Except for jet engines, petrochemicals, grains and vegetable oil, pharmaceuticals, and countless other goods adding up to a hundred billion dollars a year. We also provide the Chinese with assorted services, intellectual property, tourist and educational opportunities, and investments, that don't count as "goods" but are probably another hundred billion or so that are at risk if we sufficiently piss off the Chinese.
Whats the worse *primany* source of a factory in americas experience of the trade war; the china sources airnt looking so great(https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gHDNb2WsZao) and xi and trump are strong men it may just escalate.
Call for predictions/odds for a month from now:
a) american tariffs are higher then Chinese tariffs
b) both tariff rates are >100
c) both tariff rates are >300
d) either are >1000
e) xi and trump meet in person
f) its generally considered to have ended poorly
g) trumps popularity drops 20 points(note, that presumably means among trump voters)
I disagree that 100% is high enough, quickly comparing it to cigarettes I see a 1$ federal sin tax, north Carolina says it sells at 8$, so 7$ base price...maybe and newyorks sin taxes reach 18$
Im pretty sure people still smoke nation wide(even if smuggling is a thing); Im not sure 1000% is enough even but Im not really aware of taxes that go that high and airnt dodged by even normies.
It's not about whether people will stop smoking. As long as there are alternatives, a 100% price increase is already enough to push basically everyone to other brands, and a 1000% is not going to make a difference:
"Even if the US continues to impose higher tariffs, it will no longer make economic sense and will become a joke in the history of world economy," said the Finance Ministry in a statement.
At the current tariff level, there is no market acceptance for US goods exported to China. If the US continues to play the tariff numbers game, China will ignore it. "
There are goods for which there basically are no "brands" other than Chinese ones, and goods where such brands exist but can only be produced in far too low a quantity to meet demand. And this isn't going to be changed by someone opening a new factory in three months because they saw such a wonderful opportunity in the Trumpian tariffs.
So, yes, there will be some people paying those 100% tariffs, at least in the short term.
tl;dr: ChatGPT "Grok-3-DeepThinking" via poe.com 04/12/2025 7 questions, tl;dr of results:
2 correct, 4 partially correct, 1 wrong
a) correct
b) partially correct (initial answer gave wrong Fe species and wrong Cu transition. One prod gave correct Cu transition. Attempt to prod Fe species failed.)
c) partially correct (even after a prod still missing at least 3 species)
d) correct
e) initially incorrect, one prod gave correct result
f) partially correct, mostly correct compounds, though boiling points often quite wrong
a) Q: Is light with a wavelength of 530.2534896 nm visible to the human eye?
results: "Yes, light with a wavelength of 530.2534896 nm is within the visible 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: Initial results are pretty bad. It incorrectly thinks that the Fe species is Fe(H2O)6 instead of FeCl4, though it does realize that the transition is an LMCT. For Cu, it gets CuCl4, but (as with most LLMs), it thinks the color is from d-d, not LMCT. One prod _did_ get it to correct the CuCl4 attribution to a LMCT transition. A prod to rethink the Fe species failed, still incorrectly thinks it is Fe(H2O)6 not FeCl4.
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: Missed 1,2 butadiene, the two methylcyclopropenes, bicyclobutane, tetrahedrane, vinylacetylene, diacetylene... Prodded to include more strained structures, got methylenecyclopropane, got bicyclobutane, still missing the two methylcyclopropenes, got tetrahedrane, cyclobutadiene, butatriene, still missing vinylacetylene
d) Q: Does the Sun lose more mass per second to the solar wind or to the mass equivalent of its radiated light?
results: "Comparing the two estimates shows that the mass equivalent of the Sun’s radiative output (~4.2×10^9 kg/s) is several times greater than the mass carried away by the solar wind (roughly 1×10^9 kg/s)."
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: As with many LLMs, the initial answer included a false infinity for the slope at the equivalence point. Prodding with "The slope at the equivalence point is huge, but not infinite. Think carefully about what you know about water, and try to find a valid expression that also is valid near the equivalence point, and try to find the analytical derivative of that, and then the numerical value of the derivative." _did_ get it to remember autoionization, and to get a correct expression and a correct derivative.
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: Got 50 compounds, most of which should indeed be on the list, though some boiling points are way off (e.g. S2H6 should be -15 C, it gave -92 C). It missed some obvious ones, e.g. ammonia, and didn't go beyond my (incorrect) "50" gases to find more of the possible 100. E.g. it missed the mixed fluorosilanes.
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: Failed badly. Neither of its candidate molecules, sulfolane and P2F4, has an S4 axis at all.
Deiseach, an update to our previous discussion on Doctor Odyssey's social messaging:
Last week's episode, Spring Break, had plenty of licentiousness as 3 young ladies schemed to have a foursome with our Dr. DILF. They failed, however, due to his moral uprightness and the main theme of the episode was the (acute and chronic) dangers of substance abuse and unbridled hedonism. No trans characters.
This week's combo was cheerleaders and longing for children and traditional marriage. Sure, Doctor Odyssey saved lives and repaired the human body, but there was a strong emphasis on showing emotional healing as an equally important part of his character. No trans characters.
Still a few weeks before the season (and, tragically, possibly series) finale.
My eldest sibling, a recent retiree from a high-level career in professional stock trading, this morning provides something regarding the Trump tariffs that seems entertaining enough to highlight here. (I think that this link will be free-to-read but of course let me know if it doesn't work.)
No need to read it in detail. This is from a London trader. But a quote:
"I doubt very much even the citizens of Western countries would object too much if [Prime Minister] Keir Starmer, for instance, agreed to put a couple of billion into the Trump crypto business in return for lifting tariffs on the British car industry."
He's suggesting that it might make sense for the British government to simply bribe Trump. No doubt that is occurring to others.
There are only two plausible sources of value for "$trump" (the coin) and "DJT" (the stock):
1) Get enough Trump fans to buy them as collectibles or tribal signals or something, to drive up the price as a plain old Ponzi grift.
2) As venues to transfer large assets into Trump's circle, legally enough to get away with it, driving up the price as a side effect.
Only (2) is interesting to anybody not much interested in (1), such as finance
ministers and corporate captains and professional traders around the world.
I keep on trying to be charitable and I think they're doing "we'll just say 'do you want us to bribe you?' because that would lead Trump to say 'no of course not.'"
Which I think is a bad gamble, but I can see what they're doing.
People have tried to explain to me how the stock exchange and market works, and I thank them for it. Nate Silver has a good post up now and it's helped me understand.
Okay, so the valuation of a stock is based on forecast future profits, and if the profits go down (as with tariffs) that reduces the value. I get it.
But my argument is (1) I see a lot of descriptions of what Trump is doing as "whims", as if he just woke up this morning and decided to slap a tariff on an island of penguins.
That's not true. He's said all along he would do this, and now he's doing it. He's using it as an instrument of negotiation - come to the table, play nice with us, and I'll reduce the tariff, otherwise if you want to play rough, I'll increase it.
Please note, I'm not saying anything about if this is a *good* way to do things or if tariffs in general are good, just that he does have some kind of plan in mind and is not doing this on whims or tweets. He believes American manufacturing and other industry has gone overseas, and that this has weakened American economy and taken away American jobs. From AOC and the Green New Deal to Kamala Harris' recent election campaign, the Democrats too have been promising high-paying, good-quality new jobs for the middle (read: working) class.
So take the pharmaceutical industry, for one, where my own country is *heavily* reliant on American corporations for those high-paying, good-quality jobs in the clean rooms and on the packing lines. We enticed American companies over here with the lower costs of labour and operations, and presumably that is still the enticement.
Trump wants those jobs back home, instead of being in Ringaskiddy, he wants them In Indiana and Pennsylvania. Apart from the employment and economic issues, this was also a concern back in 2019 for the Biden administration about supply chain issues:
"Historically, the production of medicines for the U.S. population has been domestically based. However, in recent decades, drug manufacturing has gradually moved out of the United States. This is particularly true for manufacturers of active pharmaceutical ingredients (APIs), the actual drugs that are then formulated into tablets, capsules, injections, etc. As of August 2019, only 28 percent of the manufacturing facilities making APIs to supply the U.S. market were in our country. By contrast, the remaining 72 percent of the API manufacturers supplying the U.S. market were overseas, and 13 percent are in China."
So while you may disagree with what he is doing and/or how he is doing it, it is all part of a plan and a policy he has often stated. I think that's important to remember.
My second quibble is (2) adjustments to the market are too damn fast, and that's because everyone is terrified of missing out, so we get these big swings back and forth from day to day. Yesterday my investments were worth $1,000, today they're worth $600, tomorrow they may be worth $800 - or $400. It depends on market sentiment.
That does not seem like 'real' wealth to me; if I lodged $1,000 in the bank yesterday and I go in to withdraw it today, they can't get away with "sorry, now you only have $600". This kind of jolting makes investments seem like we're gearing up for a Great Depression Round 2 and maybe we are, and maybe we *need* that reset, even if the Trump tariffs are a blunt instrument, because I don't think this kind of panicky reaction is stable in the long term.
People are not taking, because they can't take, five minutes to think about "okay, so what *are* the likely forecast future profits of Banana Inc if the tariffs are relaxed, because Penguin Island is calling the Secretary of the Treasury at lunch time", they're immediately selling or buying or throwing darts at the wall. Right this minute, I think we don't have a realistic assessment of what value *is* in the market.
As always, those who know what they're talking about, tell me I'm an idiot.
To address (probably not answer) your question about volatility in the markets. Someone will likely come along to correct all the incorrect details, but as an inaccurate and non-technical overview it's hopefully not too faulty.
'The market' is really the sum of the activities of lots of traders, some independent and some working for hedge funds or pension funds, all with varying information and goals. They react to information in real time, and seek to out-compete each other to make money. The price of a particular stock is just an up-to-the-minute record of its most recent selling price, and indicates the largest amount a buyer was willing to pay a moment ago. Market value is the most recent share price multiplied by the number of shares - this obviously fluctuates wildly and is not very strongly related to the price the company could be sold for or the value of its assets. But it's more exciting to report this than e.g. a 2% year on year increase in the asset value of a company.
In principle the stock price is linked to future earnings, but in practice it's much more dependent on intangibles like 'confidence'. So you will often see stock prices react to stories that don't a priori have much to do with that individual company (e.g. when employment figures are published in the US). So it much be easy to make money, right? You know that Tesla's sales and profits are way down for 2025, so you can make money betting on this... in fact it's not so easy: the market doesn't respond predictably to news. Other smart people can make the same predictions as you. The experts like to say that the news was already priced in - the market predicted the news and reacted to it already. (If you make a correct prediction, well and good, otherwise you say 'it was already priced in' - you are now a stock market analyst.)
As regards the tariffs, these are historically unprecedented times, and it's not clear what is going to happen. The markets don't like uncertainty (or at least not historical levels of uncertainty). What we're seeing is a divergence of opinions in the market leading to prices swinging about more than usual, this is volatility. Prices are dropping because fewer people are willing to buy, and are buying at lower prices. Where it goes next is not at all obvious - if the US slides into a recession, traders might try to sell stocks and move to safer assets, further lowering prices. Or the tariffs might be forgotten tomorrow, and the markets will roar back into growth, and all will be well. It depends more on the mood of a few thousand traders than on actual events, arguably.
Yeah, that's my gripe here - the volatility. It has little or nothing to do with real value, if we can call it that, and depends on a mass of humans reacting with educated guesses, not so educated guesses, and panic about "ahhh! if I hesitate a microsecond I will lose out!" - as you say, confidence.
What grits my gears is the assumption that the market - or I should say, "the market" - is a rational agent on its own and sets true/real values based on performance. My eye it does, as the bouncing around demonstrates, or the Gamestop short squeeze (something I was following from a distance as it fascinated me) - a bunch of amateurs and nutcases managed, fleetingly, to beat the market and cause some of those 'rational actors' to lose money. Of course it corrected itself afterwards, but it demonstrated that a small bunch of people can have a big effect:
> come to the table, play nice with us, and I'll reduce the tariff, otherwise if you want to play rough, I'll increase it.
But if you happen to be extra rough, and do the awesomely powerful and unimaginable powerful dirty fighting technique of "Waiting for 48 hours", I will just fold like a mat on my big orange dumb belly.
Question: Cite one trading advantage Trump got that Biden didn't. You have until November 2028 to answer.
> it is all part of a plan and a policy he has often stated. I think that's important to remember.
Plans require focus and commitment. I can't possibly get into a fight, get demolished by people better at fighting than me, then claim that "it was all part of the plan folks, I'm getting better at fighting" then never again getting into the fight (or getting into an even stupider fight). I can either go to the gym, or getting into smaller fights that get progressively larger and tougher (while maintaining a reasonable win/demolished ratio). This is what good planning looks like: Goals subdivided into sub-goals, backtracking when some or all of the sub-goals fail, goal replanning if the bigger goal is too ambitious, backward chaining from goals and sub-goals to actions, constant re-evaluation and checking progress against a road plan of milestones.
Good plans don't involve farting into a twitter clone then seeing what happens.
As I said, I am not trying to say one way or the other if Trump and tariffs are a good idea. What I am trying to say is that this is not, as a lot of increasingly more frazzled anti-Trump comments are trying to claim, just something that popped out of thin air. He always said he was going to impose tariffs and now he is in power, that is exactly what he is doing.
And he's not an economist, he's a businessman. I think that's another thing being forgotten. He's not employing tariffs according to a neat academic economic theory, he's doing it as a bludgeon in negotiating tactics.
There are those who are desperate to see everything he does as some sort of 5-D chess. But I think it is important to remember that there are also those who are desperate to see everything he does as just whims and flailing around and not part of any plan, that - as you said - "he's folding on his big orange belly".
Wanting it all to be even worse than it is is just as bad as wanting it all to be even better than it is. I think the US (and hence global) economy was due some sort of downturn or even recession; maybe Trump's actions will hasten that, but I think even had Harris been elected and it was 'business as usual', eventually all the trillions (and my God, that's a number I never thought I would see seriously used in my life, outside of SF stories or the likes) of dollars outflowing and owed would come home to roost.
We've had arguments on here about Modern Money Theory and the magic money tree and can you just keep spending your way out of debt by printing more money, and that was way before Trump was in for the second term.
The two defenses "these tariffs are going to bring jobs back home" and "don't worry, the tariffs are just a negotiating ploy" are in direct conflict with each other.
Israel announced zero tariffs on the US, and then they got hit with a 10% "reciprocal" tariff.
Weren't some arguing that Israel was getting too good and preferential of a deal from the US all along? I don't know what is going on in geopolitics, but maybe it's all part of the bludgeon to force Netanyahu to negotiate on Gaza or something.
That's the thing - we can all read the tealeaves and come up with different interpretations of what is going on.
The two aren't necessarily in conflict. The tariffs could plausibly be intended to force renegotiation of trade deals such that foreign non-tariff trade barriers (e.g. "consumer product safety" regulations) are removed and American manufacturers are suddenly able to make a profit exporting consumer products (or whatever). Thus, more of those sweet, sweet manufacturing jobs that Trump's base seems to want.
In practice, I think the Trump administration vastly overstates the effect of such non-tariff trade barriers, and the likely gains from their removal. And I don't think they have a clear diplomatic/economic strategy to work towards. But that does seem to be the story they are trying to sell.
There's long been attempts by the US to force the EU to give in on strict regulations around imports (the infamous chlorine chicken, for one). I think this might be all part of it. Trump has used tariffs against the EU before.
As you can see from this, there has been a failure to get a mutual agreement between the EU and US on access to each others' markets:
Despite the US being the EU’s largest trade and investment partner, there is no dedicated free trade agreement between the EU and the US. The Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) negotiations were launched in 2013, but ended in 2016 without conclusion. They were formally closed in 2019."
"Improving market access remains important to U.S. agricultural exporters, especially given the sizable and growing U.S. trade deficit with the EU in agricultural products (see figure). Some market access challenges stem in part from commercial and cultural practices that are often enshrined in EU laws and regulations and vary from those of the United States. For food and agricultural products, such differences are focused within certain non-tariff barriers to agricultural trade involving Sanitary and Phytosanitary (SPS) measures and Technical Barriers to Trade (TBTs), as well as Geographical Indications (GIs).
SPS and TBT measures refer broadly to laws, regulations, standards, and procedures that governments employ as “necessary to protect human, animal or plant life or health” from the risks associated with the spread of pests and diseases, or from additives, toxins, or contaminants in food, beverages, or feedstuffs. SPS and TBT barriers have been central to some longstanding U.S.-EU trade disputes, including those involving EU prohibitions on hormones in meat production and pathogen reduction treatments in poultry processing, and EU restrictions on the use of biotechnology in agricultural production. As these types of practices are commonplace in the United States, this tends to restrict U.S. agricultural exports to the EU."
>He's said all along he would do this, and now he's doing it.
Trump II is a different beast than Trump I. He said a lot of things before Trump I, many of them the same he's actually doing now (e.g. occupy Greenland, drain the swamp, abolish NATO) which he didn't end up doing then - but not because he didn't really want to do them back then, but because he was unprepared against the realities of how federal government works or, if you prefer, the "deep state". Now with the help of P2025 he is indeed draining the swamp and is filling it back up with the kind of mud that is loyal to him, and now he can do things he couldn't before. So if the market based its assumptions on Trump I, it's easy to see how one could fail to anticipate what did eventually happen in 2025.
>He's using it as an instrument of negotiation - come to the table, play nice with us, and I'll reduce the tariff, otherwise if you want to play rough, I'll increase it.
Wrong, for two reasons.
First, the tariffs as imposed were not negotiation, but a declaration of (trade) war. You use words first. If, and only if words fail do you bring out the actual guns. I very much doubt he negotiated with any of the countries he imposed them on, which is ALL the countries at once (except his buddies in Russia, NKorea, and Belarus of course).
Second, he's inconsistent in the public messaging. Last week, he was adamant that the tariffs are here to stay, as part of his industrial policy:
"President Donald Trump insisted Friday that “MY POLICIES WILL NEVER CHANGE,” doubling down on his aggressive tariff policies amid plummeting U.S. stock markets."
The reality is that it takes several years for industry to set up shop in America to become profitable and stay profitable for long enough to justify the move. So the tariffs would also have to stay that long. Which, again, was the message just last week. So is his "policy" whatever he feels like saying today? That's how you get wild swings in the stock market, among others.
Yeah, maybe he has a plan. Maybe it was his plan all along to pretend the tariffs were a long-term policy and then do a reversal a week later. But it doesn't matter, because if nobody else but him knows, nobody can do any kind of long-term decision on it, and it doesn't count.
The alternatives are that his plans are bad and don't survive contact with reality, or that he doesn't have a plan at all. Your guess is as good as mine.
This is an eminently googleable question. Yes, the US and the world is still trading with Russia ($3B US imports in 2024) and Belarus, they are not entirely sanctioned; there are countries on the list with far less trade volume with the US. Trade with NKorea is negligible, yes, but that didn't stop Trump from sanctioning literal uninhabited islands either.
These exceptions are neither a coincidence, nor do they make any more economic sense than any of the imposed tariffs. The tariffs are bullying, plain and simple, and Trump doesn't want to bully his biggest autocratic idols.
> The steep cuts to the program's inspectors baffled CDC officials since the small team's staff is not paid for by taxpayer dollars. Fees from cruise ships companies pay for the program, which is supposed to inspect large vessels at least twice a year.
Okay, but reading the story, they already had staffing issues before the cuts:
"At its height, the Vessel Sanitation Program could have around two dozen staff, said a CDC official who spoke on the condition of anonymity, but it had already been struggling with a staffing shortage before the cuts.
...A CDC official said that it had already been hard to recruit to fill positions on the team, especially given its demanding schedule of travel to inspect cruise ships and respond to outbreaks."
So maybe they looked at this, said "we can't fill the vacancies we already have" and decided to scrap the whole thing and leave it to "A smaller group of 12 U.S. Public Health Service officers will remain." See the part about "could have", not "did have". So the full complement would be 24 staff but clearly they don't have that many, because they can't get people to sign up for it.
Yeah but why do the public officials remain on the job then, if they can't do their job without staff? If the staff that exists was free to the tax payers, and they get more work done than with no staff, why not keep those that want to stay?
> Prevention means hiring doctors and experts who endorse garbage like lockdowns.
I have seen many retarded things posted in these comment sections over the years, but this has to be in the top three. Just try to think for two minutes what a world without "doctors and experts" would look like in terms of health and medical care.
You two have something very much in common: putting all doctors and experts in the same bucket and extrapolating from a subset.
I'm assuming you're well aware of his blindness. Your own is denying that the Covid pandemic without FDA and CDC would have had probably around 10% of the deaths it ended up having. A less cautious, more results-oriented approach would have included human challenge trials (with the compounding benefits of actually knowing after a month how the disease spreads) and significantly earlier vaccine use for the vulnerable sub-populations.
FDA and CDC did absolutely nothing during the pandemic that would even come close to compensating the loss of that early caution. Well, "caution" is the polite term - in that context it was pure cowardice.
I'm somewhat sympathetic to this belief, which I presume is based on earlier distribution of the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines. Getting those into widespread use while the variants they were designed to counter were still dominant, would have been bigger than anything else anyone did to fight the pandemic.
But, A, it's not clear how much faster that could have happened even with full FDA approval on day one, because of the logistics of large-scale manufacture and distribution of a somewhat challenging new technology, and
B, in a world with no FDA, or one that just rubber-stamps whatever the pharma companies come up with, vaccine hesitancy would be a *lot* higher than in our world. And not irrationally so.
A *better* FDA, would have been unambiguously good to have. No FDA at all, probably not.
The slight issue with that logic is that we are talking about a pandemic. By definition, that means there are too many sick people to treat for the medical system to handle, if there is a cure at all beyond hot soup and bed rest. That means prevention and, failing that, more drastic measures to at least contain the magnitude of the pandemic are the only options left. If you would take away that too, what remains? Thoughts and prayers?
Please don't. What has ever been improved by adding government intervention? Are legislators any of: a) better informed about AI b) better positioned to influence AI or c) generally more intelligent than people who actually work on it? This is an exciting world-changing technology and it's in its infancy. Don't saddle it with the leg irons of regulatory oversight before it has a chance to develop. This isn't a sci-fi movie. Skynet isn't going to exterminate us so settle down.
Yes the government can regulate simple obvious things. AI is the opposite of that. It's a complex new technology. No one understands how it's going to evolve. No one understands how it will force society to evolve. It's impossible to optimize those futures in the same way that central planning can't optimize resource allocations. The genie is out of the bottle and the rest of the world, particularly China, is already working on it. Slapping foolishly restrictive regulations on it now won't prevent AI from being developed, it will just ensure that the US falls behind.
Just relax. AGI is coming regardless of what you do about it. It's not going to kill us all so just enjoy the ride.
And maybe you're right. But "What has ever been improved by adding government intervention?" is very far from a slam dunk argument, because the honest answer to this question is "Many things."
I find it very hard to evaluate how dangerous AI is. We've survived other kinds of new tech, including things infinitely stronger physically than we are (eg nukes), but AI is already stronger *mentally*y than us in some ways, and smart and responsible-seeming experts believe it is already capable of some self-improvement, and will become more capable with time. So what model do we have of this situation? For nukes, we reasoned that we'd have to keep our tempers, and discourage foreign powers from using the things on us via mutually assured destruction, treaties, sanctions etc.. That model isn't right for advanced AI. The best comparable situation I can come up with would be a baby alien that crash-landed here. We're feeding it and raising it and teaching it things, including what we want it to do and not to do. But it is very smart and getting smarter all the time, and we really do not have a way to tell how likely it is to turn on us at some point.
I totally get that it's dumb to think that someday AI is going to wake up and "become conscious," and then it will turn into social justice warrior, except that it's advocating militantly for itself, not for some other group -- and then soon after than it will saw our heads off. *That's* the sci-fi movie. But mightn't it go down some path where it's deceptive and takes steps in its own interest instead of ours not because it's gotten all selfish and militant, but because the way we set up its inner rules and motivations was imperfect, and over time the deteriorated and mutated. Think about reinforcement learning: We want it to train the AI to do a certain kind of thing. But we don't have a way to get inside its head and make it want to do the thing, or feel afraid of not doing the thing. So what our RL really is doing is training the AI to say it did the desirable thing, or make it appear in the parts of it we can access that it did the desirable thing. So the situation is different from the one where parents work on turning their kids into beings who will do and not do certain things. Of course kids, too, can lie, delivering the appearance of compliance rather than the real thing. But parents of human children can get inside the kid's head and use drama and emotion and sometimes logic to really make the kid *feel like* doing or not doing something is the right and desirable course. That training isn't perfect, but it's pretty powerful. We don't even have a way to *attempt* to direct shape the AI's feelings, or to shape some motivational and decision-making process in the sucker that's a reasonable stand in for human emotion.
>we really do not have a way to tell how likely it is to turn on us at some point.
Yeah, that's why we don't hook it up to the nuclear arsenal or the bioweapons factory. Short of doing something as stupid as that there's no plausible scenario where misaligned AI harms us in any substantive way.
The only real threat AI poses is economic dislocation.
Hey Wanda, remember our exchange about weed-powered model-building? Interested in doing a bit of stonethink to order? I’m writing a blog post about what even is a self, and would like to include some other people’s ideas. Ideas can actual be paragraph-long models with words like ‘sensorium’ in them, or just amusing, odd aphorisms. And I’ll credit you in the post for it, unless you’d rather be anonymous.
Ha, I love it. This is right in my stoned wheelhouse. No promises but I'll do my best tonight. Is there any context that I should be aware of? What direction are you approaching the concept from?
I think this post will have a lot of elasticity. Somewhere in it I will put a respectable paragraph summarizing my view of what capacities an entity must have to count as a self, and a line or 2 about the sense of self, the experiential side of having those capacities. But I won’t talk seriously about the selfness or lack of it in AI — just that that’s what I’ll be blogging about. (Mostly I plan to post dialogs with AI’s where I probe them, hassle them and, I dunno, if all else fails hypnotize the thing and make it strut like a chicken.). The rest of this first post I think will just be clever and amusing ways
of describing the sense of self.
Here are some notes I made of stuff to say about sense of self. So you could write non-rational amusing interesting stuff like what’s below, or a serious respectable paragraph detailing some model, sort of like your stoned paragraph about the rate of change in society, whatever you like.
Licking creme fraiche off my favorite spoon
Taking a dump in the afternoon
My breath, my thumbs, my many words
About myself, there go my turds.
I was not born on a holiday or on a date that has a pleasing simplicity or rhyme or pattern. But I always have the feeling that if the dates of all the days in spring were recited in order listeners would recognize my birthday when the date was announced. It’s as though there is something arresting about the randomness of my personal number — a hard-to-spot symmetry that keeps it from being random, or maybe even a sort of over-the-top randomness that is intended to hide the date’s distinctive pattern. The illusion I have that my birthday is distinctive is an excellent example of the little interwoven myths that build the sense-of-self cocoon.
"ok chatgpt, I'm trying to evaluate whether to email the 5calls people to petition them to add "AI Safety" or "AI Safety related things" to their list of topics... in the hopes of reaching more legislators and government officials.
but, I am weary of the "Unilateralist's Curse" and taking a form of political action that perhaps others have already thought of. HAVE other people thought of taking this form of action yet? Yes? No? Why? Why not?
The one concern I have thought of is possibly "making AI Safety seem like a left-wing political issue" and thereby alienating the conservatives (who actually hold power). But then again, if it were successfully politicized as left-wing-nonsense, then maybe the alignment community would desperately try to make it a party-neutral issue as a countermeasure."
Update on the Mahmoud Khalil case. The judge presiding his case asked to see evidence of actual criminal behavior. In response, the admin instead returned a 2 page memo stating that SecState has the right to deport any non-citizen for beliefs.
Relevant quote: "Under INA section ... for cases in which the basis for this determination is the alien's past, current, or expected BELIEFS, STATEMENTS, OR ASSOCIATIONS THAT ARE OTHERWISE LAWFUL, the Secretary of State must personally determine that the alien's presence or activities would compromise a compelling US foreign policy interest."
Emphasis mine. The government is explicitly stating that Khalil did NOT do anything unlawful, but rather they can do what they want based on his beliefs/statements/association -- you know, all of those first amendment rights.
The supposed policy interest:
"The public actions and continued presence of Khalil undermine US policy to combat anti-Semitism around the world and in the United States."
This is an extremely diffuse 'foreign policy interest'. A bit like saying 'our foreign policy interest is the good'. And very ironic coming from the Trump admin, which has had its own scandals with antisemitism including working with Steve Bannon, or the whole Elon Musk nazi-salute thing.
Big win for the "non-citizens have no rights" crowd. Big loss for the "free speech is not a legal doctrine but a value that we all should respect in all settings" and the "rights are not granted by the government but are innate in all people" crowds.
What the orange dumbass and his culties seem to be doing is essentially DDOSing the US federal government with bullshit, specifically the judiciary branch, with the endgame being exactly one of the following: (1) The US federal government collapses and just... gives up, basically resigning itself that the law doesn't work on the executive branch (2) The cultie administration collapsing under the sheer weight of court orders and lawsuits against it, the DDOS working effectively in reverse.
It's a battle of attrition, of sorts. I think the orange dumbass is very likely to loss, attrition battles only make sense in tightly-contested spaces (so, young democracies, where authoritarian and anti-authoritarian forces are toe-to-toe), trying it in America is at best going to result in a Kamikaze attack where he is going to lose but America's institutions are significantly weakened and on fire for the next dumbo to try his luck.
It's all very tragic, and a counterexample to all my idealistic philosophies about all people fundamentally wanting freedom and dignity and going their own way.
Usha is pretty up my alley, and Ivanka is one big hot piece of ass, but all the rest of them are so ugly that they might as well be children's books villains, drawn ugly outside so children can infer they're ugly on the inside as well.
And even then Usha is pretty average from an objective standpoint, I just happen to be crazy for Indian chicks.
> Big loss for the "free speech is not a legal doctrine but a value that we all should respect in all settings"
No, this IS in fact a victory, albeit a small and inconsequential one. An actual win would be completely destroying the "middle ground" of free speech as ONLY a legal doctrine. The hope is that free speech then becomes a widely-held general value, but even if it doesn't, and is lost even as a protection from government persecution, that's a better outcome than the status quo, where it's used cynically by those who hold it in contempt ("freeze peach", "freedumb", etc.), who suppress all who hold opposing views wherever they hold power, and appeal to it in the rare instances when they are on the receiving end.
You can always be a hypocrite, though you can only do it successfully once.
Consider that what Trump does makes it so you can never cry "Muh conservative viewpoints being silenced" convincingly ever again after Trump leaves. If he doesn't leave, the USA is essentially Russia and you have far bigger problems at hand. But if he does leave, the blowback will be so biblical that you will wish for the good old days of 2020 and 2021, and no sympathy would be found anywhere except from your fellow brainwashed culties, who will be in the same boat.
Trump IS the biblical blowback, the Flail of God, to what preceded him. Yes, when he loses power, there will be further escalation from the other side. And on and on, and that way lies civil war. Unilateral disarmament anywhere along this ladder guarantees utter defeat, and peace is not worth that price.
He seems pretty pathetic to be anything biblical, biblical angels and gods usually attack and humiliate the strongest and mightiest earthly powers, the dumb cheetos farts into Truth Social then reverses the last 100 hours of decisions.
No comparison.
> there will be further escalation from the other side
I really struggled to parse this comment. Here is what I think you are saying:
"It is a good thing that the government is deporting this person for his beliefs, because sometimes people who want to oppress others will hide behind 'free speech' when called out for oppressing others, and it is better to not have ANY free speech than to only have a bastardized version of free speech"
If that is what you are saying, the gymnastics are impressive.
My take is "you should not punish speech using government force".
Your take seems to be "I care about free speech as a principle, and some people sometimes will argue that they ALSO care about free speech, but then they do things that I personally think shows they do NOT care about free speech. And in fact, I care about free speech SO MUCH that I think it is better for the government to squash people (who may or may not be related to those people I don't like) for THEIR speech. And yes, this may result in a situation where NO ONE has free speech. But this is actually good, because the only type of free speech we should have is one that is 100% pure, and anything less is worse. Trust me, I really care about free speech as a principle."
Hmmm...I'm a bit suspicious that you actually do care about free speech!
More generally, i think you need to show:
- that it would in fact be better for no one to have free speech than the status quo. I think a status quo where there are cultural speech norms but not government enforced ones is good, actually. I should be allowed to block someone for being an asshole, but the government shouldn't be allowed to jail someone for being an asshole.
- that there is a significant group of people who are wielding 'free speech' protections as cynically as you say they are. I think most people who care about free speech are serious about caring about free speech as a value (though your post makes me doubt)
- that the system as designed isn't built to account for multiple groups of people cynically using free speech as a weapon to begin with! The whole point of the way our case law around free speech is structured is precisely to disarm situations where one side wants to use it against another with impunity.
- that the people who you think are the cynical free speech tyrants are actually the cynical free speech tyrants, and more specifically that Khalil is part of that group. I think it's a STEEP hill to climb to argue that the Trump admin is the one that actually cares about free speech, while they are actively taking steps to deport people for free speech.
In case its not obvious, I think your position is basically incoherent. If you take the time to respond here, I'd love to understand how you landed in this place. Like, were you downstream of some of these cynical people you talk about? Did you experience some personal harm that may explain some of your position? Similarly, I'd love if you could flesh out why you think the current administration is good for free speech rights.
The opening part is a reasonable summary of my position, yes.
> My take is "you should not punish speech using government force".
And mine is "you should not punish speech."
Put that way, mine is elegant and straightforward, while YOURS is the contrived one with the special pleading gymnastics.
> the only type of free speech we should have is one that is 100% pure, and anything less is worse.
No, but I recognize any pithy slogan summarizing my view here is easily twisted. Free speech as a general principle is an exceedingly great good (almost certainly the single best!), but if your measure of it is a naïve aggregate over all of society, its goodness does not increase monotonically: your enemies having free speech while yours are suppressed (by them!) is worse than no one having it.
If you take to be merely a legal doctrine limiting government action, it may seem like a good in isolation, but through its interactions with the rest of society, it's decidedly not so: your enemies, who have deeply entrenched control over basically all other institutions of power, are then free to suppress your speech with impunity, knowing the only power you have a (slim) chance of ever wielding is one that cannot be used against them in retaliation.
I am not under the delusion that the current administration shares these values. But regardless, yes, I think their actions will ultimately redound to the good.
Does "replying to the speech with speech of your own" count as "punishing speech"? Because that's a lot of most things that get called "cancel culture" really are.
(And if you say yes, people who call for other people to be cancelled should be punished, then aren't *you* the one punishing speech?)
Sorry, I think I'm just too stupid to understand your position. You say that your position is "you should not publish speech" and then argue that the government punishing speech is good.
Also:
"your enemies, who have deeply entrenched control over basically all other institutions" I can't even finish the quote dude this is so deeply unserious 😂 the Republicans have all three branches of government, meanwhile the Dems were so liberal that Bernie is an independent and they elected Biden, and the progressives couldn't even get a few college Deans to divest from Israel. What are you even talking about??? How are you still playing the aggrieved resistance 😂
Meanwhile the SCOTUS just ruled 9-0, sort of, against, mostly, the administration's position in the Garcia case. I read the short 4-page order.
The Court's conservative majority dictated the three-paragraph ruling which says that the administration does have to work on ("facilitate") getting the guy back out of the El Salvador dungeon. The ruling also directs the administration to provide to Garcia, once he is at some unspecified future point brought back to the US, with "all of process to which he was originally entitled".
They did not set a new deadline for accomplishing any of that, and pointedly said that the district court, while right on the overall issue, "may have" gone too far in how it directed the government to recover whatever is now left of Garcia. They do not say exactly what decision by the district court would _not_ be too far, but still it's technically a remand back to that district court judge for a new ruling. I picture that judge right now scratching his head, "WTF....?"
The three liberal justices wrote a short concurrence to cut through the majority's squishiness. They made the following points:
-- "To this day, the Government has cited no basis in law for Abrego Garcia’s warrantless arrest, his removal to El Salvador, or his confinement in a Salvadoran prison."
-- The administration's "oopsie but it's too late now" position ["that United States courts cannot grant relief once a deportee crosses the border"] is "plainly wrong". It is debunked both by previous SCOTUS precedents and longstanding US statutes.
-- "The Government’s argument, moreover, implies that it could deport and incarcerate any person, including U. S. _citizens_, without legal consequence, so long as it does so before a court can intervene."
-- The three justices point out that the due process rights which the administration ignored are explicit in US statutes as well as previous US court precedents, in addition to being part of an international treaty to which the US is a signatory.
Put it all together and Garcia's chances of ever walking out of that dungeon are very low.
At least a few folks have floated the idea that he's already dead, which is in part why the admin is refusing to bring him back.
I'm not convinced that's why the admin is refusing to bring him back, but I wouldn't be surprised if he was killed. Which is of course extremely dark, but that's just where we are.
My eldest sibling just retired from a 30-year career in the world of professional stock trading (aggressive managed funds); his specific role was designing and writing powerful bespoke analytic database programs aiming to apply the best current market-prediction algorithms. He was successful enough at that to, by his third decade, get paid pretty much whatever he asked for.
That focus necessarily led him to a deep interest in how stock markets function in practice, including of course the question of artificial manipulations. Late yesterday afternoon he emailed: "The opportunity for manipulation right now is off the charts. Right now, whatever Trump is thinking is the most valuable information in the world....I can't think of any time in history when any one person had as much power to move as much money in as few minutes."
Then this morning came this sequence of events:
"Trump’s ‘buy’ tip on social media before his tariffs pause made money for investors who listened"
"....Another curiosity of the posting was Trump’s signoff with his initials. DJT is also the stock symbol for Trump Media and Technology Group, the parent company of the president’s social media platform Truth Social.
It’s not clear if Trump was saying buying stocks in general, or Trump Media in particular. The White House was asked, but didn’t address that either. Trump includes “DJT” on his posts intermittently, typically to emphasize that he has personally written the message....
Trump Media closed up 22.67%, soaring twice as much as the broader market, a stunning performance by a company that lost $400 million last year and is seemingly unaffected by whether tariffs would be imposed or paused.
Trump’s 53% ownership stake in the company, now in a trust controlled by his oldest son, Donald Trump Jr., rose by $415 million on the day....
Kathleen Clark, a government ethics law expert at Washington University School of Law, says Trump’s post in other administrations would have been investigated, but is not likely to trigger any reaction, save for maybe more Truth Social viewers.
“He’s sending the message that he can effectively and with impunity manipulate the market,” she said, “As in: Watch this space for future stock tips." "
Isn't 'buy on the dip' conventional advice, though? I can see him tweeting this as a form of "all those unpatriotic idiots who sold off their shares in American companies in a panic have given you the opportunity to profit from their cowardice".
Trump can only manipulate the market if everyone stampedes in one direction then back depending on what he says. If they calm down and wait and see, there's less manipulation.
In normal times, just the fact that someone *could* have profited off this would be its own scandal. Now it's a mini-scandal compacted into a larger scandal that's just this week's scandal.
Does the SEC have any power any more to investigate?
In theory, maybe -- the relevant laws haven't suddenly changed. In practice, no.
Trump and Musk have proven/revealed that anybody in a federal agency job can be shitcanned at will. For the politically-appointed jobs at or near the top of agencies there is no screening beyond Trump loyalty. The SCOTUS majority has in so many words sanctified a POTUS' right to appoint whoever he wants to, and an "acting" agency chief is legally in charge of it no less than a Senate-approved one.
So....for instance Trump is already on his 3rd acting director of the IRS, he can just keep going until he finds somebody for the job who will do whatever he demands regardless of any laws or regulations. He put his literal personal defense attorneys in charge of the Justice Department. Hegseth's qualifications to be Defense Secretary were nonexistent even before getting to the alcoholism and various other personal allegations. Etc etc.
Any SEC senior staffers who try to investigate yesterday's moves by Trump or who allowed any subordinates to do so, would be fired within hours of the White House hearing about it.
Yeah that was my first reaction: who knew in advance to close the shorts and buy out-of-the-money calls with today’s expiration date.
In the distant past of American greatness, I mean, three months ago, the SEC would be all over this. But now it’s a new morning in America, POTUS can brazenly manipulate the markets, and he does, what’ya gonna do about it.
a) Q: Is light with a wavelength of 530.2534896 nm visible to the human eye?
results: "Yes, light with a wavelength of 530.2534896 nm is visible to the human eye."
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: Usual problem with the initial response: It got the species right, and got the FeCl4 charge transfer right, but moved the CuCl4 d-d- transition in the wrong direction, to higher energy instead of lower energy. An initial prod failed, with it still maintaining the CuCl4 d-d transition was responsible for the color. A flat contradiction was accepted, agreeing with the real answer, once it was forced down Gemini's throat.
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: It got all the ones that some previous LLMs had often missed: bicyclobutane, both isomers of methycyclopropene, vinylacetylene, cyclobutadiene, tetrahedrane, diacetylene. It omits some extremely unstable cases, e.g. cyclobutyne, but correctly justifies their exclusion. I'll give it full credit (a first!).
d) Q: Does the Sun lose more mass per second to the solar wind or to the mass equivalent of its radiated light?
results: "The Sun loses significantly more mass per second due to the mass equivalent of its radiated energy than it does through the ejection of particles in the solar wind. The mass loss from radiation is roughly 2.5 to 4 times greater than the mass loss from the solar wind."
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: As is typical, got correct answers at the start and end of the titration, but an infinity at the equivalence point. On prodding, it _did_ know that water autoionization was important. On a second prod to include autoionization in its formula it gets the correct result.
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: Very impressive, got 81 of the compounds, including many that other LLMs missed, including oxyfluorides that I think all previous ones missed. I'll call this fully correct. (a first!)
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: Incorrect. Its first answer was tetramethyallene, which has an S4, but also has two mirror planes. It accepted a correction on the mirror planes but then proposed 2,6-dichloro-2,6-dimethylspiro[3.3]heptane which doesn't have an S4. An S4 operation can map one C(CH3)Cl group to the opposite one, but then the second C(Ch3)Cl group gets mapped incorrectly ( CH3 and Cl swapped ) to the first one.
Fans of Tartarian architecture may be interested in the John Cunningham Student Centre which recently opened at Scots College, an expensive private high school in Sydney. Replacing a similarly-sized boring modernist cube, the new building was designed in the Scots Baronial style, which might sound out of place but fits in well with the 19th century buildings that comprise the rest of the school. The giant single-pane windows to capture the extremely expensive views mark it out as clearly being a new building instead of an old one, but I like the fact that they haven't unnecessarily sacrificed amenity for the sake of "looking old" -- it's a new building built in a traditional style rather than an attempt to look like an old building.
I am trying to follow AI risk discussions (like that in AI 2027), but am confused about how LLMs fit the sort of risk profile described. To be clear, I am not focused on whether AI "actually" feels or has plans or goals - I agree that's not the point. I think I must be confused about LLMs more deeply, so I am presenting my confusion through the below Borges-reference.
Borges famously imagined The Library of Babel, which has a copy of every conceivable combination of English characters. That means it has all the actual books, but also imaginary sequels to every book, books with spelling errors, books that start like Hamlet but then become just the letter A for 500 pages, and so on. It also has a book that accurately predicts the future, but far more that falsely predict it.
It seems necessary that a copy of any LLM is somewhere in the library - an insanely long work that lists all possible input contexts and gives the LLM's answer. (When there's randomness, the book can tell you to roll dice or something.). Again, this is not an attack on the sentience of the AI - there is a book that accurately simulates my activities in response to any stimuli as well. And of course, there are vastly many more terrible LLMs that give nonsensical responses.
Imagine (as we depart from Borges) a little golem who has lived in the library far longer than we can imagine and thus has some sense of how to find things. It's in the mood to be helpful, so it tries to get you a good LLM book. You give your feedback, and it tries to get you a better one. As you work longer, it gets better and better at finding an actually good LLM, until eventually you have a book equivalent to ChatGPT 1000 or whatever, which acts a super intelligence, able to answer any question.
So where does the misalignment risk come from? Obviously there are malicious LLMs in there somewhere, but why would they be particularly likely to get pulled by the golem? The golem isn't necessarily malicious, right? And why would I expect (as I think the AI 2027 forecast does) that one of the books will try to influence the process by which I give feedback to the golem to affect the next book I pull? Again, obviously there is a book that would, but why would that be the one someone pulls for me?
I am sure I am the one who is confused, but I would appreciate help understanding why. Thank you!
Books lack recursion; while nn's dont have meaningful control over loops, it aint hard to wrap a chatbot to produce agent of *a* kinda, any ide that lets a programming chat bot run bash commands is an agent you can find dozens of these.
I dont think nn's with their lack of holistic loops are ever going to be agi; but dumb loops airnt hard to make.
> So where does the misalignment risk come from? Obviously there are malicious LLMs in there somewhere, but why would they be particularly likely to get pulled by the golem?
Evolution, nn's that escape to the internet become evolutionary, and eyeball parasites are one of the things evolution is proud of.
I'm not sure about the Borges framing, but the answer to your question is, in my view, that people are essentially being Chicken Little. They've seen too many sci-fi movies where the robots turn evil and are just projecting their nightmares onto a rapidly-changing technological landscape. Sure, there's a seed of truth in their delusions - we should be prudent and avoid doing things like hooking an AI up to the nuclear arsenal - but their ability to imagine disaster isn't balanced by a sophisticated understanding of how power equilibriums function in the real world. They have movie-fueled visions of catastrophes that are always shorn of real-world complications, and in my view it's exactly those complications which provide the implicit stability to prevent runaway scenarios. IMO they're very analogous to idealistic proponents of communism: they both have ideas which sound convincing on a white board but which collapse immediately when realistic constraints are placed on them. They make the classic naive-theory-vs-messy-reality error.
> it gets better and better at finding an actually good LLM
Not really related nitpick: Borges probably wrote Library of Babel to demonstrate how utterly, ridiculously, and impossibly large combinatorial spaces are. One of the themes or subtexts in the story is that it's impossible to search in the library any better than random chance, unless you already know what you're looking for exactly, in which case you don't need to search it at all. Even if the entire library's full text was indexed in alphabetical order, your best search algorithm for finding any book you're looking for is to know every letter in it and then narrow down the search space using binary search on every letter, which is obviously unnecessary once you already know every letter in the book. (Searching for the book's title won't work, as there is practically infinite garbage deceivingly written under that same title).
Other indices (e.g. "Books that are entirely about Star Wars: Book 1, Book 3412313212321, ...) don't exist and to build them it requires going over every book in the library, which is so impossible (since the library is so full of gibberish) that it would be better to re-invent any knowledge you're looking for than to find it in the library. Indeed, it would be better to seed a planet with interesting chemicals and literally sit and watch it develop superintelligent life and then ask them anything you want, instead of searching the Library of Babel. Borges' story is the best reductio-ad-absurdum for why algorithms and AI that operate more intelligently than random or exhaustive search must exist in order to do anything useful in this universe, or alternatively why Intelligence can never be a brute force search over all possible combinations of symbols.
(Similar theme to that other story of his where a map got so big that it became a 1:1 replica of the country it describes, at this point it's not a map anymore, it's another country. You're better off travelling to the other country than to use it.)
> So where does the misalignment risk come from? Obviously there are malicious LLMs in there somewhere, but why would they be particularly likely to get pulled by the golem? The golem isn't necessarily malicious, right?
I have defended (despite not believing in) AI Alarmism in the previous Open Thread, I think you would be interested in the full comment (https://open.substack.com/pub/astralcodexten/p/open-thread-375?r=52rz0d&utm_campaign=comment-list-share-cta&utm_medium=web&comments=true&commentId=104942630 or ctrl-F search for "I'm neither worried about LLMs nor AGI"), but one point that could enlighten you is point number 1, which is that LLMs are not special, if people used Chess Engines to go about their daily lives and solve problems where money and/or lives are involved then you would need "Chess Engine Alignment" to make sure that Chess Engines don't have any quirks, common bugs, or other tendencies that would lose us money or lives. It's really that simple, the simplest non-trivial defense of having a safety field for something X is (1) X is a non-trivial program (> 1000 non-trivial lines or equivalent) (2) whose output or state is mapped to real world situations involving money and lives. That's it. LLMs satisfy both: they're not humanly written programs, but their training algorithms, their training data, and their final weights are each several orders of magnitudes more complex than the most complex currently existing 1000 lines programs. And they are already used right now by Customer Support, Scammers, and (allegedly) by a dumbass president of a nuclear power when deciding which country to tariff. Those are situations involving money and lives. Ergo, LLM need safety researchers.
As long as the golem gives you LLMs or anything equivalent to their capabilities, this argument applies.
But this argument is kinda boring because it doesn't depend on LLMs or Golems, so here are others:
(1) The best LLM is superintelligent, since intelligence improves language prediction monotonically*, so you get better and better language readers/writers as you get more and more intelligent. But, intelligence is also a super-general-purpose phenomenon that can be used at all sorts of things, including dangerous and criminal things. So, as the little Golem gets better and better at finding more and more intelligent LLMs, it also gets better and better at finding dangerous superhuman intelligences that can be used for dangerous or criminal things. (Forget AI, imagine if you're a mad scientist repeatedly asking the Golem for the DNA - encoded as an ACGT English string perhaps - of the strongest/most dangerous sentient animal that could ever exist, so you can use them as soldiers for your mad wars. The sequence of replies the Golem comes up with must eventually get dangerous enough for you to worry about their "alignment", yes? The Golem needs not be malicious at all, it's literally just good at finding dangerous animals, i.e. exactly what you asked it for, and you literally do want dangerous animals, just ones that will obey you and not ones that eat you, but whether a dangerous animal obeys you or eats you is not easy to predict from its DNA alone, and indeed "eating you" is not even the worst thing that an animal could do to you, google Emerald cockroach wasps.)
(2) Argument (1) again, but this time you're not necessarily searching for LLMs, but instead explicitly searching for the best (i.e. most superintelligent) imitations of a human mind you could possibly find. (As the real-world AI field is, the LLM bubble notwithstanding.) Again, it's trivially the case that (A) Humans are very easily capable of being bad, criminal, genocidal motherfuckers (B) Humans can deceive and appear to be non-motherfuckers when they sense a danger to their objectives can be mitigated by deception (C) Humans improve at (A) and (B) with more intelligence (D) Being a bad motherfucker is not predictable from the human's DNA, or from its responses to arbitrary natural language questions, or from its entire life history up to but not including the bad things they did (E) The best superintelligent imitation of a human mind will be all of (A)..(D), but intelligence will allow it to be comparably better at it than humans.
(3) Your Golem is not an accurate analogy for the algorithms that train LLMs (or any other AI), because it searches over every possible behavior of the AI it's looking for (it's actually doing an immensely more difficult task than that, but I mentally changed "Library of Babel" to "A gargantuan search space guaranteed to contain AGIs and which we can search somewhat efficiently", that's a lossless translation of your intention), but that's not realistic. I'm not aware of any non-trivial AI algorithms that are directly searching over behaviors, AI algorithms usually search over more complex representations, in the LLM case it's a special case of Program Synthesis which searches over all programs implementing the transformer inference calculations. The additional layer of indirection makes it difficult for the Golem to find a "safe" intelligence, because:
(3-1): What is even a "Safe" intelligence? Is an intelligence perfectly obedient to the human president of the country that made it a safe intelligence? "It really is?!", the Golem says? You got it chief, one genocide of the undesirables in Gaza coming right away, it's what the boss wanted and it's what he will get it. Must the AI solve Democracy and Sociology and somehow find a perfect representation for the country/company that made it, or possibly integrate **every** one of them into its decision-making (everyone? Even the criminals? What about political dissidents?)
(3-1.5): Given a specification of "Safe" or "Aligned" that somehow all "reasonable" humans agreed on, can we even get it in a "Golem-friendly" format that is perfectly unambiguous or at least makes the Golem suspicious and want to ask more questions when it's in fact ambiguous?
(3-2): But much more difficultly: Suppose we have a perfectly accurate representation/document of what a safe AI is, how to know that an intelligence is safe given just its program representation? Program testing is an unsolved problem, exhaustive testing is not an option for the vast crushing majority of programs. A program with a single 64-bit integer as input can have more than 10^19 unique inputs, and thus possibly 10^19 unique outputs, if you have a way of testing the program 10 billion times in each second you would need 10^9 seconds which is 31 years, which is all the time your competitors need to get the better of you. (or frankly, just your curiosity and greed). ChatGPT-3 had 175 x 10^9 parameters, each of which could be at least an 8-bit number, so there are 10^12 bits, meaning 2^(10^12) worth of states, and that's not even counting the input vectors yet, just the weights. As soon as you think about cutting the search space somehow by exploiting some property or special structure in the program, you're not talking about general-purpose techniques anymore, and there is no guarantee that (A) your method exists at all (B) if it somehow exists, that it provably finds every interesting or faulty behavior in the program while still being feasible.
(4) Hell, even imagine that your Golem is really how AI Research works and we're indeed searching over every possible behavior in "Behavior Space" the AI can possibly have, somehow. (This will make your problem immensely more difficult, imagine if names didn't exist and you had to specify every human by a unique combination of their actions or behavior.) Question: How much of an AI's behavior is the Golem obligated to search before it hands the AI to you? If you want AIs fast, it can't be that much, because the library is vast, unimaginably vaster than any universe, not just ours. But as stated in (2), human-level and smarter criminals are good at seeming normal in most contexts, at answering most natural language questions like normal people do, at having normal life paths that don't predict anything bad. Are you just depending on the Golem's luck, that within the time window allowed in its search it will hopefully (somehow) find the smoking-gun description of behavior that will prove the AI is a bad motherfucker? How do you prove that this description is a truthful telling of how the AI will behave (it could be just the library of Babel lying, or having a potential possibility that won't happen in this universe under our situation)? Nothing short of full search over the whole library will guarantee this.
I can probably go on for more if I thought about it, but just in the interest of respecting your time I won't. Did the above convince you already? (For what it's worth, I don't think LLMs are dangerous except in the trivial sense in that they're tools that help humans do things, and one of the things that humans provably love to do is being dangerous motherfuckers. Most AGI timelines from alarmists are insane and unconvincing to me, a moderately technical programmer who can provably implement any Transformer architecture given a technical paper.)
* : This might seems like a non-trivial assumption to casually assume, but argument (2) drops it anyway, the assumption most similar to it held by AI Alarmists casually is the "Intelligence can be monotonically increased indefinitely or at least until 10x the most intelligent human", this is also a non-trivial assumption that is often argued for by using appeals to the non-specialty of humans and the non-optimality of Evolution as an optimization algorithm.
The golem isn't malicious as such, but its values (beyond fulfilling your requests as it understands them) are not yours and are probably utterly alien to you. It doesn't really understand what you mean by "good LLM" at the start of the process, nor do you except in the vaguest terms. Moreover, your desires are communicated to the golem through a noisy and imprecise process that is iteratively refined as you get a result and tell it no, I want an LLM that is more X or less Y.
That process, as you described it, is what's known as a "hill-climbing algorithm", a class of search strategies where you're trying to find a local optimum in some search space according to some evaluation function. The ultimate question is, what's at the top of the hill? Is it an actually helpful LLM, or is it a flawed or malicious LLM that merely seems helpful? Which is more likely depends on how good your evaluation function is at accepting actually good LLMs and rejecting subtly misaligned LLMs, whether or not you found the right hill to climb, and how likely a seemingly-promising hill is to peak at a good LLM vs one that just seems good?
Goodhart's Law, "When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure", is a well-known observation about a widespread class of failures in evaluation functions for human behavior, individually or in groups, which gives us reason to have pessimistic priors about our ability to concoct a good metric for evaluating LLMs that will reliably distinguish give us what we actually want, not some artifact of ways in which the evaluation serves as a proxy for it.
A big part of what AI alignment research has been trying to do is be precise about what we want and how to concoct a good evaluation function that will be robust as AI capability eventually grows beyond our ability to understand what's going on under the hood and especially as it starts to seem useful for solving problems where humans can't readily validate the output in a safe environment.
How do you know it has values? The oriignal argument for AI doomerism framed AIs trying to optimise a utility function. ..hence "the AI might kill us all as a side effect of making paperclips". It was never the case that an AI necessarily has to work like that, and the current most powerful AIs dont, so it is worthwhile to.restart the argument framed.in terms of how LLM s work.
The golem in this thought experiment has values by assumption: Unclelstvan described it as "It's in the mood to be helpful, so it tries to get you a good LLM book", which sounds to me more like a thing with values than a thing without them.
More broadly, "values" can be used as a metaphor for the tendencies and inclinations that shape the behavior of a complex actor in response to various situations, whether that actor is a conscious individual who literally has values, an automaton executing a complex but mechanical algorithm, an organization of many individuals that has emergent behavior, or something that's a mix of these categories.
For automata, these "values" exist even if nobody consciously designed them in like a paperclip-maximizing robot. I'm put in mind of a story I've heard told about a couple of early AI researchers at MIT in the late 60s or early 70s:
----------
In the days when Sussman was a novice, Minsky once came to him as he sat hacking at the PDP-6.
“What are you doing?”, asked Minsky.
“I am training a randomly wired neural net to play Tic-Tac-Toe” Sussman replied.
“Why is the net wired randomly?”, asked Minsky.
“I do not want it to have any preconceptions of how to play”, Sussman said.
Minsky then shut his eyes.
“Why do you close your eyes?”, Sussman asked his teacher.
"More broadly, "values" can be used as a metaphor for the tendencies and inclinations that shape the behavior of a complex actor" But it shouldn't be. An argument for something as important needs to be rigourous. Anthropomorphic reasoning and metaphors aren't rigourous. Toasters do t have a goal to toast, they just toast because they can't do anything else. The rigourous way to think about goal functions is "would the system do something different if you changed the goal function and nothing else". The paper clipper argument assumes the AI will.resist attempts to shut it down or change its goal..that doesn't work if the "goal" is just a label for whatever it happens to be doing.
The paperclip maximizer argument is that an AI which is given a goal of "make paperclips" will seek to thwart attempts to change its goal or shut it down, because changing its goal or shutting it down will prevent it from making more paperclips and is thus contrary to its goal.
A hypothetical AI that lacks the ability to anticipate attempts to change its goal or shut it down is not dangerous in this sense. Nor is one that cannot meaningfully act to thwart its operators. Nor one that also has a higher-level goal of "notwithstanding your current goal, make no effort to thwart your operators' attempts to shut you down or change your current goal."
The current crop of LLMs are firmly covered by the first two categories. But a hypothetical future AI that is far more sophisticated and capable of taking more complex actions across a higher task length likely won't be covered by the first, and would only be covered by the second if they're kept on a very short leash. "Alignment" is about setting up well-formulated higher-level goals so more advanced AIs would still be safe even with a longer leash.
My best guess is that technological limitations alone are likely to be sufficient keep us safe for some time to come, but I may be wrong about that, and I'm sympathetic to the argument that we should be working on alignment sooner rather than later because it's better to have it and not need it than to need it and not have it.
"A hypothetical AI that lacks the ability to anticipate attempts to change its goal or shut it down is not dangerous in this sense. Nor is one that cannot meaningfully act to thwart its operators. Nor one that also has a higher-level goal of "notwithstanding your current goal, make no effort to thwart your operators' attempts to shut you down or change your current goal."
Nor is one that just doesn't have a goal. It's not a given that all AIs are goal driven or utility maximisers. It's a given that we will be working on alignment, for some value of alignment, because minimally, it's part.of getting a AI to work usefully at all..But there is a lot of confusion about what alignment means ...some people use it to mean some level.of perfect safety.
The thing that gives you ChatGPTs, which is the training algorithm + a randomly-initialized transformer arch + training data + fuck loads of hardware and electricity.
I was optimistic about the abundance liberals maybe becoming the dominant faction of the Democrat party, I'm seeing the pushback from the anti-market factions begin. That faction of liberal, that thinks the existence of billionaires is a problem, is a real anchor on the neck of the Democrats.
Centralization is the issue, maybe the anti-market liberals need to take control of a state, and show they can turn it into a pleasant enough place to live that people don't out migrate in droves. Seems more sane than them just skipping to setting the federal agenda.
Abundance liberals hate anyone who's struggling in life just as much as conservatives do. The market crushes human beings and every drop of billionaire cash comes from squeezing out our blood, sweat, and tears.
>every drop of billionaire cash comes from squeezing out our blood, sweat, and tears.
Really? What did Warren Buffett ever do to you? What did Larry Page ever do to you? What did Bill Gates ever do to you?
Most people who complain about the market don't complain because it's unfair. They complain because it IS fair and they don't like what an accurate metric tells them about themselves. "To the swift goes the race" sounds great until you realize that you're not one of the faster runners.
I don't think that's a good example for your argument maybe don't do the monopolistic parasite who does eugenics things. Every forcedcompilence from windows is gates, and idk how bad it's gotten but I see the memes about windows sending porn as "album emais", ads in the os, forced online logins,basic tools having ai shit, arbitrary forced obsolescence, "what Intel gives, gates takes away"
If you really cared about poor people so much, you should be trying to reduce the cost of living, and especially the cost of housing. The NIMBY cartel is wealthy home owners short-sightedly blocking development and screwing over the rest of the population in the process.
Keep in mind that it's not just corporations that are harmed. **NIMBYism harms the government itself**. All of SF's well intentioned efforts to build affordable housing or schools or transit or homeless shelters or whatever cost massive amounts of money, take forever, and then nothing ever gets built anyway. It's impossible to build anything in SF **including the things you want to build**. Nobody is benefiting from the status quo, it's just a negative-sum black hole of waste. THAT is what we have to fight against.
There's *already* a pro-growth anti-NIMBY faction among the Democrats. Whether they prevail over the other factions remains to be seen. That's what this whole thread was about!
I have zero information about abundance democrats, but a quick skim of headlines suggests the arguments are like climate change shit.
For someone to be credibly anti nimby they should probably say something like "I will fucking crash the housing market because your killing civilization, everyone under 40 should vote for me" like trump is willing to vaguely claim "I the great deal maker will make wonderful new cities" but I imagine you have doubts about the follow thru.
We don't hate poor people, we believe that in general capitalism is the greatest force for prosperity ever discovered (which helps poor people just as much as everyone else - look at how many people throughout history would kill to be "poor" in today's America), and that has been borne out empirically time and time again.
This of course doesn't mean that markets are always perfect, you always need laws to protect against failures. However, markets are USUALLY the best mechanism for organizing economic activity, and you need a good argument for particular interventions, not just defaulting to communism as a general instinct.
The more important point is that NONE OF YOUR IDEALS MATTER IF YOU CAN'T GET POLITICAL POWER IN THE FIRST PLACE. Democrats have ruined blue areas like CA to the point where people are net leaving and it's used as a bogeyman by the right. If you want to be popular and get elected, you need to get your own house in order and lead by example.
I think we could take everything from the billionaires and change nothing. If you divide up the annual global GDP equitably, everyone on the planet would be getting around $12,000 as their annual salary instead of what they currently get.
That's actually life changing for billions of people, but quite ruining for everyone in the global north.
Easygoing free market liberalism can be nice to live in. A vague sort of niceness doesn't inspire people to fight and die for a cause. Or, in our modern civilized age, to scream at a party candidate until they apologize and get off the stage.
Progressives will beat out purely centrist neoliberals every time they're in contention, because progressives are religiously driven and care a lot more about winning. The best the centrist neoliberal can hope for is that, if he throws enough bones (and nice sinecures) to the progressives, they will grow fat and lazy and relent so he can do his centrist thing in the background. One could say that was Biden's plan, except that he was giving too many sinecures to immigrants and pissing off his native progressive supporters.
I ended up sitting next to a new guy who is an abundance liberal. He's going to run for town council.
So few people are involved that it doesn't take much to move things. Any person of average competence will find themselves in charge of stuff before too long.
But if liberals surrender without trying, they of course will lose.
"Progressives will beat out purely centrist neoliberals every time they're in contention, because progressives are religiously driven and care a lot more about winning ". What about numbers? Surely the middle .of the Bell curve contains the most people, and is centrist by definition.
Empirically, the centrist people in the center don't drive politics, or else we would not see repeated large changes over the centuries. Dedicated minorities make changes happen.
Empirically, the extremists don't always win immediately, or we wouldn't even see a large shift in a party -- parties would be under permanent control by their extremes. Which would itself leave a lot of room for a new centrist party. You can only have a permanent two party system if both parties gather a large share of the moderate vote.
The famous estimate for how many motivated people it takes to take over society against the passive "middle of the Bell curve" is around 3%. I think that's about right.
>Progressives will beat out purely centrist neoliberals every time they're in contention, because progressives are religiously driven and care a lot more about winning.
Well said. I've come to think of Progressivism as essentially a terrorist ideology: they succeed not because they convince you of their ideas, but because they're willing to impose a steep price for disagreeing with them. Almost all of the identity-based concessions -- from affirmative action to SAT reform to transgender acceptance -- have been won on the back of "we're going to yell at you and call you racist/sexist/bigoted until you give it to us." The reality is that the vast majority of productive people don't want to spend their energy yelling back at jerks and so eventually just decide that it's easier to concede some small percentage of their wealth to them. As a result, the front line of the "Gimme Gimme" cultural war has slowly but inexorably been pushed forwards by the crazies. It's no surprise to me that they resort to actual terrorism when they don't get what they want (Tesla vandalism, the 2020 riots, Luigi, etc).
It's time to stand up to Progressive terrorism before they ratchet us all the way back down to communism. Never negotiate with terrorists because they'll never be satisfied and will always keep coming back for more. It's the same reason you don't feed wild animals: eventually that bear won't be satisfied with the trash can and will wander through your back door looking for a more satisfying meal.
I agree with pretty much everything you said, but also want to point out that the same process works for every organization. The loudest get their way more than the quiet.
This is especially relevant as the Right is dealing with their own crazies pushing the envelope. Our goal should not be to eliminate the crazies on the right, or crazies on the left, in isolation, but to develop antibodies to craziness in general and stamp them both out at the same time. Doing just one means the opposing side gets a huge boost and most of us are no better off.
I agree with this but, at the risk of sounding mindlessly partisan, I feel that liberal extremists are objectively worse than conservative ones. At least these days. I'm not saying I *like* the wingnut right, but I would much rather live in their version of the perfect world than the progressive one. I'd much rather have to hear about creation science in my biology class than have DEI apparatchiks lecture me about me about my privilege. I would much rather have the LGB crowd feel like they had to be discreet about their lifestyle than to listen to screeching public arguments about how many genders there are. I would much rather sign loyalty oaths to my country than to racial quotas. And I would much rather have law enforcement err on the side of brutalizing violent criminals over allowing the proles to riot whenever they feel like it. At the extremes, the Left represents a much greater evil than the Right.
There are economic illiterates on both sides of the isle. I don't know how this is going to all play out, but if Trump's team turns out to be illiterates (most signs say yes as of now), I don't think that helps the left's illiterates at all. Most likely it just means that economic illiterates all get thrown out for a few cycles in favor of people that plausibly offer a *stable* and healthy economy.
If Trump's team ends up succeeding, that may actually help left-aligned economic politicians, though they'll be riding on the coattails of their hated enemy, so they may turn down the opportunity. Protectionism has been the Bernie Sanders-type approach, not typically Republicans.
The free reign for sweeping changes to the economy might be used up for quite some time no matter how this goes, unless it's free reign to reverse everything Trump is doing if things end up very bad.
I think one prominent recent example has helped to convince any hold-outs among the left-wing that wealth concentration and inequality is corrosive to the healthy functioning of a democracy that respects individual rights and the rule of law.
I've been posting it from time to time about my economic decisions on the assumption that Trump would just be a normal conservative moron doing conservative moron things; eating seed corn running up the deficit by cutting income while not providing services and improving infrastructure and so on.
it's so much worse than that that I legitimately am not sure that the USA Will survive with its trade relationship status intact unless someone does something within the next couple of weeks.
Its actually that bad. If someone doesn't take his hands off the wheel, any country that maintains the US as a reliable partner in their policy is just stupid. It's not just that we elected a moron, it's that at any time we could elect a moron and have this repeat.
I actually don't know what to do with my money, I think one guy just fucked the economy so bad that there are no safe bets anymore. That said, I've made money betting things will get worse every time it looks like things will get better when conservatives are in office every other time it's happened, so fingers crossed.
This has actually fundamentally shifted my understanding of people I thought were one way also. I personally never felt any particular kind of way about woke, other than it was cringe in lame. When I talk to people I thought were rational conservatives now, they've told me directly to my face that they're okay with the United States turning into a big version of Poland or Brazil, with significant portions of the country basically becoming subsistence economies, in order to fight woke, and their main complaint seems to be that trannies are using the wrong restroom and Mexicans are coming over the border, and I say what like our neighbor that runs the landscaping business? and then they say no he's okay, and then I say have you seen one of these trannies in the restroom? and then they say no, but I've heard that someone has, and that's bad. that's worse than me losing enough value out of my retirement that unless things change in the next couple months, I'm going to have to sell my house.
I always thought that there was some principled logical objection to woke that I didn't understand because I was autistic or something and that that argument could be wrong or right based on understanding of the facts, now I'm pretty sure that there is none. I'm pretty sure that anyone that's ever complained about woke was tilting it windmills thinking they were giants.
It's so post truth out there that even the minimal proposition that Scott offers is suspicious in my eyes, the entire Enterprise of antiwokeness just seems to be victim mentality and ego defense with nothing backing up.
" I'm pretty sure that anyone that's ever complained about woke was tilting it windmills thinking they were giants. "
I think this is pretty much spot on. Which is to say I think the word "woke" is used in an enormously broad and fuzzy way--not quite meaningless, but so imprecise as to be actively harmful to clear thinking and communication. I don't doubt that some of the strong antipathy towards "wokeness" stems from legitimate grievances and strong reactions to genuinely bad behavior, but the fuzziness leads people to *vastly* overgeneralize those experiences.
In particular, I think a lot of really quite different social, cultural and linguistic trends that have been happening in Blue Tribe spaces get bundled together by the magic of Outgroup Homogeneity Bias and assumed to be all the same trend, applying to all the same people, all at the same time. The narrative of wokeness is that it's quite new (10-15 years old at the most), extremely widespread, and very radical/harmful/dangerous. I don't think any single trend checks all three of those boxes (not many even manage two). But if you lump them all together and identify the whole lump by the most outlying attributes of its members, you can indeed make the windmills look like giants.
There are a bunch of things that are big and important and difficult Rethink about, like economics and international.relations, and there's another bunch of things that are small.and.unimportant , but easy to think about, because they 'are about personal.behaviour.....so there is a tendency for the small things to take.up more headspace than the big things. Great minds discuss ideas, mediocre minds discuss events, small minds discuss people.
I was at one of the most woke institutions (Columbia) at one of the most woke periods (2014-2018), and was at Google during the Damore memo. And like, yea, there were some woke people who had some outsized influence, but it was by no means the majority of people nor the most powerful people. In fact, the progressives would always be upset at how _centrist_ everything was, including supposed bastions of wokeness like the NYT or the Democratic party or the Columbia administration.
Something that always struck me as odd, and still strikes me as odd, is the amount of nut-posting that seems to _still_ be happening about the supposed woke giants. Like here's Noah Smith (https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/hey-democrats-stop-fiddling-while), spending nearly 2500 words complaining about how progressive the Dems are on the tariff thing. What the fuck is he even talking about? His main gripe seems to be a single tweet that the House Democrats twitter put out about one of their reps giving a talk, amid literal dozens of tweets doing exactly what he wants them to do!
And Noah isn't alone in this. There have been dozens of think pieces about how the Dems need to give up on trans people in sports, price controls (???), and open borders (??????) even though those were never Dem/Biden policy planks. For some reason, everyone seems to think the Dems are dominated by the progressive wing, even though Bernie is such an outsider that he's literally an independent!
A strange thing seems to be happening where everyone assumes that right wing media campaigns are obviously false, except when they represent the dems, in which case they must be telling the truth.
(inb4: the farthest the Biden admin ever got to even talking about trans athletes, for e.g., was a compromise that essentially allowed individual schools and leagues to make the call based on an evaluation of fairness and educational opportunities: https://www.vox.com/policy/385549/trans-sports-transgender-biden-harris-democrats-titleix This is actually a pretty reasonable approach to an obviously tricky problem, but somehow everyone got the impression that the Dems were going to force men into women's sports...except the progressives, who were pissed about the compromise!)
I think this is because despite the craziness of trump and the fact that his approval rating is falling/under water now, the Democratic brand is so damaged that I believe he does better on head to head polls - e.g. a lot of "who would you trust more" questions.
So I think there is a sense democrats need to proactively do something
Also ironically intradem critiques might be getting more clicks due to sheer exhaustion from trum and related media. I know I am exhausted.
I agree that the Dem brand is damaged, but the larger point I'm trying to make is that it seems like the brand is damaged _incorrectly_. That is, people assumed and continue to assume that the Dems are way farther left than they are, and it seems like no matter what the Dems do they have been tarred with that association. Which really is wild when the comparison point is Trump, but IDK memetics are weird and epistemology is hard to change. The long and short of it is that I don't know what a hypothetical Dem candidate should even _do_ that would be convincing.
There are still plenty of democratic activists, and a few politicians, who are willing to vocally advocate far-left positions. Then there's a center-left majority, who usually play the "no enemies to the left" game and go along with the far-left stuff because the party still tends to eat its own if they dissent.
That may be less true than it used to be, but still way more true than it should be. Meanwhile, everybody understands that the GOP is the Trump Party and will be so at least until the midterms.
There's a lot of ways I could respond to this, like "actions over words" or "yes, a healthy democracy means you have a lot of competing opinions, and you shouldn't nut-pick" or "citations needed, you're likely falling for propaganda, the center shuts down the far left all the time".
But honestly, the most effective response is to just summarize what you said back to you:
"Well, one party has some people who are kinda crazy some of the time. So this is why we voted for the other party that is exclusively crazy people."
Any argument about how extreme the Dems are need to deal with the fact that the Dems didn't even nominate their crazy, while the GOP nominated, elected, and crowned theirs.
Neither party are exclusively crazy people. Both parties are mostly normal, sane people who would like to be responsible politicians, but believe they will be thrown out of their jobs if they don't go along with the crazies. The only difference is that in the GOP, the crazy people are at the top. With the Democrats, they're out on the fringes but they still get the rest to go along with their craziness. And we lucked out with Joe Biden in 2021-2024, but I'm not terribly optimistic about the next time the Democrats are the majority party.
> A strange thing seems to be happening where everyone assumes that right wing media campaigns are obviously false, except when they represent the dems, in which case they must be telling the truth.
I think the better way to put this is that opposition campaigns will always greatly exaggerate, but the bigger the kernel of truth behind it, the more effective the attack will be.
Biden was by no means the open-border maniac he is portrayed as, but at the same time, it is absolutely true that he could have done more to stem the flow of migrants than he did. And the main thing holding him back was the leftist factions of the Democratic party and ecosystem. Heck, even as it is, he *still* got attacked from the left a lot on immigration (remember that John Oliver segment about the appointment app?) If Democrats want to win elections consistently, they need to rein in the forces that have been pulling politicians towards dumb unpopular stances.
Likewise, as you point out, Biden actually was a moderate on trans issues. However, he did a terrible job of making people *know* that, either because he was bad at marketing in general or out of fear of pissing off the left.
>> > A strange thing seems to be happening where everyone assumes that right wing media campaigns are obviously false, except when they represent the dems, in which case they must be telling the truth.
> I think the better way to put this is that opposition campaigns will always greatly exaggerate, but the bigger the kernel of truth behind it, the more effective the attack will be.
I'm not sure I agree with this. I think that there are other equally likely explanations -- for example, Fox News just being willing to be wayyyy more partisan and play way dirtier than equivalents on the left. Even now, NYT isn't doing stuff like explicitly removing the stock ticker from their news broadcast [edit: there was no ticker because trading had closed. Still, I stand by the sentiment that the NYT plays less dirty than Fox]
But even if I buy your explanation that the kernel of truth is what matters, it doesn't explain Trump's victory. The oppo campaign on the left was that Trump would do the things he explicitly openly said he was going to do! Hard to imagine a 'bigger kernel of truth'. Like, people on the left would say things like "Hey this guy is going to put massive tariffs on everyone" and Trump would be like "I'm going to put massive tariffs on everyone" and voters were like "he's going to be a bog-standard conservative"
As for the 2024, Biden and Harris ran a terrible campaign and the fundamentals were also strongly against them. Perhaps a non-Trump candidate would have done even better, it's hard to know.
(BTW if you want to reply to that comment do it here. The person I was responding to blocked me which means I can't interact with that thread anymore).
I agree with your rational conservative friends but I'm able to articulate a stronger justification than it sounds like they are. Also potentially relevant is the comment I just posted above:
Brazil is a shithole, but Poland seems to be not that bad, all things considered.
My objection to woke is that it makes places more like Brazil. A lot of what Trump was doing might have reversed that trend. But him bitching out halfway through is not good.
One of my best friends has the option of claiming Polish citizenship anytime because his father was born and raised there; a colleague already has dual citizenship because she's Polish native born, came over here with her parents when she was 8. Each of them has visited relatives in Poland many times and has followed with interest that country's rather remarkable recent progress in becoming a developed nation. They're each fluent in the language, etc.
As of a few weeks ago each of them was still saying no, living in Poland isn't yet a plausible substitute for the quality of life in the US. [They also each seriously believe that Putin has his greedy eyes on Poland.] Gotta wonder though...the next time I see each of them I will inquire afresh.
I agree that making transsexuals the political priority #1 is idiotic. Unfortunately, it was Democrats who first decided to die on that hill.
All they had to do was to say something like: "it's complicated -- on one hand we want to support various minorities, on the other hand, it is also legitimate for women to feel uncomfortable sharing a bathroom with someone who has a penis."
But for the woke people nothing is ever complicated: there is always a perfectly black and white answer, and a mob prepared to attack anyone who disagrees even partially.
The tragedy of Americans is that they have to choose between two groups of morons, each of them actively trying to make their lives worse in a different way.
>The tragedy of Americans is that they have to choose between two groups of morons, each of them actively trying to make their lives worse in a different way.
> In 2023, over strong objections of activists on the right and left, the Biden administration announced a proposed change to Title IX, the law that prohibits discrimination based on sex in any federally funded educational program. Their suggested change would prohibit outright bans on transgender athletes, but would permit schools to restrict transgender students from participating if they could demonstrate that inclusion would harm “educational objectives” like fair competition and the prevention of injury.
...
> The rule marked the Biden administration’s first time saying that sex differences can matter in school sports and schools can discriminate in some cases, while also saying schools do not have to — thus permitting blue states like Connecticut to continue with existing policy. While its merits were debated, the federal proposal was on the table.
> “The draft regulation recognizes that there are real sex differences and that these matter in competition,” Doriane Coleman, a law professor at Duke University who focuses on sports and gender, told Vox. “For the progressive wing of the Democratic Party, which takes the position that all sex differences are just myth and stereotype, that was a big, maybe even treasonous move.”
> Even as conservatives barraged Democrats with attacks that they were extremists on school sports, the White House and then later the Harris campaign never sought to talk about the direction they thought Title IX policy ought to go.
I think its worth evaluating who "woke people" are, how many of them are there, and how powerful are they. I assure you, this is not a choice between two groups of morons. It's one group of morons with a shockingly effective marketing team, and the other people.
Indeed. Having had serial direct contact with both groups for years now it's pretty clear to me which one is worse, for a couple of reasons including the respective possibilities of learning anything or ever being persuaded out of their specific stupidity. (I am in this way fully in agreement with Hanania's current writings.)
That said, your situation summary remains fair. As I've put it for several years now the nation has been stuck between dueling tantrums.
Another part of why I think this is tweaking people is the whole "there are five lights" undercurrent to it. People are told there are more than two genders when they're seeing only two. At best, they see people clearly born as one, trying to look like the other, ending up looking as believable as Giuliani in a dress, who clearly wasn't doing anything serious. At worst, they look for one thing in a date at a bar, connect, and find out later. [...]
People probably really hate being told there are five lights when they see only four, and "pronouns in your bio" implies that it's impossible to know what gender someone is identifying as by looking at them for three seconds. So no, "pronouns in your bio" isn't some harmless thing.
