brain, per his podcast appearance with Jorden Peterson, and now he hates wokeness. Given that all his IVF kids are male, I wouldn't be shocked if he is also mad about having a daughter just on principle.
> Given that all his IVF kids are male
Huh, I didn't know that. No wonder he's this angry about losing a "son".
It's not enough to simply repeal the laws now, because the opposition would simply reverse that decision in the future. The only way he accomplishes anything meaningful is by eliminating all opposition and preventing the rise of future opposition. That is, of course, what he's trying to do.
I do not think you understand the opposition Elon Musk faces.
As far as redirecting the power of the United States of America towards a Von Braunian project of Mars Colonization, the United States *Congress*, which neither Elon Musk nor Donald Trump controls, is very much opposed to the sort of spending that would require. And Congress controls the budget.
In the unlikely event that Congress does cough up an expanded budget for the space program, they're going to insist that it go through NASA because NASA knows how to funnel that money into the right congressional districts. NASA, is one of the executive branch agencies Elon Musk has been pissing off by firing or threatening to fire all their employees.
As far as Elon's private space program, that sane Congress (again beyond Trump/Muskian control) is very much opposed to completely unregulated private space flight, on account of the propensity of careless rocketeers to occasionally blow up small towns. To that end, Congress has passed laws saying that nobody is allowed to launch rockets into space unless the FAA has signed off on their safety plans. That law is not going to change.
Congress passed that law with the intent that it be only a minor speed bump to prevent insanely reckless behavior on the path to private space development. But it does require the FAA's cooperation; the default case if the FAA ceases operations is not "the bureaucrats have gone away, yay, now anybody can launch spaceships whenever they want!", it is "Oops, now it's illegal for anyone to launch a spaceship, ever". And, again, Musk has been acting in a way calculated to both cripple and piss off the organization which will determine whether launch licensing requirements are a speed bump or a roadblock (with the default being roadblock).
Does Elon Musk have a plan to eliminate *Congress*? Because I think a lot of us would like to know more about that.
> Does Elon Musk have a plan to eliminate *Congress*? Because I think a lot of us would like to know more about that.
Obviously he's not going to just tell you. But he's not going through all this trouble just to keep the government as-is. He's shooting for the moon, so to speak. (Fitting, given the name of his department.)
Pretty much. You independently came to the same take as Elon's biographer Walter Isaacson (as summarised by 'Tim', a commenter on Noah Smith's recent post https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/only-fools-think-elon-is-incompetent/comment/95561443):
> I can say whatever I want about Musk, but this is his primary driver ==>The man wants to go to Mars. Everything he does revolves around this. The government was an impediment to his goals. Tesla is a side gig. So, too, is Starlink.
> His political transformation isn't typical age-drawn conservativism. He sees government as an instrumental tool to achieve his goals. People lose sight of the fact that he is focused on DOGE right now, but he will be largely done in two years and entirely done once he understands the mid-terms, depending on how the resistance to his chainsaw plays in the court, in the midterms and the streets. He will recalibrate. He does not fear being wrong or failure. That is his (and that of science and technology) greatest method for innovation and success. He also has incredible focus.
> Musk says stupid things for different reasons, sometimes to try them out. Your post is on point. His value is Mars.
Was Twitter an impediment to his goal of going to Mars? What about the opportunity cost of spending 43B USD on a social network, which could instead have been used to fund, I don't know, maybe the development, construction, and transport of a Mars colony?
His purchase of Twitter ended up benefiting him hugely. For Musk, money is literally irrelevant, other than as a way to get people to do what he wants. I don't think he'd be the "King of Doge" if he hadn't taken over Twitter and bent the discourse to his will.
And no, this guy is not stupid. Don't be stupid and underestimate him. I do think he's a bit loony, but I guess that comes with the package.
> For Musk, money is literally irrelevant, other than as a way to get people to do what he wants.
Evidently wrong. Even for Musk, tens of billions of USD is far from "irrelevant". If it was, SpaceX wouldn't need external investments (which amounted to several billion USD in the last 4 years alone), and external investors are always a hassle and a distraction from your core goals. SpaceX also wouldn't have required the revenue stream from Starlink, again a distraction from Musk's goal of building a self-sustaining colony on Mars.
Elon is a reprehensible human being.
I still think he'll get to Mars, barring something like an early death from drug overdose or something. Multiple huge missteps and failures that would probably sink most entrepreneurs (including the $43bn acquisition and all the brouhaha around it) have barely slowed him down it seems, as has (to quote Noah Smith) "the entire apparatus of American proceduralism and anti-development policy being against what he was trying to do".
> I still think he'll get to Mars
I hope he does, to be honest. I share his dream of making us a space-faring civilization, and I used to admire him for his ambition and goals.
No reason why you shouldn't still admire him. What he's doing right now is certainly more productive than complaining about woke people on obscure internet blogs.
I think the irony there is that he was trolling about buying Twitter, everybody lost their minds, he then attempted to back out, everyone decided to force him to go through with it on the basis (so far as I could see) that they hoped this would bankrupt him and destroy him.
He bought it, set about root and branch reform, and now everybody is still losing their lives over fascism and hate speech and what all. If they'd let him back off on buying Twitter, they'd still have their Blue Check paradise. They didn't, he did, he wasn't destroyed, so now like it or lump it.
> with it on the basis (so far as I could see) that they hoped this would bankrupt him and destroy him.
Nonsense, they forced him to go through with it because he massively overbid on the value of twitter and letting it go would be financially irresponsible
Well, yeah, Musk did and does a lot of trolling on social media, which is another counterexample to the claim that "Everything he does revolves around this" – unless someone can explain to me, how shitposting on Twitter will make human life multiplanetary even one minute sooner.
UNLESS – bear with me, I just had a fantastic insight – unless he's doing his best to make life on Earth stink so much that people will BEG to move to Mars, just to get away from X.
There's an argument that legacy media and social media behemoths having a stranglehold on communication to the public would have gotten in the way of Musk's eventual goals.
Maybe, especially if that nation-state seems hell-bent on slowing down your plans for BS reasons just to spite you.
It would have to be a superpower with a profoundly stupid and easily manipulated leader.
The only weird thing here is you thinking this thought is weird. What alternative, less weird accounts are available?
Well yeah, no shit. This is just instrumental convergence at work. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Instrumental_convergence
Welcome again to Hollywood. Your previous efforts have drawn the eye of management, and you bask in the light of their benevolent gaze. They have rewarded you with Aeron chairs that they purchased at the liquidation sale of an AI startup that wanted to improve human flourishing or something something. Anyway, your butts are now floating on clouds.
Your assignment this week is to devise a comedy set in the the Star Wars universe. And it shouldn't be incidentally Star Wars themed either. It should include key features of the universe, like the Jedi and the Empire. Management wants to market this one worldwide, so the humor should be pretty broad. Ideally everyone from French intellectuals to Brazilian street kids will laugh their asses off at the antics on screen.
I'd just ask Adult Swim what to make int feature-length. They already have a lot of comedy set well in Star Wars.
I’d like to see a comedy about Max Reebo, the sad blue elephant leader of the band in the famous cantina scene.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U_hRXPJUmEY
Isn't that exactly what Spaceballs was?
Darth Vader hit in the crotch with a light saber.
Squash Vader, kick him in the crotch!
Squash Vader, kick him in the crotch!
Squash Vader, kick him in the crotch!
Kick Darth Vader in the crotch!
May the Schwartz be with you...
Remake "Yes, Minister" set in the late days of the Old Republic. Maybe even reuse Senator Palpatine for the Jim Hacker role, although that would require substantial reinterpretation of the character.
Palpatine would definitely be Sir Humphrey there, not Jim Hacker. But as Malcolm Tucker in "The Thick of It" with less swearing and more veneer of niceness while he's backstabbing? Yes, I could see that.
Or Francis Urquhart in the original British "House of Cards".
This idea I like. I don't think the Palpatine version works though (Hacker is often stupid and easily manipulated, Palpatine is not). Maybe Chancellor Velorum or whatever his name was.
I think Hacker deserves a little more credit than he's often given for intelligence. He seems stupider than he actually is because Humphrey and Bernard, especially Humphrey, are exceptionally smart, well-educated, and quick on their feet. And Hacker is often successfully manipulated. But there are indications that he is often harder to manipulate than many of his peers, and he seems to get the better of Humphrey about a third of the time. In terms of understanding complex concepts, he's got a lot of gaps in his knowledge but is usually a pretty quick study. And educationally, he graduated with third-class honors (i.e. slightly below the middle of his class) from a very prestigious and selective university. For a long time, I misunderstood some bits where Humphrey (an Oxford alum) was rolling his eyes at Hacker for being a London School of Economic graduates and only semi-recently found out that this was a joke about snobbery among Oxford and Cambridge graduates; the American equivalent would be someone who went to Harvard or Yale scoffing at someone who went to Stanford.
But to your core point, you are correct that Hacker isn't anywhere near as dominant in cleverness and manipulation as Palpatine has always appeared to be. Velorum would be better from a storytelling perspective, although since I've been cast as a hack writer I am tempted to use the bigger-name character and let lore consistency fall by the wayside, as this seems to be the spirit of the age.
Yeah, the Velorum YPM is probably the best approach here. He's led to ignore the trade federation blockade of Naboo by the foreign office like Hacker was with st George's island.
Also worth noting by the end of Yes Prime Minister, Hacker gets his way most of the time!
That's because he's smart enough to listen to Dorothy Wainwright.
Just hire the people who made "TROOPS".
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UmtCcI5440Y
Glad to see this in thread. I was about to post it.
I am reflexively cringing already and I haven't even gotten past "Ewoks have to be in this somewhere".
I've seen the Holiday Special, I remember Chewie's kid Itchy (oh how we laughed - not). A proposal for a Star Wars comedy should be quietly buried in a very deep grave.
...Lucasfilms literally already tried this. It was so bad that the 39 episodes that were produced were buried away before they even aired.
https://youtu.be/oMVrMP8us6Q?si=b5szdk67i-_SpIQq
Looks like they leaned a bit too hard on the Wacky button. Star Trek has had some successful parody efforts. Maybe steal a page or two from them.
Imagine, hypothetically, having Ukraine join the US as the 51st state. Most Ukrainians including Zelenskyy would jump on the chance. Trump gets his mineral rights. Europe gets the full might of the US military to protect them against Russian expansion plans. Putin would be mightily pissed off, but probably not to the nuke level. China might make a play for Taiwan, but better now than in 5-10 years, since they are not really ready.
Struggling to see the downsides.
It's hard to know where to even begin with that one...
SURELY Putin will be OK with US military bases this close to Moscow. I mean what reasonable man can be against nuclear-tipped missiles being deployed closer and closer to his country borders.
There are already US military forces in the Baltic States, closer to Moscow than any place in Ukraine. And one of the obvious consequences of the invasion of Ukraine was that Finland joined NATO, which gives three nuclear powers access to territory all of forty miles from St. Petersburg. Russia's actions are not consistent with "OMG NATO is too close to our great cities!" being a major concern.
You should consider replying to a specific post instead of your fantasies. Not nato, USA. Not great cities, Moscow. Not just “military”, nuclear missiles.
Also until you can show me the point in Baltic states that is closer to Moscow than any place in Ukraine there is no point in continuing this discussion since you’re obviously not even trying.
Not closer, but Latvia is only about 150km further away from Moscow than Ukraine is, which is a miniscule difference for ICBMs. But there are no nuclear missiles in Latvia, nor in the Baltics, not even in Poland or anything closer to Moscow than Germany is, so why should Putin have feared the deployment of nukes to Ukraine?
Because we were discussing a hypothetical in which Ukraine becomes a 51st state in which case the nukes will eventually follow
Most of the 50 current states don't host any nuclear weapons. The United States *could* deploy nuclear weapons to e.g. Oregon, but it could also deploy nuclear weapons to e.g. Latvia if it feels the need. I don't think the Latvians would object at this point.
There are no nuclear missiles in Ukraine, so what is even your point?
Ukraine has been fighting wars for its sovereignty for 11 years (counting its war to retain the Donbas). I am skeptical they would cede it, especially to a maniac like Trump who has been insulting and extorting them since he came to power.
You can be way more than skeptical, it would never be something the country would want.
They wouldn't cede it. We'd have to invade. Maybe coordinate with Putin.
The argument goes - Ukraine has no hope of sovereignty without the US: if the US withdraws its support, Russia wins the war. The US fully intends to withdraw its support, and therefore half of Ukraine should be ceded to the US because this is preferable than all of it going to Russia.
Ukraine would still have the same hope that Afghanistan did, that after a protracted guerilla was Vladimir Putin's successor (who is not as invested in or tied to the war) will say "good riddance" and go home.
They will also have the faint hope that the Russian army is close enough to collapse that they can hold out with just European support. I am quite skeptical about that, but it depends heavily on intangible and immeasurable factors so it is the kind of thing that proud, desperate, and mortally-offended people might grasp at.
"probably not to the nuke level", um. Well.
The statement "struggling to see the downsides" requires saying more there.
What, expressed as odds, is your working definition of "probably"? And what, specifically, is your assumption of "nuke" -- tactical? Strategic?
>"probably not to the nuke level", um. Well.
Seconded! That was my immediate thought as well. Walking directly into an ongoing hot war with the only nation with even more warheads than we have... Umm...
Based on my years of experience with EU3, this is a terrible idea. Ukraine is non-core for the USA, culture and religion don't match, and it's all distant overseas territory.
A state with 1/7th the GDP per capita of Puerto Rico? I'll pass.
That would probably go up under American rule.
>Most Ukrainians including Zelenskyy would jump on the chance.
Would they? Is this not a war for their right to remain a sovereing nation?
Yes, but more importantly to NOT be a part of Russia and be genocided
...At this point, I think they would have the same reaction to the US as well.
...I mean, they wouldn't get genocided; just shipped to a camp in Rwanda, because they weren't born in the US and so couldn't be allowed to exist in the new 51st state any more.
You are remarkably confident that the United States would never commit a genocide. I'm not so sure.
>Most Ukrainians including Zelenskyy would jump on the chance.
That is quite the assertion.
He's rightly guessing that most ukrainians are open to immigrating to the United states, but wrongly extrapolating from that that they would be fine with annexation. One thing does not imply the other.
>He's rightly guessing that most ukrainians are open to immigrating to the United states
Where does he guess that? Not that I'd disagree with it, but he doesn't say that.
He doesn't specifically say that. I'm extrapolating, possibly steelmanning.
One possible downside: Joining a state that is currently at war with Russia will mean that the US will immediatly switch to being at war with Russia, potentially escalating into nuclear war within a few hours, despite the best intentions of both leaders.
But apart from civilization ending Nuclear war, possibly no downsides.
As long as Russia proper is not being attacked or threatened, there is basically no chance of a nuclear escalation.
What is "Russia proper"? It's a serious question, this is a state that appears not to have a fully defined border. Not in a sense of having a border dispute like it has with Japan, but in a more profound way of not quite knowing, itself, what its borders are. It created this insanity by officially annexing and including in its Constitution the four Ukrainian regions they don't even fully control militarily. So, amazingly, the city of Kherson is "Russian", according to the Russian Constitution, and yet Russians regularly bomb its civilian population. Then there's the parts of Kursk region occupied by Ukraine, and it seems to be treated differently, at least rhetorically, from the parts of Kherson region, also "occupied" by Ukraine.
Like I said, no defined border. And once you give up on having a defined border, anything is possible and nothing is true anymore.
I'm morbidly curious: What does Russia's Constitution say about the Baltics?
Courtesy of ChatGPT:
The Baltic countries—Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania—are not directly mentioned in the Russian Constitution. However, there are historical references and context in Russian legal and political frameworks regarding these nations due to the Soviet era.
Soviet Legacy: The Baltic states were part of the Soviet Union until its dissolution in 1991. During this time, they were considered Soviet republics, and any constitutional or legal documents related to the USSR would have included them. After the collapse of the USSR, the Russian Federation's constitution (adopted in 1993) did not specifically mention the Baltic states, as they were recognized as independent countries by the international community.
Territorial Claims and Disputes: Although not directly mentioned in the Constitution, Russian officials have occasionally made statements about territorial claims or historical discussions concerning the Baltic countries. These statements may arise from disputes over borders or from political rhetoric, but they are not part of the official constitutional text.
International Recognition: The Russian Federation, following the collapse of the Soviet Union, recognizes the independence of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania in accordance with international law. The Russian Constitution affirms the principle of respecting territorial integrity and the sovereignty of other states, including the Baltic nations.
In short, while the Baltic countries are not mentioned in the Russian Constitution, their historical and political relationship with Russia is influenced by the legacy of the Soviet Union.
Many Thanks!
>The Russian Constitution affirms the principle of respecting territorial integrity
( giggles nervously... )
"Russia proper", according to Russia, includes Crimea and Donbass.
But Russia proper IS being attacked and partially occupied by Ukraine and, under your idea, by the US. In any case, Russian nuclear threats in the Ukraine war predate even that occupation; they were raised during the first major Ukrainian counter-offensive inside Ukraine. China saw it necessary to publicly veto Russian use of nukes, and reportedly the Biden admin also made non-public threats to intervene directly on behalf of Ukraine in case of nuclear weapons use.
I mean, we could just split it 50/50. What could go wrong?
I have a better idea. Ukraine joins USA, USA rents Ukraine to Russia for 99 years for % of all revenues earned from this territory (basically, a tax). Every person born on territory of Ukraine automatically receives American and Russian citizenship. The territory should be governed by an agreed-upon mix of Russian and American laws.
* Ukraine becomes (a formal part of) NATO country.
* Russia gets the whole Ukraine (in 99 years sentient AI will probably kill us all and so the time limit doesn't matter)
* USA gains a new revenue source (admittedly, probably a small one, but still better than nothing)
* Ukrainian population booms as people rush to become its citizen to get that sweet dual citizenship for their children (note that only children get citizenship, not immigrants themselves)
* Ukraine gets both Russian and American investments, as both countries are now interested in developing its industries.
I think about mailing this plan to Trump's office. I think he'll like it. It isn't any more crazier than his Gaza plan.
Given what's been happening in Ukraine, in Russia and in the US, how are any of the parties to this proposal supposed to trust any of the other parties to keep to the agreed-upon terms for any length of time?
But this is a question for any kind of peace deal, isn't it? For example, what guarantees Russia have that Ukraine won't ever join NATO, even if it promises not to do so now? Even Constitution can be changed, so writing this down in Ukraine's Constitution won't be very safe, too. The only kind of real guarantee is presence of Russian troops in Ukrainian territory. This can came about through absolute surrender of Ukraine in case of military defeat, or as a result of this completely brilliant peace plan.
Of course, Ukraine has no guarantee that Russia would let it join USA in 99 years, but this is really far off, and it actually would be more of America's problem than Ukraine's. If in 99 years America is stronger than Russia (and both countries still exist in recognizable form, of course), then American probably can enforce that agreement (China got Hong Kong from Britain, in the end, although at the time of writing THAT agreement, it probably seemed to many that Britain could cheat China too!).
Of course, USA has no guarantee that Russia will honestly pay its percentage of profits. But this is exactly the case where usual commercial arbitration can be enough: it would be pretty easy to make it easier for Russia to pay than to
fact another round of asset seizures (if the % is not TOO large, of course).
Mind you, I still think my Trump's Peace Plan for Ukraine(tm) is batshit insane. But at least it's novel and interesting, compared to what the boring officials offer! Just today, I saw yet another article urging Trump just to stay the course and continue with Biden's policies, hoping for freezing the battle lines and providing some kind of security guarantees to Ukraine, which are unacceptable for Russia. This is even more unrealistic than my plan, and will just lead to more bloodshed now, and probably in the future, too. And boring.
> But this is a question for any kind of peace deal, isn't it?
You establish trust in many ways, but a key one is a long history of not going back on your past commitments and not backstabbing allies. Putin and Trump have both thrown that out of the window.
...That seems unnecessarily complicated and unlikely to work compared to just conquering the country and splitting it. Also, NATO is no longer a relevant consideration.
Alternativey, Russia can get the entirety of Ukraine in exchange for them aiding the US invasion of Canada. Both countries get to increase their power over their spheres of influence. Win-win.
Conquering a country is a long and hard business, longer and harder than it already is. And I don't quite believe the hype about NATO uselessness. It hasn't been proved. Anyway, NATO membership would act as a consolation prize for Ukraine in this case.
> Alternativey, Russia can get the entirety of Ukraine in exchange for them
> aiding the US invasion of Canada. Both countries get to increase their power
> over their spheres of influence. Win-win.
Oh, another nice idea! But I'm afraid it's more crazy than mine, because Russia lacks capacity for amphibious assault, which is required to reach Canada, and has no large fleet to support Atlantic blockade. At this distance, Russia's only reach are nukes, but I'm not sure Trump wants to LARP Fallout: Ontario.
They could come from the North, through the Arctic. I hear Russia's icebreakers are good.
I remain unconvinced that haf a country, halfway around the globe, populated by motivated war veterans who hate your guts and want you out is really the prize Trump thinks it is.
Given the recent MUH posts, I'm curious where people here would draw the line on a series of questions I sometimes ask people during work lunch debates.
It starts with my own assumptions that:
a) Consciousness is a meaningful concept. I may not know how it works, or how to measure it, but I know it exists from first hand experience.
b) Materialism: whatever consciousness is, it arises in the brain from laws-of-physics obeying matter.
Assuming you agree with these, or close enough:
1. Is it possible to build a computer that simulates the brain (and as much as the environment as needed) to arbitrary accuracy? Is this simulation conscious? If not, why not? If so...
2. We can imagine a specific implementation of that computer: a giant bank of memory stores the brain/environment state, plus a much smaller processor and program that update the state according to the laws of physics. Is this simulation conscious? If not, why not? If so..
3. The "physics program" does not appear to be doing much here - it seems that all the relevant brain information is stored in the memory. So, could we just pre-compute the brain states, save them to an even larger memory bank, and then use an even smaller program to "play back" the brain? Is this simulation conscious? If not, why not? If so...
4. It now hardly seems necessary to "play back" the brain state - is the memory bank storing the brain state sequence itself conscious? If not, why not? If so...
It would seem Tegmark bites the bullet all the way past 4, perhaps as far as saying all possible conscious entities exist in the digits of pi.
PS You seem to have very lively work lunch discussions, I am jaleous!
Whatever consciousness is, it seems obvious that it's a dynamic quantity. Snapshotting a particular brain state would therefore not be conscious in the same way that a picture of a falling object would not be falling.
I think a perfectly faithful simulation of a brain would clearly be conscious under the assumptions of materialism.
> 1. Is it possible to build a computer that simulates the brain (and as much as the environment as needed) to arbitrary accuracy? Is this simulation conscious? If not, why not? [...]
I have to dissect "simulate" first, sorry.
If you mean, is it possible to build a computer that can do what the brain does, including being conscious of something, while not being constructed fully like a brain, then I say, sure.
But if you only mean, build a computer that tracks or calculates certain properties of certain parts of the brain over a course of time, then I say, it will not be conscious of anything.
I can run a continuous stream of text, dynamically generated, even calculated according to some laws of physics, over a screen describing very realistically some weather, but that's not weather.
I think the information processing that happens in our brain is not what makes us conscious. Instead I think all that juggling of electrically charged things in special ways is what makes us concious.
I'm sure a computer like ours today will never be conscious, no matter what program it's running, because what happens in it is so very, very, very different from what happens in the things we know are conscious, us. Or at least me, in my case. The things in computers move totally different then in brains.
That is exactly my feeling, but much more clearly explained than I could have put it.
The idea that consciousness is defined by the functional roles of mental states rather than by their physical makeup (aka functionalism) seems plausible to me. However, even if functionalism is true, I do not think that it implies that consciousness can be simulated on a computer. This is because it seems to me that at least some of the important 'functions' of a brain are physical ones, like the juggling of electric charges that you mention. And I do not think that those can be meaningfully simulated.
In fact, the idea that it is possible to simulate them is, in my opinion, a type of "map and territory" confusion: i.e., yes, some characteristics of a territory can be represented (simulated) on a map, but as we all know, even the most accurate, detailed map is not the territory. Similarly, even a highly detailed simulation might capture some aspects of neural processing without truly replicating the physical phenomena that give rise to consciousness.
Oh yes, that map-territory distinction.
That's why I can hardly believe that anyone believes a simulated person would be conscious. Or believes in mind-upload.
If they would just believe that the computer running a simulation, of whatever, might be conscious. That might be, _if_ built right.
But the simulation is indeed only a kind of map, implemented in something that's extremely different from what is simulated.
assumption b) is unsupported
at least because 1) we know it arises in more than just the brain (see studies on how gut microbiome affects mood), and 2) it's SO WEIRD that it may not be "material" in the way we typically assume, or not material at all.
I think b) is heavily supported, even if it's not (yet) conclusively proven. I have very little doubt that it eventually will be.
information might be necessary, but I doubt it's sufficient. information is all around us. It's hard to base a theory of consciousness purely on information without going full pan-psychism.
>1. Is it possible to build a computer that simulates the brain (and as much as the environment as needed) to arbitrary accuracy? Is this simulation conscious? If not, why not? If so...
An important part of most people’s experience is that it is valenced — I lot of what we see and hear and know pleases or displeases us. I think for something to count as what we call conscious, the entity has to have skin in the game — has to want and dread things, and thus have valenced percepts, memory, rumenations, etc. The reason we have hopes and fears, goals and dreads, is that we are biological systems, complexly wired to survive and produce offspring. Most of the valencing that goes on has to do with how current experience weighs in the direction of what we’re wired to seek and to avoid.
So when you talk about including as much of the environment as needed, consider the body, which is in some ways part of the experiencing self, but in other ways part of the environment. If a blow from the environment breaks my leg, that is an injury to the self, as self, but in another way it’s an event in the brain’s environment. The injury informs the brain of the damage via sensations, but also makes adrenalin and no doubt other stuff that affects how the brain functions. You think in a different way after an injury like that not only because the injury causes pain and constitutes a negative development in achieving goals, but also because the injured body chemically alters the brain via hormones, etc. And the same can be said of many, maybe most life events. If I yearn for coffee in the morning I drink some, and the caffeine alters the brain. Etc.
Because of that I do not think it makes sense to talk about brains separate from bodies being able to embody consciousness.
"An important part of most people’s experience is that it is valenced — I lot of what we see and hear and know pleases or displeases us. I think for something to count as what we call conscious, the entity has to have skin in the game — has to want and dread things, and thus have valenced percepts, memory, rumenations, etc."
This is the part that has always been the most mysterious for me, valence. From an evolutionary point of view, experiencing pain, pleasure, or shame makes perfect sense and is highly effective at helping us navigate the myriad decisions of life. But how on earth can a a bunch of interconnected cells generate these experiences?
> has to want and dread things, and thus have valenced percepts, memory, rumenations, etc.
Wait, why do you need memory and ruminations? I don't see any reason memory and intelligence would be required for valence and consciousness. Not understanding the past or future doesn't make the present any less real.
Well, ok, but even if an animal or machine only experience life in the present my main point applies.
Yep, I bite all these bullets, and have receipts: https://blog.domenic.me/mathematical-consciousness/
At 1.
I agree with a) and b). But as you state we don't really know what consciousness is or how it arises. So the answer to "Is the simulation conscious?" is we just don't know, and currently have no way of knowing.
> The "physics program" does not appear to be doing much here - it seems that all the relevant brain information is stored in the memory.
When a person is in a dreamless sleep all the relevant information is also stored in the memory. And yet we are not calling such person conscious. Seems that this "physics program" is quite important.
> So, could we just pre-compute the brain states, save them to an even larger memory bank, and then use an even smaller program to "play back" the brain? Is this simulation conscious? If not, why not?
The program that would be pre-computing the brain state is conscious. The program that just plays it back is not. Just like a computer game that you are playing has gameplay, but a recording of it - doesn't.
I agree that being conscious of something is, like being alive, something that happens. If things weren't changing, none of them would be conscious.
>When a person is in a dreamless sleep all the relevant information is also stored in the memory. And yet we are not calling such person conscious. Seems that this "physics program" is quite important.