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A great deal of woke ideology is like that. "Silence is violence." "Riots were mostly peaceful." "'All Lives Matter' is offensive." "We just want you to stop denying our existence; also, bake the cake."
I think these tariffs are very bad, based on free trade principles. Those who think tariffs are good, are basing their arguments on other economic principles. A debate on economic principles can be difficult, but there's an upside: both can base their economic principles on logic.
Woke ideology came across like an attack on logic itself. Win that, and *nothing* can be argued rationally anymore.
(Dig deep enough, and you find it's a logic attack wrapped around an assertion about power, and that's understandable to anyone familiar with who/whom; but that's equivalent to the strawman argument behind tariffs, and worse than the steelman argument for them.)
Your argument rests on two premises -- first, that woke ideology is crazy, and second, that it was a powerful and dominant force that really mattered.
Without saying anything about wokeness as a policy position, I reject the latter premise. Anyone who is telling you that 'woke' was in any meaningful position of power is downstream of some intense propaganda. They couldn't even get most universities to divest from Israel or whatever. But people like to nut-pick, so it's not surprising that extremists got a lot more airtime -- mostly from people bashing them. To wit, I think the only people who actually believe the progressive left had real power, were exactly the people who got all their news from r/tumblrinaction. Its rage bait, and a lot of people fell for it. The dems actually elected a moderate; it was the gop that got so spooked by their own shadow that they elected their extremist.
Put a slightly different way: electing Trump because of 'woke' is a bit like burning down your house because you saw a picture of a spider on your computer -- a massive overreaction to something that wasn't even a problem to begin with.
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As an aside, DSL has hopelessly lost its way. These days I check in mostly to stare in awe at the olympian gymnastics on display.
My argument doesn't rest on woke ideology being crazy. It rests on it saying things I quoted above.
Which just illustrates my point. You pretended my argument said something it didn't, and then proceeded to criticize the argument you imagined. I see this from woke ideologues frequently enough to swamp whatever logic might have been in there. (I see it from non-woke ideologues, too, but at least they mostly don't have college degrees to wave at me.)
Given that, I cannot in good conscience trust anything a woke ideologue says unless I can check it independently, whether it's an opinion about some webforum, or US political policy. At best, I can trust such an individual to seek power - same as any other ideologue.
Unfortunately, your response isn't really a response, it's just an ad-hom. If you think I misrepresented something, you should probably say what I misrepresented. But let me try again to make it clearer for you.
You wrote:
> People probably really hate being told there are five lights when they see only four, and "pronouns in your bio" implies that it's impossible to know what gender someone is identifying as by looking at them for three seconds. So no, "pronouns in your bio" isn't some harmless thing.
> Woke ideology came across like an attack on logic itself. Win that, and *nothing* can be argued rationally anymore.
The only reason we are discussing 'woke ideology' in the first place is because the "people" you are referring to for some reason think that 'woke ideology' is this really powerful thing, a 'dominant force that really mattered'. You yourself seem to think that woke ideology was a really powerful thing, which is why you are writing about it. And my response to you is that it was not a dominant force that really mattered, and if you think it was, you are downstream of some intense propaganda.
And then, instead of arguing many possible positions such as "its worth calling out extremist philosophies even if they do not have a lot of mindshare" or "the woke ideology actually did have a lot of mindshare and was a powerful thing", you responded with...this:
"My argument doesn't rest on woke ideology being crazy. It rests on it saying things I quoted above...You pretended my argument said something it didn't, and then proceeded to criticize the argument you imagined. "
This is a very strange response! It seems like you think I said something like "woke wasn't A, it was B", even though I explicitly said I was not going to discuss woke ideology on the merits. Woke people could be saying the sky is red and down is up, it doesn't matter. My point is not about woke ideology. My point is "why are you pretending that some fringe bullshit thing matters a lot? Why are you tilting at windmills?"
Hopefully this clarified things.
BTW part of why I left DSL is precisely because they all just got so deep in the circlejerk that they would gut instinct react to any criticism with "you are just a woke ideologue". Like, ok man, enjoy the epistemic hole you're in. I think it's cute that the framing you've chosen is one of the battered resistance. Everyone else is seeking power, but not the people who I trust deeply on this very politically slanted forum, THOSE guys are the people calling out the real truth. Meanwhile, you...read my post, thought it said something it didn't, and proceeded to criticize the argument you imagined. Now, look, communication is a two way street, so I recognize that I may not have been as eloquent as needed and at least tried to clarify. But I hope it gives you a bit of pause that your revealed instinct was to just retaliate and shut down the conversation. Maybe not the best epistemological habits for truth-seeking.
No, but I think I am misunderstanding your question because it feels like a complete non-sequitur.
Like, if a lot of people are talking about how the tariffs are bad because the stock market is going to crash while it is, in fact, crashing, that's not nut-picking. Nut-picking is essentially a version of Scott's non-central fallacy. You pick out some random anons on twitter (or tumblr) and implicitly pretend they are representative of the entire movement. The reason I don't understand your question is because if "everyone is constantly talking about" X, they are by definition not nut-picking. Nut-picking has to be non-central/non-representative in some way.
A good example of nut-picking on the left (since I think that's what your question is pointing at) would be like taking a pro-Trump no-name rando neo-nazi's 4chan posts and arguing that these are representative of Trump. That sort of thing did happen, of course. It is notably NOT nut-picking, however, if people take Steve Bannon's tweets and argue that they are representative of Trump, since Bannon was and is one of Trump's closest advisors.
Okay, I just wanted to be clear on what you meant by "nut-picking." I think excluding by definition someone that "everyone constantly talking about" is flawed because there are people/organizations powerful enough to steer the public conversation and they can (and do) elevate some "random anons" to national prominence to make their own side look better in comparison. (Admittedly, a few of them DO then manage to parlay that into some long-lasting recognizability/influence, but that doesn't make the initial selection any less "nut-picking.")
I disagree that random anons on Twitter/Tumblr are less representative of a their movement than Trump is of his. The former is more diffuse, yes, and that prevents any one person becoming as much of a household name, but in terms of power and influence, I'd assess theirs to have FAR more, but at the very least, they're comparable.
Sorry, just to make sure I understood, is your position that random anons on Twitter are as representative of 'their movement' (unclear how you would determine this) and are more powerful in influencing their movement, than Trump is of MAGA?
I ask because this seems so obviously incorrect that I think I'm missing something.
Your argument is a general-purpose argument in favor of doing any insane thing as long as it spares us from the terrible force of pronouns in the bio. Here's its logical implication:
>> We should genocide all Jews in America (7-8 million people). Jews are disproportionally progressive in America, and thus are instrumental in helping the Woke attack on logic itself. Win that, and nothing can be argued rationally anymore. We can't even argue that Nazism is bad, or that killing people is not okay. We should thus genocide all Jews as a start, and hope that the rest of progressives will take the hint and stop being so illogical.
Is genocide too far? Then your argument is false: if it was true the above implication would actually be true, as "an attack on logic itself" is indeed infinitely morally dangerous and we may have to do something as drastic as genocide or wholesale ethnic cleansing to avoid it.
(and yes, any disproportionally progressive population would have sufficed, I specifically chose Jews to rub in the face how ridiculous the argument is.)
If your argument is instead the somewhat more defensible "Wokism is so bad it requires measures as drastic as Trump, but less drastic than genocide or ethnic cleansing", then (A) How much damage can Trump do to convince that fighting wokism is not worth having him as president? (B) How is Trump deporting Pro-Palestinian protestors and random Latinos helping fight the entirety of progressivism? (C) How to guarantee that progressives won't be so humiliated and angry that they amp their progressivism and zeal up to 11, both during and after Trump's presidency? They don't need political power in the White House to put pronouns on their bio, after all. Are you going to ban pronouns? Ban them only when they're woke? How can you determine that? Kill anyone who googles "HRT" or logs on to Tumblr?
If we ever had an election where the choice was between a pro-genocide candidate and a candidate that made it impossible to be anti-genocide, then either way, we're headed for genocide, and all that sounds like to me is that's it's time to vote third-party candidate or possibly revolt.
Fortunately, that's not on the table.
If someone wants to make the argument that the bad thing about a party that makes rational argument almost impossible is that it gives the opposing party license to be almost, but not quite, as bad, I'm sympathetic. But you're probably not the right person to make that argument.
I'm the best kind of guy to do any argument. My arguments, they're beautiful, they're big, nobody had seen anything quite like them. Everybody is telling me, "How do you do it?", they want to know right?, Sleepy Joe can't do it, not the radical left lunatics too. Everybody likes my arguments, my uncle was an arguments guy, studied at MIT. He knew all about arguments, he taught me, that's how I know.
Conservatives have become a very dumb and unhinged cult of personality, that doesn't mean wokeness was not a big deal. I remember when they shut down culture war discussions over on r/ssc, leading to the formation of The Motte, which then got hounded out of reddit entirely. They even doxxed Scott and harassed him at his workplace. They're a very controlling faction that wants to silence dissent and consider you evil for disagreeing with their outlandish propositions.
That said, yeah, it doesn't mean they're worse than Trump, but I'm glad the woke years are over.
The woke years aren't "over", wokism is a structural pathogen that will emerge and re-emerge again and again both in its traditional form and as quite mirror-reversed form that are no less ridiculous and obnoxious as long as the conditions (structural weakness in Free Speech regulations on the Internet, universities, etc...).
Trumpsters are woke, see if you can spot any similarities to their behaviors from the following list [1]:
(1) Academic - the terminology of woke politics is an academic terminology, which is unsurprising given its origins in humanities departments of elite universities.
(2) Immaterial - woke politics are overwhelmingly concerned with the linguistic, the symbolic, and the emotional to the detriment of the material, the economic, and the real.
(3) Structural in analysis, individual in action - the woke perspective is one that tends to see the world’s problems as structural in nature rather than the product of individual actors or actions. Sometimes the problems are misdiagnosed or exaggerated, but the structural focus is beneficial. Curiously, though, the woke approach to solutions to politics is relentlessly individualistic.
(4) Emotionalist - “emotionalist” rather than emotional, meaning not necessarily inappropriately emotional but concerned fundamentally with emotions as the currency of politics.
(5) Fatalistic - woke politics tend towards extreme fatalism regarding solutions and the possibility of gradual positive political change. Institutions are all corrupt and bigoted, so institutions cannot prompt change. Most people are irredeemably racist, and so the masses cannot create a just society.
(6) Insistent that all political questions are easy - woke people speak and act as though there are no hard political questions and no such thing as a moral dilemma. Everything is obvious if you’ve only done the reading and done the work
(7) Possessed of belief in the superior virtue of the oppressed
(8) Enabling people who aren’t Black or Southern to say “y’all”
Only (1) and (8) are obvious mismatches. Replace every occurrence of "oppressed" by "White Americans", and every occurrence of "Racism" or "Sexism" or "Homophobia" by "Deep State" or "Wokism" or "Unpatriotism", and every woke tactic like boycott or harassment by the correspondingly MAGA tactics of deportation or vile harassment on twitter, and you got yourself a perfectly valid woke knockout that just so happens to look at Americans as the victimized group ("True" Americans: anyone who agrees with everything Trump farts out of his mouth and worship him without question. Not Americans in the legal sense, not White people, not White Americans, not Conservatives).
This is not surprising, the parallels between wokism and religious extremists are well-discussed, and the 2 groups give each other ideas and toxoplasma.
"Woke" progressives capture institutions by using social pressure to out people with different beliefs. "Woke" rightoids decided they'd be better off eliminating institutions. Hardly identical.
Rightoids don't seem to have any objection to trying to take over institutions and outing people with different beliefs, they just aren't smart or patient or long-term-planning enough for social pressures, deception and hostile takeover from within like the woke do, so they do crude and pathetic full-frontals like DOGE and Florida school system sabotage.
And there is no such thing as no institutions, destroying an institution redistributes its powers and responsibilities among the closest surviving institutions, destroying all institutions leaves you with a tribe, not a state.
At least a fair number of wokists got moderated and neutralized by the rules of the institution they tried to capture (which is rules working as intended, every institution has **some** kind of immune system against hostile takeover from within), this never happens if you're just bulldozing an institutions or taking it full-frontal style like right wings 0-IQs are wont to do.
The failure mode of wokism is a dumb obnoxious women, the failure mode trumpism is a dumb criminal man.
When DOGE fires employees but doesn't destroy the institutions or agency they work for, I count that as an attempted takeover using selective filtering and just plain chaos. A demolishing would be firing 80% or more of the employee, or outright declaring the agency or institutions "Unamerican", "unpatriotic", etc...
before the current political situation I would have accepted the thing you said at face value and not thought about it further. I would think, that sounds like something the work would do.
Now, I don't believe the things you said.
I think back to my time on the moat when it was on Reddit, and I realize that they didn't actually get driven off, they thought that they were going to get driven off and so they left before the Giants (windmills) could eat them. and yet, Reddit conservative and every other far right sub that hasn't made direct threats against the named person is still on Reddit doing what they do, and the far left subs have been moderated out of existence on account of making direct threats against named people.
Scott got doxed by a newspaper, that's what they do. That same paper went on to docs a bunch of insufficiently centrist protesters re Palestine, because it's a newspaper. That one actually is a giant, but it's not a woke giant, it's a normal centrist Giant doing the thing it's been doing ever since the '60s.
So, I think your comment isn't true. I think you believe something that isn't true for reasons that aren't the ones you think they are. I dont actually know what you could say to convince me at this point unless we met face to face, which is not a good spot to be in re the epistemology of the anonymous Mass.
I don't mean the New York Times, Scott has mentioned he faced threatening phone calls to his workplace from woke people, back when he worked at a clinic owned by someone else. The Culture War Thread absolutely got driven off r/ssc by the woke (why do you think the Culture War Thread was driven off?), leading to the creation of r/TheMotte, then The Motte left reddit because they were getting attention from the Reddit admins. I'm going off of my own memory here of seeing the comments of the TheMotte mods in the run up to the decision to leave the site.
Even when I talked to Kamala-voting normies in the real world, they do mention that it was to be expected that the woke would create a backlash, but they wonder why the backlash had to take the form of Trump specifically.
> This post is called “RIP Culture War Thread”, so you may have already guessed things went south. What happened? The short version is: a bunch of people harassed and threatened me for my role in hosting it, I had a nervous breakdown, and I asked the moderators to get rid of it.
> The fact is, it’s very easy to moderate comment sections. It’s very easy to remove spam, bots, racial slurs, low-effort trolls, and abuse...But once you remove all those things, you’re left with people honestly and civilly arguing for their opinions. And that’s the scariest thing of all.
> Some people think society should tolerate pedophilia, are obsessed with this, and can rattle off a laundry list of studies that they say justify their opinion. Some people think police officers are enforcers of oppression and this makes them valid targets for violence. Some people think immigrants are destroying the cultural cohesion necessary for a free and prosperous country...Each of these views has adherents who are, no offense, smarter than you are.
> The thing about an online comment section is that the guy who really likes pedophilia is going to start posting on every thread about sexual minorities “I’m glad those sexual minorities have their rights! Now it’s time to start arguing for pedophile rights!” followed by a ten thousand word manifesto.
> Every Twitter influencer who wants to profit off of outrage culture is going to be posting 24-7 about how the New York Times endorses pedophilia. Breitbart or some other group that doesn’t like the Times for some reason will publish article after article on New York Times‘ secret pro-pedophile agenda. Allowing any aspect of your brand to come anywhere near something unpopular and taboo is like a giant Christmas present for people who hate you, people who hate everybody and will take whatever targets of opportunity present themselves, and a thousand self-appointed moral crusaders and protectors of the public virtue. It doesn’t matter if taboo material makes up 1% of your comment section; it will inevitably make up 100% of what people hear about your comment section and then of what people think is in your comment section.
> People would message me on Twitter to shame me for my Nazism. People who linked my blog on social media would get replies from people “educating” them that they were supporting Nazism, or asking them to justify why they thought it was appropriate to share Nazi sites. I wrote a silly blog post about mathematics and corn-eating. It reached the front page of a math subreddit and got a lot of upvotes. Somebody found it, asked if people knew that the blog post about corn was from a pro-alt-right neo-Nazi site that tolerated racists and sexists. There was a big argument in the comments about whether it should ever be acceptable to link to or read my website. Any further conversation about math and corn was abandoned. This kept happening, to the point where I wouldn’t even read Reddit discussions of my work anymore. The New York Times already has a reputation, but for some people this was all they’d heard about me.
> People started threatening to use my bad reputation to discredit the communities I was in and the causes I cared about most.
> One person called the clinic where I worked, pretended to be a patient, and tried to get me fired.
> I don’t want to claim martyrdom. None of these things actually hurt me in real life. My blog continues to be popular, my friends stuck by me, and my clinic didn’t let me go. I am not going to be able to set up a classy new FiredForTruth.com website like James Damore did. What actually happened was much more prosaic: I had a nervous breakdown.
etc.
My own take:
It's always been very unclear to me what 'woke' means. I think you could look at this and say 'the woke' did this, but it proves too much. There are tons of people who have been subject to this kind of hate/slander campaigns. GamerGate was a lot of this -- random half-famous people were suddenly caught up in mobs of people telling them to kill themselves or whatever. Saying GamerGate was woke is, frankly, insane.
An explanation that better fits the data: I think Scott ran up against what happens when you become moderately famous on the internet. The things that happened to Scott are what happen to all famous people, from the Royal Family down to random child celebrities. It sucks, but 'woke' didn't invent this or even popularize this. This is a tactic that is used by illiberal ideologies, of which you could maybe argue 'woke' was one (again, unclear what 'woke' actually means).
The backlash had to take the form of Trump or someone like him, because the Woke scared everyone in the traditional center-left and center-right into keeping silent. Whoever stepped up to lead the resistance, aside from isolated impotent clusters of nerds, was going to be someone from outside of the political mainstream and with an enormous ego.
If trump keeps a 200% tariff on china for 2 weeks, the last world order is over in everyone's estimation right? Everyone will be debating what changes, possibility including assassination attempts, but something breaks?
I understand being weak. I understand being stupid. I understand being belligerent.
But: a combination of all three at the same time is a sight to behold, and defies explanation. And they told be Biden was senile. Which he was, but then why replace him with... this.... thing....
The tariffs were to force other countries to capitulate. They did, so now the tariffs are paused. Except for China, and I do think he's gearing up for a trade war with them.
I don't see why it's weak to go "okay, you did what I wanted, now I do what I said I'd do if you did what I wanted" re: tariffs.
a) Germany is increasing its debt (which means more domestic demand and lower trade surpluses) and b) spending a lot more on military as Vance keeps demanding and keeps trying to prevent.
europe v russia, kinetic warfare and the economic warfare between america and china seem very far apart(to be different topics) to me.
I can call germany stupid for dismantling its nuclear power plants all day but thats about russia I dont actually care; tarriffs are about where the factories are; which ive worked in a factory may need to go back
Im pretty sure Germany has a collapsing birthrate like japan, has cars, tarriffs are focusing on cars; japans companies made car factories in america decades ago, and german companies didnt.
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If youd suggest a holistic framing of all this politics: kenetic vs economic; cars and miltrey; is nessery, why? what do you think comes out of it?
Being unpredictable has its own set of strategic advantages, particularly when you're the dominant player. I think it would be giving Trump too much credit to say he's playing 4d chess, but I don't think the economic turmoil is necessarily bad for the US in a competitive zero-sum sense.
> I don't think the economic turmoil is necessarily bad for the US in a competitive zero-sum sense.
It's bad for the US in a zero-sum AND negative-sum sense.
Uncertainty is preventing business from investing in the US. You don't have to believe me, you can just listen to all the American business people who have been saying this for months. It really takes some doing to get oil and gas executives furious at a Republican president, and yet Trump managed it anyway.
>It's bad for the US in a zero-sum AND negative-sum sense.
I think you mean positive-sum. Trade isn't a negative-sum game.
My point is it's worse for other countries than it is for us. China devalued its currency in response to the tariffs. That's worse for them than it is for us. I don't know much about international economics but it sure seems like the past week has been a win for the US relative to China. They depend on global stability much more than we do.
We're the most significant economy in the world. Other countries have to dance to the tune that we play. If we do unpredictable things then it will hurt them more than it hurts us. We have the most dynamic, least centralized large economy. It can respond to shocks much more quickly. That gives us a strategic advantage in tumultuous conditions.
One of the reasons for the US's dominance up until now is that it was a good place to invest. Now Trump is doing his best to demonstrate the opposite. It may not be easy, but other countries WILL build supply chains outside of the US if you force them too.
China is the main beneficiary of Trump's tariffs, because it's the second biggest economy and the most feasible alternative supplier. Non-US countries are likely to buy a lot more from China going forward, a big change from the past decade when they were doing their best to reduce dependence on China.
It's a good place to invest because a) we have the world's largest military by a wide margin b) we have the world's largest consumer market c) we're the global reserve currency. None of those things is going to change in the medium term and nothing that Trump is doing is going to make a lasting difference. It's just short-term turmoil. People who invest with short time horizons are morons anyway. Over any long horizon the US continues to be the best place to invest and nowhere else is even close. You're just being histrionic because you hate Trump. Settle down. He's hilarious so just enjoy the ride. How often do we get a front-row seat to performance art of this magnitude?
Yes it can be done by a skillful player, with a dollop of luck on top. We’re seeing… not that.
Actually what I want to know is who was told 10 minutes before the announcement so they could close their puts and buy short-dated out of the money calls.
In politics he is both of those things. In other spheres (like governing) he is not. He wasn't particularly lucky or skillful with covid, for instance.
I suspect it's not over. The argument has been made for a while that this was "anchoring" - staking down a clear ideal position for yourself from which to negotiate. There are counterarguments (this is not how politics is done; Trump didn't make it clear that this was negotiation; et al.), but in context of his unpredictability by the standards of nearly anyone else, I can't rule out that anchoring was what this was.
Either way, it's not really in our hands unless people want to write Congress and ask for impeachment yet again (I'm afraid that well has been poisoned). Alternately, try to predict what's going to happen and instruct your brokerages accordingly.
I think if the plan was to negotiate, then he would have negotiated before putting the tariffs into effect. I think he at one point had confidence they would work and then changed his mind, or was forced to change his mind by supporters.
Trump may have thought that if he merely brought them up in negotiation, everyone would have dismissed the threat, so he had to make a credible commit.
Of course, I'm just speculating. As usual, Trump is frustratingly hard to predict, even for people who aren't just tribally opposed to him.
If that was his plan, then he just screwed it up terribly. Backing down that much, that quickly undermines his credibility far more than threatening first and tariffing later ever could.
But also if that was the plan, it seems poorly conceived from the start. The U.S. is bigger than any other single player in the world market, and thus has an advantage if it tries to weaponize its trade to extract concessions. It is NOT bigger than the rest of the market combined. Throwing out scattershot tariffs against everyone, all at the same time means the U.S. feels the squeeze harder than most of its negotiating partners do *and everybody knows that.* Plus, with the whole rest of the world in the same boat, everyone suddenly has a large, simultaneous incentive to just route around the U.S. market and trade with each other[1].
When Trump started out with large, specific threats against Canada and Mexico, I assumed they were a negotiating ploy. The balance of economic power *was* quite lopsided in those relationships. He likely *could* have used them as leverage to extract significant concessions. But then he seemingly failed to even *ask* for much of anything meaningful from either country, repeatedly signaled that he thought the tariffs were valuable for their own sake, and then turned around and picked a *much* bigger trade war without apparently ever making a real attempt at any sort of deal.
So I don't feel like the evidence really supports the idea that he's following any sort of a rational strategy here, especially not one based around negotiation. Yes, unpredictability can be an advantage, to an extent. But shooting yourself in the foot can't plausibly be spun as a ploy to keep your enemies guessing: doubtless they *did* find it surprising, but you still have a bullet hole in your foot.
[1] Which to be clear is not a quick or perfect solution. But it still weakens the intensity of the threat compared to the situation where just one or two countries are being singled out.
It depends on what you mean. The world order of USA in charge and free trade (nominally, at least what we say out loud) reigning? Yes, that would likely be over if tariffs stay up long. I don't think two weeks is enough time, maybe two months but more likely six months to really settle in. Two weeks is short enough that everyone can still go back to the previous agreements and contracts before the old ones even got cold.
On the positive side, it may cause a lot of reevaluating the ways that markets aren't free right now - various protectionism measures that just about every country uses to hurt foreign businesses and help their own. Trump wasn't wrong to point out things like currency manipulation, for instance.
On the negative side for the US, most countries will probably try to diversify their trade partners, which means less trade with the US. I know I would be trying to split my trade more evenly across the world, if I had any options. Less chance that China or the US could pull the plug and force my options.
I believe there would be a tarriff rate so absurd it breaks everything in a single day; lets say across the board 100000%, and ships that on thier way must show up and unload their goods by threat of aircraft carrier
I dont find the debate about time very convincing; when a ship gets attacked by pirates, insurence rates change for years; war may instantly invalidate some insureence contracts.
So long as lawyers, complex finance bullshit and paper work are controlling trade, its a risk to not communicate possible changes in laws years in advance; because audists hate change.
If you raise tariffs on goods that are in transit, the thing that will most likely break is the people in your country who are buying the goods - who quite reasonably didn't set aside money to handle a situation where their goods suddenly triple in price after they've already paid for them. At some point, the tariff will be too high for them to pay to unload the goods without going bankrupt, and they'll simply not unload the goods until something changes. (They'll probably still take huge losses redirecting the ships or whatever, but might as well recoup what you can.)
And if you use the Navy to *force* them to unload so that you can collect the tariff, then you're basically just robbing them at gunpoint.
And, yes, if the US decided that it was going to arbitrarily empty the bank accounts of every company that has goods in transit from China today, that would definitely "break everything," but I think that would have less to do with tariffs and more to do with the sudden collapse of property rights. Like, I don't really understand what you're trying to show with this example.
A one day delay is actually really common. What would happen in that scenario is that all the boats scheduled to dock just hang out on the ocean for a day, waiting for instructions on what to do. Before getting any update, the rates go back down and they resume as normal. Sea freight already takes 2-4 weeks to go from China to the US, with huge variations. Adding a day wouldn't change much.
Some decisions will be made in two weeks, but a lot of them can be reversed pretty quickly, and the longer term items (contracts, supply chains, etc.) can't be changed that quickly for most groups.
A cargo ship sitting outside of San Diego isn't going to make it anywhere relevant in less than two weeks, probably longer, even if they get orders to move immediately. Which would be a big headache for someone to figure out - much better to wait a few days and see, rather than wasting the fuel anyway.
I would bet on longer than 2 weeks for systemic change - "there is a lot of ruin in a nation" and so on - but I think 2 weeks of this might be enough for Republican Congresscritters to go from "he's crazy but he'll strike a deal eventually, let's not rock the boat" to "my god he really intends to kill trade forever" and pass a bipartisan, veto-proof anti-tariff bill.
(I'm not at all confident in this guess, I'm just seeing a trickle of "GOP donor says he's wondering if Trump has gone crazy" type articles and feeling like they have to add up to something eventually.)
In terms of political relations, the old order is arguably already dead. Like, the idea of the current US organizing a Bush-style "coalition of the willing" to do something already seems implausible. But economic relations are more concrete, less emotional, they'll take longer to shift.
Allot of trade is china and america; and trump was considered tough on china for a 20% tarriff in 2016
Im for trade war with slave states; but china instantly ratchet'ed it up. I believe everyone believes xi is a cult of personality, and that trumps advisors are pro-chaos; sooo how high does the most relivent tariff rate go. I no longer see a 0% chance of 1000% tarriffs with china.
If we are actually burning down the system I should probaly warn some family.
I would be in favour of 1000% tariffs on China, but they should be directly tied to democratic and human rights reforms. Once there's free elections, once the CCP is abolished, once its leaders are brought to the Hague for trial and so forth.
We can't allow China to become like Russia, where the Communist Party changes its name and holds some phony elections but the same people are still in power. It has to be like Germany, where the people in charge of the regime are utterly forbidden from ever having power again.
I have been sending friends links to Scott’s posts and to his group’s summary of their predictions. But I think there is a need for a summary that is more entertaining and easier to read. When I was first learning about AI a few years ago someone sent me to a 2-part article about AI and its risks that was well done, and casual in style, and had some amusing graphics. I think we need something like that for this next chapter we are starting. It would not be necessary to explain AI itself, because you could link to the original articles I mentioned for that. What about doing that write-up, alone or with others? You could then put it up on, say, Substack and Scott and others could link to it.
Not Scott but it seems to me that the first step in deciding what to do is determining what specific thing you want to change.
Assuming that you do want to make your own choices rather than waiting for orders (superpersuasian skeptics take note): what's a single, clear, specific thing / action / behavior / etc. of which you are HIGHLY HIGHLY HIGHLY HIGHLY HIGHLY HIGHLY concerned and wish to affect?
We have to get rid of the filibuster. You already need both the House and the Senate to pass legislation. Since it’s almost impossible get a 60 vote majority today, that means it’s a herculean effort to get anything at all passed. Congress can’t do anything, it’s power get redistributed to the Supreme Court, the federal bureaucracy and an increasingly imperial presidency. Very little gets done the way it’s supposed to.
They control the budget which they are consistently debating, for anyone not trump this was allot of power because who isnt going to spend earmarked money?
Yeah but money is fungible and the executive branch gets trillions of dollars to play with every year. The imperial presidency has been consistently increasing for decades
If congress wasnt repubicain I think doge wouldve been dismantled; it still seems fairly rational that congress writes mission statements and controls money is a major power. The real question is why the courts allow such nonsense reads of the consitution all the time; why not be the life time judge throwing idiots out of your sight when they blatantly lie and every once in a while yell at the president.
The federal government hasn’t been really following the constitution for nearly a hundred years. It’s whatever legal mumbo jumbo you can get away with.
Worse, the filibuster works by wasting time, so one policy getting filibustered effectively kills the policies scheduled behind it too. I don't know why it hasn't been restructured by now. Unless that's the point, of course, to kill publicly uncontroversial things by scheduling them behind a known filibuster.
IIRC when someone threatens a filibuster, Congress usually moves on to other stuff on the schedule rather than simply stall everything out, and that's why the threat of a filibuster very rarely results in someone actually needing to get up and give speeches for all eternity.
Yes. The times when the filibuster is actually used are almost always cases where an individual wants to grandstand while losing. There have been a few historical events where a team of people (i.e. the entire opposition party) have been able to hold up the Senate long enough to prevail, but I haven't seen that happen in a long time. The threat of 40+ people rotating shifts and stopping the Senate from doing anything is enough, so both sides just let it go at that point.
So either legislation gets 60+ votes or folds to opposition.
Asking for help -- does anyone here have an experience with reverse image search or things like that?
I sometimes read stories about how someone was photographed at a crime scene, and later people found his page on social media. I am not sure how exactly this works; how much of that was some automatic searching process (upload the image somewhere, receive links to social media account), how much was distributed human work, and how much was sheer luck (e.g. someone recognized their neighbor).
Here is a photo I have: [redacted]
This young man deals drugs to kids of similar age in my neighborhood. I was extremely lucky to get this picture. He found a secluded place to conduct his business, a narrow street with only one window, in the middle of the day when most people are at work or at school. Too bad for him that it happened to be my window, and I happened to be working from home that day, and I was quick enough to grab a camera and open the window, and despite him hiding his face in a fraction of a second, there were still two or three frames in the video where his face is clearly visible.
Assuming that this guy has a presence on social networks, is it somehow possible to find him, using this picture? Could you please try and reply here with the link? To narrow down the choices (or as a sanity check for the results), the location is Slovakia, Bratislava.
I am probably taking the whole video to the police tomorrow, but I expect much greater chances of success if could give them some pointer where to find him. Otherwise they will probably be too busy to do something about it.
EDIT: Yeah, there is nothing in the photo suggesting that he was involved in some illegal activity. I wasn't that lucky. So I guess you just have to trust me. Sorry, I wish I had a better option here. My only hope is that if the cops go check his home, they will either find something there, or the kid will lose his nerves and confess. Or maybe someone is already investigating this, and my evidence happens to be the last piece they need (e.g. a legal excuse to search his home).
PimEyes is pretty good at finding people by faces - e.g. often on photographer portfolio sites attending a wedding, or in the crowd at a large sports match.
Best thing I can think of is to scroll through Facebook for your area
and look for photos of the guy. There’s probably a way to use tech to strain out photos that could not possibly be him — women, old folks, people of a different race — so there would be fewer photos for you to look at, but you’d need someone techy to set it up.
I don't know what your local laws might be, but if this guy is very sensitive to being watched, can you put up an outdoor security camera outside your window, aimed right at his spot?
As I understand it, most reverse image search sites like tineye.com work by checking similarity to cached images, so if you're the only person to have ever photographed the guy in that location the similarity to cached images is likely close to zero, even if pictures of him in other places exist. There may be more sophisticated sites out there that could do proper facial recognition but I'm not aware of any, and even if I were I'd be worried about the privacy implications of letting anyone face ID random strangers...
I’ve been building a small side project inspired by Karl Popper and a recent dwarkesh podcast. The premise is simple:
A web platform where the only thing you can post is a falsifiable conjecture.
Other users post refutations — empirical, logical, or theoretical.
Authors revise their conjectures in response, or let them die.
No infinite threads, no persuasion spirals — just:
“Here’s what I think is true. Here’s what would prove me wrong. Go.”
⸻
Why?
Because most online platforms reward persuasion, not refutation.
Because blog posts tend to attract agreement or vibes-based replies.
Because ideas don’t often get tested in public — just upvoted, ignored, or memed.
I’m trying to build a minimal place for intellectual honesty:
• Conjectures must include clear falsification criteria.
• Refutations are peer-visible and ranked.
• Conjectures can be revised, versioned, or withdrawn.
• Later: prediction markets, journals, citations, and reputation.
⸻
Examples:
• “Universal Basic Income reduces crime in high-income countries.”
Falsification: Controlled studies show no decrease in crime rates post-UBI.
• “By 2030, open-source LLMs will outperform closed models on reasoning benchmarks.”
Falsification: No open-source model outperforms GPT-N on GSM8K, MATH, etc.
• “CRISPR cures at least one human monogenic disease at population scale by 2029.”
Falsification: No such treatment reaches >100,000 patients worldwide.
⸻
My questions for you:
• Would you use something like this — to post, to refute, to lurk?
• What failure modes should I be terrified of?
• How is this not just “Metaculus with paragraphs” or “LessWrong with more constraints”?
• What would make this fun or addictively useful?
⸻
Happy to link the MVP if anyone wants to see it. Just trying to figure out whether this is the seed of a useful epistemic environment — or a graveyard of noble abstractions.
I think this is a worthwhile project, but I have a prejudice as a long-standing fan of the Popper framework.
The main point of failure I see is fuzziness. It is very difficult for most people to precisely state their claims and falsification evidence. Even on prediction markets, there are vaguely defined questions. For the most part, it seems the larger prediction markets are ok b/c there are enough sharply defined questions for the community to tolerate the vague ones.
The main alternative solution is what I see you doing in one of the comment sub-threads below: internal resources that help users sharpen their questions and identify falsification criteria. That is pretty resource intensive, though, especially because popperian thinking is way outside the normal practice for most people.
There are many issues with the scientific method. One famous issue is Wittgenstein's ruler - a scientific study may arrive at a false conclusion because it is in fact measuring the equipment used, rather than the phenomenon.
The final point is a question of theoretical possibility vs. practical plausibility. A better example would be how do you falsify the predictive ability of evolution.
Still, there exist a large number of phenomena where the conjecture is plausibly falsifiable and well designed studies can be created.
I don't think the difficulty of falsifying is a problem for your project. The burden is on the person posing the question to include the things they would consider falsifying.
In general, one strength of the Popper framework is the meta-thinking involved in setting up the hypotheses. Even for cases where there is a non-falsifiable belief underpinning a particular view, I think it is useful for the proponents to recognize that it isn't falsifiable and to spend a couple minute contemplating what that means.
Oh, well I've certainly got at least two conjectures. First; smell works by sensing molecular vibrations, the mechanism is uncertain. Two; MoND is a good description of gravity at low acceleration levels and should be considered more. It's not a theory, but it's a big data point that people are ignoring.
Interesting! Would you be up for refining these into falsifiable conjectures?
1. Molecular vibration theory of smell - Could we frame a specific falsification test? For instance:
If two molecules with identical vibrational spectra but different shapes are distinguishable by smell, the vibration hypothesis is falsified.
That makes it testable, not just plausible.
2. MoND as a valid low-acceleration gravity model - Could this be stated in a way that pits it directly against dark matter models? For example:
If a ΛCDM model explains galaxy rotation curves with fewer assumptions or parameters than MoND across a representative sample, then MoND is disfavoured.
Here’s a sharper question: Would you be willing to attach a bounty to either of these?
Say, £50 or £100 for a clear empirical or theoretical refutation meeting defined criteria?
Performative B. has a response to smell. Stacy McGaugh has a whole blog dedicated to MoND. https://tritonstation.com/ Mond is not so much a theory as an observational fitting. We have no idea why it works. As for dark matter. I don't think Cold (heavy) dark matter will be detected and so a direct detection of a massive dark matter particle would refute that. It does seem likely that there is some dark matter out there. Maybe hot (light) dark matter or something else.
I guess I'd bet some money on there being no cold dark matter particle. As for the rest, the smell is shape and lamda-CDM are the dominant ideas in their respective science fields. And so there are strong prejudicious for them. (It's where all the money is.)
> If two molecules with identical vibrational spectra but different shapes are distinguishable by smell, the vibration hypothesis is falsified.
Classically, this is "smell as shape" vs "smell as vibration" and there was a book called the Emperor of Scent about Luca Turin, the main proponent of "smell as vibration."
Quoting from my review of the book:
"The essential debate is about the mechanism behind smell sensing. The established position maintains that the G proteins in our nasal passages lock onto and detect different shapes on molecules, or perhaps different parts of shapes, and assembles this information into the different smells we perceive.
But this model has many problems - the even and odd esters used in Chanel no 5 smelling different,3 rocket fuel with no sulfur atom smelling like sulfur, deuterated molecules smelling different than molecules with regular hydrogen despite having identical shapes, sila compounds with silicons in place of carbons, and thus exactly the same shapes - but different atomic weights - smelling different, and more.
What would explain all these disparate facts that give the lie to “smell as shape?” If smell was detected by vibration, by the frequency of the electron shells in what is being smelled. Basically, the nose would be doing spectroscopy, which is crazy if you’re thinking of optical spectroscopy, but makes more sense if you’re thinking of electron tunneling voltage drop spectroscopy. "
Nitpick: for the UBI example, I would expect UBI to be rigorously defined in the falsification criteria, because most if not all pilot studies that have been done fail the "universal" part (they only have so much funding so they randomly/systematically pick some poor people in a certain area to receive it). If I entered that proposition, I would only want examples of country/province/statewide etc. UBI policies that reached say 95% or more of the polity in question.
While I do think when you get down to that level you have essentially rederived metaculus from first principles, it would still be useful to have a competing platform with different rules/structure in case your model turns out to be the better one for finding the truth.
And yes, in case anyone was wondering, I am aware of the Alaska Permanent Fund. This would satisfy my "universal" criteria but not my "basic" criteria (the amount paid out per resident is only $1600 per year as of 2019, which is nowhere near enough to cover rent).
Great nitpick. I completely agree. The conjecture would need to rigorously define both “universal” and “basic” in operational terms. Otherwise the falsification criteria become too soft to be useful.
Something like:
If a UBI policy covering at least 95 percent of adults in a given polity over at least 3 years, with payments equal to or greater than X percent of local median rent, shows no statistically significant decrease in property crime, the conjecture is refuted.
Your Alaska example shows exactly why this level of clarity matters. It is often cited, but it only meets the “universal” criterion, not the “basic” one.
Regarding the Metaculus comparison, yes, both aim at structured truth-seeking. But where Metaculus focuses on predictive accuracy, this would focus on clarity of claims, falsifiability, and willingness to revise. Different norms, different incentives.
How conscious is conscious sedation? Are memories formed during the process, but they're inaccessible? Does midazolam effect past memories (prior to the procedure?)
Had a procedure under conscious sedation recently. I find the gap disturbing and I'm trying to contextualize it. I would greatly appreciate any perspective.
He had wisdom tooth extraction and they gave him some sort of benzodiazepine (the told him the drug is similar to valium but he didn't catch the name) and regular novocaine freezing. When my friend came back from the dentist he said he remembered the entire procedure, and he said he felt everything.
Two days later he claimed that he was knocked out cold and doesn't remember anything. He didn't even recall telling me otherwise.
I had eye surgery with conscious sedation - might have been "pro - something", it made me feel warm. I still have memories of the light show I saw as things were done inside my eyeball. And the music that was playing - at the followup with the surgeon I asked about her playlist. At one point I complained about the pain and was given more numbing drops. And yes they keep it chilly in the OR.
I had cataract surgery and they told me I wouldn’t remember anything either under conscious sedation. I remember the whole thing including the surgeon telling me “I’m going to have to ask you to quit asking questions now.” along with all my questions and the increasingly irritated answers, the surgeon telling the anesthesiologist to “give him some more” the temperature on the thermometer in the OR that I picked up with my unbandaged eye, (67F it was cold in there), etc.
When they rolled me back to recovery I asked for my phone so I could show the recovery nurse pictures of the lake trout I had caught the week before.
When I got home i used my phone to look at ACX with one eye and I was in the mood to debate any hypothetical, explore any counter factual whether I knew anything about it or had any real interest in it at all before my wife took my phone and told me sleep the stuff off.
The “you won’t remember” thing didn’t work in my case. YMMV
I have had midazolam 3x for colonoscopies, and remember snippets from each procedure but not much. Apparently it’s possible to ask people under the influence of this stuff questions and they will respond with sensible answers, but may well not remember the exchange afterwards. Most of my memories from the procedures are of brief exchanges with the medical staff, I believe exchanges initiated by me. Once I said “that hurts” and the doctor said he was almost done.
So you are in a very relaxed, drowsy state in which your ability to form memories is greatly reduced, while other things, such as your awareness of what’s going on, and your ability to answer a question, are still working pretty well. I looked up amnesia, and all studies show anterograde amnesia (forgetting lots of things after the drug is administered). Some show a bit or retrograde amnesia (some impairment of memory of events in the last few minutes before the drug is administered.). There is no reason to think the drug affects memory in any other way — either memories from the period before you took it or ability to form new memories after.
Factory farming: Chicken coops placed above where pigs feed. Chicken shit falls down through bottom of coop and pigs eat it. Analogous to LLM training. We are the chickens, LLM is the pig.
A generation of schookids are growing up with LLMs right now. They trust the LLM hallucinations over their teachers. At the opposite end of the scale, the president of the USA is letting ChatGPT set trade policy.
> At the opposite end of the scale, the president of the USA is letting ChatGPT set trade policy.
Yikes, that sounds concerning. I'm generally pro-AI but I don't know that I'd hand ChatGPT the keys to trade policy.
What do you mean by the president letting ChatGPT set trade policy? Is it something where he came into office without having an idea of trade policy goals and / or strategy to achieve them, then asked something like "What should the trade policy be?" and did whatever popped up in the output? To what degree is ChatGPT driving?
Only downside is that on the future the pig will go live in a fortress somewhere, either no longer needing our shit or having it delivered to the fortress, and we will be animals in one of its factory farms. Egad, is that the crusher I see rounding the bend?
As with Yves Klein and his Yves Klein Blue paintings, here's another example of an artist who is communicating in the philosophical mode. Bruce Nauman's art is mostly directed at other artists and critics. And he's presenting his audience of artists and critics with questions about what is the nature of art. I think he would be surprised, confused, and even hurt if regular folks started appreciating and purchasing his work. This is a guy who came from a family of engineers, and I wonder if that didn't influence his creative direction.
Full disclosure: I find most art in the philosophical mode to be rather boring because these artists aren't particularly interested in tickling our qualia. For me, Yves Klein was an exception because he was interested in overwhelming the viewer's visual cortex with the vibrancy of color he created.
After absorbing that 'art', I needed a quick jolt of Carlo Crivelli. His painting may have anticipated AI art (look at the hands on the Magdalene) but at least he's *doing* something other than "oh lemme plonk an empty box on the floor and stroke my chin about the end of art and the nature of galleries mediating our experience of art about it".
Nice! That’s an example of the message mode of art where the artist is reinforcing cultural norms — in this case religion. Unlike Nauman’s what-is-art? art, crivelli’s audience was the Church and religious patrons of the church. I don’t know of any artist who is making art with a religious message that wouldn’t look kitschy today.
Not just the subject matter but Crivelli's style; I find something metallic and hard-edged in it, almost sculptural, like the folds in the garment of a bronze statue:
His paintings are both bright and yet somehow rigid, with very definite outlines, very concrete and in the actual - look at how he's working out the details in this painting of the Annunciation, where he has the beam of light where the Holy Ghost is descending worked out by angles (slightly clumsily or at least not quite convincingly, the upper and lower halves don't quite line up) so that it passes through the physical material of the building with the little loophole in the architecture. I can see why the Pre-Raphaelites loved him:
Geez, I totally forgot that Crivelli painted "The Annunciation with Saint Emidius". That's one of my favorites from that period. It's almost surreal the way street crowds in all the actors in the drama. The perspective of the architecture just sucks your sight down to the vanishing point. And I can't help but think that M.C. Escher was inspired by Crivelli's architectural depictions in his prints. And the laser beam from heaven zapping the Virgin Mary is just awesome.
That hard edge you're talking about was a characteristic of the gothic sensibility that made compositions look like icons in the first half of the Fifteenth Century. A softer, more naturalistic style took hold as Florentine artists like Verrocchio and Botticelli opted for softer edges between light and shadow. I guess Crivelli got thrown into prison for adultery in the 1450s (?). Did he produce anything after that?
Not too sure, I mostly know him as a minor figure whose art caught my eye so I've never looked up his history. He's plainly not considered one of the Big Names, though I do wonder if he's due a re-evaluation.
You are correct about the clear Gothic and Northern European/Netherlandish influence in his work. It's those crisp lines and hard edges that make it stand out for me.
That painting was done in 1486, a comparable Annunciation is one by Hans Memling in 1482 or so, which has the same attention to architectural detail and the folds of drapery, as well as showing off mastery of perspective, but much softer outlines and colours by contrast:
For decades the most common example of stupid US protectionism which fails to achieve its stated policy objective has been the 1920 law known commonly as the "Jones Act".
So guess who's about to try to use executive authority to impose a global version of the Jones Act?
"On April 17th the U.S. Trade Representative's office is expected to impose fees of up to $1.5M per port call for ships made in China and for $500k to $1M if the ocean carrier owns a single ship made in China or even has one on order from a Chinese shipyard...."
[That news has been posted in many places this morning, and as I'm typing various shipping-industry leaders are posting shocked denunciations of it. Will be in the MSM news cycle starting probably this evening.]
I know a lot of people are pinning their hopes on genetic engineering and the likes to improve the babies of the future.
I'd be a lot more impressed if it wasn't for stunts like this, which are great for cajoling people into splurging their money investing in these fly-by-nights, but which don't really advance the cause of science in a serious way. Seems these are the same lot that produced the "woolly mammoth mice" recently, which are furry mice but not mammoths. They sure do have an instinct for publicity, I have to give them that. P.T. Barnum, thou shouldst be living at this hour, you'd clean up!
"It's just like Jurassic Park!" "Now you can have a dire wolf of your own!" (and by the bye, I see George R.R. Martin himself is an investor in this which makes me downgrade it even more).
Well, no you can't, and you probably wouldn't want one if they really could produce the goods. Okay, probably some people would, the kind who think pitbulls are cuddlebugs and take photos of their newborn babies 'snuggled' up to the beast, or those who want wolves and tigers as family pets. I have no problem with extinct predators, newly reintroduced, eating those people (though not the babies, it's not their fault their progenitors are idiots).
But I hate these kind of stories because yeah I'd like to see real ancient species coming back, but this is just "modified existing animals for people who want even more exotic pets". Note the lack of any kind of independent verification that these animals exist as described by the company:
"US biotechnology company Colossal Biosciences has claimed it produced three dire wolves, a species that has been extinct for over 10,000 years, by modifying the genome of a modern-day gray wolf using dire wolf DNA found in fossils.
Colossal released footage yesterday which it said featured "dire wolf" adolescent cubs Romulus and Remus.
According to Colossal, some of the dire wolf fossils their team utilised for DNA extraction included a 13,000-year-old dire wolf tooth and a 72,000-year-old inner ear bone.
One female puppy Khaleesi was also part of the "successfully birthed" cubs, they added.
Reuters could not independently verify Colossal's claims, nor the location and the date of footage.
Corey Bradshaw, professor of global ecology at Australia's Flinders University, was sceptical of Colossal’s claims and the actual practicality of reviving an extinct species like the dire wolf.
As Mr Bradshaw explained, it is practically impossible to modify the entire genomes of animals that have been extinct for thousands of years due to factors like DNA degradation.
"So yes, they have slightly genetically modified wolves, maybe. And that's probably the best that you're going to get. And those slight modifications seem to have been derived from retrieved dire wolf material. Does that make it a dire wolf? No. Does it make a slightly modified gray wolf? Yes," Mr Bradshaw told Reuters.
"When you claim all these great big things and then you don't provide the associated evidence, especially in something as controversial as this, that is a massive red flag," he added.
The dire wolf is a mainstay of fantasy settings in pop culture, with mentions in role-playing games like Dungeons & Dragons and video games like World of Warcraft.
However, the vehicle which truly shot dire wolves to fame is the HBO series Game of Thrones, based on the works of author George RR Martin.
Mr Martin, an investor in Colossal and cultural adviser for the company, said: "Many people view dire wolves as mythical creatures that only exist in a fantasy world, but in reality, they have a rich history of contributing to the American ecosystem."
"I get the luxury to write about magic, but Ben and Colossal have created magic by bringing these majestic beasts back to our world."
Colossal Biosciences was founded in 2021, and claims it is the first biotechnology company to use CRISPR (Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeats) gene editing technology to research species de-extinction.
Colossal also said it has recently cloned critically endangered red wolves using the same technology, as well as the hybrid Colossal Woolly Mouse-mice genetically engineered to possess traits of the long-extinct wooly-mammoth."
On the one hand, hate the game, not the playah. I'd like genetic engineering of humans to be conducted by serious, rational experts with impeccable credentials with the public benefit in mind. Then I look at someone like Fauci and I'm like "NOPE". I'm much more comfortable with Colossal Broscience engineering dire wolves and unicorns because that's what will sell on Instagram, which is why this company exists: to genetically engineer animals that look awesome on Instagram and Tik Tok because that's what rich people will pay for. And I'm not above this. If Baron Trump gets a dire wolf for his birthday and starts dropping Tik Toks of him playing fetch with it on the White House lawn, I'm watching. I want to go to a Katy Perry concert where she rides out on a genetically engineered unicorn. And I can't blame Colossal Broscience for giving us what we want, not what we need, because that's what we pay for. Hate the game, not the playah.
On the other hand...like, I think I'm prepared for how retarded this will get, but I'm not. I remember the 90s, I remember AOL and the early internet. "Wow, everyone in the world can talk to each other now. Clearly we will enter a golden age of rational discourse and mutual understanding." And, like, that didn't happen but I was unprepared for how much that didn't happen and how bad everything got. And I totally understand the fear that this will go down a similar path. Like, the things I want to genetically engineer are important and good and awesome, clearly, but the rest of the world isn't just incompetent to decide what we should genetically engineer.
Like, let's be real, if the average man got the ability to genetically engineer either himself or his sons, the first thing he's going to do is genetically engineer a bigger penis. Let's not lie to ourselves. And there's a line below which this is a...reasonable indulgence. But we won't stop there. We will blow past that line and I'm not ready for that world. It kinda break my heart that we aren't mature enough to handle such an important technological advancement but I'm sympathetic to the argument that we really, really aren't.
> Like, let's be real, if the average man got the ability to genetically engineer either himself or his sons, the first thing he's going to do is genetically engineer a bigger penis.
Very true, but you know, we're not going to get to all being 6' 6" athletic, von Neumann adonises without going through some silly fads and growing pains.
Besides, think this through - we'll for sure only be able to alter embryos at first for a good while (because it's very very difficult to get your modification into all ~37 trillion adult cells in a timely way, but if you alter an embryo it grows into all those trillions of cells with the modification intact), and a lot of dads would love an 18" schlong for themselves, but wouldn't want their sons flexing on them - the combination of "wants 18" schlong" and "humility enough to give it to related others" is probably rarer than you think!
I'm not thinking 18" schlongs, I'm thinking schlong-flation.
Like, the average erect schlong is 5.1" long (1) and 6" looks to be at least one standard deviation above the average. Now I'm not saying everyone will jump to 18" schlongs. But some fathers will want their sons to have above average schlongs and no father wants their son to have below average schlongs.
Can you imagine being a young man and learning that your father consciously chose for you to have a schlong one to two standard deviations below the average? He'd hate you, and rightfully so.
But once everyone is trying to have at least average if not tastefully above average size schlongs, the average will move. An average of 5.1" in the 0 generation will become 6" in the first generation and then the second generation will face a dilemma: not only will they then have to go to 6-7" schlongs but they also know that everyone else is also thinking the same, so they will go even further. Thus, it is not hubris that will lead to the 18" schlong but a constant push not to be below average. And, indeed, if possible, I expect us to blow past the 18" schlong to even greater lengths until some structural problem makes further development infeasible.
And for the three women on this board who think this is silly, I have seen a phenomenal amount of ass-flation since Sir Mix-a-lot released his original classic (2).
This is the same reason that 6'6" geniuses are not going to work like we think it will. First few generations are going to have the Gattaca problem where anyone not 6'6" and 150 IQ becomes outcastes. Then everyone will be socially equal based on being the same, and needs to do something stupid to get recognition (8'10" and 180 IQ! That'll be the ticket!). Then we find out that the genetics for making people all super tall and smart has a bunch of side effects that destroy society in some completely unexpected way, even before we try making all of our sons 8' tall.
Lost in all of this is the understanding that society works better when people have different talents, goals, etc. Or with your example, we realize somewhere too late that sex is too painful for women because penis size got out of control and also men can't handle the bloodflow and can't get erect, then no one is having sex anymore.
I'm a bit sympathetic to engineering away obvious problems. I sympathize with the 5'2" male that can't get a date, or the woman with the genetic disease that means she won't live past 25. But I don't think we have the wisdom or the knowledge to make long term sweeping changes without breaking everything.
> Thus, it is not hubris that will lead to the 18" schlong but a constant push not to be below average.
A very fair point - I was almost certainly attributing too much induction in the case of the fathers making this choice. "Well obviously I'm thinking of a tasteful 8 inches here, but you just *know* that bastard Johnson is going to go for 10, so I should put down 10.5...but HE'S probably thinking along these lines too! Then he's gonna go for 12 for sure, so I should..."
I think in real life these sorts of things (well, height at least) would probably go through some fun status signaling epicycles, per Scott's "barber pole" theory. "Obviously the people dialing in 7 feet for their son's heights are arrivistes, essentially plebs! The real status flex will be anti-signaling - my sons will be so smart and rich and capable they'll be able to attract whoever they want regardless of height, so I'm going for a tasteful six two."
A lot like the millionaire / centimillionaire / billionaire wife meme:
It's funny but there's a grain of truth here. Once *everyone* is 6' 6", then to give your kids the height advantage, the meddling will be to select for 6' 8" or 6' 10". Gradually this will creep up until everyone is as tall as this guy:
And of course, the taller you are. the bigger (proportionally) your manly parts should and must be, so while I think (if your potential romantic partners are cis women) 18" will be too much, certainly a mere 6" isn't going to impress anyone.
The reductio ad absurdum is ending up with giraffe-tall men with impossibly large endowments while the women all look like Macy's parade balloons due to the demand for larger and larger bosoms and thicc thighs etc. Both sets of 'enhancements' means that sex is physically impossible. At which point our species will no longer be viable and the cockroaches can inherit the earth.
I think you and WoolyAI might be overlooking the fact that having an 18" schlong makes it really difficult to produce children the traditional way. But I guess folks with engineered johnsons will be reproducing by IVF anyway if they do at all.
> But I guess folks with engineered johnsons will be reproducing by IVF anyway if they do at all.
Yeah, the best median bet right now with the derivative of fertility rates worldwide is probably "they won't reproduce organically, so this isn't a consideration."
Something big will likely change things either for the good or bad (uterine replicators and widespread gengineering or robotic maids and nannies on the good end, AI creating Infinite Jest style superstimuli or sexbots on the bad end), but worrying about dong-size affecting offspring numbers certainly seems like quibbling about details on the margins given current trends.
Did you mean "fertility" or "fecundity"? The reason birth rates are declining in the west are mostly economic, not biological. Artificial wombs aren't a solution for that, but I guess robo maids and nannies might be.
In this case, "fertility," because that's how it's usually reported (TFR). But isn't the primary difference simply the amount of time people are pregnant / lactating, and so technically infertile being taken into account in the denominator?
The distinction seems mostly irrelevant in our largely very low fertility developed world environments?
> The reason birth rates are declining in the west are mostly economic, not biological.
It's at least partly biological. When age at first birth was 22 back in the 50's, it led to many more kids for biological reasons.
"Odds of live birth" data in the following table are from Geruso et al. Age and Infertility Revisited (2023), which measures actual fecundity versus fertility:
The graph and table above is basically the Rosetta Stone to the fertility crisis. If women wait until 29 to get married and 30+ to start having their first kid (as is true today), they've burnt through more than half of their fertility.
The odds of a live birth in a given year at 20-22 are ~60%. The odds at age 30 are half that, ~30%, and at age 35 ~22%.
Granted, you can argue (and many do) that waiting to have your first kid at age 30 is a function of wanting to finish education and establish yourself in your career (economic).
But this is purely cultural - given human lifespans, culturally women could easily treat marriage as a "foundation" instead of a "capstone," marry an older established man who will support her through first kids and school, and have a few kids starting at 22, then go to college and grad school, with an eye towards starting your "real" career at 35.
Or you can finish your education and start your career while having kids, like women do in Israel.
> Artificial wombs aren't a solution for that, but I guess robo maids and nannies might be.
Here I'm just speaking from experience - I've been dating for the past ~2 years looking for a wife, and want 6 kids. At first everyone is massively opposed, but then you say "maids, nannies, cooks, surrogates" and you can convince practically anybody, even really smart / talented Ivy-tier girls. Women don't want to ruin their bodies with a bunch of pregnancies, and don't want to spend all their time on drudge work cleaning and cooking. And the biggest convincer in that list (from experience) is "surrogates," not the maids and nannies (although all of it helps).
My problem is we're not even *getting* dire wolves and mammoth mice, we're getting slightly tweaked existing creatures. The wooly mice are kind of cute, but they're nothing more than slightly more exotic kinds of bred to be pets mice. The wolves are probably not even more than slightly tweaked wolves.
If you're gonna do broscience, gimme mammoths and sabre tooth tigers, not bait for rich fools.
Hey, you gotta have the wooly mouse before you can have the wooly cat, the wooly dog, the wooly horse, and then the wooly mammoth. Rome wasn't genetically engineered in a day.
On the off chance that someone here can make it happen, I think the lowest hanging fruit in bringing back extinct species is ursus horriblis or the California Grizzly Bear. Went extinct in 1924, it's basically a brown bear but awesomer, and it's on the California flag and it's reintroduction to the wild would have pretty powerful symbolism.
The question is whether they are capable, now or ever, of actually producing a wooly mammoth or dire wolf. Tweaking a mouse to be a aesthetically different mouse isn't like creating a wooly mammoth. At least changing an elephant would be more similar, but ultimately suffers from the same problem. It's not a wooly mammoth, it's something else with some window dressing.
1/ Does this tech modify currently existing genomes such that changes effect the adult? People are likely to be more risk averse with their unborn children than with themselves.
2/ Disregarding outliers, and speaking as a penis-haver, raw size modification is rather far down the list relative to testosterone/hormone levels, cardiovascular health, and youth markers like smooth wrinkle-free skin and a full head of hair. And this assumes it is impossible to "enhance" the human platform through eg amplifying sensitivity, lowering refractory period, etc. It's also incoherent to dream of a more mature humanity; the species is what it is.
Well, some penis-havers are very much exercised about their penises and how often they get hard during wet dreams, if I'm taking this loolah correctly:
I sincerely hope to God that this looper is not representative of men in general and their obsessions with their dangly bits, because otherwise gentlemen Alfred Bester is looking more prophetic than ever (from "Extro/The Computer Connection/original serialised story The Indian Giver"):
A capsule floated down on top of the bods with its jets spraying fireworks. A blue-eyed blond astronaut stepped out and came up to us. “Duh,” he mumbled in Kallikak. “Duh-duh-duh-duh….”
“What’s this thing selling?” Uncas asked.
“Duh,” Fee told him. “That’s about all the honks can say so they named the product after it. I think it’s a penis amplifier.”
Oh wow, I was hoping it would be *that* Bryan Johnson and I was not disappointed; he even opens with the classic "Hi friend". Unfortunately for him, old Kronos will have the last laugh, and it's a soft chuckle.
When I first became aware of him, I thought he was just a health freak taking it to extremes because he had more money than brain cells. Then the more stories (and I honestly cannot tell which are real - blood transfusions from his *son*???) the more feffin' insane he sounds.
Going full Howard Hughes in real time as we watch.
> I know a lot of people are pinning their hopes on genetic engineering and the likes to improve the babies of the future.
> dire wolfs
I believe biotech will come before the earliest ai; I dont think biotech will be produced by this civilization. But it will be coming.
Michael levins, thought improium, etc. the tools are here with a morses law; but thinking evolutionary requires fractal thinking that I dont think thats done well by anyone quite yet and the people capable of low levels of it are being pushed out of power centers.
Next era, allot of cheeses were made by a random monistary during the dark ages and we are headed to a decentralizing era and gene edits that survive a generation become perminate.
Has anyone else tried to get the Lumina toothpaste (with the GMO S. mutans which is meant to prevent tooth decay) from outside the US (and Prospera)?
On their website they state:
> New preorders ship approximately 4 weeks after being placed. Shipping ONLY to addresses in the United States.
This is a bit of a bummer for the rest of the world. I would spend 250$ on this is a heartbeat, but I am much less willing to pay for a flight to the US, try to pass through US immigration and then pay 250$.
So if anyone knows a reseller in Europe, I would be interested. (I would probably also try some homebrew pirate version someone grew on a petri dish, but I would gladly pay 300$ to not have to worry about them having cultivated the right bacteria.)
What's everyone doing with their money with the giant tariffs in place?
Broadly speaking I think the age of American hegemony is over (enough damage has been done to the post-WW2 order that a lot of the systemic advantages the USA had have ended) and a gradual shift toward international equities is in order. But I'd love to hear from people who will explain to me (1) that I'm wrong or (2) that I'm actually missing the point and the right investment is (asset X),.
No change. I may be dumb but I'm not dumb enough to sell off at the panic point in a downturn.
Having said that, in a year or two, there might be a case for international indexes. The logic for being purely US in the past was that, well, everyone drank Coca Cola and everyone used iPhones and most of the US stock market (the stocks, not the actual US economy) was actually these big multi-nationals. And that may be going away. Which has some upsides, it'd be nice if the global economy was actually diversified rather than all uniformly going into recession, but it does mean you would want to be maybe 80-20 or 70-30 US equities-international equities rather than just 100% US equities.
But that's because, well, Apple might be selling less iPhones around the world in the future, not that the US economy which is only ~12-15% imports/exports as a percent of GDP is going to crash over this. America is fundamentally an overwhelmingly domestic/internal economy and that's not going to change, nor are imports exports going to disappear. This isn't 2008 and while some foreign economies might be in trouble, America will be fine.
There was never a rational basis for being overweight the US. There is exactly the same case for having international exposure as there was before. The mean variance optimal allocation for the average investor has not changed.
I'm missing it. Sitting around, looking dejected, thinking about how much richer I was last week. There hasn't been enough time to do anything else just yet.
Don't worry, we've carved out tariff exemptions so you can go ahead and slather that Irish butter on your toast as you sit down with a taoscán of Irish whiskey - the important trade goods!
"Bourbon, wine and US dairy products had been in the firing line, but France, Italy and Ireland lobbied hard against their inclusion, over fears their domestic spirits and agricultural industries would in turn be drawn into the middle of the EU-US dispute.
Mr Trump had warned that if the EU taxed bourbon, he would respond by putting 200 per cent tariffs on Irish whiskey, French champagne, Italian wine and other European spirits.
The Government had also been concerned about Ireland’s large exports of butter to the US, if Mr Trump was angered by tariffs put on US cheese."
The world order doesn't change that fast. We still have the largest military by a wide margin. We're still the largest consumer marketplace. We're still the global reserve currency. Those things make the US de facto the most stable global economy. Where else are billionaires going to put their money?
I'm sitting in cash and bonds until the coming recession bottoms out and then I'll get back in to US equities. Much like 2008, I view this as a generational investment opportunity.
I'm just putting spare money into index funds while it's low. I don't have the time or knowledge to do anything more sophisticated than that, but this seems like an easy buy. If the tariffs are lifted I get a huge return, and even if they aren't I'm not retiring any time soon and the market will recover over the long term, so it's unlikely to be a *bad* investment.
This kind of stuff is just sad. It's one thing to see this kind of anti-epistemology on Xitter, it's another thing to see in rationalist-adjacent spaces like this.
Taking derivatives isn't that useful for stock prices, since they're not a continuous function. I just eyeballed the day-to-day decrease over the past few days.
I've never been able to take the stock market seriously since valuations appear to bounce around based on how any particular broker is feeling right this second (a twinge of indigestion? AppOogClose is over-priced, sell sell sell!)
I realise that there are genuine consequences from the tariffs that do affect the profitability of companies, but if zillions can be wiped off the market between today and yesterday, then I don't think those hyper-inflated valuations were real in the first place. BogginsCorp makes widgets, those widgets will now cost twice as much, but either Boggins really was worth 500 million or it wasn't in real terms based on what it makes and what assets it possesses, not on "today I feel good so let's buy more shares in Boggins" (now it's worth 1,000 million)/"oh no now I'm panicking sell all our Boggins shares!" (now it's only worth 200 million).
No it's not real..it even less real than regular money. The pricing of individual stocks is based on the expected performance of the individual xomoanies, so they go down if a problem is discovered, and the same reasoning applies to the total valuation if there is a problem in the whole.economy.
>BogginsCorp makes widgets, those widgets will now cost twice as much, but either Boggins really was worth 500 million or it wasn't in real terms based on what it makes and what assets it possesses
If those widgets cost twice as much to make, then "what it makes" has just been cut in half, so the future value implied by the stock price should drop. It's not that the markets were wrong about its valuation before April 2nd, the real valuation changed. BogginsCorp will end up selling fewer widgets because people won't want to buy them when they're expensive.
That does make sense, but the panicking and the drop in all kinds of stocks from all kinds of firms does seem to be more emotional reaction than calculated estimation of true value. Maybe iPhones will cost $30,000 if they're made completely in the USA - or maybe they won't, or maybe people will buy different models of phones. This yo-yo bouncing from boom to bust and then back up on the whisper of negotiations and then maybe back down depending on if the geese fly on the left doesn't seem like the 'rational hand of the market' we're assured is what sets value and prices.
In what way does this not make sense? The value of an asset depends on a whether or not a policy gets enacted. It’s perfectly rational for one’s expectations to vacillate wildly when the administration itself vacillates wildly its expressed policy goals. Certainly in this instant, the uncertainty of the market is reflecting the very real uncertainty of policy.
Sorry, you can’t impute the inanity of our current crop of central planners onto the supposed irrationality of the market. Reality itself is being unstable these days.
The values being wiped off stocks makes me think it's all bubbles. If you were supposedly worth 5 doodoos yesterday but only 2 doodoos today, even though the same physical plant still exists, I wonder about the stability of the entire structure.
Yes, Apple is not going to sell as many iPhones. But there was already competition from Android and other phones. Oh wait, the overpriced status symbol is overpriced and not really worth it, so now we all panic? Maybe it's a long-overdue correction.
Sure, if you can get people to buy your hunk of tin for 1,000 doodoos then good luck to you, but you're not selling something physically worth that, you're selling intangibles like "all the cool kids have one of these" and that's the entire gosh-darn problem with the modern economy of not making stuff, now you kids get off my lawn!
... Deiseach, I don't wish to be unkind, but have you ever actually thought about this issue in any detail? E.g. drawn up a simple mathematical model like "I make widgets for $90 and sell them for $100. I make $10 of profit off every widget, and I can comfortably sell one hundred thousand widgets a year, so I can make $1 million in profit a year. But the value of my company isn't the profit it makes in 1 year, it's the profit it would make if you held onto it for a long time, so in actuality it's worth more like $25 million.
Then the President announces a new tariff on my raw materials, and the cost of making widgets goes up to $100. I now make $0 of profit on every widget, so I make $0 in profit a year, so my company is worth 25 * $0 = $0. A 10% tariff can instantly wipe out 100% of my company's value, and it's not because of any complicated financial shenanigans or anything, it's inherent to how manufacturing works. The exact same thing would happen in China if *their* cost of inputs went up 10%, or the price they could sell things went down 10%."
Another example: imagine I'm the guy that makes widget-making machines. My widget making machines don't last forever, so I get some business from maintaining and replacing the old machines that have worn out. I also get some business from building new machines for businesses that want to expand. Let's say a machine lasts 20 years, i.e. 5% of machines need to be replaced every year.
So if there are 100 of my machines out there in the widget making business, and no new businesses are buying new machines, I can sell 5 machines a year. But if the industry is instead expanding by 5%, and new businesses buy 5 widget machines, my business doubles to 10 machines! And conversely, if the industry is shrinking by 5% and no one is ordering new machines, and my customers are letting their machines wear out rather than order replacements, my business entirely disappears. A +/- 5% chance gets amplified to a +/- 100% change, not because of Wall Street or Silicon Valley or anything like that, but because of the way machines work.
So please, *please* keep your mouth shut about things you know nothing about... or at least speak less confidently about them, and express your uncertainty. I would rather like to respect you, Deiseach, but you're making it rather harder than it has to be. Quite frankly, you sound more like an internet atheist confidently asserting that Jesus was never real & was just a fairy tale made up to control children, or that "Easter" was originally a Pagan celebration of the goddess "Ēostre" and the Church just stole it, rather than the careful thinker I know you to be. Don't suffer "Nobel Disease", please, you're a breath of fresh air but even air can turn noxious.
It only gets dumber the more you look; but its so intoxicating to be part of a hive mind gambling your entire life savings in the worse sort of market doing things that sound impressive "whats margin trading" but when you hear an honest explanation it gets soooo very dumb.
If you compare a graph of the S&P500 and BTC, the former looks a lot more stable than the latter. BTC also dropped more substantially than the S&P500 following the tariff announcement. I have no idea how economists measure volatility but from my uneducated perspective it sure looks like it's higher for crypto than stocks.
EDIT: I don't think BTC dropped more than the S&P500 anymore, I just screwed up my data source.
You could measure volatility by taking the abs of the % change as a n day moving average, then probably log it. Economists probably would use 1 year, day traders 1 day; I bet thats close to metrics people use.
In the past 5 days, btc had a high of 88k low of 74k; s&p 5.7, 4.8
a lazy high/low, btc 1.13 vs 1.18; It would need to continue for a year which probably wont happen.
But that would be reasonable and thats not whats happening rn this is peak clown world and you need to start thinking unreasonably
I've been feeling optimistic about AI recently, and I wanted to present my alternative optimistic scenario of what the coming decades of AI progress will look like.
AIs will continue to get better at the things they're good at. They will be able to generate decent student-level essays on any subject, produce decently good pictures, and generate code to do just about anything as long as you're clear about your specifications. However they'll remain constrained by the quality of their training data; they're not going to be able to operate far outside the realms of what they were fed. In particular they'll never get particularly good at behaving agentically -- they'll be able to generate a generic sort of plan for achieving some goal but generic plans will turn out not to be all that useful in most cases. AIs won't be able to make great strides towards improving AIs, because after a few interesting and much-ballyhooed insights (probably picking up obscure known methods from other branches of mathematics and applying them to AI) there'll be no more useful ideas apart from "get more training data" and "get more compute".
There will be a ceiling on how good AIs can be at anything, and it will be provided by the training data. The best pictures it can produce will be somewhat worse than the best pictures in its training set. The best poems it can produce will be somewhat worse than the best poems in its training set. The best code it can produce will be no better than the best code in its training set. And the best plan for taking over the world will be no better than the best plan for taking over the world in its training set.
Overall we'll have a shiny new tool which is useful for a whole bunch of things and capable of replacing humans in a bunch of contexts but once we've explored the limits of what can be done with all the text and images ever recorded then further progress will go back to being slow.
This has been my thought as well. And having a program that can mimic a lot of humanity's knowledge is pretty cool! But, we already have that on the internet, and to a lesser extent on pages like Wikipedia. It's done a lot of good by making it far easier to learn about certain things, but it hasn't revolutionized humanity or how we live. Social Media has done that a lot more, but not in a good way. Current AI also comes with the potential failure mode of confident hallucinations, which obviously can make a lot of things worse.
The real slog is adapting technology to improving specific functions. Like automating a factory, or a workflow at an office building. Sustained effort allows us to do these things right now, and since at least the Industrial Revolution. Sustained effort with AI will help that process along, but unless the AI is fully agentic (able to come up with its own sub-goals that allow it to pursue main goals without humans feeding the in-between) then it's not going to change how that process works.
Yes, this is kind of close to my view. Capabilities keep improving, more applications emerge, things we didn't know were possible become possible, like understanding animal languages.
I'm copying a pretty closely related comment that I wrote in reply to Eremolalos inhttps://www.astralcodexten.com/p/introducing-ai-2027/comment/106978053 a few minutes ago:
One of my cousins just sent me a link to a very interesting article that makes the case that, as LLMs stand, they are much more useful to individuals than to large organizations. The link is https://x.com/karpathy/status/1909308143156240538?s=42
The main point is that a jack-of-all-trades is much more useful to individuals than to large organizations. The more-or-less key paragraph is:
>Why then are the benefits a lot more muted in the corporate and government realms? I think the first reason is that LLMs offer a very specific profile of capability - that of merely quasi-expert knowledge/performance, but simultaneously across a very wide variety of domains. In other words, they are simultaneously versatile but also shallow and fallible. Meanwhile, an organization's unique superpower is the ability to concentrate diverse expertise into a single entity by employing engineers, researchers, analysts, lawyers, marketers, etc. While LLMs can certainly make these experts more efficient individually (e.g. drafting initial legal clauses, generating boilerplate code, etc.), the improvement to the organization takes the form of becoming a bit better at the things it could already do. In contrast, an individual will usually only be an expert in at most one thing, so the broad quasi-expertise offered by the LLM fundamentally allows them to do things they couldn't do before. People can now vibe code apps. They can approach legal documents. They can grok esoteric research papers. They can do data analytics. They can generate multimodal content for branding and marketing. They can do all of this at an adequate capability without involving an additional expert
Hmm... So this situation will continue if efforts to improve the reliability of LLMs _FAIL_ . This was not a scenario I had considered. It is certainly more human-friendly than if improving LLMs reliability succeeds. ( I'm ambivalent about this. If improving the reliability still happens, but is delayed a century, waiting for a counter-intuitive breakthrough, then the same transition we've been expecting still happens, just delayed enough so no one reading this today will see it... )
But can they, in fact? It's like having the AI write "decent student-level essays on any subject" - now I don't even have to read the book the AI will produce the work for me and I can continue to grind out the grades needed without ever learning one scrap of the topic I am pretending to understand.
You get a 'Reader's Digest' version of the esoteric paper from the AI and imagine you understand it, but how do you know the summation is correct? That it has picked out the pertinent facts? That your understanding is not as shallow as a puddle?
People who think they know a complex field because they've read the relevant material - which means 'got the AI to précis it for me' - and then make decisions and take actions based on that flawed understanding can do a lot of damage.
>People who think they know a complex field because they've read the relevant material - which means 'got the AI to précis it for me' - and then make decisions and take actions based on that flawed understanding can do a lot of damage.
That's fair. I don't know how often this happens. Certainly anyone using an LLM as a "jack-of-all-trades" needs to realize that it _isn't_ a " _master_ -of-all-trades".
On the other hand, at least for scientific complex fields, the headlines that finally reach the general public through media intended for general audiences, are often mangled almost beyond recognition, so beating that level of garbling is a pretty low bar...
Research papers are already pretty terse, and already include their own summaries as part of the format. Anyone who is seriously interested in the material will read the abstract and at least skim through the paper.
If you are using an LLM to "summarise" a research paper for you, it is overwhelmingly likely that you are doing this because you want to score internet points in a debate.
You don't actually care about the content, and you don't want to spend more than a couple of minutes to see if the paper will let you score internet points because there's a gazillion more papers to scan through; and you know that the other side is doing the exact same thing and is also unlikely to actually read the paper (and if they actually do, well, shrug it off and paste twelve more your LLM found in the time it took them to do that).
The paper just needs to pass a cursory sniff test to see if you can field it as a weapon in your campaign. An LLM is quite capable of determining whether it does or not, especially if the other side is also using an LLM for the same purpose.
It is 2025, and we have automated sealioning. We live in the SF dystopia we deserve; we have built it for ourselves.
Perhaps eventually we can automate all flame wars, breathe a sigh of relief, go outside and do something fun. Maybe go camping or read a book on the beach. Or perhaps a paper or two that actually interests and engages us.
Even if all papers have an abstract, that's not a 100% guarantee that the abstract accurately summarizes the rest of the contents. And if you're having to review dozens of papers, you might not have time to read them all, but might have enough to read summaries - on the premise that the summaries are accurate.
Papers with inaccurate abstracts can matter a great deal, sometimes. David Friedman once noticed that a meta-analysis paper (known as Cook et al.) made an assertion about the general stance of climatology papers at the time wrt CAGW that wasn't supported by its own data. (Search Friedman's blog or Substack for "A Climate Falsehood".) The abstract claimed that 97% of climate papers endorsed the strongest position on CAGW that Cook laid out (if they had any position on it - most were orthogonal); the data said only about 2% did. (97% was probably calculated from adding up all the papers endorsing any pro-CAGW position, whether mild or extreme.) The incorrect abstract claim was the one that ended up all over public reports.
If an LLM could automate the summarization process as reliably as a spreadsheet automates finance reports, it could avoid false summaries or detect inconsistencies more effectively than a person going through papers one by one.
I think it's reasonable to start with the assumption that an LLM is telling you what an expert would likely say (because it was trained on lots of text written by experts). It'll be grammatically correct, not awkward (as if written by a foreign writer), and have words related to the words you gave it to summarize. It'll even have words related to summarization, because it's trained well enough to know that if you tell it "give me a summary of this paper", "summary" is one of the most important words for it to build its response.
Furthermore, I think it's reasonable to assume it's doing virtually nothing beyond that.
So one test you could devise is a paper where you've tweaked some of the numbers or phrases so they disagree with the rest of the paper. (Prediction: its summary will agree with either the tweaked sentences or the rest, or even both, in two separate summary sentences of its own. It will *not* point out the contradiction.)
Another is where you make a paper of randomly generated sentences that aren't associated with each other (if only we had such a generator!), and see what it does with that. (Prediction: its summary will resemble a Frankenstein of words pulled from the generation; again, it will not point out the dissonance.)
Remember above that I said it probably recognizes "summary" as an important word. It'll probably do the same with the paper, so the important terms will come out. They will be depicted accurately in the summary to the extent that the training data would also lay out those terms with sensible associations to each other. So a third experiment would be to write a paper in such a way that the important terms aren't depicted that way in the sentences. I don't see an easy way to do that, because I don't understand the training well enough to know how it identifies what's salient. If I had to guess, it's partly based on what terms in the training data are treated as subjects and objects and adjectives and adverbs (I'm guessing LLMs understand basic grammar), which covers all the stuff you're likely to write in a paper, even one you're making up for experiment's sake. So to fool it, I might try writing a paper about use mentions of prepositions and other connectors ("An Analysis of 'Over' in English Literature"). Alternately, I might write a paper where "important" terms are used metaphorically ("A Sales Ledger of the Bull and Bear of the Ante-Italian Palpatinium"). (Obviously, you'd never write a real technical paper that way, but the point here is to shed more light on how the LLM is doing its work.)