That is a good point - But, all we really know is that that person has no memory of being conscious during sleep. He might well have been conscious, but have no memory of that in the morning, or there might well be several conscious parts within a brain.
Yes, but if I understand you correctly you didn't remark that to weaken Ape in the coat's point, right?
You do think, in a human's brain or robot's computer there has to happen something for the human or robot to be conscious.
> That is a good point - But, all we really know is that that person has no memory of being conscious during sleep.
Have you ever went under anesthesia? It doesn't feel like you can't remember what happened over the past few hours. It feels as if nothing happened at all. There's not even a sense of time passing.
Anesthesia doesn't help clear up the question of sleep because it is markedly different: people have a sense of time having passed when they wake up, and dream, and have confusing experiences where parts of your brain are off.
Let's take a person who has just died from other causes than damage to the brain. For some time their brain will still hold all the relevant information. And yet the person is not conscious.
> who has just died from other causes than damage to the brain
...you're going to have to define "died" there; cessation of brain activity is part of the definition I am aware of, and a brain in that state can no longer be said to "hold all the relevant information". We know, meanwhile, that e.g. people stay conscious for many seconds following a beheading, so however you define death, it can't be quite as simple here as extreme damage to parts of the body other than the brain.
How do you know they're not conscious? It's not like we have a way of testing for it.
They do not behave the way a central example of a conscious person would behave, so theories that assume that they are conscious anyway get a complexity penalty.
I definitely get the pull of this line of thinking, but I start to get uneasy already in point 1. As Emma_B notes below, I already think there's a difference between simulating an apple in a gravitational field, and an actual apple.
I can think of a few ways to try cash out this distinction, none of which I feel like I deeply understand, but for the most part I think the distinction has to do with the way both an apple and a stimulated apple arise from physics-obeying matter: the actual apple seems written in the "machine code" of the universe, whatever that might be, in a way the stimulated apple isn't.
I also think there's something maybe with the interaction with the environment: to stimulate an apple down to the level of machine code would require simulating all the quantum fields it's composed of, and couples with... But as those fields permeate the universe and couple with everything else, the "environment needed" to simulate a "real" apple feels like it might have to be the whole universe? Or past/future light cone, or whatever?
So for consciousness, I incline to the view that the details of how the computation in physics-obeying matter is actually implemented, and that whatever the relevant notion is might not find the physics module irrelevant, or might insist on an implementation that doesn't split into a memory for states and a physics program for updating, or some other constraint that invalidates one of the steps you outline.
I think this point of view is already a bit un-Tegmarkian in that it privileges certain computations carried out in "the natural programming language of the universe", so I think part of the disconnect here might be happening at a deeper level; that if you buy even step 1 you're already basically a Tegmarkian anyway. But to me, I find the whole Tegmark view weird and unintuitive precisely because I already reject (maybe this is too strong, but I at least find it very unnatural and unconvincing) the idea that all "mathematical objects" are on an equal footing when it comes to existence: I think the universe is prior; what exists is *the universe* whatever it *is* (imagine me gesturing wildly around me, to indicate and encompass everything).
I don't deny that there are paradoxes or unresolved issues with my view (it certainly feels like some abstract mathematical concepts have an independent reality; I don't actually know _what_ the universe is, or what makes _it_ the thing that *is* and not something else) but I don't find alternative views actually make me feel like I understand those issues any better anyway, so my pull towards them is limited, if not non-zero.
+1
Haha I was about to say the same for your response!
I think especially your "I think the information processing that happens in our brain is not what makes us conscious. Instead I think all that juggling of electrically charged things in special ways is what makes us conscious" says what I was trying to say better.
It also reminds me, apropos some discussion above, that I've read that some anesthetics seem to induce a sort of unconscious-type quiescent state even in single-celled organisms, and if I remember rightly the mechanism is thought to be something to do with the proton gradient across the mitochondria--which I think is evidence that something about the energetics even within single cells matters to consciousness as much or more than the information processing between neurons
"1. Is it possible to build a computer that simulates the brain (and as much as the environment as needed) to arbitrary accuracy?"
It is not clear to me what exactly can be simulated in a computer, or what exactly a simulation means (I am aware that this is largely due to my lack of knowledge in this area). To take an example that seems much simpler than consciousness, consider the case of simulating the displacement of a simulated object under gravity, say Newton's apple. I do not doubt that it is possible to simulate the motion of the simulated apple very accurately, but I do not think that this means that the simulated apple weighs anything. And I do not think that this is a problem of accuracy: whatever the accuracy, it seems to me that a simulated apple will never weigh anything in the real world.
Why should simulated consciousness be different, i.e. be real world consciousness?
+1
This isn't by any means a full answer but perhaps suggestive of a route. I feel much more confident in saying that I know that people are conscious (and looking across the kitchen this morning that dogs are conscious, although differently and less so) than that brains are conscious. My consciousness of myself is of myself as a physical being, and thought experiments about what if I were a brain in a vat don't really help me reflect on the nature of myself as a conscious being or of the conscious beings around me.
> 3. The "physics program" does not appear to be doing much here - it seems that all the relevant brain information is stored in the memory. So, could we just pre-compute the brain states, save them to an even larger memory bank, and then use an even smaller program to "play back" the brain? Is this simulation conscious? If not, why not? If so...
Disagree, eyeballs use blue noise location of senors, this reduces artifacts from sampling; that comes for free from existing on top of physics.
When encoding infomation, maximizing entropy is nearly 1 to 1 with data compression and some data compression will be desirable.
Evolution will likely encode as much of possible into physical computation mechinisms that biology gets for free, and the result of even minor approximations will likely cause artifacts evolution playthings simply wont be robust to
I thought about saying something like this in my answer below, that maybe I can simulate an apple fully, but only at a lower level: this follows from the idea that I could simulate an apple by simulating a full quantum field theory (or whatever final model of physics) and then my objection about "machine language" seems to be dealt with, but I'm still not sure I totally buy this.
I have two arguments, one specific to consciousness, one not:
1. It seems to me like "consciousness relative to oneself" is basically what I mean by conscious, and I find most of my puzzlement persists if I allow something to be conscious relative to itself, but not to me: is computation conscious relative to itself at any point? If so, when? Do I have to interact with it for that to be so? Run the program but not interact? Store the program but not run it? It seems I face all the same confusions, now about "consciousness relative to itself" rather than "conscious".
2. I think this view only makes sense if "existence relative to" ends up being an equivalence relation that partitions our space (and what exactly _is_ our space? Can a square circle exist relative to anything? Relative to itself?) into mutually exclusive partitions--i think the idea of "casual link" sounds right to me, but I think formalizing that is probably going to exactly give that partition structure: my best guess of what a casual link is, is something like "object A was ever in object B's past or future light cone", or some quantum gravity-ish thing that reformulated more or less the same idea; but this automatically makes it reflexive and symmetric, and I think transitive if you take interiors of light cones but someone who knows this stuff for real should correct me.
This means that anything you can interact with in any meaningful way at all should either exist-relative-to-you or not exist-relative-to-itself: if something exists relative to itself, but not relative to you, it can't have any casual link to you at all.
If this idea is right, and applies to consciousness too, it should mean again that thinking about the simulation case isn't really helped by this move: because you can causally interact with the computer on which the simulation is running, and thus on the simulation itself, either it is conscious relative to itself _and relative to you_, or it is neither of those, and you may a well just collapse conscious-relative-to-itself and conscious-relative-to-you into one concept, "conscious" and be back where you started.
Now, one way to try escape this is to try weaken the notion of casual link to only go in one direction. I think an idea like this is not totally implausible, but doesn't seem to me to help with the initial puzzle. This is because the actual computer on which the simulation is stored/run is clearly downstream causally from you, and so long as you don't do something like shove it into a wormhole as soon as you've programmed it, you will continue to exist in its future light cone for some time after, and so insofar as there is any correspondence between the states of the computer and the consciousness of it, you will be both causally both downstream and upstream from it.
Thoughts like this lead me to the notion that you can only fail to distinguish between a simulation and an actual thing if you a) run it in the "machine code" of the universe and b) make it completely causally isolated from you after a certain point. I imagine this process would be hard to distinguish from *creating a new universe with that thing inside it*... That is, the way to simulate an apple in GR in such a way that it is actually *an apple* and not a simulation is to either just, a) observe a real apple, or b) create a new spacetime, causally downstream of yours with an apple in it, that you can never interact with again (if you can interact with it again, this is just a) again).
I agree with you on the moral point, I think, but I'm not sure I agree that conscious-relative-to-itself resolves anything for me otherwise. If there is something it is like to be a particular subsequence of the digits of pi, or to be Frodo Baggins, I find that very mysterious... Possibly even moreso for the fact that they both seem to exist only in some very strange abstract way that is causally unconnected from me!
If I ask, "what is consciousness? how does it arise?", and learn that the digits of pi are conscious, following that up with, "but don't worry there's no causal connection between you and the digits of pi" isn't going to do anything to make me feel like I have a better understanding of my initial questions.
On 2, yeah, I think I ended up saying something stronger than I meant, I don't think it's impossible to simulate a consciousness without spawning a new universe, but I think the details of the simulation may matter quite a bit, down to details like what level of physics it's stimulated on, or how entangled it is with the rest of the world--enough that I would not grant consciousness to a stored program that wasn't being run.
> "For the contest, I prioritized winning over platonic accuracy and shifted my real predictions to be more extreme. I don't know whether this is a lesson in self-confidence, support for the 'nothing ever happens' hypothesis, or a knock against the scoring algorithm. "
This is a known issue with any sort of prediction contest (it's common on Kaggle): As the number of contestants grows, your odds of winning go up by being overconfident (which trades expected value of your final score for variance, since when there's a large number of contestants you have a higher chance of getting on top with higher variance). It's going to happen with any scoring algorithm (so long as your number of required predictions is fixed).
This reminds me of the "guess 2/3 of the average of other guessers" game:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guess_2/3_of_the_average
in which the only Nash equilibrium is zero. Has this sort of thing been analyzed for prediction markets? Do they still converge when everyone is rational and knows everyone else is rational and knows that they know etc.
Adding a rough description:
- Assume there's two (or more) contestants and one 60/40 question. In this case we get the nash equilibrium you describe, where both players have to predict 100% on the 60/40 question to maximize their win odds.
- But now assume there's five 60/40 questions. In that case you may be incentivised to bet 100% on one question, but if you bet 100% on two questions, you're likely to lose at least one of them and then lose the contest. (The full solution is, I think, more moderate than even this - if you bet 100% on one question you have a 40% chance of losing outright if you get that one wrong but won't necessarily win if you get it right, depending on how the other questions go, and the calculation gets messy).
- now assume instead of two contestants there's over 32 (2^5) contestants). Then you have to guess 100% certainty on every question (if you do that you have a 1/32 chance of winning, which is better than your position as a generic contestant).
(This is assuming all questions are 50/50. If they're lower entropy the 32 number should be smaller).
In last year's contest there were ~30 questions for ~1000 contestants, so the threshold at which you should go all in on every question is about 2^30, or a billion contestants, so we fall far short of that. But some degree of overconfidence is still optimal, and the exact calculation of how to optimize it is messy.
Yes (a friend of mine wrote a paper on this, but frustratingly it's been stuck in "awaiting publication" hell for over a year now so I can't find it online). The equilibrium still isn't zero (or, well, total confidence), since when there's many questions there's many different ways to increase variance (it is with just one question though).
My rants in this years contest got downvoted agruing this point but I disagree its impossible; I trust the current math would work with good questions.
If it was rational to bet 20-80% on each question, blanket over confidence over 50 questions would likely be unwise. Given that there were arguably 15 shit questions, several of which you would be deeply irrational to predict >10%, and will result in rule lawyering; the scoring system breaks down because the game break down.
"It's rational to be overconfident on some questions" doesn't mean "be overconfident all the time". There is a tradeoff between expected value and variance based on the true/assumed probabilities, with the optimal strategy calling for going for more variance as the number of contestants increases (and less as the number of predictions goes up). For a given amount of variance, there's also a (nontrivial to compute) optimal strategy frontier for how to allocate it.
This does *not* depend on the questions being good (more or better phrased questions do help - although I disagree with your opinion of the questions being bad in this instance - but if you have ~thirty questions and over a thousand contestants, that's still going to incentivise going for variance).
(this is katifish) Fwiw I predict my true probabilities on binary questions (at least when there is no crowd forecast visible - when there is I often adjust slightly towards it, depending on how confident I am of my relative knowledge). For continuous questions it's trickier and in the end I do extremize a bit in several cases, but partly that's an effect of trying to get the distribution shape I want. I buy that the strategy changes as you get to v. large numbers of people, but I'm iffy on whether ACX or even Bridgewater are really at that level.
I did a rough calculation above, ACX/Bridgewater is a very long way short of "guess 100% on everything" but is close enough to the threshold that optimal strategy does include being somewhat overconfident (how much exactly depends on how good your competition is - if all 1k+ people are almost as good as you you need to be more overconfident since you can't reliably outskill them. Given that the superforcaster average last year was about 70th percentile I'd guess about 30% on net are actually good enough that luck matters as much as skill in outperforming them, where by "on net" I include fractional people (who you can outskill but might beat you on a very good day)).
That makes sense to me. My intuition is also that degrees of over/underconfidence interact with frequency of updating/new information, would be curious to know if you've pulled this into your models or not. Bridgewater in particular benefits a lot from updating frequently, at least on certain q's, in a way ends up being very different from ACX spot scoring. (Last year Bridgewater also split the prize pool in a way that led to more even rewards across a higher number of top participants, which may also have changed incentives around extremizing)
This specific model is for one off contests (where everyone submits a single prediction by a deadline). Not sure how I'd adapt it for updatable models - a simple mostly-accurate way to do it would be to model every new bit of information/update opportunity as another low-information question you can answer (or, say, just subdivide each question into 365 highly correlated daily questions), which makes allowing constant updates equivalent to just having more total question-bits. This should incentivise less overconfidence (since it's equivalent to having more questions).
Dividing the prize should also reduce the risk incentive (at the limit, giving everyone a prize in proportion to their score just incents maximizing score ev, which is equivalent to guessing true probabilities).