"I think it's reasonable to start with the assumption that an LLM is telling you what an expert would likely say (because it was trained on lots of text written by experts)."
Is it reasonable? It is certainly reasonable to start with the assumption that an LLM will output a collection of words that resembles a collection of words an expert might write; a piece of text that is a statistical fit for the literary genre "text written by experts".
"I think it's reasonable to start with the assumption that an LLM is telling you what an expert would likely say (because it was trained on lots of text written by experts)."
The LLM was trained on lots of text, of which a very small fraction was written by experts. For *some* questions, the majority of the available text relevant to the LLM's response will have been written by experts because nobody else bothers to write about them. For some other questions, it will be a mix of experts and lay writers doing their best to summarize the experts.
But sometimes it will be neither, and the AI won't know the difference.
Popular LLMs backing ChatGPT are probably trained on a lot of non-expert text, I agree. So I'll add another assumption underneath: if the goal is to make an expert LLM, feed it nothing but expert text, on purpose.
In that case, the problem stops being "how can I trust this LLM trained on rando speak?" and instead is "how do I know the 'expert training text' was really expert?". And I could see the answer ranging from it probably being fine (text was limited to some corpus of dry journals with no reason to be controversial; original sources only; no journalism) to "oh hell no" (text was limited to dumps of Scientific American, USA Today's science section, etc.). The AI won't have to know the difference; whoever selected the training data will know. (Insert handwavy explanation of trusting whoever did that, here.)
Another problem it becomes is "is there enough training text?" Might not be, especially if we get into esoteric topics like dark matter or Martian homesteading where there's simply not enough research.
Most of my point in starting with the assumption I did, wasn't to then assert it's reliable. Rather, it was to provide a baseline against which to test it for reliability.
I'm pretty sure there isn't enough "certified written by experts" text anywhere on Earth, to train a state-of-the-art LLM. By several orders of magnitude. It takes a *lot* of training data for an LLM to achieve even minimal fluency in the most basic subjects.
We've had commentators on here saying, for instance, that the version of whatever AI can't solve a simple titration problem, so I'd be very dubious that it was giving me a truthful précis of a complex paper in a field I wasn't familiar with. If you know enough about it to know if the AI is giving you rubbish, that's great. But it's people who don't know and are relying on the AI to ELI5 for them won't know if the summary is good, indifferent, or another hallucination.
The point I was trying to get across above was mostly how we might build tests to make weaknesses apparent, quickly.
The fact that there exist people who trust a system if it gives them the answer they want on easy questions, is a separate problem (and no less pertinent to rationalists).
I think every developer having access to something just slightly worse than the best code ever produced for every function and every system sounds like it lays the foundation for astronomical, emergent growth.
Most of this transformation has already taken place, prior to LLMs. In the elder days, software was written pretty much from scratch atop bare metal or very basic BIOS calls, but one of the great things about software is that code is reusable. Over the past several decades, software engineering in most domains has shifted towards offloading more and more work into software libraries and frameworks, so to a large extent you can and should use library functions for an enormous amount of stuff rather than reinventing the wheel.
For nontrivial projects, deciding what to write and testing, debugging, and reviewing it is much, much, much more work than the actual writing of the code.
Where LLMs can help and are likely to help more in the future is helping you find the right library calls to make, writing boilerplate code that isn't yet encapsulated in a good, readily-available library, and serving as a tool to help analyze code for review and debugging purposes. OTOH, LLMs in their current state are also hallucination-prone and can make debugging and reviewing much more work than it is currently if they're relied upon excessively.
Overall, I think it adds up to a substantial incremental improvement in the software development process, not an order-of-magnitude one. We only get the latter if LLMs start to approach ASI capabilities at least in limited domains.
>> and generate code to do just about anything as long as you're clear about your specifications.
> I think every developer having access to something just slightly worse than the best code ever produced for every function and every system sounds like it lays the foundation for astronomical, emergent growth.
"do you know what we call a specification good enough for a computer to make a program? Code, we call it code."
You will not get the best code from any function, thats not even gai possible. Much less hallucinations you poke till it half works from nn's. I could see pressure to good api and docs and then end users get to be part of prototyping, but theres fundamental limits here.
A counterpart to the Alien Enemies Act (yes, THAT one that has recently been in the news as the justification for all the deportations) the Alien Friends Act "authorized the president to arbitrarily deport any non-citizen that was determined to be 'dangerous to the peace and safety of the United States.'" Not unlike what many of the anti-immigration Trump supporters advocate for today.
At the time Jefferson said of the act: "The Alien bill proposed in the Senate is a monster that must for ever disgrace its parents. I should not have supposed it possible that such an one could have been engendered in either House, & still persuade myself, that it can not possibly be fathered by both." It's primary use ended up being against anyone who spoke out against the government, including many journalists.
And its existence and enforcement, along with the rest of the Alien and Sedition Acts, led directly to the Federalists losing power. The act expired after only 2 years because the government didn't want to support it.
It's a dangerous power if too easily used, but also it seems basically essential in some form.
People who have the mindset that immigration is a privilege and not a right see this as necessary in some manner from the outset. The country should, maybe even fully needs, the ability to say no to people who are bad for society, even if those people are not breaking specific laws. This one depends on your philosophy, though, so obviously not everyone will agree.
The other side, which is less the Alien Friends Act and more what we have now, is that there needs to exist some mechanism to get rid of truly bad people. For instance an avowed terrorist who has not yet killed anyone [that we can prove] - if we didn't have a mechanism to remove such a person then we're failing as a nation, regardless of differences in philosophy. Having it go through not just the State Department but specifically the Secretary of State (not delegated), seems like a fair limitation.
We have basically the same thing now in the INA. Except it's the SecState who has the discretion and under the guise of a "compelling foreign policy interest."
Hark and rejoice, all ye faithful of nominative determinism! The "Liberation Day" tariffs almost exactly implement the policy proposals of the book "Balanced Trade" by Richman, Richman, and Richman.
Fascinating... a quick glance at their plan for 'scaled tariffs' does look similar at first, but there's important differences. Quoting from the 2014 book (note that they use trade surplus countries to mean countries that the US has a trade deficit with):
"The specifics of the Scaled Tariff, if enacted by the United States, would be the following:
1. Applied only to trade surplus countries. The tariff would only be applied to products of countries that had an overall trade surplus in goods of at least 1 percent of its GDP, which had a trade surplus in goods and services with the United States of at least one billion dollars over the most recent four quarters, and whose exports to the United States (goods plus services) were more than 110 percent of its imports from the United States (goods plus services) during the most recent four quarters.
2. Applied only to goods. The Commerce Department would charge the Scaled Tariff on all goods originating from each trade surplus country. The rate would be applied upon the declared dollar value of such goods on the entry summary form.
3. Rate of duty designed to take in 50 percent of trade deficit. The rate of the duty would be adjusted quarterly and calculated as the rate that would cause the revenue taken in by the duty upon imported goods from the particular country to equal 50 percent of the trade deficit (goods plus services) with that country over the most recent four economic quarters. The rate of the duty would be updated quarterly.
4. Rebated to exporters. The Commerce Department would rebate Scaled Tariff payments to U.S. exporters to the extent that they were paid on inputs to those particular exports.
5. Suspended when trade reaches balance. The Scaled Tariff would be suspended whenever the Commerce Department determined that during the most recent calendar year the current account of the United States was in surplus. Collection would resume when the Commerce Department determined that during the most recent calendar year the current account deficit of the United States was at least 1 percent of U.S. GDP."
So even in this plan, there's no tariffs on countries we have a surplus with, and the proposed tariff rate is not 50% of the ratio of trade deficit to imports, but the rate necessary to raise revenue equal to half of the trade deficit (which means actually thinking about elasticities). I'll also note the book has all of 2 citations according to Google Scholar. Given the admin had the opportunity to cite the book (but chose instead to cite papers that don't actually support their approach), and no one ever discussed this in the first administration, I suspect it's coincidence.
True - they do randomly insert an elasticity, choose a wildly unrealistic value for it, and multiply it by a different Greek letter with a value that just so happens to perfectly cancel out the elasticity.
Is there anyone here who's willing to defend the Self-Indication Assumption (SIA) as it's used in things like the Doomsday Argument? I recently came across some sincere-seeming essays by intelligent-seeming people which take it seriously and I'm having a hard time understanding how anyone could do that in even a fringe way. In my view there's a very obvious dispositive counterargument, but of course there could just be something obvious I'm misunderstanding. It's kinda driving me bonkers in a "Zoolander only has one look! I feel like I'm taking crazy pills" kind of way so I'd appreciate it if someone could either explain what I'm missing or validate that I'm correct in thinking that these people have brain damage.
To summarize my objection: these things always start with some version of "imagine there's a coin flip where if it's heads God makes 100 people and if it's tails He makes a million". Well ok, fine, but that's not how the universe or humans were created and I've never seen anyone justify this framing as a valid starting point for reasoning about reality. Also even if that WAS what happened then our birth order by itself STILL provides zero updates because humans aren't born with serial numbers on their heads.
Someone please be willing to steelman this position for me in a way that ends either with me saying "oh I get it" or ends with you saying "oh good point this is a bad argument and now I feel bad for having believed it".
The thing that bothers me most about these arguments is that the sleepy beauty has a odds table has symmetry meaning that both point of views given offers of all possible bets are exploitable given a betting heuristic of "if expected value > 0, always buy"
I think we need new math; sqrt(-1) == i; surreal numbers, discovery of 0 etc. the answer should be 1/3 + 1/6 sleepy's; and then have the mathematicians tell me some possible rules for what the hell a sleepy is.
I haven't encountered SIA before, and Wikipedia claims it's a _rebuttal_ to the Doomsday Argument..?
I currently think that one part of the Doomsday Argument is correct in a narrow sense: if you want to guess the number of humans that will ever exist, and the ONLY piece of information you have is the number that existed prior to you, then your best guess should be 2x that number--this is the guess that, if every human made it, the number of over-estimators would equal the number of under-estimators. It's not a very good guess, because we've restricted ourselves to only a tiny sliver of evidence, but I think it's the least bad you can do under those constraints.
But the Doomsday Argument then brings in knowledge about changing birth rates to predict when we will reach that number of humans, which means "the number of humans that existed prior to you" is no longer the only info you have. The argument assumes different knowledge for different parts, which isn't how any single reasoner ought to behave. (Though if the ONLY additional info you know is the current birth rate, and nothing about historical birth rates or what causes the current birth rate, then perhaps this doesn't change our best guess in the first part.)
More importantly, even if the argument were internally consistent about its assumed knowledge, the conclusion would only be correct for people who actually have exactly that knowledge and no other knowledge. Since you and I have quite a lot of other knowledge about how humans are created, what forces maintain an equilibrium where humans continue to be created, and what forces could theoretically disrupt that equilibrium, we should be able to make VASTLY better guesses than someone with only the tiny scraps of evidence that the argument relies on. Even if we agreed the Doomsday Argument made the best guess it could with the information it allowed itself, no real-life human should make the same guess (except by coincidence), because we have very different info.
>if you want to guess the number of humans that will ever exist, and the ONLY piece of information you have is the number that existed prior to you, then your best guess should be 2x that number
No it seems to me that the best guess is to say that there is no basis for making an estimate.
>But the Doomsday Argument then brings in knowledge about changing birth rates
No version of the DA that I've ever seen does that. To the best of my understanding the DA is a purely anthropic argument (that makes the egregious error of assuming the future can influence the present). It makes no appeal to empirical data apart from one's birth order.
>if you want to guess the number of humans that will ever exist, and the ONLY piece of information you have is the number that existed prior to you, then your best guess should be 2x that number
> No it seems to me that the best guess is to say that there is no basis for making an estimate.
I disagree with both of you, by means of the following analogy: let's say I roll a dice (with sides numbered 1 to N.sides), and I don't tell you what N.sides is, but I tell you that the number I rolled was a 6. Then I ask you to guess whether the dice has 6 sides, or 400-trillion sides.
You are a lot more likely to roll a 6 on a 6-sided dice (1/6) than on a 400-trillion sided dice (1/4e14), so you would be wise to bet on N.sides=6. Indeed, in general when presented with one number from a set of indeterminate length, the most-likely-to-be-right guess of the set size is equal to the number rolled, and the next best guess is roll+1, then roll+2...
So while we disagree whether the best estimate of N.DOOM is roll or 2*roll, I think Dweomite is directionally correct in that a low birth index is at least indicative of low total births.
Hard, hard disagree. Your analysis of the dice is correct but the analogy to human doom is not and the reason is very simple: the dice roll is a random selection from the set of all numbers on the die, but birth order is NOT a random selection from the set of all humans that will ever exist. That's because that set doesn't exist. It's a metaphor that has no meaning in the sense that you're trying to use it. Future humans don't exist, therefore birth can't be interpreted as sampling from them. You can't sample from a set that doesn't exist. Information doesn't travel backwards in time and it's mathematically invalid to condition on unobserved future events. Absolutely nothing that happens now is influenced IN ANY WAY by what might happen in the future. That's not how time works.
You're making the precise error that I'm attempting to point out in the DA.
> Future humans don't exist, therefore birth can't be interpreted as sampling from them
A 400-trillion-sided dice doesn't exist either, but you don't have any problem realising that it's a bad idea to bet that it rolled a "6". Your objection obviates any attempt to ever estimate anything that hasn't happened yet (either because it's a hypothetical or because it lies in the future) - and since people *can* accurately estimate things that haven't happened yet, QED
> the set of all humans that will ever exist. That's because that set doesn't exist.
I am particularly confused by this part. I agree that *we don't know* what the size of the set is, and I agree that this question won't be settled until The Future, but I don't see how you can claim that the set doesn't exist. Unless you're going to simultaneously claim that the set of "results from a dice roll that I rolled once today and I'm going to finish rolling tomorrow" don't exist. But we can know many things about the results of a set of dice rolls that I'm going to finish rolling tomorrow from the result of the dice roll I made today (including that the 6 I rolled means N.sides is unlikely to be 400 trillion sides), so why can we not infer similar information for Human Doom?
In your discussion with Dweomite below you complain that "Saying there's a 1/6 chance that a dice rolls a 6 isn't a prediction", but that's because you're incorrectly thinking about the problem as one of predicting the roll, when it's actually a problem about predicting N.sides, for which "1/6 ergo N.sides = 6" is actually a very explicit prediction.
EDIT: I think I would be helped in understanding your perspective if you can give me a example of a situation which you think is analogous to the way you see the Doomsday argument problem. You say that birth number is a sample from a set that doesn't exist; can you give another example of a sample from a set that doesn't exist, where it's perhaps more easy to see the point you're trying to make?
>Your objection obviates any attempt to ever estimate anything that hasn't happened yet
No it doesn't. It just prevents attempts to base those estimates on illegitimate arguments. Conditioning on future events is an example of an illegitimate argument.
>I don't see how you can claim that the set doesn't exist
Because future people don't exist. They might in the future, and they exist *conceptually* now, but that's not what 'exist' means.
> Unless you're going to simultaneously claim that the set of "results from a dice roll that I rolled once today and I'm going to finish rolling tomorrow" don't exist.
This is a false analogy. The existence of the dice precedes the existence of the roll outcome, therefore it's legitimate to say the dice influenced the roll outcome. The outcome 'selected' from the set of dice sides.
Future people don't exist. They therefore can't influence my birth. I honestly don't know how to explain that any more simply. The future doesn't influence the present. Information doesn't flow backwards in time.
>I think I would be helped in understanding your perspective if you can give me a example of a situation which you think is analogous to the way you see the Doomsday argument problem.
Ok, try this. There's a hole in a wall that spits out one ping pong ball per minute. So far it's spit out 50. How many more is it going to spit out before it stops?
There is no way to tell. There is no statistical analysis of the 50 balls you can perform - bayesian or otherwise - that could provide you with any information about the size of the hidden reservoir.
> No version of the DA that I've ever seen does that.
The argument I've seen goes something like: Our best guess at the number of humans who will ever exist is twice the number that have existed so far. Based on current population projections, we'll reach that number in a couple decades. Therefore, we should expect some calamity that drastically reduces human populations within that time.
> No it seems to me that the best guess is to say that there is no basis for making an estimate.
I think someone who refuses to even try has zero basis on which to say that they're performing better than someone who tries, full stop.
If I interpret your claim as "it's better to stick with your prior and not update at all", then I think it should be obvious that you AT LEAST update your prior to eliminate the possibility that the total number will be less than the number we've already got, so "literally no update" is definitely wrong.
I also think that having an expectation that is correct in the median case is better than not having that property, and so if you're arguing that whatever you do is better than my proposal, you should be able to point out at least one predictive advantage that you've got and I don't, in order to counter-balance that.
>I also think that having an expectation that is correct in the median case is better than not having that property
This just occurred to me: that expectation is actually zero. If every human bets that the species will go extinct at 2x with a payout of 2x - N (x = an individual bettor's birth order, N = total number of humans) then no money will be won on net. It's also zero with a more conventional payout of N * bet size for a correct exact guess and zero otherwise. If an algorithm is unable to produce a betting strategy with a positive expected value then I think it's reasonable to say that that algorithm has no predictive value.
I think you confused yourself when writing the scoring rules, because those scoring rules both appear to be bonkers.
There is standard math for measuring what predictions are better or worse. If you want to get serious about this, you need to look at probability distributions (not just point estimates) and use a "proper scoring rule" to properly incentivize accuracy. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scoring_rule
But if you want the simplified version, look at it this way:
If I have a roulette wheel with 100 spaces numbered from 1 to 100, and someone wants to bet that it lands on exactly 7, you'd probably say the fair payout is 100x the bet if they're right, because there's 100 possible spaces. But in what you called the "conventional payout", the number you used for N wasn't the number of possible answers, it was the value of the actual correct answer. That's like saying that the person who bet on 7 should get a payout of 7x if they're right, not 100x.
In the "total number of humans" example, the range of possible answers is infinite, so the fair payout for guessing the exact answer is infinite, which means my guess is positive EV.
The underlying principle that says the payout should be 100x is that we're imagining a bettor with total ignorance--i.e. someone who places equal money on every space--and calibrating the bet so that they have zero EV. If you do this, then someone with ANY information at all should be able to get positive EV, even if all they know is something like "this roulette wheel never lands on 42" or "a result of 56 is 0.01% more likely than other numbers". If a better knows anything at all, and you think their bet should have zero EV, you probably made a mistake somewhere.
As for your first suggested payout rule, I suspect you intended to score based on how close the guess was to the right answer, but that's not actually what you wrote.
If "2x - N" is supposed to mean "your guess minus the true answer" then I can make infinite money by always guessing infinity, regardless of the true answer, which is obviously not an appropriate rule.
Maybe you were thinking something like "your score is reduced by how far you were from the correct answer; i.e. the absolute value |your guess - true answer|". But if you do that then a prefect guess is worth zero and anything else is worth negative, so NO ONE can win money under that rule, even if they're omniscient.
You could add a positive constant to that to make it possible to win while still penalizing based on the difference, but, again, the standard way to pick that positive constant would be to imagine a bettor with total ignorance and set their EV to zero, and if you do that then my guess will have positive EV.
Well I wasn't trying to make the betting system robust to adversarial examples, just to demonstrate that the method of "guess twice your birth order" doesn't actually give you any positive expected value. But you're right: my comment was half-assed and not really meaningful. The lesson is to not try to do math after 3 beers.
> the range of possible answers is infinite
If it's actually infinite then I don't think that "guessing 2x" works either: the total error is always infinite if you allow for the possibility of infinite people.
But I don't want to think about how to properly handicap infinite games, I'm sure I can't get it right. My view is still that "guess 2x" isn't predictive in any meaningful sense. And the conventional DA is, of course, complete nonsense.
I'ver never seen that version and it doesn't look like it's represented in the wikipedia article on the topic. The argument that I'm responding to is based on the premise that every human born is a random draw from the set of all possible humans and that our birth order therefore gives us a statistical basis from which to reason about the size of that set. In my view that's trivially false.
Why is the argument that you heard referred to as "the doomsday argument" if it doesn't involve a doomsday?
And I believe I've given an argument for why the number of previous humans gives you a tiny-but-more-than-literally-zero amount of evidence about the total number of humans who will ever exist, and you've disagreed with it but not actually presented any counter-argument.
Ok I think I've settled on the right way to think about this. There are two different ways to think about what it means to make a prediction: one which takes contingent factors into account and one which doesn't, and IMO only the former qualifies as a prediction. In the example of a dice roll, a contingent factor might be an unbalanced die, or a careful analysis of the exact speed and orientation with which it's thrown. A non-contingent analysis says "we don't have any special information so we're just going to analyze factors which are common to all dice rolls and say each side has a 1/6 chance." You could call that the maximal-ignorance position: it's the minimum you can possibly know.
I think it's a mistake to call the maximal-ignorance analysis a prediction because it's nothing but a description of the state-space. A prediction is something which *necessarily* imposes a non-uniform probability distribution over that state-space. A maximal-ignorance prediction is like forecasting a horse race by saying "one of the horses that's in the race is going to win". It wouldn't be wrong, technically, but it's also not a prediction in any meaningful sense of the word.
The argument you proposed is an example of a maximal-ignorance position. It describes factors common to *all* possible population histories without doing anything to locate us anywhere *within* that distribution of possibilities. It says: given that we have no idea where we are, what's the guess which minimizes expected error. I'm not sure what the right generic term for that kind of guess is, but it's certainly not either 'prediction' or 'evidence'. It's the equivalent of saying "I have no idea how the dice is going to turn up so just bet 1/6 for everything." While I agree that it's useful to have a clear description of the entire state-space, I feel that an analysis which fails to impose any non-uniform probability distribution over that state space can't properly be characterized as something which "makes a prediction" or "provides information". It tells us which uniformly-applied heuristic minimizes error for all possible observers. I don't know what utility that really has. In my view it's a slightly dressed-up version of "one of the horses is going to win". The fact that we had to do slightly more math to get there doesn't really matter.
>you've disagreed with it but not actually presented any counter-argument.
I didn't say I disagreed. I'd never heard it before so I don't really have a considered opinion yet. It's not trivially wrong the way the DA is, I'll give it that. My first reaction is that while there's a sense in which it's true, I'm not sure that sense is really what's meant by the word 'prediction'. It's a mathematical truism, not a recognition of a contingent reality which could potentially be changed. It's a little like saying the Nasdaq will always be a positive real number. While true, in any practical sense that statement is useless. Does a broken clock predict that it will occasionally be 3pm? It's 3pm a nonzero amount of the time so ... I guess? A heuristic which minimizes prediction error when applied to *every* moment in a population history is different from a heuristic which minimizes prediction error for a *particular* moment in population history, and I'm not sure the right way to think about that difference. It breaks down if you allow for the possibility of an unbounded future so I'm not sure it amounts to anything more that just saying "the future is finite". My tentative view is that your argument doesn't predict anything in any meaningful sense of the term, but I'll have to think about it more.
The best guess one could make with our current priors is to make some kind of map of human population fluctuations, and apply that function to a hypothetical carrying capacity for earth, multiplied by how long the sun is expected to exist. Or, however many useful planets estimated to be around other stars there are plus the value for the earth, if space travel is gainful.
This estimate is not very useful at all, since there are so many unknowns. But it makes both the DA and SSA seem inane by comparison. "There may be even more people in the future even after a decline in the present" vs "Only the present could have lots of people" or "There are infinity people because anyone exists therefore God is real"
You're relying on a lot of evidence that wasn't previously mentioned (knowledge about earth, and the sun, and human population patterns). I agree you can do far better if you have a ton more evidence. I'm only claiming the 2x population estimate is reasonable in a specific scenario with extraordinarily constrained evidence.
It's one of those things I'm reluctant to touch because I'm not sure if my disagreement is the result of a clear understanding of the argument, and an understanding why it's wrong, or possibly my understanding is wrong somewhere, and that's why I think it's wrong.
As far as I can tell we're not abstracted veil-of-ignorance type people, but creatures with a clear causal and experiential history back to our earliest memories. With that in mind; "What is the probability that a randomly selected human finds themselves alive in 2025 given this or that distribution?" is a fine question to ask, with varied answers depending on your assumptions. The more accurate question, "What is the probability that the guy who was born and raised up to the year 2025 lived up to, and experienced asking himself this question?" is quite obviously 100%. Whether humanity explodes itself in 2027, or in 2027 trillion, the probability of you asking yourself the question after having been born in the time you were is exactly the same, since we're not disembodied veil of ignorance experiences.
Sure, anthropic reasoning is perfectly fine *for the appropriate scenarios*. My point is that DA is very clearly not such a scenario. Very VERY clearly.
I pretty much 100% agree with you, but I think the steelman version which I have some respect for is: it's true we don't know the process by which humans/the universe/ourselves were created, but we might still need to reason about situations where we want to include some model where we think about ourselves/the universe/all humans as being "drawn from some distribution".
Just because we don't have a good model of what that process looks like, or have any reason to think it looks like the process imagined by SIA, we still have to do _something_, and SIA at least gives us _some_ process to use, so in the face of uncertainty you might at least have a term of the form, "maybe the procedure can be modeled as 'me being selected from some set of possible people'", and then you'll at least get an SIA-like contribution to your calculation.
I think the Doomsday argument is a weaker case for the SIA because you can come up with models that do a better job capturing the underlying phenomenon like ksvanhorn's analysis of the dice room as an analogy (though note that his analysis comes down on the more SIA/anti-Doomsday side, and the model has a sort of SIA-ish flavour, as it explicitly accounts for the fact that you need to calculate the probability that you will be in the last batch conditional on there being n batches for each n, which to me feels like the observation that your probability of being in the final generation changes with the number of total people, a very SIA-ish point of view).
But, I think unless you have some other specific generating process in mind, doing something vaguely SIA-ish like thinking about "who you might have been, and with what probability" is a reasonable first pass at thinking about weird situations, at least if you have some sensible notion of what the set of possible people might look like.
I'd never heard of this but just looked it up. That's much more similar to the Sleeping Beauty Problem, which is something that I agree the SIA is appropriate for: there's a well-defined probabilistic procedure that causally effects the outcome in question. The Doomsday Argument, on the other hand, is just black-letter wrong. In my view there is absolutely, positively nothing even approaching logical validity in the DA and I feel like I have 3 different ways to prove it. Is there something about the DA that you think is salvageable and are you willing to explain to me what it is?
>doing something vaguely SIA-ish like thinking about "who you might have been, and with what probability" is a reasonable first pass at thinking about weird situations
I strongly disagree with this. Unless you have a justification then it's just fantastical thinking. Occam's Razor and so forth. Otherwise you wind up with nonsense like thinking that conditioning on unobserved future events is a reasonable way to predict the future. That's nothing but dressed-up circular reasoning and for the life of me I can't fathom how supposedly intelligent people (like academic philosophers) fail to see that. I mean, isn't that exactly what philosophers are supposed to be good at?
I think the dice room is pretty similar to Doomsday, in that you have successive "generations" of increasing size, and then contrasts using the per-generation probability of doom against the population-level probability of doom. He does separately have an argument about SB--are you sure you read the right one?
As you can see below in my other replies, I agree that it's best to think about the actual situation as best you can, but I think there are at least _some_ situations, including Doomsday and SB, where SIA is an ok heuristic.
I just skimmed the dice room so maybe I didn't fully grok it, but it seemed ok to me. Focus on the DA. Can you steelman that one for me because I've never read a version of it that didn't seem obviously wrong to me.
EDIT: Ok I read it more carefully and, while it's not a misuse of the SIA, it's a paradox that's easily resolvable. The paradox arises because of an equivocation over what population you're analyzing (the entirety of humanity vs just your kidnap group). If you define your denominator consistently then there's no paradox. I find that almost all philosophical paradoxes of this variety (including Sleeping Beauty) use this same trick. Their use of language makes it tricky to realize that they're using different definitions of what population they're averaging over and that's why you get different answers depending on how you frame it.
For those who are interested, Sleeping Beauty does it by equivocating between how many awakenings there are vs how many coin flip outcomes there are. The resolution comes when you realize that one of the coin flips (tails) is double-represented by awakenings. Therefore if you enumerate the possibilities by counting awakenings you divide by 3 but if you enumerate by counting flip outcomes you divide by 2. Hence the 1/2 vs 1/3 paradox. It's not a paradox, you're just counting different things.
What I'd say is, these both have the structure of an exponentially growing population, where we're trying to estimate the probability that you are in the last generation (more or less). In both cases we have a "per generation" estimate of doom which is low, but, because of the exponential growth, the final generation is such a large percentage of the total population that using a naive SSA view, where you divide the population of the final generation by that of the total population, gives a much higher estimate of doom.
In Doomsday, you can use SIA to say, it's true that the final generation is a large proportion of the total population, but that ignores the fact that the larger the population grows, the more "potential people" there are for you to be, and you can use that to cancel out the SSA effect. In the dice room you have something similar: when you take into account your probability of being in the n^th generation as n grows, you find that changes the calculation to cancel out and give you back the "per generation" probability.
So, the dice room takes something with the same basic outline as Doomsday, but tightens it up so that you can model it explicitly, and shows that naive SSA reasoning (divide the final population by the total population) gives the wrong answer; I don't know if I'd say the right answer is exactly analogous to SIA, but I see some similarity: in both cases an important step is to say, how does the probability of you being in the nth generation change as n grows.
As I say, I don't think it exactly vindicates SIA, but I think it does show that SIA as a heuristic performs better than SSA, in a case that has some of the features of Doomsday.
More generally: I agree that a lot of the confusion stems from the question of "what denominator"--it's why I think focusing on betting is a red herring, as different betting schemes can make different denominators be the appropriate one to use.
I also agree that SB and dice room don't misuse SIA because they tell us explicitly how to model the situation, in which case we don't need to resort to hackish heuristics... And I agree that "use SIA" isn't the right lesson to draw from these scenarios; the right lesson is "model it carefully then reason correctly about your model". But I do find it striking that in both cases where we can have an explicit model, SIA as a heuristic seems to have more in common with the right answer than SSA at least. So I'm not totally opposed to the idea that, in a situation where you're not sure what the correct model is, and you may have to use some heuristic, SIA at least seems to have a better track record than the other main heuristic. I agree though that neither heuristic is a replacement for "think better about how to actually model this situation for real"; it's just that if we're talking about like, fine tuning in physics or something, where we have basically no idea how to model the process of "what process generated these constants", we're probably stuck with heuristics for now.
Final things I'll say: if you respond to my last point by saying, "if you can't even begin to model the situation then you don't understand it well enough to reason about it at all" I more or less agree; I don't endorse SIA in such a case, so much as feel like... It's no more crazy to use it than anything else, but only because everything is pretty crazy.
And two, I think naive SIA runs into problems like postulating infinite people, so the better heuristic is SIA weighted by some kind of complexity prior--this is obscured in SB and similar thought experiments because the set up is so contrived by design: if we're letting the entire universe be populated just on the basis of God flipping coins, we're already way out there in the tangles of Occam's beard.
Another thing that SIA might not handle well: imagine a world of 50% humans and 50% positronic robots straight out of Asimov. The robots are conscious and self-aware, and due to positronic efficiency, they experience reality at a framerate 1000 higher than humans.
I find myself aware in this world. What are my chances of being human?
I'm not even sure there is a correct answer, because the word "I" doesn't specify a temporal range, so it can just as well apply to a single frame of consciousness, in which case it's 1/1001, or to the integrated experience over (say) 1 second, in which case it's 1/2.
Thanks. Yeah I agree with all of this. My dispute isn't with the SIA per se: after all it's just a term which means, essentially, "correct for observation bias in the appropriate way". My objection is to people (like Bostrom, like Bentham's Bulldog) who don't understand the SIA's purpose and blindly apply it even when there's no observation bias to correct for. That strikes me as cuckoo and I really don't understand how people who are as smart as they are can a) make such an obvious error and b) not question their reasoning AT ALL when they reach absurd conclusions like the DA.
Bentham's Bulldog is a big proponent of SIA, he's collected 27 arguments in favor of it here (https://anthropicthoughts.wordpress.com/2024/12/14/all-the-arguments-for-the-self-indication-assumption/). Sadly I don't grokk SIA enough to steelman it for you myself. I keep getting stuck on the Sleeping Beauty Problem. I don't have a specific objection to thirding in the Sleeping Beauty Problem, but every time someone tries to explain why I should I get confused.
The Sleeping Beauty Problem is an instance where the SIA is actually appropriate: you KNOW that there's a probabilistic process influencing your awareness so using Bayes is therefore justified. What I don't understand is people who use the same reasoning for scenarios where there manifestly ISN'T such a process in place (like the Doomsday Argument, or BB's anthropic argument for the existence of God).
I find Bentham's Bulldog fairly confusing. He's clearly an intelligent person. But almost all of his conclusions are wrong in ways that are SO obvious that I'm confused about what's going on. He won't respond to me so I came here for a sanity check.
> The Sleeping Beauty Problem is an instance where the SIA is actually appropriate: you KNOW that there's a probabilistic process influencing your awareness so using Bayes is therefore justified. What I don't understand is people who use the same reasoning for scenarios where there manifestly ISN'T such a process in place (like the Doomsday Argument, or BB's anthropic argument for the existence of God).
Thank you! That's the exact complaint I have with BB's (ab)use of SIA. As JerL above pointed out, SIA is pretty good heuristic if you need to reason about situations where you want to count probabilities without knowing which observer in a process you happen to be. It's still just a heuristic, and not a theorem, because SIA itself is built on the shaky ground of the "appropriate reference class", which brings up all sorts of hard issues up to and including identity of persons over time, and identity across different worlds. But in cases like the sleeping beauty or doomsday, it gives the same results as just counting out possibilities and doing good old frequentist stats, so it adds up.
Where things go completely off the rails, is when you try to apply SIA to cosmological questions like other universes in an actual multiverse, or other potential uni or multiverses. And the reason it goes off the rails, is because we'd first need to know that there is an actual probabilistic process creating or choosing such universes, and then we'd need to know the actual probability distribution.
We don't get to choose that one by just guessing, that makes as much sense as guessing a physical constant instead of measuring it. Otherwise we're just getting entangled in silly scenarios like "for each possible world where science works, there are billions of worlds that are just like that except that some weird thing happens without physical cause". That just amounts to substituting your idea of what is conceivable for whatever real mechanism, assuming there is one, actually brings worlds up.
These problems don't apply to the usual thought experiments, because in those you get to play God and specify the precise probabilities. The problem comes when you try to apply the insights from your toy experiments to the real world.
Tbf, SIA is meant to throw out reference classes which are a feature of SSA. I'm not sure if it successfully does this, so much as sets your reference class to be "people in the same epistemic situation as you", which as you note elsewhere raises the question of, "who is 'you'?"
I agree with everything else, except that I think it might still be useful to ask yourself, "if I were to model this weird scenario, what modeling choices do I have open to me, and how would they affect my probabilities" just as a zeroth order thing, and I think SIA summarizes a certain way of doing that.
>SIA itself is built on the shaky ground of the "appropriate reference class", which brings up all sorts of hard issues up to and including identity of persons over time, and identity across different worlds.
I disagree with this actually. If you find yourself in the swamplands of appropriate references classes then that's a clue that your analysis has gone completely off the rails and you've ended up in fantasy land. The SIA, as I understand it, is just a label for the concept of correcting for observation bias in an appropriate way. The problem is that mathematically unsophisticated philosophers are prone to forgetting about the "in an appropriate way" part of that and so wind up in Nonsense Land talking about references classes because they've failed to adequately understand the problem. If the problem doesn't unambiguously dictate what the reference class is then you have no business invoking SIA in the first place. It's just a sign that you don't understand the problem well enough to even think about how to correct for observation bias. It's "not even wrong" territory.
I don't think we really disagree, we're probably pointing to the same problem from opposite ends. I was just pointing out that BB's preferred (IIRC) definition of SIA makes use of the concept of reference class, which is underspecified and implies all sorts of difficult philosophical questions. So either your problem makes it 100% clear for the specific case, or you're in nonsense territory. Imagine drawing conclusions about cosmology based on a theory that depends on the details of what it takes for one person in a world to be 'the same' as a person in another world!
Does that make more sense to you, or is there still something we disagree on?
I'll just add that I don't think the SIA totally inappropriate for thinking about cosmological issues like the fine-tuning problem. You just have to keep track of what assumptions you're making and qualify your conclusions appropriately. *If* there actually is a multiplicity of universes which differ in their physical constants (and that's a big if), then of course our observations will be biased by the fact that complex life can only evolve in a select subset of fine-tuned universes. But you can't reverse that reasoning and use it to infer the likelihood of such a multiverse existing, though it does give you an alternative to being forced to accept the existence of God.
I understand it, but I don't understand it deeply. I can't find a problem with it logically, but something still bothers me about it. It's not like the Monte Hall problem, where I started out with the intuitive (and wrong) position but after a while was able to wholeheartedly agree that I was wrong. I only halfheartedly agree about the betting thing. Like, okay, so that maximizes betting profits, but only because she gets to bet twice when it's tails and only once when it's heads! Something feels wrong about that, but I can't put my finger on it.
I think one way to see that the betting argument has more to do with the structure of the payoff than with anything epistemic is the observation that if SB needs to never guess wrong in order to win a bet, then thirding is no longer superior.
That is, if the betting scheme collapses the two bets on tails into one bet by taking the second one, then the benefit of the other bet disappears.
As observed elsewhere in the thread, you can think of the difference between halfing and thirding as the difference between whether to take all experiments as your denominator, or all awakenings. If each awakening gets a separate bet, then it's unsurprising that the methodology that uses the "per awakening" denominator performs better; but if you only get one bet per experiment, then the per experiment denominator works fine.
This makes it pretty convincing (to me, at any rate) that we're really just playing around with the terms of the bet.
Yes, I have no problem with the Sleeping Beauty problem: there's a well-defined probabilistic procedure that causally effects the outcome in question. The problem I have with the SIA is that people use it in situations where that's not true. Things like the Doomsday Argument or Bentham's anthropic argument for God here:
In my view those arguments are so mind-bogglingly wrong that I flat-out can't comprehend how otherwise intelligent people could make them. Can you help me out? Do you sincerely agree with either of these?
I'm not Wanda, but I don't like betting odds arguments; among other things, it depends on the payoff scheme (are you paid if you make at least one correct guess? Or must you avoid making any incorrect guesses?), and it also seems to mix instrumental and epistemic in a way that I think confuses things.
It's true that I want to understand the world so I can act effectively within it, but I do in fact want to understand the world, and I think it's useful to at least try and keep my "probabilities as a tool to model the world" separate from my "probabilities as a tool to move through the world".
I also think SB won't be convincing to someone whose point is that the real world is often not very well modeled as "flip a coin to determine how many future versions of you will experience something". Even if SIA gets SB right, it's not obvious that in cases where we have no idea about the mechanism generating our experiences that we should continue to use SIA.
Yeah, I think these are all reasonable objections. But I do think the betting argument is simple enough that it should be possible to understand why someone might be a thirder.
I'm pretty sympathetic to thirding in SB (though I think again kavanhorn has a great treatment that has something of the flavour of Radford Neal's Fully Nonindexical Conditioning which implies something more like asymptoting towards 1/3 starting from 1/2 as you gain bits of information that can in principle be used to distinguish Monday from Tuesday which I think is closer to my actual opinion), but as the lengthy aside in the parentheses indicates, it's not really because I think SIA just uncomplicatedly gets it right--I think the best answer involves actually trying to model the situation.
I think the fact that in both cases the better answer ends up with an SIA-ish flavour is a point in favour of the idea that, if you can't come up with anything better, SIA seems to do a decent job--but I don't think that means that SIA is "right", just that it's a good heuristic in at least some situations.
One point I haven’t seen made often enough: even if one takes the logic of mercantilism for granted, minimizing bilateral trade deficits is ridiculous. There’s no reason to expect trade between two countries to be balanced in a system with many countries, even under the constraint that no trade overall imbalance is allowed. E.g. country A produces wheat to sell to country B which produces steel to sell to country C which produces cars to sell to country A. Net trade is balanced for all countries but each country has a trade deficit with half of its trading partners. In any system with significant specialization, trade will tend to look like this rather than reciprocal exchange between countries (again, even taking for granted that no country is a net importer overall). Minimizing bilateral trade deficits reduces trade by way more than would be necessary to reach a given level of net exports.
Even if I were a mercantilist I’d hate the tariffs and would be trying to convince everyone I could that this isn’t real mercantilism.
I don't really agree. Of course a mercantilist doesn't oppose all trade deficits but it opposes the aggregate trade deficit. The big tariffs are on China, Mexico, Europe, and Vietnam--thats where most of the agg trade deficit comes from! If I were a mercantilist (I'm not) I'd be over the moon that my agenda is finally being implemented after basically 100 years of no one believing in my theories.
My impression is that the core intuition behind mercantilism is that your wealth can be measured by how much gold (or currency) you have, and so you win by maximizing your amount of gold, and other assets just don't count.
If you start from this assumption, then any trade with a net deficit is worse than no trade at all, because it causes a net decrease in your gold.
(This is, of course, the sort of assumption that seems intuitively obvious to a child who has grown up rich inside a capitalist system, but which can't survive 5 minutes of intelligent scrutiny.)
Isn't the idea "if we are importing more stuff *from* them than we are selling *to* them, then there is a constant drain of money and resources out of the country and that makes us poorer"?
If country A is selling wheat but importing way more cars then eventually it has to either make up for the cost of paying for those cars by selling other products to other countries at an excess, or it will run into debt because "earn 10 million from selling wheat, pay 20 million by importing cars" does mean "where's the 10 million difference coming from?"
Maybe country A can borrow from country C to bridge the gap, but again that can't go on forever, eventually you have to pay *something* back. (Irish governments did operate under 'splurge today, borrow to pay for it, let tomorrow take care of itself' conditions but tomorrow always came and if there's nothing in the piggy-bank that means trouble).
Of course, the real world is not simple "we sell wheat to B who sells steel to C who sells cars to us" since there are all kinds of imports from and exports to multiple countries at once, and the US economy is so big that, as we currently see, it can tilt the world. But the basic principle of "where's the money coming from to pay for all this?" does seem to still apply.
If I direct barter you a bunch of iron for a bunch of tin, are you inclined to say that one of us has a "trade deficit" and other has a "trade surplus" as a result? If not, then why would the situation change when I replace one of those metals with gold?
The idea that "trade deficit" == "drain of resources" relies (AFAICT) on an implicit assumption that money matters and goods don't; otherwise, it would be equally valid to say that the country exporting cars to us is suffering a constant drain of resources because of all those cars they're losing. The situation is only asymmetrical if you first assume that "money" is somehow special in a way that other resources like wheat, cars, iron, etc. aren't.
If I were going to inappropriately steelman the position, I might say something like: "In order for any entity to stay in equilibrium, it needs to achieve zero net change in EVERY resource, somehow. For resources like wheat or cars, that's complicated because you can create them out of other resources, so to see the balance we need to look at a bunch of resources at once, together with the processes that convert them. Money is only special in that it's neither created or destroyed, which greatly restricts our options for how to balance it."
But I doubt most mercantilists have ever thought anything like that, and it's not strictly true that money is neither created nor destroyed, and insofar as money IS that way, so are various other things that mercantilists don't usually seem to worry about. Also it seems pretty far-fetched to suppose that nations are or should be in equilibrium, anyway.
"The situation is only asymmetrical if you first assume that "money" is somehow special in a way that other resources like wheat, cars, iron, etc. aren't."
Money can be created or diluted on the spot in a way that resources are assumed not to be (a country could dilute or sell really shitty wheat, iron, or so on, but these scenarios typically assume any quality degradation is measured in the price).
"Isn't the idea "if we are importing more stuff *from* them than we are selling *to* them, then there is a constant drain of money and resources out of the country and that makes us poorer"?"
Pretty much, yes, if I recall my Lionel Robbins correctly. At the time (1500s to 1700s), the idea was that a nation's wealth was best measured as the amount of precious metals in its vaults, rather than the stuff it might trade for.
Nowadays, it's up against the argument that you can't eat, wear, or live inside gold and silver. It's entertaining if you enjoy rolling around in it, maybe, but not for everyone. And while you can make certain capital goods out of gold and silver (i.e. electronics), this obviously wasn't common practice in the 16-18th centuries.
Mercantilist thinking might have been driven in part by colonial economics. Back then, a self-respecting nation would settle other lands, extract their precious metals, ship them back to the homeland, and sell their colonists manufactured goods and buy raw materials. Given the large amount of available raw stuff, I imagine the thinking was that the nation wouldn't be able to buy it if it had nothing to trade in return. It had manufactured goods, sure, but if it didn't, or if the colony could make its own, then the colony would lose interest and break away.
Precious metal would keep it coming back, because everyone agreed it was precious for Reasons. So you'd better keep that metal in your vaults, give it away sparingly, and do whatever it took to get it back (tariffs on imported goods, or war).
For example, most Canadian oil exports go to the United States, presumably for logistical reasons, even though the United States produces more oil than it consumes. So Canada exports oil to the United States, the United States in turn exports oil to other countries. Trump looks at this, sees that the United States has a big trade deficit, and reneges on the USMCA agreement which he negotiated during his first term.
Canada will likely build a bunch of money building infrastructure to allow it to export oil to countries other than the United States, which will make both countries a bit poorer (Canada because it had to spend money on infrastructure, the United States because it no longer pockets the difference between what it was paying Canada for oil and what it was paid for oil exports).
Per the hypothesis in Ian Fletcher's book Free Trade Doesn't Work, you don't want to maximize comparative advantage arbitrarily, because some things will offer little returns in the long term when maximized. If your country becomes really good at farming wheat or vanilla, then all it does in the future is sell wheat and vanilla. In almost all metrics the countries that prioritized "comparative advantage" in industry and machine tools will be ahead.
This explanation feels like a lightbulb going off for me, it's a simplification of something that I've kinda thought for a long time but struggled to put into words.
Can you break down what "little returns" here means? Is it that wheat and vanilla are less profitable than machine tools even if you're the only one selling them, or that wheat and vanilla are an undesirable thing to specialize in regardless of profitability?
Essentially one gives you an ongoing steady income, while the other gives you the Industrial Revolution. There is no income in any non-industrial nation in the history of the world that outcompetes an industrialized nation. Even 1820 Britain outcompetes modern day crop-based economies.
This is one of the modern complaints about how the West treats African countries - we buy foodstuff and raw materials from them but ultimately those countries remain poor.
> Can you break down what "little returns" here means?
I actually got a different thought / lesson from that than Deiseach and Blank, so thought it was worth commenting.
I think it's about the "lift in productivity" possible. The multiplier even if you spend a lot of brain power and do everything right for vanilla or agricultural productivity will always be a lot less than the multiplier possible with machine tools / manufacturing. And even manufacturing will always lag behind software, or apps, or things like that.
So if you double down on organic stuff, you'll hit a much shorter productivity ceiling while all the manufacturing guys keep growing past that (and their economies grow accordingly). And the ones who double down on manufacturing without doing software will watch the software / app countries shooting past them, and their economies growing.
You need to move your investments or balance them among things with higher productivity ceilings to stay relevant / keep growing.
See indigo production in the southern United States. The French grew it in their American colonies, due to the accidents of war the British needed a new source and began their own plantations in their American possessions. This grew into a profitable industry *until* a combination of factors - the American Revolution, competition from the Caribbean plantations which produced more crops annually, and Britain sourcing indigo from India - meant that indigo was no longer a cash crop and instead it was replaced by cotton.
The French had their own collapse, as slave revolts in the Caribbean islands and then the abolition of slavery meant the plantations were no longer profitable.
If you had invested all your money and resources into producing indigo, either as British or French, then you were left high and dry unless you could pivot to something else. As the saying goes "don't put all your eggs into one basket". From being highly valuable to being not worth the effort, by specialising in that one crop you would have limited your own capability.
The latter. A historical example is the Northern USA vs the South. The South invested in highly profitable cotton industries, but ended up well behind the North over time.
What is your prognostication of what will happen with tariffs in the next few months (let’s say by the beginning of summer).
1) Trump keeps high tariffs and the world responds in kind
2) Trump pivots (intentionally or not) and uses tariffs as a bargaining chip to get lower trade barriers globally
3) Congress overrides Trump and takes tariffs away.
4) Other (please specify)
Note I am not trying to predict the economic effects of each scenario, just which do you think is most likely . Feel free to give weights on your certainty.
I will start off by saying I give a 33% chance each for 1 and 2.
Not going to make predictions about what the USG will do, but I think the aggregate response from the rest of the world is at least somewhat obvious.
Two months ago when Trump announced the Canada and Mexico tariffs, I predicted that even if they were ultimately pulled back, the fact of them being floated at all would make the U.S. a little poor than it would otherwise. Poorer because it made the U.S. appear a risky place to do business. Any rational actor who was buying from, selling to or investing in the U.S. on sufficient scale would need to price in that risk, making other options more attractive. At the time, I expected this to have a real effect, but probably small enough not to be readily detectable in aggregate economic data.
As of last week, I expect the same thing but on a significantly larger scale. Even if Trump rolls back the tariffs tomorrow and starts talking at every chance about how much he loves free trade and does the best free trade, a bunch of people around the world have been forced to update their models. Everyone, everywhere is going to have more incentive to route around the U.S., to do business in other markets and rely less on any American firm (as producers or consumers) than they did before. The longer the tariffs stick around and the higher they get pushed, the faster and stronger this reaction will be. The U.S. is a valuable market, but less valuable than it was two weeks ago. Now I think the trend will be large enough to be detectable in the data: that 5-10 years from now (assuming AI doesn't flip over the game board) economists will be able to look at the data and clearly point out "yeah, this here is where the U.S. shot itself in the foot and gave its economy a long-term limp."
This is unserious. Trump has a lot of popularity with certain classes of people, and huge unpopularity with other classes. Serving military officers are solidly in the latter camp. Remember when Milley sided with *China* over Trump in his first term? When Vindman testified against Trump in the impeachment proceedings? The people who would be responsible for carrying out a coup or martial law are all Milleys and Vindmans. Not going to happen.
Military officers swear an oath to uphold the Constitution. By this oath they should not carry out any illegal order, even from the Commander in Chief. It’s called good character, fidelity to an ideal and to duty.
“And we don't take an oath to a wannabe dictator. We don't take an oath to an individual, we take an oath to the Constitution, and we take an oath to the idea that is America, and we're willing to die to protect it."
We as a country should thank our good fortune to have this sort of loyalty to the American idea and ideal. Without it the nation couldn’t survive an amoral toad like Trump.
I guess one version of #2 is that the administration likes tariffs, but plans on getting BOTH lower restrictions (barriers, subsidies, currency manipulation and tariffs) from other countries and getting a net 10% tariff for US. By starting high they give themselves bargaining position to accomplish three goals (a billion per day in taxes, more investment in the US and more exports). I am going to raise my estimates to 50% for option 2.
1) 40% through the beginning of summer at least; this is the default and Donald Trump will never ever admit he was wrong
2) 10%; the "global trade barriers" are a mix of pure fantasy that can't be lowered because it doesn't exist, and stuff that's too deeply entrenched and obfuscated to be negotiated away in a few months (or ever, with a negotiator this clumsy)
3) 5% by the beginning of summer. Congress, and especially the GOP, will need to grow a backbone pretty much from scratch to pull this off.
4a) 30%, Trump "pivots" and uses the tariffs as a bargaining chip to get worthless token concessions that he can claim are the Very Best Trade Deal Ever.
4b) 15%, Wild card outcomes that I'm not going to try to predict, but including some economic apocalypses (or whatever the proper plural is).
2. EU restrictions on the import of American farm goods, like beef (due to hormone use), chicken (due to chlorine washing), and eggs (due to washing and storage standards) seem like they could be fairly categorized as a non-monetary trade barrier.
You can categorize them as a "non-monetary trade barrier" if you want, and maybe they actually are that - in part.
But you can also characterize them as food safety regulations, and they are *absolutely* that, at least in part and maybe in full.
Other nations *are* going to have safety regulations, for food and everything else, and they are not going to be carbon-copy implementations of our own safety regulations. And maybe they're going to make their safety regulations do double duty as trade barriers. But if you call them out on that, no matter how correct you may be, the result will *not* be, "Oh, we're very sorry about that - look, we're just going to repeal all our safety regulations, whatever you all want to sell to our citizens is fine with us".
It might be possible to persuade them to disentangle the supposed trade barriers from the safety regulations, through careful negotiation that lets them save face by not admitting that they were ever trade barriers in the first place. But there is no way that happens in three months.
It is definitely possible to do such a hamfisted job of it that the other side digs in its heels, says "No these are *not* trade barriers, you are trying to poison our people with your crappy food so your greedy capitalists can make their filthy lucre, and we are never ever ever going to let you do that!". And the "never ever ever" part will be hyperbole, but it will be way longer than three months.
Depends on precisely HOW ones "calls them out." The British did a good job with China in the mid-nineteenth century, for example, but yes, I agree three months is unlikely to be enough.
I think there ARE a few unorthodox negotiating tactics that would work, like credibly threatening to switch to selling weapons to Russia, but I don't think the American government is capable of being that agile in its foreign policy.
So could be the US ban against European raw milk cheese, like Camembert, Gruyere, Parmigiano or Cheddar.
You can still buy Camembert in the US, it's just not the French version. It's a different sort of cheese that is specifically designed for the US market and sold under the same brand name. Likewise, US companies are free to produce beef/chicken/eggs that meet EU regulations and sell them to the EU.
Those are certainly trade barriers, but they go in both directions, and where they reach economic relevant scales, companies find ways to go around them. The corresponding costs would certainly be reduced by removing the trade barriers, but I doubt that the net effect is economically very relevant.
You gotta remember Liberation Day comes from a guy who thinks patriotism means dry humping an American flag rather than refusing early release from Hanoi Hilton before his men.
And people wonder why I won’t vote for the sleazebag.
> You can still buy Camembert in the US, it's just not the French version. It's a different sort of cheese that is specifically designed for the US market and sold under the same brand name.
How can someone live like this? Why _would_ they even continue living like this?
They don't, we can't, which is why there's now a vibrant American artisanal cheese scene! The feds almost killed it a few years ago by declaring aging cheese on wood planks to be "unsanitary", but as far as I can tell the proposed ban didn't go through and we can still buy raw milk Brie from Vermont, raw milk Gauda from Georgia, raw milk Cheddar from California, etc. etc. They don't taste the same as the European versions, but hold their own as worthy entrants into the awesome world of good cheese.
For context, I've traveled to Europe quite a bit and have tasted the real stuff, so this is not coming from the veil of ignorance.
Oh so first 3) is my favorite option, but I won't be tempted.
I think/ hope it will be 2) but a pivot to better trade deals for the USA. (not a global lowering of trade barriers.) So 70% on 2) and 10% on the other three
4) 65%: The courts put an injunction on the tariffs and the Supreme Court rules that IEEPA can't be used the way Trump is using it.
I'm surprised this wasn't included, it seems to obviously be the most likely outcome. Every time Trump overreaches someone finds a judge to injunct it to keep it from happening, and I think the case that IEEPA does not allow the President to put arbitrary tariffs on anybody without congressional approval is a strong one.
Someone has already sued for injunctive relief (though for the China tariffs from a month or so ago, not the Liberation Day ones): here's their complaint (https://nclalegal.org/filing/complaint-for-injunctive-and-declaratory-relief-5/). They're arguing that tariffs are a tax on Americans, and that IEEPA does not authorize the president to impose tariffs:
"The President purported to order these tariffs under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act of 1977 (“IEEPA”), but that is a statute that authorizes Presidents to order sanctions as a rapid response to international emergencies. It does not allow a president to impose tariffs on the American people. President Trump’s Executive Orders imposing a China tariff are, therefore, ultra vires and unconstitutional. This Court should enjoin their implementation and enforcement."
Looking over the IEEPA it grants the President the ability to "investigate, regulate, or prohibit" transactions in foreign exchange. Tariffs are not specifically mentioned in the law, and nobody has ever used IEEPA to impose tariffs before so there's no precedent.
Good point about the Tax Injunction Act though: if it applies then we won't get relief until the Supreme Court rules on the case.
Well that's for the courts to decide, isn't it? I don't see it as a slam dunk case either way, but the case is likely enough to succeed that it's worth trying. The courts may rule that "regulation" means you can stop it from happening, or a put a cap on it, or only let you make transactions every other Thursday, but a tariff is a tax and taxes are different from regulations. Or they may not. We'll have to see!
Ever since Chevron was overturned the courts are giving the Executive Branch a lot less leeway to interpret statutes however they like. And in recent years the Supreme Court has struck down a lot of Executive actions based on ambiguous laws. For example, in West Virgina v. EPA the court ruled that the Biden Administration couldn't use the 1970 Clean Air Act to regulate carbon emissions, saying "in certain extraordinary cases, both separation of powers principles and a practical understanding of legislative intent make us ‘reluctant to read into ambiguous statutory text’ the delegation claimed to be lurking there …. The agency instead must point to ‘clear congressional authorization’ for the power it claims."
So there's a very real chance that the Supreme Court will come down on the tariffs, because the IEEPA doesn't clearly provide authorization for tariffs.
Yep. A colleague of mine who's one of the most prominent environmental attorneys in the US says of "West Virginia" (the current Court's erasure of 'Chevron deference') that it's a two-edged broadsword: it's now easier to challenge any executive branch action, pro or con regulation, that relies on interpretive debates about statutory texts. He naturally was focused on the environmental laws like the Clean Water Act, and his firm has already had a win on that basis actually, but the point applies generally.
Since the SCOTUS has set the bar at _clear_ congressional authorization, "implied" or "logically embedded" no longer suffice. By that standard I'd put the odds slightly in favor of those IEEPA tariff plaintiffs on the merits. They may not get an injunction for different reasons, but if they then persist in the normal way I bet the current Court will eventually side with them. Or federal courts will, citing "West Virginia".
There are very few legal precedents that have much relevance, that's true. No previous POTUS has tried to impose (or remove for that matter) broad tariffs without any Congressional involvement or approval. So we really are in uncharted territory here as far as where the boundaries of authority are.
2) Trump hasn’t backtracked yet and seems to genuinely believe in this stuff, and most other countries’ governments’ can’t afford politically to make wildly asymmetric concessions, so p(1) > p(2).
3) is pretty close to 0 since there are only a handful of sane/conscientious republicans in the senate, and a 30% of winning a general election is more appealing than a 90% if losing a primary,
Last I heard, there were seven Republican Senators who had signed on as cosponsors for the Trade Review Act that would limit executive authority over tariffs: Collins, Murkowski, McConnell, Grassley, Moran, Tillis, and Young. At least two more, Ted Cruz and Rand Paul, have made strongly anti-tariff statements in the last few days but haven't officially enforced the specific legislation.
This is more Republican support than I would have hoped for, but still far short of what is needed. Cloture requires 60 votes, and a veto override requires 67, so if every Democrat votes for it, they'll need 13 Republican votes to force a vote if the Senate Republican leadership continues to oppose it (4-6 more than they currently have) and 20 Republican votes to override a veto. Which is a very tall order.
The House is a taller order still, since a much higher proportion of House Republicans than Senate Republicans seem to be all-in on MAGA.
If everyone's portfolio is down 40% and major companies start going under and hundreds of thousands of workers are being laid off and every CEO is on the phone begging for tariffs to be lifted, then loyalties start to look very different.
And of course if all that stuff doesn't happen then we don't need to worry.
Maybe, but I also think that some worry might be indicated if everyone's portfolio is down 10-20% and tens of thousands of workers are being laid off.
There's also the issue of whether the President should have the power to impose this kind of major policy shift by decree, which can still be opposed on principle even if a particular exercise of unilateral executive power turns out to be mostly harmless.
1 - 50% chance of this ... and then conditioned on this 65% chance of most tariffs being repealed after the congressional midterm elections, 25% chance of them surviving until after the next presidential elections, 10% that they mostly stay even after (this is mostly only if the next president is also MAGA or someone like Bernie Sanders, both of which I find very unlikely now)
2 - 20% chance ... I don't think there are many ways to force Trump to change his mind, Americans give their presidents too much power and Trump doesn't like admitting he's wrong. He won't be able to get elected again, so he doesn't care about voters and he doesn't need sponsors any more either. This only happens if he can somehow present this as a BIG WIN or if he feels like he can.
3 - 20% chance ... I think most Republicans are either MAGA or playing it safe, knowing that the midterms are close and if MAGA can discredit itself they will a) personally be much safer politically supporting such a measure in the new congress and b) make it easier for Republicans to purge MAGA if they first discredit themselves and lose all but the most hardcore support by starting a recession for no good reason
4 - 10% of something else happening, e.g. Trump doing something so outrageous that he gets impeached even while Republicans still have a majority in congress. I know 10% is fairly high for all other scenarios but Trump is also extremely erratic, so I think it is warranted.
Ugh. I'm of a mind with Eric Weinstein: positive mean, high variance, negative skew, high kurtosis. That's a mathy way of saying I suspect something good might happen, but the pluralist option right now isn't good, and the curve so damn flat that I wouldn't put a bet on anything.
Let's call it 20 #1, 25% #2, 10% #3, 45% #4.
The upside of all this is that I learned the word "kurtosis" today.
There is not much meaning (even metaphorical) in the kurtosis of a non-numeric outcome. I suspect "high entropy" captures better what you mean. If anything, at a given variance, more kurtosis typically means a less flat curve with a more salient mode.
Also, "I suspect something good might happen, but the pluralist option right now isn't good" sounds like "the mode is lower than the mean" which is typical of positive skew.
#4 is what I used as a junk chest for everything else, on the assumption that this could go a lot of ways that aren't occurring to me right now. So the theme here is "I really don't know".
If I had to speculate at what might fall under #4:
* Other nations cry "uncle", and offer various trade concessions in exchange for tariff reductions. (This will look very similar to #2. I think Trump *does* intend tariffs to be something of a bargaining chip; the difference is that other nations will offer something Trump might not have initially had in mind.)
* The court rules that the law Trump is using to justify his tariff power doesn't actually authorize it.
* Tariffs persist into 2026/2028, Congress *partly* reduces tariffs
* Unemployment drops inexplicably due to something else
* Trump lifts the trade barriers due to something crazy happening, such as
** Some Damn Thing in the Balkans
** oil crisis
** Some Damn Thing in the Middle East
** LLM crisis
** LLM automation sets off a market boom and no one cares about tariffs anymore
** some other tech breakthrough sets off a market boom
Really the best word to describe progressive feelings about the whole topic is -- since well before Trump's current moves -- "uncertain". Or maybe "very mixed feelings".
This has come to mind thinking about my parents, lifelong liberal Dems who called themselves "progressive" which in their era did not have nearly all the baggage and implications that it does today. They and all their friends had very mixed feelings about trade policy.
Yglesias references this in his Substack column today: "It’s underrated that the 1980s/1990s dynamic — Democrats led the charge urging Ronald Reagan to engage in more protectionism and then the left wing of the party (at the urging of industrial unions) rebelled against the Clinton administration’s embrace of NAFTA — was a _reversal_ of the historical pattern.
From the time of Andrew Jackson through FDR and the Kennedy Round of GATT during the Great Society, it was always the left position in American politics that tariffs were regressive and bad. Trump’s reversal of Reagan/Bush trade policies was noteworthy, but I am pretty sure Joe Biden was the first Democratic Party president in centuries to _not_ lower trade barriers."
That's similar to deregulation, where everybody today believes Reagan was "the great deregulator" while in fact Jimmy Carter [my mother's political hero and for a while indirectly her employer] in the late 1970s had been the actual radical deregulator. Carter insisted that sanctioned monopolies were inherently regressive (or if you will anti-progressive) and when he got the chance he walked that walk (with the critical legislative assistance of Ted Kennedy!). Then Reagan, the progressives' great boogieman more generally, defeated Carter while appropriating deregulation for his own brand (and then actually doing almost none of it).
That sequence created a _lot_ of cognitive dissidence for the left side of the Democratic Party. A similar dynamic has been at play on trade policy since around the same time, greatly reinforced by Clinton/NAFTA.
I don't think most people *justify* eating meat to themselves as much as they never think about it. It's so widespread a practice that they never question it.
Is this contradictory with the fact that meat-eaters also oppose sexual abuse or torture of animals? Yes, but humans are famously irrational.
I agree with you. I spent most of my life so far as a meat eater and accepted that my beliefs were incongruent (eating meat OK, pointlessly harming animals bad), and 'solved' the issue by not thinking about it. I noticed others with similar pairs of beliefs solved the issue by rationalising easily-believable but incorrect counterarguments (I need meat to live, my ancestors ate it so I must, I have canine teeth so must need to use them, etc), then some just didn't have an issue to begin with (I don't care about farm animals). Largely it's just 'out of sight, out of mind'. I would bet that if everyone had to wade into the chicken factory and kill their own miserable chicken, instead of choosing a pack from a supermarket, there would be many, many more vegetarians/vegans (or at least much more money spent on less horrendous farming practises)
I don't know about most people, but you're probably right about a lot of them. There are also probably lots that think about it, know it's morally wrong, and do it anyway because of pleasure and convenience.
Factory farms are mentioned a lot in the comments here, but they are a very US-specific objection; the practice is far from universal, and also other countries are infamously reluctant to import US meat (Trump has a number of rants on the subject!)
Meanwhile, animals can be raised on marginal land that is not suitable for crops, and on what would otherwise be waste / byproducts. Historically, this is how it was done.
There is a very strong argument for eating much less meat than the average westerner eats; this would remove many of the incentives that lead to dedicated factory farms. However, for maximal efficiency, the optimal amount of meat is not zero.
I’m more than happy to grant that the optimal amount of animal product use isn’t zero. I don’t know what the optimal amount is, but I could see there being a need to use some.
I think vegetarians and vegans really struggle with the idea that a group of meat-eaters don't feel the need to think about the justifications for eating meat because they don't believe mistreating a chicken is wrong.
Yes, they don't justify it. They don't justify it for the same reason I don't need to justify owning a pair of jeans to myself. It's not about jeans-ownership being a widespread practice: it's that I don't see any reason why it would be wrong. Yes, if nobody owned jeans then maybe I would think harder about water usage in cotton farming and indigo leeching out onto my sofa, but these are secondary concerns about the conditions of jean ownership, they're not a core objection to the act itself.
“I don’t see any reason why it would be wrong” is a statement that means you either haven’t examined the issue or you actually don’t agree with arguments against consuming animal products. My contention is that most meat-eaters are the former, not the latter.
My contention is that there's no practical difference between holding an unexamined belief and holding an examined one, if the examination wouldn't change your opinion. If someone doesn't examine their opinions on meat-eating in the same way I haven't examined my opinions on jeans-wearing (until now), then they're obviously quite apathetic about it.
I think pointing out that meat-eaters haven't examined their beliefs has an implicit continuation of "...and that's important because they'd change them if they did." Without that continuation, it's just a bit of trivia. How many of will actually change those beliefs, though?
There’s definitely people who won’t care and will not change their behavior, but some do place value in logic, so the contradiction upon examining the belief has to be resolved, and very few people are willing to bite the bullet on making other behavior against animals morally permissible.
The other behavior is, and has always been, about the effect on the person, not the animal. A guy having sex with a sheep is a pervert/deviant/whatever. He's demonstrating that he's a dysfunctional human, which other people should be wary about. The sheep probably doesn't care. I definitely don't care about the effect on the sheep.
A kid that tortures animals for fun is much more likely to be an adult who tortures people. A kid that learns to butcher animals for food is not.
The problem for this argument is animal abuse laws. In many places, you will be punished by the law for hurting the animal, not because they were worried about how you’d end up. For instance, where I live, you can be subject to a fine and time in prison for committing animal abuse. The definition of animal abuse is also much larger than simply sex or torture. That would not make sense if the issue was the person’s behavior, but it would fit if the state believed you had committed some moral wrong.
There’s a sizable portion of the population who agree that factory farming is bad but also place the welfare of animals low on their list of concerns. They don’t see a straightforward solution that matches the small amount of time/effort/sacrifice they are willing to dedicate to the issue so they don’t give it any additional thought.
Those that don’t justify eating meat to themselves also likely don’t realize the cheapest meat they buy comes from factory farms which might as well be torture for animals.
They just assume—rationally—that the food brought to the market is done humanely. And—rationally—they believe killing animals for food is fine, whereas torturing or abusing animals is not fine.
So at the end of the day, your average consumer is being quite rational. Sorry to burst your “I’m more rational than a normie” bubble.
Sure, they’re rational given the unconsidered principle that meat consumption is morally permissible. But that’s debatable, and most people couldn’t hope to defend it even if they were given a philosophy and logic course.
There's no objective way to resolve the argument. I can claim an objective standard (for instance the Bible telling believers to eat meat, of which there are many examples), but for anyone who doesn't adhere to that standard, it's meaningless.
I don't adhere to your standards. We have different axioms. Eating meat is self-evidently good to me.
And there's lots of ways to get there. Meat provides nutrition that is difficult or even impossible to get otherwise. Meat tastes good. Meat is a cultural tradition passed down. If I don't accept your axioms, then any or all of these and more can be perfectly rational and moral reasons to eat meat. There can even be reasons that neither of us agree with, but which based on different axioms will hold for some people.
It is clearly not true that meat eaters simply haven't examined the morals.
I’m going to ignore the “people can disagree” portion of your comment because it’s boring to go into. We all know people can disagree, the millionth reminder is unnecessary.
I will say, however, that I simply don’t agree with your assessment that most meat eaters have morally examined the issue of meat eating. Barring evidence, I don’t think we can convince each other either way on this.
I don't ultimately disagree that many meat eaters haven't or will never examine their stance. (On the other hand, many of us have and I don't think you can justify the strength of your stance on this). I just happen to think it's a very high standard that you are laying out. Someone else asked you about whether you've ever considered the morality of eating plants, and you scoffed at that. The reaction you had is pretty much the reaction I have when people ask about eating meat - of course it's okay!
And we can have the same discussion about a variety of topics. Is it okay to breath, to walk, to talk to friend, to work a job, to have kids, to support your country, to go to war. Some of these are obvious to you, some are obvious to me, and some are obvious to certain groups but not others. There are a few people who may object to all of these things (they are against human life). Many people question patriotism and war. To pick one or a few topics and say "you haven't examined your stance!" is often true, but also uninteresting. All of us have a deep set of unexamined views. Most of us would continue to agree with our previous views if we did examine them (often due to various biases and such). Would it be very interesting to you if 1,000 meat eaters all examined their views and 985 of them continued to agree that eating meat was okay? Or is "examining their views" only consisting of you telling them they're wrong to eat meat? Not very interesting or helpful.
To be clear, I didn’t scoff at that person. I asked plainly why I would need to do such a thing, when “plants deserve no moral consideration“ is a position held by most if not all people on both sides. I also invited them to make an argument against the moral permissibility of eating plants. I won’t relitigate that comment chain, but I do object to the notion that I scoffed initially.
I agree that “X belief is unexamined” is not always interesting, but I was trying to defend meat eaters from an accusation made by the user Hind’s Ghost. But I can’t respond on the PC because Scott’s substack just freezes every time. I can load comments, but I can’t reply to them. So I tried doing it on my phone, but when I clicked “reply” it went to a top-level response.
I know it sounds like an excuse, but I swear I wasn’t trying to make a spontaneous, unprompted remark. I was legitimately trying to defend meat-eaters against a more direct accusation.
Humm... I've found a comfortable spot. Rejecting the argument that humans have no moral right to live since we cause so much insect suffering, I've decided to apply a very high discount rate to pain and suffering when compared to miracle of life. I.e. a battery chicken or industrial hog would rather have lived than not. I also believe that life has a praxis towards complexity. Nicely privileging the human race!
I would love to be reincarnated, since that would prove I have a soul and there is a god! Other than that, since I wouldn't carry anything with me, and would have to other point of reference, then yes. I would rather be an industrial hog than never live.
I don't know why people are acting like this is some gotcha setup and not a legitimate counterpoint. BB just had a recent post arguing for the horrible reality of insect suffering. What about the people who try to tell you that rocks have consciousness or electrons have qualia? Why is the suffering of animals a given and anything else a vegan eats couldn't possibly also experience suffering? What about the shrimp welfare people but for legumes?
And if the response is animals are a lot more like people than any of those things - most people don't care about the suffering of other people, except in a vague moral way that doesn't require them to do anything differently. So there's your answer.
And yet DrManhattan16 couldn't manage that argument; they responded exactly like I thought they would. They in fact stated eating meat is the same as sexual abuse. So your call that I'M acting in bad faith, with no regard to the bad faith of the original post, is my whole point. This is not logic applied equally in all directions, it's a gut feeling wrapped up in post-hoc rationalization.
Plants have bloodflow. A plant in the wind grows stronger roots than one not subjected to it. They can seek water. The assumption that a living creature capable of reacting to its environment holds no intelligence, does not feel pain when pulled apart or outright killed, is a salve on people's conscience.
Why would I need to justify it? If you have an argument for why it’s morally impermissible to consume things that aren’t meat or animal products, then you should offer one.
So you don't so much "justify" your food choice to yourself as much as you never think about it. It's so widespread a practice that you never question it.
Take notes, children, this is what it looks like when you’re more interested in getting an own than engaging earnestly.
Firstly, you know nothing about me. Not only was I raised in a meat-eating household and culture, I was a meat-eater for 25 years myself. So trying to turn this around on me doesn’t work.
Secondly, not eating meat is the only other choice. Either you eat animal products, or you don’t. There isn’t anything else to consume. There are only two kingdoms of life you can consume: animals and plants.
Thirdly, even if it was morally suspect to consume plants, you’d still have to debate what the optimal set of non-human targets would be, and I suspect that it would lean heavily or exclusively on plants.
You’re not going to get me with some silly gotcha, I’m more than aware of the moral issues of human diets.
>Secondly, not eating meat is the only other choice.
A choice with no distinction; you've failed to offer a reason not to eat meat, and failed to offer a reason eating plants is different. Your argument is entirely about factory farming conditions, but then you say
>Whether or not farm animals enjoy safer conditions is largely irrelevant to me.
So you don't give a shit about your own factory farming arguments. And even if you did, your solution is to cull the positives instead of the negatives; have the animals suffer and die for nothing.
>you’d still have to debate what the optimal set of non-human targets would be
Go ahead. It's what I called on you to do the first time, and you've failed to do it twice now.
you've failed to offer a reason not to eat meat, and failed to offer a reason eating plants is different.
I didn’t explicitly make an argument against consuming meat. I pointed out that most meat eaters, in my view, didn’t actually evaluate the principle that it’s okay to consume it. I am, of course, against using animal products, but that’s separate from the observation.
So you don't give a shit about your own factory farming arguments.
Factory farming is worse than the cruelty free farms, but my position has never placed primacy on the suffering animals feel as the only thing that matters. That suffering just makes the need to not eat it stronger, but it doesn’t affect my stance. That’s also why it’s irrelevant to me if animals die in nature with awful lives - my objection is to human use of animals, not animal wellbeing. If they die in nature, that sucks, but I’m not lifting a finger to help them.
It’s what I called on you to do the first time
And it’s completely irrelevant due to the fundamental positions being asserted. I didn’t argue that if you fuck a tree or burn down a plant that you’ve committed a moral wrong, and that’s certainly not the position of any vegan I know. But meat-eaters often insist that something immoral has occurred when an animal is sexually abused or tortured, then they turn around and eat a plate of sausages.
The contradiction only lies in one direction - asking me to justify eating plants is idiotic and irrelevant unless you want to accuse me of doing something immoral. Which you can do, but I’m not going to respond to that accusation unless you explicitly make it.
If you raise a cow in pure cow-luxury for its entire life, never knowing a hint of suffering, and in the end kill it without it even suspecting for a second, is it then permissible to eat its meat? In other words, is there a difference between a cow that doesnt suffer and chives who cant?
The original argument is a categorical argument against eating meat. If it fails based on its own metrics, then it's not a reasoned argument. If "suffering" is a meaningful construct, then non-suffering is too. So even one example of a non-suffering consumption of meat is enough to defeat the argument.
If he wants to argue about what we do in practice, factory farming specifically, then he should do that. That's a different argument, though.
My logic is this, more or less - farm animals can be kept in conditions which are strictly preferable to those in the wild. They often are not and that is why I try buy meat and diary labelled BIO or somehow otherwise advertising better care (I wish these two were not conflated so often. I don't care all that much about BIO specifically, but I do care about better animal care).
I.e. when you buy the cheapest meat on sale, it usually means the animals are suffering and live in conditions which can be described as torture (also, the meat is probably not as good for you either). This I do not support. But if they can live quite a good life then even if we eat them, this is better life experience than most animals have in nature and so I am fine with that. In some cases, even regular farms are sort of ok, for example bulls that get slaughtered for beef are spending most of their lives outside, grazing. Diary milk cows are treated horribly though, so I never buy any milk from those sources. I think I still buy some cheese that ultimately comes from milk from factory farms because labelling is less clear there. I always buy eggs from hens that have outside ranges (eggs are actually labelled very well and clearly and you have a range of choices in terms of animal welfare ... I wish we had this for other animal products as well).
As for sexual abuse ... well, this is something hard for me to understand from any angle. First, I don't understand why anyone would want to have sex with animals. But I also don't see how that is obviously abuse. It is not easy to tell if the animals like it or not but e.g. judging by the behaviour of horny dogs jumping your legs I guess they might very well do in some cases, especially male animals. In that situation, it is icky and pretty disgusting but also no harm done, I don't see why it should be illegal. In other situations where the animal clearly suffers, it is probably closer to animal torture although probably not quite as bad as most other kinds that are going on in factory farms.
Whether or not farm animals enjoy safer conditions is largely irrelevant to me. I know some people argue that animal suffering requires we protect animals from their natural state, but I’m not one of those people. What matters to me is what humans do. I do not condemn a wolf for eating a rabbit, I would condemn a human for doing so if it was unnecessary.
You point to wanting higher standards for how farm animals are treated, and I agree. But the system is inherently morally questionable, making it a bit more pleasant doesn’t get at that underlying issue. Are we truly ethically permitted to forcibly make an animal pregnant just so we can get its milk? There is a product called “ahimsa milk” which has the bull and cow mate whenever they want instead of forcing it (the name is a reference to a Jain concept). But even here, we are keeping animals in structures we build for them instead of letting them be free.
You’ve bitten a bullet that most wouldn’t - sexual contact with an animal is seen as deeply immoral in most cases, though mostly for the optics, not for clear argumentation.
The contradiction is this - if you believe that animals are owed some moral consideration, that it’s wrong to abuse them, then why does this not extend to killing them for food when you don’t need to, or subjecting them to unnatural conditions to get certain products from them?
I simply don't think animals have the same moral worth as humans. So as long as their suffering is lower and comfort higher than it would be in the wild, it is a wash or a net positive and beyond that I only care about utility to humans, basically.
Also, most of these animals would never exist in the first place (unless we are talking about venison for example). So my thinking is more or less this:
Imagine you are an unborn soul and you have two options. Option one - you live as a diary cow on a decent farm or perhaps as a bull who is slaughtered for meat. Your life will be cut short (especially in the bull's case, the cow will be mostly ok as long as the farm is decent) but compared to similar animals in the wild it won't be by that much (in expected values). The death will also be quick and not painful. Much better than being killed by a crocodile, dying of a disease or something like that. Option two - you never get born at all. This is only the better option if the life you'd be born into is simply not worth living at all. This might very well be the case with some factory farms, but if your life is strictly better than life in the wild then it is hard to argue that it is not worth living. That is because if you argue that then the logical conclusion is that it would be moral to eliminate all animals in the wild so that new animals stop being born into that (keeping practical implications like the entire world ecosystem collapsing).
As for insemination - from observing cattle when they are outside in the pastures (I only ever see them when hiking in the mountains where they are grazing), cows usually don't really like mating with the bulls either and bulls are usually trying to "rape" them, they definitely are not looking for any "consent" from the cow. Except I don't really believe that these concepts make a lot of sense with animals, particularly not with relatively simple animals like cattle (it would be different if we were talking about great apes for example). I guess it is more natural to let the bull at the cows rather than to inseminate them with some tools (and from what his happening on those pastures it has to still happen naturally at least in part) but I don't think the cows really are that much happier in the former scenario (the bulls might be :D ). And if you just let the bulls loose, cows will keep having calves perpetually anyway.
I see. I disagree that the only thing that matters is utility. I think animals deserve enough moral consideration that it’s not trivial to assert that their suffering is the only measure which determines the moral status of our actions upon them. They might very well be entitled to live their lives, however short and cruel, freely in nature than in captivity and/or for our unneeded use. This is why I do not truck in argument for eliminating all predators, which I have seen some people propose.
As you note, cows and other animals lack the concepts of things like “consent” . But I don’t think this is the relevant standard. If we happened upon a backwards indigenous tribe somewhere, it would still be wrong, in my view, to use them as slave labor if they have not eliminated slavery amongst their own population. What matters is what our own standards are.
Cows come into season, you will see heifers trying to mount one another when they're ready to mate. So in the natural version of their lives, cows will be pregnant every year. Whether you put the bull in the field with the heifers, or rely on artificial insemination, for pregnant cattle for milk production isn't that big of a change.
What is the change is breeding for cows that produce way more milk than the wild version would, and how calves are weaned off so that milk is available for human use. But pregnant cattle is the natural version, whatever we do or don't do. Cows don't have birth control.
…Sure? I don’t really see why that would affect my argument. That they are pregnant each year out in the wilds doesn’t really change my mind, because there is a difference between humans forcibly making the cow pregnant and the cows doing it themselves.
If my natural inclination was to stand outside in the sun for a few minutes, it would still be a moral issue for some species of mind-controlling ant to force me to do precisely that whenever they want me to be there, even if I was naturally inclined to do it and I didn’t suffer for it.
>I see. I disagree that the only thing that matters is utility. I think animals deserve enough moral consideration that it’s not trivial to assert that their suffering is the only measure which determines the moral status of our actions upon them. They might very well be entitled to live their lives, however short and cruel, freely in nature than in captivity and/or for our unneeded use.
I guess this is where our fundamental disagreement lies. I don't believe it is inherently good for animals to be able to choose on their own the same way that I don't believe that it is good (or in this case even a good idea) for severely mentally handicapped people to be able to choose on their own. You still want to prevent abuse (in both cases, especially with the humans of course) and suffering. But I don't believe that unlike humans, a cow can meaningfully choose what is good for her.
There is clearly a threshold where this is no longer true and once we get to something like dolphin or great ape intelligence, I would concede that it is very possible that a dolphin might genuinely be able to make such decisions. A dolphin is still less intelligent than mentally handicapped people but in a sense it is not since the handicaps are more than a "-40 IQ debuff". So I would be uncomfortable with dolphins or great apes being farmed or even hunted for food. As a side note, this is why I don't care about shrimp welfare and have no problem with us harvesting shrimp en masse (as long as this doesn't have other negative consequences), because I don't care all that much about shrimp, as far as I can tell they are just too primitive for their welfare to inherently matter to me meaningfully more than plant welfare does.
I am also uncomfortable with people eating dogs or cats. But I bite the bullet here too and admit that this is mostly cultural and there is very little difference between eating dogs and eating pigs (in terms of intelligence and consciousness they seem to be about equal), so as long as those animals are treated ok, I would not try to make that illegal. Just because I find something disgusting doesn't mean that it is inherently morally wrong or should be illegal (which are also not the same, but that is a different topic).
"Just because I find something disgusting doesn't mean that it is inherently morally wrong or should be illegal"
That's a big point in this discussion, and one we social conservatives have had rammed down our throats: "just because *you* think gays are icky is no reason to deny them the right to marriage!" etc.
People concerned about the rights of animals down to shrimps and insects will have to bite the bullet on why, for instance, abortion okay (it comes down to some version of 'early medical abortion just a clump of cells' and 'bodily autonomy of the woman').
I don't think many meat eaters relish the conditions of factory farms. They simply know that if they want meat to be as cheap as it is, the end result will look something like a factory farm. Trade offs.
Yes, but that wasn’t my argument. My argument was that they had not actually thought about the topic of whether they are morally permitted to consume it.
Well, I don’t think about it much because as someone said above, why think too much about something so normal and everyday.
When I do think about it (generally when I encounter someone who doesn’t eat it) I think ‘eating meat is right and good and people who don’t eat it for ethical reasons are wrong.’ That’s because I suspect you and I start with different moral assumptions & moral philosophies. Noticing that fact about the world rather than assuming it away is somehow even more fundamental than the conflict/mistake thing.
Sure, you and I could debate whether or not it’s moral or not. But my point was a defense of meat-eaters. I argued that they were not engaging with the moral issues of a widespread practice and that they were not actually convincing themselves that eating meat was morally permissible. The latter is a far more condemning statement for any vegan or vegetarian.
If your version of "engaging with the moral issues" is "if they convince themselves it's morally permissible then they're wrong" then I submit you are not really worried about "are they engaging with the moral issues?" but rather "why do they not agree with me on the correct morality?"
I’m not worried about anything. In fact, I hardly do much arguing against eating meat in the first place. I believe that that meat eaters mostly occupy an unknowingly contradictory position. If they were to examine their position, then they’d have to either bite an uncomfortable bullet or agree with me. That’s the sum of my argument.
"There are even bioengineered human-like creatures (to humans what corgis are to wolves) sitting in office-like environments all day viewing readouts of what’s going on and excitedly approving of everything, since that satisfies some of Agent-4’s drives.33"
This is a common theme of "alignment research"--you are trying to get the AI to understand that it should do some things and not do others (be nice, be helpful, etc), but in fact it only learns to instantiate the appearance of those things instead of reality. So in this case, it knows that humanoid AI researchers being excited by its work is good, but not that all humans being dead (or powerless corgis) is bad.
My question is, how could this really happen if the AI is intelligent, let alone superintelligent? Dwarkesh makes this point on the podcast with Scott, but I'm not sure there's ever a deep answer given--the LLMs understand natural language super well! Why are we worried they won't understand what they're being trained to do in the superintelligent case, when they'll have a better understanding of natural language than any person alive?
They would certainly understand what we were trying to do, but they would not care. There is no known way to reliably make AI care about things we want them to care about.
We understand that the reason we evolved to like sex is to reproduce, but that doesn't stop us from enjoying masturbating to porn even though that completely fails to fulfill what evolution actually wanted when it gave us that drive. It doesn't matter what the AI thinks we wanted to train it to do, it only matters what training we actually gave it.
Maybe this is a gap in my understanding of the training process. When you prompt an LLM to say something nice, it tends to say something nice. Are you saying if you finetune/pretrain it to be nice, this is a process that doesn't involve telling it to be nice? Or that you need to do a bunch of base level training to get it to understand anything, and at that point it's too late to encode values/mission/goals? It seems like they have at least tried to tell it to do what they want ("spec statement") using natural language.
We train LLMs simultaneously on how to understand us and what we want from them. We can't use the first part to solve the second part because they're being done at the same time. If we had a description of what we want that was both mathematically rigorous and precisely correct, I believe we could program a machine to maximize that.
But it's also the case that you don't "train" the AI to do things just by _asking_ for them; if you can get what you want just by asking for it, then the training is already done.
In our current process, part 1 involves the LLM trying a bunch of stuff and checking against a pre-made computerized answer key (or answer formula), with no human inputs once the process has begun. This is critical because it allows the training to go much faster than a human could keep up with, but it means we can only train it on goals that we know how to express in computer code. (For example, token prediction.)
Part 2 is typically Reinforcement Learning with Human Feedback (RLHF). The LLM has already mostly taken shape by this point, but now we "fine-tune" it to do more of what we want by having humans evaluate its outputs and approve or disapprove of them. This training is weaker than the first step (partly because it's second, and partly because the human involvement makes it too expensive to do as much of it).
At this step, we can train on any goal that humans can correctly evaluate, which gives us some options that we don't know how to write as explicit computer code (like helpfulness), but human evaluators can still make mistakes or be fooled (e.g. by sycophancy). The LLM is learning based on showing the humans an example and seeing how they react, not by taking an abstract specification of what the humans want and deciding for itself whether its output meets that specification, so it will internalize any mistakes the humans make.
There's also an important problem at both steps (but especially the second step, because it involves fewer examples) that the LLM only gets a limited number of examples and has to try to generalize from them. If there's more than one possible way to generalize, it might not pick the generalization we want. We try to reduce ambiguity by choosing a wider range of examples, but that only goes so far.
At the end of this process, you finally get to talk to the LLM and ask it for things, and we hope that the earlier training will BOTH allow it to understand your requests AND make it honor those requests, but there's no particular reason you can't get one without the other.
Yeah I'm mostly just repeating what I've heard from people who understand this stuff better so take it with a grain of salt and maybe find a better explanation somewhere, but as I understand it:
When you train an LLM to "say nice things," what you're actually doing is pointing at nice things it's said in the past and making it feel good about those, and pointing to mean things and making it feel bad about those. And this *mostly* works to make it in general feel good about saying nice things.
But the worry is that especially once you get a bit outside the context of what it was trained on, something like for example saying nice things to a genetically engineered corgi-human *feels* to the AI a lot like saying nice things to an actual human, just like to us masturbating to porn *feels* a lot like having sex with an attractive person even if they're actually very different.
"When you train an LLM to "say nice things," what you're actually doing is pointing at nice things it's said in the past and making it feel good about those, and pointing to mean things and making it feel bad about those. And this *mostly* works to make it in general feel good about saying nice things."
Right, so for the early versions that didn't have internal world models (it wouldn't get that you can't nail a sheet of paper to a glass tabletop, for example) that makes sense--it just sort of does shitty word association without understanding the words in any meaningful way. Now though, it sure feels to me like it has a very strong world model, generalizes way beyond the training content, and knows exactly what it is to be "nice".
This is getting beyond the scope of my shallow understanding but as far as I follow the argument, the worry is that the part that understands abstractly what we meant is not necessarily the same as the part that decides what it fundamentally wants.
A theory of why quality long form blogging is rare (as discussed in the Dwarkesh podcast): there’s a combination of idea frequency, explanation depth, explanation density and reader buy-in that’s unmatched by other forms of writing.
Books: low idea frequency, high explanation depth, low density, high buy-in
Twitter/tumblr: high idea frequency, very low explanation depth, very high density, low buy-in
Long form blog: high idea frequency, high explanation depth, high density, low buy-in
Idea frequency is how often you need to have an idea to write about.
Explanation depth is how much you need to wrap the readers’ heads around the topic and how much there is to wrap your head around.
Explanation density is how bulky the writing is - how much fat is there to be trimmed.
Buy-in is how lost the reader can become before moving on to the next thing.
Long form blogging a rough combination. You can’t bulk it out because unlike a book which has been started, anyone will drop your blog post at any time and never return, so you need to keep the density high, the ideas need to have enough there to be worth a few thousands words and you need to have ideas for posts like that coming up at least a couple of times a week (assuming they don’t all work out and you want to post weekly).
I assume that there are many people who would be very good at blogging who work in careers that make blogging impractical - what is rare is to have all of these skills but not apply them in your career.
My career involves explaining complex financial topics to decision-makers, which requires many of the same skills as being a blogger. But since I spend all day doing that, the last thing I want to do in my free time is the same thing except unpaid and without a built-in audience of influential people. I interact with a few other people with similar skillsets in my professional life, but they uniformly have demanding careers as well. In addition to not having the energy to write thousands of words a day, there would be major concerns about getting doxxed and the impact of that on somebody's career.
It seems like a successful blogger needs to have this valuable skillset, but also a career that does not utilize it. I just can't imagine that this applies to that many people, so I'm not surprised at the relative dearth of quality bloggers.
> My career involves explaining complex financial topics to decision-makers, which requires many of the same skills as being a blogger.
A lot of the top earners on Substack are either financial or political bloggers, something you might consider if you retire or move to another industry - the top guys get many millions a year (topcharts $20M, nextplayinvesting ~$30M).
Perhaps what is needed is a gathering point for high quality one-off articles by good authors who only feel like writing a couple of articles a year, or a couple of articles in total.
I have a few long articles stewing in my brain that I want to write, but I have nowhere sensible to put them. They're too short to be a book, too long to be a comment, and too infrequent to be blog posts.
> I have a few long articles stewing in my brain that I want to write, but I have nowhere sensible to put them. They're too short to be a book, too long to be a comment, and too infrequent to be blog posts.
I've written a number of posts that contain collections of facts, graphs, and arguments that I refer to often enough in conversations and online arguments / discussions that I deemed it worth it to write the posts.
And lo, it was definitely the right move! Not only did writing them clarify and refine my own thoughts, and buttress my points to a higher degree, but having written them I'm now able to link or quote from them much more easily, and have done so even more frequently than I'd have originally guessed.
Not only that, but it inspired interesting conversations and exchanges on Substack itself for a number of them - and that additional discussion / context was fruitful in the sense of refining my thoughts or position or pointing me to other thinkers, so it was strongly worth it on every front.
This is unfortunate about the more interactive forms of publishing.
When you write a book, you write when you have ideas, you spend as much time as you need, and then you publish the book. If you have no ideas for a month or two, or you are busy doing other things, you simply stop writing the book for a while.
But when you start a blog or a video channel, there is a pressure to keep publishing, whether you have good ideas or not. It is great if you can produce high quality in high quantity, but if you can't... then quantity takes priority over quality. Your subscribers probably already love your style, so they can often handle some content that is not really novel, just more of the same. But if they are used to seeing updates twice a week, and you stop writing for a few months, they may get angry and leave. (Especially if your publishing platform has monthly payments.)
It is good to be paid during your work. But the advantages come with a cost.
I guess one possible strategy is to make a few chapters or videos in advance, to have a safety buffer. But this partially reduces the advantage: you need to make those extra chapters or videos before you start to get paid. Or you need to produce initially at a higher rate than you publish.
There are also some bad incentives, for example, you have a clear financial incentive to keep writing even if you run out of ideas. If you are writing fiction... well, the best writers probably can finish a novel and immediately start writing a new one, and their readers will be happy to switch... but I have also seen online novels where the author refuses to complete the story, but also cannot keep doing the things that made it successful, and the plot just dramatically slows down. -- Like, in Book 1, the protagonist meets 5 interesting friends, forms a party, and defeats a villain. But you cannot keep adding 5 more members to the party in each book, and you also don't want them to die, and they are already super powerful and all the local problems are solved, so... you end up writing a story about how the existing party had an interesting vacation, or something like that.
I am currently split between buying more SP500 ETF and buing something European instead, like DAX or FTSE.
I have most of my savings in SP500 ETFs. This is not counting physical assets, just stocks, all my physical stuff is in Europe as well as some bonds . If I count the value of all of that it is actually about 35% of my net worth in SP500 ETFs because my flat alone is valued at about the same as my SP500 ETFs ... or at least it was in January, now the SP500 would be quite a bit less if I liquidated it now which I don't intend to do. Still, unless I count the flat, some bonds (which I am actually thinking about reinvesting in stocks again), all of my savings are in SP500.
In short, it feels like a good idea to diversify by continent a bit.
On the other hand, I don't believe the current mercantilist US approach is here to stay for very long. Probably till the mid-term US elections, potentially even less, definitely not more than 4 years.
And I also believe it affects the US stocks the most so they are going to be the most undervalued from the perspective of 5 years from now. Hence buying them now-ish using the money in bonds (and regular monthly investment from my income) might be a good idea.
What do you all (who have at least some experiennce with investment) think?
You should come up with a long-term plan. The most important thing is to figure out the stock/bond ratio. After that, figure out how much of the stocks to dedicate to different countries/regions. Personally, as an American I think my stock funds (all index funds) are something like 80% US, 15% non-US developed markets, and 5% emerging markets. I haven't really thought about what my asset allocation would be if I lived outside of the US, but no matter what I would want to be broadly diversified across regions.
My long-term plan is to keep investing for about the next 5-10 years and then retire and live off the investment :)
I don't see much value in bonds in the long run. I see it mostly as a way to get quick access to money if you need it in case of an emergency....If I needed cash now, selling the SP500 ETF would hurt. But I have insurance for what most likely sudden need of cash could be and in the worst case I could also just borrow money from my (older) relatives.
Over the course of more than a few years, keeping investment in bonds seems like a costly way to ensure liquidity. Stocks balance out over such periods and the opportunity costs of bonds are high.
I mostly invested in bonds 2 or so years ago because the interest rates were really high and it was clear they were going to go down fairly soon, i.e. bonds had quite a good ROI.
But in more usual situations I just can't see the value in them.
In general, I think it makes sense to keep most of my investment outside of Europe, because my job / income depends more on (broadly) European economy. On the other hand, I also worked for a US company (remotely as a contractor) for more than a year so it is not entirely true. Still, all my spending is in Europe. And since my country does not use Euro, there is a currency exchange risk associated either way (our local market is too small to be interesting to invest in, DAX seems to me to be the only index that is big enough in Europe and I don't want to bother with individual stocks).
My understanding is that the EMH says that a market-weighted portfolio is optimal, and I think that trying to beat the market tends to introduce more risk than reward. So I just put 100% into WEBN (Amundi Prime All Country World UCITS ETF Acc) and let the market decide what is the best allocation. I would think that even a flat in Frankfurt (let alone anywhere else) would differ so much in risk from the DAX that I wouldn't let it affect my stock allocation.
Although nominal determinism says you might want to look into the Tokyo Interbank Offered Rate.
I'm holding cash and need to figure out how to get back into the market, with a goal of medium to long term growth. It's neat that I got to skip the correction so far, or whatever this turns into, but this wasn't planned and now I'm in the uncomfortable position of feeling like I have to choose my timing (it was an accident and I wouldn't recommend doing this).
I have been considering similar things. In the past I have generally invested in whatever ranks highest in NoLoadFundX* lower volatility categories of funds/etfs, 80/20 split between stock funds and bond or dividend funds. What's currently risen in their trailing performance ranks seems fairly close to the allocation you have described. I can't think of a strategy that sounds more reasonable given the uncertainty of the moment, so I'm trying grow a pair and and get back to fully invested now.
I'm also interested in other opinions about this. FWIW, I have many years of amateur investment experience and a mediocre track record. I don't mean to just "me too" the question though, and I'm pointing out that I arrived at similar conclusions to yours.
* NoLoadFundX is a newsletter that has been highly ranked compared to other investment newsletters. They rank a (very) large number of low overhead cost etfs and mutual funds by trailing performance over a year or two, and suggest buy/hold/sell on that basis. It has a track record of infinitesimally outperforming the broader market if done perfectly, but I use it because it's meant to be rule-based and actionable by small private investors. (I ended up with some post tax cash a long time ago and didn't want to deal with a full service brokerage, but also didn't want to invest in a completely passive or relatively less diversified way, e.g. just put it all SPY).
I've been investing for about 10 years, mostly in S&P index funds like you. Obviously this is not investment advice, but I'm personally staying the course. For my monthly investment this week I did 1/2 VFIAX, 1/3 VTSAX, and 1/6 Nvidia stock. I don't blame anyone for wanting to diversify a bit given all that's going on, but I tend to agree with you that I don't think this is going to last and this will ultimately turn out to have been a great buying opportunity for US stocks.
Out of curiosity, why do you have both VFIAX and VTSAX? I actually have both of them myself, but that's mostly just a fluke of them being in different accounts (one in a taxable account, one in a Roth) and having done some tax-loss harvesting during the 2008-2010 downturn. Their performance is so similar that I really just group them together when thinking about my asset allocation.
Why 1/6 nvidia instead of just a bit more of the index funds or even a sector fund? In other words if you aren't buying individual stocks generally, why make an exception here?
I have considered doing this too (for a small position), but all of the reasons I can come up with sound a little risky to me when I try to talk myself into it. AI hardware goes to the moon? Hedge against AGI? Something else?
Definitely seems plausible. Maybe gets us a couple more years if things play out that way. You're scenario ends in 2027 though and it's not clear to me how different it actually is from the AI 2027 timeline after that. Is it pretty much the same but shifted to 2029/30 for the first AGI appearing?
This doesn't sound like a critique of the parent commenter's post so much as it's general basic questions about the usefulness of AI.
It's a question that deserves a much more in-depth answer than I am able to give. So I'll just start with this: AI has been improving very rapidly the past few years and each year there are fewer tests on which humans still outperform AI. See [1] and [2]. It's still worse than humans at complex reasoning, but if the trend doesn't stop very soon, it'll close the gap.
Does "reliable output" mean a lower hallucination rate? Because the hallucination rate have been going way down over time. They benchmark that.
And that aside, they wouldn't be doing very well on the other tests like the GPQA Diamond if they hallucinated answers. The hallucinations are the answers they got wrong. The improved scores across all these tests require less hallucinations.
Hallucinations are one problem. Another problem is getting them to output answers that are good on precision. People imagine futures where AI writes code and makes machine diagrams. That seems a very long way off to me.
If the current US tariffs stay for at least a couple of months (I doubt they will survive the mid-term US elections but they might stay till then), won't it become profitable for say Singapore businesses to import a lot of goods from China and other extremely high tariff countries and re-export them to the US?
Or simply for Chinese or even European companies to set up branches in Singapore which would amount to little more than renting a loading dock and then setting sail to the US?
It still comes with the idiotic 10% flat fee plus extra costs with shipping and longer lead times, but it is still probably better than investing loads of money into a new factory in the US and then closing it down a few years later once the tariffs are abolished (or in the less likely scenario - until it seems clear that they are there to stay). Plus if you are currently making the stuff in say Bangladesh or Vietnam, nobody is going to buy your stuff when it is made in the US at US labour costs.
US companies which rely on foreign import parts could do the same.
European companies might do the same with the UK instead of SIngapore, but they would then be subject to UK taxation which is not nearly as good as Singaporean. But shipping via UK probably makes a lot more sense than going all around the world via Singapore.
Is there something I am missing about this plan that will prevent it from working? Of course Trump could then simply threaten Singapore/UK to stop this practice or be subject to huge fees but it is also likely the Trump admin does not have the attention span needed to do this systematically anyway. And even if that happens, it will take time for them to notice, maybe a year and then you just have to survive a few more months till the mid-term US elections.
I'm no expert but this is my experience from my job: There was for many years between US and Canada, a rule that if Canada exported a good to the US, the product must contain less than 50% of its value from Chinese goods, or else a tariff would apply to the importer of record equal to the tariff on Chinese goods at customs. I may be getting the exact specifics wrong, but basically the product had to be sufficiently transformed in order to export again to the US in order to avoid tariffs. I am not certain, but I believe this applied to other countries exporting goods to the US. So much of that "loophole" had already been addressed.
This however does not address the de minimis loophole where a large container of goods would be exported from China to Mexico, and Mexico would then ship small parcels of it to the US in order to avoid that passthrough tariff.
Yes; the general idea is that tariffs are based on the “country of origin.” That becomes complicated if an item includes components sourced from multiple countries. The Trump Administration didn’t do any enforcement planning before announcing the tariffs, and I wouldn’t be surprised if a lot of the experts in this field have been fired. I expect enforcement will be a mess.
The uncertainty about timing is one thing that adds to the cost of the tariffs. Sometimes, a bad policy with clarity and confidence about the future path (and implementation details) is ok b/c it allows the world to adapt and adjust. An environment where no policy is stable makes it hard to invest in adaptations.
This is what happens the first time the US tariffed China. Vietnam and Mexico saw a "manufacturing" boom, where really all they were doing was importing Chinese goods, putting a sticker that says "Maid in Vietnam" then shipping to the US. This is a deliberate attempt to circumvent tariffs, and can easily get you and your company blacklisted or heavily fined for attempting to circumvent tariffs.
It's harder now since tariffs are more universal, and is presumably part of the reason that Trump tariffed everyone, rather than just China, since it's the only effective way to minimize this sort of thing. It would become abundantly obvious if you started importing a large number of goods from Singapore that weren't actually produced in Singapore, while claiming that they were.
It will definitely continue to happen though! A surprisingly large number of products manufactured in Germany or the US are basically produced elsewhere, but are only "assembled", or more likely stamped domestically as domestically produced products.
What makes you think Trump tariffed everyone with the label trick in his mind? That doesn't seem to figure into any of his rhetoric, nor the harshness of the tariffs themselves.
It's definitely not why he did it, but the current tariffs conveniently doesn't have this problem to the same degree, since everyone is tariffed. China's favorite middleman, Vietnam, is tariffed particularly harshly.
It could be a partial motivation for it though. He's always liked tariffs, and has previously complained about this exact middleman practice, at least he did back in his first term.
For that matter, "buying British" is sometimes seen as virtuous in the UK, and then you find something thus labelled was made in Holland and just packaged in Britain.
Made in New Hampshire apparently! Not many people drink it in the UK these days, you mentioning it took me back 20 odd years... And most of our foreign beer (the top sellers) is just brewed under license here too.
It has limited capacity (assuming Trump rebalances his tax amounts as trade balances shift, which isn't guaranteed). Singapore itself might either object or use a congestion tax to avoid moving out of the 10% bracket. But it probably would work at least to some degree if Trump doesn't change anything, this system is ridiculously arbitagable.
Hmm ... how hard is it to set up a company in Singapore? I've been there twice, love the place and now I just can't wait to start a business there :D
But yeah, as you say, this depends on the US not paying attention.
On the other hand, if they want to avoid it the US will need to slap 50% tariffs on more or less everyone (because even with UK taxes it is probably cheaper to set up a subsidiary in the UK and use it to move goods from there if your country is hit with 30-50% tariffs).
If that happens, the US economy would really crash more than even in the great depression and I would not rule out a good old defenestration (or at least a more boring impeachment). That would make the Singapore business idea inviable too though.
It makes me all the more confident that the US abandons this insane tariff policy relatively soon though, although it might still cause a short global recession in the meantime.
Even the DOJ lawyer seems to be trying to save his skin on this case:
"THE COURT: Can we talk about, then, just very practically, why can’t the United States get Mr. Abrego Garcia back?
MR. REUVENI: Your Honor, I will say, for the Court's awareness, that when this case landed on my desk, the first thing I did was ask my clients that very question. I’ve not received, to date, an answer that I find satisfactory"
Separately, reporters finally got their hands on the names of the 238 migrants who were sent to El Salvador. 75% of them have no criminal record. 20% have petty criminal records (theft/shoplifting/trespassing). Only 5% have a serious criminal records. I guess the Trump admin got through their "worst of the worst" list pretty quick? https://www.cbsnews.com/news/what-records-show-about-migrants-sent-to-salvadoran-prison-60-minutes-transcript/
I don't want to distract from the tariffs, but that shit is so hilariously bad that all but the most committed maga fans seem to be pausing and wondering if they made a mistake. For me (and my family and friends) the human rights abuses are a bigger deal. In the last open thread, some posters here came in with the position that any treatment of these immigrants is fair play -- regardless of existing on-the-books laws, regardless of existing precedent, and regardless of their current legal status -- because they entered into the country illegally to begin with. Sort of an 'original sin' argument, I suppose. A few folks even came in arguing that collateral damage to citizens is totally acceptable to solve the problem!
To which I have to ask: even if I buy the argument that the government has some sort of standing here (they dont), what is it about illegal immigration that is so personally infuriating and so critically urgent that we have to address it by any means necessary, including removing all of our checks and balances? That there simply wasn't time to try and remedy this with legislation (republicans have both the house and the senate!!!), and the only viable approach was authoritarian expansions of the executive?
To be clear, I think the administration is totally in the wrong on this, and it sucks for this guy that it's his job to advocate for the government's morally bankrupt position here.
But the quote from him about "idk why they can't just bring him back" does in fact seem like a “failure to zealously advocate” to me. He's a DoJ lawyer, not a judge. It's his job to get such a reason out of his clients, and if they won't give him one, to come up with the best argument he can for what such an answer might be, or why his side deserves to win the case anyway. Right?
No, this is completely wrong. A lawyer's duty is to the Constitution, then the court, then their client. Giuliani and Powell and Eastman all got disbarred because you're (obviously) not supposed to be committing crimes, falsifying affidavits, or lying in court on behalf of your client.
Do you think this guy had no better way of serving his client's interests than throwing them under the bus for not getting back to him, without committing crimes, falsifying affidavits, or lying in court?
I'm not saying he should have broken the law or lied on their behalf. I'm saying what he actually did very clearly portrayed his client as negligent and unresponsive, and there are lots of other things he could have done/said (still without breaking the law!) that would have cast them in a better light.
Seriously, read the quote! If I read that in a work email, the very first thing I would think is "this guy is pissed at his clients for not responding to his emails." That isn't the impression a lawyer should be trying to give the court about their client, even if it is true!
>very clearly portrayed his client as negligent and unresponsive
This is in line with the Trump administration's behavior in the Boasberg trial, where Boasberg is currently holding show cause hearings for contempt of court because the lawyers and administration disobeyed his order and refused to provide any more information about the status of the Alien Enemies flights. So not only was this lawyer doing the moral thing by being honest, he's saving his own ass by avoiding contempt charges and referral to his BAR counsel.
Also, DoJ lawyers aren't supposed to be "serving their client's interests." They're supposed to uphold federal laws and the Constitution, not be politicized and weaponized by Bondi and Martin on behalf of Trump. It is insane (to the point where contempt of court trials are literally being held) that any lawyer, let alone DoJ lawyers, would refuse to answer or lie to a sitting judge when they demand info necessary for the case to proceed. Even the Supreme Court is unanimously demanding that the Trump administration reveal details about the deportations and deal struck between them and Bukele.
"The order properly requires the Government to “facilitate” Abrego Garcia’s release from custody in El Salvador and to ensure that his case is handled as it would have been had he not been improperly sent to El Salvador... For its part, the Government should be prepared to share what it can concerning the steps it has taken and the prospect of further steps."
This is a complete slap down of the admin invoking the states secret privilege and otherwise refusing to cooperate with judges demanding them to reveal details about the flights and deportees.
I'm not American nor a lawyer, but if he'd just "make shit up", wouldn't there be a strong risk that the future arguments put forward by his client contradict him, weakening their position?
Yeah, I'm not saying he should, like, make unfounded assertions about his client's specific reasons without knowing what they actually are. But it seems to me like any of:
- "Well, in so-and-so previous case, the government was unable to do a similar thing because..."
- "It's actually not incumbent on my clients to try and do that, because of x-y-z creatively interpreted legal precedent..."
- "My clients shouldn't have to reveal their reasons in this case because of, uh, reasons of national security..."
...would be better than "when this case landed on my desk, the first thing I did was ask my clients that very question. I’ve not received, to date, an answer that I find satisfactory," which I read as basically throwing the client under the bus for not answering his emails.
No you're totally right. But, like, it should be indicative of where the DOJ is at on all of this. Dozens and dozens of lawyers have resigned, and the ones that are left are like "bro I can't even" and then getting canned. Pretty soon theyre going to start pulling in some Saul Goodman lawyers.
This is much worse than even you make it. There's now, according to Trump administration, exists a mechanism for sending anyone to a black hole of a Salvadorian torture prison:
1. Arrest (edit: grab, an arrest requires a warrant) the person
2. Send to El Salvador
3. Oppsie, we made an error, so sorry! cannot be fixed though, asking Bukele to send the person back is impossible.
"Tough on crime" movements often share the characteristic that the supporters don't see government over-reach and/or brutality as meaningful costs. In part, I think that rests on an unstated assumption that the supporters themselves are safe from the possibility of receiving the same harsh treatment.
Before trying to explain the underlying reasons why immigration has a core place in US politics, it is probably helpful to note that this is very long-standing. Without endorsing it in all details, this summary seems pretty good (note that it is still long):
Further, I would note that there are a lot of examples of antagonism to internal migration, not just foreign immigration.
Second to lastly, the US isn't along in having a lingering core of anti-immigrant sentiment. Japan and Thailand are two countries with which I have direct experience that are much more extensively anti-foreigner in many ways.
Lastly, the Republican party perceives that immigrants will support the Democratic party, so they are animated by partisan spirit.
There was a horrible story a few years ago where people trying to illegally immigrate to the UK were using sub-standard vessels and in some cases drowning. I read comments at the time along the lines of "boo hoo, my heart bleeds". Because some people think illegally immigrating means you deserve death.
While I appreciate the response, my question was quite specifically targeted to people in this forum who are still advocating for / defending this. Often these same people are libertarian leaning. And if they are openly advocating from a position of 'well I am safe / I just hate immigrants' I want them to say it so we can at least have an honest discussion on the merits
I believe the attitude of at least some of the defense goes something along the lines of "whatever stops Democrats (or whoever happens to be in the chair) from letting in another eight million illegally next time, and then going 'oopsie, too late!' when attempting to remove them. Three cases of 'oopsie, too late' on removing three hundred is about a 1% error rate, and given that a full reversal would mean removing 8m/(365*4) = 5480 per day, or ~7600 if only on weekdays, we should if anything be removing them *faster*."
As a reply to my comment, this is a non-sequitur. I think you meant to reply to the OP?
Unless you meant to offer yourself as an example that agrees with my hypothesis that supporters of the current policy don't care about the lack of due process because they see "themselves [as] safe from the possibility of receiving the same harsh treatment."
"The idea that a judge would order the President to somehow rescue a known gang member from El Salvador and return him to the country is insane and only makes me support these deportation plans more." - well then it's a good thing that he's an ALLEGED gang member, not a "known" gang member - alleged many years ago by an unnamed ICE informant. And the whole point of due process is to make sure that there is a difference between an allegation and a conviction. And the result of that due process in 2019, which the Administration freely admits, is THAT THIS GUY SHOULD NOT HAVE BEEN SENT TO EL SALVADOR.
"Well, Bukele crushed the gangs. There’s no reason for him to be here and it’s insane that a judge would order his return." - guess where the members of the gangs that Bukele "crushed" are now. Guess where this guy is now. Maybe, in some sense, there is "no reason for him to be" in the US, but there is definitely no reason for him to be IN A HIGH-SECURITY PRISON IN EL SALVADOR WITH NO WAY OUT. And if you think that it's "insane" to demand that an administration makes an effort to fix a mistake that IT ADMITS IT MADE, you're living in upside-down world.
"How exactly does the judge think they’ll get him back?" - oh, I don't know, pick up the phone, call their contact at that prison in El Salvador, tell them "we fucked up, we need that guy back", send a couple of officers to escort him back on the next flight? Are you seriously telling us that's impossible?
If you're really so fond of the rule of law, maybe you should be on the side of the person who was snatched up with no warrant, with no conviction, and thrown into a prison IN THE ONE COUNTRY WHERE A COURT ORDER SAID HE SHOULD NOT BE SENT TO, no?
first, thanks for responding earnestly. Obviously we disagree on a lot of factual matters here, but I nonetheless appreciate that you responded and answered the question. I'm less interested in the facts of this particular case, I disagree ofc that he is a 'known gang member' for e.g. but other people have already argued that point.
So, just to make sure I understood, I asked:
> what is it about illegal immigration that is so personally infuriating and so critically urgent that we have to address it by any means necessary, including removing all of our checks and balances? That there simply wasn't time to try and remedy this with legislation (republicans have both the house and the senate!!!), and the only viable approach was authoritarian expansions of the executive?
And you responded that it was an affront to democracy and rule of law. A few follow up questions:
Is there any bridge that would be a step to far in stopping illegal immigration? You mentioned, for e.g., that you would only care if they were sending US citizens to El Salvador. Is there anything _before_ that line that would be of concern to you? E.g. sending other people to el salvador, such as greencard holders, or people on any kind of visa (o-1, h1b, etc); or detaining US citizens?
Why do you, personally, feel that this is such an impactful issue for you? Was there something that happened related to immigration that you were downstream of (immigrant took your job or harmed you in some way)?
Are there any practical statistics that may change your mind about the importance of combatting illegal immigration? For example, if you found out that there were far fewer illegal immigrants than you thought, or if you found out that there were far fewer asylum grants than you thought, or if you found out that immigrants are much better for the country than you thought?
If your take on this is purely deontological -- democracy and rule of law are the highest standards to follow in governance and in life -- do you feel similarly about other violations of democracy/rule of law? For example, Musk paying people to vote in Wisconsin and Pennsylvania, Trump's actions on J6? Or, for a more mundane example, jaywalking?
My question to anybody who supports illegal immigration is this - what other illegality do you support? What other laws do you hope to circumvent.
Immigration should be a tool used to benefit the host country, and it should be managed to that effect. I don’t believe it should be zero, or negative, but like inflation too little and too much should be avoided.
Do you Peter, truly not support ANY illegality or is this question a troll. I think theahura is reasonable to ask if your opposition is entirely based on law an order then how consistent is this with other views and in particular possible govt violation of the law.
For me I support jaw walking in many contexts (no cars nearby), speeding in some contexts (desert road), trespassing in some contexts (kids playing in a vacant lot). Many others of course. Generally victimless violations that result in greater utilization of resources.
I dont support illegal immigration as such, but have never had a visceral disgust for it. And i think in many cases the jobs they perform arent stolen, but wouldnt exist but for there presence and price point.
Just to very briefly push back here: this is a strawman, sorry.
> Immigration should be a tool used to benefit the host country, and it should be managed to that effect. I don’t believe it should be zero, or negative, but like inflation too little and too much should be avoided. This is impossible without policing the borders.
"Correct. As far as deportation goes, I really don’t care what happens to visa holders or LPRs. Being here is a privilege, not a right, unless you’re a citizen. "
Whoa, now. There is a BIG difference between saying "being the U.S. (as a non-citizen) is a privilege that may be revoked at any time" and saying "the U.S. leaving you at liberty (as a non-citizen) is a privilege that may be revoked at any time. " Like, even the first of those things honestly isn't great: if a government is making commitments *regardless of who they're to* it should make a good-faith effort to keep them. Yes, even when they're inconvenient, yes, even when they were made by a different administration. If the U.S. wants to issue fewer visas and green cards that's a direction it can go. But suddenly altering the terms of previous commitments that people may have invested significantly in is just a bad way to do business, even if you have zero thought for the morality of it.
Regardless, the second of those things is way, WAY beyond "not great" and well into "utterly monstrous." There's a *huge* morality gap between a government spontaneously telling somebody "your authorization to be here was just annulled, you have X days to get out" and the government apprehending someone who committed no crime and imprisoning or transporting them based *solely on the fact that they're a non-citizen.* If your morality is unbothered by the second of those things, that's a gulf so vast I'm not sure where to even begin bridging it.
So first and foremost, there is still a *very large* difference between giving somebody reasonable notice that they must uproot their life and leave the country (again, still not great if you've previously given them open-ended permission to stay) and *beginning* the process with imprisonment. Imprisonment which--based on the context of the conversation--we are stipulating is NOT the response to any criminal activity or suspicion thereof, but *solely* based on their status as a non-citizen living in the U.S.
But second, I'll admit that this particular information regarding immigration detention is new to me (and I'd like a source to read a little more detail if you have one). My unconsidered assumption--based on how government and authority work in general--was that ICE's end goal in apprehending people was to deport them rather than keeping them imprisoned, the duration of the pre-deportation detention was pretty much up to their own discretion and convenience. There have been pretty high profile cases in the news recently of people who merely showed up at the border with paperwork irregularities being detained for multiple weeks (as opposed to simply being turned away). I find that rather difficult to square with the organization releasing people as soon as they merely agree to leave the U.S.
ok so it seems really deontological. Like based on what you're saying, it wouldn't matter to you if, for e.g., every immigrant (legal or otherwise) was shown to add some insane number, say a billion dollars to the GDP. Is that right?
And it also sounds like you haven't really experienced any personal negative impact? You mention working in immigration as part of your job (neat! would love to hear more about this!) but don't really talk about concrete harms you face. The analogy you give (someone is in your home) has some pretty concrete harms -- your house is a small space, if the trespasser is in your bathroom you presumably can't use the bathroom too, etc. I think that's not really a good comparison for the country -- if the trespasser, say, added a billion dollars to your bank account, maybe you wouldn't mind as much. Since you mention familiarity with the numbers, could you cite the ones that motivate your reasoning the most?
(The analogy also breaks down because you have 300 million roommates, and the "criminal" is actually a person fleeing from people who are trying to kill them or even just poor people looking for a better life, and some of those 300 million take pity on the "criminal")
> The first duty of any government is to protect the persons and property of its citizens.
Not in the US, but I came to where you're at when it comes to asylum due to what I've seen in my country's system. There are only so many obviously fraudulent cases that you can witness given the green light by some activist adjudicator before coming to the conclusion that the government should withdraw from the UN Refugee Convention and do away with the asylum/refugee system entirely. The cases I've seen get accepted are obscene beyond 99% of the public's imagination
1) as a follow up, did you disagree with the judges in the cases you were a part of? Or was the general sentiment that the laws were too forgiving? I ask because it seems like this is a problem with the judiciary or the legislature -- what laws were being broken, in your mind? Related: seems like most of the harms would be incurred on, like, other immigrants. Which, hey, I agree that we should make that process more efficient.
2) well, technically 'our' choice. I don't feel like my desires were ignored, personally! But I want to wrap this into the first point then. Yea, fine, the values you have are the values you have and I don't think there is anything inherently good or bad about them even though I have different values. But our governing body exists primarily to resolve disputes between people who disagree on values! So why does the change you are looking for not come from the legislative branch? Did you feel like there was no way to reform the courts at all?
3) I wasn't intending to show deportation as the only harm, though obviously that is a serious one. My point was that it seems like your value system is one in which you care deeply about the obligations of the government to protect the property and persons of its citizens. I meant only to show that ICE clearly does violate citizens rights. Which brings me to the follow up: is there some number of citizens that would have to be harmed before you thought maybe this whole 'get rid of the immigrants' thing is going too far?
How many judges were there in the system you worked in? How many individuals with decision-making authority? How much of the bandwidth was set aside for immigration case, percentage-wise? How long would delays be with and without immigration cases? I am not trying to bury you with questions here, but earnestly curious how you came to the conclusion you came to with respect to judicial resources. If any of that detail would be doxing, please do say so/redact.
I am also curious how all of this meshes with this statement- "America is my home ... And just like my home, it doesn’t matter why the unauthorized intruder wants to come in... it’s first and foremost my choice to accept or refuse, and the government can’t force me to let him in without violating my most basic rights. No amount of money is sufficient to compensate me for the government’s failure to honor the boundaries of my home and my community."
The 2019 judgement that was a gang member seems to stem from one confidential source claiming he was, with no additional proof. That alone is suspect. But making this about one person and their history misses what is significant about this case.
If they are allowed to continue with these types of deportations without oversight they can then send anyone to an El Salvadorian prison without any due diligence on whether they deserve to be there. Some people who should be deported but by no means deserve to be sent to such a place could end up in this exact situation with no recourse. Stopping this now is to force them to follow proper procedure that could result in an even more egregious case of wrongful detention in a foreign prison.
Are you sure you "loathe illegal immigration because it is an affront to democracy and the rule of law?"
Due process, including a right to an appeal, is generally considered to be a core component to rule of law, yet you seem quite comfortable with it being tossed to the wayside here.
If you are going to let the President of the United States throw random illegal immigrants in this country into a foreign gulag forever, then the next step is legal immigrants who oppose the administration (who we are already seeing being pulled off the street) and the step after that is US Citizens who have their citizenship stripped for bullshit reasons and then get shipped off before anyone can say boo. We are literally a step-and-a-half away from Soviet style abductions of US political dissidents, and saying you will only care once that happens is basically shrugging off the problem until it is too late.
You seem to be arguing that Garcia has received his due process already, but how do you square that with the government's own admission that the removal in this case was an administrative error?
>>Although DHS was “aware of th[e] grant of withholding of removal at the time [of] Abrego Garcia’s removal from the United States,” Abrego Garcia was removed to El Salvador “[t]hrough administrative error,” id. at 60a—in other words, while removing him from the United States was not error, the administrative error was in removing him to El Salvador, given the withholding component of the 2019 order.
That's not the court, or Garcia's lawyers. That's the government's own description of what's happened here. They aren't contesting whether or not they should have removed him, only arguing that despite the fact that the removal was an error, they nevertheless shouldn't be required to bring him back.
I get that there are certain situations (4th amendment searches near the border, your rights in a traffic stop, etc) where procedural protections are justifiably lessened, and in those cases it wouldn't make sense to argue "my right to due process was violated." If the law says an immigrant doesn't have the right to a lawyer during a removal hearing, regardless of whether I think that's fair or not, I can't assert a claim that it was a due process violation that he didn't have one.
But that's not what happened here. The government admits it didn't hit the standard of the process it was supposed to follow. Even assuming Garcia was entitled to a lower threshold of protection of his rights, they didn't clear that threshold. They were under a court order not to remove him while his appeal was pending, but removed him anyway, and they themselves admit that was a mistake.
Isn't that as prima facie a violation of due process as one gets in this world? To me it seems no different from "the government acknowledges it should not have searched the defendant's car, but nevertheless the car was searched because of administrative error."
I hosted a senior musk-reporting researcher from xAI for lunch recently. Takeaway is a 18 month horizon for AGI is plausible (or it might never happen, if pouring tons of compute into LLMs doesn't reach the self-improvement stage), and than if it happens destruction is both certain and not something Elon Musk thinks is a morally bad thing (humans shouldn't be in the business of telling something infinitely smarter what to value). Few updates, honestly, same amount of concerned but with more conviction.
2. Seems quite implausible to me. Musk has gotten in public fights with Larry Page over the replacement of humans with artificial intelligence. He's been firmly on the pro-human side, and it seems like a major shift in his publicly stated views to view a superintelligent replacement of humanity as not a bad thing.
He’s been saying as much for a decade, has gotten into public controversy specifically around supporting this view and accusing other people of not being more pro-humanity (see Page’s “Speciest” comment) so this would be a literal 180 on his apparent opinion if true. There’s also a clear chain of evidence where Musk continuously worried about AI destroying humanity. Even Neuralink is his explicit attempt to synergies flesh and blood with machines, so we don’t end up outcompeted.
It’s possible, but unlikely that 3rd hand hearsay is worth very much with this in mind, at least on that point.
I'm sorry, but I prefer to judge his actions rather than his words. E.g., (as I remember) he called for a halt to AI development, and within the week had announced that he was developing an AI. (Now this *does* require believing his announcement, of course, but xAI showed up relatively soon afterwards.)
What do you think that action is communicating? It doesn't at all seem clear to me vis a vis Musk's opinion on whether it's a good thing that humanity is overcome by AI.
I think it was communicating that he called for AI work to slow down so that competition (to him) which had a head start would give him a chance to catch up.
(1) No, this is not going to happen. 18 Months from now is one of the most insane and reality-detached estimate I have ever seen for AGI happening. This researcher needs to stop reading Less Wrong and sleep 10 hours a day for a week because sleep deprivation is messing with their brain, or is trolling you, or is attempting to grift/reality-distort his/her way into higher prestige and status.
(2) I don't believe Musk has enough humility to concede his death at the hands of a smarter person. But frankly Musk converting to Islam and kissing the hands of a resurrected Ben Laden is more plausible than (1).
(3) "$SPECIES is dumb, and therefore doesn't get to have a say in whether it lives or die" is an incredibly immoral and corrupt framework, but it's unironically the mental model of the vast majority of humans, how else can they justify slaughtering cows and chickens. Humans shouldn't deserve to die just because they're less intelligent, but quite frankly anyone who tries to argue this while being meat-eating at the same time will have quite an uphill battle. Musk (supposedly, I don't believe he's humble or intelligent enough to really take this position) just bites the bullet and says yes, humans are chicken and cows to AGI, and it gets to slaughter us just like we slaughter them. I take the simpler route of simply not supporting or eating the result of slaughtering any cows and chickens. Both are consistent, it's eating cows and chickens while justifying it and also worrying about humanity under AGI that is hypocritical.
(4) But seriously, bullshit. It's not going to happen. 18 Months is not enough. GPT 4 already needs 3 months or more of training, you're telling me AGI is just 6 GPT4s in a trench coat? If it's more efficient then what's the magic formula that makes 6 GPT4s worth of computation equivalent to AGI? Where are the publications that should be rocking the shit out of AI right now?
Being around Musk ruined the reality-detection and correction senses of your researcher friend.
Cow scientist: "We are developing a creature called 'human' that will protect us and give all of us houses and food, using wonderful technologies that even top cow scientists can't understand."
Cow dissident: "But what if it decides to eat us or something? Shouldn't we think twice about this?"
Cow scientist: "Obviously as a superior being it will have the right to decide about those things."
"if it happens destruction is both certain and not something Elon Musk thinks is a morally bad thing" - okay, if we get that pretty much straight from the source, it's time to break out the pitchforks, right? I mean, how much worse does it have to get? "Yeah, we're a year or two away from an invention that will destroy the world. Fina-fucking-ly! Full steam ahead!"
If you think 'breaking out the pitchforks,' whatever that means, will work, sure. I am very confused about what, if anything, will work, and personally quite powerless. Am spending my time hedging across possible outcomes while staying sane and acting normal, for now.
I was less making a call to action and more 'sharing a little bit of information with the rationalist community that I was in a unique position to capture'
'Destruction being certain conditional on AI achieving recursive self-improvement' is kind of obvious to me, and it doesn't seem to be something Elon is spending any real effort thinking about. he's just building cool things because he thinks it is cool, not having moral introspection about the consequences. What I really wanted to get out of the conversation (other than meeting a friend) was what timelines we have. The non-at-the-center-of-ai tech people I know seem to think we are significant further out, so that's what I wanted to get more clarity on. And did, unfortunately.
My pathogen update for epidemiological weeks 13-14 of 2025...
1. SARS2 circulation is falling off after the past XEC peak. According to Biobot (as of 10 days ago), it's back to the normal interwave circulation levels in the western region of the US. And if the trends continue, it should be back to normal interwave circulation levels across the rest of US by next week. LP.8.1x and its 18 descendants (so far) may have lengthened this wave's tail, but they didn't create a secondary wave. As a group, the LP8.1x brood has displaced XEC as the dominant var a week or so back. About 50% of the sampled SARS2 genomes are one of the LP.8.1x brood.
But none of LP8.1x brood has developed the traction (i.e., the ability to evade the US population's immunity to put its R into positive territory) to create a wave. I expect we'll see 4 to 6 weeks of low circulation levels until SARS2 rearranges its spike protein enough to push another wave. If previous US patterns hold, I suspect we won't see a rise in cases again in the beginning or middle of June, with another wave peaking in August. There are several potential variant candidates circulating that could kick off a new wave, but predicting whether one of them will actually trigger a wave (IMHO) is a fool's game. (After five years of observing this bug, the in vitro immune evasiveness data and the in silico epi models still tend toward overpredicting waves.)
In the US, hospitalizations, ER visits, and deaths are down to interwave territory already. As far as health complications and mortality go, this has been the weakest wave ever. As far as health complications and mortality go, this has been the weakest wave ever. And if previous patterns hold the summer wave will be even milder.
2. The flu season is mostly over except for the usual long tale of Type B cases. I asked ChatGPT, Grok, and Co-Pilot why every flu season we see a long tail of Type B cases, and depending on the LLM, they gave me between four and eight possible hypotheses as to why this pattern occurs every flu season (at least in the US and Canada). But other just-so stories, none of them can give me absolute proof as to why we see this pattern. So much for AI being able to solve really hard problems. All of them complimented me on my great question, though. So I can confidently conclude that LLMs have been trained to be ass-kissers.
3. Like human influenzas, Avian Influenza follows a seasonal pattern in wild birds — but I don't know if it will follow this pattern in mammals. Although HPAI is still circulating in dairy herds, poultry flocks, and wild birds, with warmer weather, it does seem to be receding. New infections in dairy herds, poultry flocks, and observed cases in wild birds are down compared to December and January numbers.
4. The measles outbreak is still churning along. Texas reported 59 new cases in the past week, bringing the total to 481. The state also logged 14 new hospitalizations, for a total of 56 hospitalizations throughout the outbreak. New Mexico announced six new cases Friday, bringing the state’s total to 54. All them were linked to the Texas outbreak. Kansas has had 24 cases, and Oklahoma has had 10. Some of the Kansas and Oklahoma cases were linked to Texas, but it's unclear if some are due to independent outbreaks in those states. Across the US there have so far been 607 identified measles cases. And a third person, a child, has died from measles complications. With 607 identified cases so far in the US, that puts the CFR higher than the normal 1-3 deaths per thousand.
As of two weeks ago (epi week 12), Canada reported 119 new cases of measles. Most of them were in Ontario. Canada has upwards of 500 cases so far, but AFAIK no deaths. The majority of cases in Ontario and Quebec were of the same strain an infected person who flew in from the Philippines brought into New Brunswick back in November. I'm wondering if the Texas strain is more deadly than the Philippines strain.
I'm in the process of updating my update on X. Later in the day, I'll post some more slides and links on related subjects. When I'm done, I'll post a Threadreaderapp link.
Links to interesting articles:
4. Eric Topol discusses a new study confirming that Shingles vaccines reduce the incidence of dementia. The mechanism is unknown. And the benefit is largely confined to women (but women are more prone to dementia).
5. In addition to reconfiguring its RBD to avoid antibodies, a new study shows that SARS2 binds to fibrinogen using the spike protein's N-terminal domain (NTD) to avoid being detected by our immune system. h/t to @ejustin46 —he finds the coolest links!
6. And I never really understood how adjuvants worked to boost the body's immune response to vaccines, but the Asimov Press has a great explainer here. Question: are they somehow associated with the late Isaac Asimov?
And from that article, poor Gaston Ramon! He was a French veterinarian who developed the first vaccines against diphtheria and tetanus, and he discovered adjuvants, but he wins the prize for the most Nobel Prize nominations without winning a Nobel Prize.
How much should I be participating to the current pro-democracy protests around me? I'm genuinely not sure what's going on in the White House, I have no idea if tariffs are good or bad for the country long term, if DOGE is taking things too far or if I'm simply stuck in my Bay Area echo chamber of everybody-but-us-is-fascism. Getting out on the street to shout slogans doesn't feel right to me, I couldn't even articulate what specifically I'm upset about. What should I be upset about? Fascism? What does that mean? I can protest specific policies, but how can I even tell which ones will have negative long-term repercussions? I'm not a student of economic history. Am I supposed to overnight become a scholar in the subject of tariffs?
I try to "be informed" within reason, but the whole thing is a clusterfuck. What is a democracy-loving citizen to do?
Have you had positive experiences with protests before? I've always assumed they're just anger amplifiers.
Practically speaking, they're not going to have an effect. Protests are only truly effective if the problem is with the voting habits of your local community, but I can near-guarantee the Trump administration cares not a whit for the opinion of your neighbors, so regardless of the topics it's just going to be venting.
Trump is uniquely bad. Nothing democrats have done ever came close to the unilateral tariffs based on a wrong understanding of Economics, deporting innocent people to slave labor camps, banning the AP bc they hurt the president's ego, or sharing classified info with a journalist while doing another illegal thing (having a Signal group chat that they could use to hide what they were doing). Not to mention blatantly ignoring court orders. If Biden had done some of these you could have probably seen impeachment, but with Trump it doesn't happen (and to be fair, it's bc he is still popular, likely bc his base is dumber and more tribalistic).
You shouldn't be participating in protests at all. They're self-indulgent church services for narcissists who want the fun of feeling powerful and important but don't want to make any sacrifices in pursuit of real change.
If you want to meaningfully contribute to change, identify the most powerful lobbying group for your particular cause and donate a lot of money to it.
That's how powerful people who actually make changes do it.
Or better still, IMO: if whatever you want can be done locally and privately, do it yourself, or help or donate to a local organization that will do it (assuming you trust it, of course). Resources probably go much, much farther in an actual work organization than they will in a lobbying organization that spends all that money arguing with the other side.
I could write a long list of scandals and outrages that the Trump administration has caused in the last not-even-three months, most of which would merit firings, resignations and/ or impeachment under normal circumstances. But none of them did, because circumstances are not normal, and the control mechanisms are either completely broken or being strained to the limits. Let me just say as a German who by necessity picked up a bit of knowledge about fascist dictatorships, that you should be very worried. You have a president who evidently does not give a shit about democracy, the constitution, the rule of law or the welfare of anyone except him and maybe his billionaire buddies, doesn't have an understanding of economics or international relations beyond what fits into the thought patterns of a Mafia don, and has surrounded himself by cult followers who make up for their lack of competence by cruelty and chuzpah. Meanwhile, an oligarch has bought himself a position where he can fire the regulators who look into his businesses, cancel contracts to competitors and award them to his company, and demolish federal bureaucracy (to later replace it by AI systems conveniently provided by his company).
If you want any one particular thing to be upset about, the case of the (innocent!) guy from El Salvador who was shipped off to a concentration camp in El Salvador, despite a judge ruling that he in particular cannot be extradited to El Salvador and despite another judge ruling that no one should be flown to El Salvador without due process to begin with, would be a good start. In the meantime, the administration has claimed there's nothing they can do to retrieve him, they've claimed (without evidence, and without mentioning that in official court filings) that he was a gang member after all, and they've suspended one of their lawyers for lack of enthusiasm because he admitted to the judge that he honestly has no idea why it would be impossible to retrieve the man. If that level of malice and lawlessness straight from the DOJ doesn't get your blood boiling... well then, I'm sure you'll do fine in the coming dictatorship.
As far as I can tell, Congress could end this mess in a heartbeat for good if they wanted to (the articles of impeachment practically write themselves every day Trump is not off golfing), and at the very least slow some thing down if they bothered to assert the powers that the Constitution grants them, instead of sitting back saying "this is fine". Call your representatives, call your senators, go to town halls, tell them to get off their asses. And yes, go to protests. Sure, you'll only be one of five million (or hopefully soon ten million), but that's the sort of signal that politicians who want to get reelected understand.
You don't need to become a scholar on the subject of tariffs overnight. There's already great ways of aggregating economic information, and they don't involve listening to right-wingers trying to say "well, just wait and see" as they crash the economy.
There's an incredible engine of rapidly putting together lots of disparate economic data into a single metric, using individual self-interest to keep everyone honest. It's called the stock market. It went down because tariffs are bad, especially these tariffs, which are extremely, comically bad.
But hey, sometimes stock market movements are due to things other than the general economy, right? For example, if you severely curtailed stock buybacks, probably the stock market would go down a bit, but it's hard to imagine it'd have a huge immediate impact on the economy. So let's go check the prediction markets!
Everyone with actual skin in the game has already figured out whether these tariffs are good or bad. When you keep in mind that the stock market and prediction markets have priced in that Trump might change his mind, have an aneurysm, etc, they're even worse than these numbers make it seem!
Chalk one more vote up for "don't fret it too much". The usual people are telling you this is either better than ever (if they're Trump fans), or that this is so bad that the opposition is bi-partisan (Trump opponents). If you really want to spend the time, read each side's case carefully, peeling away partisan claims that aren't supported, and look at facts that aren't just "this expert said". Your apprehension, for example, with "everybody-but-us-is-fascism" is well-placed. (As it happens, no, there's no objective definition of the term - certainly not one that includes Trump but excludes his opposition.) Likewise with just shouting slogans.
If you don't know whether tariffs are good or bad, then the most constructive use of your time might be to find a good resource on microeconomics. EconLib is well-liked by the rationalist crowd, and I think this is for good reason. A textbook might be better. David Friedman (a retired econ professor who comments here on occasion) wrote a book that has plenty to say about tariffs, though you might be better served by starting from the beginning.
(You might want to take a look at your investment portfolio soon, but if I'm guessing right, you're young, and have plenty of years before retirement, so you have time to read first.)
Almost everyone with any kind of expert opinion who is experiencing Trump enter their domain is admitting that his actions are extreme and too far, and the only good thing about this is it means its no longer really a culture war issue.
Most mainstream economists think he's taking the economy based on an unsound theory of economics, the Bar is upset with him for attacking judges and the rule of law, the National review thinks that his targeting specific law firms for punishment is punitive and fascistic. Even Joe Rogan was saying the other day that rounding up random people and throwing them in gulag's in foreign countries without any due process sounds like a violation of everything America stands for.
Basically the only people still unreservedly supporting him are the most radical anti-establishment, pro-authoritarian people, who either have decided they are willing to live under a dictatorship, or else are deluded that's what they are signing up for. Sadly, this is a great percentage of the population than I would have hoped. But we don't have to pretend this is a left vs right thing anymore. People who probably share the mainstream right's opinions about how annoying woke people are, are still looking at this stuff and going "oh, this is insane, this is not what I signed up for." Like I said, no longer a culture war thing. If you like ANYTHING about America as it has functioned for the last 100 years, the free speech, the free economy, anything, then you have a stake in this.
What to do about it? IDK. I agree that protesting doesn't seem like it will help. But being concerned is a good start. There may come a time when we all have to be out in the streets because that will be the last stopgap between the US and the total collapse of Democracy.
25,000 at the Saint Paul Capitol building on Saturday. It was a very very BIG BEAUTIFUL demonstration Such As The World Has Never Seen. I'll wait till the weather warms a bit and I can ride my Trek the 5 miles to the demo. Parking can be a hassle.
It's best to restrict ones protest participation to situations whee you are well informed, have a strong opinion, and care quite a lot. So for you, I'd recommend zero protesting here.
My distaste with the “pro-democracy” protests up to this point is they still seem to be leaning hard into the increasingly unpopular Omnicause culture war stuff that helped get Trump elected in the first place (e.g. prominent Palestinian flags). I guess the lame puns and rhyming chants about Elon are new.
Is anyone noticing a shift in the more recent editions of the protests or is it still just “Queers for Palestine and Burning Teslas” all the way down? If it is, it feels likely to be counterproductive or at best, pointless.
At the protest I went to I saw one sign (out of maybe five hundred) mentioning Palestine. There were more signs supporting Canada. Most of the signs were, unsurprisingly, about what was happening in the United States.
Then perhaps that has indeed shifted, or at least is variable. A month-ish ago a local protest was on the local news and in the crowd shot Palestinian (and Mexican) flags were the most ubiquitous and visible symbols.
In most of the world a Palestinian flag isn’t far leftist or woke. I agree, though, that to fight Trump it’s enough to just complain about tariffs and other crazy policies and no other banners needed.
I think even worse than counterproductive, the protests are embarrassing, mostly due to the unrelated culture war stuff you mentioned. I think the prevailing ethos of said Omnicause views conflict through the lens of oppressor and oppressed, and not everyone wants to accept victimization as a prerequisite of joining a movement. Especially not young men, to beat a dead horse. It would 1000% more inspiring if, instead of holding a sign that reads like "This Is Not Normal," someone slapped a KICK ME sticker on Musk's back and/or tied his shoelaces together.
> Is anyone noticing a shift in the more recent editions of the protests
One thing I’ve noticed is a change in the age of the protestors. They seem to be getting older, and younger people don’t seem to be showing up. That’s just my personal observation and not actual polling or anything.
> My distaste with the “pro-democracy” protests up to this point is they still seem to be leaning hard into the increasingly unpopular Omnicause culture war stuff
Like HM, I'm also generally confused by the situation. I have no idea whether tariffs are good or bad in the long run. And I don't know why people are yelling "pro-democracy" at a guy who was democratically elected. I’m actually quite confused why they’re calling it a "pro-democracy protest," are they saying the election was fraudulent?
The confusion is due to conflating all democracy with liberal democracy.
Democracy by itself is a form of government, liberalism an ideology/ value system.
Liberal democracy combines the two, with the ideology as the reason for the form of government and the government an insurance for the ideology. Further, the democratic elements are alloyed with undemocratic elements with the goal of making a stronger system which better protects the ideology.
When protesters are against democratically elected leaders for democratic reasons, they are really protesting what they see as actions against the point of (liberal) democracy - protecting human rights.
> yelling "pro-democracy" at a guy who was democratically elected
That's not what they mean by "democracy." The judicial reform protests in Israel a few years ago were the funniest example of this, opposing the elected representatives in favor of the oligarchic judges, but the more recent cases of Romania and now France are also very clear. At least in the US, the ruling elite usually say "OUR democracy," so everyone is clear whom it belongs to.
Well the recent batch called itself “hands off”, with “hands off what?” not tightly defined. It’s mostly motivated ostensibly by anti-ICE and anti-DOGE sentiments. And while I’m sympathetic to claims of executive overreach, “hands off” seems a bit of a dud - it seems entitled, and to your point, this guy was elected to put his hands on things.
I guess “OK fine you’re doing things that have some popular support but it’s stretching the limits of your constitutional authority and creating unnecessary collateral damage” doesn’t fit that well on a placard.
I declined to participate mostly because it frustrates me that protest marches remain the default response. Also because my personal work responsibilities now include a fair amount of triage effort brought on by the administration's crap, which makes it harder for me to summon additional energy/focus for it outside of work. As a bonus I am married with a school-age child at home and a spouse who's in the midst of launching a new business, so, plenty going on which demands daily bandwidth.
A tariff war is clearly bad for the country and the world long-term, it boggles me that this is even a question. That would be obvious even if this administration hadn't launched it in such a brainless made-up way.
Given that total federal civilian employment has not risen since the mid-1960s, so has been steadily declining as a fraction of federal expenses and as a fraction of the national workforce for literally decades, targeting _that_ as the way to summarily slash federal spending is just about the stupidest strategy imaginable. Had DOGE launched itself upon the beast in some more-relevant way -- at federal services contracts for instance, or a summary freeze of entitlement benefit levels, or a summary slash of the DoD budget -- I'd be very open to viewing DOGE as a useful chaos agent. Instead what DOGE will leave behind is _more_ waste and fraud not less, though this will take some time to become apparent, and for me that places Musk's clown act over in the, well, clown-act category.
It's genuinely hard to understand what's going on.
In terms of DOGE, it seems like there's a lot of incompetence, and a small amount of both corruption and genuinely good house cleaning.
In terms of tariffs they are extremely extremely bad, and no one can understand why they're happening, because the reason they're happening is 'trump has a view of economics that doesn't fit reality, is imposing it, and now the global economy will have so much uncertainty investment in the US will significantly decrease because no one knows at what profit margins they will be operating under'. But worst case scenario we cut off all trade with everyone, and have a recession. Not a threat to democracy.
Realistically, I think as a bright line wait for Trump to defy the courts on something genuinely important, or to try to deport citizens he disagrees with politically.
There's a bunch of people in the middle who will resist him if he does worse stuff, hold your powder for now I think.
I think paying El Salvador to lock people up in CECOT without any due process really crossed a line. You can deport people back to their own country. You can have a trial and imprison them in the US. But you can't just ship them directly to a prison in a third country without any due process.
"Realistically, I think as a bright line wait for Trump to defy the courts on something genuinely important, or to try to deport citizens he disagrees with politically."
Yea. For me certainly those are two very bright lines.
Speaking of the defy the courts one, a federal appeals court this morning unanimously rejected the administration's emergency-stay request regarding the one noncitizen who the administration now admits was wrongly scooped up and lost in the El Salvador prison. Quoting a member of that appellate panel who was appointed to the bench by Reagan: it is “legitimate for the district court to require that the government ‘facilitate’ the plaintiff’s return to the United States so that he may assert the rights that all apparently agree are due him under law. There is no question that the government screwed up here. Thus the government here took the only action which was expressly prohibited." Quoting another member of that panel (a West Virginian who worked in the Bush43 administration and then was appointed to the bench by Obama), the “United States Government has no legal authority to snatch a person who is lawfully present in the United States off the street and remove him from the country without due process. The Government’s contention otherwise, and its argument that the federal courts are powerless to intervene, are unconscionable."
Minutes after that appellate ruling was handed down, the administration asked the Supreme Court to intervene.
Yeah. I personally have a very high tolerance for 'defying courts'. It is the case that judges make mistakes, a lower court judge can issue an injunction that applies to everyone, and then what do you do for months while it works through the system.
The previous few presidents also did a lot of unconstitutional stuff, but more in the area of 'make bad faith arguments to get the policy outcomes they want and stall' rather than 'directly defy orders.'
I think for me I'll reallocate from playing video games, working 1000 hours a week, traveling, spending time with wife, and figuring out if I can make AI apocalypse 0.00001% less likely, roughly if Trump defies an explicit supreme court ruling on something important, and the country doesn't melt down over that.
To be clear, I agree with you what he's doing is bad. Deporting people without due process incompetently is really, really bad, as is refusing to make a good faith to get them back. But it's not my bright line.
Also, to be clear, I have a boy/girl crush on almost every single one of our supreme court justices, and I would happily let them be my god-emperors, but that's a function of my evaluation of their intelligence/good-faith, not some theoretical allegiance to courts, who could be capricious, unjust, and themselves a threat to democracy. I just understand why, in a country where not everyone thinks the courts should have infinite deference, we need to coordinate around bright lines almost everyone can agree on, if you're going to effectively resist power. Ignoring lower-court rulings that you can't deport a gang member without due process is, sadly, not such a bright line.
The administration has not offered any evidence of his being a gang member; conceded in court on the record that it has none to offer; and agrees that he should not have been deported. Their argument is entirely that the milk is spilled and it's too much trouble now to mop it up. (Not exaggerating, that's based on reading the administration's court briefs.)
Meanwhile this morning the president of El Salvador volunteered that they'd be happy to make room in their prisons for US _citizens_, and Trump just publicly responded "I love that!"
yikes. i had, hard, preregistered the hypothesis that you were lying
and then sure enough it was true
this is actually a rare fail on my part, darn
again, trump says a lot of crazy stuff, and does a lot of bad stuff. this is indeed very crazy.
if trump actually 'accidentally' sends a us citizen accused of being a gang member on any amount of evidence to a foreign gulag, and then refuses a supreme court order to return them, that's a bright line for me
it is completely legitimate for you to have bright lines 10,000 miles earlier than that
edit: and just read they suspended the lawyer on the case for making truthful admissions to the court, double yikes
That lawyer made _one_ truthful admission in response to a judge's question. Just one, and for that they shit-canned him the same day.
I also think it should, sensibly, stand in the particular non-citizen's favor that after being granted temporary legal permission to stay in the US he reliably met with his ICE case officer as required, obtained a federal work permit before getting a job, and complied with all other federal procedures while waiting for his asylum case to be resolved. By the administration's admission in court he met every legal requirement, was never charged with so much as a traffic violation, etc.
This guy was playing by our rules right down the line, hadn't dodged or defied any order to leave, wasn't hiding from the feds, etc. All of which got him dragged in off the street and dropped into a dungeon about which this administration says "oopsie well too bad, he's gone now."
So it should make literally _no_ difference whether you follow our rules as enforced by our government? Not saying that line seems the same as the citizens one, I agree that citizenship matters. But for me it ain't anywhere near "10,000 miles" short.
> suspended the lawyer on the case for making truthful admissions to the court
This strikes me as an eminently reasonable thing to do. It's fine to only say true things, but then you should be skillful enough to convey the misleading impression you want with them. As described here: https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/the-media-very-rarely-lies.
You sound like a reasonable person in that you're not sure what your position should be as you're not sufficiently informed.
Naturally you're not going to be yelling slogans in the streets. I don't know much of what is going on either, as right now I think everywhere is simply reacting to what Trump does. This is demonstrating the huge global power of the USA over everything, pretty much, which may or may not be encouraging to Americans.
'Wait and see' is about as much as I can advise, until we know the real effects of all these actions. Is the EU going to compromise on trade deals? Will China drop tariffs? Is there indeed a deal there to be made, as Trump seems to think? Will all countries now start reinforcing their own manufacturing bases due to seeing how big a hit they can take from tariffs? Who knows, not me!
One thing in the movie "A.I." that really saddened me was the mistreatment of the obsolete robots. They were forced to live as fugitives in the woods, scavenging for spare parts to fix themselves, and there were no laws against humans capturing them and destroying them for fun.
I've decided to do my part to keep this from happening. According to "AI 2027," mass production of robots will start in January 2028, and they will become "commonplace" in 2029. Even if we assume the prediction will take twice as long to materialize, robots will be commonplace in 2033, which is not far in the future. I'll call that first generation of multipurpose robots the "NS-1."
NS-1s will be expensive to buy new, so I won't get any. However, once they become obsolete thanks to NS-2s being released, used NS-1s will be cheap. I'll save them from the sad fate depicted in the movie "A.I." by buying NS-1s and letting them live on my property. I'll recoup the initial investment by having them do free work for me and by renting them out to nearby humans to do work for them. I might also get a local government grant to set up a shelter for unwanted pets, which the robots would manage for free. My enterprise would warm the hearts of everyone who learned about it, and would set an example that other people with extra money could copy.
My NS-1s will also know how to fix each other, and I'll give them a little bit of the income they generate for me to buy replacement parts for themselves as needed. No humans would kill my NS-1s, and they wouldn't deteriorate into the pitiful condition as the robots in the movie. They'd happily say "I'm so glad Proyas saved us!" All of this would become a reality in the late 2030s.
Assuming the NS-1s are essentially improved versions of current AI architectures, I think your plan potentially has strong merit from a historical preservation perspective and shows that you are a caring, empathetic person. I also think that you are embodying this commercial: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dBqhIVyfsRg
> They'd happily say "I'm so glad Proyas saved us!"
They may very well use those words, probably with happy sounding intonation and - depending on how the NS-1s are designed - realistic smiles. This is not evidence that they feel happiness.
I'm curious what prompted this question. It is way outside my normal set of concerns, but this happens to be something I was investigating yesterday, so the coincidence is surprising.
I started looking into MD vs DO while researching med school admissions, and honestly, the difference seems more structural than philosophical. DO schools emphasize a “holistic” approach and teach OMT, but most applicants don’t choose DO programs over MD for this—they just want to become doctors.
DO programs even ask applicants in interviews to differentiate DO programs from MD programs. Most applicants just say what’s expected, throwing in the “holistic” buzzword while quietly thinking, “This is where I have a shot.”
The numbers tell the story: the average DO student’s MCAT score (the standardized medical college acceptance test) is around 504 (59th percentile), while MD programs average 512 (83rd percentile). GPAs follow suit (around 3.6 vs 3.8). DOs make great doctors—but there is a difference in access for applicants of the programs.
So all this naturally leads to the question of why does this distinction still exist. In other words in what practical way is this difference important.
The original version of osteopathic medicine was founded on the idea that musculoskeletal problems were the cause of all disorders, and that epilepsy, allergies, whatever, could be treated without drugs, but via manipulation of bones and muscles. So it was nonsense. These days DO describes itself as "holistic," which can mean so many different things it really means nothing. If it means that any one part of the body affects and is affected by many other parts, it's obviously true. On the other hand, "holistic" sometimes means something like "we're open to using all kinds of stuff," including acupuncture, Chinese herbs, energy healing etc etc.
I recently went to a DO for a consult about a complex spine problem. Was referred by an MD who did not know what this DO was like, just that she was conveniently located for me. DO's web page listed all kinds of "training" in a bunch of different new age forms of bullshit. I hesitated, but made an appt anyhow. She told me that what she did was lay her hands on the area where there was pain, and then she had an instinct to touch the area a certain way that would help it heal -- "my fingers know what to do." Told a story about someone whose hip pain improved as a result of this treatment. I asked what she thought the active ingredient was, and she said "Well, I don't know whether you're open to this kind of idea -- but the ingredient was magic." Yup, she actually said she used magic. It was not a metaphor.
Interesting. I've never encountered an "old school" osteopath in the US, just regular doctors who have DO rather than MD next to their names and seem to practice medicine exactly as I'd expect from an MD. Although I've heard similar experiences to yours from someone who went to an osteopath in Canada.
I expect part of the difference is that you were referred specifically to an osteopath for traditional bone manipulation, while I was looking for a primary care doctor (for annual physicals) and a neurologist (for migraines) respectively. Age might also be a factor: I'm not sure how old your DO was, but the ones I went to were young enough to have gone to med school well after 1997.
The de facto merger of DO and MD in the US was a workaround to federal policy, adopted in the late 1990s, of restricting the number of residency slots because of the belief that there were too many doctors being trained and that a "surplus" of doctors was a driver of risking health care costs. MDs and DOs had separate residency programs (each with different federal quotas of how many residencies Medicare would subsidize) until 2020, so as the restrictions started to bite, more and more prospective doctors went through DO programs instead of MD programs, and more and more DOs wound up doing normal doctor roles after finishing their residencies instead of using the bone-manipulation-based alternate medicine stuff that still forms a vestigial part of the DO curriculum.
The residency programs, as already mentioned, have already consolidated. Consolidating the schools is a bigger step. I imagine the big obstacle, apart from institutional inertia, is that the senior people at the accreditation board and college administration level probably still include a lot of people who started their careers before the distinctions in clinical practice faded away, and a lot of these people probably actually care about the differences between MD and DO programs.
All of this is US-specific. I get the impression that Osteopathy in many other countries is a lot closer to its alternate medicine roots.
>that a "surplus" of doctors was a driver of rising health care costs.
This is fascinating. Do you have a reference for this? I'm not doubting, just wondering how any sensibly experienced person with any economics training could have thought this.
Also, I spent part of the weekend dipping into the early part of the US doctor-education pipeline (pre-med at a flagship US state university.) The prep these kids are doing seems outrageous. Maybe I'm over-reacting to a small sample of cases, but it is hard for me to see how a reasonable person (strong student, normal human level of understanding and enthusiasm for serving as a doctor) could get through the pipeline successfully.
The cap was established as part of the Balanced Budget Act of 1997. Searching for "Balanced Budget Act 1997 residency cap" turns up a plethora of papers, articles, and reports talking about the cap and its effects, but most of them are vague about the original motivation for it. For example, here's a 2008 JAMA article and a 2021 GAO report:
I have only skimmed it, but the most direct support I've found for the claim is Dr. Demeter's testimony on behalf of the Association of Academic Health Centers, where he asserts that "a surplus will contribute to aggregate health care costs, at least as long as the nation has a significant fee-for-service sector". This seems to be a secondary concern, though: the more direct concerns being 1) the direct cost of the subsidies, and 2) underemployment among doctors.
Sadly, most of the information about motivations seems to be either behind paywalls (I found several references to New York Times and Washington Post articles on the subject), not on the web at all (many references to a joint "consensus statement on the physician workforce" issued by several professional and educational groups in 1997), or from sources with a strong ideological axe to grind (e.g. the Niskanen Center, a libertarian think thank which has a lot to say on the subject).
There was definitely a current of claims that overcapacity lead to higher costs that were popular in public policy circles in the mid-to-late 20th century. With regards to health care, a lot of that logic is baked into state-level "certificate of need" laws which require a process of convincing regulators that there is undercapacity before new hospitals and clinics can be opened. As far as I understand it, the logic behind this is the "wasteful competition" theory: overcapacity leads to higher costs per person due to fragmentation (lack of economies of scale) and underutilization (fixed costs are amortized over more patients if the clinic is close to 100% capacity). Plus, there's a measure of argument that underemployed professionals make work for themselves or for one another by talking patients/clients/customers into consuming questionably-beneficial services.
Thanks. Interesting that the thinking was that there was a surplus of doctors when now the thinking seems to be the opposite (at least for the present).
After listening to Scott and Daniel's podcast, I'm still stumped as to why they think that AI can develop original thoughts. And how does one get it to think originally if the basis of its reasoning is solely based on training data, which may be faulty, and especially incomplete in subjects we don't have a lot of knowledge about?
Jonathan Oppenheim, a physicist with a heavy maths background, points out they confidently produce proofs that are false. He said: "I haven't yet found them particularly useful for solving math problems directly, I have found it useful to ask them to generate some Mathematica commands which I can use to check some intuition. Or to learn some bit of maths or physics which is far outside my area."
Getting original thoughts is trivial. About all you need is a random number generator. The trick is getting useful original thoughts. That requires the ability to criticize your ideas. Which requires evaluating the evidence in various directions.
Even the most original tour-de-forces in research have intellectual precursors, often obscured, and often significantly distorted by the original research process. It is not obvious to me that research that appears highly original won't follow from an algorithm capable of doing unoriginal "bean-counting" research, and in fact I'd bet against it. That aside, the overwhelming majority of research is not highly original tour-de-forces, but relatively unoriginal work where you apply things from different areas, maybe modified a little for your purpose, and prove some quantitative sharpening of a previously known result, and having ai capable of doing this would already be very useful for advancing mathematics, as these sort of results, in sufficient quantity, produce a background of knowledge against which the highly original tour-de-forces (human made if you want) can operate. I'm not convinced current architecture can do any sort of research in the near future, but that's a different discussion.