> This does *not* depend on the questions being good
one of the questions is generally accepted to be rational to guess 1%
If you fail this 1 question you will lose to someone putting a flat 50/50 on everything; they will need to punish that 1% enough
.1% will get 1 more point if to resolves false
Questions need to be close enough to be 50/50, the long run for 1/99 will be to far away in 30 question. (and there were clear examples of questions failing this)
Trump should just offer to give Zelensky 100 nuclear warheads plus missiles to deliver them. I doubt he actually cares about non-proliferation, and Russia won't dare to try to fully destabilize or conquer Ukraine if Ukraine might be able to flatten Moscow and St Petersburg - they'll go for peace and try to consolidate the territory they're holding already (like the Winter War in the 20th century).
Alternatively, I'd be fine with a tripwire force of US troops in eastern Ukraine. But the nukes would be better and cheaper, and we're building new nuclear warheads anyways (or are supposed to). We should offer them to Poland, the Baltics, and Finland too.
You guys really want nuclear war over the Donbass, huh? I don't get it
Being totally apathetic and fatalistic about proliferation does not equal supporting nuclear war. It equals living in the real world and not living in a fantasy.
I'm confused: Your post seems to assume that Trump actually wants to help Ukraine against Russian aggression. After the events of last week, it should be pretty clear to everyone that Trump isn't interested in defending Ukraine, so why in the world would he station nukes there?
Trump doesn't care about the sovereignity of Ukraine or the fate of the Ukrainian people. He claimed he'd end that war on day 1 of his term because it would be a political win over "Sleepy Joe". Unfortunately, he was talking completely out of his ass – a repeated surprise to most of his followers – and it turned out that things are a tiny bit more complicated than Trump's brain can fathom.
So he changed gears and tried to extort mining rights from Ukraine, for basically no meaningful guarantees in return. Not quite the peace deal he promised, but it would be a deal that Makes America Great Again, i.e., a political win for Trump. When Zelenskyy didn't fall for this blatant attempt at self-enrichment, Trump changed gears once again and verbally attacked Zelenskyy, turning into a mouthpiece for Putin and Lavrov.
So, taking all this into account, why would Trump station nuclear weapons in Ukraine? Any realistic answer necessarily starts with "It would make Trump look good inner-politically, because [ ]".
It seems Trump thinks Russia is more powerful in the region and so is a more useful ally. He actually wants what Russia or Ukraine can offer. That might be Ukrainian mineral rights, Russian oil and non total cooperation with Iran and China, etc.
Also I do not want Ukraine getting nukes. The chance of them using them against Russia as Russia continues to invade them is substantially above zero.
The right strategy, of course, is to continue supporting Ukraine by US and Europe to disincentivize continued aggression to the point of making Russia regret invading, while offering an offramp where you get to keep massive territory secured through war but allow a military buildup on the other side of the border because of course Ukraine needs real security guarantees.
But not US or Nato forces covered by Article 5. Russia will keep reinvading whatever it can. We know that. We also need to avoid nuclear exchange.
Article 5 is dead. NATO is dead. Does anyone seriously believe the US will come to Estonia's aid when Estonia is invaded by Russia?
Destroying NATO was Putin's wet dream and Trump has delivered, note well - for nothing in return. Such negotiator! Much winning! Very deal!
Should we start WWIII over Estonian independence? I mean...seems like a fair question. I am all for Estonia not being invaded, but it's definitely not a hill I'm willing to die on. Are you?
This is exactly the problem: the deterrence works until it's tested. We now know that mechanized brigades crossing into Russia and occupying it's "proper" (WTF this means, see other thread for that one) territory for 6 months didn't trigger "WWIII" (WTF THAT means, I think we're are in a slow-burning one already, been since 2014). We also know that a NATO member can directly shoot down a Russian war plane, killing the pilot, and nothing happens. We also know that a nation at war with Russia can directly attack the Kremlin with an explosive device, and nothing happens. OR attack a strategic deterrence site in Russia, and nothing happens. So those terrible nukes aren't all that... terrible? Do they even work?
And now we have Article 5 and it clearly doesn't mean jack. But the whole power of NATO has been built on "OMG attack a NATO country, and all will come to its defense". That's dead. Maybe it was dead 15 years ago too, but it wasn't... obvious.
To answer your question directly, yes, NATO should immediately respond and defend Estonia, because NOT doing it is more likely to eventually start a real hot WWIII than doing it. Had NATO responded properly to the downing of the Dutch Airlines plane, or a chemical weapon attack on a NATO country territory, we wouldn't be in the mess we're in now. Alas...
"But the whole power of NATO has been built on "OMG attack a NATO country, and all will come to its defense"."
Yeah, but the other NATO countries are uselessly weak, so "all will come to its defense" really just means the US anymore, and whadda ya know, it turns out you can only free-ride off some else's defense spending for so long. Your plan for continued NATO deterrence depended on the US public being played for a sucker, which is usually a great bet, but it just didn't work in this instance, sorry.
> Yeah, but the other NATO countries are uselessly weak […]
If that's the case, then why did the US call on Article 5 after 9/11? Why go through all that trouble if the other NATO members are so useless? In a later comment you wrote
> 60 years ago […] this arrangement was tolerable,
so according to you, this alleged uselessness isn't a recent phenomenon that only started to manifest after 9/11.
What Tibor said. Plus, what shitty ally just drops friends into a trash can, and goes kissing the very adversary they were supposed to be allied against? There’s a wide ground between “hey friends you need to put up your share of the burden” and “fuck you all, I’m friends with the enemy now, bye-bye”.
"Yeah, but the other NATO countries are uselessly weak"
This is not really true.
Look at this https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/nato-spending-by-country
It is true that in absolute terms the US covers the majority of NATO military expenditure.
But this still means that roughly a third of it comes from Europe and this ratio is currently increasing as more countries are increasing their military budgets (Poland currently spends a larger part of its GDP on the military than the US, but of course it is much less in absolute terms). Also, most European countries have lower labour costs than the US, so 1 dollar buys more there than in the US.
And assuming the alliance stays together, it is very useful for the US or any other NATO force to be able to operate freely in say Poland, Finland or Sweden when fighting against a Russian invasion of Estonia. So it is not just about spending and military size alone.
Russia has a GDP of Italy. Europe/European NATO members alone should be able to crush Russia if they had not ignored their defence for so long. But even with the current still mostly underprepared state of European militaries they would pretty clearly win a conventional war against Russia (especially since Russia is running out of its post-soviet stockpiles of equipment and in general has suffered pretty bad attrition during the current war).
Russia has nukes. A lot of them. France and Britain have some nukes as well but not enough for MAD against Russia, so that is the main problem.
US would obviously be a tremendous help in a hot war against Russia. But if just the European NATO members really honored Article 5 and acted decisively, they would still defeat Russia if it decided to attack Estonia. The difference might be that with US on board, Estonia suffers a lot less.
But Russia will not have a capacity to test Article 5 in at least a couple of years even if the war in Ukraine ended tomorrow. Europe seems to finally be realizing that the peace dividend is over and in 5 years should be a lot better prepared than it is now. Like I would not be surprised if Poland alone ends up with a military that can rival that of Russia. And if someone can be relied upon to go and fight the Russians if called then it is going to be the Poles (with a bit but not too much exaggeration, Russia having nukes is possibly the only reason Poland has not attacked Russia already).
So I am actually pretty optimistic about NATO surviving at least in Europe (and realistically it will be back at least with the next US administration ... but with Europeans relying on the US a bit less from now on which is probably a good thing in the grand scheme of things). And since Europe is unlikely to end up in a direct military conflict with China ("there's a whole beautiful continent between us and them"), if it can deter/defeat Russia, there are no serious enemies left.
So in my mind this is mostly it is about figuring out how to keep Europe being covered by the nuclear umbrella...but I cannot imagine a situation where the US, even with the current administration, happily lets Russia nuke Europe (or anyone really) without retaliation. I mean, even China probably would not let Russia do that because it would open a Pandora's box if they did.
This is zero-sum thinking. Just because one side gains from an negotiation doesn't mean that you've lost. It is possible to cooperate such that both sides benefit.
What concessions has Trump secured from Putin? Never mind "secured", what concessions has Trump demanded from Putin?
First, he hasn't secured anything, and neither did Putin, because there were no negotiations yet. All Trump did was to propose to start negotiations. Restoring embassy staff in both countries, well, that doesn't seem like a concession from either side to me, it's just reverting stupid and useless posturing. That EU decided that negotiations itself is a concession to Putin is EU's own problem.
Second, if Trump actually will manage to make a deal, it's very likely that you wouldn't know all concessions Putin made, because some of them will be secret (e.g. anything about limits on cooperation with China WILL have to remain secret, because Russia doesn't want to piss off China openly).
Finally, I still think negotiations will fail, precisely because Trump won't be able to extract any noticeable concessions from Putin. At least all "Trump's Peace Plans" that surfaced on the net so far has been utterly unacceptable to Russia.
Trump, using the voice of his drunkard idiot secretary of defense, publicly gave in to Putin's demands that Ukraine would not be invited to NATO and that it will not recover its territory. Before any negotiations started. Yes, words matter. I'm sick and tired of all the excuses for this bunch of blowhard nincompoops.
Negotiations will fail not because Trump won't be able to extract any concessions from Putin, he is not even going to try, the weak baby that he is. The negotiations will fail because Ukrainians will not capitulate, which is what Trump wants, and keep fighting instead.
Unless they see some light at the end of the tunnel that is not a joint US-Russian train coming to smash them.
I can't believe I'm typing this on the third anniversary of this war started, but here we are. I do remember telling a Ukrainian friend back in 22 that they had two years to finish this because there'd be an election in 2024 in the US and who knew how that was going to turn out.
Can you be more specific? Is this just a generic rebuttal, or do you think 1123581321 is wrong/too pessimistic about the actual situation at hand?
Well, the Europeans will probably come to their aid, anyway
Will they? Or will they express deep concern and then spend four months convincing Orban to approve a limited mission?
Two weeks ago I thought I knew the answer. Now I don't know.
I suppose that would be within the spirit of the Budapest Memorandum...
How plausible would you consider speculations that Trump is a Russian asset (i.e., he signed up voluntarily or was pressured into doing their bidding)?
How plausible would you consider it, as one alternative, that Trump has a natural admiration for autocrats and just thinks Putin is a great dude?
>How plausible would you consider it, as one alternative, that Trump has a natural admiration for autocrats and just thinks Putin is a great dude?
We have a lot of evidence this is true, so about 100%
How could Russia possibly incentivize Trump to be an agent? He's a famous billionaire who doesn't care what anyone thinks about him. What possible leverage could they have?
Sorry, but this strikes me as a very silly claim. President Trump obviously seeks admiration and complains voraciously when he doesn't get it. And he similarly obviously wants more material wealth and strongly approves of anybody who gives it to him, whether it's on the form of direct profits for one of his properties, campaign donations, or contributions to his inauguration fund.
Vladimir Putin isn't that stupid. Donald Trump is a *massively* unreliable partner in, well, just about anything. Talk to his first cabinet about that, or his business partners over the years. Or his wives. And he's pretty much immune to blackmail, because everyone already knows he's every kind of disreputable and an election-winning number of them are willing to give him a pass on all of it. He'd rat out or double-cross Putin the moment he thought he could get anything out of it.
And Putin doesn't need Trump to be an "asset" dancing to Russia's strings. Everything Putin really needs from Trump, particularly including the bit where Trump cuts off US military aid to Ukraine and vetoes NATO membership, he can have just by letting Trump be Trump and maybe nudging him along with a bit of targeted flattery,
Pretty sure it's the latter. The Russian asset theory feels like what his domestic opponents *want* to be true.
A line from Good Omens comes to mind: "[The Arrangement] was the sort of sensible arrangement that many isolated agents, working in awkward conditions a long way from their superiors, reach with their opposite number when they realize that they have more in common with their immediate opponents than their remote allies."
I think Trump has more in common with the leaders of Russia and China than he does with either the leaders of our existing allies or his peers in our own government. To the extent that he's giving ground, he's doing so as a favor to *Putin*, not to *Russia*. I doubt he cares much about Russia as a state. Or the U.S., for that matter.
What leverage could Russia possibly have on Trump that would stick even while he was President? Blackmail? The man has no shame, so there's no piece of information they could release which Trump would have reason to fear being released. His supporters back him no matter what. Financial? We know Trump acts to enrich himself but with control over the entire executive branch I'd think there would be numerous ways for Trump to recoup his losses should he take a loss by defying Russia.
I think Russia does use Trump and benefit from Trump, but there's probably limited collusion and limited pressure - I think the issue is that Trump is easy to manipulate and Putin is good at manipulating him (but so are Bannon, Musk, Netanyahu, etc.). Basically I think anyone who can get themselves into a position where they have Trump's attention can have their way with him.
I suspect the desire to see Trump as a Russian asset comes from trying to find a rational underpinning of his disastrous love affair with Putin. Because the alternative, that Trump really likes cruel dictators and would love to become one, is too unpleasant to contemplate.
It's literally the job of the American president to be friendly to dictators. I'd say if you can't establish your rapport with dictators, you're totally unqualified for the position. The alternative to rapprochement with dictators is World War and the potential destruction of the human race. Winston Churchill once said that only appeasement from a place of weakness was wrong. That appeasement from strength was essential for maintaining peace.
I don't agree with "friendly", but yes on the broader point. As somebody said, "you don't negotiate with your friends, you negotiate with your enemies". This is what diplomacy is for, your comparison to waste management is apt.
> It's literally the job of the American president to be friendly to dictators.
What gave you this idea? It's the job of the American president to enforce the interests of the US. Sometimes that requires being friendly to some dictator, sometimes that require the exact opposite.
Edit: Besides, even "being friendly with dictators" is a far cry from "admiring dictators and doing one's best to play into their hands", like Trump repeatedly does with Putin.
As long as the world is full of dictators, it will always, always be in the interests of the United States to be friendly to dictators. Nothing in our history contradicts this. When specific dictators get out of hand, they require dealing with in a heavy-handed but realistic manner, which is how we handled the specific case of Adolf Hitler. Note how we waited for him to initiate hostilities against us, which was a wise and thoughtful course of action.
But the vast majority of dictators need to be dealt with in a friendly manner. This is directly in the interests of the nation. And to be friendly to someone is to treat someone as one would treat a friend.
I would personally find behaving in this manner very distasteful, especially when it comes to scumbag like putin. But I'm not the President. The number one thing for the interests of America and the world is for the American president to ingratiate himself with Russia's leader, whoever that may be. Because they have so many nukes, friendship between Russia and America is important for avoiding nuclear holocaust. I compare being a diplomat to waste management or plumbing. It's a slimy, filthy job but somebody has to do it.
Putin is an evil man for invading ukraine. But no American government official has any business condemning him for that. That's Eurasian business. Not even the lowliest State Department spokesperson should be issuing complaints about Eurasian dictators.
What if there's another alternative?
Like...Trump knows the outcome of the Ukraine war is more-or-less set in stone and doesn't want to spend another few billion and create another another couple-hundred KIA for no reason?
I'll leave aside the idea that Trump "knows" something about this war; nevermind, that he even knows what Luhansk is, for example.
The outcome of the war is not set in stone precisely because there are many things that are left to negotiate in order for the actual war to end.
You don't think it's plausible that the President, or his team of advisors, knows something about the war you don't?
As for "not set in stone" - you get what I mean, don't be obtuse. Obviously details need to be worked out, but I think it's a safe assumption that, at minimum, Crimea isn't going to be under Ukrainian sovereignty when the war ends.
You don't think it's plausible that the President, or his team of advisors, knows something about the war you don't?
You know, this is an interesting question. I'm pretty sure somebody on that team knows something about this war that I don't. I'm also pretty sure I know things about this war that they don't, and this is both a general statement of the huge amount of "information about this war", and a specific statement about the abysmal lack of interest in actual complexities of this war from this specific admin ("end the war in 24 hrs!" inevitably becomes "who knew healthcare was so complicated", yes really, who could possibly).
"set in stone" - no, sorry, I'm not being obtuse, the range of potential outcomes is quite wide, and even just the status of Crimea can have a range of set points, anything from "Russian forever and recognized by UN" to "Territory illegally occupied by Russia", and then extrapolate that onto 1000+ km front line.
But our team of stable geniuses is giving up negotiating levers to Putin before the actual negotiations even started.
"Russian forever and recognized by UN" and "Territory illegally occupied by Russia" - these are the same thing. There's no real difference. The purported difference is just just marketing / propaganda. Caring about de jure outcomes is cringe.
I think it's safe to say that de facto Crimea will remain under Russian sovereignty for the foreseeable future. How that's marketed doesn't really matter all that much. Same thing with the rest of the front lines - are they gonna move more than 50 miles in either direction? Unlikely. So let's stop the killing.
That's one aspect. The other is that a smoking gun proving clearly that he's been bought would provide a lever to get rid of him.
That line of thinking seems to have been valid back around 2017. By now I think Trump has amply proven that yes, he really could shoot someone in the middle of the 5th Ave in broad daylight and the Republican party will loudly wander what the nasty woke person did to King Donald to deserve it while the Democratic party will express a deep concern.
That was certainly the motivation behind the Mueller investigation.
To be fair, the events that were reported that looked very much like the tip of an iceberg all happened as reported... just the rest of the iceberg was nowhere to be found. Still, not investigating would have been criminally negligent.
There's no iceberg actually.
Yeah, maybe, but the way the modal Democrat thought about it certainly wasn't "you know what, I don't think there's anything there, but not investigating would be criminally negligent, so let Mueller have this one. It's a nothingburger, though".
My reading of him is that he's too shameless to be blackmailed, while also too prideful to tolerate serving another. Meanwhile, he and Putin really do just want the exact same things... which will eventually cause conflict between them, but that can wait until everyone else is dealt with.
The CIA uses the acronym MICE for how they can turn someone into an intelligence soure: Money, Ideology, Coercion, and Ego. I see Trump as vulnerable to the first and last, but I agree...it's still ludicrous. Why would a New York real estate developer who was fading into irrelevancy make for a useful asset to the Russians in the first place?
Maybe I would believe the former if an ex-MI6 agent collected a bunch of hearsay to that effect from random Russians and compiled it into a dossier. Or 50 current and former US intelligence officials signed a letter saying so.
You might want to read that letter more closely.
The letter is referring to the Hunter laptop being Russian disinfo, which was obviously a direct lie purely to help Biden and hurt Trump. At this point "Russian Asset!" is like the boy who cried wolf and everyone should assume it's a bunch of BS until proven otherwise.
>The letter is referring to the Hunter laptop being Russian disinfo
If you knew that, why did you claim that the letter said that Trump was a Russian asset?
>which was obviously a direct lie
What the letter said was:
>the arrival on the US poli cal scene of emails purportedly belonging to Vice President Biden’s son Hunter, much of it related to his time serving on the Board of the Ukrainian gas company Burisma, has all the classic earmarks of a Russian informa operation. We want to emphasize that we do not know if the emails, provided to the New York Post by President Trump’s personal attorney Rudy Giuliani, are genuine or not and that we do not have evidence of Russian involvement -- just that our experience makes us deeply suspicious that the Russian government played a significant role in this case.
None of those statements is untrue.
> If you knew that, why did you claim that the letter said that Trump was a Russian asset?
"But Russia!" is the classic red herring defense of the current day. The Hunter laptop letter is a great example of this, which I thought was clearly referenced by the 50 agents (actually 51 *shrug*).
> None of those statements is untrue.
I guess in the "media rarely lies" sense where they don't blatantly and obviously make the lying clear. In 2019, the FBI investigated the laptop and confirmed that it belonged to Hunter, was genuine, and didn't appear to be tampered with. This was corroborated in the whistleblower reports from the IRS investigation in 2023. So at the time of the letter, 10/19/2020, it was known to the intelligence community (via the FBI) that the laptop and associated cloud data (the emails in question) were genuine and belonged to Hunter Biden. This is the first major red flag that the letter was a fundamentally dishonest political stunt. A bunch of intel officials without firsthand knowledge of the case directly contradict the findings of the FBI agents who actually handled the laptop.
Further, the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence released their findings on the letter operation on 6/25/2024. The letter's main architect was Michael Morell. He later testified that the whole thing was triggered by a phone call from Antony Blinken, then foreign policy advisor to the Biden campaign (and later SecState).
This is an email sent out by Michael Morell at ~6:30am 10/19/20:
"Good morning. Hope everyone had a nice weekend.
Attached is a statement that Marc and I drafted that many former senior and working-level officials from across the IC will sign and then be made public. We are 100% confident it does not contain classified information. Indeed, it specifically says we don't know what the IC or the FBI knows about this.
*This is a rush job, as it needs to get out as soon as possible.* (emphasis mine)
Thank you very much.
-Michael Morell"
So, the laptop has been known about and confirmed genuine for over a year at this point. But it's a rush job, because the election is in a few weeks and they need to discredit the story. Not to mention the irresponsible prospect of a bunch of IC officials releasing an official statement on something... when they admit not knowing what the IC or FBI knows about it. The letter draft was sent to the Prepublication Classification Review Board (PCRB) at the CIA. The time between the draft being received and cleared for release... was approximately 6 hours.
Part of the review process involved submitting a letter draft to the Office of the Director of National Intelligence. While the ODNI cleared the letter, the same day then Director of National Intelligence John Ratcliffe issued an official statement that the laptop was “not part of some Russian disinformation campaign . . . the intelligence community doesn’t believe that because there is no intelligence that supports that.” Note the DNI would actually know what the IC and FBI know about the laptop. Also note that the PCRB reaching out to the ODNI was an unprecedented step, reflecting the unique and politicizing nature of the letter.
The letter signatories repeatedly asserted that they were acting in their capacity as private citizens and had no access to secret information about the laptop. This was untrue. While the CIA didn't release all the details about the involved officials, *at least* Morell and David Buckley were employed as CIA contractors at the time. They also both had TS/SCI clearance. Note that their involvement with the letter would have been a Hatch Act violation, were they actual CIA employees rather than contractors.
Another email from Morell and Marc Polymeropoulos, 10/18/2020:
"Marc and I drafted the attached because we believe the Russians were involved in some way in the Hunter Biden email issue and because *we think Trump will attack Biden on the issue at this week's debate and we want to give the VP a talking point to use in response*" (emphasis mine).
To further establish the nature of the letter, we have unclassified emails of other CIA employees at the time:
"I also love that at least a few of the random signatures belong to individuals currently working here on contracts..."
"This frustrates me. I don't think it is helpful to the Agency in the long run. Sigh."
"It appears <redacted> is actively involved in a pro-Biden campaign and may be disclosing classified information in his efforts. It is difficult to believe that the timing of the attached <redacted> and the <redacted> are coincidental."
To summarize and establish the timeline:
2019, the FBI investigates the Hunter laptop and establishes it as genuine.
Shortly before 10/19/20, Blinken, then employed by the Biden campaign, calls up Morell, then employed as a contractor for the CIA, to discredit the Hunter laptop before the election. Emails from CIA employees at the time establish a view within the Agency that the letter was a pro-Biden stunt with the possibility for blowback.
Morell calls the letter a "rush job", and it is expedited through the PCRB, establishing the letter as a political tool in the 2020 election. Further, Morell admits that part of the reason for the letter is to help Biden and give him talking points.
The letter is released and the officials state they don't *actually* know anything, but the laptop has all the classic earmarks of a Russian operation. Actually they wanted to use a more cover-your-ass phrase of "feels like", but James Clapper wanted the earmark phrase to quote "strengthen the verbiage". This despite the FBI and ODNI knowing for over a year and stating unequivocally that the laptop was not Russian disinformation and there was no evidence to that effect.
The most charitable possible interpretation is everyone who signed the letter was totally ignorant of the actual facts and all coincidentally came to the conclusion that the Russians did it. What is not debatable is that the letter was openly arranged as a political stunt to benefit Biden. But of course no one technically "lied", since their statement was an expression of opinion and we can't read their minds.
Anyway, this whole episode along with the Steele Dossier is why claims of "Russian asset" or "Russian disinformation" should be viewed with maximal skepticism.
>"But Russia!" is the classic red herring defense of the current day. The Hunter laptop letter is a great example of this, which I thought was clearly referenced by the 50 agents (actually 51 *shrug*).
That doesn't explain why you lied.
There is an irony about all that.
The report of the Senate Intelligence Committee's independent investigation was issued by a majority-Republican committee chaired by a Republican. Even significantly redacted it makes clear that various individuals working for Trump were _trying_ to become Russian assets and that others, some of them named Trump, were actively encouraging that effort.
It does not, even assuming the most about the redactions, conclude that Trump, the president, was ever personally a Russian asset. (And it beggars belief that a different conclusion about him personally would not have leaked by now.)
That investigation did though show pretty strongly that Russia actors were actively trying to help Trump win in 2016 and that people working for Trump including a couple named Trump were trying to help that happen. That seems likely to have been enough to derail Trump politically during his first term -- perhaps convince a few more Republican senators to vote yes in one of his impeachment trials -- _except_ that the Left had meanwhile gone scorched-earth with the Steele dossier and the Mueller investigation.
Hence roughly nobody paid any attention to the Republican Senate committee's investigation and its startling (at any other time) conclusions. It died on the vine. So -- in this way as in so many others -- Trump's ace in the hole turned out to be the Left's hysterical incompetence.
"Russian asset" is a weasel phrase. It's so malleable and so subject to abuse that I don't take it very seriously.
Yes, this goes for the Jan 6 impeachment effort. Had Democrats, on Jan 7, put on a simple motion to impeach for the conduct on Jan 6 only, I bet there were enough shaken Rep. Senators to convict. But the Dems had to make a federal case out of it, complete with a formal "investigation" that the intensity of the experience faded from the Rep's memories enough to do the usual "on one hand, on the other hand" crap.
Trump was impeached in the House 6 days after Jan 6. It didn't pass the Senate bc Mitch McConnell thought it was unreasonable.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second_impeachment_of_Donald_Trump
https://www.npr.org/sections/trump-impeachment-trial-live-updates/2021/02/13/967701180/after-vote-mcconnell-torched-trump-as-practically-and-morally-responsible-for-ri
Other than that, it was almost exclusively AG Merrick Garland's fault for not prosecuting Trump earlier for the sake of 'neutrality', and somewhat Joe Biden's fault for not firing him and replacing him earlier.
https://edition.cnn.com/2025/01/06/politics/doj-trump-jan-6-riot/index.html
That jogged the memory, thanks. I'll stand by my key point: had they delivered the articles on January 8, not on January freaking 25! after Trump was no longer even President - they'd have a much better chance of conviction.
I know it's a hypothetical, but if Trump is allowed to say Russia wouldn't have attacked Ukraine if he were President, I'm allowed my hypotheticals too :)
The first seems very unlikely (Trump has been under enough scrutiny for long enough that it's likely to have come out if there was a smoking gun there, and he's rich and brazen enough to not be easily compromisable). The second seems very likely (both because Trump has said so and because it matches up with everything we know about him.
A subcase of the first though (e.g. Trump isn't a coordinated Russian asset per se but there's an unspoken understanding that they'll run some propaganda for him so long as he acts in a friendly way to them) seems plausible, though hard to draw the line between that and him just liking Putin.
I think it's unlikely, in comparison with Trump liking Putin because he's a rich dictator of a big country - and because Trump often listens to the last person who talks to him on something. That matters because Trump has a lot of people in his orbit who like Russia because they believe it is an "anti-woke" dictatorship that does Strong Man stuff.
The new German government aims to achieve independence from the USA https://archive.ph/tl3OB
Germany doesn't have a new government yet. The party that will have the first shot at creating a new government, wants the world to believe that its leaders are Serious, Courageous Statesmen who are Taking A Stand on the Most Important Issue of the Day. And they trust that the world's attention span will be short enough that people will have forgotten about all this by the time it is clear that Germany hasn't done anything of real substance.
Wake me up when the Bundeswehr can field a full combat-ready Panzer division.
ETA: What they really need for this to matter, is a nuclear arsenal. Good luck with that.
> Germany doesn't have a new government yet
Yes but we all know who the new chancellor will be.
> Wake me up when the Bundeswehr can field a full combat-ready Panzer division.