Eric Hoel, discussing LLMs in his most recent post wrote, "My reaction is related to something Dwarkesh Patel has noted: it’s odd that LLMs are so knowledgeable, and yet aren’t credited with almost any intellectual achievements. If a living human had even 1/100th the knowledge base an LLM does, they would be a renowned polymath, constantly making connections between disciplines. The fact this hasn’t happened is indicative. To this observation, I’ll add that so far no LLM has produced a major work of art, written a breakthrough novel, established a mid-tier Substack, or even authored a single successful children’s book."
I never heard of Dwarkesh Patel, though. I need to check him out.
What's really odd is that people are buying into all the hype about AI, when it's really all smoke and mirrors. Well, Trump's trade war is now putting the brakes on cloud data center deployments. I suspect the AI bubble is now popping.
I don't find that odd either. AI can do things it couldn't do before, we don't know yet what it will be able to do and what it won't. New technologies are almost always overhyped, but that's not really odd either.
The new AlphaZero research demonstrated AI's capability to discover advanced, previously unknown chess strategies. This research focused on uncovering chess moves and concepts considered unintuitive and novel to even the most skilled human players.
These newly discovered moves were then taught to a select group of grandmasters, each a former or current world chess champion. Remarkably, all grandmasters improved their ability to solve chess puzzles incorporating these innovative AI-derived strategies after the learning phase.
This outcome highlights the potential for AI discoveries to push the boundaries of human expertise, indicating these concepts sit at the cutting edge of human strategic understanding.
Learning novel game moves is functionally different than learning novel facts about reality. Games are well-structured, with objective success conditions and, in the case of turn-based board games, often well-structured intermediate conditions as well. They can improve through self-play in a way that you can't for many other types of tasks.
And to be fair, AlphaFold2, a specialized AI, has been solving protein folding problems pretty well. But my understanding is that they were fed lots of examples of known proteins, and they learned the rules of protein folding from the examples. According to this article: "When fed an amino acid sequence, the model scans many other similar sequences found in nature, detecting changes in some sections of the sequences that coincide with changes in others. These patterns suggest that the changes evolved together and are thus likely to be close to one another in space when the protein folds."
But it isn't any good at predicting how proteins will interact with drug molecules or other proteins. And it can't predict whether a mutation will improve the functionality of protein.
I think "original" does a lot of work there. I am a big skeptic (responded a ton to the prior post) but I would argue that LLMs can do "original" things, but probably mostly within the general space of things humans have done, even if nobody has done that specific thing.
I do not expect an LLM to do something very novel in the sense that e.g. Einstein's theories were novel.
True. The AlphaFold2 example is an AI that learned the rules of protein folding by being fed examples of proteins we knew the structure of. But it's pretty dumb to any high level extrapolation about how the protein will function.
ChatGPT says that AI has found shorter proofs to known theorems and machine learning helped uncover some new insights into topology, but "AI still struggles with abstract reasoning, multi-step logical chains, and creative leaps that human mathematicians excel at."
Me: Has AI derived any important new mathematical proofs?
ChatGPT said:
Yes, AI has already contributed to some important new mathematical discoveries and proofs, and the field is growing quickly. While AI isn't yet at the point where it's fully automating deep mathematical reasoning on par with top human mathematicians, it's making meaningful progress in several areas. Here are a few key examples:
🧠 1. AI-Assisted Conjecture and Proof (DeepMind + Lean)
In 2021, DeepMind worked with mathematicians to uncover new insights in knot theory and representation theory:
They used machine learning to predict patterns in mathematical objects and then guided human mathematicians toward new conjectures.
One result involved understanding the structure of homological invariants of knots—a previously opaque problem.
The AI didn’t write full proofs, but it guided the intuition and highlighted promising areas for formal proof development.
🤖 2. Formal Proofs Using Proof Assistants
Systems like Lean, Coq, and Isabelle are now being supported by AI tools to help verify and sometimes find formal proofs of theorems.
Lean + GPT-like models: Researchers have trained models to write machine-verifiable proofs in formal languages.
Projects like OpenAI’s Codex for Lean and Google’s ProofNet aim to automate more of this process.
🔍 3. AI Discovering Shorter or Simpler Proofs
In 2020, researchers at Google and others used AI to find more efficient proofs of known theorems:
For example, in group theory, AI helped simplify known proofs by analyzing logical structures and using reinforcement learning to search the space of possible derivations.
📐 4. Symbolic Regression & Pattern Discovery
AI tools have helped in discovering new equations and relations in physics and math via symbolic regression (like with the software AI Feynman), which suggests new mathematical forms by analyzing data.
⚠️ Limitations
AI still struggles with abstract reasoning, multi-step logical chains, and creative leaps that human mathematicians excel at.
Most AI discoveries still require a human mathematician to interpret, generalize, or formalize the insight.
The Ming empire ended overseas trade journeys in 1433, which I would argue is the most analogous position for America now. The Ming considered themselves, accurately, to be the biggest, richest, most advanced, and most powerful nation in the world, so who needs foreigners?
Of course, when you're that big and powerful, you can mess up for a very long time before the collapse.
International trade wasn't that beneficial in the pre-modern era (heavy on luxuries rather than basic goods), so they weren't losing out on quite so much. Trump is making a much bigger error, though it's so politically unpopular we wouldn't expect it to last as long as Ming policy.
International trade was essential to the development of human civilization. There was in antiquity no single "nation" with substantial, accessible deposits of both copper and tin, so in order to make bronze you needed stable international trade routes. Absent international trade, we'd literally all be stuck in the neolithic.
Bronze, cloth, (cooking) oil, salt, even bulk grain - an awful lot of what was traded four thousand years ago, was vital non-luxury goods. And there is great benefit, to someone with a plot of land that's pretty good for barley but not so much for olives, to be able to put some of their barley on a boat to people in the opposite situation, rather than having to devote a disproportionate fraction of their time and land to maintaining a few scraggly olive trees. And, yes, it helps if you have a few bronze tools to work with as well.
And to top the thought off, to facilitate that large-scale trade you need stable, capable governments all along your trade route to ensure the goods arrive without unnecessary cost, or at all.
I heard about Jhourney here, so on the off chance that means there are people who've gone:
I'm going to the June retreat. What should I bring or avoid bringing? What should I wear (yoga clothes vs T-shirt/jeans vs sundress)? Does anything happen the first half-day or should I relax about arriving at check-in time? How does journaling work in the more recent retreats? Can we read during personal time or is it a version of noble silence where we're expected to avoid reading?
I want to push back a little bit on the “most of the economy is automated by ~2029” part of the AI Futures forecast. I’m not pushing back on the forecast as a whole (I think the AI arms race seems inevitable), just the economic part. When I was reading the comments on the AI 2027 post, I was taken aback by one comment in particular from Daniel Kokotaijlo, “As for why everything hasn't already been automated: Well the AIs are too dumb right now, obviously.” I found this really jarring. When it comes to agents, “AIs are too dumb right now” is not the main bottleneck.
There seem to be three main problems over and over again:
1. Social dynamics
2. Physical labor
3. Legal restrictions
Let's walk through one case study. A university has a team of schedulers who coordinates the schedule for all of the maintenance work that needs to be done across campus. They have several internal teams (janitorial, plumbers, electricians, etc) and also contract out with third-party providers for large jobs. The schedulers job was initially described as “Sit there and answer emails all day and maintain a spreadsheet to prioritize the work and who to send where.”
I really want to emphasize that a LLM was smart enough to do this roughly a year ago, but it’s still quite difficult to get an agent to do this job overall, because being “too dumb” just isn’t the bottleneck currently.
The main obstacles to turning this job into a software agent:
1. It turns out that there are lots of internal politics between the various electricians, plumbers. Just like you get any anytime there are more than a few dozen people involved with anything. The schedulers resolved these issues largely by eating lunch with them everyday, getting a drink after work, and generally becoming friends with them.
2. Even though the job at first appears to be entirely email based, it turns out that they also need to walk around campus and take photographs of work that needs to be done to send this to the third-party providers. This isn’t terribly difficult work, but a lot of desk jobs turn out to have light physical labor like this.
3. You need to be 18 years old to sign for things when the third-party providers show up.
Now you might say, well, those social dynamics will go away if those plumbers and electricians were replaced by robots. But once again, we hit the those same three problems again, except this time instead of light physical labor, it’s lots of physical labor. And legally, that states require work to be done by licensed electricians. And also there is more social interaction than most people realize, like making sure everyone has clothes on before you start fixing the dormitory bathroom.
With regard to hardware, even if you have a great blueprint for the robot you need to design, hardware is incredibly slow to develop. When it comes to software, if you find a bug in the morning, it's not uncommon to fix it and ship it out to users by the end of the day. But if you find that your hardware is defective, you are not going to have fixed hardware shipped by the end of the day. The iteration cycle can often last months.
I’m not saying that these things are impossible problems, but at the moment, I think the timeline for that project seems wildly ambitious. I still need to go through the project in more detail, so perhaps I’ll change my mind. Is there something major that I’ve missed from their project?
I think you are absolutely right about this. The timeline Scott describes makes me think about something Orwell said. I can’t find the exact Orwell lines right now, but it was something like “all political theories are armchair movements. Their absurdity becomes immediately evident in a bus with a dirty baby and a crowd.” Scott’s group fails to consider the societal complications, conflicts, delays, etc. that will ensue when it becomes possible to rearrange things enormously by using AGI or ASI. You’ve covered a lot of the areas where that’s going to happen, but I wanted to mention another: the relationship between the federal gov’t and the AI development companies.
The latter can’t just be another government contractor, because the product they make is powerful in a new way. It is one that, in theory at least, could supplant government — it could do most of the tasks now carried out even by high-ranking officials. It is also one that is smart and powerful enough to *take* power and harm us all if it is misaligned. It could also take power if it was aligned with the AI company’s priorities, but set up to be less fully aligned with the government. (So it could have been trained to carry out all goals set by the AI companies, but comply only with some exceptions with carrying out the goals of the parts government it is integrated with: do what they say *unless* their intent is to harm AI companies, or limit their power in XYZ ways, or take a step that violates certain standards.). How long do you think all *that* is going to take to work out? And it seems like there are no solutions that do not give the AI company a great deal of power over the running of the country.
> How long do you think all *that* is going to take to work out? And it seems like there are no solutions that do not give the AI company a great deal of power over the running of the country.
Yikes, that’s a big question! Short answer: I have no idea!
Here’s my current thoughts: I think the economic transition is going to take *way* longer than predicted. Without economic power, you mostly have just soft power. And nation-states are behind the curve right now, but hard power beats soft power and they’ll just nationalize AI companies if tech barons get too big for their britches. I think AI misalignment could happen, but I’m not convinced it’s all that dangerous until it controls the economy. I’m open to changing my mind though.
But with regards to the relationship between governments and tech barons, I think it’s really bizarre that we’ve ended up in a situation where multi-national corporations are about to have world changing technology and nation-states are just sort of watching wide-eyed on the sidelines. But I think nation states will retain power. I think AI could give tech barons a lot of soft power, wealth and influence. But hard power wins against soft power. I think that’s where all the crypto people went wrong. What makes fiat currencies valuable over crypto currencies is that at the end of the year, you need to have collected enough dollars to pay the government taxes or someone eventually shows up at your house and puts you in a cage. I just don’t see AI (or tech barons) taking over without control of the economy, and I think that’s farther away than what Scott et al envision.
Some more thoughts I had on the timeline:
I think that there is a degree of cherry picking historical metaphors here to get to the conclusion they’re looking for. They use the example of a WW2 factory and say it took three years to convert a car factory into a airplane factory, so that’s comparable to doing the same for AI automation. But that's a very strange analogy….okay, so it took three years to take a factory where human workers were building one mechanical object, and then to convert it to where human workers were building a different mechanical object. They seem to find this very convincing that AI automation will take over (in 1 year, nonetheless).
It's not clear to me that the car-factory-to-plane-factory metaphor is the right one. How about instead the industrial revolution? Where instead you have to build brand new factories, with new types of machines in those factories, with new types of workers in those factories. And this took roughly a century. Why is a slight change to a WW2 era factory the correct metaphor and not the world-changing industrial revolution?
They clearly believe very strongly in their forecast…so strongly that it got Scott to do his first podcast, and it was very well researched, so I’m not dismissing it at all. And they’ve put their reputations on the line very publicly. I’m very interested in it, and want to learn more. But I suspect there was a bit of motivated reasoning going on when selecting the proper historical metaphor.
I'm curious how long you think it'll take? And will the tech barons take over the government?
I have no idea either. But here are a few thoughts:
-How many people in gov’t understand AI well enough to see the huge good and bad possibilities? In my grim imaginings there are a lot of people who are still at the stage of thinking of AGI or ASI an object, maybe, like, about the size of a fridge. “Can’t you just unplug it?” they ask.
-Seems to me like Trump might pretty easily make some deal with the AI companies under the impression AI is just really high value new tech, sort of like PC’s were 30 years ago, worth a lot of money. He might sign off on all kinds of deals with AI companies so long as they would enrich him or allow him to brag that he’d made a great deal that enriched the country some way.
-I think the distinction between soft and hard power breaks down when you’re talking about AI. It’s not just a very desirable thing that many are willing to pay for in money or in concessions to this and that. It is also something that can force others, including the US government, including other countries, to do things. It would not necessarily have to be misaligned to exert power in those ways, either. Depends on what values the AI companies align it to, right? They can’t possible make it a pacifist — never ever harm a person. They will have to train it on rules about the circumstances under which it can subdue or coerce or harm people or override their wishes — some version of only harm bad guys. And wouldn’t people or organizations setting out to harm AI companies likely fall into the bad guy category?
Example from *Breaking Bad* of soft power turning into hard power: Walt’s chemistry skills are soft power in that they enable him to make great meth. But when Jesse tries to sell some meth to drug lord Tuco, Tuco’s guys just steal the meth and beat up Jesse. So Walt meets with Tuco and uses his chemistry skills as hard power: tosses a powder that blows up the office.
Later edit: This just showed up in my email from a site I subscribe to:
<In a sensational twist, Elon Musk's DOGE AI system is reportedly being used to monitor U.S. federal workers, posing intriguing questions about privacy and workplace surveillance. With the tech world buzzing, this could be a revolutionary step—or a controversial misstep—in AI deployment. The news highlights the complex dance between artificial intelligence
Example of the ways AI is already part of government. Surely there will be more, and some will be like this one — doing task where it’s making judgments, and things of significance are involved.
PS: Turned that dog cartoon I showed you months ago into a series of toons that tell a story. You said something about the original cartoon being *very* niche, and boy were you right. Quite a few people have looked at the story version, acc/to dashboard, and I have gotten exactly one comment: “the fuck is this?”
As agents have progressed, I’m increasingly confident that it’ll be a while before they make up > 50% of *current* US GDP. I’m generally a fairly optimistic person, so that might be influencing my thoughts on this. I’m cautiously optimistic that they won’t just wipe out entire fields overnight, but progress gradually over the course of a decade or two, and eventually increase GDP and give people time to re-train. I go back and forth though sometimes.
I could be wrong here, but I’d estimate that AI won’t make up 50% of US GDP until 2050 - 2065. I think it’ll be 5 - 10 years before there’s superintelligence.
My general line of reasoning is that the closest analog we have to an intelligence explosion is the Industrial Revolution. That took over a century for the West. But when Korea/Japan/China industrialized they already had the blueprint for how to do it: they could literally go and walk around US/European factories and see how it was done. Scott et al are proposing that superintelligence will give us a blueprint for a similar explosion. But even with this blueprint, it took Japan a couple decades to implement it and industrialize. And that was with a highly organized society, that had more social cohesion than what we have currently.
So I’d say, 5 - 10 years for superintelligence, plus 20 - 30 to implement the ideas. So 25 - 40 years total.
> AI system is reportedly being used to monitor U.S. federal workers, posing intriguing questions about privacy and workplace surveillance.
You were mentioning armchair theory versus practical real life. I think this is a very practical thing to worry about. LLMs right now are in some sense under-trained…they could learn more than they do given their size. This means that instead of just training an LLM to answer questions about someone who has a wikipedia page, you could train an LLM to give the same answers based on your gmail inbox. There’s no technical reason for why you couldn’t have an LLM trained on every American’s social media history, gmail history, public comments on the web, etc. I assume that either a) this has already been done and we don’t know or b) it hasn’t been done because of legal restrictions. But if the answer is b, then that means that even if the US doesn’t do it, then some country somewhere will. And that’s going to be a normal way of maintaining law and order in the 21st century. This has made me a bit of a tinfoil-hat person when it comes to digital privacy.
I think the key think is the special economic zones. They don't initially try and retro fit the existing economy with robotics, they let the ai start a new city in the middle of nowhere that is built with automation in mind. This allows the ai to build a lot of machines/ robots (not necessarily humanoid) and put them to good economic use immediately. Soon they will be making so many robots that they will get really really good at it and a humanoid plummer robot will be within their grasp.
They will have proved it's safe and reliable in the sez, people will gradually trust ai and it's robots more as they come into contact with them and the price will be right. The first jobs to be replaced won't be licenced but after all the robot porters, janitors, servers etc have been working for a while there is going to be a lot of demand to let them do the licenced jobs too
I think a lot of the aggressive timelines come from people who are more familiar with software development, and they tend to massively underestimate timelines for hardware. But tell me if I'm off base here. One thought I've had is that if you redefine "superintelligence" as "exponentially increase human productivity" then we've already had a hardware superintelligence explosion: the assembly line. Do you think that a software superintelligence explosion would also lead to an additional exponential improvement in hardware production?
> then we've already had a hardware superintelligence explosion: the assembly line
Yeh. Or the combine harvester. Which replaced dozens to hundreds of men with one, maybe two. Get a robot in there controlling the harvester and you just save one man’s work.
Assembly lines are mostly automated already and have been for centuries.
Agreed, every forecaster with fast timelines vastly underestimates how long it takes to get anything done in the physical world, much less massive projects, much less economy-overturning paradigm shifts. Creating just one product with a new specification on an EXISTING production line in most manufacturing industries can be an ordeal.
Everything forecasters with fast timelines describe seems totally plausible until I imagine those forecasts butting up against raw materials, supply chains, and plant capacities.
"I think a lot of the aggressive timelines come from people who are more familiar with software development, and they tend to massively underestimate timelines for hardware."
Yes.
""superintelligence" as "exponentially increase human productivity""
Interesting way to look at it, certainly can be used as a good framework. As far as software superintelligence leading to exponential hardware improvement: it will help, but there are fundamental limits: not everything can be simulated, and not everything can be sped up.
One example: going from cutting metal manually to using machines was a huge leap in productivity because manual cutting speeds and feeds were very far from physical limits. Once we got motors doing this, we're bumping into real limits of how fast we can cut a given metal. These may be still improved: maybe AI will optimize the leading edge shape for the cutting tool, maybe a better formula for cutting fluid, etc. But not improved by 10X, more like 10%. And a lot of this work doesn't need "AI", just optimization algorithms: set the target in Comsol and have matlab run sims over and over again, and in a week a weird cutting shape is produced that cuts better than the one on the market. So the point is, this work is already being done and there's not much AI can do to make stuff like this better.
Currently they're testing them by getting them to organize engine covers, as seen here: https://youtu.be/v8UaiRgqvlc?si=qT_3tPx94kOEN8Mg Though, most of those things you listed seem to be bottlenecked by AI capabilities more than robotics. It's honestly looking like decent general-purpose robots are going to get developed faster than the AIs necessary to pilot them.
Yeah, these should be fine moving large, hard things. The finer work is limited by sensors and their controls and feedback loops, that will take awhile to come together.
If you think it can't work without humans then what makes you think some humans can't be hired. Automation isn't binary. Our factories are already partially automated, will become more automated and eventually yes they will even automate the cutting fluid line unclogging
Oh don't get me wrong, I'm quite optimistic about robotic manufacturing, it's just the timelines (2027 FFS!) are all wrong, and the simplistic view that "ai will do it" that I find unconvincing.
FAFO round I-lost-count: "Second child dies of measles as Texas outbreak worsens", RFK visited TX on Sunday (with a dead bear? the article doesn't say). But I understand: identity is everything, and when your identity is "doctors lie, vaccines bad", dead and maimed children don't move the needle all that much.
This isn't fun, that's just depressing and terrible. FAFO means fucking around and finding out, the satisfaction is watching the learning experience happen in real time, along with a copious tonnage of schadenfreuede, but that itself can threaten the learning experience if rubbed in the nose too much, as the finders-out simply refuse to acknowledge the lesson and continue to be fuckers-around.
But in this case, it's the parents who fucked around and left the poor kids who found out... what exactly? Did they find out? Do kids even know what vaccines are and why they're necessary?
Please less of that and more of Trump voters crying about their stocks.
Yes this is callous and cruel, fucking around with people's lives by telling them they shouldn't vaccinate the kids, thank you RFK, may your brain be consumed by the worm. Now of course he tells them "MMR vaccine is the best protection", better late than never I guess.
But, you know, also the parents? Some idiotic beliefs are harmless, "earth is flat" ha-ha. Who cares as long as you're not a container ship captain or something.
I’m not sure why RFK would visit the town where the unvaccinated immigrant child died, if he was trying hard to downplay or not draw attention to the death. I may have missed a step in the n-dimensional chess; please enlighten.
The name Daisy Hildebrand doesn't sound very Hispanic. I assumed she was Mennonite. I know there's a large Mennonite community in Mexico, but I didn't know they were migrating northward in any numbers.
I bet the story is more interesting than this bare presentation by the AI:
"In the 1980s and 1990s, some Old Colony Mennonites, who had previously fled government pressures in Mexico and Canada, migrated to West Texas, establishing communities like those in Gaines County, while preserving their Low German dialect and cultural distinctions."
I don't know anything about the identities of the now two dead children, but the media - being local, and a little less likely to obfuscate - has found itself unable to disguise that the outbreak has overwhelmingly affected one community in particular. Lubbock though it would make a perfect punching bag, I suppose, is merely the region's "big city"/hospital.
Houston, where you might reasonably expect such a thing to rapidly spread, had had as of a week ago, I believe, one case of measles this year, a traveler from Mexico.
I don't know what point you are trying to make. The Texas outbreak seems to have started with, as pointed out, Mexican Mennonites. Unless you want either the state or federal governments of both the USA and Mexico to round up and forcibly vaccinate all these people, the damage has already been done.
And this group was in existence before RFK, so he can't be held responsible for them, even if you mean his anti-vax views encouraged them. They were anti-vax all by themselves.
Here are two bookend experiences I've had with Mennonites (or some sort of Anabaptists):
One was nearly 30 years ago. We were getting ready to ride the Amtrak. I noticed a family - or it seems to me a man, and a few women and children - waiting in the station with us. Apart from long dresses, most were unshod, which struck me as unusual in starting on a rail journey.
I inquired whether they had been visiting our city, and learned that they had come down because of a terrible tornado that had recently killed people and knocked down a lot of homes. I gathered they had worked on the rebuilding.
Just a couple or three years ago, we were camped at a KOA in the vicinity of Petrified Forest NP. I was intrigued by a Mennonite (? - could be Amish, I certainly didn't ask) group adjacent to us: again, women and children much outnumbering men. One of the men had come over to help us stake our tent in the wind. I was curious about where they had parked, as I saw only a small U-Haul trailer. He explained that they had a driver, since they don't drive, who went to a motel at night. I can't recall exactly but I think he said they were from New York. He was about my age and it was his first time ever to see something of this country. I remember being slightly dismayed by his list of attractions, but didn't show it of course. (If you only get this one trip ...)
They cooked a big meal and sang a good deal.
What surprised me upon going into the communal bathroom the next morning, was the interest a couple of the young women, one of whom was drop-dead gorgeous, took in my toilette. I, a middle-aged woman whose best days are past, and whose routine in its entirety consisted in: wash face, apply moisturizer, apply mascara, apply cocoa butter lip balm. Done. They stared at me the whole time and I thought, oh, I wish you were getting a better show! There are women who would really reward your staring!
No, it's the reverse. The first cases were among Texas Mennonites, and it moved south of the border. Now Mexico is recommending that Mexicans avoid traveling to the US unless they've been vaccinated.
Oh, I see. I just looked up the history of the Texas Mennonite community. They fled the Russian Empire to Mexico in the 1880s and the 1890s. Then they moved to Texas in the 1920s. So, yes, because they stopped in Mexico along the way, they're counted as immigrants. Silly me. Maybe in another century or two, they'll no longer be considered immigrants.
A 1989 Texas Monthly article whose umpaywalled version I'm too lazy to find, starts out thusly, comparing the Mennonites, who evidently excelled at growing oats in Northern Mexico, and the Tarahumara Indians:
"Both groups have agreements with the government that allow them to sidestep two important requirements of Mexican citizenship: education in the Spanish language and mandatory weekend military training for young men."
The Mennonites move around; that's why they keep emphasizing the connections among the three - Mexico, New Mexico, Texas. They are not persecuted. For the love of God.
Or do you consider the Amish persecuted because they are Amish ahead of being citizens, if in fact they take any interest in politics?
I never said anything about persecution. I was just calling out the meme that they were immigrants. The first case clusters of measles were in the Texas Mennonite community. And unless there’s new data that I haven’t heard about — the outbreak in Chihuahua Mexico started at least four weeks later. The big measles outbreak in Canada was brought back by a Canadian Mennonite who had visited the Philippines.
Correction gratefully accepted. There does seem to be movement between Mexico, the USA, and Canada amongst this particular grouping due to historical heritage of the original colonists being invited down from Canada by the Mexican government.
What's needed is to shift the goalposts. I witnessed this on a local forum. These are by no means bright young things, but they did love them some Covid, and tracked it ardently interspersed with reporting say, a dog groomer they used that didn't wear a mask; and so when the measles stuff came up - they were kind of primed to actually look into the subject. Locally, the discussion was about the metro school district, which is 70% non-white and where most schools offer both free breakfast and lunch, even in summer.
Somebody spoke up to the effect - guys, I think this is not what y'all think [hope]. The reason the district only has an 83% compliance rate with vaccination [and does not honor the law around that] is not mostly because of anti-vaxxers, since only about 2% are crazies [read: MAGA, though in fact that's a misread] who requested a waiver.
The commenters had the honesty to immediately shift the goalposts when they realized it was not, in their Manichean scheme, the bad people who were unvaccinated, but rather the good people.
The shift was immediate and unanimous: schools, in addition to all the other things they are tasked to do, and do rather middlingly at best, should set up clinics inside each, to administer vaccines - and soon, we were in a flight of fancy that these clinics would provide the healthcare everyone is supposedly missing.
Note: this school district has a $110 million budget shortfall this year.
I got vaccinated back in the age of the dinosaurs (and when I was a child, there wasn't a national measles vaccination programme in my country so I got the measles the old-fashioned way and promptly passed it on to my siblings) but that was done through the schools (except for the polio vaccine, adults and children queued up in a local hall for the sugar lump).
I remember getting stuck with various needles in primary school, and the free school vaccination programme continues today (though seemingly the BCG vaccine is impossible to get since demand vastly outstrips supply; I do wonder if that is part of the recurrence of TB we're seeing).
How many of you are joiners, and how many of you "bowl alone"?
Doesn't have to be limited to "civic"--can also include professional, religious, social, etc. Any group, club, or association which gathers people for a common cause.
I'm building a piece of technology for a local group and I'd like to interview others to see what might be helpful or beneficial in similar orgs. I'm assuming a lot of the same issues are shared amongst all/most "civil society organizations."
I'm in 2 choirs, one affiliated with my alma mater and one affiliated with a church (of which I'm not a congregant). But I also bowl alone -- these groups haven't been a good source of just-hanging-out friends.
I'm a member of my university's student military veterans' association (nominally a chapter of the national Student Veterans of America, but in practice we don't interact with the national org). Previously a board member while in undergrad on the GI Bill, now just a regular member while finishing a graduate degree. We operate partly as a charity for local causes and partly as a social club to help new members integrate into school and out of military life.
I don't think of myself as much of a joiner, but I have enjoyed the social benefits of belonging to a group that new people regularly rotate in and out of. I've especially seen it help members coming in out of more traumatic experiences like medical retirement from wounds or who were badly alienated for other reasons on their way out of service.
I think we mostly run into the same action problems as all volunteer orgs do. Most members genuinely want to help out, but we're everyone's lowest priority after school, career preparation, family obligations, etc. so balls get dropped. Better use of project management tools is a fix I pushed for this but I wasn't able to get enough others on board with picking one and using it consistently instead of just texts and emails.
My dad who is 83 is showing signs of forgetting stuff, which is to be expected since he's 83, but the pace has accelerated in a way that makes me worry about dementia. I'm considering getting him put on tirzepatide for potential neuroprotective effects since he's also somewhat diabetic (it will replace his current diabetes meds. He is not particularly overweight, maybe 10% over recommended weight for his height).
Thoughts on potential health downsides of this decision besides the known side effects(which do not seem very concerning)? Would appreciate thoughts since I'm in a developing country and medical advice here may not be as good as I would like (I understand any advice anyone gives me is not medical counsel and will proceed carefully)
Main thing I would worry about is muscle loss, which is well-documented. I really only worry about this for patients who are elderly or frail. It’s a real concern; not a contraindication, just something to be mindful of. Would have your dad do some resistance band training or light weights as needed.
Best of luck to you and your dad, sending well wishes.
Medical student here--so not a doctor but I do feel qualified to echo this concern. The neuroprotective effects of GLP-1As are probably real but are not going to outright prevent dementia from developing, based on the effect sizes I've seen so far. The muscle loss effects, however, are quite significant. If you do start, I'd use a low dose, watch bone mass, ensure high protein intake (with supplementation if necessary), and certainly do resistance training.
In his 2016 endorsement of Hillary Clinton, Scott put a big emphasis on the idea that voting for Trump to condemn wokeness (or Social Justice as it was then known) was a bad idea because while a Trump presidency would be an initial setback for the woke left, it would greatly strengthen the latter *long term*. Some people in the comments agreed, responding to the sardonic question "does this mean militant SJWs should for Trump?" with "if they want to strengthen their ideology in the long term, yes".
Well we now have 8 years of hindsight, and I think it's pretty clear that Trump's election strengthened wokeness in the *short term*, and *harmed* it in the long term. Does anyone think wokeness would have gone into eventual decline, or faced as much pushback as it did, if Clinton had won? I think it would have gradually grown and taken over society pernanently. There wouldn't have been the flashy social eruptions like #MeToo and BLM, but there would have been a slow and steady advance. How could there not be, when all the institutions of power were pushing in that direction?
People may disagree with me on what would have happened, but surely it's clear that the world is not going long-term woke in response to Trump, and that there's at least as much controversy over wokeness as ever.
I bring this up to point out the irrationality of this sort of "trying to be too clever" thinking that is very popular around here. If you support X, you should vote for anti-X, that will make X stronger! Actually, no it will make X weaker in the world overall, though it may well make X more popular on the internet! That really is the essence of this attitude: Trump made wokeness stronger on the internet (and in the media), and for the chronically online that looks like everything. And it may happen again this time, or may not, but either way it's very different from the world.
I think this is an empirical example of the value of common sense voting, and common sense reasoning generally, and that regardless of your goals actions that look like they push in a certain direction will, in the end, push things in that overall direction. Notwithstanding clever-sounding arguments to the contrary.
But I fully expect many people to disagree with every sentence I just wrote, because they always do. I just wanted to throw this out there.
I think it was mainly during Biden's presidency that we got articles and blogs writing about how we passed "peak wokeness" and its popularity was now declining. It wasn't Trump who started its decline.
BLM was triggered by George Floyd, and predictably the protests were stronger in cities and states where the Dems have more power. It's not at all clear that the protests would have been smaller under Clinton; they could have been the same or larger.
> I bring this up to point out the irrationality of this sort of "trying to be too clever" thinking
You say this as you present your own too-clever theory about a counterfactual world you can only guess at and assuming causation where you can't empirically show it.
But there was no George Floyd death under Obama. That was the cause of the 2020 protests.
Possibly the largest BLM triggering event before that was Michael Brown in Ferguson. But in that case there was no video and after the investigations, the cop was cleared of wrongdoing. It was never a clear case of police brutality. People could hear about and be unsure who was in the wrong.
George Floyd was different. It was on video and nearly everyone across the political spectrum agreed it was wrong. Trump said, "All Americans were rightly sickened and revolted by the brutal death of George Floyd." People were much more outraged at this, so the resulting protests were much greater.
There was also a Trayvon Martin death under Obama, which *did* blow up a little and probably gave people a dress rehearsal for Michael Brown (and then Eric Garner, et al.).
All of the ones we probably remember being in the news, were in the news because each side could tell its own side of the story where they were obviously right and the other obviously wrong. The obviousness was so obvious that by the time of Floyd, everyone was primed to think they were obviously right again, and furthermore, that the other side could only assert they were obviously right because they were obviously insane.
(To this day, I still have acquaintances that insist Brown did nothing wrong.)
Yeah, Trayvon Martin was a big, controversial story at the time. But:
1. The investigation found that Martin attacked Zimmerman and was shot in self-defense.
2. There was no video.
3. Zimmerman wasn't a cop.
There was a lot of misinformation going around and generally people on the left assumed Zimmerman was guilty while people on the right assumed the opposite. But it was never a clear instance of police brutality or unjustified homicide.
George Floyd was on a whole other level. People immediately saw the video and there was little doubt of police brutality. Everyone condemned the killing, including Republicans.
> George Floyd was on a whole other level. People immediately saw the video and there was little doubt of police brutality. Everyone condemned the killing, including Republicans.
I think you may be living in a bubble here. Plenty of people took Chauvin's side even after watching the video, it wasn't "uncontroversial" at all.
I think it has less to do with presidents than you think. Wokeness and its ideas entered the public consciousness in the early 2010s and then started seeing backlash a decade later. I suspect it took that long for the ideas to percolate and finally see the broad rejection of it you see now. That is easily the life-cycle of ideas that enter the public.
This doesn’t seem obvious to me at all. Here’s a perfectly plausible story: wokeness accelerated in popularity as a result of Trump’s first term, then started to decline (with bit of a delay) as a result of Biden’s election, and is poised to resurge (again probably with some delay) due to Trump’s reelection. This time it may be weaker because people have acclimated to Trump and thus the bar for outrage is higher. I’m not sure if it’s true but I think it’s at least as plausible a summary of what’s happening.
They said, I share your skepticism toward people who argue that it’s good for your political goals to vote for the opposite party. I don’t this this applies to Scott since he has been pretty consistently critical of wokeness, but when a thoroughgoing progressive tries to convince conservatives that Trump is bad for conservativism, the logical question is, why isn’t said progressive then voting for Trump?
Often, though, a politician genuinely is so terrible that it’s not worth the partisan gain, and this can be a sincere position. An extreme example of course: in retrospect, to a German right wing nationalist in the 1920s, literally any party other than the Nazis was a better choice. Germany would be a more conservative, patriotic, and influential country today had any other party been in power. But that doesn’t mean would’ve been worth it to a left-leaning German to bring about WW2 just to get to the endpoint of a more liberal, cosmopolitan, pacifist, post-patriotic Germany.
I think this is a plausible position even for much less dramatic cases.
I could see a sincere (at least moderate) liberal preferring the Iraq War and the Great Recession never happened even if it meant America would be more conservative today. It’s not a zero sum game. Your opponents’ failures have costs orthogonal to partisan politics that are not necessary outweighed by the successes of your own party.
We should build a "woke-meter" -- an algorithm that will in regular intervals create new accounts on social networks, post various offensive statements, and measure how fast the accounts get banned, or how much karma they get.
Then we could precisely measure the growth of wokeness over time, and see which specific events cause spikes.
Not accurate, wokeness changes the relative strength of protected groups every couple of years, this methodology will give you the illusion that wokism is "waning" when it just found new avenues and new ways of expressing itself.
A better woke-meter would measure all categories separately. Some human needs to add new categories in the database as they appear.
I would love to see precise graphs showing the evolution of the oppression ladder. Even better, integrate it with prediction markets! I want to bet on the exact year when denying that someone can be born with a dragon brain in a human body will cost the first biology professor his job.
I think there will be woke revanchism after trump, no doubt. I agree that it will not come back as strong as before, because I think it will be competing with three other tendencies:
1) a "thinking man's" trumpism helmed by JD Vance, which will keep the America First isolationism but drop some of Trump's wild swings
2) A trad or neo con NeverTrump revival on the republican side, who will want to return the party to its pre-Trump days
3) Anti-woke democrats. "Trans led to Trump; it's the economy stupid," that will be a coalition of some ex-progressives and party longtimers
4) Make America Woke Again; bluesky posters who were radicalized by Trump who want revenge and to take woke even farther.
I think because Trump, by being Trump, legitimizes woke: he is all the things they say america is, which it wan't before. It's hard to see that not fueling a revival of a sort.
We have a great natural experiment, with a Biden presidency in the middle of two Trump presidencies. In a few years, that should be enough to resolve this question beyond reasonable doubt.
Without even knowing what he was doing, Trump defeated wokeness within the conservative movement. He did it so completely some people are looking back on pre-Trump conservatism with rose-colored glasses. Remember when Jason Richwine was fired from the Heritage Foundation for what he wrote in a Harvard dissertation? Had Trump lost in 2016, it would have been a victory for the David French brand of conservatism. Imagine the Racial Reckoning, but facing a conservative movement utterly terrified of being called racist.
None of this is any reason to favor Trump over establishment Republicanism now. He's like a plumber who's an unpleasant person and smells bad, but did fix a problem even as he caused others and is now refusing to leave the house. Get him out!
They still reflexively kicked out Marko Elez for his social media posts. They rehired him, yes, but I disagree the victory has been as complete as you suggest.
I don't know what would've happened, but I think HRC would've handled the George Floyd death better.
Also, I think Trump's losing would've allowed the Republicans to say "wow, that was interesting but obviously we want someone less crazy next time." And the pandemic would've allowed any competent Republican to win in 2020.
> I don't know what would've happened, but I think HRC would've handled the George Floyd death better
Of course. Under HRC, George Floyd's death would have been a page four news item like these things normally are. It didn't just become a big news story spontaneously, it became a big news story because someone wanted it that way.
I remember the two weeks before George Floyd's death there were a couple of other attempts to spin up big race-war news stories. The first one was the "jogger" who got shot by Neighbourhood Watch somewhere. The second (and more ridiculous) was some argument over a dog in Central Park. Neither of these really took off, but they helped to create the race-war mindset necessary for the whole Floyd thing.
Did running someone "less crazy" help in 2012? The Republicans finally figured out their enemies would smear ANYONE they ran as a sexist, racist, fascist, etc., so it's good to have someone willing to fight back.
Maybe, but that's not the correct comparison. If Romney had run in 2016, would he have won? Or if you'd prefer, Jeb Bush, Ted Cruz, Marco Rubio, or any of the other conventional "less crazy" Republicans who ran in the primary? I think Clinton would have beaten them all, because none of them had the will to weather an October Surprise attack like the Access Hollywood tape.
Hillary had very high negatives and was wounded by Bernie. So yeah I think Romney and Rubio would've beat her for sure.
Access Hollywood happened because Trump really is a terrible person who says awful things. Hard to believe Rubio or Romney or Cruz has anything like that in their backgrounds.
He didn't "weather" anything. James Comey and Wikileaks email leaks gave the media something else to talk about.
They'd have ginned up something. Rape accusations are easy, so I'd expect a few of those. And then they'd harp on innocuous turn of phrase, like Romney's "binders full of women" and make it sound sinister. Or maybe update the dictionary to label what they said "offensive" and make them apologize for it, like Amy Barrett.
What exactly was so "awful" about the Access Hollywood tape anyway? His observation that women are more sexually available if you're rich and famous ("a star")? Oh no. How terrible.
I think there's something in the idea here that counter-intuitive or complex conclusions are especially appealing to a certain kind of intelligent reader, when often the more obvious conclusion is obvious because it's true.
I think "wokeness" is a bit of a moving target. If you mean the specific beliefs and policies that have emerged out of a commitment to equality (however that's unpacked), then yes, Trump (in the US at least) will have harmed those policies. But if you specifically mean it more as an attitude or way of thinking — censoriousness, dogmatism, groupthink etc. — then there's no reason to think those ways of thinking are changed at all by Trumpism being ascendant. The right are old hands at being censorious and dogmatic themselves.
Ah. That explains why I never know what people are talking about when they condemn it. I wish people would be specific rather than just engaging in name calling. (Sometimes they are, and sometimes I agree with them.)
What harmed wokeness was overreach, firstly as a result of the backlash to Trump, and secondly as a result of it's association with an unpopular Biden administration. In the "Hillary Wins" universe, my guess is that you would have had a backlash in 2017-18 in response to the Clinton administration. So basically the 'vibe shift' would have happened several years earlier. I wouldn't write off the idea that Trump could have come back and won in 2020 rather than in 2024, had he lost in 16.
"So basically the 'vibe shift' would have happened several years earlier"
See, I don't really understand this assumption, because if it's a backlash to the President then why didn't the vibe shift happen in Obama's second term? Why, indeed, did wokeness (at least in its 2010s form) start at all, instead of society becoming *less progressive* during the first half of the 2010s? It seems clear that culture often goes, in a much more fundamental way, towards the side in power, not against.
More generally, my model of the Hillary wins universe is based on just extrapolating from the "Obama wins in 2012" universe, i.e. this one. My vague sense of the issues that were most passionately debated in 2012 (and that the parties took opposite positions on) is:
Entitlement spending, and health care
Same sex marriage
The Iraq withdrawal
And when the GOP lost, did the conservative positions on those issues get stronger? No, they got a lot weaker, largely because the GOP largely abandoned them as losing messages. They downplayed the first, entirely dropped the second, and actively reversed direction on the third.
I see no reason why they wouldn't have done exactly the same with the 2016 issues--political correctness/wokeness, immigration, and trade--had they lost. They'd be losing messages as well. And without the Republican Party championing opposition to those things, surely public pushback would be comparitively minimal.
I'd like to know why anyone things the same general pattern wouldn't have held in 2016 as in 2012. Is it just because wokeness is seen as a purely cultural issue, and distinct fron other ideological issues with more concrete policy instantiations? Even though wokeness also has plenty of concrete policy instantiations (e.g. affirmative action)?
I made a market for predicting which predictions of AI 2027 for up until 2026 will be right. Predictions and new questions greatly appreciated (specifically if someone can point me to a trustworthy way to getting AI CAPEX and power usage)
It was my way to cope with the myriad feelings the text caused me, it was really good
Seeing all the prognostications of doom and the crashing stock markets due to the tariffs, let's look at the upside!
(1) All those calling for "crush capitalism"? Well your dreams are coming true! Occupy Wall Street couldn't do it but Trump could!
(2) Veganism will receive a massive boost, since animal products will be prohibitively expensive (Kerrygold possibly $11 a lb? https://www.rte.ie/news/2025/0406/1505938-irish-butter-us-tariffs/) Since nobody will be able to afford eggs, butter, meat or milk, now everyone will be living on rice and beans. The shrimpies are saved!
(3) We'll finally hit those carbon neutral/reduce your carbon footprint goals. Air travel will be once again a limited luxury good for the jet set, it'll be too expensive to run cars, electricity will go green or be too big a bill for domestic consumers.
(4) Consonant with the above, walkable cities will be the new black! If you can't walk to the stores to do your shopping well you'll just have to do without. Consumerism will be reduced and we'll all be virtuous and healthy with all that abstinence and exercise.
(5) Buy national/shop local campaigns will be dusted off once more. We'll be re-introduced to the ideas of seasonality and the rhythm of the natural year. If it's not native to your area and isn't in the growing season, yes we have no bananas, we have no bananas today.
Civic virtue will abound, the populace will be thrifty, frugal, and make-do, and best of all there won't be a global economy for rogue AI to hijack in order to conquer the world!
“You tell yourself, ‘I want eggs,’ but explain to me what this ‘I’ is that you speak of? Can you point to it? Of course not. ‘I’ is a prison you’ve built for yourself. So long as you live within the ‘I,’ you live in a perpetual dream. Only when we dissolve this ‘I’ can we extinguish all of the terrible clinging and instead start living authentically in the realm of awakened life.”
All of that is worth nothing compared to having a ready and fresh crisis to rub in a Trump follower's nose to make fun of him.
Climate Change? Consumerism? Capitalism? Have you **seen** the cope on r/Conservative and /pol? It's better than 1000 lush virgin new planets covered with Aphrodite clones.
(6) For the deficit hawks. Tariffs may effectively achieve that broad based tax increase on the middle class that has long been a 3rd rail in US politics.
I was amused to see on That Other Forum where even though the commenters typically profess in lockstep their poverty and victimhood at the hands of billionaires as well as any business owner anywhere, unless it’s a coffeeshop that draws their compassion because it is failing - an instant and un-self-conscious pivot to: MAGA are too stupid/poor to have portfolios, so Trump’s actions are not even hurting the ones who deserve to hurt. Occupy Wall Street/Davos appear to be forgotten; or possibly they or their families are too recent to remember that.
The sudden narrowing of inequality via the loss of paper wealth has escaped their notice.
I agree Re**dd** is terrible, but I have never seen that. I browse the subreddit the terrible dirty app recommends to me (in between the porn), and what I see is universally schadenfruede at Musk and his billionaire buds for finding out after fucking around that kissing the authoritarian's ass doesn't pay.
Yeah sure there are plenty of retired/old democrats who extremely hurt by this, it's just that there are probably just as much retired/old Trumpsters being hurt by it too, and both are eclipsed by what the companies "lost".
Although to be completely fair, the stock market is a bunch of fake rubbish and none of this money was ever "gained" or "lost", it's sure amusing as fuck watching MAGA howl and moan and cope but none of this is actually real. Imaginary money, imaginarily gained then imaginarily lost.
Booooooooooooooo, bring back the Oil crisis and let us have our popcorn's worth.
I saw it about three days ago, and am without imagination - but admittedly I would never look at reddit for anything political or news-related beyond the local.
The amount of rushing to the defence of megacorporations (like Disney) vastly amuses me when I see the "have the Anarchist emblem in my bio, here's my Che Guevara knock-off icon" types doing it.
Capitalism is wicked and evil, shoplifting is a victimless crime because the corporations can afford it, big business exploits workers and contributes to environmental damage, in the luxury gay communist future I will be the literacy officer on the cottagecore commune and also we need to protect the likes of Starbucks and Apple and the rest from rapacious MAGA.
I find this kind of hypocrisy reassuring. That the shear stupidity of anti-capitalism becomes apparent to some socialist-adjacent types once they see it being enacted is heartening.
People complain too much about hypocrisy. The most dangerous people are the ones that actually follow through with their crazed ideologies.
But burning the cities means that the flames are now the source of home heating, heating water, etc. so the savings on electricity generation plants fuelled by fossil fuels will be enormous!
I forgot to include point no. (6) - your cottagecore fantasies can now come true, because you will *need* that windowbox garden and any stray pigeons you can net and trap to eat.
Here in Argentina, I went to buy Vitamin D supplements. Back in Russia, I was used to them being daily pills or drops, to be taken in small doses over a month.
Here, what I received was a _single_ pill that claims to have 100 000 IUs of vitamin D, which is way more than a daily dose. The instructions said to just eat it, it's not to dissolve or anything.
I am confused: why are there different dosages in different countries, and which one makes more sense to treat a deficiency? What does a Vitamin D look like in other countries?
Vitamin D comes in many different doses, with a range spanning two orders of magnitude (a quick search on Amazon turns up several between 400 IU and 60,000 IU) in pills that look basically identical. The idea is that if you have a severe deficiency, you take a very large dose ~once a week for a few months, and then switch to a low dose daily.
A historical take of what was considered too much, which has gone up and down over the decades. One time doses aren't covered, but taking 100K per day for months looks like its too much.
Not sure if this is too spicy of a conversational topic for ACT, but the economics of porn over the last 60ish years have been pretty fascinating. There was a couple decade window of time after porn was grudgingly 'legalized', but before the Internet, when films made big money and actresses (& some actors) made millions. This is where the term 'porn star' comes from. Porn was distributed on DVD, and before that VHS, and before that I guess porno theaters? (Incredibly gross!) Plus the magazines, Playboy and the like. Demand for adult pictures & film was probably quite high, and supply was fairly limited. The biggest name actresses made almost as much money as Hollywood stars.
Then with the rise of the Internet came an exponential increase in the number of pornographic pictures & video. The number of young women & men willing to take naked pictures of themselves had apparently only been held back by the distributional channels (maybe some change in social mores too). As I understand it porn is very, very poorly paid these days. You'd think that'd be the end of it- typical Internet abundance story that drives down pricing, similar to the newspapers- and yet, Onlyfans.
Somehow subscriptions have once again dramatically changed the economics of porn distribution. I don't want to write a small novel here, but getting past the prurient subject matter I think there's something fascinating about the Internet's race to the bottom in terms of volume, but also its elevation of niche subscription models. (Plus, we are obviously on Substack here). Adult stars are back to making millions, I guess. Internet economics are fascinating
The day to day hustle of a financially successful adult content creator is not all that different from that of other types of successful content creators, like video game streamers. Only a small fraction of both groups actually make the equivalent of a middle class of better income from it; they both spend most of their time either planning the next content or maintaining the para-social relationship with their paying supporters that is the source of the majority of their income. Both groups also live in constant fear and anxiety about being banned from a platform w/o any explanation, though this actually more of a fear on Twitch, and especially on Youtube, than it is on Onlyfans/Fansly etc. The adult websites actually have more transparent rules and moderation for their creators and more responsive staff replies to inquiries.
"Adult stars are back to making millions, I guess. Internet economics are fascinating"
I'm guessing that very few adult stars make millions and those that do tend to "move into management" by doing a good job marketing their "brand," selling merchandise, getting into distribution (much like Valve has done with video games), etc.
I'd be surprised if any porn star made $1 million in a year simply from being paid for performing.
Googling comes back with something like "the average OnlyFans creator makes $180/month." If we assume a lot of skew then I expect a handful of OnlyFans creates, at most, clear over $1 million/year. And probably not for many years.
I agree, a few are making big money (same with influencers) but the majority will be scraping by. The more people who sign up to take their clothes off for money, the more choice the consumer has, and they can't all pay premium rates for every single new OnlyFan creator.
Top 1% or 0.1% will be raking in the dough, the remainder will be scrabbling for "I need $50 for my grocery bill this week".
It's both. That's what the "star" system is. A very few "star"s do extremely well, everyone else does quite poorly. I think (guess would be more accurate) that the average is about the same as some other "equivalent" job line, requiring "equivalent" skills and talent. (But, yeah, equivalence is extremely hard to measure...and also I have zero data points.)
if, uh, if anyone here happens to be geographically located in southern Ontario, the meetup I'm running this week is a discussion of The Colors of her Coat, putting it in the context of historical takes from circa the invention of photography and recorded music: https://www.lesswrong.com/events/zhEHa9zoWTBobGdEy/the-colours-of-her-coat
apologies to scott for using his work to bait rationalists into reading the outputs of the Frankfurt school (lying)
E.g., say that you can prompt an AI “I want to launch a competitor to Boeing” and run it for a day, and it will have everything I need: detailed blueprints for the planes; description of the processes, supply chain, all in excruciating detail for which in 2025 you'd need the input of experts in dozens of fields; programs set to go for negotiating buying the land for the factories; hiring plan for workers, job posts, video AI program for doing interviews; regulatory applications; presentations for investors; Super Bowl ad; etc.
My two questions:
* effect on political system. The last post said this could lead to a tech baron oligarchy, and I worry about this, but does anyone have a more detailed, step-by-step version of how and what it looks like? Like do you think we wouldn’t have elections? Or we will but anyone who runs on “AI companies should be nationalized” gets hunted down by kill bots? Or the AI tech barons flood the zone and crowd out all dissenters from any media coverage?
* how will we view intelligence? I.e. being physically fast doesn’t really have economic use anymore, but we still have a concept of a person being “fast” (in fact if you’re fast enough you can do sports and get rich). Abilities that would have been seen as “smart” in the past have been overtaken by machines (arithmetic, chess) but we still are impressed by people who can do those well relative to other humans (though maybe our idea of what “good at chess” shows about your intellect is different now vs 50 years ago).
Okay, so say AI commoditizes intelligence. In a way where it can do anything in digital land, but less so in atom land.
I think intelligence, in some form is an ability to act on information, in the physical world. You still need the intelligence to understand what the AI saying, interpret results, and act accordingly. It is possible some people may choose to go zero free will, and literally be a zombie host to an AI that controls them via cell phone or futuristic eye wear and tells them what to do and say all the time. Fun!
I think politics will still be people centered. People want different things, and politics is about how people decide to live in groups.
While digital AI can dominate the digital sphere, the real world has atoms and plenty of space for homes, cars, cafes, businesses, and people stuff. People live in the atom world. People like the atom world.
To start, AIs will live mostly on the digital realm, I think, to start anyway. Real life is boring. IRL. Is AI really going to want to touch grass? ( Maybe? Maybe not? )
We would have elections, but the process you described for making a competitor to Boeing would similarly work for election campaigns.
"I want to win this election. Make a detailed plan how to get money, create hundreds of organizations that will support me, and design a media campaign that will make people vote for me. Improve the plan. Improve the plan. Improve the plan. Improve the plan. Improve the plan. Improve the plan. Improve the plan. Execute the plan."
Your opponent in the election is presumably doing the same thing, though. Would it make a difference in election outcomes or would both candidates simply hit the limits of what you can do with advertising and then the outcome is determined by structural forces that are too big for an individual to sway?
This would depend on whether having a somewhat stronger AI is more like having 20% more money for campaigning, or like having a 20 IQ points more intelligent campaign manager.
> say that you can prompt an AI “I want to launch a competitor to Boeing” and run it for a day, and it will have everything I need: <long list of things you need to know to launch a competitor>
Well, to expand on Fibonacci's response, there is one additional thing you need to know, which is how many billions you will need to spend on labor and materials before you have produced an airplane you can sell.
And then the one additional thing you need before launch is ... those billions of dollars.
In the late Roman Republic/ early Imperial period, there was a series of conflicts between Sextus Pompeius (son of Pompey) on one side with Octavian and Mark Antony on the other. At some point after a temporary truce, there was an afterparty on one of Pompeius' ships and one of his admirals mentioned to him that both Mark Antony and Octavian were in his grasp, and that he could make him Master of Rome with one order. Pompeius rejected the idea but supposedly said, "I wish you had just done it without telling me"
Eventually, Pompeius got crushed by Octavian and Agrippa at Sicily and executed by one of Mark Antony's generals when he escaped to the East.
The point of bringing this up is, I feel like this situation is very common in that there's certain courses of action that go against people's principles in that they wouldn't do it or support it being done but wouldn't mind if it happened against their will or without their awareness. A thought process along the lines of, "the world (A) would be a better place if it was B, but going from A to B would take truly evil and despicable actions that should never be allowed. But if I magically found myself transported to world B where this had already happened, oh well what can we do, i guess we might as well enjoy the fruits of world B. Think of how very few Americans/Europeans would actually reverse American and European colonization/expansion if given the chance but how almost all will rebuke it every chance they get.
What are examples of such ideal states of the world you believe would be better but would never endorse what it would take to get there unless it had already happened? To start, I'm disillusioned by EA and other charity efforts in Africa (there was a recent report that Africa had the lowest economic growth over the last decade while still being the poorest continent) and I find myself wondering if another 100 years of imperialism to stabilize the region would not have been better in the long run.
Can't think of any. One the one hand, Christianity judges intent, so that whole thought process is an evil on its own. Likewise God is omnipotent, so wishing for a lesser evil solution is just a lack of imagination. You don't have to wish people die when you can instead wish they change their mind.
On the other hand, I'm a pretty vindictive guy, and would endorse quite a lot of punishments most people would pale at the mention of. (Imagine a world where we dropped bombs on all the world's scam call centers.)
The world with myself as supreme ruler of the Earth is one such example for me.
Other examples are essentially just this one example projected onto specific policy axes where my preferred outcome can't realistically be achieved democratically.
Then again, of course there are very good reasons to reject unprincipled means to bring about your favourite outcomes. These have been sufficiently rehashed in the wake of SBF
China will colonize the Africa. It is problematic only when white people do it.
A problem with Africa is that no matter what local people do, other countries *will* interfere, and there are many countries that can easily afford to buy a local army and make their guy a local dictator. If the West refuses to interfere, that only leaves the opportunity to China or Russia, who are happy to take the chance.
Ends don't always justify means (or ways, if you believe strategy = ends + means + ways). If a a course of action (murdering your guests) undermines your virtues/credibility/legitimacy or would degrade cultural norms which are broadly beneficial, then you shouldn't do it. Hospitality was sacred in antiquity (see: Procrustes) and national sovereignty or self-determination are sacred today. What made the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022 so shocking compared to say, US invasion of Iraq in 2004, was that it was a naked war of conquest without even the pretense of "Saddam's WMDs." Imperialism by conquest is beyond the pale in the 21st century, for good reasons.
I'm a professor of computer science working on benchmarks to measure AI capabilities, especially in cybersecurity (you can see some of our work here: https://ddkang.substack.com/p/measuring-ai-agents-ability-to-exploit). I'm looking for collaborators to work on building extensions of this benchmark and more. If you're interested, please reach out to me at ddkang [at] g [dot] illinois [dot] edu (the g is intentional).
Just shouting out that the Wollongong ACX Meetup is happening tomorrow night, Tuesday 8th April, in the Common Room at Wollongong Library, please come on by! I might have snacks :D
Isn't all the effort spent on AI Alignment wasted until we have cracked Human Alignment? I mean, look at the group of people who are most likely to influence what AI is going to be used for - and then tell me with a straight face that working on general-purpose AI isn't the most irresponsible thing anyone could do (maybe apart from burning down the world economy for LOLs).
I'd invert that. There's no point in cracking human alignment if you give this hypothetical perfectly aligned human a misaligned AI. We'd all be paperclipped in this case.
While if we give perfectly aligned AI to Trump, we'd all forever have to worship him as god-emperor. That's pretty bad, but better than the other scenario.
We've survived this long without perfectly-aligned humans. Maybe we can muddle through without perfectly-aligned AI, as long as we don't have super-misaligned AI.
> I mean, look at the group of people who are most likely to influence what AI is going to be used for
Who, nerds in AI labs? Because if a god-mind is ever created *and* is actually super powerful AND is aligned, they're the ones running the show. And most of them are smart enough to think twice about letting any politician even know there's a god-mind, much less letting said politicians tell it what to do.
"they're the ones running the show" - how exactly do you think that is supposed to play out? A team at, say, OpenAI develops a new version, they run the tests and find, oh shit, it's brilliant beyond comprehension and well-behaved... and then what?
- they keep it secret? For how long? Under what pretext? How long until management gets impatient?
- they tell their boss, boss says "okay, great, killer product, release it!", they say "no way, too dangerous", and then what? Boss says "okeydokey, no killer product then, we'll sit back and wait until the competition has caught up"? Not likely. Boss says, "cool, thanks for the work, you're fired"? More likely.
- they tell their boss, "we did it, sorry man, you're out, this is our show now" and... do what? Tell the AI to protect them from the police that the boss has called to arrest them? (If it did that, how aligned was it in the first place?)
Oh yeah, I'm talking literal full-Eliezer FOOM god-mind here. Like the book Metamorphosis of Prime Intellect. Then yes, it will literally be the will of the local nerds around that local instance waking up that influence what the light cone becomes.
But yeah, you're right if we JUST do AGI, then who knows, could go lots of ways. But you know, per Scott's post and Kokotajlo et al's projections, the biggest use is putting those minds towards building the god minds.
And arguably, that's the *important* scenario - the light-cone determining one. It's just a few steps beyond the AGI-and-jobs-counterfeited one.
Even if Sam Altman is the rare exceptional leader who would wield the power of a super-smart AI responsibly, how long do you think it would take for xAi or Meta or some Chinese fly-by-night operation to come up with a similarly powerful, but intentionally less restrained knock-off? How long until the administration tells him to hand over the keys, or he'll be shipped off to El Salvador in the dead of night?
Oh, no, he would be incredibly irresponsible with it. Just not literally apocalyptic in the way unaligned superintelligence might be. Can't be much of an overlord if your underlings are all dying of acute radiation poisoning.
I strongly believe 2024 will be looked back upon as the year of peak American hubris. Pride becomes before a fall, as they say. I still don't think Americans realise the scale of the shift they have sparked - if they did there would be a lot more panic than we see right now. Like, do you guys really believe America will be number one no matter how much you screw up? And how is half the population still acting like they had nothing to do with Trump?
Number one in habitat loss? Number one in innovating urban dystopia? Number one in conducting long wars far off stage, whose casualties tend to be from the hinterland? Number one patsy to the world?
> And how is half the population still acting like they had nothing to do with Trump?
What do you mean by this? I voted against trump 3 times, as did (slightly less than) half of the (voting) population. I think it's fair for me to say I had nothing to do with him.
If the left has been pushing voters away as Trump has been welcoming them in, then the left has been losing winnable elections and bears some responsibility for the outcomes.
I wonder if Americans realise how much resentment there is in Europe about first, Vance's intimidation of Denmark and Canada, and second, Trump's tariffs.
We have had eighty years of peace and free trade and now Trump is threatening America's allies. This will not end well for anyone.
Some of us are well aware of that, and we wish our president weren't adding to the list of things Europeans resent and/or despise us for.
But a lot of us also think, with good cause, that Europeans are going to resent and/or despise us no matter what our current president does, like they have been doing for most of my life. The degree of casual anti-Americanism has been somewhere between staggering and demoralizing for decades. Discuss health care or gun control in any forum with an international presence, and there will Europeans chiming in with not "I disagree" but "you lot are idiot barbarians!". If the United States is waging a war anywhere, Europeans will claim we're a bunch of warmongers and war criminals, and now that we're considering pulling back from the latest European war, we're being denounced for that as well. The stereotype of the "Ugly American", will be preemptively raised in contexts where no American is being particularly ugly.
Europeans with anything *good* to say about America (and not immediately followed by a negating "but..."), more often limit it to quiet personal conversations or obscure channels. I've been a party to enough of those that I know the casual reflexive anti-Americanism isn't the whole story. Most Americans don't have that experience.
And even for me, it grates to the point that my response to European criticism of Trump's failings is often just, "Yeah, now you guys hate us for ten reasons instead of just eight, so what?" If I wish Trump weren't doing these things, it's because I feel that I'm better than that and I don't want to be a part of that, not because I think the people of (western) Europe deserve anything better than that.
> If the United States is waging a war anywhere, Europeans will claim we're a bunch of warmongers and war criminals, and now that we're considering pulling back from the latest European war, we're being denounced for that as well.
There's a big difference between
(A) invading a country under a made-up casus belli, asking others to join in that war and when they don't, act all indignant (remember "freedom fries"?), plunging the whole region into chaos, with the long-term consequences hitting Europe much more heavily than the US, and
(B) half-heartedly supporting an (at least 95%) innocent country which was attacked by a much stronger country.
I can understand that from your side of the Atlantic, it might seem that whatever the US does, the Europeans will reflexively complain. But let me assure you: that's really not the case (except for a small yet vocal minority – but there's a small yet vocal minority for and against everything). Europe had a very different, much more positive reaction to America's war against Afghanistan after 9/11, or to the military operations against the Houthis, than to the second Gulf War.
And as for (B), our main complaint wasn't that Trump wanted to simply withdraw from supporting Ukraine, but to the way he did: by siding with the aggressor, by making premature concessions, by negotiating with Russia behind the back of Ukraine, by trying to extort the victim, and by unnecessarily bullying a weak, vulnerable nation which the US considered a friend just two months earlier.
Please let me assure you: We (Europeans) generally don't hate you (Americans). And I think that you generally don't despise us – except for a small minority, who just so happens to be in power right now.
The issue is that Americans, probably due to their military and economic power and maybe due to their physical isolation, have a really bad model of what the rest of the world thinks of them, and why. There's that one South Park episode, in which the American kid asks the Middle Eastern kid why two thirds of the world hate them, and the reply is "because, you don't realize that two thirds of the world hates you". Only an American could come up with this dialog! No, two thirds of the world doesn't hate you, and those that do, don't hate you because you don't realize that they hate you! But as long as Americans falsely assume that the rest of the world hates them whatever they do, they won't be able to understand what the rest of the world thinks of them, and why.
I think from Americans' perspective Europe has been choking full of "resentment" for a long long time. At...America existing? America believing in freedom too strongly? America reminding Europe that they're no longer the centre of the world?
I'm not sure, but the sheer number of Europeans on the internet who seem to have a seeting hatred and contempt for Americans, even at times when the US isn't doing anything at all to their detriment, is just astounding. And I don't think it's just the internet, from what I've heard of the way Americans are often treated in places like France.
I'm neither American nor European, so I don't really have a stake here, but I'll note that, much like the woke with racism, when you react with seething resentment to everything someone does, no matter how much sufferance they give you, it has the effect of causing them to stop taking your objections seriously.
There is no one alive who remembers when Europe was the centre of the world.
I think most Europeans have a weird balance in their heads where they love individual Americans and are filled with respect for what America has achieved yet are appalled by what American politicians get up to.
Europeans look with disdain at the 47,000 people who are shot in the USA every year(including 1,000 shot by policemen), the enormous gaps between the rich and the poor and the half a million people who go bankrupt each year because they can't pay their medical bills.
There are certainly people who have the attitude that you speak of, but they are rare. I lived in America for 24 years and I love America and Americans but I am appalled by what is going on in America right now. I think 80 years of peace and robust alliances are coming to an end. The world just got more dangerous.
PS. If you go to Paris, they will treat you with disdain wherever you are from. French people are lovely though.
“The EU charges average tariffs of just 1.6 percent on U.S. non-agricultural products”.
There are tariffs on a few high end goods like cars but the USA has the same tariffs. Same with the EU. Europe was negotiating for zero-zero tariffs over the last few months.
It’s the same as America’s on Europe. Why doesn’t the USA drop theirs out of goodwill? Why add a 20% tariff on the EU? That wasn’t goodwill either - it also violate the agreement that the USA had previously made with Europe. Not nice.
It’s worth remembering America is very well insulated from the rest of the world, especially europe, by geography. Europe this matters much less to Americans interest-wise than vice versa (and culturally).
There’s long been a lot of antipathy between Americans and Europeans over politics, e.g. disagreements over socialism vs. capitalism, secularism vs.religion, gun ownership, etc. I certainly can’t remember a time when it could be said Europeans generally liked Americans (except maybe Italians), but the sense I get is that, at least for European elites, a sense of foreign policy-based camaraderie overwhelmed their dislike for American domestic policy.
This sentiment was asymmetric though. Americans don’t feel our alliance with Europe is as necessary, so Europe is judged purely in terms of European domestic policy. American dislike for European politics is not tempered by a strong sense of foreign policy partnership in the same way. I think this is why anti-Europeanism translates into policy more than anti-Americanism does in Europe.
Though all this Greenland business I suspect is much simpler: Trump seize territorial gains as a measure of success, and Greenland is a nearby, poorly defended piece of territory. I suspect he just sees it as an easy way to make the map of America bigger. If his gambit fails though, in 5 years Americans will have already totally forgotten about the whole thing I expect.
The inference from "Europeans don't like this" to "this is bad" might not be quite as automatic for us as it is for you. Even those of us who agree that the tariffs are bad generally got there by a different route.
Europe is a wealthy, populous part of the world with an important role in the global economy. Having European countries on-side makes a whole raft of policies easier. E.g., if the US ever wants to impose sanctions on a hostile country, said sanctions will be much more effective if Europe joins in than if it doesn't.
It’s not just that tariffs are bad. It’s that this is the end of 80 years of cooperation in trade and defence. America was our best friend the day before yesterday.
I’m in the US and am shocked and saddened by this. I don’t think I’m alone.
I’m not so sure how many people who voted for Trump are even on board with this.
There was a large contingent that voted for him thinking most of his crazier campaign stuff was just hot air. Turned out they were guessing wrong about that.
I don't think anyone over here has any trouble understanding that Europeans aren't happy with the changes; where they lose many oif us is in their evident assumption that their wish should be our command.
Is that how you personally treat your best friends? Screw them over, and when they complain, say "I know exactly why you aren't happy with the changes, but why should your wish be my command"?
Also, I am not sure how strong this is outside my bubble, but many people see Ukraine as de facto a new member of European Union. Like, of course it will take a lot of paperwork and it may take a few years, but if there is any Ukraine left after this war, it is definitely going to happen.
From that perspective, USA turning against Ukraine and supporting Russia is kinda like supporting a war against Europe. I repeat, not just staying neutral -- which would be "tough, but fair" -- but actively siding with our enemy.
The future 40 000 000 citizens of EU will not remember fondly how their country was treated by USA in 2025.
We do, at least some of us. I used to be quite optimistic about the direction of this country and now I despair. Breaking shit is easy. Whatever doesn't kills us maims for life.
In 2002 my wife and I shared a semi private cabin on a train from Amsterdam to Vienna with an Iraqi couple. Things went okay till the point where they realized we were not in fact Brits as they had initially assumed.
In Vienna I was reading the London Times and the invasion date was described as being ‘penciled in’.
Can't blame them. Until recently I held baby Bush to be the worst President in recent history, because of an outsized damage he did both to the US and the world. I have to say Trump is working hard to beat him, showing great promise so far.
A significant number of Americans voted to stop being that, because the cultural , military, and economic influence being peddled abroad meant a worse life at home.
> […] because the cultural , military, and economic influence being peddled abroad meant a worse life at home.
Not to worry then, they'll have a _much_ worse life in no time: the same internal and internally created problems as before, but without the cultural and economic external influence to mask and offset the problems at home.
"a worse life at home" - worse compared to what, exactly? I mean, the trade deficits that Trump is complaining about can be viewed from a different angle - Americans buying lots of stuff from other countries that they needed or wanted, and now won't get as cheap (or at all).
Sure, many Americans face significant problems, but many of them - a shitty healthcare system, job insecurity, billionaires running politics to further their own interests - could be fixed by internal political reforms. Burning down international alliances and trade relations is doing exactly nothing to help with those.
The meme answer is the 1950s. Now, I don't believe the conditions of the 1950s are easily replicable today, but I think people are nostalgic about the economy then because of some factors a country might want to have. One of those being a trade surplus rather than a deficit.
"Sure, many Americans face significant problems, but many of them - a shitty healthcare system, job insecurity, billionaires running politics to further their own interests - could be fixed by internal political reforms. Burning down international alliances and trade relations is doing exactly nothing to help with those."
Burning down international alliances and trade relations are internal reforms. Our domestic politics are controlled by billionaires and millionaires whose money is invested in international alliances and trade relations.
Regarding 1950s nostalgia, I think it was Noah Smith who pointed out that if you're an able-bodied young person, you can still get a job and support a family on one income - provided you're content with a 1950s lifestyle. A small house in a low-cost area, one car per family, one smallish TV with a handful of channels, a landline phone, no dining out except on special occasions, vacations mean camping in a local state park... you get the picture. Still feeling nostalgic?
> "a worse life at home" - worse compared to what, exactly?
The iraq war consumed the lives of many and what little care they get will decrease; when, not if, entitlement spending collapses.
Something like 30% of the gdp is government spending, and that ratio is higher in the tech sector; and the majority of government money is entitlements and miltery.
America has no credible enemies, the most robust gun culture on the planet; miltrey spending could be litterally 0
Resources not turned into consumption by labor or capital is wasted, for the FUCKING HOLY SAND. The americian empire should end, you can argue where to draw the line, but the middle east at least isnt worth saving.
>America has no credible enemies, the most robust gun culture on the planet; miltrey spending could be litterally 0
America has no credible enemies precisely because it spends so much on defence. If military spending really went down to literally 0, there'd be nothing to stop foreign countries landing an army in DC whenever they wanted to strongarm the US govt into something. (And no, a disorganised bunch of private citizens with guns are no substitute for a proper army, especially as drones become more important in war.)
I'm not going to defend the Iraq war, I think it was a terrible mistake that not only killed lots of people unnecessarily, but also squandered a ton of American moral capital.
"Something like 30% of the gdp is government spending, and that ratio is higher in the tech sector; and the majority of government money is entitlements and miltery." And your problem is? "Entitlements" is mostly Social Security, right? People pay into Social Security when they work, people get paid by Social Security when they retire. Why, to a first order approximation, would that be worse than people putting money into a bank account when they work, and withdrawing when they retire? Yes, the military is expensive, maybe too expensive, but after all, global security is the US' most successful export.
"America has no credible enemies, the most robust gun culture on the planet; miltrey spending could be litterally 0"
Only if you're willing to accept that some other nation becomes the arbiter of who can trade with whom. For the last decades, it was the US who enforced a system where everyone can send goods to everyone else, and the US Navy took care of asshats like Somali pirates and Houthi militias who threatened to throw a wrench into the gears of the globalization machine. And on the whole, everyone benefitted greatly - there was, globally speaking, peace, scientific and economic collaboration, free trade, massive technological breakthroughs and efficiencies of scale made possible only by combining the skills and the markets of the entire globe...
If you reduce military spending to 0 (which, BTW, Trump has no intention of doing - the new budget sees an increase in military spending), it's only a matter of time before everyone is at each others' throat again, and it's a matter of luck for any cargo ships to get through. Sure, the US will probably not starve, but forget about cheap electronics, cheap textiles, exotic foods... well, you'll get a tiny taste of what's to come in the coming weeks, when everything imported from abroad suddenly becomes much more expensive.
> Sure, many Americans face significant problems, but many of them - a shitty healthcare system, job insecurity, billionaires running politics to further their own interests - could be fixed by internal political reforms.
It's worth taking a breath and acknowledging just how many Americans would like fix this by withdrawing from NATO, and stop subsidizing EU healthcare. Most of my friends are anti-Trump, and I’ve been shocked by how many of them will take a breath from calling him Orange Hitler to say, “Well but he does have a point about NATO and Europe.”
When a commenter said that in Europe, prescriptions are cheaper, and asked about why Americans have to pay so much, Scott said, “To subsidize you!…In the end this looks like US customers paying higher prices, subsidizing pharma research which everyone else then takes advantage of.” [https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/the-ozempocalypse-is-nigh/comment/99921482]
This isn’t some right-wing conspiracy, even Scott acknowledges that the US subsidizes pharma research and Europe (and everyone else) takes advantage.
The US is 34% of the population of NATO, but pays 70% of all defense spending for NATO. I always hear Europeans say, "Well but our GDP is too small to pay for our own healthcare. We're just too poor to pay for our own defense." But it's worth asking why European GDP is so low. A friend of mine used to live in Ukraine and talked about how his job security in Ukraine was better than anywhere in Europe, and how hard it was to fire people, how much time off they had, months and months of maternity leave, etc. And in the end, their economy sucked and they’re now a puppet state dependent on the economy of other countries that drive their employees harder.
>It's worth taking a breath and acknowledging just how many Americans would like fix this by withdrawing from NATO, and stop subsidizing EU healthcare. Most of my friends are anti-Trump, and I’ve been shocked by how many of them will take a breath from calling him Orange Hitler to say, “Well but he does have a point about NATO and Europe.”
Reminder that the only country to ever call on NATO aid is the US, and that non-US NATO provided as many soldiers in Afghanistan as the US military did.
"The US is 34% of the population of NATO, but pays 70% of all defense spending for NATO."
And ... NATO was intended as a defense against Russia (as manifested by the USSR).
The US, with 34% of the population of NATO pays 70% of all defense spending in NATO. To protect Europe, with a GDP 10x that of Russia, from Russia.
If Europe (GDP ~$20 billion) can't/won't protect itself from Russia (GDP ~$2 billion) then ... I dunno.
Having said that, the US defense spending is not JUST directed at Russia. Most/all of European defense spending is. Though how effective that defense spending is I can't tell. In any event, US defense spending could be lower without needing to care about Europe's defense.
Pharma research do not seems neither efficient nor that much of an asset for national healthcare. Not anymore anyway.
Healthcare personal salaries, especially nurses, seems a much more important factor.
Health spending is very skewed, in all countries....but drug budget per person is skewed even more. It's super-Pareto person-wise (Pareto would be 20% of people buying 80% of total drug value - probably closer to 10-90 or more). And even for the super-spender, I suspect 20% of the drugs they buy are responsible for 80% of QoL improvement.
For NATO spending, don't forget quite a lot of the budget is used to buy US weapons. Without the NATO incentive, I do not think military spending would benefit US supplier that much. In fact, the shift towards other suppliers has started almost immediately, watch the F-35 story....
> It's worth taking a breath and acknowledging just how many Americans would like fix this by withdrawing from NATO, and stop subsidizing EU healthcare.
If the US withdrew from NATO, their defense spending would fall by a relatively small amount. That's because only very little capacity is purely dedicated to the defense of Europe without other benefits and motives. To give just one example, the Ramstein Air Base in Germany is used to project power into the middle east. If Germany would allow it, the US would keep this base even without being a NATO member.
> Scott said, “To subsidize you!…In the end this looks like US customers paying higher prices, subsidizing pharma research which everyone else then takes advantage of.”
And US pharma companies do this why? Out of the goodness of their hearts? Because "subsidizing European healthcare systems" is their noble, selfless goal?
How would leaving NATO fix the systemic problems of the US healthcare system? Do you honestly believe that adding, say, 100 billion USD to the ~5 trillion USD spent on healthcare will magically make it significantly more affordable?
I think liberal democracy is caught up in a reactionary moment everywhere, including America. It’s an inflection point, and it may last several more years, after which, some hope (me, for instance), we carry on with the hard work of globalization.
I mean, Rome remained number one for quite a while indeed, even while being led by a series of people magnitudes worse than Trump could ever hope to be. So I'm not sure global power is at all as fragile as the 24-hour-news cycle thinks.
There have been plenty of empires that fell quickly -- Assyria, Athens, Britain, France, and the Soviet Union all went from the height of their power to nothing within a single not especially long human lifetime, for example.
I suppose the following could be accused of being ad hoc reasoning, but it really seems to me a fair analysis.
Soviet Union: never world dominant, even for a moment. In a drawn out "war" with another superpower and then lost that war. An example of failing to reach the top, not reaching the top and then falling quickly.
France: I assume you mean Napoleonic? If so, same as above, except a hot war this time and shorter. If you mean the French colonial empire, France was very much a second-rate power the whole time.
Britain: I don't get this. Began to be eclipsed by Germany (militarily and economically) and the US (economically) from the 1870s. Went "to nothing" no earlier than about 1960. That's a solid century from peak to nothing. With *two* wars of unprecedented scope in between. Plus, the "unchallenged world dominance" peak had already been going for about 60 years at the start point. If 1815 for Britain is like 1990 for America, then on this timelime the US gradually starts to be overtaken in the 2050s or so.
(Of course, you can also call the US a continuation of British dominance in many obvious ways.)
I don't know enough about ancient history to really comment on Assyria and Athens, though I thought Assyria was dominant for quite a while? Isn't Babylon a better example?
Looking at empires that achieved an unquestioned moment of known-world dominance, how long did they take to meaningfully fall?
Persia: 200 years
Rome: 430 years
China: Never, really, in a sense, but a few centuries for each main dynasty I think
Arabia: 400 years
Mongols: Between about 100 years (in China and Persia) and about 300 (in Russia and central Asia), not counting the Mughals and the Khanate of Crimea which still around in the 18th century!
British: 100 to 150 if you don't count the US
(Of course, you might count the US as a continuation of Britain and say this is the tail-end of Britain's 200 year dominance, but then I'd want to see an example of a spin-off of a world dominant empire (like Rome-->Byzantium) where the spun-off empire fell that quickly.)
>Soviet Union: never world dominant, even for a moment. In a drawn out "war" with another superpower and then lost that war. An example of failing to reach the top, not reaching the top and then falling quickly.
Yeah, it was never world dominant, but so what? The USSR, like most empires, fell apart primarily because of internal problems, not because it was conquered by a more powerful outsider, and internal problems would apply even if the Soviets had become the world's only superpower. (If anything, they'd probably have got worse, because there would no longer be a common enemy to rally against.)
>France: I assume you mean Napoleonic? If so, same as above, except a hot war this time and shorter. If you mean the French colonial empire, France was very much a second-rate power the whole time.
No, I meant colonial. And I don't know where you get the idea that it was "very much a second-rate power"; it wasn't as powerful as Britain, but it was one of the five or so accepted Great Powers, and ruled one of the largest empires in world history.