We'll see
> What they really need for this to matter, is a nuclear arsenal. Good luck with that.
My opinion is that UK and France should do nuclear sharing agreements with other European countries.
I find myself confused by this turn of events.
Putin's economic war against Europe, then an actual war right on the EUs border, then Russian sabotage operations happening on EU territory--and the German response can only be described as phlegmatic.
Now, a small decline in the quality of US-DE relations and suddenly there's a swift and colossal response.
Why didn't Germany seek a swift and decisive separation from Russian energy or Chinese markets?
(The question isn't meant as a cheap dog, but it's a real question. I don't understand the seemingly disproportionate response)
> Now, a small decline in the quality of US-DE relations and suddenly there's a swift and colossal response.
What swift and colossal response? An interview given before even having a coalition?
I suspect it's primarily PR. Good PR, but PR. How do you sell increased military spending in an economic downturn? Orange Man bad.
Regardless of whether Trump is in the White House or not, the facts are that Europe has not carried its weight militarily in NATO for decades and the US fiscal/debt situation is troubled enough that the US probably can't continue to subsidize European defense over the next decade or two, certainly not while pivoting to focus on China.
But Germany is not in great shape domestically anymore. They've been in an economic downturn since 2022 caused by a variety of factors. They're not in a hurry to go spend a ton on Ukranian defense. So how do you convince them to spend an extra $20-$30 billion a year? Well, Europeans hate Trump...so Trump.
I think you're touching on the crux of my confusing.
If they hate Trump that much, shouldn't they hate Putin more? Putin has done more to damage the EU than the US.
Or has it? The US has been pretty hands off with Europe. It seems a benevolent hegemon if anything. Maybe a hegemon is worse than an enemy in people's perception though. An emey offers a challenge and a target but a hegemon offers... Humiliation? Not sure, just spit balling here.
I dunno, people are weird. I know they do hate him though.
It reminds me of an old Scott article where certain people "dislike" Osama bin Laden but viscerally hate Margrett Thatcher. One sec...
https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/09/30/i-can-tolerate-anything-except-the-outgroup/
Right. Putin could hold mass executions and the EU parliament would be all like "tsk tsk, baddie Vladdy, that's a human rights violation!" but Trump's mean tweets are what send them into absolute hysterics.
The US is significantly more of a threat, to be fair. Their army isn't just for show.
Russia "slowly boiled" Germany and the rest of Europe over the first two decades of this century. Like a skillful drug dealer, it got Europe addicted to its pipeline gas and easy-access oil, and bribed the powers that be to look the other way, nah, outright support this status quo.
Now Europe is trying as hard as it can not to wake up from its delusion, but it's a slow and painful process.
The bribing part is really crucial. The number of left-wing German politicians who have Gazprom's arm elbow-deep up their asses is grim even though hardly baffling.
So it's German politicians who are Russian assets? Who knew.
And then there's Schroeder, and of course how can one forget the inimitable Karin Kneissl (for those who don't know who she is: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-67624834). It would be comical if it weren't tragic.
Gerhard Schröder is a central example of who I meant. He was a left-wing politician when active, leader of the SPD.
Left-wing only from a US perspective: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gerhard_Schr%C3%B6der#Chancellor_of_Germany,_1998%E2%80%932005
I actually think the worst was Merkel, because the cartoonish capture of Schroeder was well-covered and understood, while Merkel had both the enormous power and a reputation for pragmatism and even-headiness, so she could keep advancing Nord Streams, for example, and get her way. She had the best chance to stop Putin, and she did the opposite.
> Putin's economic war against Europe
> Russian sabotage operations happening on EU territory
I agree that reasoning with these facts, one SHOULD be confused.
I think the reason is that Germany was relying on USA for defence but now suddenly realises it can't any more.
Note that Friedrich Merz has no government experience at all. He still has a lot to learn about stuff like this.
I'll believe it when they actually appropriate a larger military budget. And if they want true military independence, they either need a credible nuclear deterrent against Russia or a reliable alliance with a country with one (better shore up on those UK and French ties).
It seems they would also need some sort of energy source.
Drones can use wind and solar, but tanks and ships not so much.
My ideal solution would be a joint European detterent. maybe UK or France could do a dual key arrangement with germany?
Well, yeah, good. Depending on the US while they're run by an authoritarian troll who'd feed his grandmother to the wolves if it earned him a dollar is just not a good idea.
The vassals are getting uppity, the empire must be getting very weak
Ironic, isn't it? Elected to "Make America Great Again", dude starts weakening America with a fervor as if he was getting paid for it.
America needs to discard sections of its empire(the middle east comes to mind), Im not sure germany makes the cut.
It does? Aren't we taking over Gaza? Or is it the Gaza in Mozambique? Do the dufuses, I mean, the BEST PEOPLE, running our government now know the difference? One has so many questions!
If trump actually takes over gaza I hope the crowd boo him for the rest of his life and the miltrey desserts for even risking starting another war over sand.
The problem with listening with what the tv star means is that the man lies and a/b tests crowds
Yes, we live in insane times when one can write what you wrote above about the actual freaking President of these here United States.
Seeing Europe as a burdensome part of the empire rather than powerful allies is precisely the myopic, greedy thinking that is weakening America.
I said Germany; as a demographics doomer I dont think you should confuse Germany and France, nor their proximity/economic dependence to the middle east oil/oceans
You think the US can stay best buddies with France while cutting ties to Germany? I don't see that happening.
Demography is a problem for Germany, but maybe we can refill with refugees from the US.
Remind me again how great the British Empire became after it started to get rid of its colonies.
or Soviet Union.
The Brits gave up their colonies because they were no longer great, not the other way around
Britain's problem was nationalization industry, not giving up the colonies.
What Britain should have done is turned the Empire into a federation -- something like the EU. This was actually discussed in the 1880s, but nothing happened. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Imperial_Federation
Roughly as important as France who kept more, but it currently surviving and I see no sea peoples (yet)
Maybe he does, but it's behind a paywall
What early evidence do we have on the effect of a very active trump? Can we avoid a dark age?
heres my pre-election thoughts/anxiety: https://monkyyyscience.substack.com/p/minor-prediction-america-will-have
> 30% off odd of bandaid fixes, such as trump being elected ... and selling the western federal land in new cities for a gen Z middle clas
> Such fixes would be *extremely* wise
*IF* trump start making new cities and it isnt just talk; my view of the future drastically improves; but it may still not be enough and we enter a darkage anyway; id call this time line "managed decline" where we never replace institutions as fast as they are dying but there are attempts to make new ones; maybe for every 5 cities that are overran with homelessness and basically seem unlivable to my tastes, 1 new city gets made. That bluntly, would obviously not be good enough but it would be better then 0, which is a not unrealistic probability in my mind.
Has any culture increased its birth rates post contract with the modern world? Is there any new appersational projects?
Birthrates increased during the baby boom, but it's not easily replicable.
I feel like I'm forever pointing out that the Australian "baby bonus" scheme which handed out modest (~$5000) bonuses for births seems to have caused a meaningful blip upwards in birth rate from 1.7 to 2.0. It started in 2002, so the oldest of these additional kids are already in the workforce and paying taxes.
Although $3-5K is a small fraction of the cost of raising a child, I feel like the psychological effect was large enough to put some potential parents over the edge into having another one. It's nice to know that your efforts are appreciated.
If I might propose something for the US, then why not structure a baby bonus as student loan forgiveness? The Democrats are falling over themselves to forgive student loan debt anyway, and turning it into a pro-natalist policy might get Republicans on board. By being restricted to college graduates it would also be expected to be on the whole eugenic rather than dysgenic, though I wouldn't use those words to talk the Democrats into it.
There is already a Child tax credit for about that much. Both Harris and Vance talked about expanding it during the campaign (no idea what trump said). haven't heard it talked about it in 2025.
>If I might propose something for the US, then why not structure a baby bonus as student loan forgiveness?
I'd guess there's a psychological difference between seeing your bank balance go up vs seeing your debt go down
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baby_boom#/media/File:US_Birth_Rates.svg
Theres a few ways to read that data I think, but even naively it looks a regression to a downward trend
sure, but there must have been a reason why the regression happened. It wasn't a blip, it lasted 20 years!
I just got this hardcopy anthology of Scott's stories/poems/parables:
https://www.lulu.com/shop/scott-alexander/the-goddess-of-everything-else/paperback/product-j6d7wv.html
There are some that are not exactly on the internet anymore and that I had missed. I've been reading them to my 16-year-old. They are insanely fun and mind-bendy.
Is this published with Scott's consent? Does he receive a royalty? (Maybe it's a strange question, I was just surprised that I didn't recall this book being mentioned in SSC or ACX)
Also, are there any other books by Scott published on paper, aside from this and unsong?
I'm not sure. This was my source: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/WFmDFQJp27Fb7nxmF/print-books-of-scott-alexander-s-writing
Scott seems to always give a green light to these kinds of things but you're right, it would be good to get explicit confirmation on this one.
Scott, would you mind telling us if you're OK with this book being published and bought?
SlateStarCodex is published under a CC license (https://slatestarcodex.com/about/), anyone can print and share it. In this particular case, it doesn't look like there's any profit (all money goes to the printing service).
There's been a heated discussion recently on X about the "Great Man" interpretation of history that started with a tweet about Elon Musk. Historians are calling it debunked and claiming that no contemporary historian takes it seriously, others are arguing that modern humanities are ideologically captured and that the Elon Musk/Trump phenomenon is a clear example of its validity. I lean towards it being an accurate descriptor of history, especially recent history but I'm willing to be convinced otherwise. What's the steelman against history mainly been driven by highly agentic individuals? To what degree is the modern consensus on historical narratives ideological?
In favor of the "Great Man" theory I present https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shuji_Nakamura
without whom we would not have GaN LEDs, or general purpose LED lighting.
https://www.thepsmiths.com/p/review-85-days-in-slavyansk-by-aleksandr
> The second version of the story is also a lie, or at best a half-truth. The dead giveaway is in the last sentence, because it’s an iron law of history that revolutions never, ever come out of popular uprisings. The wheels of history are turned by political entrepreneurs — individuals or close-knit groups who notice ahead of everybody else that the world has changed in some fundamental way. This unstable situation where material conditions have shifted but society keeps rolling in its groove creates a sort of potential energy, like a charged electric field or a boulder perched at the top of a cliff. In the world of business we call this a market opportunity, and we admire those with the gumption to seize them. In the world of war and politics, market opportunities often look more like a forest full of dry tinder, and the would-be entrepreneur needs an additional quality, fanaticism, that enables him to calmly light a match and flick it over his shoulder.
I think it should be fairly clear and fairly uncontroversial that the importance of individuals, however defined, follows some kind of power law type distribution.
Among important people though, few have the kind of importance you'd actually want. Many are important but very replaceable, like Neil Armstrong. Among those who are not highly replaceable, many have the importance which just comes from being in the right place at the right time, rather than having made themselves important through their own force of will. And among those who did become important through their own force of will, most do not actually succeed in changing the world in ways they actually want; they change the world but make it worse even by their own standards.
The problem is that people understand the "Great Man" theory in two ways. The first one is that history is shaped by individual humans, and that more powerful or skilled humans shape it to a greater extend than less powerful humans. This is the interpretation that most non-historians follow, and it is correct. The second interpretation is that history can be largely explained by the impact of a few "Great Men", people of much greater ability than everyone else, to the point that they're heroic embodiment of virtues, and may be graced with divine inspiration. This is the interpretation favoured by historians, and is incorrect, which is why they hold this theory in low regard.
Why is the second interpretation incorrect? Setting aside issues of divine inspiration, many (most?) developments in history are largely the result of forces greater than a single individual, be it climate, geography, culture, and so on. The great man theory has a hard time explaining developments like the invention of agriculture or writing, the expansion of the Roman republic, the plagues that have afflicted the world, or the industrial revolution. Moreover, many events in history took place because of actions by a few individuals, but these individuals were hardly the embodiment of virtues. In cases like the First World War, most individuals involved were fairly mediocre.
This is similar to the motte-and-bailey fallacy, the motte being "powerful individuals shape history" and the bailey "almost all history is explained by the actions of a few heroic individuals".
I think it's important to note distinctions of scale. Over the long-term (~centuries) history is probably largely deterministic, but over the short-term I would imagine that it can be nudged into temporary and optional contingencies. Like say you re-ran history starting in 1920. It was probably inevitable that the US and USSR would be natural enemies but the shape of that conflict was highly dependent on WW2, which itself depended largely on one man. If history is a boulder on a hill then the great man is the one who pushes it off. He may not have had any say in the height of the hill but he gets to decide which side the boulder rolls down.
When I've heard modern historians talk positively about what could be considered adjacent to "great man" historiography, the terminology they use is "contingency", i.e. events that proceeded chaotically from many minor factors (one of which being choices and actions by individuals who were positioned to have wide-reaching consequences) rather than being driven by broader social forces. Basically, contingent factors are the sorts of things that a time traveller could interfere with in order to change macro-level events.
To be honest I think that the motte and bailey works the other way. The motte is “historical forces cause the rise of historical figures”, the bailey is then “who those actual historical personages are doesn’t matter”. Also divinity hasn’t anything to do with it.
Regarding the divinity bit, the original proponents of the Great man theory, like Thomas Carlyle, believed that those Great Men were divinely inspired. Hegel also believed in something like that (https://xcancel.com/BretDevereaux/status/1893510992459345991#m). Of course the people on Twitter arguing for (the first interpretation of) the Great Mean theory do not believe in divine inspiration for the most part. Both sides are just talking past each other.
Carlyle has been mentioned more than once here, and I agree that’s a bit overboard on the hero worship for great men. Also I think that historical forces matter a lot, but there are times when who is alive matters as well.
If Great Men define history, then surely we can predict the future by looking at what the Great Men want and imagining they get it. While the individual personalities of leaders is definitely a significant part of how effective superforecasters predict the future, this more extreme take doesn't really seem to be true.
To quote Bismarck, generally agreed to be one of the Great Men of history: "A statesman cannot create anything himself. He must wait and listen until he hears the steps of God sounding through events; then leap up and grasp the hem of His garment."
To the extent that particular men shape history, they only rarely shape it in the direction that they want it.
Rare indeed is the Great Man who not only shapes history but shapes history in a direction that he would have wanted. And even then, it's usually too easy to tell. Cecil Rhodes would probably have been pretty happy with the direction that Africa was taking at the time of his death, but if you fast-forwarded to the present he'd presumably be very disappointed.
In theoretical disputes like this I strive to see if there's a synthesis to be struck. Great Man history is admiring the destructive power of volcanoes. Modern impersonal history is like studying plate tectonics. Of course without understanding plate tectonics we cannot predict, understand, or properly appreciate a volcano, or fathom whence they draw their power. Of course the plates would keep moving and we would glean lots of geological insights from studying plate tectonics even if we never gazed upon a volcano. And yet none would dispute that when, where, and how a volcano erupts can change the world, or inspire fear, awe or religious devotion. They are symbols that entice people to study geography and geology, the stuff of metaphors and literature.
We need both. For different reasons.
> I strive to see if there's a synthesis to be struck
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jy026hzTpvg
There have been individuals whose intervention in history has changed its course entirely, but many of the commonly assumed great men didn't have as large an impact as claimed.
The most obviously impactful individual of the recent centuries, I'd say, was Lenin. Even without Lenin there's a high chance that some sort of a socialist party would take at least temporary power in Russia, but Bolsheviks really were a remarkably expectional group in their combination of extremism and having the level of organization that allowed to get in power despite their extremism, and in the many parts of the revolutionary process it was Lenin who steered them through the decisions where they could have easily pushed too hard or not have pushed hard enough.
You don't think Marx was more impactful? Or do you think the same ideas would have been expressed by someone else if he had been killed at a young age? I'm inclined to say yes - ideas only become popular if society is open to them - but the timing might have been too late to influence rapidly-modernizing countries.
There's actually a relatively easy answer to what would have happened if Marx had died at an yearly age: the work we attribute to him would mostly be attributed to Friedrich Engels, who had already came to many of the same conclusions as Marx did before meeting him, as demonstrated by The Condition of the Working Class in England.
Take out Marx and Engels both and you might see changes, but then you'd already be deviating from the Great Man theory, as it is now.
You don't think Trotsky played a similar backup role to Engels? Wouldn't he have led the Bolsheviks in Lenin's absence?
No, not really. While Trotsky was probably the second most important figure among the Bolsheviks for making the Bolshevik Revolution happen, Lenin really stands head and shoulders above the rest both regarding leadership (Trotsky had a great flash of military leadership during the war but was inept in Bolshevik internal struggles, as shown by his eventual fate.
I mean, we could just call it the Great Men theory instead.
Yes, second that.
I think with most history, you can look at events and see that various impersonal factors at work were effectively creating "roles" for people to play in events that occurred, and there was always more than one talented person to fill that role. If Genghis Khan never exists, odds are we still get major steppe confederation invasions of China and elsewhere under powerful, charismatic leaders - that was a phenomena that had occurred before him, and would occur afterwards. If Abe Lincoln never exists, then the Republican Party probably just has someone else win the Civil War - Lincoln did not have any singular talents at that point in time that would have turned it otherwise. If Thomas Edison never exists, we still get the light bulb and the industrial laboratory - the reason they occurred was because of the technological and societal milieu of the time, not because of Edison's unique talents.
But occasionally it does matter, and so I think there genuinely are Great Men of History even if they are quite rare. Patrick Wyman of "Tides of History" had a really good set of podcast episodes recently where he made a strong case for Alexander the Great being such a person - his singular talents at that point in time were critical factors in the downfall of the Persian Empire and the rise of the Hellenic East, and they likely would have been irreplaceable if he had died early on.
>If Thomas Edison never exists, we still get the light bulb and the industrial laboratory - the reason they occurred was because of the technological and societal milieu of the time, not because of Edison's unique talents.
The light bulb, yes, (Swan was there too, and I think a bunch of other similar inventors).
The industrial laboratory... I'm not so sure. Were there other near-simultaneous inventions of it?
I do think that, besides critical _people_, there are critical _projects_. At the very least developments can be pushed forward or set back by a decade by a good or bad design choice. For instance, Lee de Forest's first triode "Audion" tube was partially misunderstood by Forest himself, so, if he had known that the role of residual gas in the tube was detrimental, vacuum tube electronics might has progressed around 5 years earlier.
It’s pretty clear to me that if Hitler had a squeaky voice and was terrified of public speaking the world would be totally different place now.
I also don’t believe that the “it’s just historical currents” believers actually believe this or there would be analysis and not that much concern about Trump as the “scientific view” should be that somebody like Trump was inevitable and if it wasn’t Trump then it would be somebody else. You would also have to assume that Not Trump but Exactly Like Trump would have won the election this time as that too would be inevitable.
Edit:
By the way there’s been some commentary about “historians don’t believe in Great men” but I think generally it’s sociology larping as a science (again) postulating scientific rules of history which they can’t explain nor use to predict anything.
As for historians many do believe that the actual people in power matter.
If it is inevitable that a nationalist or fascists comes to power in Germany - if that’s the reality of Germany in the 1930s, if he’s not Hitler he’s not going to do what Hitler did.
Throughout his tenure Hitler is doing things that bewildered his colleagues and the military. Even entering the Rhineland shocked the military, which was tiny at the time.
In any case the “some other Hitler would arise” argument needs to pick the actual person who would have replaced Hitler *and* be as radical as Hitler, and prove that he would have the personal ability to come to power. Is it Von Papen? Alfred Hugenberg? Werner von Fritsch? .
(Werner von Fritsch is an example of someone who would have been happy with a fascist or nationalist regime but was clearly unhappy with many of hitler’s policies which is why he was purged in 1938).
Even their diaries even high ranking Nazis showed disquiet at Hitler’s hubris. If they were in power then it’s likely they would have been much more timid - assuming anybody but Hitler gets the Nazis to power to begin with.
Unless you believe that historical forces would have produced another Hitler if Hitler wasn’t born - with the exact same policies and ability then you have to deal with the actual people alive at the time who could have run nationalist or fascist Germany - and none of them were Hitler.
Hitler's major impact on world history was him being a huge loser who lost. History would also be quite different if Pausanias of Orestis hadn't decided to kill Philip of Macedon, but he was hardly a "Great Man."
The “great man” theory of history isn’t an endorsement of Hitler. It’s just saying
1) the national socialists probably wouldn’t have come to power without Hitler, and
2) if some other fascist organisation came to power they wouldn’t have been as radical.
The great man theory of history is not saying that individuals have agency over history. That's a statement so obvious as to be near meaningless - Pausanias had great influence over history, as did the Taoist alchemist who stumbled on gunpowder. Nor is it saying that history is a chaotic system full of small changes that could clearly ripple out to large ones, and roads not traveled; there's a reason that alternate history is a subject of particular interest to history spergs, who debate endlessly the plausibility of this or that change or consequence.
It is specifically attributing ~all of history to powerful individuals making their mark. Hitler did not make his mark on history because he had great power and his individual choices thus had great influence on history; Hitler made history because he was Hitler, and he forced his way onto the historical stage. Reading Carlyle's On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History, it's hard to imagine jerking off Great Men any more than he does. For one quote:
> The great man, with his free force direct out of God's own hand, is the lightning. His word is the wise healing word which all can believe in. All blazes round him now, when he has once struck on it, into fire like his own. The dry mouldering sticks are thought to have called him forth. They did want him greatly; but as to calling him forth--! Those are critics of small vision, I think, who cry: "See, is it not the sticks that made the fire?" No sadder proof can be given by a man of his own littleness than disbelief in great men. There is no sadder symptom of a generation than such general blindness to the spiritual lightning, with faith only in the heap of barren dead fuel. It is the last consummation of unbelief. In all epochs of the world's history, we shall find the Great Man to have been the indispensable savior of his epoch;--the lightning, without which the fuel never would have burnt. The History of the World, I said already, was the Biography of Great Men.
I’m still going with Hitler having to be born first WWII even if a guy called Carlyle once was over excited by Great men.
The great man theory of history is not "human beings have agency over history," it is "special people make history." In the Great Man view, Hitler (or perhaps some non-evil equivalent figure, since Carlyle was a bit of a moralist in his perception) would come to power even without WW1 or the Treaty of Versailles or the Great Depression or the Weimar Republic being a creaky piece of crap.
If you mean "powerful people have agency over history," that's not great man theory. Great man theory is that there is something uniquely special about the great men themselves - that if we restarted history from 1918, all the same Great Men would rise to power in the 20s and 30s and 40s and so on (until, one presumes, we are far enough past the point of divergence that none of them are born).
Someone would have eventually discovered gunpowder.
"Eventually" is a word that hides a lot. It took centuries after the development of gunpowder for effective firearms to be developed - suppose that c. 1700 European chemists discover the formula. How long would it take them to make a good gun, rather than some comically shit handcannon? How would history have gone differently without gunpowder being available to the Mongols, the conquistadors, or the Russians in their taming of the steppes?
History looks very different with a Hitler who stopped at Poland or just reclaimed territories lost after WW1.
WW2 under different circumstances could have been the world vs Stalin instead of the world vs Hitler leading to communism taking the place of fascism as the unthinkable political system.
I'm not so sure. Rising fascist movements were a thing in more than just Germany in the post-WWI Europe (see Mussolini), and I think it's quite probable that we just get a different fascist leader in 1930s Germany. The big difference is that if we don't get Hitler, maybe that regime is just the regular kind of awful to Jews (harassment, bullying, expulsion) and not the Holocaust.
Even Mussolini wouldn't have been bold enough to do things like invade Greece if not for Hitler.
Without the Holocaust, there would not have been an Israel, i.e., a Jewish state in the middle of a predominantly Muslim region. Doesn't that count as "changing the course of history", at least for the Middle East?
I'm skeptical of that. A non-Holocaust Fascist Germany might have exiled even more Jews to Israel than IRL, and a lot of folks were already there in Israel trying to build it (and leading resistance movements to the British forces of Mandatory Palestine).
I think they were likely going to try for a state in the WW2 aftermath even if no Holocaust occurred - and the international community might have gone along, because "partition and ethnic cleansing to create 'homogenous' ethnic states" was sort of common in that era (a ton of it happened right after WW1 when the Ottoman and Austro-Hungarian empires fell).
That, and also there was Stalin, he was about to control most of the jews at about that time anyway, they would have tried to leave, and the mandatory Palestine would have been one of their only options anyway. Heartzel became a Zionist precisely because something was clearly coming, Hitler or not
Well, yeah but if we're going full butter fly effect, you don't need a "great man" for your "great man" theory
I think you misunderstood the "butterfly effect". From Hitler to Holocaust, to foundation of Israel, are all relatively direct consequences. The butterfly effect, in contrast, denotes the phenomenon of a miniscule change in the starting conditions of a chaotic system leading to observably different outcomes without apparent causal connections between the change and the outcome. When the causal connection is obvious, as it is here, it's not the butterfly effect.
The quick version is that supposing Elon accelerated electric cars, rocketry and populism by 20 years, we’d still have got them in 20 years’ time. Apart from when rapid changes elsewhere have been important (e.g. AI), you wouldn’t expect 20 years’ timing difference to matter in the scheme of things.
With rocketry, I actually do think Musk mattered for more than just timing. You can see the counterfactual with Bezos (smart guy who is interested in space stuff and willing to put lots of money into it), and it's much less impressive.
Is it really less impressive? It looks to me like the tortoise and the hare, one company is building a sustainable business, the other is trying to speedrun getting to Mars and damn the wreckage along the way.
Then look again. Glacially slow progress does not equate sustainability, especially not in extremely capital intensive sectors like launch services. While BO is still looking forward to their first paid orbital launch, SpaceX has been raking in serious revenue for a long time now through Falcon 9 and Starlink – no "speedrun to Mars", quite the opposite actually.
As much as I hate on Musk as a person, SpaceX is really, really impressive. Probably because Gwynne Shotwell has been running the show since before Musk has gone full retard.
Yeah but if you hate Elon as you should then SpaceX succeeded despite Elon not because of him /s
What about major historical forks in the road like Lenin being smuggled into Russia in 1917 and pushing very radical communism as opposed to the more moderate communists who were willing to work with the government? Or FDR deciding to embargo Japan leading to the Pacific War? Hitler goes without saying. Even if Germany was at a breaking point, it could have ended up under a less extremist fascist dictator like Francisco Franco or maybe even a highly charismatic communist who blamed capitalists in general rather than Jews for the humiliation of WW1.
I think even with Lenin, the Bolsheviks would have been in a strong position to try something like the October Revolution - the conditions had been set for it by the Kerensky government.
ya, individuals definitely define periods of history by being extraordinary, but they dont necesarily alter its course in any meaningful way. at least that would be far more rare if at all possible. A shakespeare can do what 100 lesser poets cannot, but hes not going to invent a new language. we still speak english. there's obviously limits to the impact a 'great man' can have.
Shakespeare didn't invent a new language, but William the Conqueror caused a new language to be invented.
And while it's also not inventing the entire language, Hangul, the current *writing system* of the Korean language, is said to have been spearheaded by King Sejong in the 15th century. [The original version of this comment said something stronger, but I'm seeing more ambiguous statements on the Web when I check again.] I think there's some South Asian and Southeast Asian languages that have had similar major reforms pushed by powerful individual leaders, but I don't remember which.
Hey Scott, I'm looking to turn "Universal love, said the cactus person" and "Idol Words" into audio dramas, as part of a program of live readings with music&foley accompaniment.
Seeing how you're still alive and such it's probably appropriate to ask for your permission, so first question is, are you ok with that?
Second question (assuming first question is a yes): are you interested in the result? Should I send the finished recordings your way and if so, where to?
Plan is to perform at raves and such and currently I cannot imagine any real money would be involved for anyone. However, if you would like to talk about compensation or conditions for that, please let me know where to reach you for further discussion.
Thanks for all you do & kind regards
As someone pointed out on another thread the blog posts are licensed under CC: https://slatestarcodex.com/about/
Any Germans here who want to discuss the election results?
I think from the perspective of „Only Nixon could go to China“ the result is not the worst. If CDU+SPD form a coalition they can reform the dept break and allow more investments into infrastructure and are kept in check by are rather big progressive block in the opposition. I could imagine (/hope) that the later also helps to shift the discussions more towards progressiv topics (unlike the last term were the opposition was mainly a big conservativ and right wing block).