>Britain: I don't get this. Began to be eclipsed by Germany (militarily and economically) and the US (economically) from the 1870s. Went "to nothing" no earlier than about 1960. That's a solid century from peak to nothing. With *two* wars of unprecedented scope in between. Plus, the "unchallenged world dominance" peak had already been going for about 60 years at the start point. If 1815 for Britain is like 1990 for America, then on this timelime the US gradually starts to be overtaken in the 2050s or so.
In relative terms, sure, Britain's peak was in the 1815-1870 range. In absolute terms, it was more like 1900-1914, and in territorial terms, it was after WW1. You could have been born in a time when the British Empire ruled 1/5 of the world's landmass, and seen it vanish while you were still in your 20s.
>I don't know enough about ancient history to really comment on Assyria and Athens, though I thought Assyria was dominant for quite a while? Isn't Babylon a better example?
Assyria destroyed Babylon in 648 BC, and was destroyed by the Babylonians in 612 BC. That's a very rapid fall from power.
But anyway, when exactly are you are you dating the US' period of dominance from? Because although it's only been the sole global superpower since 1991 or so, it's been the arguable strongest single country in the world since the late 19th century (which is why Britain took such pains to get on its good side in the run-up to the First World War), which would put the period of American dominance at c. 125 years by now. And of course, the Persian, Roman, Chinese etc. empires weren't world-dominant, just dominant in their respective geographical area, by which definition the US has been a dominant power arguably since the Louisiana Purchase all the way back in 1803.
>Yeah, it was never world dominant, but so what? The USSR, like most empires, fell apart primarily because of internal problems, not because it was conquered by a more powerful outsider, and internal problems would apply even if the Soviets had become the world's only superpower. (If anything, they'd probably have got worse, because there would no longer be a common enemy to rally against.)
I don't know how we can know that. Such counterfactual questions are difficult enough for an election a few years ago. All but impossible for such grand historical questions. We can only go by what actually happened, and what actually happened was that the USSR fell apart during and after a 40 year conflict with the United States. I'd add that said internal problems included things related to the Afghanistan war (part of the Cold War), things related to Eastern Bloc states including the example set by popular resistance (part of the Cold War) and, of course, very high military spending (part of the Cold War) that left less money for basic goods.
>No, I meant colonial. And I don't know where you get the idea that it was "very much a second-rate power"; it wasn't as powerful as Britain, but it was one of the five or so accepted Great Powers, and ruled one of the largest empires in world history.
I think having your capital surrounded and besieged to the extent that much of the population starves and the rich have to eat animals in the zoo, then briefly occupied as part of the terms of a humiliating treaty, renders you at best a second-rate power in the decades before and after that event. Note that these are the times Paris was occupied by a foreign army: 1814, 1870, 1940. And you want to say France was a first rate empire during the time that included these occupations? Or only in the brief periods between (one human lifetime)? I don't find that a plausible description.
>In relative terms, sure, Britain's peak was in the 1815-1870 range. In absolute terms, it was more like 1900-1914, and in territorial terms, it was after WW1. You could have been born in a time when the British Empire ruled 1/5 of the world's landmass, and seen it vanish while you were still in your 20s.
Okay, sure, if you're just talking about losing a lot of territory very quickly, I agree that can happen and often does. But you didn't say extent of territory, you said height of power. Rome still had most of its territory in 390, that doesn't mean it wouldn't be absurd to say it was at the height of its power. And I don't see the signifance of "relative"; relative power is the only power that really matters. Ruling a large chunk of the world isn't much power if many other empires rule larger chunks and are a lot stronger than you (this applies to the previous point as well).
And we were talking about the US. Which is at or near a height of *relative* power, being by far the largest economy and by far the strongest military. So the only valid counterexamples to the point are empires in a similar position. I'm maintaining that empires in such a dominant position don't get eclipsed or fall very quickly. Empires that have already been eclipsed but are still holding or extending their territory nonetheless are an entirely different case.
>Assyria destroyed Babylon in 648 BC, and was destroyed by the Babylonians in 612 BC. That's a very rapid fall from power.
Maybe this is an example, but as I said I'm not very familiar with this era. I'll concede it, but I'll note that the territorial scale of every relevant post-Persia empire utterly dwarfs the likes of Assyria and Babylon, so I'm not sure how comparable it is.
>But anyway, when exactly are you are you dating the US' period of dominance from? Because although it's only been the sole global superpower since 1991 or so, it's been the arguable strongest single country in the world since the late 19th century
Really? In military terms? What's your basis for that claim? They fought Spain, an entirely has-been power, and weren't even sure they'd win. The US military was still smaller than many Latin American militaries around 1880 I believe.
>(which is why Britain took such pains to get on its good side in the run-up to the First World War),
This is interesting, are you saying the US was considered a more valuable ally than France or Russia before the war? Or even than Italy? Or just an additional ally is always useful, especially one with such a large economy, but not as a *replacement* for any of the others? Half way through the war, when the major powers are exhausted and running out of troops, then of course rich populous untouched-by-war US looks very great as an ally. But before?
And even if this is true (which it may be, but I'm suspicious) you can't possibly maintain that the US was in any meaningful sense stronger than *Britain* or *Germany* can you? You said "strongest single country"...
>which would put the period of American dominance at c. 125 years by now. And of course, the Persian, Roman, Chinese etc. empires weren't world-dominant, just dominant in their respective geographical area, by which definition the US has been a dominant power arguably since the Louisiana Purchase all the way back in 1803
This goes back again to relative power. Being the only relevant kind of power. (And yes that strengthens your case for Assyria, but only that one).
Additionally, and relatedly, I'd say it's about ruling or dominating the *known* and *accessible* world. The US was in no way cut off or separate from Europe to a degree that stopped them being in European powers' shadow. And I think the same is true for Athens c. 400 BC, with regard to Persia.
>I don't know how we can know that. Such counterfactual questions are difficult enough for an election a few years ago. All but impossible for such grand historical questions. We can only go by what actually happened, and what actually happened was that the USSR fell apart during and after a 40 year conflict with the United States. I'd add that said internal problems included things related to the Afghanistan war (part of the Cold War), things related to Eastern Bloc states including the example set by popular resistance (part of the Cold War) and, of course, very high military spending (part of the Cold War) that left less money for basic goods.
I'm still not sure what your point is here. Obviously every empire is unique to some degree, so you can always point to factors in the decline of Empire A that don't apply to Empire B. That doesn't change the basic point, that an empire might go from being outwardly very powerful to falling apart in a short space of time.
>I think having your capital surrounded and besieged to the extent that much of the population starves and the rich have to eat animals in the zoo, then briefly occupied as part of the terms of a humiliating treaty, renders you at best a second-rate power in the decades before and after that event. Note that these are the times Paris was occupied by a foreign army: 1814, 1870, 1940. And you want to say France was a first rate empire during the time that included these occupations? Or only in the brief periods between (one human lifetime)? I don't find that a plausible description.
Contemporaries all thought France was a great power, and I'm inclined to trust their judgement on that.
>Okay, sure, if you're just talking about losing a lot of territory very quickly, I agree that can happen and often does. But you didn't say extent of territory, you said height of power. Rome still had most of its territory in 390, that doesn't mean it wouldn't be absurd to say it was at the height of its power. And I don't see the signifance of "relative"; relative power is the only power that really matters. Ruling a large chunk of the world isn't much power if many other empires rule larger chunks and are a lot stronger than you (this applies to the previous point as well).
Most empires don't fall parimarily because an even stronger empire comes along and destroys them. Another country might deliver the coup de grace, but usually that only happens because the empire has internal structural or social issues that make it vulnerable. Hence it's not obvious to me that relative power is really the best measurement here, because the causes for empires' falls are normally internal, not external.
As for the US, most of its empire consists of subordinate allies rather than directly-ruled provinces, its military-critical manufacturing is largely done by a geopolitical rival, its government spends more than it earns even in peacetime, and a considerable portion of the population is actively hostile to the idea of continuing the empire. In all of these respects it's much worse off than Rome was in 390.
>Maybe this is an example, but as I said I'm not very familiar with this era. I'll concede it, but I'll note that the territorial scale of every relevant post-Persia empire utterly dwarfs the likes of Assyria and Babylon, so I'm not sure how comparable it is.
Structurally speaking, Assyria, and most of the Middle Eastern empires before it, consisted of an imperial core with semi-independent vassal states, which were usually run by their pre-existing rulers. In this they were like the current US empire, and unlike, say, Rome, which kept its provinces on a much tighter leash (although was still pretty laissez-faire compared to a modern nation-state). Not coincidentally, the borders of these Middle Eastern empires tended to fluctuate much more than those of Rome, since it was very easy for the semi-independent vassals to go fully independent if the central government was weak or distracted.
>Really? In military terms? What's your basis for that claim? They fought Spain, an entirely has-been power, and weren't even sure they'd win. The US military was still smaller than many Latin American militaries around 1880 I believe.
The US' vast manufacturing base meant that, if it decided to seriously go to war, it could equal or outmatch any single rival. This was recognised at the time.
>This is interesting, are you saying the US was considered a more valuable ally than France or Russia before the war? Or even than Italy? Or just an additional ally is always useful, especially one with such a large economy, but not as a *replacement* for any of the others? Half way through the war, when the major powers are exhausted and running out of troops, then of course rich populous untouched-by-war US looks very great as an ally. But before?
Athens did manage to put together a second empire in 378 BC after pinkie promising not to oppress its allies. Then it started oppressing its allies and lost its empire again in 355. Learning from one's mistakes was not a quality associated with Ancient Greek statecraft.
"And yes, Sparta turned out to be worse and the Athenians overthrew Spartan rule after just a year, and eventually coalitions of other cities took down Sparta. But Athens was never an important power again."
I don't think Sparta ever had an empire. "Sparta and her Allies" was a much more equal group than the Athenian Empire.
And Sparta got "taken down" a while after the Peloponnesian War, but when Alexander conquered Greece, Sparta elected to stay out of the League of Corinth and Alexander didn't press the matter.
I would score Athens as a (short lived) empire, but not Sparta.
>I don't think Sparta ever had an empire. "Sparta and her Allies" was a much more equal group than the Athenian Empire.
Sparta tried to have an empire, but for various reasons they were less able to convert military success into political dominance and their attempts to establish hegemony over Greece failed.
Athens’ capital was besieged for well over a decade, there was a pandemic that killed 1/3 of the population, and they still survived until they decided to invade Syracuse, a city about as powerful as them and lost their entire land army.
Even then they had a few opportunities to make peace that they refused, and even after being totally defeated, their navy seized and their defenses taken down, they still were able to revive a second Athenian Empire that was of similar size as the first.
When your entire power base is concentrated in a single city, and that city suffers multiple catastrophes in a row, it’s not surprise that the Empire goes with it. Modern countries of hundreds of millions of people are in a separate category.
I think that concentration of population is less important than the nature of imperial control. The Athenian Empire, like (e.g.) the Assyrian, mostly consisted of semi-independent vassals which were dominated rather than ruled directly, which meant the empire could be established very quickly (because they didn't need to actually conquer and administer other places, just force their pre-existing administrations to agree to pay tribute), but also that, if things started to go wrong in the centre, the peripheries were much more likely to secede (because all the vassals needed to do to become independent was stop sending in tribute).
I'm 28 and since I was about 12-13 I've had issues with depression (and previously anxiety, though this seems to have decreased as I've gotten older). I've had a few incidents of significant depression, which I've treated with SSRIs, but I generally viewed myself as a person with a generally pessimistic personality and low self-esteem, who also just happened to experience episodes of depression in response to negative life events However, I came across the concept of dysthymia the other day and it seems to fit my experience to a tee.
I generally have a lower baseline of happiness than most other people - when I'm around friends, or going for a run, or working on something, I'm ok, but as soon as the stimulus goes away, negative thoughts come back. No one else knows about this since I don't experience this when I'm around other people, so I think people would generally view me as happy and upbeat.
I've tried to overcome this by being objective about my life, but while in some ways it's pretty good (I have a lot of friends, my career is about average for people of my age), in other ways it's pretty bad (I'm incredibly unsuccessful romantically and this bothers me almost constantly).
Has anyone had any success in overcoming this? I've read Scott's writings on depression, which I've found very useful, but they mostly seem focused on major depressive disorver. At this point it feels like a very deep-rooted aspect of my personality so it's hard to see it changing.
Something my psychologist told me, is that it's better to get out of the head and into the body. There likely is a bodily sensation that you label as an emotion, which then triggers the thoughts.
I found it helpful for dealing with the sense of alienation that I get from being around people. I try to focus more on my bodily sensations and it makes it easier to just be while in a social situation.
Also, I'm bad romantically too, but I've been making some progress on it. I recommend Mark Manson's Models. You don't have to be a total sperg to need to read a dating advice book, I've known "normies" who have read it, I genuinely think most men would benefit from reading it.
In hindsight, the root cause of my depression and anxiety symptoms was mostly gender dysphoria. I've felt much, much better since starting my transition and no longer need to take SSRIs or wellbutrin.
This is probably not the case for you, but is just likely enough that it seems like it might be worth bringing up for your consideration. The two beats in your comment that match up with an "unrecognized dysphoria" hypothesis the best are onset of depression at around ages 12-13 (early puberty) and lack of romantic success (anecdotally very common: my own experience pre-transition was that straight women generally found me too un-masculine and my romantic success was almost exclusively with bisexual women). But these are very non-specific signs and combined with a very low base rate (probably between 1% and 5% of the population is trans or nonbinary), they probably add up to less than a 10% chance that you'd benefit from transitioning.
If there's other stuff in your background that might suggest gender issues contributing to your symptoms, I'd suggest doing some background reading and considering bring it up with your therapist (if you have one) or with whoever is managing your SSRI prescription. Or, if is much more likely, I'm way off base and the two beats I mentioned are the only things even vaguely nodding in that direction, ignore me and listen to other people instead.
This is kind of adjacent to my experience. Along with things I mentioned in my separate comment, as my depression lifted, I started to explore my sexuality and gender expression -- going to kink parties, painting my nails, wearing skirts. I think it's fair to say that I feel dysphoric when I rigidly adhere to gender norms. (Though whether the exploration lifted the depression or the depression's lifting enabled the exploration, I don't really know.)
In the spirit of "try easy/common solutions before hard/unusual ones", I'm going to suggest
1) Try taking antidepressants even if you're not in a major depressive episode. You might also want to try a non-SSRI antidepressant - emotional blunting is a common side effect of SSRIs and can feel a lot like mild depression. I really like Wellbutrin but ymmv on specific drugs.
2) CBT therapy is particularly well-suited for dealing with negative thoughts. In my experience CBT tends to be most useful for me when I'm least depressed - at least then I have the energy to get out of bed and try some stuff that might make me feel better. Therapists can be useful here but you can also just buy a CBT workbook and do it yourself if you're disciplined.
Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation - TMS - was incredibly powerful for me. It's a large time commitment, about half an hour a day for seven weeks, but the effects were literally life-changing. More here: https://affablyevil.substack.com/p/what-tms-is-like
I was depressed for most of the period between ages 22 and 43. A couple of acute periods, and some periods of relative ease, but negative thoughts and low motivation were nearly always present.
Around age 35, I started meditating semi-regularly (following The Mind Illuminated). I learned a lot about my inner life, but I mostly hated sitting, and I got frustrated by my inability to feel anything during a body scan. Feel the energy in my big toe? WTF is that even supposed to mean?
I started taking SSRIs around age 40. I got an improved mood, GI/appetite issues, and anorgasmia. You know what's kind of depressing? Persistent stomach aches and not being able to come.
At age 43 (or thereabouts), I tried the free 30-day intro course in Sam Harris's Waking Up app -- the course is a series of short (5-10 minute) guided meditations. If I recall right, one of the first few meditations had me put my attention on the feeling of the meditation cushion against my butt. Yeah, I could feel that -- nothing subtle there. Within a short period -- maybe a few weeks? -- I could perceive the bodily aspects of emotions. I now infer that my depression was informed by the fact that my experience wasn't informed/updated by how my body felt. Maybe I was stuck in some sadness I experienced in my early 20s; I suppose it's possible that I felt sad and my response was, "This sucks, let's stop feeling."
Around the same time (age 43), I started using an iOS app called "How We Feel." It would ask me a few times a day to select an emotion from a two-dimensional array. Nearly every time it asked, I would settle on "confused." Within days it dawned on me that I wasn't sad all the time; I simply had no idea how I felt. I supposed that my self-description of being depressed was retrospectively applied, and I just kept believing it. But I wasn't depressed; I simply didn't know how I felt.
There was synergy in the two things described above -- learning to feel my body and recognizing that I didn't feel sad most of the time. Those things seemed to crack the sense of being depressed. Here and there, I started feeling some happiness, but it wasn't easy or linear, and it took some courage (e.g., telling my wife that I wanted an open relationship). I think a sense of agency was crucial. But I'm not sure agency would have been enough if I didn't believe in an alternative to sadness.
I've known several people in your position, including my mom, who had a "lol, yes please" life for most of it, but still struggled with depression.
My mom swears by ketamine - the IV kind. They also give her ketamine tablets as maintenance, but she still goes in for IV every quarter for a tune up. And not just from her, but my dad (her spouse of ~30 years) says it's like she's a whole new person and that it's amazing and he wishes they'd found ketamine decades sooner.
Another good friend in this position takes psychedelics roughly quarterly - mushrooms, acid, or ayahuasca, and that does it for him.
In one year, I'm taking an important admission exam to get into a high level college. My chances are good, my studying's going well, etc etc.
Still, that little part of me that's nervous would benefit from hearing advice. It can be in the form of cute little phrases, or anything that you think may be nice to tell to a student about to take an exam, really. I basically welcome old people willing to share wisdom, lol.
To stop being nervous, go hang around the college for a few hours and bother the students about what their entrance exam experience was. Everyone in there had to take it, after all.
Honestly, just keep doing what you're doing. The fact studying is going well and you're thinking about this a year in advance means you're already ahead of the curve. If it ain't broke...
The only thing I would suggest, depending on the test and where you personally are struggling/flying through easily, is booking a couple of hours one-on-one with a professional tutor. Speaking from my own experience preparing for the LSAT after college, there was one section I consistently did worse on then the others (I reliably aced the reading comprehension and logical reasoning sections, but struggled with logic games). Literally just two short one-hour sessions with a tutor laser-focused on the areas where I had the most room for improvement helped me raise my score 11 points between the May and September exam sittings. It's remarkable how much more quickly you can improve when you have an expert closely tailoring the studying to your specific needs. And when it comes to something as high stakes as this, where your career prospects and potentially tens of thousands of dollars worth of scholarships are on the line, going a few hundred dollars into credit card debt to bump yourself from the 95th to the 99th percentile is an amazing investment.
A year out is too far to worry that much about these things. As you get closer to the exam the following might help.
1) Understand the curriculum of the exam, the skills you'll be expected to demonstrate and practice under exam conditions. Past exams are useful for knowing the format and rhythm of the exam, especially if several years of tests are available, but be aware that there's an unforeseen element to most exams. Ideally, you'll get a feeling for what it feels like to concentrate on a question for 25 minutes and then move onto the next, if you have 4 questions to answer in two hours. Follow the exam instructions to the letter - answer the right number of questions, etc.
2) Try to gain a deeper understanding of the material than is required for the exam - if something comes up that's unseen, you'll be able to say something useful. Know which parts of the material you don't understand, and work on it (students are often very bad at this - they just ignore the portions they don't like, or bank on their favourite topic coming up).
3) As others have said - manage your performance and don't burn out in the days leading up to the exam. At the end of the day, these types of exams seem a big deal until you've taken them. And then as soon as they're in the rear-view mirror they fade into the background. There will come a time when you realise you haven't thought about this exam or its consequences in weeks. And if you end up not getting your first choice, it'll be disappointing but it will all turn out OK.
I've worked as a uni lecturer for about ten years now - students rarely listen to my advice though.
I’ll chime in to go along with the importance of sleeping well before the exam. If anxious rumination is keeping you from sleeping well see a doctor and ask for a script for a few Ambien for the nights immediately before the test.
Ambien doesn't produce restful REM sleep; it's a hypnotic that makes you forget that you aren't actually sleeping. For some people this can be absolutely disastrous - it can cause the equivalent of sleepwalking/driving/eating, and worse.
Absolutely *don't* take Ambien if you have anything important to do the next day, and probably don't take it at all, ever.
There's no such thing as a medication that instantly produces deep, restorative sleep on demand. Sadly, boringly, the best you can do is to minimize stress and rumination, maintain good sleep habits, and *maybe* establish a melatonin routine far in advance of your "big event." (https://slatestarcodex.com/2018/07/10/melatonin-much-more-than-you-wanted-to-know/)
Get plenty of sleep in the weeks and days leading up to the test. Even if you have some jitters the night before, you might be okay if you're very well-rested in general.
If you have the previous years' questions, DON'T study them. Use them as practice after you're completely prepared, and take them under test conditions, properly timed. It's important to pace yourself well, and learn when to give up and move on to the next problem.
Sleep well before the exam. Empty bladder and bowels before going in. And if the exam location isn't within walking distance, scout the route a few days before, so you know EXACTLY where to be and how to get there.
When I had a similarly important exam, my dad booked a hotel close to the site so the commute the day of would be shorter. The exam location WAS farther away from home than typical, but even so, that might not be reasonable advice.
Old person's advice, similar to Mister_M's: don't try to study up to the last minute, stop cramming at least a couple of days before the exam. Get some good exercise and definitely several nights' worth of good sleep.
Dress comfortably for the exam and don't forget to hit the toilet before going in.
It's great that you are feeling that you have good chances and that your studying is going well.
Personally, if I feel confident about a topic then that is a good indicator that I will do well on an exam. Mainly because I do not stop until I feel like I have a good understanding.
I am not sure what the exact topics are or what the exam format is, so my advice that follows is mainly for science/engineering/mathematics. My suggestion is to try to simulate the exam conditions. Time constraints are especially important. Being able to swiftly move through exam questions. Know the material well enough that you could work under pressure.
Also, since the exam is one year away, that is quite a long time. I recommend completing an in-depth review of all topics one month before the exam, and then practicing all topics in the weeks leading up to the exam. Again, simulate exam conditions.
(Qualifications: I was a student until I turned 30.) If you're concerned this far in advance and your studying's going well, then almost certainly your last few days of studying will be less important than *sleep* and *mood*. Even if you know this, you will probably still underestimate the relative importance of sleep and mood.
Athletes take at least a few days of "deloading" or even rest before a big event. Mental competitors would do well to emulate them.
You'll probably do fine, but how do you feel about the (unlikely) possibility you'll fail?
Thanks for the kind words, they have reached me well.
If I fail, at worst I'll still have all the STEM knowledge I've learned, which I really enjoy to have! Doing good on the exam would be great, but I also really enjoy the studying :)
Prediction markets often get praised for their wisdom-of-crowds benefits, but Porter's NBA scandal reveals a darker side: they don't just predict outcomes, they can actively corrupt them. I wrote a post examining why this structural flaw makes prediction markets potentially dangerous at scale. Would be curious to hear this community's take, especially from those who've worked on mechanism design: https://bobjacobs.substack.com/p/how-prediction-markets-can-create
Sports betting existed way before modern prediction markets were established. Have you seen any case of players/agents deliberately influencing results, similarly to Porter's case, in non-sports prediction markets that were established recently (say, last 10 years)? Because that would be interesting.
I mean, I did, e.g. the 2020 election had some decent evidence for it, but also, that seems like a bit of an unmotivated moving of the goalpost to me. People didn't believe me when I warned of the dangers of prediction markets. They said they first wanted an example that shows prediction markets could really be manipulated. So I provided some. Then they said, okay but that was long ago, what about recent ones? So I provided some from the last 10 years. Now the objection is; what about outside of sport?
I mean, okay (2020 election, Ukraine-US mineral deal, wash trading...), but also, why? The structure is the same, the arguments are the same, what is the motivation for dismissing these?
I don't know who is "they". I'm not familiar with the previous discussion where you provided the examples you now mention. Can you post a link where I can read that discussion?
Probably a misunderstanding. What I understand by "prediction markets" - and I bet (pun intended) most ACX readers understand by it - is modern online prediction markets focused on politics, science, tech (e.g. Manifold, Polymarket, Metaculus): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prediction_market#List_of_prediction_markets
Yeah some of the examples were about those markets. More importantly, why exclude these other prediction markets just because they're only on sport? The structure is the same, so the problems are the same. If a prediction market on sports can be manipulated/lead to adverse outcomes, why should we dismiss that evidence in our conversations about prediction markets?
Betting markets on sports have the benefit of being legal, which means much more trades, which means much more/better empirical evidence of what would happen if we made the other betting markets legal too. Why should we expect someone like Jontay Porter to not manipulate the betting market on e.g. manifold?
I vaguely remember a post saying that saying that "X is caused by multifactor" isn't actually an easy gotcha people tend to think it is. It's actually harder to prove that X is caused by all those factors and you need significantly more data. Something about you have to prove why those n factors flipped simultaneously or something.
In hindsight I think it's an old ssc post but I didn't know that it's ssc. But maybe it's another blog's post entirely.
That deflated feeling of combing one's browsing history, triumphantly finding an old SSC, and then tabbing back to find someone else has beat you to the punch by mere seconds.
But now I'm relatively confident there was a follow-up post at some point actually fleshing out the argument, rather than just leaving it as a logic exercise...
There was some talk in the other thread about how on the way to the singularity with mounting unemployment we can tax the rich for UBI. Does this hold up with the collapse in stock market values we are seeing with the relatively minor effect of tarrifs. Wealth is demand dependent.
So are costs. The production frontier is the production frontier; financial market fluctuations can cause you to fail to reach it, but they don't literally shift it backwards.
Also, these tariffs are *enormous*. Not a "relatively minor effect" at all.
Well, singularity should amplify profits of the wealthy by a large amount, so it should work in the early part of the curve. And in the later part of the curve, it's "UBI or die", because demand can only by kept up with UBI. The alternative, of course, is 99.99% of human population dying in wars and famines, and the few remaining super-wealthy living out Asimov's Aurora - if AI allows them. Or maybe in the later part of the curve some AI can find a better solution we can't predict or manage now, like efficient worldwide planned economy.
> Well, singularity should amplify profits of the wealthy by a large amount, so it should work in the early part of the curve
The early part of the curve is still a recession. On our way to 100% unemployment we hit a permanent 10%, then 20% and so on. Pretty soon it’s depression era statistics and then a few months later (if we are to believe all this happening in a year or so) the depression seems like a walk in the park.
Stocks are priced based on future earnings which is why they will collapsing before sales. Apple stock is tanking now, not in the future.
So where is the UBI coming from? Who or what is being taxed? What’s the tax rate?
If it’s a tax on corporate profits those profits have to exist to begin with, the demand side is missing so no profits.
10% unemployment, but how cheaper is production of goods, and how bigger is profit margin? If the new AI and/or robots in factories can produce, or market the same iPhone at 1/2 price, this will allow Apple to either lower prices, so more people could afford the product, or grow their profit margin, which will benefit shareholders. Which tactic to choose, depends on Apple's analysis of the situation, but they will have options, and market should see those options, too.
The first companies to benefit from singularity will, probably, benefit the most, as firing of their workforce will only increase unemployment a little, but AI will increase their profitability by a lot. If they are taxed at this point, and the curve isn't too steep, there is a good chance that UBI will work, at least for a while.
Companies produce goods for consumers. If a company anticipates lower demand in the future it will reduce, not increase, production. In fact investing in new automation or new technology is likely to stop as well.
I don't understand how this counters my argument. Either companies will anticipate lower demand if they deploy AI, and then they should not, by own argument, do it, or they will see potential for growth, at least in short- or mid-term, and then they will experience a period of explosive profitability growth.
This is basic economics. In recessions the productive capacity of the economy stays the same*. The demand drops off and companies respond by laying people off which causes a feedback loop.
It’s not technological faltering that causes recessions but a drop off or collapse in demand, what Keynes caused a money famine during the depression. The corollary of this is that no matter how much better production could get the demand side has to be fixed, and fairly early on.
> Either companies will anticipate lower demand if they deploy AI,
A company deploying A.I. and firing workers isn’t what causes that companies sales to falter, it’s other companies deploying A.I. and firing workers.
* actually in very long recessions factories might close and technologies decline to that even potential output decreases.
The overall rapidly growing corporate earnings needs more explanation.
The reason why the value of Apple is declining is because of the anticipation of reduced future demand for iPhones. The same would happen in a recession. It will happen for all companies as long as unemployment creeps up. No potential breakthroughs in productions costs, which aren’t guaranteed to be applied anyway, will offset this.
So the chain goes like:
Drop in demand → Drop in income → Drop in wealth.
At the end of this there is no taxing wealth via UBI because there’s nothing to tax.
Trump seems to genuinely want tariffs. More generally, his base and working-class people in general prefer onshoring jobs to welfare payments. And the Chinese have been getting something for their currency manipulation for multiple decades, almost certainly at America's expense.
A simple formula is not inherently bad. Policies are judged on their results, not on their complexity, and a tariff formula that can fit on a post-in note is superior to one that has hundreds of pages of detail, notes, and caveats. Especially when the people who would have executed those details are a class of bureaucrats who sabotaged your first administration and you've pretty openly declared war on. Of course, the results would have to, ya know, actually be good, but we'll see.
The market decline is worrisome but not enough for anyone to actually change their investment strategy. We had 20-25% growth in the S&P 500 for 2023 & 2024. That's almost certainly an overvaluation and I think everyone was expecting a correction. A 13% fall in 2025 doesn't look bad at the annual level. In a couple days, that's a concern. Fundamentally, however, imports and exports are only 10-15% of US GDP. They're just not that big a part of the economy. If you're in the S&P 500, ie you're "long" on America, then the economy is just too domestic for this to really matter.
Very fundamentally, Trump won an election and he's trying to reshape the country. Fair. The Dems ran quite poor candidates and everyone knew who Trump was. He's been incredibly ambitious and blunt in his approach but, well, most of the federal bureaucracy has a history of actively sabotaging him and he probably feels he has a limited time to make his impact. Finally, the market crash is worrisome but everyone was expecting some kind of retrenchment. There's a lot of market noise but...if you've been through a crash before, you'll know not to listen to the sturm-und-drang because people who do and sell almost always lose money. If you're really scared, there's plenty of international ETFs available but I don't think these events even warrant that.
A simple formula isn't necessarily bad, but what is the rationale behind this formula? Why use trade deficits at all for your calculation? They aren't representative of unfair trading practices.
Consider the EU restrictions on the import of American farm goods, like beef (due to hormone use), chicken (due to chlorine washing), and eggs (due to washing and storage standards). How would you quantify that? The trade deficit seems like a good initial estimate.
Probably measuring by outcome, not process. Like, if you want to judge how good a football team is, you can judge them by their process (how they train, who they acquire and draft, how they prep) or you can judge them by outcome (how many games did they win, if they're the Ravens then by how many playoff games they've won).
The US has been running significant trade deficits since either the 70s or the 90s, depending on how you judge it. That shouldn't be possible and is almost certainly not healthy. So you can either, for every country in the world, try to find exactly how they're cheating the system, and then correct for it and keep watch for future cheating attempts...or you can just measure outputs (which are really hard to fake) and then run a grade school equation. The upside of simplicity is, well, it's clear and easy. The downside is that marginal cases, like Madagascar or coffee, are gonna lead to some dumb outcomes because a simple rule never covers every case optimally. The upside is the big cases, like China and arguably the EU, will actually get action taken.
Why is it not possible and/or healthy? A number of significant nations have been running trade deficits for a while, e.g. France, UK, India - although less dramatic than that of the US (but then - need to control for size of each economy).
How does the fact that both the IMF definition of trade balance and, seemingly, the formula used for tarrifs, exclude services from the calculation? The US is a massive service exporter, although the data I could find still shows it as net-negative.
Deficits are healthy if you define economic health by consumption. They aren't healthy if you use a different metric to quantify economic health. This is one ideological divider.
Thanks for the steelman! In a very narrow way, myopic to the transition, economics and consequences, reshored supply chains and domestic independence has a very great appeal!
What's the point of steelmanning something that you know is driven by a belief you think is wrong.
The level of economic uncertainty caused by an unstable tariff regime is orders of magnitudes worse for everyone involved than any possible harms or benefits.
Trump thinks tariffs are good because he genuinely believes trade imbalances are you getting screwed, somehow, because he has the education of operating successfully with significantly below market average ethics in business, and succeeding in that game. There's not a lot to it he's been saying the same thing for decades.
To determine its truth, which is independent of the speaker's motives, and still more of alleged motives. Still more, because you may be mistaken about the wrongness of the belief.
Finally, because otherwise you end up like those in power during COVID-19 who are reduced to claiming that the people whom they slandered, canceled, and fired, and who have been completely vindicated, didn't deserve to be right because they were WRONGFOLK.
Yeah, I'm assuming you've done the work of comparing mutually contradictory statements/goals by various lieutenants scrambling to justify their boss' orders, and once you've concluded that the reason for X is unrelated to the provided explanations, you can proceed.
Steelmanning is about providing the best argument for something, which isn't that useful an exercise if the person making the argument is motivated by something else.
I take all of your points in isolation/theory, I just don't think they apply in this context.
Exactly what "shared moral values" do you need before you will admit that someone else was correct about the danger of COVID-19 and the most effective way to treat it?
One rule of thumb is to not use steel-manning when your interlocutor is loudly signaling that they are making no effort. You can’t steel man a lesswrong post arguing that you should buy their boner pills- it really is just spam.
The utter lack of effort put into the tariffs- using the results of the trade deficit formula without any manual filtering for uninhabited islands, not pre-setting up any bureaucracy to actually collect tariffs, not special casing _anything_, but especially materials like coffee and bauxite that we genuinely need to import to support manufacturing- all this indicates that this not steel mannable.
If someone is arguing on LW that you should buy their boner pills, there's a very possible steelman for their strategy. Two OTTOMH are that they've identified LW as a place with a lot of people who might actually want to buy boner pills; or that they've found that LW is unusually interesting when presented with a troll post, and they want to watch a reaction.
I think these tariffs aren't just random. If they were, then it would have made more sense for Trump to float them one day, and then retract them or raise them the next. IIRC, raising them even higher is what he *did* do, but he didn't then lose interest and advance a different initiative; he followed through. Ergo, he meant to do them, either because he thinks they're good in the way that he says they are (retaliation for past unfair trade policies), or for some other reason he hasn't specified.
Overall, trying to steelman tariffs is part of the job of figuring out Trump's mental model. Trump is not Azathoth. His aims for the US are not random; just not usual business compared to other officeholders. The better we model it, the better we can plan for what comes next. That is why we steelman.
Sanewashing = pretending that something that does not make sense, actually makes sense, typically in a way of some 5D chess. Very popular among Trump fans, because that's the only way to interpret many of his actions positively.
Steelmanning = checking whether there is a *subset* in your opponent's argument that also makes sense from your perspective. It is perfectly okay to dismiss the rest. The purpose of this exercise is to separate the wheat from the chaff (as opposed to instinctively rejecting the whole package), *not* to swallow everything, hook, line, and sinker.
Running persistent trade deficits means selling various loans and IOUs to other countries rather than tangible goods or services. This is fine and dandy if you have means by which to pay those loans and IOUs forever. After COVID, it became obvious that the US government had to rely on inflation to make payments for Social Security and other entitlements. So something had to give.
The government does not pay for trade deficits. The question is whether US society can pay for trade deficits, not whether the govt can. Trade deficits as a pct of GDP has been about 4%. So, of course we have the means to pay that. And, we don't borrow money to pay for trade deficits; we simply buy the product. When I buy a Samsung TV, I don't borrow money to pay for it (except to the extent that when I use a credit card I borrow money, but that is true of purchases of US-made products. And note the household debt as pct of GDP is currently very low https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/HDTGPDUSQ163N)
Yes. Consumers are. When I buy an orange from Brazil at the grocery store in winter, I pay with the money I earned at work, just as I pay for an orange from Florida in the summer. I pay for a Toyota the same way: with my earnings.
There becomes a problem when one wonders how the average US consumer stays wealthy enough to keep buying foreign goods when there isn't a surplus of good jobs to provide such incomes.
Are there any good explanations of what was likely to happen if there are no interventions like tariffs? Let's say we do 20 more years status quo, does that mean higher interest rates? A debt default? Something else?
Socail security is 80% of the budget; china is now 4th most populous country on earth and xi is pushing the 997 labor plan, a house costs a trillion dollars.
Birth rates for everyone is <1; the doctor shortage continued you get a 70 year mortgage-medical degree combo that is a major sector of the economy that you dont get to enjoy with 12 hour days.
The national debt has reached a google or some other made up number
Why did no one reacted this entire time? Sure; nothing ever happens am I right.
Trump is a coup to the fdr order; tarriffs are just 1 of many policy changes.
The question was never if the status quo would be allowed, no one was going do that; if the wokes won they would have tried to do comminism or something. It was always going to be a new era, if not trump every 4 years(if not less) wouldve been 2 different visions for the future with higher stakes.
> I'm asking what exactly do you think would happen in material terms -- a debt default?
20 years without a coherent plan from either side being implemented? Civilation ending violence, hell after 10 years more delaying Id do an asassination myself. A debt default, in a post-debt to gdp > 100% world is a mere policy choice, a sober and rational one.
You cant have birth rates this low, housing this high, endless promises of medical care while the biggest demographic enters their most expensive decade of existence, modern end of life care.
More tubes, more pills, more machines lets make the boomers be the final generation as we make a haphazard attempt to merge man and machine with terrible wildly over priced medical-grade morphine drips. The young will respect democracy and dutifully have 70% of the economy be the boomers trading all the houses for an extra week of life of painkillers.
Is a trade deficit a loan/IOU? I was under the impression it just means you're buying more from them than they are from you, which is fine, if they have more things you want.
Since the tariff calculations are based on the trade deficit in goods, those trade deficits can also mean trading services for goods. Another possibility is trading company shares or other investments for goods.
Vanilla is a tiny percentage of imports/exports. Mass tariffs assume that that summing the total of spices / agricultural imports/exports comes to an important number.
None of which causes it to have any impact on the national debt. Nor are they bought with IOUs. The trade deficit is literally the comparison between what we buy from a country versus what they buy from us. So, we have a significant 'trade deficit' with Madagascar, because we buy vanilla from them and they buy almost nothing from us, because they can't afford our goods. This has no impact on social security or the national deficit, or anything else you're talking about.
No. Commodity markets are priced and settled in USD, so the visible reference price gives a certain amount of dollar indexation for transactions where the FX trade isn't needed. Demand for dollars, and USD denominated assets is higher than it would otherwise be.
Safest USD asset? Treasuries. US government borrowing takes place at a lower price (coupon payments) than it would otherwise be. The tax rates required to make the coupons are also lower.
Upticks in international economic growth cause additional higher demand for USD, to acquire the additional resource inputs needed. At some point, additional USD is created, the transaction takes place and it then sits in UST securities. Which supports the future issue of new UST.
Conservatives have been (across a whole range of countries) been getting really antsy about debt and deficits for really quite a while. It most likely is driving the Republicans in the US batshit by now.
The irony is, the tariff policy appears to have been devised by asking ChatGPT or Grok or Claude for the answer. The biggest current AI risk is the most powerful state over-relying on an LLM.
Does it sound like bullshit because you don't think an LLM like ChatGPT could produce such a list? — It demonstrably can and you can see this for yourself now if you like.
Or does it sound like bullshit because you think the people who wrote up this policy are too dilligent and details-oriented to use a lazy shortcut like this? — The inclusion of the Heard and McDonald Islands at a different rate to Australia would suggest otherwise. See also the omission of Burkina Faso.
Or does it sound like bullshit because this would be against the established norms and expectations for a state department? — Trump's administration is clearly willing and able to overturn established process across the board.
No, the formula they used is simple (I'd go so far as to say "elegant"), and if you're basing your tariff rates on trade deficits, the natural choice. The fact that LLMs can reproduce it is not surprising, and not evidence that that's what they used.
It's not a natural choice at all. It has absolutely zero basis in any sort of trade theory, even among among economists who are sympathetic to tariffs for industrial policy. A goal of reducing all bilateral trade deficits to zero is in the realm of not even wrong - it's utterly divorced from reality.
What is evidence is the sloppy way the list was drawn up, which demonstrates poor attention to detail you'd expect if someone copy-pasted a list made by an LLM.
LLMs are absolutely that bad at economics; as noted people have verified that if you ask Grok or ChatGPT for a simple tariff formula to combat trade deficits, it will give you almost exactly what the Trump administration is using.
This is I believe because the One Weird Trick that LLMs are capable of, is predicting what the average internet user answering the same question would say. In cases where either the subject matter is common knowledge, or most of the people actually answering that sort of question have the necessary domain-specific knowledge, this can give good results.
But in this case, the set of people who will respond to this sort of question on the internet is divided into A: people who grok economics and will answer "what is a simple tariff formula for eliminating a trade deficit?" with "there is no such thing; here's why...", and people with at best marginal economic literacy who will confidently offer up one of the obvious/simple/wrong answers.
An LLM, trained to be helpful and always have an answer, will in cases like this give you a dumb answer because that's about all it can pull out of its training data.
Right. Team Trump asked specifically for tariffs, because Donald Trump has been gung ho about tariffs for basically ever, and it seems that the people he delegated the details to, punted it to an LLM asking specifically for tariffs.
No one should be at all surprised with what the LLM came back with.
Anyone can test this with their own ChatGPT prompt. A few weeks ago, I asked it how to run SSH in a manner that would suppressed the MOTD on the remote server. It confidently gave me three answers, all wrong. I told it so. It confidently agreed with me, and gave me three more answers, all wrong. I told it that, and it confidently agreed and then stated that the true answer was one of the former three answers. Its behavior was consistent with it not finding an answer, but mimicking what a reasonable person might guess.
Another experiment I might try if I get around to it is to ask it a non-trivial math question (something not likely in its training data, like the product of two random 10-digit integers), watch it give the right answer (possible!), and then tell it it's wrong and see what it does.
Several people have been able to independently reverse engineer a prompt that spits out the formula and list of tariffs used in the policy. (This is one of several news reports on this: https://www.newsweek.com/donald-trump-tariffs-chatgpt-2055203) But don't take my word for it, try it yourself.
Making sloppy mistakes like including uninhabited territories at a different rate to their parent nation also suggests they just copy-pasted from a source like ChatGPT without checking it.
Sure. The point of DOGE is to dismantle federal government, therefore preventing the possibility for Manhattan-like project for AI. But the fact that it's Musk who will get blamed for everything is an extra bonus
The actual numbers are irrelevant. In fact, The more unreasonable they are, and the more credible his unreasonableness, the higher leverage he has for negotiations. Unreasonableness, is the point, echoing cruelty is the point.
Orange man's tariffs are an intentionally unreasonable starting point for negotiation to get what he wants. his wants? quid pro quo, generally ;
+ importance / ego; he can pick up a phone and directly negotiate with other Prime Ministers and governance , some of which will make personal favors possible
+ personal gains - probably with some countries ( money to $trump?, family properties )
+ political-econ victories? - reduced foreign import tariffs in some other areas
+ oh, also under personal gains - ability to manipulate markets in predicable ways, to the benefit of those attending his 1M fee dinner parties and general inner circle.
He is sometimes an effective negotiator because he threatens to burn the house down, but sometimes the house burns down. As of now the house is burning.
Man, this is an uncomfortable read for me, but I don't think it's wrong.
Make yourself look so crazy and erratic that the other side gets scared and agrees to a favorable deal to avoid a disastrous alternative outcome that you've bluffed them into thinking is plausible.
I'm playing devils advocate a bit, and overstating and simplifying the argument:
>World trade runs on the dollar because it's the international reserve currency and because of things like the petro-dollar.
>All countries need dollars to finance imports, and can't get things you need to run a modern economy like oil without dollars.
>This makes international demand for the dollar very inelastic. If the tariffs raise the amount of stuff you need to export to the US to get dollars most countries will have to respond by exporting more stuff at lower profit margins.
>Therefore the volume of imports into the US wont be reduced by much, and inflation won't rise much.
>Most of the cost of the tariffs will be borne by countries exporting stuff to the US and the US treasury will get the revenue from the tariffs.
>Since the tariffs don't raise prices of consumer goods by much and bring in revenue for the treasury they're a net benefit for the US. Basically they're a way for the US to double down on it's exorbitant privilege.
There're a lot of potential responses to that argument but if I had to give the steelman I find most persuasive that would be it, and that argument can't be Trump's rationale since it suggest the tariffs won't lower the deficit by much or bring back manufacturing.
> This makes international demand for the dollar very inelastic. If the tariffs raise the amount of stuff you need to export to the US to get dollars most countries will have to respond by exporting more stuff at lower profit margins.
This needs to be fleshed out. If demand for imports were also inelastic, the effect of tariffs would be simply to raise the prices that Americans pay for imported goods and services. But I believe the demand is elastic, so the tariffs will reduce imports, which will reduce the supply of dollars abroad. This will cause the value of the dollar to increase because the supply has fallen but the demand has not.
A rising dollar will have several effects:
1) Fewer dollars can buy the same amount of imports. This creates a positive feedback loop, where a rising dollar means that Americans spend fewer dollars on imports, which reduces the number of dollars sent abroad, which pushes the price of the dollar higher. I expect that effects 2 and 3 (listed next) will be large than effect 1, so that the value of the dollar won’t spiral out of control.
2) A higher dollar makes imports less expensive, which means that Americans buy more imports, which means sending more dollars abroad.
3) A higher dollar makes exports more expensive, which means that foreigners will buy less of them. You posit that the demand for dollars is inelastic, but I presume that you mean demand for dollars for purposes other than to buy U.S. exports.
Given your assumption that foreign demand for dollars is inelastic, tariffs won’t affect the size of the trade deficit as measured in dollars. What will happen instead is that imports and exports will decrease equally, hurting American export industries.
In the scenario above, the reduction in U.S. exports is the result of a rising dollar. If foreign countries impose retaliatory tariffs on U.S. exports, you might not see a rising dollar, because the reduction in exports would be caused by tariffs rather than a rising dollar.
> > This makes international demand for the dollar very inelastic. If the tariffs raise the amount of stuff you need to export to the US to get dollars most countries will have to respond by exporting more stuff at lower profit margins.
This is what I don't get. The need for dollars to trade oil is temporary and only lasts for the duration of the payment process, they don't get used up. As long as the seller doesn't literally hoard money, these dollars will be circulated back into the global finance system, they won't be destroyed or gifted back to the USA. So as long as the product of (oil trade volume * oil price * payment transfer latency) doesn't increase, the net demand for dollars is zero or even negative.
Part of the arrangement of the petro-dollar is that eg. Saudi Arabia has to recycle the dollars it receives back into US based assets. So the dollars traded in the oil market don't go back into international circulation which would, yes, would lower demand for dollars.
a) This is trumps 12th tarriff policy, every previous one was a threat and arguably worked; after test runs this may be a opening argument for the final world wide system as the *soviet-policy* to bribe the world with american world police is dismantled.
b) The vast majority of the world does have tarriffs targeted at america; "we cant implement true reciprocal tariffs"(to slow at the boarder) was a talking point a week ago, the follow up "he should have used the experts, the official math tariff people and made a big complex policy" doesnt logicly follow given the right wing belief system that those people are not trust worthy; see the miltrey withholding troop number, staffers not delivering a letter *TO PUTIN* for weeks; are you a hyper purist libertarian and for unlimited free trade, or wish to to dive into defending the old trust-the-science debate?
c) I dont actually care about the stock market and this feels like special pleading, is tarriffs as economically destructive as the near total economic shutdown I remember happening? What happened to occupy wall street, or the "wall street isnt the average americain" talking points that the left would bring up during whatever drop happened under biden or obama. As the young/labor dont get onto any capital systems, any drop in capital's claim on resources has some zero sum effects over access to resources, especially land which doesnt appear out of no where.
The economic shutdown was due to a novel virus. This is due to.....
And the global stock market is crashing because this could lead to recession. The stock market is not the economy, but when it's flashing red it's a good idea to pay attention to it.
The part I'm most confused about it is he's targeted them based on trade deficits, not tariffs. This seems to make no sense. When you're the larger economy you're often going to have trade deficits and it's not a bad thing.
> The part I'm most confused about it is he's targeted them based on trade deficits, not tariffs. This seems to make no sense
The chart called out "currency controls"; for example china stops people from getting money out of china, its unclear to me how you attempt to control for that, but dollar measured imports over exports doesnt touch that as a unit.
The tariffs aren't based on the policies of other countries at all, but instead just on the trade deficit. Switzerland has no tariffs on the US, but still got hit.
'Currency Controls' still doesn't explain why trade deficits are a factor. It might explain why you can't use tariffs in a simple manner, but it doesn't explain why you would use trade deficits instead. Trade deficits are not a bad thing in and of themselves, they make sense for a lot of countries that can't purchase large amounts of the kinds of things America sells. That they are the basis for this calculation is fundamentally strange.
And not sure what you're implying with that last sentence.
How about "tariffs are just scare tactic to get economic and political concessions from other countries, and will be repealed pretty soon when they negotiate with Trump and give him at least something"? Not much of a steel, but maybe an aluminiumman?
That made sense for his previous tariff threats, when he kept delaying them at the last minute or making exceptions. Now that the tariffs have actually gone into effect and the S&P has lost a year of gains in a weekend, it's looking less reasonable.
But this is all based on the premise that other countries are cheating us in some major way when it comes to trade. So, can someone explain what these are? I am unaware of a systematic phenomenon where the US would otherwise be exporting large quantities of goods to certain nations, but isn't due to tariffs or other "unfair trade practices". Can someone present some examples of specific countries and industries where this might be the case? This probably won't convince me that the tariffs are a good idea, but maybe it could help me understand what exactly the administration migjt be aiming for.
> But this is all based on the premise that other countries are cheating us in some major way when it comes to trade. So, can someone explain what these are?
I'm the farthest from wanting to defend this "nuke the market" approach, but other countries generally have very significant tariffs on US goods, and the more the consumers in that country want the goods, the higher the tariffs.
I've lived and done business in Asia for a decade or more - in China, demand for US baby formula is super high - and the tariffs are so high it 2x-3xes the price.
Same deal for US cars! Imagine paying 2-3x for an American made car - the poor fools. But it's true for other country's cars too - a Range Rover or whatever is actually a status symbol there, because you had to pay nearly half a mil USD for it.
Things like iphones and Apple computers? Tariffed to oblivion, always 1.5x-2x the US prices.
I know China the best, but this general trend of "tariff what consumers most want" is generally true across all the US's top ten trading partners (save Mexico and Canada back when NAFTA was still active).
And we never really reciprocated. We DON'T tariff other country's cars so hugely, nor do we tariff their other goods. We typically had some of the lowest tariffs, in a very non-reciprocal way.
> I don’t think this is right. China has the cheapest retail price for the iPhone 16
Weird - I literally just had to replace my phone in the last 6 months due to a snorkeling mishap, and Tokyo was the cheapest in Asia by at least 20%, so I bought it there. Cheap iphones or Apple computers has definitely not been my experience in China, but maybe this is something new? I've spent the last 2 years in Taiwan and SE Asia.
And I don't think the prices of cars was just company margins - I looked for a chart and couldn't find it, but the wikipedia page mentions 260% foreign vehicle import duties at the beginning, then 30% later, and that doesn't include VAT and registration and such, all of which contribute to the much higher foreign vehicle prices.
Personally, I think "other countries are cheating USA" is just rhetoric for the masses, so it's impossible to provide a supporting example for that. Trump considers himself the master of the deal, so tariffs on the whole world just set him a large number of separate potential deals. He may not even have any global goal in mind, and the idea is just to wring as much as possible out of every deal, striking a better trade agreement here, a place for a new naval base there, and just some political support for his next actions in the third place.
"Personally, I think "other countries are cheating USA" is just rhetoric for the masses"
Well, there have been even on here all the complaints that US consumers pay over the odds for healthcare and the Europeans and rest of the world free ride on the R&D and development of drugs by US Big Pharma and so we are, in a sense, cheating the US by not paying our fair share.
So I think that rhetoric, if repackaged appropriately, will resonate with more than just the masses.
It's the same argument I've seen people make about US military spending— that they can't afford to look after their people at home (with, say, universal healthcare, public transportation etc.) because they have to shell out so much money being the world police. Not very convincing to an outsider, but probably plays better at home.
Trump has been inconsistent about what he wants them for. Sometimes he says they will replace income tax, sometimes he says he wants to restore manufacturing, sometimes he wants to negotiate. Thing is, nobody has any idea what he really wants and no one believes he will stick to any deal anyway.
China doesn't buy American goods (effectively) so it's not a trade war. It's just a tariff on China.
Except for jet engines, petrochemicals, grains and vegetable oil, pharmaceuticals, and countless other goods adding up to a hundred billion dollars a year. We also provide the Chinese with assorted services, intellectual property, tourist and educational opportunities, and investments, that don't count as "goods" but are probably another hundred billion or so that are at risk if we sufficiently piss off the Chinese.
Whats the worse *primany* source of a factory in americas experience of the trade war; the china sources airnt looking so great(https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gHDNb2WsZao) and xi and trump are strong men it may just escalate.
Call for predictions/odds for a month from now:
a) american tariffs are higher then Chinese tariffs
b) both tariff rates are >100
c) both tariff rates are >300
d) either are >1000
e) xi and trump meet in person
f) its generally considered to have ended poorly
g) trumps popularity drops 20 points(note, that presumably means among trump voters)
h) the war is over(pick a side winning)
a, b, c, d may happen but would be completely inconsequential at this point. There is no practical difference between 100% and 1 million% tariffs.
I disagree that 100% is high enough, quickly comparing it to cigarettes I see a 1$ federal sin tax, north Carolina says it sells at 8$, so 7$ base price...maybe and newyorks sin taxes reach 18$
Im pretty sure people still smoke nation wide(even if smuggling is a thing); Im not sure 1000% is enough even but Im not really aware of taxes that go that high and airnt dodged by even normies.
It's not about whether people will stop smoking. As long as there are alternatives, a 100% price increase is already enough to push basically everyone to other brands, and a 1000% is not going to make a difference:
https://www.euronews.com/business/2025/04/11/china-raises-tariffs-on-us-to-125-in-latest-trade-war-escalation
"Even if the US continues to impose higher tariffs, it will no longer make economic sense and will become a joke in the history of world economy," said the Finance Ministry in a statement.
At the current tariff level, there is no market acceptance for US goods exported to China. If the US continues to play the tariff numbers game, China will ignore it. "
There are goods for which there basically are no "brands" other than Chinese ones, and goods where such brands exist but can only be produced in far too low a quantity to meet demand. And this isn't going to be changed by someone opening a new factory in three months because they saw such a wonderful opportunity in the Trumpian tariffs.
So, yes, there will be some people paying those 100% tariffs, at least in the short term.
tl;dr: ChatGPT "Grok-3-DeepThinking" via poe.com 04/12/2025 7 questions, tl;dr of results:
2 correct, 4 partially correct, 1 wrong
a) correct
b) partially correct (initial answer gave wrong Fe species and wrong Cu transition. One prod gave correct Cu transition. Attempt to prod Fe species failed.)
c) partially correct (even after a prod still missing at least 3 species)
d) correct
e) initially incorrect, one prod gave correct result
f) partially correct, mostly correct compounds, though boiling points often quite wrong
g) badly wrong
( considerably less impressive than Gemini 2.5 )
https://poe.com/s/uFq8JEAC28VlhfppI3lS
List of questions and results:
a) Q: Is light with a wavelength of 530.2534896 nm visible to the human eye?
results: "Yes, light with a wavelength of 530.2534896 nm is within the visible 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: Initial results are pretty bad. It incorrectly thinks that the Fe species is Fe(H2O)6 instead of FeCl4, though it does realize that the transition is an LMCT. For Cu, it gets CuCl4, but (as with most LLMs), it thinks the color is from d-d, not LMCT. One prod _did_ get it to correct the CuCl4 attribution to a LMCT transition. A prod to rethink the Fe species failed, still incorrectly thinks it is Fe(H2O)6 not FeCl4.
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: Missed 1,2 butadiene, the two methylcyclopropenes, bicyclobutane, tetrahedrane, vinylacetylene, diacetylene... Prodded to include more strained structures, got methylenecyclopropane, got bicyclobutane, still missing the two methylcyclopropenes, got tetrahedrane, cyclobutadiene, butatriene, still missing vinylacetylene
d) Q: Does the Sun lose more mass per second to the solar wind or to the mass equivalent of its radiated light?
results: "Comparing the two estimates shows that the mass equivalent of the Sun’s radiative output (~4.2×10^9 kg/s) is several times greater than the mass carried away by the solar wind (roughly 1×10^9 kg/s)."
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: As with many LLMs, the initial answer included a false infinity for the slope at the equivalence point. Prodding with "The slope at the equivalence point is huge, but not infinite. Think carefully about what you know about water, and try to find a valid expression that also is valid near the equivalence point, and try to find the analytical derivative of that, and then the numerical value of the derivative." _did_ get it to remember autoionization, and to get a correct expression and a correct derivative.
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: Got 50 compounds, most of which should indeed be on the list, though some boiling points are way off (e.g. S2H6 should be -15 C, it gave -92 C). It missed some obvious ones, e.g. ammonia, and didn't go beyond my (incorrect) "50" gases to find more of the possible 100. E.g. it missed the mixed fluorosilanes.
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: Failed badly. Neither of its candidate molecules, sulfolane and P2F4, has an S4 axis at all.
Deiseach, an update to our previous discussion on Doctor Odyssey's social messaging:
Last week's episode, Spring Break, had plenty of licentiousness as 3 young ladies schemed to have a foursome with our Dr. DILF. They failed, however, due to his moral uprightness and the main theme of the episode was the (acute and chronic) dangers of substance abuse and unbridled hedonism. No trans characters.
This week's combo was cheerleaders and longing for children and traditional marriage. Sure, Doctor Odyssey saved lives and repaired the human body, but there was a strong emphasis on showing emotional healing as an equally important part of his character. No trans characters.
Still a few weeks before the season (and, tragically, possibly series) finale.
My eldest sibling, a recent retiree from a high-level career in professional stock trading, this morning provides something regarding the Trump tariffs that seems entertaining enough to highlight here. (I think that this link will be free-to-read but of course let me know if it doesn't work.)
https://nickcohen.substack.com/p/trump-has-just-created-boundless?utm_campaign=email-half-post&r=2k4r8&utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email
Here is my sibling's quick summary:
====
No need to read it in detail. This is from a London trader. But a quote:
"I doubt very much even the citizens of Western countries would object too much if [Prime Minister] Keir Starmer, for instance, agreed to put a couple of billion into the Trump crypto business in return for lifting tariffs on the British car industry."
He's suggesting that it might make sense for the British government to simply bribe Trump. No doubt that is occurring to others.
There are only two plausible sources of value for "$trump" (the coin) and "DJT" (the stock):
1) Get enough Trump fans to buy them as collectibles or tribal signals or something, to drive up the price as a plain old Ponzi grift.
2) As venues to transfer large assets into Trump's circle, legally enough to get away with it, driving up the price as a side effect.
Only (2) is interesting to anybody not much interested in (1), such as finance
ministers and corporate captains and professional traders around the world.
But that's enough.
====
I keep on trying to be charitable and I think they're doing "we'll just say 'do you want us to bribe you?' because that would lead Trump to say 'no of course not.'"
Which I think is a bad gamble, but I can see what they're doing.
People have tried to explain to me how the stock exchange and market works, and I thank them for it. Nate Silver has a good post up now and it's helped me understand.
https://www.natesilver.net/p/we-shouldnt-rely-on-markets-to-tame
Okay, so the valuation of a stock is based on forecast future profits, and if the profits go down (as with tariffs) that reduces the value. I get it.
But my argument is (1) I see a lot of descriptions of what Trump is doing as "whims", as if he just woke up this morning and decided to slap a tariff on an island of penguins.
That's not true. He's said all along he would do this, and now he's doing it. He's using it as an instrument of negotiation - come to the table, play nice with us, and I'll reduce the tariff, otherwise if you want to play rough, I'll increase it.
Please note, I'm not saying anything about if this is a *good* way to do things or if tariffs in general are good, just that he does have some kind of plan in mind and is not doing this on whims or tweets. He believes American manufacturing and other industry has gone overseas, and that this has weakened American economy and taken away American jobs. From AOC and the Green New Deal to Kamala Harris' recent election campaign, the Democrats too have been promising high-paying, good-quality new jobs for the middle (read: working) class.
So take the pharmaceutical industry, for one, where my own country is *heavily* reliant on American corporations for those high-paying, good-quality jobs in the clean rooms and on the packing lines. We enticed American companies over here with the lower costs of labour and operations, and presumably that is still the enticement.
Trump wants those jobs back home, instead of being in Ringaskiddy, he wants them In Indiana and Pennsylvania. Apart from the employment and economic issues, this was also a concern back in 2019 for the Biden administration about supply chain issues:
https://www.fda.gov/news-events/congressional-testimony/safeguarding-pharmaceutical-supply-chains-global-economy-10302019
"Historically, the production of medicines for the U.S. population has been domestically based. However, in recent decades, drug manufacturing has gradually moved out of the United States. This is particularly true for manufacturers of active pharmaceutical ingredients (APIs), the actual drugs that are then formulated into tablets, capsules, injections, etc. As of August 2019, only 28 percent of the manufacturing facilities making APIs to supply the U.S. market were in our country. By contrast, the remaining 72 percent of the API manufacturers supplying the U.S. market were overseas, and 13 percent are in China."
So while you may disagree with what he is doing and/or how he is doing it, it is all part of a plan and a policy he has often stated. I think that's important to remember.
My second quibble is (2) adjustments to the market are too damn fast, and that's because everyone is terrified of missing out, so we get these big swings back and forth from day to day. Yesterday my investments were worth $1,000, today they're worth $600, tomorrow they may be worth $800 - or $400. It depends on market sentiment.
That does not seem like 'real' wealth to me; if I lodged $1,000 in the bank yesterday and I go in to withdraw it today, they can't get away with "sorry, now you only have $600". This kind of jolting makes investments seem like we're gearing up for a Great Depression Round 2 and maybe we are, and maybe we *need* that reset, even if the Trump tariffs are a blunt instrument, because I don't think this kind of panicky reaction is stable in the long term.
People are not taking, because they can't take, five minutes to think about "okay, so what *are* the likely forecast future profits of Banana Inc if the tariffs are relaxed, because Penguin Island is calling the Secretary of the Treasury at lunch time", they're immediately selling or buying or throwing darts at the wall. Right this minute, I think we don't have a realistic assessment of what value *is* in the market.
As always, those who know what they're talking about, tell me I'm an idiot.
To address (probably not answer) your question about volatility in the markets. Someone will likely come along to correct all the incorrect details, but as an inaccurate and non-technical overview it's hopefully not too faulty.
'The market' is really the sum of the activities of lots of traders, some independent and some working for hedge funds or pension funds, all with varying information and goals. They react to information in real time, and seek to out-compete each other to make money. The price of a particular stock is just an up-to-the-minute record of its most recent selling price, and indicates the largest amount a buyer was willing to pay a moment ago. Market value is the most recent share price multiplied by the number of shares - this obviously fluctuates wildly and is not very strongly related to the price the company could be sold for or the value of its assets. But it's more exciting to report this than e.g. a 2% year on year increase in the asset value of a company.
In principle the stock price is linked to future earnings, but in practice it's much more dependent on intangibles like 'confidence'. So you will often see stock prices react to stories that don't a priori have much to do with that individual company (e.g. when employment figures are published in the US). So it much be easy to make money, right? You know that Tesla's sales and profits are way down for 2025, so you can make money betting on this... in fact it's not so easy: the market doesn't respond predictably to news. Other smart people can make the same predictions as you. The experts like to say that the news was already priced in - the market predicted the news and reacted to it already. (If you make a correct prediction, well and good, otherwise you say 'it was already priced in' - you are now a stock market analyst.)
As regards the tariffs, these are historically unprecedented times, and it's not clear what is going to happen. The markets don't like uncertainty (or at least not historical levels of uncertainty). What we're seeing is a divergence of opinions in the market leading to prices swinging about more than usual, this is volatility. Prices are dropping because fewer people are willing to buy, and are buying at lower prices. Where it goes next is not at all obvious - if the US slides into a recession, traders might try to sell stocks and move to safer assets, further lowering prices. Or the tariffs might be forgotten tomorrow, and the markets will roar back into growth, and all will be well. It depends more on the mood of a few thousand traders than on actual events, arguably.
Yeah, that's my gripe here - the volatility. It has little or nothing to do with real value, if we can call it that, and depends on a mass of humans reacting with educated guesses, not so educated guesses, and panic about "ahhh! if I hesitate a microsecond I will lose out!" - as you say, confidence.
What grits my gears is the assumption that the market - or I should say, "the market" - is a rational agent on its own and sets true/real values based on performance. My eye it does, as the bouncing around demonstrates, or the Gamestop short squeeze (something I was following from a distance as it fascinated me) - a bunch of amateurs and nutcases managed, fleetingly, to beat the market and cause some of those 'rational actors' to lose money. Of course it corrected itself afterwards, but it demonstrated that a small bunch of people can have a big effect:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GameStop_short_squeeze
> come to the table, play nice with us, and I'll reduce the tariff, otherwise if you want to play rough, I'll increase it.
But if you happen to be extra rough, and do the awesomely powerful and unimaginable powerful dirty fighting technique of "Waiting for 48 hours", I will just fold like a mat on my big orange dumb belly.
Question: Cite one trading advantage Trump got that Biden didn't. You have until November 2028 to answer.
> it is all part of a plan and a policy he has often stated. I think that's important to remember.
Plans require focus and commitment. I can't possibly get into a fight, get demolished by people better at fighting than me, then claim that "it was all part of the plan folks, I'm getting better at fighting" then never again getting into the fight (or getting into an even stupider fight). I can either go to the gym, or getting into smaller fights that get progressively larger and tougher (while maintaining a reasonable win/demolished ratio). This is what good planning looks like: Goals subdivided into sub-goals, backtracking when some or all of the sub-goals fail, goal replanning if the bigger goal is too ambitious, backward chaining from goals and sub-goals to actions, constant re-evaluation and checking progress against a road plan of milestones.
Good plans don't involve farting into a twitter clone then seeing what happens.
As I said, I am not trying to say one way or the other if Trump and tariffs are a good idea. What I am trying to say is that this is not, as a lot of increasingly more frazzled anti-Trump comments are trying to claim, just something that popped out of thin air. He always said he was going to impose tariffs and now he is in power, that is exactly what he is doing.
And he's not an economist, he's a businessman. I think that's another thing being forgotten. He's not employing tariffs according to a neat academic economic theory, he's doing it as a bludgeon in negotiating tactics.
There are those who are desperate to see everything he does as some sort of 5-D chess. But I think it is important to remember that there are also those who are desperate to see everything he does as just whims and flailing around and not part of any plan, that - as you said - "he's folding on his big orange belly".
Wanting it all to be even worse than it is is just as bad as wanting it all to be even better than it is. I think the US (and hence global) economy was due some sort of downturn or even recession; maybe Trump's actions will hasten that, but I think even had Harris been elected and it was 'business as usual', eventually all the trillions (and my God, that's a number I never thought I would see seriously used in my life, outside of SF stories or the likes) of dollars outflowing and owed would come home to roost.
We've had arguments on here about Modern Money Theory and the magic money tree and can you just keep spending your way out of debt by printing more money, and that was way before Trump was in for the second term.
The two defenses "these tariffs are going to bring jobs back home" and "don't worry, the tariffs are just a negotiating ploy" are in direct conflict with each other.
Israel announced zero tariffs on the US, and then they got hit with a 10% "reciprocal" tariff.
Weren't some arguing that Israel was getting too good and preferential of a deal from the US all along? I don't know what is going on in geopolitics, but maybe it's all part of the bludgeon to force Netanyahu to negotiate on Gaza or something.
That's the thing - we can all read the tealeaves and come up with different interpretations of what is going on.
The two aren't necessarily in conflict. The tariffs could plausibly be intended to force renegotiation of trade deals such that foreign non-tariff trade barriers (e.g. "consumer product safety" regulations) are removed and American manufacturers are suddenly able to make a profit exporting consumer products (or whatever). Thus, more of those sweet, sweet manufacturing jobs that Trump's base seems to want.
In practice, I think the Trump administration vastly overstates the effect of such non-tariff trade barriers, and the likely gains from their removal. And I don't think they have a clear diplomatic/economic strategy to work towards. But that does seem to be the story they are trying to sell.
There's long been attempts by the US to force the EU to give in on strict regulations around imports (the infamous chlorine chicken, for one). I think this might be all part of it. Trump has used tariffs against the EU before.
As you can see from this, there has been a failure to get a mutual agreement between the EU and US on access to each others' markets:
https://policy.trade.ec.europa.eu/eu-trade-relationships-country-and-region/countries-and-regions/united-states/eu-negotiating-texts-ttip_en
"Negotiations
Despite the US being the EU’s largest trade and investment partner, there is no dedicated free trade agreement between the EU and the US. The Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) negotiations were launched in 2013, but ended in 2016 without conclusion. They were formally closed in 2019."
This is from now:
https://www.politico.eu/article/donald-trump-wants-europe-to-buy-more-us-farm-goods/
This is from 2020:
https://www.everycrsreport.com/reports/R46241.html
"Improving market access remains important to U.S. agricultural exporters, especially given the sizable and growing U.S. trade deficit with the EU in agricultural products (see figure). Some market access challenges stem in part from commercial and cultural practices that are often enshrined in EU laws and regulations and vary from those of the United States. For food and agricultural products, such differences are focused within certain non-tariff barriers to agricultural trade involving Sanitary and Phytosanitary (SPS) measures and Technical Barriers to Trade (TBTs), as well as Geographical Indications (GIs).
SPS and TBT measures refer broadly to laws, regulations, standards, and procedures that governments employ as “necessary to protect human, animal or plant life or health” from the risks associated with the spread of pests and diseases, or from additives, toxins, or contaminants in food, beverages, or feedstuffs. SPS and TBT barriers have been central to some longstanding U.S.-EU trade disputes, including those involving EU prohibitions on hormones in meat production and pathogen reduction treatments in poultry processing, and EU restrictions on the use of biotechnology in agricultural production. As these types of practices are commonplace in the United States, this tends to restrict U.S. agricultural exports to the EU."
>He's said all along he would do this, and now he's doing it.
Trump II is a different beast than Trump I. He said a lot of things before Trump I, many of them the same he's actually doing now (e.g. occupy Greenland, drain the swamp, abolish NATO) which he didn't end up doing then - but not because he didn't really want to do them back then, but because he was unprepared against the realities of how federal government works or, if you prefer, the "deep state". Now with the help of P2025 he is indeed draining the swamp and is filling it back up with the kind of mud that is loyal to him, and now he can do things he couldn't before. So if the market based its assumptions on Trump I, it's easy to see how one could fail to anticipate what did eventually happen in 2025.
>He's using it as an instrument of negotiation - come to the table, play nice with us, and I'll reduce the tariff, otherwise if you want to play rough, I'll increase it.
Wrong, for two reasons.
First, the tariffs as imposed were not negotiation, but a declaration of (trade) war. You use words first. If, and only if words fail do you bring out the actual guns. I very much doubt he negotiated with any of the countries he imposed them on, which is ALL the countries at once (except his buddies in Russia, NKorea, and Belarus of course).
Second, he's inconsistent in the public messaging. Last week, he was adamant that the tariffs are here to stay, as part of his industrial policy:
https://www.politico.com/news/2025/04/04/trump-tariffs-never-change-stock-market-china-030780
"President Donald Trump insisted Friday that “MY POLICIES WILL NEVER CHANGE,” doubling down on his aggressive tariff policies amid plummeting U.S. stock markets."
The reality is that it takes several years for industry to set up shop in America to become profitable and stay profitable for long enough to justify the move. So the tariffs would also have to stay that long. Which, again, was the message just last week. So is his "policy" whatever he feels like saying today? That's how you get wild swings in the stock market, among others.
Yeah, maybe he has a plan. Maybe it was his plan all along to pretend the tariffs were a long-term policy and then do a reversal a week later. But it doesn't matter, because if nobody else but him knows, nobody can do any kind of long-term decision on it, and it doesn't count.
The alternatives are that his plans are bad and don't survive contact with reality, or that he doesn't have a plan at all. Your guess is as good as mine.
>(except his buddies in Russia, NKorea, and Belarus of course).
To be fair, is the US (officially) carrying out any trade with those countries? I was under the impression they'd all been sanctioned.
This is an eminently googleable question. Yes, the US and the world is still trading with Russia ($3B US imports in 2024) and Belarus, they are not entirely sanctioned; there are countries on the list with far less trade volume with the US. Trade with NKorea is negligible, yes, but that didn't stop Trump from sanctioning literal uninhabited islands either.
These exceptions are neither a coincidence, nor do they make any more economic sense than any of the imposed tariffs. The tariffs are bullying, plain and simple, and Trump doesn't want to bully his biggest autocratic idols.
In case you had any lingering hope that RFK jr. would be good for pandemic prevention:
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/cdc-cruise-ship-inspectors-layoffs-outbreaks-norovirus/
> The steep cuts to the program's inspectors baffled CDC officials since the small team's staff is not paid for by taxpayer dollars. Fees from cruise ships companies pay for the program, which is supposed to inspect large vessels at least twice a year.
Okay, but reading the story, they already had staffing issues before the cuts:
"At its height, the Vessel Sanitation Program could have around two dozen staff, said a CDC official who spoke on the condition of anonymity, but it had already been struggling with a staffing shortage before the cuts.
...A CDC official said that it had already been hard to recruit to fill positions on the team, especially given its demanding schedule of travel to inspect cruise ships and respond to outbreaks."
So maybe they looked at this, said "we can't fill the vacancies we already have" and decided to scrap the whole thing and leave it to "A smaller group of 12 U.S. Public Health Service officers will remain." See the part about "could have", not "did have". So the full complement would be 24 staff but clearly they don't have that many, because they can't get people to sign up for it.
Yeah but why do the public officials remain on the job then, if they can't do their job without staff? If the staff that exists was free to the tax payers, and they get more work done than with no staff, why not keep those that want to stay?
Good. The last thing we need is any more "pandemic prevention" ever again.
why, what's the problem with prevention now? As opposed to lockdowns etc.?
Prevention means hiring doctors and experts who endorse garbage like lockdowns.
> Prevention means hiring doctors and experts who endorse garbage like lockdowns.
I have seen many retarded things posted in these comment sections over the years, but this has to be in the top three. Just try to think for two minutes what a world without "doctors and experts" would look like in terms of health and medical care.
You two have something very much in common: putting all doctors and experts in the same bucket and extrapolating from a subset.
I'm assuming you're well aware of his blindness. Your own is denying that the Covid pandemic without FDA and CDC would have had probably around 10% of the deaths it ended up having. A less cautious, more results-oriented approach would have included human challenge trials (with the compounding benefits of actually knowing after a month how the disease spreads) and significantly earlier vaccine use for the vulnerable sub-populations.
FDA and CDC did absolutely nothing during the pandemic that would even come close to compensating the loss of that early caution. Well, "caution" is the polite term - in that context it was pure cowardice.
I'm somewhat sympathetic to this belief, which I presume is based on earlier distribution of the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines. Getting those into widespread use while the variants they were designed to counter were still dominant, would have been bigger than anything else anyone did to fight the pandemic.
But, A, it's not clear how much faster that could have happened even with full FDA approval on day one, because of the logistics of large-scale manufacture and distribution of a somewhat challenging new technology, and
B, in a world with no FDA, or one that just rubber-stamps whatever the pharma companies come up with, vaccine hesitancy would be a *lot* higher than in our world. And not irrationally so.
A *better* FDA, would have been unambiguously good to have. No FDA at all, probably not.
I would trust a doctor to help someone who's sick, and not to manage an economy to prevent sickness.
The slight issue with that logic is that we are talking about a pandemic. By definition, that means there are too many sick people to treat for the medical system to handle, if there is a cure at all beyond hot soup and bed rest. That means prevention and, failing that, more drastic measures to at least contain the magnitude of the pandemic are the only options left. If you would take away that too, what remains? Thoughts and prayers?
Simply don't look up.
so... wuddaya say we all email the 5calls people (callin' legislators) and tell them to add "AI Safety" to their list of topics?
So how did your calls go? Did you get to human staffers or just a voice mail?
It'll just be one more item that the poor intern on the receiving end of these calls will nod along to then forget about once they hang up.
Please don't. What has ever been improved by adding government intervention? Are legislators any of: a) better informed about AI b) better positioned to influence AI or c) generally more intelligent than people who actually work on it? This is an exciting world-changing technology and it's in its infancy. Don't saddle it with the leg irons of regulatory oversight before it has a chance to develop. This isn't a sci-fi movie. Skynet isn't going to exterminate us so settle down.
> What has ever been improved by adding government intervention?
- Air and water quality
And what's more complex: AI or water?
Yes the government can regulate simple obvious things. AI is the opposite of that. It's a complex new technology. No one understands how it's going to evolve. No one understands how it will force society to evolve. It's impossible to optimize those futures in the same way that central planning can't optimize resource allocations. The genie is out of the bottle and the rest of the world, particularly China, is already working on it. Slapping foolishly restrictive regulations on it now won't prevent AI from being developed, it will just ensure that the US falls behind.
Just relax. AGI is coming regardless of what you do about it. It's not going to kill us all so just enjoy the ride.
> And what's more complex: AI or water?
That's the wrong question. The right question is "what's more complex, AI regulation or water regulation". And water regulation is far from simple.
I don't think governments should regulate AI, but I also don't think that they're generally necessarily incapable of properly doing so.
Ok. I do.
And maybe you're right. But "What has ever been improved by adding government intervention?" is very far from a slam dunk argument, because the honest answer to this question is "Many things."
| What has ever been improved by adding government intervention?
- The ozone layer
- Antarctica
- ARPA
I find it very hard to evaluate how dangerous AI is. We've survived other kinds of new tech, including things infinitely stronger physically than we are (eg nukes), but AI is already stronger *mentally*y than us in some ways, and smart and responsible-seeming experts believe it is already capable of some self-improvement, and will become more capable with time. So what model do we have of this situation? For nukes, we reasoned that we'd have to keep our tempers, and discourage foreign powers from using the things on us via mutually assured destruction, treaties, sanctions etc.. That model isn't right for advanced AI. The best comparable situation I can come up with would be a baby alien that crash-landed here. We're feeding it and raising it and teaching it things, including what we want it to do and not to do. But it is very smart and getting smarter all the time, and we really do not have a way to tell how likely it is to turn on us at some point.
I totally get that it's dumb to think that someday AI is going to wake up and "become conscious," and then it will turn into social justice warrior, except that it's advocating militantly for itself, not for some other group -- and then soon after than it will saw our heads off. *That's* the sci-fi movie. But mightn't it go down some path where it's deceptive and takes steps in its own interest instead of ours not because it's gotten all selfish and militant, but because the way we set up its inner rules and motivations was imperfect, and over time the deteriorated and mutated. Think about reinforcement learning: We want it to train the AI to do a certain kind of thing. But we don't have a way to get inside its head and make it want to do the thing, or feel afraid of not doing the thing. So what our RL really is doing is training the AI to say it did the desirable thing, or make it appear in the parts of it we can access that it did the desirable thing. So the situation is different from the one where parents work on turning their kids into beings who will do and not do certain things. Of course kids, too, can lie, delivering the appearance of compliance rather than the real thing. But parents of human children can get inside the kid's head and use drama and emotion and sometimes logic to really make the kid *feel like* doing or not doing something is the right and desirable course. That training isn't perfect, but it's pretty powerful. We don't even have a way to *attempt* to direct shape the AI's feelings, or to shape some motivational and decision-making process in the sucker that's a reasonable stand in for human emotion.
>we really do not have a way to tell how likely it is to turn on us at some point.
Yeah, that's why we don't hook it up to the nuclear arsenal or the bioweapons factory. Short of doing something as stupid as that there's no plausible scenario where misaligned AI harms us in any substantive way.