Before the election, I was quite worried about a government with SPD involvement (instead of CDU+Greens, which looked possible for some time) – mostly because of their lackluster support of Ukraine and military spending, and their commitment to raise pensions, which is completely inconceivable given the demographic developments and the share of the federal budget which already subsidises the pension system.
Now that Scholz stepped back in favour of Klingbeil, I am much less worried about the military side of this. I hope for political realism on pensions, and we're set for the most critical issues.
I'm not optimistic that CDU will be able to curb stifling regulation of businesses, but I'm willing to give them a chance.
Result's? Progressiv topics? Were instead of where? You are struggling hard to make your text intelligible in english while adressing germans? Wenn Du Dich mit deutschen austauschen willst, schreib doch einfach deutsch. But, okay, maybe it is worthwhile to share a talk between germans on this forum. I just can't contribute anything sufficiently kind, true and necessary, sorry.
Couple of things to be optimistic about; it could have been much worse. Primarily I'm glad that CDU+AfD cannot form a government, because nobody but the CDU would go into a coalition with them. Also glad that Merz's antics just before the election revitalized the Left party, enough that they got solidly above 5%. Also glad that Putin's red bitches from the BSW took some votes off Putin's brown bitches from the AfD while still staying below 5%. Also glad that nobody trusts the supposed economic-liberal FDP with their econ competence and they also stayed below 5%.
"Primarily I'm glad that CDU+AfD cannot form a government"
I beg your pardon? Granted I am only an American, but every graph I've seen of Bundestag seat allocation indicates that CDU/CSU can form a two-party coalition with either AfD or SPD and have a majority. The CDU/AfD coalition would have a larger, firmer majority than CDU/SPD.
OP is probably forgetting that <50% of votes can translate to >50% of seats (because of the parties which didn't make the 5% threshold)
Oh, maybe! I guess that would make sense, just naively adding 28.5% to 20.8% and coming up with 49.3%.
Unfortunately the Putin's bitches part is not true. The smallest part of BSW votes comes from former AFDians. https://www.tagesschau.de/wahl/archiv/2025-02-23-BT-DE/charts/analyse-wanderung/chart_1873623.shtml
Thanks, hadn't seen that graphic yet. Considering how close CDU+AfD came to a combined 50+% though, every little bit helped.
German here.
> If CDU+SPD form a coalition they can reform the dept break and allow more investments into infrastructure […]
In an ideal world, this is what would be happening. In the real world, especially in the real Germany, I'm afraid that additional debt will be used to finance social programs instead of investments in infrastructure and national defense. When you listen to the German Mittelstand, you almost never hear about defunct infrastructure, but always about how they're drowning in excessive and incompetently implemented regulations. They would love to expand their operations and invest in their companies, but can't, because some bureaucrats in the Amt make that impossible.
I don't know how to realistically solve that conundrum. Will spending even more money solve those problems? I seriously doubt it. In fact, I fear it'll make the situation even worse.
The CDU might be more sympathetic to deregulation than, e.g., the Greens (who I voted for, for the record).
No single party has the political will to radically reduce regulations and bureaucracy (much less a coalition of two or more parties), there are too many vested interests. May the FDP if they got an absolute majority, but even then I have my doubts.
No, we'd need an outsider to pull this through. Someone like Milei, paired with the productivity and efficiency of German SMEs, would be a truly transformative force.
I think we've avoided the worst conceivable outcomes. It's good to know that we'll probably get solid support for Ukraine, a moderate reform on immigration, possibly some economy-friendly measures...
I'm relieved that the BSW and the FDP are out for now - the FDP has the potential to be a useful party, but not with Christian Lindner, and the only thing that the BSW could have been good for was taking votes from the AfD, but that didn't happen. Also, their absence means that a two-party coalition is possible, which should be easier to establish and more stable than a three-party coalition.
20% for the AfD is not good in the long run, but a lot of things can happen in four years - maybe we're lucky, and both Putin and his American lackey bite the dust soon?
BSW got just under 5%, many of which would otherwise have gone to AfD. So they did take votes from them.
I just checked the voter migration charts. An estimated 60,000 votes for BSW from previous AfD voters, compared to 350,000 from Linke and 450,000 from SPD. Yes, maybe some of those would otherwise have gone to the AfD, but it's not like BSW attracted AfD voters directly.
Also, the 4.9% of votes for the BSW don't count in the allocation of seats in the Bundestag, so everyone else's share is inflated by 20/19... so for the AfD, it's probably a wash.
That's interesting. Do you have a URL for that? I like the way German election results statistics are given in such depth.
https://www.tagesschau.de/wahl/archiv/2025-02-23-BT-DE/analyse-wanderung.shtml
These are based on polling data, obviously (since there cannot be official data tracking the votes of individuals).
American here, but curious about the results and optimistic that they may point to some European ability to counteract the captured US government. Two questions:
1) Do you think the presumptive coalition will be able to encourage more unity in the face of the Russia/Trump alliance? If not, what are the effective blockers in Europe?
2) The English language media I’ve seen has been very concerned about the AfD, but seems to be sighing in relief. Is that a reasonable response, or is the festering Ossi vote waiting in the wings like the RN in France? What policy changes could bring AfD voters back into the fold? Would some reindustrialization in the East or other economic wins shift things, or are AfD voters now partisan enough (like US Republicans) that policy changes won’t shift the tribal borders much? How much attention should we pay to this trend?
1) I hope so. I think the key players are Germany, France and Poland - if their leaders see eye-to-eye, good things can happen.
2) I hope that an immigration reform (plus reindustrialization if we can pull it off) will move some voters back to the center.
Also, there's a long-standing pattern in German politics that right-wing protest parties disintegrate due to bickering and infighting after at most a decade, because the people who gather in such parties are self-selected to be quarrelsome assholes. The AfD is long overdue IMO; I guess they've been kept afloat by successes in the elections, but any kind of headwind could cause them to crumble. (I admit this may be wishful thinking.)
I think AfD is at the point of escape velocity where even a big split would not be fatal for them and allow one of the factions to rebuild.
What kind of immigration reform is actually possible/likely in Germany? The non-AfD parties have been resolutely refusing to give the people what they want on immigration for decades, are they really going to start now?
It think that topic was made bigger then it actually is. I think that topic got so big because during the last government there was a clear split, the ruling parties were the ones who were historically on the "pro immigration" side and the opposition parties where the "against immigration" parties.
The changes to the immigration laws from the last years are already having an effect and the majority of the immigrants are having jobs after a while. Additionally the EU asylum reform will take effect this year.
With the CDU now part of the government it will be against there interest to further fuel the conversation. I believe the demographic changes are so monumental that the pressure from the economy to allow work migrants will shift the conversation.
They will if they've got any sense. Personally if I was Merz I'd consider offering AfD full control over immigration policy, in return for them giving full backing to his foreign and defence policies.
That would be political suicide, seeing how he swore on everything that's holy that there would be no collaboration with the AfD.
You may be right -- I'm not an expert on the ins and outs of German politics.
Yes. The CDU risked a major scandal a few weeks ago, letting the Bundestag vote on a fairly aggressive immigration bill that only they and the AfD ended up supporting. I assume that if you spend that much political capital, and you win the election, at least a slightly reduced bill will be passed (the SPD seems to be willing to take some steps in that direction as well).
How strict is party discipline in the German political system? In the US, representatives and senators can pretty much break with their party whenever they want. In the UK, going against the party line is quite rare (though free votes have been allowed, e.g. the recent euthanasia debates). I know there were some intra-party splits on those immigration measures recently. If the CDU and SPD leadership come to a consensus on an immigration reform bill, and they can afford to lose about a dozen votes, is it pretty much guaranteed to pass? Or could enough SPD or CDU members of parliament kill the bill (assuming there aren't any votes from the AfD)?
Under normal circumstances, party discipline is quite strict. There are rare occasions where it is explicitly lifted if the topic touches on difficult ethical issues (a vote on a reform of abortion law is the only example I can think of right now), but otherwise delegates are expected to suck it up and vote with the party line.
Since the ruling coalition split up last November, circumstances were not normal, and majorities were more ad-hoc, but the CDU's plan is to form a stable coalition pronto and return to normalcy.
Thank you, this is good to hear.
How likely do you think it is that Hungary / Slovakia/ Slovenia will be spoilers to a more muscular European approach? Or will something happen outside of the EU organization where the NATO rump might be able to dig in better.
(Also: I’m so sorry my country is putting the world in jeopardy, again. We tried as hard as we could…)
I sure hope that it will be possible to either sideline Hungary etc. or bully them into cooperation. (Not the MO I'd prefer, but these are tough times.)
Is Slovenia pro-Putin? I wan't aware of that.
I suspect what might happen in measures taken both within and without the EU. The problem with the EU is a lot of things require unanimity meaning things can't get done
"Is Slovenia pro-Putin?"
I don't think they are.
I have a Substack that I've been writing / updating intermittently exploring the idea of cooperation, in the context of the global future, building towards how and why cooperative AI, and cooperation with AI, is needed, and possible, but very much not a default. https://exploringcooperation.substack.com/
If people find this interesting enough to subscribe, I'm likely to prioritize it higher, and post more - and I'm also open to any kind of feedback on the content. (Either as comments, or directly; I'm easy to find online.)
About me, as @Mallard suggested: I'm a public policy researcher / Tetlock-era Good Judgement Superforecaster / Expert in AI risk and Biorisk / university visiting lecturer who has worked as an independent contractor for Open Philanthropy, Future of Humanity Institute, RAND Corporation, and a variety of other EA-affiliated organizations. See: https://davidmanheim.com / https://linkedin.com/in/davidmanheim
What is your favorite post so far? Or what would be a good post to read first?
I think the best place to start, for those who aren't very familiar, is with the first or second post, which are short:
https://exploringcooperation.substack.com/p/why-write-about-cooperation
https://exploringcooperation.substack.com/p/cooperation-is-everywhere
My favorite so far is a harder choice, but probably this one, which approaches median SlateStarCodex length:
https://exploringcooperation.substack.com/p/cooperation-working-at-scale
I'm very excited about some of the future posts about the future and AI, but I keep getting excited about the posts I want to write, then I realize I can't cover parts of what I want to say without additional background about things I've been thinking about in the past several years - there's a lot to say!
You may want to edit in a few words about your credentials / background, since many people may skim your username or not recognize it, and figure it's just another random guy with a Substack.
Thanks, good call!
About the "why are building ugly now," question
This video provides an explanation of the trend towards simpler shapes, especially around windows: the invention of caulk!
I never heard of this in the context of this debate, and I found it pretty convincing.
If you're short on time you should still watch the first few minutes, the core of the argument is made there. Actually I would skip the last few minutes even if you have time, they're not the most informative.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DBOXF-FION4
TL:DW:
When you fit a window into its opening, it's never going to line up properly, that would require crazy tolerances of maybe a couple millimeters (you might be able to make windows that accurately but good luck building a substantial brick wall with tolerances under a centimeter)
(I would add that wooden windows and will probably shift with time, so a rigid joint probably wouldn't cut it)
Before the invention of silicone joints or expanding foam, this problem was solved by adding a bunch of overlapping pieces of wood or stone, that would be cut on site to fit both the opening and the windows, thus closing the gap and masking the inconsistencies. Obviously this was very labor-intensive, but once you're cutting pieces by hand one by one you might as well make them pretty and intricate
Now that we have caulk and expanding foam, it's way easier to mass-produce not only the windows but the structural elements of the facade, and then fill the gaps.
Of course this didn't come without difficulties, especially early on, but it seems quite hard to go back to the way things were
There's some truth in the politics- and trend- related narratives for sure, but I find a technological explanation more convincing when it comes to a single durable shift, with no cycles.
It also provides some ground to my feeling that even though I love old architecture, it would be weird to precisely mimic its style today: it's because the style used to be functional, and now it isn't anymore
Similarly windows used to have little brick arches at the top, to absorb downward force above the window; which required a bunch of manually cut bricks. These have been replaced by reinforced concrete lintels, which are off the shelf.
Good point!
Thanks for sharing this! I hadn’t heard this theory before, but it makes some sense to me.
I wish I had a better sense of where the physical/economic/social boundaries of the ugly building shift lie. I don’t wish there were baroque leaves in the facade of any building I go into, but seeing hermetically sealed polyhedral volumes without eaves gets my blood boiling quickly. My sense of comfort in housing is most pleased by Craftsman houses of the 1920s, which are short on ornament but long on accommodating normal human lives. If anything, those 1900-1930 houses I’m thinking of have less ornament (plywood cabinets, for example, and plain lumber molding) than the mass-produced 1980s tract home I grew up in. I like the caulking hypothesis, but I don’t have a sense of how much explanatory power to give it.
I see what you mean, and I think I agree, it's not just about ornaments
I feel like the caulking hypothesis does some work to explain why some ornaments fell out of fashion more systematically than others (namely frames and ledges around windows and doors)
Unrelated to the caulking question, I find wrought iron balconies are way prettier that balconies made of tubes and extruded profiles. That said, it I were to design my house I'm not sure I would be inclined to pay 3 times as much to have prettier balconies
(No idea if it's actually a factor of 3)
That's rather unconvincing.
If you're going to cut wood on site, making it intricate and pretty is a lot more work to be done. If you're mass-producing windows to be easily slotted in, then the cost of making mass-produced ornements is much lower.
Yes!
Maybe I wasn't clear, the idea isn't that the custom-made ornamented pieces were replaced by bland factory-made pieces
The idea is that they were rendered useless by caulk and expanding foam
So yes there is a difference between bland and ornamented, that hasn't changed
But it's a smaller difference than between non-existent and ornamented
Funny timing, just moments ago I posted "Should Tyler Believe in God? A Bayesian Update" ( https://orthopraxis.substack.com/p/should-tyler-believe-in-god-a-bayesian ), inspired by Tyler's recent CWT with Ross Douthat. Probably should have shoved most of the math into an appendix, a future edit perhaps. (Much of my intended audience may not have much Bayesian background, so I probably fell into the trap of wanting to clearly define everything.)