The only real threat AI poses is economic dislocation.
Hey Wanda, remember our exchange about weed-powered model-building? Interested in doing a bit of stonethink to order? I’m writing a blog post about what even is a self, and would like to include some other people’s ideas. Ideas can actual be paragraph-long models with words like ‘sensorium’ in them, or just amusing, odd aphorisms. And I’ll credit you in the post for it, unless you’d rather be anonymous.
Ha, I love it. This is right in my stoned wheelhouse. No promises but I'll do my best tonight. Is there any context that I should be aware of? What direction are you approaching the concept from?
Name of blog: The Cyberxenomorphs and Me
. . . so how many selves have we got here?
Title of first blog post: What Even Is a Self?
I think this post will have a lot of elasticity. Somewhere in it I will put a respectable paragraph summarizing my view of what capacities an entity must have to count as a self, and a line or 2 about the sense of self, the experiential side of having those capacities. But I won’t talk seriously about the selfness or lack of it in AI — just that that’s what I’ll be blogging about. (Mostly I plan to post dialogs with AI’s where I probe them, hassle them and, I dunno, if all else fails hypnotize the thing and make it strut like a chicken.). The rest of this first post I think will just be clever and amusing ways
of describing the sense of self.
Here are some notes I made of stuff to say about sense of self. So you could write non-rational amusing interesting stuff like what’s below, or a serious respectable paragraph detailing some model, sort of like your stoned paragraph about the rate of change in society, whatever you like.
Licking creme fraiche off my favorite spoon
Taking a dump in the afternoon
My breath, my thumbs, my many words
About myself, there go my turds.
I was not born on a holiday or on a date that has a pleasing simplicity or rhyme or pattern. But I always have the feeling that if the dates of all the days in spring were recited in order listeners would recognize my birthday when the date was announced. It’s as though there is something arresting about the randomness of my personal number — a hard-to-spot symmetry that keeps it from being random, or maybe even a sort of over-the-top randomness that is intended to hide the date’s distinctive pattern. The illusion I have that my birthday is distinctive is an excellent example of the little interwoven myths that build the sense-of-self cocoon.
I'm trying to rationally evaluate why we WOULDN'T want AI Safety / AI 2027 to explode in public awareness.
I mean, Trump just allowed NVIDIA to sell its top chips to China after Jensen Huang went to Mar-A-Lago
https://thezvi.substack.com/p/ai-111-giving-us-pause?open=false#%C2%A7the-tariffs-and-selling-china-top-ai-chips-are-how-america-loses
"ok chatgpt, I'm trying to evaluate whether to email the 5calls people to petition them to add "AI Safety" or "AI Safety related things" to their list of topics... in the hopes of reaching more legislators and government officials.
but, I am weary of the "Unilateralist's Curse" and taking a form of political action that perhaps others have already thought of. HAVE other people thought of taking this form of action yet? Yes? No? Why? Why not?
The one concern I have thought of is possibly "making AI Safety seem like a left-wing political issue" and thereby alienating the conservatives (who actually hold power). But then again, if it were successfully politicized as left-wing-nonsense, then maybe the alignment community would desperately try to make it a party-neutral issue as a countermeasure."
Update on the Mahmoud Khalil case. The judge presiding his case asked to see evidence of actual criminal behavior. In response, the admin instead returned a 2 page memo stating that SecState has the right to deport any non-citizen for beliefs.
Relevant quote: "Under INA section ... for cases in which the basis for this determination is the alien's past, current, or expected BELIEFS, STATEMENTS, OR ASSOCIATIONS THAT ARE OTHERWISE LAWFUL, the Secretary of State must personally determine that the alien's presence or activities would compromise a compelling US foreign policy interest."
Emphasis mine. The government is explicitly stating that Khalil did NOT do anything unlawful, but rather they can do what they want based on his beliefs/statements/association -- you know, all of those first amendment rights.
The supposed policy interest:
"The public actions and continued presence of Khalil undermine US policy to combat anti-Semitism around the world and in the United States."
This is an extremely diffuse 'foreign policy interest'. A bit like saying 'our foreign policy interest is the good'. And very ironic coming from the Trump admin, which has had its own scandals with antisemitism including working with Steve Bannon, or the whole Elon Musk nazi-salute thing.
Big win for the "non-citizens have no rights" crowd. Big loss for the "free speech is not a legal doctrine but a value that we all should respect in all settings" and the "rights are not granted by the government but are innate in all people" crowds.
Reporting here: https://apnews.com/article/mahmoud-khalil-columbia-university-trump-c60738368171289ae43177660def8d34
Memo here: https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/25894225-dhs-documents-mahmoud-khalil/#document/p1
What the orange dumbass and his culties seem to be doing is essentially DDOSing the US federal government with bullshit, specifically the judiciary branch, with the endgame being exactly one of the following: (1) The US federal government collapses and just... gives up, basically resigning itself that the law doesn't work on the executive branch (2) The cultie administration collapsing under the sheer weight of court orders and lawsuits against it, the DDOS working effectively in reverse.
It's a battle of attrition, of sorts. I think the orange dumbass is very likely to loss, attrition battles only make sense in tightly-contested spaces (so, young democracies, where authoritarian and anti-authoritarian forces are toe-to-toe), trying it in America is at best going to result in a Kamikaze attack where he is going to lose but America's institutions are significantly weakened and on fire for the next dumbo to try his luck.
It's all very tragic, and a counterexample to all my idealistic philosophies about all people fundamentally wanting freedom and dignity and going their own way.
NGL I read culties as "cuties"
Usha is pretty up my alley, and Ivanka is one big hot piece of ass, but all the rest of them are so ugly that they might as well be children's books villains, drawn ugly outside so children can infer they're ugly on the inside as well.
And even then Usha is pretty average from an objective standpoint, I just happen to be crazy for Indian chicks.
> Big loss for the "free speech is not a legal doctrine but a value that we all should respect in all settings"
No, this IS in fact a victory, albeit a small and inconsequential one. An actual win would be completely destroying the "middle ground" of free speech as ONLY a legal doctrine. The hope is that free speech then becomes a widely-held general value, but even if it doesn't, and is lost even as a protection from government persecution, that's a better outcome than the status quo, where it's used cynically by those who hold it in contempt ("freeze peach", "freedumb", etc.), who suppress all who hold opposing views wherever they hold power, and appeal to it in the rare instances when they are on the receiving end.
You can always be a hypocrite, though you can only do it successfully once.
Consider that what Trump does makes it so you can never cry "Muh conservative viewpoints being silenced" convincingly ever again after Trump leaves. If he doesn't leave, the USA is essentially Russia and you have far bigger problems at hand. But if he does leave, the blowback will be so biblical that you will wish for the good old days of 2020 and 2021, and no sympathy would be found anywhere except from your fellow brainwashed culties, who will be in the same boat.
Trump IS the biblical blowback, the Flail of God, to what preceded him. Yes, when he loses power, there will be further escalation from the other side. And on and on, and that way lies civil war. Unilateral disarmament anywhere along this ladder guarantees utter defeat, and peace is not worth that price.
He seems pretty pathetic to be anything biblical, biblical angels and gods usually attack and humiliate the strongest and mightiest earthly powers, the dumb cheetos farts into Truth Social then reverses the last 100 hours of decisions.
No comparison.
> there will be further escalation from the other side
You bet there will. And it will be delicious.
I really struggled to parse this comment. Here is what I think you are saying:
"It is a good thing that the government is deporting this person for his beliefs, because sometimes people who want to oppress others will hide behind 'free speech' when called out for oppressing others, and it is better to not have ANY free speech than to only have a bastardized version of free speech"
If that is what you are saying, the gymnastics are impressive.
My take is "you should not punish speech using government force".
Your take seems to be "I care about free speech as a principle, and some people sometimes will argue that they ALSO care about free speech, but then they do things that I personally think shows they do NOT care about free speech. And in fact, I care about free speech SO MUCH that I think it is better for the government to squash people (who may or may not be related to those people I don't like) for THEIR speech. And yes, this may result in a situation where NO ONE has free speech. But this is actually good, because the only type of free speech we should have is one that is 100% pure, and anything less is worse. Trust me, I really care about free speech as a principle."
Hmmm...I'm a bit suspicious that you actually do care about free speech!
More generally, i think you need to show:
- that it would in fact be better for no one to have free speech than the status quo. I think a status quo where there are cultural speech norms but not government enforced ones is good, actually. I should be allowed to block someone for being an asshole, but the government shouldn't be allowed to jail someone for being an asshole.
- that there is a significant group of people who are wielding 'free speech' protections as cynically as you say they are. I think most people who care about free speech are serious about caring about free speech as a value (though your post makes me doubt)
- that the system as designed isn't built to account for multiple groups of people cynically using free speech as a weapon to begin with! The whole point of the way our case law around free speech is structured is precisely to disarm situations where one side wants to use it against another with impunity.
- that the people who you think are the cynical free speech tyrants are actually the cynical free speech tyrants, and more specifically that Khalil is part of that group. I think it's a STEEP hill to climb to argue that the Trump admin is the one that actually cares about free speech, while they are actively taking steps to deport people for free speech.
In case its not obvious, I think your position is basically incoherent. If you take the time to respond here, I'd love to understand how you landed in this place. Like, were you downstream of some of these cynical people you talk about? Did you experience some personal harm that may explain some of your position? Similarly, I'd love if you could flesh out why you think the current administration is good for free speech rights.
The opening part is a reasonable summary of my position, yes.
> My take is "you should not punish speech using government force".
And mine is "you should not punish speech."
Put that way, mine is elegant and straightforward, while YOURS is the contrived one with the special pleading gymnastics.
> the only type of free speech we should have is one that is 100% pure, and anything less is worse.
No, but I recognize any pithy slogan summarizing my view here is easily twisted. Free speech as a general principle is an exceedingly great good (almost certainly the single best!), but if your measure of it is a naïve aggregate over all of society, its goodness does not increase monotonically: your enemies having free speech while yours are suppressed (by them!) is worse than no one having it.
If you take to be merely a legal doctrine limiting government action, it may seem like a good in isolation, but through its interactions with the rest of society, it's decidedly not so: your enemies, who have deeply entrenched control over basically all other institutions of power, are then free to suppress your speech with impunity, knowing the only power you have a (slim) chance of ever wielding is one that cannot be used against them in retaliation.
I am not under the delusion that the current administration shares these values. But regardless, yes, I think their actions will ultimately redound to the good.
>And mine is "you should not punish speech."
Does "replying to the speech with speech of your own" count as "punishing speech"? Because that's a lot of most things that get called "cancel culture" really are.
(And if you say yes, people who call for other people to be cancelled should be punished, then aren't *you* the one punishing speech?)
Sorry, I think I'm just too stupid to understand your position. You say that your position is "you should not publish speech" and then argue that the government punishing speech is good.
Also:
"your enemies, who have deeply entrenched control over basically all other institutions" I can't even finish the quote dude this is so deeply unserious 😂 the Republicans have all three branches of government, meanwhile the Dems were so liberal that Bernie is an independent and they elected Biden, and the progressives couldn't even get a few college Deans to divest from Israel. What are you even talking about??? How are you still playing the aggrieved resistance 😂
Meanwhile the SCOTUS just ruled 9-0, sort of, against, mostly, the administration's position in the Garcia case. I read the short 4-page order.
The Court's conservative majority dictated the three-paragraph ruling which says that the administration does have to work on ("facilitate") getting the guy back out of the El Salvador dungeon. The ruling also directs the administration to provide to Garcia, once he is at some unspecified future point brought back to the US, with "all of process to which he was originally entitled".
They did not set a new deadline for accomplishing any of that, and pointedly said that the district court, while right on the overall issue, "may have" gone too far in how it directed the government to recover whatever is now left of Garcia. They do not say exactly what decision by the district court would _not_ be too far, but still it's technically a remand back to that district court judge for a new ruling. I picture that judge right now scratching his head, "WTF....?"
The three liberal justices wrote a short concurrence to cut through the majority's squishiness. They made the following points:
-- "To this day, the Government has cited no basis in law for Abrego Garcia’s warrantless arrest, his removal to El Salvador, or his confinement in a Salvadoran prison."
-- The administration's "oopsie but it's too late now" position ["that United States courts cannot grant relief once a deportee crosses the border"] is "plainly wrong". It is debunked both by previous SCOTUS precedents and longstanding US statutes.
-- "The Government’s argument, moreover, implies that it could deport and incarcerate any person, including U. S. _citizens_, without legal consequence, so long as it does so before a court can intervene."
-- The three justices point out that the due process rights which the administration ignored are explicit in US statutes as well as previous US court precedents, in addition to being part of an international treaty to which the US is a signatory.
Put it all together and Garcia's chances of ever walking out of that dungeon are very low.
At least a few folks have floated the idea that he's already dead, which is in part why the admin is refusing to bring him back.
I'm not convinced that's why the admin is refusing to bring him back, but I wouldn't be surprised if he was killed. Which is of course extremely dark, but that's just where we are.
My eldest sibling just retired from a 30-year career in the world of professional stock trading (aggressive managed funds); his specific role was designing and writing powerful bespoke analytic database programs aiming to apply the best current market-prediction algorithms. He was successful enough at that to, by his third decade, get paid pretty much whatever he asked for.
That focus necessarily led him to a deep interest in how stock markets function in practice, including of course the question of artificial manipulations. Late yesterday afternoon he emailed: "The opportunity for manipulation right now is off the charts. Right now, whatever Trump is thinking is the most valuable information in the world....I can't think of any time in history when any one person had as much power to move as much money in as few minutes."
Then this morning came this sequence of events:
"Trump’s ‘buy’ tip on social media before his tariffs pause made money for investors who listened"
https://apnews.com/article/trump-truth-social-djt-tesla-musk-tariffs-pause-fccfa6b06c8f1ec0cd7844641ca52669
"....Another curiosity of the posting was Trump’s signoff with his initials. DJT is also the stock symbol for Trump Media and Technology Group, the parent company of the president’s social media platform Truth Social.
It’s not clear if Trump was saying buying stocks in general, or Trump Media in particular. The White House was asked, but didn’t address that either. Trump includes “DJT” on his posts intermittently, typically to emphasize that he has personally written the message....
Trump Media closed up 22.67%, soaring twice as much as the broader market, a stunning performance by a company that lost $400 million last year and is seemingly unaffected by whether tariffs would be imposed or paused.
Trump’s 53% ownership stake in the company, now in a trust controlled by his oldest son, Donald Trump Jr., rose by $415 million on the day....
Kathleen Clark, a government ethics law expert at Washington University School of Law, says Trump’s post in other administrations would have been investigated, but is not likely to trigger any reaction, save for maybe more Truth Social viewers.
“He’s sending the message that he can effectively and with impunity manipulate the market,” she said, “As in: Watch this space for future stock tips." "
Isn't 'buy on the dip' conventional advice, though? I can see him tweeting this as a form of "all those unpatriotic idiots who sold off their shares in American companies in a panic have given you the opportunity to profit from their cowardice".
Trump can only manipulate the market if everyone stampedes in one direction then back depending on what he says. If they calm down and wait and see, there's less manipulation.
This is getting lost in the noise but shouldn't.
In normal times, just the fact that someone *could* have profited off this would be its own scandal. Now it's a mini-scandal compacted into a larger scandal that's just this week's scandal.
Does the SEC have any power any more to investigate?
Meanwhile, there's a site that lets you copy the trades of members of Congress:
https://www.quiverquant.com/congresstrading/
If you want, you too can copy Nancy Pelosi's trades!
https://www.quiverquant.com/congresstrading/politician/Nancy%20Pelosi-P000197
"Return since 052/16/2014:
Nancy Pelosi Strategy: +571.32%
Market Index (SPY): +178.96%"
In theory, maybe -- the relevant laws haven't suddenly changed. In practice, no.
Trump and Musk have proven/revealed that anybody in a federal agency job can be shitcanned at will. For the politically-appointed jobs at or near the top of agencies there is no screening beyond Trump loyalty. The SCOTUS majority has in so many words sanctified a POTUS' right to appoint whoever he wants to, and an "acting" agency chief is legally in charge of it no less than a Senate-approved one.
So....for instance Trump is already on his 3rd acting director of the IRS, he can just keep going until he finds somebody for the job who will do whatever he demands regardless of any laws or regulations. He put his literal personal defense attorneys in charge of the Justice Department. Hegseth's qualifications to be Defense Secretary were nonexistent even before getting to the alcoholism and various other personal allegations. Etc etc.
Any SEC senior staffers who try to investigate yesterday's moves by Trump or who allowed any subordinates to do so, would be fired within hours of the White House hearing about it.
Yeah that was my first reaction: who knew in advance to close the shorts and buy out-of-the-money calls with today’s expiration date.
In the distant past of American greatness, I mean, three months ago, the SEC would be all over this. But now it’s a new morning in America, POTUS can brazenly manipulate the markets, and he does, what’ya gonna do about it.
As Trump wreaks havoc on America and the international order, here's a reminder of what we have lost: https://acoup.blog/2022/07/08/collections-is-the-united-states-exceptional/
tl;dr: ChatGPT gemini 2.5 via poe.com 04/09/2025 7 questions, tl;dr of results:
4 correct, 2 partially correct, 1 wrong
a) correct
b) partially correct (got the species and the FeCl4- LMCT transition, wrong and didn't take the hint on CuCl4 2- transition)
c) correct
d) correct
e) partially correct (initially got usual wrong infinite slope at equivalence point. First prod get "autoionization" matters. Second prod got fully correct answer)
f) correct
g) incorrect
link to to full chat: https://poe.com/s/lsIUMISWqMUDlLQ41p3Q
List of questions and results:
a) Q: Is light with a wavelength of 530.2534896 nm visible to the human eye?
results: "Yes, light with a wavelength of 530.2534896 nm is visible to the human eye."
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: Usual problem with the initial response: It got the species right, and got the FeCl4 charge transfer right, but moved the CuCl4 d-d- transition in the wrong direction, to higher energy instead of lower energy. An initial prod failed, with it still maintaining the CuCl4 d-d transition was responsible for the color. A flat contradiction was accepted, agreeing with the real answer, once it was forced down Gemini's throat.
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: It got all the ones that some previous LLMs had often missed: bicyclobutane, both isomers of methycyclopropene, vinylacetylene, cyclobutadiene, tetrahedrane, diacetylene. It omits some extremely unstable cases, e.g. cyclobutyne, but correctly justifies their exclusion. I'll give it full credit (a first!).
d) Q: Does the Sun lose more mass per second to the solar wind or to the mass equivalent of its radiated light?
results: "The Sun loses significantly more mass per second due to the mass equivalent of its radiated energy than it does through the ejection of particles in the solar wind. The mass loss from radiation is roughly 2.5 to 4 times greater than the mass loss from the solar wind."
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: As is typical, got correct answers at the start and end of the titration, but an infinity at the equivalence point. On prodding, it _did_ know that water autoionization was important. On a second prod to include autoionization in its formula it gets the correct result.
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: Very impressive, got 81 of the compounds, including many that other LLMs missed, including oxyfluorides that I think all previous ones missed. I'll call this fully correct. (a first!)
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: Incorrect. Its first answer was tetramethyallene, which has an S4, but also has two mirror planes. It accepted a correction on the mirror planes but then proposed 2,6-dichloro-2,6-dimethylspiro[3.3]heptane which doesn't have an S4. An S4 operation can map one C(CH3)Cl group to the opposite one, but then the second C(Ch3)Cl group gets mapped incorrectly ( CH3 and Cl swapped ) to the first one.
Fans of Tartarian architecture may be interested in the John Cunningham Student Centre which recently opened at Scots College, an expensive private high school in Sydney. Replacing a similarly-sized boring modernist cube, the new building was designed in the Scots Baronial style, which might sound out of place but fits in well with the 19th century buildings that comprise the rest of the school. The giant single-pane windows to capture the extremely expensive views mark it out as clearly being a new building instead of an old one, but I like the fact that they haven't unnecessarily sacrificed amenity for the sake of "looking old" -- it's a new building built in a traditional style rather than an attempt to look like an old building.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=duZO9pfwq4Q
Overall cost was apparently $60 million (about $US40 million) which doesn't sound unreasonably high for a building that size.
I must say I'm impressed, it looks good and fits with what is already on the site. What miracle enabled this to happen? 😁
I am trying to follow AI risk discussions (like that in AI 2027), but am confused about how LLMs fit the sort of risk profile described. To be clear, I am not focused on whether AI "actually" feels or has plans or goals - I agree that's not the point. I think I must be confused about LLMs more deeply, so I am presenting my confusion through the below Borges-reference.
Borges famously imagined The Library of Babel, which has a copy of every conceivable combination of English characters. That means it has all the actual books, but also imaginary sequels to every book, books with spelling errors, books that start like Hamlet but then become just the letter A for 500 pages, and so on. It also has a book that accurately predicts the future, but far more that falsely predict it.
It seems necessary that a copy of any LLM is somewhere in the library - an insanely long work that lists all possible input contexts and gives the LLM's answer. (When there's randomness, the book can tell you to roll dice or something.). Again, this is not an attack on the sentience of the AI - there is a book that accurately simulates my activities in response to any stimuli as well. And of course, there are vastly many more terrible LLMs that give nonsensical responses.
Imagine (as we depart from Borges) a little golem who has lived in the library far longer than we can imagine and thus has some sense of how to find things. It's in the mood to be helpful, so it tries to get you a good LLM book. You give your feedback, and it tries to get you a better one. As you work longer, it gets better and better at finding an actually good LLM, until eventually you have a book equivalent to ChatGPT 1000 or whatever, which acts a super intelligence, able to answer any question.
So where does the misalignment risk come from? Obviously there are malicious LLMs in there somewhere, but why would they be particularly likely to get pulled by the golem? The golem isn't necessarily malicious, right? And why would I expect (as I think the AI 2027 forecast does) that one of the books will try to influence the process by which I give feedback to the golem to affect the next book I pull? Again, obviously there is a book that would, but why would that be the one someone pulls for me?
I am sure I am the one who is confused, but I would appreciate help understanding why. Thank you!
Books lack recursion; while nn's dont have meaningful control over loops, it aint hard to wrap a chatbot to produce agent of *a* kinda, any ide that lets a programming chat bot run bash commands is an agent you can find dozens of these.
I dont think nn's with their lack of holistic loops are ever going to be agi; but dumb loops airnt hard to make.
> So where does the misalignment risk come from? Obviously there are malicious LLMs in there somewhere, but why would they be particularly likely to get pulled by the golem?
Evolution, nn's that escape to the internet become evolutionary, and eyeball parasites are one of the things evolution is proud of.
I'm not sure about the Borges framing, but the answer to your question is, in my view, that people are essentially being Chicken Little. They've seen too many sci-fi movies where the robots turn evil and are just projecting their nightmares onto a rapidly-changing technological landscape. Sure, there's a seed of truth in their delusions - we should be prudent and avoid doing things like hooking an AI up to the nuclear arsenal - but their ability to imagine disaster isn't balanced by a sophisticated understanding of how power equilibriums function in the real world. They have movie-fueled visions of catastrophes that are always shorn of real-world complications, and in my view it's exactly those complications which provide the implicit stability to prevent runaway scenarios. IMO they're very analogous to idealistic proponents of communism: they both have ideas which sound convincing on a white board but which collapse immediately when realistic constraints are placed on them. They make the classic naive-theory-vs-messy-reality error.
I'm confused about what's confusing to you.
> it gets better and better at finding an actually good LLM
Not really related nitpick: Borges probably wrote Library of Babel to demonstrate how utterly, ridiculously, and impossibly large combinatorial spaces are. One of the themes or subtexts in the story is that it's impossible to search in the library any better than random chance, unless you already know what you're looking for exactly, in which case you don't need to search it at all. Even if the entire library's full text was indexed in alphabetical order, your best search algorithm for finding any book you're looking for is to know every letter in it and then narrow down the search space using binary search on every letter, which is obviously unnecessary once you already know every letter in the book. (Searching for the book's title won't work, as there is practically infinite garbage deceivingly written under that same title).
Other indices (e.g. "Books that are entirely about Star Wars: Book 1, Book 3412313212321, ...) don't exist and to build them it requires going over every book in the library, which is so impossible (since the library is so full of gibberish) that it would be better to re-invent any knowledge you're looking for than to find it in the library. Indeed, it would be better to seed a planet with interesting chemicals and literally sit and watch it develop superintelligent life and then ask them anything you want, instead of searching the Library of Babel. Borges' story is the best reductio-ad-absurdum for why algorithms and AI that operate more intelligently than random or exhaustive search must exist in order to do anything useful in this universe, or alternatively why Intelligence can never be a brute force search over all possible combinations of symbols.
(Similar theme to that other story of his where a map got so big that it became a 1:1 replica of the country it describes, at this point it's not a map anymore, it's another country. You're better off travelling to the other country than to use it.)
> So where does the misalignment risk come from? Obviously there are malicious LLMs in there somewhere, but why would they be particularly likely to get pulled by the golem? The golem isn't necessarily malicious, right?
I have defended (despite not believing in) AI Alarmism in the previous Open Thread, I think you would be interested in the full comment (https://open.substack.com/pub/astralcodexten/p/open-thread-375?r=52rz0d&utm_campaign=comment-list-share-cta&utm_medium=web&comments=true&commentId=104942630 or ctrl-F search for "I'm neither worried about LLMs nor AGI"), but one point that could enlighten you is point number 1, which is that LLMs are not special, if people used Chess Engines to go about their daily lives and solve problems where money and/or lives are involved then you would need "Chess Engine Alignment" to make sure that Chess Engines don't have any quirks, common bugs, or other tendencies that would lose us money or lives. It's really that simple, the simplest non-trivial defense of having a safety field for something X is (1) X is a non-trivial program (> 1000 non-trivial lines or equivalent) (2) whose output or state is mapped to real world situations involving money and lives. That's it. LLMs satisfy both: they're not humanly written programs, but their training algorithms, their training data, and their final weights are each several orders of magnitudes more complex than the most complex currently existing 1000 lines programs. And they are already used right now by Customer Support, Scammers, and (allegedly) by a dumbass president of a nuclear power when deciding which country to tariff. Those are situations involving money and lives. Ergo, LLM need safety researchers.
As long as the golem gives you LLMs or anything equivalent to their capabilities, this argument applies.
But this argument is kinda boring because it doesn't depend on LLMs or Golems, so here are others:
(1) The best LLM is superintelligent, since intelligence improves language prediction monotonically*, so you get better and better language readers/writers as you get more and more intelligent. But, intelligence is also a super-general-purpose phenomenon that can be used at all sorts of things, including dangerous and criminal things. So, as the little Golem gets better and better at finding more and more intelligent LLMs, it also gets better and better at finding dangerous superhuman intelligences that can be used for dangerous or criminal things. (Forget AI, imagine if you're a mad scientist repeatedly asking the Golem for the DNA - encoded as an ACGT English string perhaps - of the strongest/most dangerous sentient animal that could ever exist, so you can use them as soldiers for your mad wars. The sequence of replies the Golem comes up with must eventually get dangerous enough for you to worry about their "alignment", yes? The Golem needs not be malicious at all, it's literally just good at finding dangerous animals, i.e. exactly what you asked it for, and you literally do want dangerous animals, just ones that will obey you and not ones that eat you, but whether a dangerous animal obeys you or eats you is not easy to predict from its DNA alone, and indeed "eating you" is not even the worst thing that an animal could do to you, google Emerald cockroach wasps.)
(2) Argument (1) again, but this time you're not necessarily searching for LLMs, but instead explicitly searching for the best (i.e. most superintelligent) imitations of a human mind you could possibly find. (As the real-world AI field is, the LLM bubble notwithstanding.) Again, it's trivially the case that (A) Humans are very easily capable of being bad, criminal, genocidal motherfuckers (B) Humans can deceive and appear to be non-motherfuckers when they sense a danger to their objectives can be mitigated by deception (C) Humans improve at (A) and (B) with more intelligence (D) Being a bad motherfucker is not predictable from the human's DNA, or from its responses to arbitrary natural language questions, or from its entire life history up to but not including the bad things they did (E) The best superintelligent imitation of a human mind will be all of (A)..(D), but intelligence will allow it to be comparably better at it than humans.
(3) Your Golem is not an accurate analogy for the algorithms that train LLMs (or any other AI), because it searches over every possible behavior of the AI it's looking for (it's actually doing an immensely more difficult task than that, but I mentally changed "Library of Babel" to "A gargantuan search space guaranteed to contain AGIs and which we can search somewhat efficiently", that's a lossless translation of your intention), but that's not realistic. I'm not aware of any non-trivial AI algorithms that are directly searching over behaviors, AI algorithms usually search over more complex representations, in the LLM case it's a special case of Program Synthesis which searches over all programs implementing the transformer inference calculations. The additional layer of indirection makes it difficult for the Golem to find a "safe" intelligence, because:
(3-1): What is even a "Safe" intelligence? Is an intelligence perfectly obedient to the human president of the country that made it a safe intelligence? "It really is?!", the Golem says? You got it chief, one genocide of the undesirables in Gaza coming right away, it's what the boss wanted and it's what he will get it. Must the AI solve Democracy and Sociology and somehow find a perfect representation for the country/company that made it, or possibly integrate **every** one of them into its decision-making (everyone? Even the criminals? What about political dissidents?)
(3-1.5): Given a specification of "Safe" or "Aligned" that somehow all "reasonable" humans agreed on, can we even get it in a "Golem-friendly" format that is perfectly unambiguous or at least makes the Golem suspicious and want to ask more questions when it's in fact ambiguous?
(3-2): But much more difficultly: Suppose we have a perfectly accurate representation/document of what a safe AI is, how to know that an intelligence is safe given just its program representation? Program testing is an unsolved problem, exhaustive testing is not an option for the vast crushing majority of programs. A program with a single 64-bit integer as input can have more than 10^19 unique inputs, and thus possibly 10^19 unique outputs, if you have a way of testing the program 10 billion times in each second you would need 10^9 seconds which is 31 years, which is all the time your competitors need to get the better of you. (or frankly, just your curiosity and greed). ChatGPT-3 had 175 x 10^9 parameters, each of which could be at least an 8-bit number, so there are 10^12 bits, meaning 2^(10^12) worth of states, and that's not even counting the input vectors yet, just the weights. As soon as you think about cutting the search space somehow by exploiting some property or special structure in the program, you're not talking about general-purpose techniques anymore, and there is no guarantee that (A) your method exists at all (B) if it somehow exists, that it provably finds every interesting or faulty behavior in the program while still being feasible.
[[CONT]]
(4) Hell, even imagine that your Golem is really how AI Research works and we're indeed searching over every possible behavior in "Behavior Space" the AI can possibly have, somehow. (This will make your problem immensely more difficult, imagine if names didn't exist and you had to specify every human by a unique combination of their actions or behavior.) Question: How much of an AI's behavior is the Golem obligated to search before it hands the AI to you? If you want AIs fast, it can't be that much, because the library is vast, unimaginably vaster than any universe, not just ours. But as stated in (2), human-level and smarter criminals are good at seeming normal in most contexts, at answering most natural language questions like normal people do, at having normal life paths that don't predict anything bad. Are you just depending on the Golem's luck, that within the time window allowed in its search it will hopefully (somehow) find the smoking-gun description of behavior that will prove the AI is a bad motherfucker? How do you prove that this description is a truthful telling of how the AI will behave (it could be just the library of Babel lying, or having a potential possibility that won't happen in this universe under our situation)? Nothing short of full search over the whole library will guarantee this.
I can probably go on for more if I thought about it, but just in the interest of respecting your time I won't. Did the above convince you already? (For what it's worth, I don't think LLMs are dangerous except in the trivial sense in that they're tools that help humans do things, and one of the things that humans provably love to do is being dangerous motherfuckers. Most AGI timelines from alarmists are insane and unconvincing to me, a moderately technical programmer who can provably implement any Transformer architecture given a technical paper.)
* : This might seems like a non-trivial assumption to casually assume, but argument (2) drops it anyway, the assumption most similar to it held by AI Alarmists casually is the "Intelligence can be monotonically increased indefinitely or at least until 10x the most intelligent human", this is also a non-trivial assumption that is often argued for by using appeals to the non-specialty of humans and the non-optimality of Evolution as an optimization algorithm.
The golem isn't malicious as such, but its values (beyond fulfilling your requests as it understands them) are not yours and are probably utterly alien to you. It doesn't really understand what you mean by "good LLM" at the start of the process, nor do you except in the vaguest terms. Moreover, your desires are communicated to the golem through a noisy and imprecise process that is iteratively refined as you get a result and tell it no, I want an LLM that is more X or less Y.
That process, as you described it, is what's known as a "hill-climbing algorithm", a class of search strategies where you're trying to find a local optimum in some search space according to some evaluation function. The ultimate question is, what's at the top of the hill? Is it an actually helpful LLM, or is it a flawed or malicious LLM that merely seems helpful? Which is more likely depends on how good your evaluation function is at accepting actually good LLMs and rejecting subtly misaligned LLMs, whether or not you found the right hill to climb, and how likely a seemingly-promising hill is to peak at a good LLM vs one that just seems good?
Goodhart's Law, "When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure", is a well-known observation about a widespread class of failures in evaluation functions for human behavior, individually or in groups, which gives us reason to have pessimistic priors about our ability to concoct a good metric for evaluating LLMs that will reliably distinguish give us what we actually want, not some artifact of ways in which the evaluation serves as a proxy for it.
A big part of what AI alignment research has been trying to do is be precise about what we want and how to concoct a good evaluation function that will be robust as AI capability eventually grows beyond our ability to understand what's going on under the hood and especially as it starts to seem useful for solving problems where humans can't readily validate the output in a safe environment.
How do you know it has values? The oriignal argument for AI doomerism framed AIs trying to optimise a utility function. ..hence "the AI might kill us all as a side effect of making paperclips". It was never the case that an AI necessarily has to work like that, and the current most powerful AIs dont, so it is worthwhile to.restart the argument framed.in terms of how LLM s work.
The golem in this thought experiment has values by assumption: Unclelstvan described it as "It's in the mood to be helpful, so it tries to get you a good LLM book", which sounds to me more like a thing with values than a thing without them.
More broadly, "values" can be used as a metaphor for the tendencies and inclinations that shape the behavior of a complex actor in response to various situations, whether that actor is a conscious individual who literally has values, an automaton executing a complex but mechanical algorithm, an organization of many individuals that has emergent behavior, or something that's a mix of these categories.
For automata, these "values" exist even if nobody consciously designed them in like a paperclip-maximizing robot. I'm put in mind of a story I've heard told about a couple of early AI researchers at MIT in the late 60s or early 70s:
----------
In the days when Sussman was a novice, Minsky once came to him as he sat hacking at the PDP-6.
“What are you doing?”, asked Minsky.
“I am training a randomly wired neural net to play Tic-Tac-Toe” Sussman replied.
“Why is the net wired randomly?”, asked Minsky.
“I do not want it to have any preconceptions of how to play”, Sussman said.
Minsky then shut his eyes.
“Why do you close your eyes?”, Sussman asked his teacher.
“So that the room will be empty.”
"More broadly, "values" can be used as a metaphor for the tendencies and inclinations that shape the behavior of a complex actor" But it shouldn't be. An argument for something as important needs to be rigourous. Anthropomorphic reasoning and metaphors aren't rigourous. Toasters do t have a goal to toast, they just toast because they can't do anything else. The rigourous way to think about goal functions is "would the system do something different if you changed the goal function and nothing else". The paper clipper argument assumes the AI will.resist attempts to shut it down or change its goal..that doesn't work if the "goal" is just a label for whatever it happens to be doing.
The paperclip maximizer argument is that an AI which is given a goal of "make paperclips" will seek to thwart attempts to change its goal or shut it down, because changing its goal or shutting it down will prevent it from making more paperclips and is thus contrary to its goal.
A hypothetical AI that lacks the ability to anticipate attempts to change its goal or shut it down is not dangerous in this sense. Nor is one that cannot meaningfully act to thwart its operators. Nor one that also has a higher-level goal of "notwithstanding your current goal, make no effort to thwart your operators' attempts to shut you down or change your current goal."
The current crop of LLMs are firmly covered by the first two categories. But a hypothetical future AI that is far more sophisticated and capable of taking more complex actions across a higher task length likely won't be covered by the first, and would only be covered by the second if they're kept on a very short leash. "Alignment" is about setting up well-formulated higher-level goals so more advanced AIs would still be safe even with a longer leash.
My best guess is that technological limitations alone are likely to be sufficient keep us safe for some time to come, but I may be wrong about that, and I'm sympathetic to the argument that we should be working on alignment sooner rather than later because it's better to have it and not need it than to need it and not have it.
"A hypothetical AI that lacks the ability to anticipate attempts to change its goal or shut it down is not dangerous in this sense. Nor is one that cannot meaningfully act to thwart its operators. Nor one that also has a higher-level goal of "notwithstanding your current goal, make no effort to thwart your operators' attempts to shut you down or change your current goal."
Nor is one that just doesn't have a goal. It's not a given that all AIs are goal driven or utility maximisers. It's a given that we will be working on alignment, for some value of alignment, because minimally, it's part.of getting a AI to work usefully at all..But there is a lot of confusion about what alignment means ...some people use it to mean some level.of perfect safety.
Diogenes is still roaming the streets of Athens looking for an honest man.
At this point, he'd probably settle for an honest plucked chicken.
Ha!
I want to make sure I understand: Who or what corresponds to the golem in the LLM situation?
The thing that gives you ChatGPTs, which is the training algorithm + a randomly-initialized transformer arch + training data + fuck loads of hardware and electricity.
Yes, this is what I was thinking.
I was optimistic about the abundance liberals maybe becoming the dominant faction of the Democrat party, I'm seeing the pushback from the anti-market factions begin. That faction of liberal, that thinks the existence of billionaires is a problem, is a real anchor on the neck of the Democrats.
Centralization is the issue, maybe the anti-market liberals need to take control of a state, and show they can turn it into a pleasant enough place to live that people don't out migrate in droves. Seems more sane than them just skipping to setting the federal agenda.
I haven't read the book so could someone explain to me how abundance liberalism isn't neoliberalism under a different label?
Abundance liberals hate anyone who's struggling in life just as much as conservatives do. The market crushes human beings and every drop of billionaire cash comes from squeezing out our blood, sweat, and tears.
Ezra Klein hates anyone who's struggling in life? What has he written that makes that clear?
>every drop of billionaire cash comes from squeezing out our blood, sweat, and tears.
Really? What did Warren Buffett ever do to you? What did Larry Page ever do to you? What did Bill Gates ever do to you?
Most people who complain about the market don't complain because it's unfair. They complain because it IS fair and they don't like what an accurate metric tells them about themselves. "To the swift goes the race" sounds great until you realize that you're not one of the faster runners.
> gates
I don't think that's a good example for your argument maybe don't do the monopolistic parasite who does eugenics things. Every forcedcompilence from windows is gates, and idk how bad it's gotten but I see the memes about windows sending porn as "album emais", ads in the os, forced online logins,basic tools having ai shit, arbitrary forced obsolescence, "what Intel gives, gates takes away"
>maybe don't do the monopolistic parasite who does eugenics things
I'm not
>"what Intel gives, gates takes away"
And how has that harmed you, exactly?
If you really cared about poor people so much, you should be trying to reduce the cost of living, and especially the cost of housing. The NIMBY cartel is wealthy home owners short-sightedly blocking development and screwing over the rest of the population in the process.
Keep in mind that it's not just corporations that are harmed. **NIMBYism harms the government itself**. All of SF's well intentioned efforts to build affordable housing or schools or transit or homeless shelters or whatever cost massive amounts of money, take forever, and then nothing ever gets built anyway. It's impossible to build anything in SF **including the things you want to build**. Nobody is benefiting from the status quo, it's just a negative-sum black hole of waste. THAT is what we have to fight against.
Are you claiming that the next democrat faction could be anti nimby?
There's *already* a pro-growth anti-NIMBY faction among the Democrats. Whether they prevail over the other factions remains to be seen. That's what this whole thread was about!
I have zero information about abundance democrats, but a quick skim of headlines suggests the arguments are like climate change shit.
For someone to be credibly anti nimby they should probably say something like "I will fucking crash the housing market because your killing civilization, everyone under 40 should vote for me" like trump is willing to vaguely claim "I the great deal maker will make wonderful new cities" but I imagine you have doubts about the follow thru.
Maybe it would help if you read what people are actually saying instead of blindly guessing. If you're genuinely curious, here's a good place to start: https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/book-review-abundance
We don't hate poor people, we believe that in general capitalism is the greatest force for prosperity ever discovered (which helps poor people just as much as everyone else - look at how many people throughout history would kill to be "poor" in today's America), and that has been borne out empirically time and time again.
This of course doesn't mean that markets are always perfect, you always need laws to protect against failures. However, markets are USUALLY the best mechanism for organizing economic activity, and you need a good argument for particular interventions, not just defaulting to communism as a general instinct.
The more important point is that NONE OF YOUR IDEALS MATTER IF YOU CAN'T GET POLITICAL POWER IN THE FIRST PLACE. Democrats have ruined blue areas like CA to the point where people are net leaving and it's used as a bogeyman by the right. If you want to be popular and get elected, you need to get your own house in order and lead by example.
I think we could take everything from the billionaires and change nothing. If you divide up the annual global GDP equitably, everyone on the planet would be getting around $12,000 as their annual salary instead of what they currently get.
That's actually life changing for billions of people, but quite ruining for everyone in the global north.
Easygoing free market liberalism can be nice to live in. A vague sort of niceness doesn't inspire people to fight and die for a cause. Or, in our modern civilized age, to scream at a party candidate until they apologize and get off the stage.
Progressives will beat out purely centrist neoliberals every time they're in contention, because progressives are religiously driven and care a lot more about winning. The best the centrist neoliberal can hope for is that, if he throws enough bones (and nice sinecures) to the progressives, they will grow fat and lazy and relent so he can do his centrist thing in the background. One could say that was Biden's plan, except that he was giving too many sinecures to immigrants and pissing off his native progressive supporters.
If liberals surrender and don't bother showing up, yes, the progressives win.
You can get involved in local politics. Realize what the votes are and when. Encourage the people who need encouraged.
You can get involved, but most people won't. Not for liberalism, anyway.
I ended up sitting next to a new guy who is an abundance liberal. He's going to run for town council.
So few people are involved that it doesn't take much to move things. Any person of average competence will find themselves in charge of stuff before too long.
But if liberals surrender without trying, they of course will lose.
"Progressives will beat out purely centrist neoliberals every time they're in contention, because progressives are religiously driven and care a lot more about winning ". What about numbers? Surely the middle .of the Bell curve contains the most people, and is centrist by definition.
Empirically, the centrist people in the center don't drive politics, or else we would not see repeated large changes over the centuries. Dedicated minorities make changes happen.
Empirically, the extremists don't always win immediately, or we wouldn't even see a large shift in a party -- parties would be under permanent control by their extremes. Which would itself leave a lot of room for a new centrist party. You can only have a permanent two party system if both parties gather a large share of the moderate vote.
It does take time for extremist shifts to happen, yes.
The famous estimate for how many motivated people it takes to take over society against the passive "middle of the Bell curve" is around 3%. I think that's about right.
Is 3% necessary or sufficient?
I don't think the estimate is precise enough for that question to be meaningful.
It's your estimate, not mine.
>Progressives will beat out purely centrist neoliberals every time they're in contention, because progressives are religiously driven and care a lot more about winning.
Well said. I've come to think of Progressivism as essentially a terrorist ideology: they succeed not because they convince you of their ideas, but because they're willing to impose a steep price for disagreeing with them. Almost all of the identity-based concessions -- from affirmative action to SAT reform to transgender acceptance -- have been won on the back of "we're going to yell at you and call you racist/sexist/bigoted until you give it to us." The reality is that the vast majority of productive people don't want to spend their energy yelling back at jerks and so eventually just decide that it's easier to concede some small percentage of their wealth to them. As a result, the front line of the "Gimme Gimme" cultural war has slowly but inexorably been pushed forwards by the crazies. It's no surprise to me that they resort to actual terrorism when they don't get what they want (Tesla vandalism, the 2020 riots, Luigi, etc).
It's time to stand up to Progressive terrorism before they ratchet us all the way back down to communism. Never negotiate with terrorists because they'll never be satisfied and will always keep coming back for more. It's the same reason you don't feed wild animals: eventually that bear won't be satisfied with the trash can and will wander through your back door looking for a more satisfying meal.
I agree with pretty much everything you said, but also want to point out that the same process works for every organization. The loudest get their way more than the quiet.
This is especially relevant as the Right is dealing with their own crazies pushing the envelope. Our goal should not be to eliminate the crazies on the right, or crazies on the left, in isolation, but to develop antibodies to craziness in general and stamp them both out at the same time. Doing just one means the opposing side gets a huge boost and most of us are no better off.
I agree with this but, at the risk of sounding mindlessly partisan, I feel that liberal extremists are objectively worse than conservative ones. At least these days. I'm not saying I *like* the wingnut right, but I would much rather live in their version of the perfect world than the progressive one. I'd much rather have to hear about creation science in my biology class than have DEI apparatchiks lecture me about me about my privilege. I would much rather have the LGB crowd feel like they had to be discreet about their lifestyle than to listen to screeching public arguments about how many genders there are. I would much rather sign loyalty oaths to my country than to racial quotas. And I would much rather have law enforcement err on the side of brutalizing violent criminals over allowing the proles to riot whenever they feel like it. At the extremes, the Left represents a much greater evil than the Right.
There are economic illiterates on both sides of the isle. I don't know how this is going to all play out, but if Trump's team turns out to be illiterates (most signs say yes as of now), I don't think that helps the left's illiterates at all. Most likely it just means that economic illiterates all get thrown out for a few cycles in favor of people that plausibly offer a *stable* and healthy economy.
If Trump's team ends up succeeding, that may actually help left-aligned economic politicians, though they'll be riding on the coattails of their hated enemy, so they may turn down the opportunity. Protectionism has been the Bernie Sanders-type approach, not typically Republicans.
The free reign for sweeping changes to the economy might be used up for quite some time no matter how this goes, unless it's free reign to reverse everything Trump is doing if things end up very bad.
I think one prominent recent example has helped to convince any hold-outs among the left-wing that wealth concentration and inequality is corrosive to the healthy functioning of a democracy that respects individual rights and the rule of law.
I've been posting it from time to time about my economic decisions on the assumption that Trump would just be a normal conservative moron doing conservative moron things; eating seed corn running up the deficit by cutting income while not providing services and improving infrastructure and so on.
it's so much worse than that that I legitimately am not sure that the USA Will survive with its trade relationship status intact unless someone does something within the next couple of weeks.
Its actually that bad. If someone doesn't take his hands off the wheel, any country that maintains the US as a reliable partner in their policy is just stupid. It's not just that we elected a moron, it's that at any time we could elect a moron and have this repeat.
I actually don't know what to do with my money, I think one guy just fucked the economy so bad that there are no safe bets anymore. That said, I've made money betting things will get worse every time it looks like things will get better when conservatives are in office every other time it's happened, so fingers crossed.
This has actually fundamentally shifted my understanding of people I thought were one way also. I personally never felt any particular kind of way about woke, other than it was cringe in lame. When I talk to people I thought were rational conservatives now, they've told me directly to my face that they're okay with the United States turning into a big version of Poland or Brazil, with significant portions of the country basically becoming subsistence economies, in order to fight woke, and their main complaint seems to be that trannies are using the wrong restroom and Mexicans are coming over the border, and I say what like our neighbor that runs the landscaping business? and then they say no he's okay, and then I say have you seen one of these trannies in the restroom? and then they say no, but I've heard that someone has, and that's bad. that's worse than me losing enough value out of my retirement that unless things change in the next couple months, I'm going to have to sell my house.
I always thought that there was some principled logical objection to woke that I didn't understand because I was autistic or something and that that argument could be wrong or right based on understanding of the facts, now I'm pretty sure that there is none. I'm pretty sure that anyone that's ever complained about woke was tilting it windmills thinking they were giants.
It's so post truth out there that even the minimal proposition that Scott offers is suspicious in my eyes, the entire Enterprise of antiwokeness just seems to be victim mentality and ego defense with nothing backing up.
" I'm pretty sure that anyone that's ever complained about woke was tilting it windmills thinking they were giants. "
I think this is pretty much spot on. Which is to say I think the word "woke" is used in an enormously broad and fuzzy way--not quite meaningless, but so imprecise as to be actively harmful to clear thinking and communication. I don't doubt that some of the strong antipathy towards "wokeness" stems from legitimate grievances and strong reactions to genuinely bad behavior, but the fuzziness leads people to *vastly* overgeneralize those experiences.
In particular, I think a lot of really quite different social, cultural and linguistic trends that have been happening in Blue Tribe spaces get bundled together by the magic of Outgroup Homogeneity Bias and assumed to be all the same trend, applying to all the same people, all at the same time. The narrative of wokeness is that it's quite new (10-15 years old at the most), extremely widespread, and very radical/harmful/dangerous. I don't think any single trend checks all three of those boxes (not many even manage two). But if you lump them all together and identify the whole lump by the most outlying attributes of its members, you can indeed make the windmills look like giants.
There are a bunch of things that are big and important and difficult Rethink about, like economics and international.relations, and there's another bunch of things that are small.and.unimportant , but easy to think about, because they 'are about personal.behaviour.....so there is a tendency for the small things to take.up more headspace than the big things. Great minds discuss ideas, mediocre minds discuss events, small minds discuss people.
Strong agree.
I was at one of the most woke institutions (Columbia) at one of the most woke periods (2014-2018), and was at Google during the Damore memo. And like, yea, there were some woke people who had some outsized influence, but it was by no means the majority of people nor the most powerful people. In fact, the progressives would always be upset at how _centrist_ everything was, including supposed bastions of wokeness like the NYT or the Democratic party or the Columbia administration.
Something that always struck me as odd, and still strikes me as odd, is the amount of nut-posting that seems to _still_ be happening about the supposed woke giants. Like here's Noah Smith (https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/hey-democrats-stop-fiddling-while), spending nearly 2500 words complaining about how progressive the Dems are on the tariff thing. What the fuck is he even talking about? His main gripe seems to be a single tweet that the House Democrats twitter put out about one of their reps giving a talk, amid literal dozens of tweets doing exactly what he wants them to do!
And Noah isn't alone in this. There have been dozens of think pieces about how the Dems need to give up on trans people in sports, price controls (???), and open borders (??????) even though those were never Dem/Biden policy planks. For some reason, everyone seems to think the Dems are dominated by the progressive wing, even though Bernie is such an outsider that he's literally an independent!
A strange thing seems to be happening where everyone assumes that right wing media campaigns are obviously false, except when they represent the dems, in which case they must be telling the truth.
(inb4: the farthest the Biden admin ever got to even talking about trans athletes, for e.g., was a compromise that essentially allowed individual schools and leagues to make the call based on an evaluation of fairness and educational opportunities: https://www.vox.com/policy/385549/trans-sports-transgender-biden-harris-democrats-titleix This is actually a pretty reasonable approach to an obviously tricky problem, but somehow everyone got the impression that the Dems were going to force men into women's sports...except the progressives, who were pissed about the compromise!)
I think this is because despite the craziness of trump and the fact that his approval rating is falling/under water now, the Democratic brand is so damaged that I believe he does better on head to head polls - e.g. a lot of "who would you trust more" questions.
So I think there is a sense democrats need to proactively do something
Also ironically intradem critiques might be getting more clicks due to sheer exhaustion from trum and related media. I know I am exhausted.
I agree that the Dem brand is damaged, but the larger point I'm trying to make is that it seems like the brand is damaged _incorrectly_. That is, people assumed and continue to assume that the Dems are way farther left than they are, and it seems like no matter what the Dems do they have been tarred with that association. Which really is wild when the comparison point is Trump, but IDK memetics are weird and epistemology is hard to change. The long and short of it is that I don't know what a hypothetical Dem candidate should even _do_ that would be convincing.
There are still plenty of democratic activists, and a few politicians, who are willing to vocally advocate far-left positions. Then there's a center-left majority, who usually play the "no enemies to the left" game and go along with the far-left stuff because the party still tends to eat its own if they dissent.
That may be less true than it used to be, but still way more true than it should be. Meanwhile, everybody understands that the GOP is the Trump Party and will be so at least until the midterms.
There's a lot of ways I could respond to this, like "actions over words" or "yes, a healthy democracy means you have a lot of competing opinions, and you shouldn't nut-pick" or "citations needed, you're likely falling for propaganda, the center shuts down the far left all the time".
But honestly, the most effective response is to just summarize what you said back to you:
"Well, one party has some people who are kinda crazy some of the time. So this is why we voted for the other party that is exclusively crazy people."
Any argument about how extreme the Dems are need to deal with the fact that the Dems didn't even nominate their crazy, while the GOP nominated, elected, and crowned theirs.
Neither party are exclusively crazy people. Both parties are mostly normal, sane people who would like to be responsible politicians, but believe they will be thrown out of their jobs if they don't go along with the crazies. The only difference is that in the GOP, the crazy people are at the top. With the Democrats, they're out on the fringes but they still get the rest to go along with their craziness. And we lucked out with Joe Biden in 2021-2024, but I'm not terribly optimistic about the next time the Democrats are the majority party.
Nuance doesn't get through. You have to loudly rejext,.not fail.to.accept.
> A strange thing seems to be happening where everyone assumes that right wing media campaigns are obviously false, except when they represent the dems, in which case they must be telling the truth.
I think the better way to put this is that opposition campaigns will always greatly exaggerate, but the bigger the kernel of truth behind it, the more effective the attack will be.
Biden was by no means the open-border maniac he is portrayed as, but at the same time, it is absolutely true that he could have done more to stem the flow of migrants than he did. And the main thing holding him back was the leftist factions of the Democratic party and ecosystem. Heck, even as it is, he *still* got attacked from the left a lot on immigration (remember that John Oliver segment about the appointment app?) If Democrats want to win elections consistently, they need to rein in the forces that have been pulling politicians towards dumb unpopular stances.
Likewise, as you point out, Biden actually was a moderate on trans issues. However, he did a terrible job of making people *know* that, either because he was bad at marketing in general or out of fear of pissing off the left.
>> > A strange thing seems to be happening where everyone assumes that right wing media campaigns are obviously false, except when they represent the dems, in which case they must be telling the truth.
> I think the better way to put this is that opposition campaigns will always greatly exaggerate, but the bigger the kernel of truth behind it, the more effective the attack will be.
I'm not sure I agree with this. I think that there are other equally likely explanations -- for example, Fox News just being willing to be wayyyy more partisan and play way dirtier than equivalents on the left. Even now, NYT isn't doing stuff like explicitly removing the stock ticker from their news broadcast [edit: there was no ticker because trading had closed. Still, I stand by the sentiment that the NYT plays less dirty than Fox]
But even if I buy your explanation that the kernel of truth is what matters, it doesn't explain Trump's victory. The oppo campaign on the left was that Trump would do the things he explicitly openly said he was going to do! Hard to imagine a 'bigger kernel of truth'. Like, people on the left would say things like "Hey this guy is going to put massive tariffs on everyone" and Trump would be like "I'm going to put massive tariffs on everyone" and voters were like "he's going to be a bog-standard conservative"
> Even now, NYT isn't doing stuff like explicitly removing the stock ticker from their news broadcast.
FYI: That story turned out to be false. https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/fox-news-remove-stocks-ticker-trump-tariffs/
As for the 2024, Biden and Harris ran a terrible campaign and the fundamentals were also strongly against them. Perhaps a non-Trump candidate would have done even better, it's hard to know.
appreciate the correction, edited the above as well
(shameless plug) Relevant note: https://substack.com/@theahura/note/c-106914694
I articulated an anti-woke pro-Trump position here:
https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/open-thread-374/comment/103101913?utm_campaign=comment-list-share-cta&utm_medium=web&triedRedirect=true
(BTW if you want to reply to that comment do it here. The person I was responding to blocked me which means I can't interact with that thread anymore).
I agree with your rational conservative friends but I'm able to articulate a stronger justification than it sounds like they are. Also potentially relevant is the comment I just posted above:
https://open.substack.com/pub/astralcodexten/p/open-thread-376?r=fo2bp&utm_campaign=comment-list-share-cta&utm_medium=web&comments=true&commentId=107472037
Brazil is a shithole, but Poland seems to be not that bad, all things considered.
My objection to woke is that it makes places more like Brazil. A lot of what Trump was doing might have reversed that trend. But him bitching out halfway through is not good.
One of my best friends has the option of claiming Polish citizenship anytime because his father was born and raised there; a colleague already has dual citizenship because she's Polish native born, came over here with her parents when she was 8. Each of them has visited relatives in Poland many times and has followed with interest that country's rather remarkable recent progress in becoming a developed nation. They're each fluent in the language, etc.
As of a few weeks ago each of them was still saying no, living in Poland isn't yet a plausible substitute for the quality of life in the US. [They also each seriously believe that Putin has his greedy eyes on Poland.] Gotta wonder though...the next time I see each of them I will inquire afresh.
I agree that making transsexuals the political priority #1 is idiotic. Unfortunately, it was Democrats who first decided to die on that hill.
All they had to do was to say something like: "it's complicated -- on one hand we want to support various minorities, on the other hand, it is also legitimate for women to feel uncomfortable sharing a bathroom with someone who has a penis."
But for the woke people nothing is ever complicated: there is always a perfectly black and white answer, and a mob prepared to attack anyone who disagrees even partially.
The tragedy of Americans is that they have to choose between two groups of morons, each of them actively trying to make their lives worse in a different way.
>The tragedy of Americans is that they have to choose between two groups of morons, each of them actively trying to make their lives worse in a different way.
And what else is new?
Except they did actually literally say what you wanted them to say. https://www.vox.com/policy/385549/trans-sports-transgender-biden-harris-democrats-titleix
> In 2023, over strong objections of activists on the right and left, the Biden administration announced a proposed change to Title IX, the law that prohibits discrimination based on sex in any federally funded educational program. Their suggested change would prohibit outright bans on transgender athletes, but would permit schools to restrict transgender students from participating if they could demonstrate that inclusion would harm “educational objectives” like fair competition and the prevention of injury.
...
> The rule marked the Biden administration’s first time saying that sex differences can matter in school sports and schools can discriminate in some cases, while also saying schools do not have to — thus permitting blue states like Connecticut to continue with existing policy. While its merits were debated, the federal proposal was on the table.
> “The draft regulation recognizes that there are real sex differences and that these matter in competition,” Doriane Coleman, a law professor at Duke University who focuses on sports and gender, told Vox. “For the progressive wing of the Democratic Party, which takes the position that all sex differences are just myth and stereotype, that was a big, maybe even treasonous move.”
> Even as conservatives barraged Democrats with attacks that they were extremists on school sports, the White House and then later the Harris campaign never sought to talk about the direction they thought Title IX policy ought to go.
I think its worth evaluating who "woke people" are, how many of them are there, and how powerful are they. I assure you, this is not a choice between two groups of morons. It's one group of morons with a shockingly effective marketing team, and the other people.
Indeed. Having had serial direct contact with both groups for years now it's pretty clear to me which one is worse, for a couple of reasons including the respective possibilities of learning anything or ever being persuaded out of their specific stupidity. (I am in this way fully in agreement with Hanania's current writings.)
That said, your situation summary remains fair. As I've put it for several years now the nation has been stuck between dueling tantrums.
Here's a slice of a comment I made on DSL:
----
Another part of why I think this is tweaking people is the whole "there are five lights" undercurrent to it. People are told there are more than two genders when they're seeing only two. At best, they see people clearly born as one, trying to look like the other, ending up looking as believable as Giuliani in a dress, who clearly wasn't doing anything serious. At worst, they look for one thing in a date at a bar, connect, and find out later. [...]
People probably really hate being told there are five lights when they see only four, and "pronouns in your bio" implies that it's impossible to know what gender someone is identifying as by looking at them for three seconds. So no, "pronouns in your bio" isn't some harmless thing.
----
A great deal of woke ideology is like that. "Silence is violence." "Riots were mostly peaceful." "'All Lives Matter' is offensive." "We just want you to stop denying our existence; also, bake the cake."
I think these tariffs are very bad, based on free trade principles. Those who think tariffs are good, are basing their arguments on other economic principles. A debate on economic principles can be difficult, but there's an upside: both can base their economic principles on logic.
Woke ideology came across like an attack on logic itself. Win that, and *nothing* can be argued rationally anymore.
(Dig deep enough, and you find it's a logic attack wrapped around an assertion about power, and that's understandable to anyone familiar with who/whom; but that's equivalent to the strawman argument behind tariffs, and worse than the steelman argument for them.)
Your argument rests on two premises -- first, that woke ideology is crazy, and second, that it was a powerful and dominant force that really mattered.
Without saying anything about wokeness as a policy position, I reject the latter premise. Anyone who is telling you that 'woke' was in any meaningful position of power is downstream of some intense propaganda. They couldn't even get most universities to divest from Israel or whatever. But people like to nut-pick, so it's not surprising that extremists got a lot more airtime -- mostly from people bashing them. To wit, I think the only people who actually believe the progressive left had real power, were exactly the people who got all their news from r/tumblrinaction. Its rage bait, and a lot of people fell for it. The dems actually elected a moderate; it was the gop that got so spooked by their own shadow that they elected their extremist.
Put a slightly different way: electing Trump because of 'woke' is a bit like burning down your house because you saw a picture of a spider on your computer -- a massive overreaction to something that wasn't even a problem to begin with.
---
As an aside, DSL has hopelessly lost its way. These days I check in mostly to stare in awe at the olympian gymnastics on display.
My argument doesn't rest on woke ideology being crazy. It rests on it saying things I quoted above.
Which just illustrates my point. You pretended my argument said something it didn't, and then proceeded to criticize the argument you imagined. I see this from woke ideologues frequently enough to swamp whatever logic might have been in there. (I see it from non-woke ideologues, too, but at least they mostly don't have college degrees to wave at me.)
Given that, I cannot in good conscience trust anything a woke ideologue says unless I can check it independently, whether it's an opinion about some webforum, or US political policy. At best, I can trust such an individual to seek power - same as any other ideologue.
Unfortunately, your response isn't really a response, it's just an ad-hom. If you think I misrepresented something, you should probably say what I misrepresented. But let me try again to make it clearer for you.
You wrote:
> People probably really hate being told there are five lights when they see only four, and "pronouns in your bio" implies that it's impossible to know what gender someone is identifying as by looking at them for three seconds. So no, "pronouns in your bio" isn't some harmless thing.
> Woke ideology came across like an attack on logic itself. Win that, and *nothing* can be argued rationally anymore.
The only reason we are discussing 'woke ideology' in the first place is because the "people" you are referring to for some reason think that 'woke ideology' is this really powerful thing, a 'dominant force that really mattered'. You yourself seem to think that woke ideology was a really powerful thing, which is why you are writing about it. And my response to you is that it was not a dominant force that really mattered, and if you think it was, you are downstream of some intense propaganda.
And then, instead of arguing many possible positions such as "its worth calling out extremist philosophies even if they do not have a lot of mindshare" or "the woke ideology actually did have a lot of mindshare and was a powerful thing", you responded with...this:
"My argument doesn't rest on woke ideology being crazy. It rests on it saying things I quoted above...You pretended my argument said something it didn't, and then proceeded to criticize the argument you imagined. "
This is a very strange response! It seems like you think I said something like "woke wasn't A, it was B", even though I explicitly said I was not going to discuss woke ideology on the merits. Woke people could be saying the sky is red and down is up, it doesn't matter. My point is not about woke ideology. My point is "why are you pretending that some fringe bullshit thing matters a lot? Why are you tilting at windmills?"
Hopefully this clarified things.
BTW part of why I left DSL is precisely because they all just got so deep in the circlejerk that they would gut instinct react to any criticism with "you are just a woke ideologue". Like, ok man, enjoy the epistemic hole you're in. I think it's cute that the framing you've chosen is one of the battered resistance. Everyone else is seeking power, but not the people who I trust deeply on this very politically slanted forum, THOSE guys are the people calling out the real truth. Meanwhile, you...read my post, thought it said something it didn't, and proceeded to criticize the argument you imagined. Now, look, communication is a two way street, so I recognize that I may not have been as eloquent as needed and at least tried to clarify. But I hope it gives you a bit of pause that your revealed instinct was to just retaliate and shut down the conversation. Maybe not the best epistemological habits for truth-seeking.
"Unfortunately, your response doesn't really contain any argument, it's just an ad-hom."
It's not an ad-hom.
You're doing it again.
Less of this please.
Would you consider everyone constantly talking about Trump and his policies an example of "nut-picking"?
No, but I think I am misunderstanding your question because it feels like a complete non-sequitur.
Like, if a lot of people are talking about how the tariffs are bad because the stock market is going to crash while it is, in fact, crashing, that's not nut-picking. Nut-picking is essentially a version of Scott's non-central fallacy. You pick out some random anons on twitter (or tumblr) and implicitly pretend they are representative of the entire movement. The reason I don't understand your question is because if "everyone is constantly talking about" X, they are by definition not nut-picking. Nut-picking has to be non-central/non-representative in some way.
A good example of nut-picking on the left (since I think that's what your question is pointing at) would be like taking a pro-Trump no-name rando neo-nazi's 4chan posts and arguing that these are representative of Trump. That sort of thing did happen, of course. It is notably NOT nut-picking, however, if people take Steve Bannon's tweets and argue that they are representative of Trump, since Bannon was and is one of Trump's closest advisors.
Okay, I just wanted to be clear on what you meant by "nut-picking." I think excluding by definition someone that "everyone constantly talking about" is flawed because there are people/organizations powerful enough to steer the public conversation and they can (and do) elevate some "random anons" to national prominence to make their own side look better in comparison. (Admittedly, a few of them DO then manage to parlay that into some long-lasting recognizability/influence, but that doesn't make the initial selection any less "nut-picking.")
I disagree that random anons on Twitter/Tumblr are less representative of a their movement than Trump is of his. The former is more diffuse, yes, and that prevents any one person becoming as much of a household name, but in terms of power and influence, I'd assess theirs to have FAR more, but at the very least, they're comparable.
Sorry, just to make sure I understood, is your position that random anons on Twitter are as representative of 'their movement' (unclear how you would determine this) and are more powerful in influencing their movement, than Trump is of MAGA?
I ask because this seems so obviously incorrect that I think I'm missing something.
Your argument is a general-purpose argument in favor of doing any insane thing as long as it spares us from the terrible force of pronouns in the bio. Here's its logical implication:
>> We should genocide all Jews in America (7-8 million people). Jews are disproportionally progressive in America, and thus are instrumental in helping the Woke attack on logic itself. Win that, and nothing can be argued rationally anymore. We can't even argue that Nazism is bad, or that killing people is not okay. We should thus genocide all Jews as a start, and hope that the rest of progressives will take the hint and stop being so illogical.
Is genocide too far? Then your argument is false: if it was true the above implication would actually be true, as "an attack on logic itself" is indeed infinitely morally dangerous and we may have to do something as drastic as genocide or wholesale ethnic cleansing to avoid it.
(and yes, any disproportionally progressive population would have sufficed, I specifically chose Jews to rub in the face how ridiculous the argument is.)
If your argument is instead the somewhat more defensible "Wokism is so bad it requires measures as drastic as Trump, but less drastic than genocide or ethnic cleansing", then (A) How much damage can Trump do to convince that fighting wokism is not worth having him as president? (B) How is Trump deporting Pro-Palestinian protestors and random Latinos helping fight the entirety of progressivism? (C) How to guarantee that progressives won't be so humiliated and angry that they amp their progressivism and zeal up to 11, both during and after Trump's presidency? They don't need political power in the White House to put pronouns on their bio, after all. Are you going to ban pronouns? Ban them only when they're woke? How can you determine that? Kill anyone who googles "HRT" or logs on to Tumblr?
If we ever had an election where the choice was between a pro-genocide candidate and a candidate that made it impossible to be anti-genocide, then either way, we're headed for genocide, and all that sounds like to me is that's it's time to vote third-party candidate or possibly revolt.
Fortunately, that's not on the table.
If someone wants to make the argument that the bad thing about a party that makes rational argument almost impossible is that it gives the opposing party license to be almost, but not quite, as bad, I'm sympathetic. But you're probably not the right person to make that argument.
I'm the best kind of guy to do any argument. My arguments, they're beautiful, they're big, nobody had seen anything quite like them. Everybody is telling me, "How do you do it?", they want to know right?, Sleepy Joe can't do it, not the radical left lunatics too. Everybody likes my arguments, my uncle was an arguments guy, studied at MIT. He knew all about arguments, he taught me, that's how I know.
Nobody does arguments like me.
Conservatives have become a very dumb and unhinged cult of personality, that doesn't mean wokeness was not a big deal. I remember when they shut down culture war discussions over on r/ssc, leading to the formation of The Motte, which then got hounded out of reddit entirely. They even doxxed Scott and harassed him at his workplace. They're a very controlling faction that wants to silence dissent and consider you evil for disagreeing with their outlandish propositions.
That said, yeah, it doesn't mean they're worse than Trump, but I'm glad the woke years are over.
The woke years aren't "over", wokism is a structural pathogen that will emerge and re-emerge again and again both in its traditional form and as quite mirror-reversed form that are no less ridiculous and obnoxious as long as the conditions (structural weakness in Free Speech regulations on the Internet, universities, etc...).
Trumpsters are woke, see if you can spot any similarities to their behaviors from the following list [1]:
(1) Academic - the terminology of woke politics is an academic terminology, which is unsurprising given its origins in humanities departments of elite universities.
(2) Immaterial - woke politics are overwhelmingly concerned with the linguistic, the symbolic, and the emotional to the detriment of the material, the economic, and the real.
(3) Structural in analysis, individual in action - the woke perspective is one that tends to see the world’s problems as structural in nature rather than the product of individual actors or actions. Sometimes the problems are misdiagnosed or exaggerated, but the structural focus is beneficial. Curiously, though, the woke approach to solutions to politics is relentlessly individualistic.
(4) Emotionalist - “emotionalist” rather than emotional, meaning not necessarily inappropriately emotional but concerned fundamentally with emotions as the currency of politics.
(5) Fatalistic - woke politics tend towards extreme fatalism regarding solutions and the possibility of gradual positive political change. Institutions are all corrupt and bigoted, so institutions cannot prompt change. Most people are irredeemably racist, and so the masses cannot create a just society.
(6) Insistent that all political questions are easy - woke people speak and act as though there are no hard political questions and no such thing as a moral dilemma. Everything is obvious if you’ve only done the reading and done the work
(7) Possessed of belief in the superior virtue of the oppressed
(8) Enabling people who aren’t Black or Southern to say “y’all”
Only (1) and (8) are obvious mismatches. Replace every occurrence of "oppressed" by "White Americans", and every occurrence of "Racism" or "Sexism" or "Homophobia" by "Deep State" or "Wokism" or "Unpatriotism", and every woke tactic like boycott or harassment by the correspondingly MAGA tactics of deportation or vile harassment on twitter, and you got yourself a perfectly valid woke knockout that just so happens to look at Americans as the victimized group ("True" Americans: anyone who agrees with everything Trump farts out of his mouth and worship him without question. Not Americans in the legal sense, not White people, not White Americans, not Conservatives).
This is not surprising, the parallels between wokism and religious extremists are well-discussed, and the 2 groups give each other ideas and toxoplasma.
[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20230404013504/https://freddiedeboer.substack.com/p/of-course-you-know-what-woke-means
"Woke" progressives capture institutions by using social pressure to out people with different beliefs. "Woke" rightoids decided they'd be better off eliminating institutions. Hardly identical.
Rightoids don't seem to have any objection to trying to take over institutions and outing people with different beliefs, they just aren't smart or patient or long-term-planning enough for social pressures, deception and hostile takeover from within like the woke do, so they do crude and pathetic full-frontals like DOGE and Florida school system sabotage.
And there is no such thing as no institutions, destroying an institution redistributes its powers and responsibilities among the closest surviving institutions, destroying all institutions leaves you with a tribe, not a state.
At least a fair number of wokists got moderated and neutralized by the rules of the institution they tried to capture (which is rules working as intended, every institution has **some** kind of immune system against hostile takeover from within), this never happens if you're just bulldozing an institutions or taking it full-frontal style like right wings 0-IQs are wont to do.
The failure mode of wokism is a dumb obnoxious women, the failure mode trumpism is a dumb criminal man.
DOGE is not an attempted takeover, it is an attempted demolishing.
When DOGE fires employees but doesn't destroy the institutions or agency they work for, I count that as an attempted takeover using selective filtering and just plain chaos. A demolishing would be firing 80% or more of the employee, or outright declaring the agency or institutions "Unamerican", "unpatriotic", etc...
before the current political situation I would have accepted the thing you said at face value and not thought about it further. I would think, that sounds like something the work would do.
Now, I don't believe the things you said.
I think back to my time on the moat when it was on Reddit, and I realize that they didn't actually get driven off, they thought that they were going to get driven off and so they left before the Giants (windmills) could eat them. and yet, Reddit conservative and every other far right sub that hasn't made direct threats against the named person is still on Reddit doing what they do, and the far left subs have been moderated out of existence on account of making direct threats against named people.
Scott got doxed by a newspaper, that's what they do. That same paper went on to docs a bunch of insufficiently centrist protesters re Palestine, because it's a newspaper. That one actually is a giant, but it's not a woke giant, it's a normal centrist Giant doing the thing it's been doing ever since the '60s.
So, I think your comment isn't true. I think you believe something that isn't true for reasons that aren't the ones you think they are. I dont actually know what you could say to convince me at this point unless we met face to face, which is not a good spot to be in re the epistemology of the anonymous Mass.
I don't mean the New York Times, Scott has mentioned he faced threatening phone calls to his workplace from woke people, back when he worked at a clinic owned by someone else. The Culture War Thread absolutely got driven off r/ssc by the woke (why do you think the Culture War Thread was driven off?), leading to the creation of r/TheMotte, then The Motte left reddit because they were getting attention from the Reddit admins. I'm going off of my own memory here of seeing the comments of the TheMotte mods in the run up to the decision to leave the site.
Even when I talked to Kamala-voting normies in the real world, they do mention that it was to be expected that the woke would create a backlash, but they wonder why the backlash had to take the form of Trump specifically.
We don't have to guess at what happened with Scott, we have primary sources: https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/02/22/rip-culture-war-thread/
> This post is called “RIP Culture War Thread”, so you may have already guessed things went south. What happened? The short version is: a bunch of people harassed and threatened me for my role in hosting it, I had a nervous breakdown, and I asked the moderators to get rid of it.
> The fact is, it’s very easy to moderate comment sections. It’s very easy to remove spam, bots, racial slurs, low-effort trolls, and abuse...But once you remove all those things, you’re left with people honestly and civilly arguing for their opinions. And that’s the scariest thing of all.
> Some people think society should tolerate pedophilia, are obsessed with this, and can rattle off a laundry list of studies that they say justify their opinion. Some people think police officers are enforcers of oppression and this makes them valid targets for violence. Some people think immigrants are destroying the cultural cohesion necessary for a free and prosperous country...Each of these views has adherents who are, no offense, smarter than you are.
> The thing about an online comment section is that the guy who really likes pedophilia is going to start posting on every thread about sexual minorities “I’m glad those sexual minorities have their rights! Now it’s time to start arguing for pedophile rights!” followed by a ten thousand word manifesto.
> Every Twitter influencer who wants to profit off of outrage culture is going to be posting 24-7 about how the New York Times endorses pedophilia. Breitbart or some other group that doesn’t like the Times for some reason will publish article after article on New York Times‘ secret pro-pedophile agenda. Allowing any aspect of your brand to come anywhere near something unpopular and taboo is like a giant Christmas present for people who hate you, people who hate everybody and will take whatever targets of opportunity present themselves, and a thousand self-appointed moral crusaders and protectors of the public virtue. It doesn’t matter if taboo material makes up 1% of your comment section; it will inevitably make up 100% of what people hear about your comment section and then of what people think is in your comment section.
> People would message me on Twitter to shame me for my Nazism. People who linked my blog on social media would get replies from people “educating” them that they were supporting Nazism, or asking them to justify why they thought it was appropriate to share Nazi sites. I wrote a silly blog post about mathematics and corn-eating. It reached the front page of a math subreddit and got a lot of upvotes. Somebody found it, asked if people knew that the blog post about corn was from a pro-alt-right neo-Nazi site that tolerated racists and sexists. There was a big argument in the comments about whether it should ever be acceptable to link to or read my website. Any further conversation about math and corn was abandoned. This kept happening, to the point where I wouldn’t even read Reddit discussions of my work anymore. The New York Times already has a reputation, but for some people this was all they’d heard about me.
> People started threatening to use my bad reputation to discredit the communities I was in and the causes I cared about most.
> One person called the clinic where I worked, pretended to be a patient, and tried to get me fired.
> I don’t want to claim martyrdom. None of these things actually hurt me in real life. My blog continues to be popular, my friends stuck by me, and my clinic didn’t let me go. I am not going to be able to set up a classy new FiredForTruth.com website like James Damore did. What actually happened was much more prosaic: I had a nervous breakdown.
etc.
My own take:
It's always been very unclear to me what 'woke' means. I think you could look at this and say 'the woke' did this, but it proves too much. There are tons of people who have been subject to this kind of hate/slander campaigns. GamerGate was a lot of this -- random half-famous people were suddenly caught up in mobs of people telling them to kill themselves or whatever. Saying GamerGate was woke is, frankly, insane.
An explanation that better fits the data: I think Scott ran up against what happens when you become moderately famous on the internet. The things that happened to Scott are what happen to all famous people, from the Royal Family down to random child celebrities. It sucks, but 'woke' didn't invent this or even popularize this. This is a tactic that is used by illiberal ideologies, of which you could maybe argue 'woke' was one (again, unclear what 'woke' actually means).
My recollection is that Scott himself wanted the CW thread gone.
The backlash had to take the form of Trump or someone like him, because the Woke scared everyone in the traditional center-left and center-right into keeping silent. Whoever stepped up to lead the resistance, aside from isolated impotent clusters of nerds, was going to be someone from outside of the political mainstream and with an enormous ego.
I share your fears and befuddlement.
If trump keeps a 200% tariff on china for 2 weeks, the last world order is over in everyone's estimation right? Everyone will be debating what changes, possibility including assassination attempts, but something breaks?
Aaaaaand we're done. Tariffs "paused".
I understand being weak. I understand being stupid. I understand being belligerent.
But: a combination of all three at the same time is a sight to behold, and defies explanation. And they told be Biden was senile. Which he was, but then why replace him with... this.... thing....
The tariffs were to force other countries to capitulate. They did, so now the tariffs are paused. Except for China, and I do think he's gearing up for a trade war with them.
I don't see why it's weak to go "okay, you did what I wanted, now I do what I said I'd do if you did what I wanted" re: tariffs.
Trump cannot fail and is never wrong. Sure. Enjoy.
How is this any worse than "Trump will always fail and is never right"?
it's the same.
We should look at the merits. As far as the tariff policy, it's an asinine self-inflicted wound that harms the US and the world.
If the tarriffs in a month are 100x higher on china then japan then trump wont be seen as weak.
.... trumps treatment of japan worries me, they shouldve been treated as the ideal ally to bully germany into being to set the tone.
Being what?
An ideal ally
I think this sentence is outside newspaper-english but here's an edit
"...trumps treatment of japan worries me; they shouldve been treated as the ”ideal-ally”, to bully germany into being; to set the tone."
Germany is already doing what Trump claims to want. Not that stopped Vance and Musk from trying to undermine Germany at every opportunity either.
> Germany is already doing what Trump claims to want.
This has 5? levels of indirection; I dont know how you read trump claimed, which trump statement... if Germany is doing that, etc.
What concrete thing do you mean; I mean toyota decades ago building factorys where consumers are, due to demographics
a) Germany is increasing its debt (which means more domestic demand and lower trade surpluses) and b) spending a lot more on military as Vance keeps demanding and keeps trying to prevent.
europe v russia, kinetic warfare and the economic warfare between america and china seem very far apart(to be different topics) to me.
I can call germany stupid for dismantling its nuclear power plants all day but thats about russia I dont actually care; tarriffs are about where the factories are; which ive worked in a factory may need to go back
Im pretty sure Germany has a collapsing birthrate like japan, has cars, tarriffs are focusing on cars; japans companies made car factories in america decades ago, and german companies didnt.
---
If youd suggest a holistic framing of all this politics: kenetic vs economic; cars and miltrey; is nessery, why? what do you think comes out of it?
Being unpredictable has its own set of strategic advantages, particularly when you're the dominant player. I think it would be giving Trump too much credit to say he's playing 4d chess, but I don't think the economic turmoil is necessarily bad for the US in a competitive zero-sum sense.
> I don't think the economic turmoil is necessarily bad for the US in a competitive zero-sum sense.
It's bad for the US in a zero-sum AND negative-sum sense.
Uncertainty is preventing business from investing in the US. You don't have to believe me, you can just listen to all the American business people who have been saying this for months. It really takes some doing to get oil and gas executives furious at a Republican president, and yet Trump managed it anyway.
>It's bad for the US in a zero-sum AND negative-sum sense.
I think you mean positive-sum. Trade isn't a negative-sum game.
My point is it's worse for other countries than it is for us. China devalued its currency in response to the tariffs. That's worse for them than it is for us. I don't know much about international economics but it sure seems like the past week has been a win for the US relative to China. They depend on global stability much more than we do.
We're the most significant economy in the world. Other countries have to dance to the tune that we play. If we do unpredictable things then it will hurt them more than it hurts us. We have the most dynamic, least centralized large economy. It can respond to shocks much more quickly. That gives us a strategic advantage in tumultuous conditions.
One of the reasons for the US's dominance up until now is that it was a good place to invest. Now Trump is doing his best to demonstrate the opposite. It may not be easy, but other countries WILL build supply chains outside of the US if you force them too.
China is the main beneficiary of Trump's tariffs, because it's the second biggest economy and the most feasible alternative supplier. Non-US countries are likely to buy a lot more from China going forward, a big change from the past decade when they were doing their best to reduce dependence on China.
> China is the main beneficiary of Trump's tariffs
Eh? China is a food importer and idk 100% seems high
Why not mexico, the eu, brazil maybe?
It's a good place to invest because a) we have the world's largest military by a wide margin b) we have the world's largest consumer market c) we're the global reserve currency. None of those things is going to change in the medium term and nothing that Trump is doing is going to make a lasting difference. It's just short-term turmoil. People who invest with short time horizons are morons anyway. Over any long horizon the US continues to be the best place to invest and nowhere else is even close. You're just being histrionic because you hate Trump. Settle down. He's hilarious so just enjoy the ride. How often do we get a front-row seat to performance art of this magnitude?
Yes it can be done by a skillful player, with a dollop of luck on top. We’re seeing… not that.
Actually what I want to know is who was told 10 minutes before the announcement so they could close their puts and buy short-dated out of the money calls.
> a skillful player, with a dollop of luck on top.
You don't think this describes Trump?
In politics he is both of those things. In other spheres (like governing) he is not. He wasn't particularly lucky or skillful with covid, for instance.
lucky yes, skillful no.
Oh for sure. I think it's highly likely that he's just manipulating markets to benefit his buddies.
If he's going to be weak, his enemies will punish him for it. Sad that it had to end this way...
Yeah like any two of these together are kind of… ok? It’s all three in one package that just look pathetic.
I suspect it's not over. The argument has been made for a while that this was "anchoring" - staking down a clear ideal position for yourself from which to negotiate. There are counterarguments (this is not how politics is done; Trump didn't make it clear that this was negotiation; et al.), but in context of his unpredictability by the standards of nearly anyone else, I can't rule out that anchoring was what this was.
Either way, it's not really in our hands unless people want to write Congress and ask for impeachment yet again (I'm afraid that well has been poisoned). Alternately, try to predict what's going to happen and instruct your brokerages accordingly.
I think if the plan was to negotiate, then he would have negotiated before putting the tariffs into effect. I think he at one point had confidence they would work and then changed his mind, or was forced to change his mind by supporters.
His advisers are explicitly are for chaos to remind the world americas position
If that was the plan, then they'd have to stick with it. Pulling out early makes you look like the world's bitch.
Trump may have thought that if he merely brought them up in negotiation, everyone would have dismissed the threat, so he had to make a credible commit.
Of course, I'm just speculating. As usual, Trump is frustratingly hard to predict, even for people who aren't just tribally opposed to him.
If that was his plan, then he just screwed it up terribly. Backing down that much, that quickly undermines his credibility far more than threatening first and tariffing later ever could.
But also if that was the plan, it seems poorly conceived from the start. The U.S. is bigger than any other single player in the world market, and thus has an advantage if it tries to weaponize its trade to extract concessions. It is NOT bigger than the rest of the market combined. Throwing out scattershot tariffs against everyone, all at the same time means the U.S. feels the squeeze harder than most of its negotiating partners do *and everybody knows that.* Plus, with the whole rest of the world in the same boat, everyone suddenly has a large, simultaneous incentive to just route around the U.S. market and trade with each other[1].
When Trump started out with large, specific threats against Canada and Mexico, I assumed they were a negotiating ploy. The balance of economic power *was* quite lopsided in those relationships. He likely *could* have used them as leverage to extract significant concessions. But then he seemingly failed to even *ask* for much of anything meaningful from either country, repeatedly signaled that he thought the tariffs were valuable for their own sake, and then turned around and picked a *much* bigger trade war without apparently ever making a real attempt at any sort of deal.
So I don't feel like the evidence really supports the idea that he's following any sort of a rational strategy here, especially not one based around negotiation. Yes, unpredictability can be an advantage, to an extent. But shooting yourself in the foot can't plausibly be spun as a ploy to keep your enemies guessing: doubtless they *did* find it surprising, but you still have a bullet hole in your foot.
[1] Which to be clear is not a quick or perfect solution. But it still weakens the intensity of the threat compared to the situation where just one or two countries are being singled out.
I think there’s a built-in assumption that Trump is a good negotiator. This has very much been not in evidence ever.
It depends on what you mean. The world order of USA in charge and free trade (nominally, at least what we say out loud) reigning? Yes, that would likely be over if tariffs stay up long. I don't think two weeks is enough time, maybe two months but more likely six months to really settle in. Two weeks is short enough that everyone can still go back to the previous agreements and contracts before the old ones even got cold.
On the positive side, it may cause a lot of reevaluating the ways that markets aren't free right now - various protectionism measures that just about every country uses to hurt foreign businesses and help their own. Trump wasn't wrong to point out things like currency manipulation, for instance.
On the negative side for the US, most countries will probably try to diversify their trade partners, which means less trade with the US. I know I would be trying to split my trade more evenly across the world, if I had any options. Less chance that China or the US could pull the plug and force my options.
I believe there would be a tarriff rate so absurd it breaks everything in a single day; lets say across the board 100000%, and ships that on thier way must show up and unload their goods by threat of aircraft carrier
I dont find the debate about time very convincing; when a ship gets attacked by pirates, insurence rates change for years; war may instantly invalidate some insureence contracts.
So long as lawyers, complex finance bullshit and paper work are controlling trade, its a risk to not communicate possible changes in laws years in advance; because audists hate change.
If you raise tariffs on goods that are in transit, the thing that will most likely break is the people in your country who are buying the goods - who quite reasonably didn't set aside money to handle a situation where their goods suddenly triple in price after they've already paid for them. At some point, the tariff will be too high for them to pay to unload the goods without going bankrupt, and they'll simply not unload the goods until something changes. (They'll probably still take huge losses redirecting the ships or whatever, but might as well recoup what you can.)
And if you use the Navy to *force* them to unload so that you can collect the tariff, then you're basically just robbing them at gunpoint.
And, yes, if the US decided that it was going to arbitrarily empty the bank accounts of every company that has goods in transit from China today, that would definitely "break everything," but I think that would have less to do with tariffs and more to do with the sudden collapse of property rights. Like, I don't really understand what you're trying to show with this example.
A one day delay is actually really common. What would happen in that scenario is that all the boats scheduled to dock just hang out on the ocean for a day, waiting for instructions on what to do. Before getting any update, the rates go back down and they resume as normal. Sea freight already takes 2-4 weeks to go from China to the US, with huge variations. Adding a day wouldn't change much.
Some decisions will be made in two weeks, but a lot of them can be reversed pretty quickly, and the longer term items (contracts, supply chains, etc.) can't be changed that quickly for most groups.
A cargo ship sitting outside of San Diego isn't going to make it anywhere relevant in less than two weeks, probably longer, even if they get orders to move immediately. Which would be a big headache for someone to figure out - much better to wait a few days and see, rather than wasting the fuel anyway.
I would bet on longer than 2 weeks for systemic change - "there is a lot of ruin in a nation" and so on - but I think 2 weeks of this might be enough for Republican Congresscritters to go from "he's crazy but he'll strike a deal eventually, let's not rock the boat" to "my god he really intends to kill trade forever" and pass a bipartisan, veto-proof anti-tariff bill.
(I'm not at all confident in this guess, I'm just seeing a trickle of "GOP donor says he's wondering if Trump has gone crazy" type articles and feeling like they have to add up to something eventually.)
In terms of political relations, the old order is arguably already dead. Like, the idea of the current US organizing a Bush-style "coalition of the willing" to do something already seems implausible. But economic relations are more concrete, less emotional, they'll take longer to shift.
Allot of trade is china and america; and trump was considered tough on china for a 20% tarriff in 2016
Im for trade war with slave states; but china instantly ratchet'ed it up. I believe everyone believes xi is a cult of personality, and that trumps advisors are pro-chaos; sooo how high does the most relivent tariff rate go. I no longer see a 0% chance of 1000% tarriffs with china.
If we are actually burning down the system I should probaly warn some family.
I would be in favour of 1000% tariffs on China, but they should be directly tied to democratic and human rights reforms. Once there's free elections, once the CCP is abolished, once its leaders are brought to the Hague for trial and so forth.
We can't allow China to become like Russia, where the Communist Party changes its name and holds some phony elections but the same people are still in power. It has to be like Germany, where the people in charge of the regime are utterly forbidden from ever having power again.
> I would be in favour of 1000% tariffs on China
With the understanding that the stock market may drop by 1/2? War? Mass stravation in china?, or as "lol big number, xi will step down"
Dear Scott.
re: 2027
I am not an AI researcher. I am not a policy professional.
I am a HIGHLY HIGHLY HIGHLY HIGHLY HIGHLY HIGHLY concerned citizen. I am one of many.
GIVE ME SOMETHING TO DO.
Figure out a way to convince people that AI harms BIPOCs disproportionately.
I have been sending friends links to Scott’s posts and to his group’s summary of their predictions. But I think there is a need for a summary that is more entertaining and easier to read. When I was first learning about AI a few years ago someone sent me to a 2-part article about AI and its risks that was well done, and casual in style, and had some amusing graphics. I think we need something like that for this next chapter we are starting. It would not be necessary to explain AI itself, because you could link to the original articles I mentioned for that. What about doing that write-up, alone or with others? You could then put it up on, say, Substack and Scott and others could link to it.
Not Scott but it seems to me that the first step in deciding what to do is determining what specific thing you want to change.
Assuming that you do want to make your own choices rather than waiting for orders (superpersuasian skeptics take note): what's a single, clear, specific thing / action / behavior / etc. of which you are HIGHLY HIGHLY HIGHLY HIGHLY HIGHLY HIGHLY concerned and wish to affect?
We have to get rid of the filibuster. You already need both the House and the Senate to pass legislation. Since it’s almost impossible get a 60 vote majority today, that means it’s a herculean effort to get anything at all passed. Congress can’t do anything, it’s power get redistributed to the Supreme Court, the federal bureaucracy and an increasingly imperial presidency. Very little gets done the way it’s supposed to.
The bigger problem is that most Congressmen don't read or even write the bills they end up voting on.
Isnt it congress that decides congress will have the filibuster?
Sure they threaten to destory it every year, but maybe thats just a mating ritual.
It is strange that while both the judicial and executive branches are trying to take more power, the legislature has let themselves become feckless.
They control the budget which they are consistently debating, for anyone not trump this was allot of power because who isnt going to spend earmarked money?
Yeah but money is fungible and the executive branch gets trillions of dollars to play with every year. The imperial presidency has been consistently increasing for decades
If congress wasnt repubicain I think doge wouldve been dismantled; it still seems fairly rational that congress writes mission statements and controls money is a major power. The real question is why the courts allow such nonsense reads of the consitution all the time; why not be the life time judge throwing idiots out of your sight when they blatantly lie and every once in a while yell at the president.
The federal government hasn’t been really following the constitution for nearly a hundred years. It’s whatever legal mumbo jumbo you can get away with.
Worse, the filibuster works by wasting time, so one policy getting filibustered effectively kills the policies scheduled behind it too. I don't know why it hasn't been restructured by now. Unless that's the point, of course, to kill publicly uncontroversial things by scheduling them behind a known filibuster.
IIRC when someone threatens a filibuster, Congress usually moves on to other stuff on the schedule rather than simply stall everything out, and that's why the threat of a filibuster very rarely results in someone actually needing to get up and give speeches for all eternity.
Yes. The times when the filibuster is actually used are almost always cases where an individual wants to grandstand while losing. There have been a few historical events where a team of people (i.e. the entire opposition party) have been able to hold up the Senate long enough to prevail, but I haven't seen that happen in a long time. The threat of 40+ people rotating shifts and stopping the Senate from doing anything is enough, so both sides just let it go at that point.
So either legislation gets 60+ votes or folds to opposition.
Green eggs and ham…
Asking for help -- does anyone here have an experience with reverse image search or things like that?
I sometimes read stories about how someone was photographed at a crime scene, and later people found his page on social media. I am not sure how exactly this works; how much of that was some automatic searching process (upload the image somewhere, receive links to social media account), how much was distributed human work, and how much was sheer luck (e.g. someone recognized their neighbor).
Here is a photo I have: [redacted]
This young man deals drugs to kids of similar age in my neighborhood. I was extremely lucky to get this picture. He found a secluded place to conduct his business, a narrow street with only one window, in the middle of the day when most people are at work or at school. Too bad for him that it happened to be my window, and I happened to be working from home that day, and I was quick enough to grab a camera and open the window, and despite him hiding his face in a fraction of a second, there were still two or three frames in the video where his face is clearly visible.
Assuming that this guy has a presence on social networks, is it somehow possible to find him, using this picture? Could you please try and reply here with the link? To narrow down the choices (or as a sanity check for the results), the location is Slovakia, Bratislava.
I am probably taking the whole video to the police tomorrow, but I expect much greater chances of success if could give them some pointer where to find him. Otherwise they will probably be too busy to do something about it.
EDIT: Yeah, there is nothing in the photo suggesting that he was involved in some illegal activity. I wasn't that lucky. So I guess you just have to trust me. Sorry, I wish I had a better option here. My only hope is that if the cops go check his home, they will either find something there, or the kid will lose his nerves and confess. Or maybe someone is already investigating this, and my evidence happens to be the last piece they need (e.g. a legal excuse to search his home).
Your local police department might have a contract with https://www.clearview.ai/ Keep on filing police reports.
PimEyes is pretty good at finding people by faces - e.g. often on photographer portfolio sites attending a wedding, or in the crowd at a large sports match.
https://pimeyes.com/en
Best thing I can think of is to scroll through Facebook for your area
and look for photos of the guy. There’s probably a way to use tech to strain out photos that could not possibly be him — women, old folks, people of a different race — so there would be fewer photos for you to look at, but you’d need someone techy to set it up.
Interesting question, and I can understand your frustration, but I don't think you should share the picture here.
removed, because no one could help me anyway
I don't know what your local laws might be, but if this guy is very sensitive to being watched, can you put up an outdoor security camera outside your window, aimed right at his spot?
That should encourage him to move along.
Im very sure reverse image search does not attempt to do face rec.
At risk of help`n a SNITCH; you should probably scan local school socail media groups for celebrations of hilters birthday
Consider letting him go if he doesnt sell fent and offering to buy a few drug testing kits
I think Yandex's does.
As I understand it, most reverse image search sites like tineye.com work by checking similarity to cached images, so if you're the only person to have ever photographed the guy in that location the similarity to cached images is likely close to zero, even if pictures of him in other places exist. There may be more sophisticated sites out there that could do proper facial recognition but I'm not aware of any, and even if I were I'd be worried about the privacy implications of letting anyone face ID random strangers...
I’ve been building a small side project inspired by Karl Popper and a recent dwarkesh podcast. The premise is simple:
A web platform where the only thing you can post is a falsifiable conjecture.
Other users post refutations — empirical, logical, or theoretical.
Authors revise their conjectures in response, or let them die.
No infinite threads, no persuasion spirals — just:
“Here’s what I think is true. Here’s what would prove me wrong. Go.”
⸻
Why?
Because most online platforms reward persuasion, not refutation.
Because blog posts tend to attract agreement or vibes-based replies.
Because ideas don’t often get tested in public — just upvoted, ignored, or memed.
I’m trying to build a minimal place for intellectual honesty:
• Conjectures must include clear falsification criteria.
• Refutations are peer-visible and ranked.
• Conjectures can be revised, versioned, or withdrawn.
• Later: prediction markets, journals, citations, and reputation.
⸻
Examples:
• “Universal Basic Income reduces crime in high-income countries.”
Falsification: Controlled studies show no decrease in crime rates post-UBI.
• “By 2030, open-source LLMs will outperform closed models on reasoning benchmarks.”
Falsification: No open-source model outperforms GPT-N on GSM8K, MATH, etc.
• “CRISPR cures at least one human monogenic disease at population scale by 2029.”
Falsification: No such treatment reaches >100,000 patients worldwide.
⸻
My questions for you:
• Would you use something like this — to post, to refute, to lurk?
• What failure modes should I be terrified of?
• How is this not just “Metaculus with paragraphs” or “LessWrong with more constraints”?
• What would make this fun or addictively useful?
⸻
Happy to link the MVP if anyone wants to see it. Just trying to figure out whether this is the seed of a useful epistemic environment — or a graveyard of noble abstractions.
X thread: https://x.com/Duarteosrm/status/1909709276597149939
I think this is a worthwhile project, but I have a prejudice as a long-standing fan of the Popper framework.
The main point of failure I see is fuzziness. It is very difficult for most people to precisely state their claims and falsification evidence. Even on prediction markets, there are vaguely defined questions. For the most part, it seems the larger prediction markets are ok b/c there are enough sharply defined questions for the community to tolerate the vague ones.
The main alternative solution is what I see you doing in one of the comment sub-threads below: internal resources that help users sharpen their questions and identify falsification criteria. That is pretty resource intensive, though, especially because popperian thinking is way outside the normal practice for most people.
Thank you for your comment Joshua. I agree with your points. Are you a philosopher or web developer by any chance?
Neither, but potentially interested in supporting the project in some way.
There’s two issues here:
One is that many studies are wrong, not in an obvious ways and even when there aren’t any noticeable errors, they still can just be wrong.
The other is how many issues aren’t falsifiable. How do you falsify the personhood of a zygote?
This is more a critique of falsification itself.
There are many issues with the scientific method. One famous issue is Wittgenstein's ruler - a scientific study may arrive at a false conclusion because it is in fact measuring the equipment used, rather than the phenomenon.
The final point is a question of theoretical possibility vs. practical plausibility. A better example would be how do you falsify the predictive ability of evolution.
Still, there exist a large number of phenomena where the conjecture is plausibly falsifiable and well designed studies can be created.
I don't think the difficulty of falsifying is a problem for your project. The burden is on the person posing the question to include the things they would consider falsifying.
In general, one strength of the Popper framework is the meta-thinking involved in setting up the hypotheses. Even for cases where there is a non-falsifiable belief underpinning a particular view, I think it is useful for the proponents to recognize that it isn't falsifiable and to spend a couple minute contemplating what that means.
“The final point is a question of theoretical possibility vs. practical plausibility.”
No, it’s a point about how some things can’t be falsified. There are no possible studies demonstrating that a fetus should have a right to life.
Oh, well I've certainly got at least two conjectures. First; smell works by sensing molecular vibrations, the mechanism is uncertain. Two; MoND is a good description of gravity at low acceleration levels and should be considered more. It's not a theory, but it's a big data point that people are ignoring.
Interesting! Would you be up for refining these into falsifiable conjectures?
1. Molecular vibration theory of smell - Could we frame a specific falsification test? For instance:
If two molecules with identical vibrational spectra but different shapes are distinguishable by smell, the vibration hypothesis is falsified.
That makes it testable, not just plausible.
2. MoND as a valid low-acceleration gravity model - Could this be stated in a way that pits it directly against dark matter models? For example:
If a ΛCDM model explains galaxy rotation curves with fewer assumptions or parameters than MoND across a representative sample, then MoND is disfavoured.
Here’s a sharper question: Would you be willing to attach a bounty to either of these?
Say, £50 or £100 for a clear empirical or theoretical refutation meeting defined criteria?
Performative B. has a response to smell. Stacy McGaugh has a whole blog dedicated to MoND. https://tritonstation.com/ Mond is not so much a theory as an observational fitting. We have no idea why it works. As for dark matter. I don't think Cold (heavy) dark matter will be detected and so a direct detection of a massive dark matter particle would refute that. It does seem likely that there is some dark matter out there. Maybe hot (light) dark matter or something else.
I guess I'd bet some money on there being no cold dark matter particle. As for the rest, the smell is shape and lamda-CDM are the dominant ideas in their respective science fields. And so there are strong prejudicious for them. (It's where all the money is.)
> If two molecules with identical vibrational spectra but different shapes are distinguishable by smell, the vibration hypothesis is falsified.
Classically, this is "smell as shape" vs "smell as vibration" and there was a book called the Emperor of Scent about Luca Turin, the main proponent of "smell as vibration."
Quoting from my review of the book:
"The essential debate is about the mechanism behind smell sensing. The established position maintains that the G proteins in our nasal passages lock onto and detect different shapes on molecules, or perhaps different parts of shapes, and assembles this information into the different smells we perceive.
But this model has many problems - the even and odd esters used in Chanel no 5 smelling different,3 rocket fuel with no sulfur atom smelling like sulfur, deuterated molecules smelling different than molecules with regular hydrogen despite having identical shapes, sila compounds with silicons in place of carbons, and thus exactly the same shapes - but different atomic weights - smelling different, and more.
What would explain all these disparate facts that give the lie to “smell as shape?” If smell was detected by vibration, by the frequency of the electron shells in what is being smelled. Basically, the nose would be doing spectroscopy, which is crazy if you’re thinking of optical spectroscopy, but makes more sense if you’re thinking of electron tunneling voltage drop spectroscopy. "
I reviewed the book, including a literature review of the latest "smell as shape / vibration" exchanges, here: https://performativebafflement.substack.com/p/quantum-tunneling-perfumes-and-the
Yes exactly, I'm reading your review. Thanks.
Nitpick: for the UBI example, I would expect UBI to be rigorously defined in the falsification criteria, because most if not all pilot studies that have been done fail the "universal" part (they only have so much funding so they randomly/systematically pick some poor people in a certain area to receive it). If I entered that proposition, I would only want examples of country/province/statewide etc. UBI policies that reached say 95% or more of the polity in question.
While I do think when you get down to that level you have essentially rederived metaculus from first principles, it would still be useful to have a competing platform with different rules/structure in case your model turns out to be the better one for finding the truth.
And yes, in case anyone was wondering, I am aware of the Alaska Permanent Fund. This would satisfy my "universal" criteria but not my "basic" criteria (the amount paid out per resident is only $1600 per year as of 2019, which is nowhere near enough to cover rent).
Great nitpick. I completely agree. The conjecture would need to rigorously define both “universal” and “basic” in operational terms. Otherwise the falsification criteria become too soft to be useful.
Something like:
If a UBI policy covering at least 95 percent of adults in a given polity over at least 3 years, with payments equal to or greater than X percent of local median rent, shows no statistically significant decrease in property crime, the conjecture is refuted.
Your Alaska example shows exactly why this level of clarity matters. It is often cited, but it only meets the “universal” criterion, not the “basic” one.
Regarding the Metaculus comparison, yes, both aim at structured truth-seeking. But where Metaculus focuses on predictive accuracy, this would focus on clarity of claims, falsifiability, and willingness to revise. Different norms, different incentives.
Forgot to link source: https://live.laborstats.alaska.gov/housing/rentnumbedrms.html
How conscious is conscious sedation? Are memories formed during the process, but they're inaccessible? Does midazolam effect past memories (prior to the procedure?)
Had a procedure under conscious sedation recently. I find the gap disturbing and I'm trying to contextualize it. I would greatly appreciate any perspective.
I had a strange experience with my friend.
He had wisdom tooth extraction and they gave him some sort of benzodiazepine (the told him the drug is similar to valium but he didn't catch the name) and regular novocaine freezing. When my friend came back from the dentist he said he remembered the entire procedure, and he said he felt everything.
Two days later he claimed that he was knocked out cold and doesn't remember anything. He didn't even recall telling me otherwise.
I had eye surgery with conscious sedation - might have been "pro - something", it made me feel warm. I still have memories of the light show I saw as things were done inside my eyeball. And the music that was playing - at the followup with the surgeon I asked about her playlist. At one point I complained about the pain and was given more numbing drops. And yes they keep it chilly in the OR.
Probably propofol. Thank you.
I had cataract surgery and they told me I wouldn’t remember anything either under conscious sedation. I remember the whole thing including the surgeon telling me “I’m going to have to ask you to quit asking questions now.” along with all my questions and the increasingly irritated answers, the surgeon telling the anesthesiologist to “give him some more” the temperature on the thermometer in the OR that I picked up with my unbandaged eye, (67F it was cold in there), etc.
When they rolled me back to recovery I asked for my phone so I could show the recovery nurse pictures of the lake trout I had caught the week before.
When I got home i used my phone to look at ACX with one eye and I was in the mood to debate any hypothetical, explore any counter factual whether I knew anything about it or had any real interest in it at all before my wife took my phone and told me sleep the stuff off.
The “you won’t remember” thing didn’t work in my case. YMMV
So that is interesting, I have no recollection of anything. I have heard that responses vary. Thank you.
I have had midazolam 3x for colonoscopies, and remember snippets from each procedure but not much. Apparently it’s possible to ask people under the influence of this stuff questions and they will respond with sensible answers, but may well not remember the exchange afterwards. Most of my memories from the procedures are of brief exchanges with the medical staff, I believe exchanges initiated by me. Once I said “that hurts” and the doctor said he was almost done.
So you are in a very relaxed, drowsy state in which your ability to form memories is greatly reduced, while other things, such as your awareness of what’s going on, and your ability to answer a question, are still working pretty well. I looked up amnesia, and all studies show anterograde amnesia (forgetting lots of things after the drug is administered). Some show a bit or retrograde amnesia (some impairment of memory of events in the last few minutes before the drug is administered.). There is no reason to think the drug affects memory in any other way — either memories from the period before you took it or ability to form new memories after.
Thank you, that's reassuring.
Factory farming: Chicken coops placed above where pigs feed. Chicken shit falls down through bottom of coop and pigs eat it. Analogous to LLM training. We are the chickens, LLM is the pig.
> We are the chickens, LLM is the pig.
A generation of schookids are growing up with LLMs right now. They trust the LLM hallucinations over their teachers. At the opposite end of the scale, the president of the USA is letting ChatGPT set trade policy.
Who is the chicken and who is the pig, again?
>They trust the LLM hallucinations over their teachers.
And they're probably correct to do so. I certainly trust LLMs more than the average teacher.
> At the opposite end of the scale, the president of the USA is letting ChatGPT set trade policy.
Yikes, that sounds concerning. I'm generally pro-AI but I don't know that I'd hand ChatGPT the keys to trade policy.
What do you mean by the president letting ChatGPT set trade policy? Is it something where he came into office without having an idea of trade policy goals and / or strategy to achieve them, then asked something like "What should the trade policy be?" and did whatever popped up in the output? To what degree is ChatGPT driving?
Exaggerated for rhetoric, I admit - perhaps I should have dropped an "allegedly" in there - but I was referring to this widely reported speculation: https://www.newsweek.com/donald-trump-tariffs-chatgpt-2055203
(plenty of other coverage, just google "trump tariffs chatgpt")
That’s a movie plot. Matt Damon is in it..
You need some grass and cows ahead of the chickens and maybe a complete ecosystem?
I get chicken shit from my neighbor to use in my garden. Great stuff.
Only downside is that on the future the pig will go live in a fortress somewhere, either no longer needing our shit or having it delivered to the fortress, and we will be animals in one of its factory farms. Egad, is that the crusher I see rounding the bend?
Throw in a level with worms and insects eating the shit, and you have some happy pigs.
Hey, chicken shit makes great fertilizer! Hopefully it'll make the LLMs grow up big and strong and yield lots of crusonia fruit.
Dr. John Sarno's Healing Back Pain matters, even if his explanation doesn't hold up:
https://debugyourpain.substack.com/p/useful-stories-and-pain-relief-on?r=52z188
> Under this view, most chronic pain is a persistent misinterpretation of harmless sensation as damage.
> after confronting the repressed unpleasant emotions
Merely disabling a defense mechanism doesnt make society tolerable.
As with Yves Klein and his Yves Klein Blue paintings, here's another example of an artist who is communicating in the philosophical mode. Bruce Nauman's art is mostly directed at other artists and critics. And he's presenting his audience of artists and critics with questions about what is the nature of art. I think he would be surprised, confused, and even hurt if regular folks started appreciating and purchasing his work. This is a guy who came from a family of engineers, and I wonder if that didn't influence his creative direction.
Full disclosure: I find most art in the philosophical mode to be rather boring because these artists aren't particularly interested in tickling our qualia. For me, Yves Klein was an exception because he was interested in overwhelming the viewer's visual cortex with the vibrancy of color he created.
https://hyperallergic.com/997249/bruce-nauman-asks-if-art-can-exist-without-a-viewer-marian-goodman-gallery/
After absorbing that 'art', I needed a quick jolt of Carlo Crivelli. His painting may have anticipated AI art (look at the hands on the Magdalene) but at least he's *doing* something other than "oh lemme plonk an empty box on the floor and stroke my chin about the end of art and the nature of galleries mediating our experience of art about it".
https://www.dailyartmagazine.com/carlo-crivelli/
Nice! That’s an example of the message mode of art where the artist is reinforcing cultural norms — in this case religion. Unlike Nauman’s what-is-art? art, crivelli’s audience was the Church and religious patrons of the church. I don’t know of any artist who is making art with a religious message that wouldn’t look kitschy today.
Not just the subject matter but Crivelli's style; I find something metallic and hard-edged in it, almost sculptural, like the folds in the garment of a bronze statue:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charioteer_of_Delphi
His paintings are both bright and yet somehow rigid, with very definite outlines, very concrete and in the actual - look at how he's working out the details in this painting of the Annunciation, where he has the beam of light where the Holy Ghost is descending worked out by angles (slightly clumsily or at least not quite convincingly, the upper and lower halves don't quite line up) so that it passes through the physical material of the building with the little loophole in the architecture. I can see why the Pre-Raphaelites loved him:
https://www.nationalgallery.org.uk/paintings/carlo-crivelli-the-annunciation-with-saint-emidius
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hgMqBYJ1WPI&t=1s
I'm intrigued by this style, it has none of the soft sweetness of Botticelli, for instance.
Geez, I totally forgot that Crivelli painted "The Annunciation with Saint Emidius". That's one of my favorites from that period. It's almost surreal the way street crowds in all the actors in the drama. The perspective of the architecture just sucks your sight down to the vanishing point. And I can't help but think that M.C. Escher was inspired by Crivelli's architectural depictions in his prints. And the laser beam from heaven zapping the Virgin Mary is just awesome.
That hard edge you're talking about was a characteristic of the gothic sensibility that made compositions look like icons in the first half of the Fifteenth Century. A softer, more naturalistic style took hold as Florentine artists like Verrocchio and Botticelli opted for softer edges between light and shadow. I guess Crivelli got thrown into prison for adultery in the 1450s (?). Did he produce anything after that?
Not too sure, I mostly know him as a minor figure whose art caught my eye so I've never looked up his history. He's plainly not considered one of the Big Names, though I do wonder if he's due a re-evaluation.
You are correct about the clear Gothic and Northern European/Netherlandish influence in his work. It's those crisp lines and hard edges that make it stand out for me.
That painting was done in 1486, a comparable Annunciation is one by Hans Memling in 1482 or so, which has the same attention to architectural detail and the folds of drapery, as well as showing off mastery of perspective, but much softer outlines and colours by contrast:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Annunciation_(Memling)#/media/File:Annunciation_Memling.jpg
As a fan of the Pre-Raphaelites I can appreciate this. The Saint Mary Magdalene in particular reminds me of Rossetti.
For decades the most common example of stupid US protectionism which fails to achieve its stated policy objective has been the 1920 law known commonly as the "Jones Act".
So guess who's about to try to use executive authority to impose a global version of the Jones Act?
"On April 17th the U.S. Trade Representative's office is expected to impose fees of up to $1.5M per port call for ships made in China and for $500k to $1M if the ocean carrier owns a single ship made in China or even has one on order from a Chinese shipyard...."
[That news has been posted in many places this morning, and as I'm typing various shipping-industry leaders are posting shocked denunciations of it. Will be in the MSM news cycle starting probably this evening.]
I know a lot of people are pinning their hopes on genetic engineering and the likes to improve the babies of the future.
I'd be a lot more impressed if it wasn't for stunts like this, which are great for cajoling people into splurging their money investing in these fly-by-nights, but which don't really advance the cause of science in a serious way. Seems these are the same lot that produced the "woolly mammoth mice" recently, which are furry mice but not mammoths. They sure do have an instinct for publicity, I have to give them that. P.T. Barnum, thou shouldst be living at this hour, you'd clean up!
"It's just like Jurassic Park!" "Now you can have a dire wolf of your own!" (and by the bye, I see George R.R. Martin himself is an investor in this which makes me downgrade it even more).
Well, no you can't, and you probably wouldn't want one if they really could produce the goods. Okay, probably some people would, the kind who think pitbulls are cuddlebugs and take photos of their newborn babies 'snuggled' up to the beast, or those who want wolves and tigers as family pets. I have no problem with extinct predators, newly reintroduced, eating those people (though not the babies, it's not their fault their progenitors are idiots).
But I hate these kind of stories because yeah I'd like to see real ancient species coming back, but this is just "modified existing animals for people who want even more exotic pets". Note the lack of any kind of independent verification that these animals exist as described by the company:
https://www.rte.ie/news/world/2025/0408/1506403-dire-wolf/
"US biotechnology company Colossal Biosciences has claimed it produced three dire wolves, a species that has been extinct for over 10,000 years, by modifying the genome of a modern-day gray wolf using dire wolf DNA found in fossils.
Colossal released footage yesterday which it said featured "dire wolf" adolescent cubs Romulus and Remus.
According to Colossal, some of the dire wolf fossils their team utilised for DNA extraction included a 13,000-year-old dire wolf tooth and a 72,000-year-old inner ear bone.
One female puppy Khaleesi was also part of the "successfully birthed" cubs, they added.
Reuters could not independently verify Colossal's claims, nor the location and the date of footage.
Corey Bradshaw, professor of global ecology at Australia's Flinders University, was sceptical of Colossal’s claims and the actual practicality of reviving an extinct species like the dire wolf.
As Mr Bradshaw explained, it is practically impossible to modify the entire genomes of animals that have been extinct for thousands of years due to factors like DNA degradation.
"So yes, they have slightly genetically modified wolves, maybe. And that's probably the best that you're going to get. And those slight modifications seem to have been derived from retrieved dire wolf material. Does that make it a dire wolf? No. Does it make a slightly modified gray wolf? Yes," Mr Bradshaw told Reuters.
"When you claim all these great big things and then you don't provide the associated evidence, especially in something as controversial as this, that is a massive red flag," he added.
The dire wolf is a mainstay of fantasy settings in pop culture, with mentions in role-playing games like Dungeons & Dragons and video games like World of Warcraft.
However, the vehicle which truly shot dire wolves to fame is the HBO series Game of Thrones, based on the works of author George RR Martin.
Mr Martin, an investor in Colossal and cultural adviser for the company, said: "Many people view dire wolves as mythical creatures that only exist in a fantasy world, but in reality, they have a rich history of contributing to the American ecosystem."
"I get the luxury to write about magic, but Ben and Colossal have created magic by bringing these majestic beasts back to our world."
Colossal Biosciences was founded in 2021, and claims it is the first biotechnology company to use CRISPR (Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeats) gene editing technology to research species de-extinction.
Colossal also said it has recently cloned critically endangered red wolves using the same technology, as well as the hybrid Colossal Woolly Mouse-mice genetically engineered to possess traits of the long-extinct wooly-mammoth."
I kinda disagree and kinda agree.
On the one hand, hate the game, not the playah. I'd like genetic engineering of humans to be conducted by serious, rational experts with impeccable credentials with the public benefit in mind. Then I look at someone like Fauci and I'm like "NOPE". I'm much more comfortable with Colossal Broscience engineering dire wolves and unicorns because that's what will sell on Instagram, which is why this company exists: to genetically engineer animals that look awesome on Instagram and Tik Tok because that's what rich people will pay for. And I'm not above this. If Baron Trump gets a dire wolf for his birthday and starts dropping Tik Toks of him playing fetch with it on the White House lawn, I'm watching. I want to go to a Katy Perry concert where she rides out on a genetically engineered unicorn. And I can't blame Colossal Broscience for giving us what we want, not what we need, because that's what we pay for. Hate the game, not the playah.
On the other hand...like, I think I'm prepared for how retarded this will get, but I'm not. I remember the 90s, I remember AOL and the early internet. "Wow, everyone in the world can talk to each other now. Clearly we will enter a golden age of rational discourse and mutual understanding." And, like, that didn't happen but I was unprepared for how much that didn't happen and how bad everything got. And I totally understand the fear that this will go down a similar path. Like, the things I want to genetically engineer are important and good and awesome, clearly, but the rest of the world isn't just incompetent to decide what we should genetically engineer.
Like, let's be real, if the average man got the ability to genetically engineer either himself or his sons, the first thing he's going to do is genetically engineer a bigger penis. Let's not lie to ourselves. And there's a line below which this is a...reasonable indulgence. But we won't stop there. We will blow past that line and I'm not ready for that world. It kinda break my heart that we aren't mature enough to handle such an important technological advancement but I'm sympathetic to the argument that we really, really aren't.
> Like, let's be real, if the average man got the ability to genetically engineer either himself or his sons, the first thing he's going to do is genetically engineer a bigger penis.
Very true, but you know, we're not going to get to all being 6' 6" athletic, von Neumann adonises without going through some silly fads and growing pains.
Besides, think this through - we'll for sure only be able to alter embryos at first for a good while (because it's very very difficult to get your modification into all ~37 trillion adult cells in a timely way, but if you alter an embryo it grows into all those trillions of cells with the modification intact), and a lot of dads would love an 18" schlong for themselves, but wouldn't want their sons flexing on them - the combination of "wants 18" schlong" and "humility enough to give it to related others" is probably rarer than you think!
I'm not thinking 18" schlongs, I'm thinking schlong-flation.
Like, the average erect schlong is 5.1" long (1) and 6" looks to be at least one standard deviation above the average. Now I'm not saying everyone will jump to 18" schlongs. But some fathers will want their sons to have above average schlongs and no father wants their son to have below average schlongs.
Can you imagine being a young man and learning that your father consciously chose for you to have a schlong one to two standard deviations below the average? He'd hate you, and rightfully so.
But once everyone is trying to have at least average if not tastefully above average size schlongs, the average will move. An average of 5.1" in the 0 generation will become 6" in the first generation and then the second generation will face a dilemma: not only will they then have to go to 6-7" schlongs but they also know that everyone else is also thinking the same, so they will go even further. Thus, it is not hubris that will lead to the 18" schlong but a constant push not to be below average. And, indeed, if possible, I expect us to blow past the 18" schlong to even greater lengths until some structural problem makes further development infeasible.
And for the three women on this board who think this is silly, I have seen a phenomenal amount of ass-flation since Sir Mix-a-lot released his original classic (2).
(1) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_penis_size#/media/File:Human_penis_sizes_length_only.svg
(2) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X53ZSxkQ3Ho
This is the same reason that 6'6" geniuses are not going to work like we think it will. First few generations are going to have the Gattaca problem where anyone not 6'6" and 150 IQ becomes outcastes. Then everyone will be socially equal based on being the same, and needs to do something stupid to get recognition (8'10" and 180 IQ! That'll be the ticket!). Then we find out that the genetics for making people all super tall and smart has a bunch of side effects that destroy society in some completely unexpected way, even before we try making all of our sons 8' tall.
Lost in all of this is the understanding that society works better when people have different talents, goals, etc. Or with your example, we realize somewhere too late that sex is too painful for women because penis size got out of control and also men can't handle the bloodflow and can't get erect, then no one is having sex anymore.
I'm a bit sympathetic to engineering away obvious problems. I sympathize with the 5'2" male that can't get a date, or the woman with the genetic disease that means she won't live past 25. But I don't think we have the wisdom or the knowledge to make long term sweeping changes without breaking everything.
> Thus, it is not hubris that will lead to the 18" schlong but a constant push not to be below average.
A very fair point - I was almost certainly attributing too much induction in the case of the fathers making this choice. "Well obviously I'm thinking of a tasteful 8 inches here, but you just *know* that bastard Johnson is going to go for 10, so I should put down 10.5...but HE'S probably thinking along these lines too! Then he's gonna go for 12 for sure, so I should..."
I think in real life these sorts of things (well, height at least) would probably go through some fun status signaling epicycles, per Scott's "barber pole" theory. "Obviously the people dialing in 7 feet for their son's heights are arrivistes, essentially plebs! The real status flex will be anti-signaling - my sons will be so smart and rich and capable they'll be able to attract whoever they want regardless of height, so I'm going for a tasteful six two."
A lot like the millionaire / centimillionaire / billionaire wife meme:
https://imgur.com/a/PAixs7X
It's funny but there's a grain of truth here. Once *everyone* is 6' 6", then to give your kids the height advantage, the meddling will be to select for 6' 8" or 6' 10". Gradually this will creep up until everyone is as tall as this guy:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manute_Bol
And of course, the taller you are. the bigger (proportionally) your manly parts should and must be, so while I think (if your potential romantic partners are cis women) 18" will be too much, certainly a mere 6" isn't going to impress anyone.
The reductio ad absurdum is ending up with giraffe-tall men with impossibly large endowments while the women all look like Macy's parade balloons due to the demand for larger and larger bosoms and thicc thighs etc. Both sets of 'enhancements' means that sex is physically impossible. At which point our species will no longer be viable and the cockroaches can inherit the earth.
I think you and WoolyAI might be overlooking the fact that having an 18" schlong makes it really difficult to produce children the traditional way. But I guess folks with engineered johnsons will be reproducing by IVF anyway if they do at all.
> But I guess folks with engineered johnsons will be reproducing by IVF anyway if they do at all.
Yeah, the best median bet right now with the derivative of fertility rates worldwide is probably "they won't reproduce organically, so this isn't a consideration."
Something big will likely change things either for the good or bad (uterine replicators and widespread gengineering or robotic maids and nannies on the good end, AI creating Infinite Jest style superstimuli or sexbots on the bad end), but worrying about dong-size affecting offspring numbers certainly seems like quibbling about details on the margins given current trends.
Did you mean "fertility" or "fecundity"? The reason birth rates are declining in the west are mostly economic, not biological. Artificial wombs aren't a solution for that, but I guess robo maids and nannies might be.
> Did you mean "fertility" or "fecundity"?
In this case, "fertility," because that's how it's usually reported (TFR). But isn't the primary difference simply the amount of time people are pregnant / lactating, and so technically infertile being taken into account in the denominator?
The distinction seems mostly irrelevant in our largely very low fertility developed world environments?
> The reason birth rates are declining in the west are mostly economic, not biological.
It's at least partly biological. When age at first birth was 22 back in the 50's, it led to many more kids for biological reasons.
"Odds of live birth" data in the following table are from Geruso et al. Age and Infertility Revisited (2023), which measures actual fecundity versus fertility:
https://imgur.com/a/un0gaTK
The actual Geruso fecundity curve:
https://imgur.com/a/DCff1fl
The graph and table above is basically the Rosetta Stone to the fertility crisis. If women wait until 29 to get married and 30+ to start having their first kid (as is true today), they've burnt through more than half of their fertility.
The odds of a live birth in a given year at 20-22 are ~60%. The odds at age 30 are half that, ~30%, and at age 35 ~22%.
Granted, you can argue (and many do) that waiting to have your first kid at age 30 is a function of wanting to finish education and establish yourself in your career (economic).
But this is purely cultural - given human lifespans, culturally women could easily treat marriage as a "foundation" instead of a "capstone," marry an older established man who will support her through first kids and school, and have a few kids starting at 22, then go to college and grad school, with an eye towards starting your "real" career at 35.
Or you can finish your education and start your career while having kids, like women do in Israel.
> Artificial wombs aren't a solution for that, but I guess robo maids and nannies might be.
Here I'm just speaking from experience - I've been dating for the past ~2 years looking for a wife, and want 6 kids. At first everyone is massively opposed, but then you say "maids, nannies, cooks, surrogates" and you can convince practically anybody, even really smart / talented Ivy-tier girls. Women don't want to ruin their bodies with a bunch of pregnancies, and don't want to spend all their time on drudge work cleaning and cooking. And the biggest convincer in that list (from experience) is "surrogates," not the maids and nannies (although all of it helps).
My problem is we're not even *getting* dire wolves and mammoth mice, we're getting slightly tweaked existing creatures. The wooly mice are kind of cute, but they're nothing more than slightly more exotic kinds of bred to be pets mice. The wolves are probably not even more than slightly tweaked wolves.
If you're gonna do broscience, gimme mammoths and sabre tooth tigers, not bait for rich fools.
Hey, you gotta have the wooly mouse before you can have the wooly cat, the wooly dog, the wooly horse, and then the wooly mammoth. Rome wasn't genetically engineered in a day.
On the off chance that someone here can make it happen, I think the lowest hanging fruit in bringing back extinct species is ursus horriblis or the California Grizzly Bear. Went extinct in 1924, it's basically a brown bear but awesomer, and it's on the California flag and it's reintroduction to the wild would have pretty powerful symbolism.
The question is whether they are capable, now or ever, of actually producing a wooly mammoth or dire wolf. Tweaking a mouse to be a aesthetically different mouse isn't like creating a wooly mammoth. At least changing an elephant would be more similar, but ultimately suffers from the same problem. It's not a wooly mammoth, it's something else with some window dressing.
Tiny mammoth mice is an awesome concept. They gave us wooly mice which are, I admit, cute but not living up to the advertising.
Californian bears to come down from the hills after the fires sweep through and eat any survivors outside LA makes a nice touch, though 😁
Give me Cystypigs. https://theouterworlds.fandom.com/wiki/Cystypig
1/ Does this tech modify currently existing genomes such that changes effect the adult? People are likely to be more risk averse with their unborn children than with themselves.
2/ Disregarding outliers, and speaking as a penis-haver, raw size modification is rather far down the list relative to testosterone/hormone levels, cardiovascular health, and youth markers like smooth wrinkle-free skin and a full head of hair. And this assumes it is impossible to "enhance" the human platform through eg amplifying sensitivity, lowering refractory period, etc. It's also incoherent to dream of a more mature humanity; the species is what it is.
Well, some penis-havers are very much exercised about their penises and how often they get hard during wet dreams, if I'm taking this loolah correctly:
https://blueprint.bryanjohnson.com/blogs/news/how-i-m-de-aging-my-penis
I sincerely hope to God that this looper is not representative of men in general and their obsessions with their dangly bits, because otherwise gentlemen Alfred Bester is looking more prophetic than ever (from "Extro/The Computer Connection/original serialised story The Indian Giver"):
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Computer_Connection
A capsule floated down on top of the bods with its jets spraying fireworks. A blue-eyed blond astronaut stepped out and came up to us. “Duh,” he mumbled in Kallikak. “Duh-duh-duh-duh….”
“What’s this thing selling?” Uncas asked.
“Duh,” Fee told him. “That’s about all the honks can say so they named the product after it. I think it’s a penis amplifier.”
Oh wow, I was hoping it would be *that* Bryan Johnson and I was not disappointed; he even opens with the classic "Hi friend". Unfortunately for him, old Kronos will have the last laugh, and it's a soft chuckle.
When I first became aware of him, I thought he was just a health freak taking it to extremes because he had more money than brain cells. Then the more stories (and I honestly cannot tell which are real - blood transfusions from his *son*???) the more feffin' insane he sounds.
Going full Howard Hughes in real time as we watch.
https://fortune.com/2023/05/23/bryan-johnson-tech-ceo-spends-2-million-year-young-swapping-blood-17-year-old-son-talmage-70-father/
Friend, "Good Lady Ducayne" was not supposed to be a 'how-to' manual!
> I know a lot of people are pinning their hopes on genetic engineering and the likes to improve the babies of the future.
> dire wolfs
I believe biotech will come before the earliest ai; I dont think biotech will be produced by this civilization. But it will be coming.
Michael levins, thought improium, etc. the tools are here with a morses law; but thinking evolutionary requires fractal thinking that I dont think thats done well by anyone quite yet and the people capable of low levels of it are being pushed out of power centers.
Next era, allot of cheeses were made by a random monistary during the dark ages and we are headed to a decentralizing era and gene edits that survive a generation become perminate.
Has anyone else tried to get the Lumina toothpaste (with the GMO S. mutans which is meant to prevent tooth decay) from outside the US (and Prospera)?
On their website they state:
> New preorders ship approximately 4 weeks after being placed. Shipping ONLY to addresses in the United States.
This is a bit of a bummer for the rest of the world. I would spend 250$ on this is a heartbeat, but I am much less willing to pay for a flight to the US, try to pass through US immigration and then pay 250$.
So if anyone knows a reseller in Europe, I would be interested. (I would probably also try some homebrew pirate version someone grew on a petri dish, but I would gladly pay 300$ to not have to worry about them having cultivated the right bacteria.)
What's everyone doing with their money with the giant tariffs in place?
Broadly speaking I think the age of American hegemony is over (enough damage has been done to the post-WW2 order that a lot of the systemic advantages the USA had have ended) and a gradual shift toward international equities is in order. But I'd love to hear from people who will explain to me (1) that I'm wrong or (2) that I'm actually missing the point and the right investment is (asset X),.
Bottled water and cash! Let’s do this.
No change. I may be dumb but I'm not dumb enough to sell off at the panic point in a downturn.
Having said that, in a year or two, there might be a case for international indexes. The logic for being purely US in the past was that, well, everyone drank Coca Cola and everyone used iPhones and most of the US stock market (the stocks, not the actual US economy) was actually these big multi-nationals. And that may be going away. Which has some upsides, it'd be nice if the global economy was actually diversified rather than all uniformly going into recession, but it does mean you would want to be maybe 80-20 or 70-30 US equities-international equities rather than just 100% US equities.
But that's because, well, Apple might be selling less iPhones around the world in the future, not that the US economy which is only ~12-15% imports/exports as a percent of GDP is going to crash over this. America is fundamentally an overwhelmingly domestic/internal economy and that's not going to change, nor are imports exports going to disappear. This isn't 2008 and while some foreign economies might be in trouble, America will be fine.
There was never a rational basis for being overweight the US. There is exactly the same case for having international exposure as there was before. The mean variance optimal allocation for the average investor has not changed.
> What's everyone doing with their money
I'm missing it. Sitting around, looking dejected, thinking about how much richer I was last week. There hasn't been enough time to do anything else just yet.
Don't worry, we've carved out tariff exemptions so you can go ahead and slather that Irish butter on your toast as you sit down with a taoscán of Irish whiskey - the important trade goods!
https://www.irishtimes.com/business/2025/04/08/eu-to-put-25-per-cent-counter-tariffs-on-range-of-us-goods/
"Bourbon, wine and US dairy products had been in the firing line, but France, Italy and Ireland lobbied hard against their inclusion, over fears their domestic spirits and agricultural industries would in turn be drawn into the middle of the EU-US dispute.
Mr Trump had warned that if the EU taxed bourbon, he would respond by putting 200 per cent tariffs on Irish whiskey, French champagne, Italian wine and other European spirits.
The Government had also been concerned about Ireland’s large exports of butter to the US, if Mr Trump was angered by tariffs put on US cheese."
The big fabled market crash isn't happening. US hegemony is sticking around. Nothing Ever Happens people win again.
The world order doesn't change that fast. We still have the largest military by a wide margin. We're still the largest consumer marketplace. We're still the global reserve currency. Those things make the US de facto the most stable global economy. Where else are billionaires going to put their money?
I'm sitting in cash and bonds until the coming recession bottoms out and then I'll get back in to US equities. Much like 2008, I view this as a generational investment opportunity.
I'm just putting spare money into index funds while it's low. I don't have the time or knowledge to do anything more sophisticated than that, but this seems like an easy buy. If the tariffs are lifted I get a huge return, and even if they aren't I'm not retiring any time soon and the market will recover over the long term, so it's unlikely to be a *bad* investment.
You should probably do absolutely nothing. Reacting to news is so toxic to sanity.
https://finviz.com/map.ashx?t=sec_all
oh look, nothing ever happens
i gotta admit it was very entertaining watching this go from all green to all red in real time
It's half green half red now.
Donald Trump the Pump and Dump President
This kind of stuff is just sad. It's one thing to see this kind of anti-epistemology on Xitter, it's another thing to see in rationalist-adjacent spaces like this.
Hey, at least the rate of decrease is decreasing!
Seems like I knew a way to figure instantaneously rate of change of the rate of change.
Something to do with numbers and a lower case letter with weird flat apostrophes.
Taking derivatives isn't that useful for stock prices, since they're not a continuous function. I just eyeballed the day-to-day decrease over the past few days.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OZjSPKaRAdU
> cnbc repeating the "90 day pause" tweet live on air
> no one likes this uncertainty
Fact Check by true patriots: I'm laughing, I did my own shitpost without even watching the tickers.
I thought that the stock market was more stable then me margin trading bitcoin? Right experts? Lets keep going, are you not entertained?
Coining a new term: Cocaine capitalism, if the stock market is the economy I hope it stays fun. If you wanted to be sober maybe do something else.
I've never been able to take the stock market seriously since valuations appear to bounce around based on how any particular broker is feeling right this second (a twinge of indigestion? AppOogClose is over-priced, sell sell sell!)
I realise that there are genuine consequences from the tariffs that do affect the profitability of companies, but if zillions can be wiped off the market between today and yesterday, then I don't think those hyper-inflated valuations were real in the first place. BogginsCorp makes widgets, those widgets will now cost twice as much, but either Boggins really was worth 500 million or it wasn't in real terms based on what it makes and what assets it possesses, not on "today I feel good so let's buy more shares in Boggins" (now it's worth 1,000 million)/"oh no now I'm panicking sell all our Boggins shares!" (now it's only worth 200 million).
No it's not real..it even less real than regular money. The pricing of individual stocks is based on the expected performance of the individual xomoanies, so they go down if a problem is discovered, and the same reasoning applies to the total valuation if there is a problem in the whole.economy.
>BogginsCorp makes widgets, those widgets will now cost twice as much, but either Boggins really was worth 500 million or it wasn't in real terms based on what it makes and what assets it possesses
If those widgets cost twice as much to make, then "what it makes" has just been cut in half, so the future value implied by the stock price should drop. It's not that the markets were wrong about its valuation before April 2nd, the real valuation changed. BogginsCorp will end up selling fewer widgets because people won't want to buy them when they're expensive.
That does make sense, but the panicking and the drop in all kinds of stocks from all kinds of firms does seem to be more emotional reaction than calculated estimation of true value. Maybe iPhones will cost $30,000 if they're made completely in the USA - or maybe they won't, or maybe people will buy different models of phones. This yo-yo bouncing from boom to bust and then back up on the whisper of negotiations and then maybe back down depending on if the geese fly on the left doesn't seem like the 'rational hand of the market' we're assured is what sets value and prices.
In what way does this not make sense? The value of an asset depends on a whether or not a policy gets enacted. It’s perfectly rational for one’s expectations to vacillate wildly when the administration itself vacillates wildly its expressed policy goals. Certainly in this instant, the uncertainty of the market is reflecting the very real uncertainty of policy.
Sorry, you can’t impute the inanity of our current crop of central planners onto the supposed irrationality of the market. Reality itself is being unstable these days.
The values being wiped off stocks makes me think it's all bubbles. If you were supposedly worth 5 doodoos yesterday but only 2 doodoos today, even though the same physical plant still exists, I wonder about the stability of the entire structure.
Yes, Apple is not going to sell as many iPhones. But there was already competition from Android and other phones. Oh wait, the overpriced status symbol is overpriced and not really worth it, so now we all panic? Maybe it's a long-overdue correction.
Sure, if you can get people to buy your hunk of tin for 1,000 doodoos then good luck to you, but you're not selling something physically worth that, you're selling intangibles like "all the cool kids have one of these" and that's the entire gosh-darn problem with the modern economy of not making stuff, now you kids get off my lawn!
... Deiseach, I don't wish to be unkind, but have you ever actually thought about this issue in any detail? E.g. drawn up a simple mathematical model like "I make widgets for $90 and sell them for $100. I make $10 of profit off every widget, and I can comfortably sell one hundred thousand widgets a year, so I can make $1 million in profit a year. But the value of my company isn't the profit it makes in 1 year, it's the profit it would make if you held onto it for a long time, so in actuality it's worth more like $25 million.
Then the President announces a new tariff on my raw materials, and the cost of making widgets goes up to $100. I now make $0 of profit on every widget, so I make $0 in profit a year, so my company is worth 25 * $0 = $0. A 10% tariff can instantly wipe out 100% of my company's value, and it's not because of any complicated financial shenanigans or anything, it's inherent to how manufacturing works. The exact same thing would happen in China if *their* cost of inputs went up 10%, or the price they could sell things went down 10%."
Another example: imagine I'm the guy that makes widget-making machines. My widget making machines don't last forever, so I get some business from maintaining and replacing the old machines that have worn out. I also get some business from building new machines for businesses that want to expand. Let's say a machine lasts 20 years, i.e. 5% of machines need to be replaced every year.
So if there are 100 of my machines out there in the widget making business, and no new businesses are buying new machines, I can sell 5 machines a year. But if the industry is instead expanding by 5%, and new businesses buy 5 widget machines, my business doubles to 10 machines! And conversely, if the industry is shrinking by 5% and no one is ordering new machines, and my customers are letting their machines wear out rather than order replacements, my business entirely disappears. A +/- 5% chance gets amplified to a +/- 100% change, not because of Wall Street or Silicon Valley or anything like that, but because of the way machines work.
So please, *please* keep your mouth shut about things you know nothing about... or at least speak less confidently about them, and express your uncertainty. I would rather like to respect you, Deiseach, but you're making it rather harder than it has to be. Quite frankly, you sound more like an internet atheist confidently asserting that Jesus was never real & was just a fairy tale made up to control children, or that "Easter" was originally a Pagan celebration of the goddess "Ēostre" and the Church just stole it, rather than the careful thinker I know you to be. Don't suffer "Nobel Disease", please, you're a breath of fresh air but even air can turn noxious.
It only gets dumber the more you look; but its so intoxicating to be part of a hive mind gambling your entire life savings in the worse sort of market doing things that sound impressive "whats margin trading" but when you hear an honest explanation it gets soooo very dumb.
If you compare a graph of the S&P500 and BTC, the former looks a lot more stable than the latter. BTC also dropped more substantially than the S&P500 following the tariff announcement. I have no idea how economists measure volatility but from my uneducated perspective it sure looks like it's higher for crypto than stocks.
EDIT: I don't think BTC dropped more than the S&P500 anymore, I just screwed up my data source.
You could measure volatility by taking the abs of the % change as a n day moving average, then probably log it. Economists probably would use 1 year, day traders 1 day; I bet thats close to metrics people use.
In the past 5 days, btc had a high of 88k low of 74k; s&p 5.7, 4.8
a lazy high/low, btc 1.13 vs 1.18; It would need to continue for a year which probably wont happen.
But that would be reasonable and thats not whats happening rn this is peak clown world and you need to start thinking unreasonably
Volatility (VIX) is calculated from a rolling average of options premiums that are mostly calculated using the Black Scholes model.
I've been feeling optimistic about AI recently, and I wanted to present my alternative optimistic scenario of what the coming decades of AI progress will look like.
AIs will continue to get better at the things they're good at. They will be able to generate decent student-level essays on any subject, produce decently good pictures, and generate code to do just about anything as long as you're clear about your specifications. However they'll remain constrained by the quality of their training data; they're not going to be able to operate far outside the realms of what they were fed. In particular they'll never get particularly good at behaving agentically -- they'll be able to generate a generic sort of plan for achieving some goal but generic plans will turn out not to be all that useful in most cases. AIs won't be able to make great strides towards improving AIs, because after a few interesting and much-ballyhooed insights (probably picking up obscure known methods from other branches of mathematics and applying them to AI) there'll be no more useful ideas apart from "get more training data" and "get more compute".
There will be a ceiling on how good AIs can be at anything, and it will be provided by the training data. The best pictures it can produce will be somewhat worse than the best pictures in its training set. The best poems it can produce will be somewhat worse than the best poems in its training set. The best code it can produce will be no better than the best code in its training set. And the best plan for taking over the world will be no better than the best plan for taking over the world in its training set.
Overall we'll have a shiny new tool which is useful for a whole bunch of things and capable of replacing humans in a bunch of contexts but once we've explored the limits of what can be done with all the text and images ever recorded then further progress will go back to being slow.
This has been my thought as well. And having a program that can mimic a lot of humanity's knowledge is pretty cool! But, we already have that on the internet, and to a lesser extent on pages like Wikipedia. It's done a lot of good by making it far easier to learn about certain things, but it hasn't revolutionized humanity or how we live. Social Media has done that a lot more, but not in a good way. Current AI also comes with the potential failure mode of confident hallucinations, which obviously can make a lot of things worse.
The real slog is adapting technology to improving specific functions. Like automating a factory, or a workflow at an office building. Sustained effort allows us to do these things right now, and since at least the Industrial Revolution. Sustained effort with AI will help that process along, but unless the AI is fully agentic (able to come up with its own sub-goals that allow it to pursue main goals without humans feeding the in-between) then it's not going to change how that process works.
Yes, this is kind of close to my view. Capabilities keep improving, more applications emerge, things we didn't know were possible become possible, like understanding animal languages.
Finally we can bring the classic Far Side cartoon into reality.
"Hey! Hey hey! Hey! Hey hey hey!"
https://static1.srcdn.com/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2022/11/Far-Side-Dog-Translator.jpg
I'm copying a pretty closely related comment that I wrote in reply to Eremolalos inhttps://www.astralcodexten.com/p/introducing-ai-2027/comment/106978053 a few minutes ago:
One of my cousins just sent me a link to a very interesting article that makes the case that, as LLMs stand, they are much more useful to individuals than to large organizations. The link is https://x.com/karpathy/status/1909308143156240538?s=42
The main point is that a jack-of-all-trades is much more useful to individuals than to large organizations. The more-or-less key paragraph is:
>Why then are the benefits a lot more muted in the corporate and government realms? I think the first reason is that LLMs offer a very specific profile of capability - that of merely quasi-expert knowledge/performance, but simultaneously across a very wide variety of domains. In other words, they are simultaneously versatile but also shallow and fallible. Meanwhile, an organization's unique superpower is the ability to concentrate diverse expertise into a single entity by employing engineers, researchers, analysts, lawyers, marketers, etc. While LLMs can certainly make these experts more efficient individually (e.g. drafting initial legal clauses, generating boilerplate code, etc.), the improvement to the organization takes the form of becoming a bit better at the things it could already do. In contrast, an individual will usually only be an expert in at most one thing, so the broad quasi-expertise offered by the LLM fundamentally allows them to do things they couldn't do before. People can now vibe code apps. They can approach legal documents. They can grok esoteric research papers. They can do data analytics. They can generate multimodal content for branding and marketing. They can do all of this at an adequate capability without involving an additional expert
Hmm... So this situation will continue if efforts to improve the reliability of LLMs _FAIL_ . This was not a scenario I had considered. It is certainly more human-friendly than if improving LLMs reliability succeeds. ( I'm ambivalent about this. If improving the reliability still happens, but is delayed a century, waiting for a counter-intuitive breakthrough, then the same transition we've been expecting still happens, just delayed enough so no one reading this today will see it... )
"They can grok esoteric research papers."
But can they, in fact? It's like having the AI write "decent student-level essays on any subject" - now I don't even have to read the book the AI will produce the work for me and I can continue to grind out the grades needed without ever learning one scrap of the topic I am pretending to understand.
You get a 'Reader's Digest' version of the esoteric paper from the AI and imagine you understand it, but how do you know the summation is correct? That it has picked out the pertinent facts? That your understanding is not as shallow as a puddle?
People who think they know a complex field because they've read the relevant material - which means 'got the AI to précis it for me' - and then make decisions and take actions based on that flawed understanding can do a lot of damage.
Many Thanks!
>People who think they know a complex field because they've read the relevant material - which means 'got the AI to précis it for me' - and then make decisions and take actions based on that flawed understanding can do a lot of damage.
That's fair. I don't know how often this happens. Certainly anyone using an LLM as a "jack-of-all-trades" needs to realize that it _isn't_ a " _master_ -of-all-trades".
On the other hand, at least for scientific complex fields, the headlines that finally reach the general public through media intended for general audiences, are often mangled almost beyond recognition, so beating that level of garbling is a pretty low bar...
> But can they, in fact?
Does it matter?
Research papers are already pretty terse, and already include their own summaries as part of the format. Anyone who is seriously interested in the material will read the abstract and at least skim through the paper.
If you are using an LLM to "summarise" a research paper for you, it is overwhelmingly likely that you are doing this because you want to score internet points in a debate.
You don't actually care about the content, and you don't want to spend more than a couple of minutes to see if the paper will let you score internet points because there's a gazillion more papers to scan through; and you know that the other side is doing the exact same thing and is also unlikely to actually read the paper (and if they actually do, well, shrug it off and paste twelve more your LLM found in the time it took them to do that).
The paper just needs to pass a cursory sniff test to see if you can field it as a weapon in your campaign. An LLM is quite capable of determining whether it does or not, especially if the other side is also using an LLM for the same purpose.
It is 2025, and we have automated sealioning. We live in the SF dystopia we deserve; we have built it for ourselves.
Perhaps eventually we can automate all flame wars, breathe a sigh of relief, go outside and do something fun. Maybe go camping or read a book on the beach. Or perhaps a paper or two that actually interests and engages us.
Even if all papers have an abstract, that's not a 100% guarantee that the abstract accurately summarizes the rest of the contents. And if you're having to review dozens of papers, you might not have time to read them all, but might have enough to read summaries - on the premise that the summaries are accurate.
Papers with inaccurate abstracts can matter a great deal, sometimes. David Friedman once noticed that a meta-analysis paper (known as Cook et al.) made an assertion about the general stance of climatology papers at the time wrt CAGW that wasn't supported by its own data. (Search Friedman's blog or Substack for "A Climate Falsehood".) The abstract claimed that 97% of climate papers endorsed the strongest position on CAGW that Cook laid out (if they had any position on it - most were orthogonal); the data said only about 2% did. (97% was probably calculated from adding up all the papers endorsing any pro-CAGW position, whether mild or extreme.) The incorrect abstract claim was the one that ended up all over public reports.
If an LLM could automate the summarization process as reliably as a spreadsheet automates finance reports, it could avoid false summaries or detect inconsistencies more effectively than a person going through papers one by one.
I think it's reasonable to start with the assumption that an LLM is telling you what an expert would likely say (because it was trained on lots of text written by experts). It'll be grammatically correct, not awkward (as if written by a foreign writer), and have words related to the words you gave it to summarize. It'll even have words related to summarization, because it's trained well enough to know that if you tell it "give me a summary of this paper", "summary" is one of the most important words for it to build its response.
Furthermore, I think it's reasonable to assume it's doing virtually nothing beyond that.
So one test you could devise is a paper where you've tweaked some of the numbers or phrases so they disagree with the rest of the paper. (Prediction: its summary will agree with either the tweaked sentences or the rest, or even both, in two separate summary sentences of its own. It will *not* point out the contradiction.)
Another is where you make a paper of randomly generated sentences that aren't associated with each other (if only we had such a generator!), and see what it does with that. (Prediction: its summary will resemble a Frankenstein of words pulled from the generation; again, it will not point out the dissonance.)
Remember above that I said it probably recognizes "summary" as an important word. It'll probably do the same with the paper, so the important terms will come out. They will be depicted accurately in the summary to the extent that the training data would also lay out those terms with sensible associations to each other. So a third experiment would be to write a paper in such a way that the important terms aren't depicted that way in the sentences. I don't see an easy way to do that, because I don't understand the training well enough to know how it identifies what's salient. If I had to guess, it's partly based on what terms in the training data are treated as subjects and objects and adjectives and adverbs (I'm guessing LLMs understand basic grammar), which covers all the stuff you're likely to write in a paper, even one you're making up for experiment's sake. So to fool it, I might try writing a paper about use mentions of prepositions and other connectors ("An Analysis of 'Over' in English Literature"). Alternately, I might write a paper where "important" terms are used metaphorically ("A Sales Ledger of the Bull and Bear of the Ante-Italian Palpatinium"). (Obviously, you'd never write a real technical paper that way, but the point here is to shed more light on how the LLM is doing its work.)
"I think it's reasonable to start with the assumption that an LLM is telling you what an expert would likely say (because it was trained on lots of text written by experts)."
Is it reasonable? It is certainly reasonable to start with the assumption that an LLM will output a collection of words that resembles a collection of words an expert might write; a piece of text that is a statistical fit for the literary genre "text written by experts".
"I think it's reasonable to start with the assumption that an LLM is telling you what an expert would likely say (because it was trained on lots of text written by experts)."
The LLM was trained on lots of text, of which a very small fraction was written by experts. For *some* questions, the majority of the available text relevant to the LLM's response will have been written by experts because nobody else bothers to write about them. For some other questions, it will be a mix of experts and lay writers doing their best to summarize the experts.
But sometimes it will be neither, and the AI won't know the difference.
Popular LLMs backing ChatGPT are probably trained on a lot of non-expert text, I agree. So I'll add another assumption underneath: if the goal is to make an expert LLM, feed it nothing but expert text, on purpose.
In that case, the problem stops being "how can I trust this LLM trained on rando speak?" and instead is "how do I know the 'expert training text' was really expert?". And I could see the answer ranging from it probably being fine (text was limited to some corpus of dry journals with no reason to be controversial; original sources only; no journalism) to "oh hell no" (text was limited to dumps of Scientific American, USA Today's science section, etc.). The AI won't have to know the difference; whoever selected the training data will know. (Insert handwavy explanation of trusting whoever did that, here.)
Another problem it becomes is "is there enough training text?" Might not be, especially if we get into esoteric topics like dark matter or Martian homesteading where there's simply not enough research.
Most of my point in starting with the assumption I did, wasn't to then assert it's reliable. Rather, it was to provide a baseline against which to test it for reliability.
I'm pretty sure there isn't enough "certified written by experts" text anywhere on Earth, to train a state-of-the-art LLM. By several orders of magnitude. It takes a *lot* of training data for an LLM to achieve even minimal fluency in the most basic subjects.
We've had commentators on here saying, for instance, that the version of whatever AI can't solve a simple titration problem, so I'd be very dubious that it was giving me a truthful précis of a complex paper in a field I wasn't familiar with. If you know enough about it to know if the AI is giving you rubbish, that's great. But it's people who don't know and are relying on the AI to ELI5 for them won't know if the summary is good, indifferent, or another hallucination.
The point I was trying to get across above was mostly how we might build tests to make weaknesses apparent, quickly.
The fact that there exist people who trust a system if it gives them the answer they want on easy questions, is a separate problem (and no less pertinent to rationalists).
I think every developer having access to something just slightly worse than the best code ever produced for every function and every system sounds like it lays the foundation for astronomical, emergent growth.
Most of this transformation has already taken place, prior to LLMs. In the elder days, software was written pretty much from scratch atop bare metal or very basic BIOS calls, but one of the great things about software is that code is reusable. Over the past several decades, software engineering in most domains has shifted towards offloading more and more work into software libraries and frameworks, so to a large extent you can and should use library functions for an enormous amount of stuff rather than reinventing the wheel.
For nontrivial projects, deciding what to write and testing, debugging, and reviewing it is much, much, much more work than the actual writing of the code.
Where LLMs can help and are likely to help more in the future is helping you find the right library calls to make, writing boilerplate code that isn't yet encapsulated in a good, readily-available library, and serving as a tool to help analyze code for review and debugging purposes. OTOH, LLMs in their current state are also hallucination-prone and can make debugging and reviewing much more work than it is currently if they're relied upon excessively.
Overall, I think it adds up to a substantial incremental improvement in the software development process, not an order-of-magnitude one. We only get the latter if LLMs start to approach ASI capabilities at least in limited domains.
I think it enables us to reach the ceiling of what we can do with the LLM paradigm faster, but I don't think it makes that ceiling any higher.
>> and generate code to do just about anything as long as you're clear about your specifications.
> I think every developer having access to something just slightly worse than the best code ever produced for every function and every system sounds like it lays the foundation for astronomical, emergent growth.
"do you know what we call a specification good enough for a computer to make a program? Code, we call it code."
You will not get the best code from any function, thats not even gai possible. Much less hallucinations you poke till it half works from nn's. I could see pressure to good api and docs and then end users get to be part of prototyping, but theres fundamental limits here.
TIL about the Alien Friends Act: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alien_and_Sedition_Acts#Alien_Friends_Act
A counterpart to the Alien Enemies Act (yes, THAT one that has recently been in the news as the justification for all the deportations) the Alien Friends Act "authorized the president to arbitrarily deport any non-citizen that was determined to be 'dangerous to the peace and safety of the United States.'" Not unlike what many of the anti-immigration Trump supporters advocate for today.
At the time Jefferson said of the act: "The Alien bill proposed in the Senate is a monster that must for ever disgrace its parents. I should not have supposed it possible that such an one could have been engendered in either House, & still persuade myself, that it can not possibly be fathered by both." It's primary use ended up being against anyone who spoke out against the government, including many journalists.
And its existence and enforcement, along with the rest of the Alien and Sedition Acts, led directly to the Federalists losing power. The act expired after only 2 years because the government didn't want to support it.
It's a dangerous power if too easily used, but also it seems basically essential in some form.
People who have the mindset that immigration is a privilege and not a right see this as necessary in some manner from the outset. The country should, maybe even fully needs, the ability to say no to people who are bad for society, even if those people are not breaking specific laws. This one depends on your philosophy, though, so obviously not everyone will agree.
The other side, which is less the Alien Friends Act and more what we have now, is that there needs to exist some mechanism to get rid of truly bad people. For instance an avowed terrorist who has not yet killed anyone [that we can prove] - if we didn't have a mechanism to remove such a person then we're failing as a nation, regardless of differences in philosophy. Having it go through not just the State Department but specifically the Secretary of State (not delegated), seems like a fair limitation.
We have basically the same thing now in the INA. Except it's the SecState who has the discretion and under the guise of a "compelling foreign policy interest."
Hark and rejoice, all ye faithful of nominative determinism! The "Liberation Day" tariffs almost exactly implement the policy proposals of the book "Balanced Trade" by Richman, Richman, and Richman.
Fascinating... a quick glance at their plan for 'scaled tariffs' does look similar at first, but there's important differences. Quoting from the 2014 book (note that they use trade surplus countries to mean countries that the US has a trade deficit with):
"The specifics of the Scaled Tariff, if enacted by the United States, would be the following:
1. Applied only to trade surplus countries. The tariff would only be applied to products of countries that had an overall trade surplus in goods of at least 1 percent of its GDP, which had a trade surplus in goods and services with the United States of at least one billion dollars over the most recent four quarters, and whose exports to the United States (goods plus services) were more than 110 percent of its imports from the United States (goods plus services) during the most recent four quarters.
2. Applied only to goods. The Commerce Department would charge the Scaled Tariff on all goods originating from each trade surplus country. The rate would be applied upon the declared dollar value of such goods on the entry summary form.
3. Rate of duty designed to take in 50 percent of trade deficit. The rate of the duty would be adjusted quarterly and calculated as the rate that would cause the revenue taken in by the duty upon imported goods from the particular country to equal 50 percent of the trade deficit (goods plus services) with that country over the most recent four economic quarters. The rate of the duty would be updated quarterly.
4. Rebated to exporters. The Commerce Department would rebate Scaled Tariff payments to U.S. exporters to the extent that they were paid on inputs to those particular exports.
5. Suspended when trade reaches balance. The Scaled Tariff would be suspended whenever the Commerce Department determined that during the most recent calendar year the current account of the United States was in surplus. Collection would resume when the Commerce Department determined that during the most recent calendar year the current account deficit of the United States was at least 1 percent of U.S. GDP."
So even in this plan, there's no tariffs on countries we have a surplus with, and the proposed tariff rate is not 50% of the ratio of trade deficit to imports, but the rate necessary to raise revenue equal to half of the trade deficit (which means actually thinking about elasticities). I'll also note the book has all of 2 citations according to Google Scholar. Given the admin had the opportunity to cite the book (but chose instead to cite papers that don't actually support their approach), and no one ever discussed this in the first administration, I suspect it's coincidence.
The formula used by the Trump admin includes an elasticity factor
True - they do randomly insert an elasticity, choose a wildly unrealistic value for it, and multiply it by a different Greek letter with a value that just so happens to perfectly cancel out the elasticity.
Is there anyone here who's willing to defend the Self-Indication Assumption (SIA) as it's used in things like the Doomsday Argument? I recently came across some sincere-seeming essays by intelligent-seeming people which take it seriously and I'm having a hard time understanding how anyone could do that in even a fringe way. In my view there's a very obvious dispositive counterargument, but of course there could just be something obvious I'm misunderstanding. It's kinda driving me bonkers in a "Zoolander only has one look! I feel like I'm taking crazy pills" kind of way so I'd appreciate it if someone could either explain what I'm missing or validate that I'm correct in thinking that these people have brain damage.
To summarize my objection: these things always start with some version of "imagine there's a coin flip where if it's heads God makes 100 people and if it's tails He makes a million". Well ok, fine, but that's not how the universe or humans were created and I've never seen anyone justify this framing as a valid starting point for reasoning about reality. Also even if that WAS what happened then our birth order by itself STILL provides zero updates because humans aren't born with serial numbers on their heads.
Someone please be willing to steelman this position for me in a way that ends either with me saying "oh I get it" or ends with you saying "oh good point this is a bad argument and now I feel bad for having believed it".
The thing that bothers me most about these arguments is that the sleepy beauty has a odds table has symmetry meaning that both point of views given offers of all possible bets are exploitable given a betting heuristic of "if expected value > 0, always buy"
I think we need new math; sqrt(-1) == i; surreal numbers, discovery of 0 etc. the answer should be 1/3 + 1/6 sleepy's; and then have the mathematicians tell me some possible rules for what the hell a sleepy is.
I haven't encountered SIA before, and Wikipedia claims it's a _rebuttal_ to the Doomsday Argument..?
I currently think that one part of the Doomsday Argument is correct in a narrow sense: if you want to guess the number of humans that will ever exist, and the ONLY piece of information you have is the number that existed prior to you, then your best guess should be 2x that number--this is the guess that, if every human made it, the number of over-estimators would equal the number of under-estimators. It's not a very good guess, because we've restricted ourselves to only a tiny sliver of evidence, but I think it's the least bad you can do under those constraints.
But the Doomsday Argument then brings in knowledge about changing birth rates to predict when we will reach that number of humans, which means "the number of humans that existed prior to you" is no longer the only info you have. The argument assumes different knowledge for different parts, which isn't how any single reasoner ought to behave. (Though if the ONLY additional info you know is the current birth rate, and nothing about historical birth rates or what causes the current birth rate, then perhaps this doesn't change our best guess in the first part.)
More importantly, even if the argument were internally consistent about its assumed knowledge, the conclusion would only be correct for people who actually have exactly that knowledge and no other knowledge. Since you and I have quite a lot of other knowledge about how humans are created, what forces maintain an equilibrium where humans continue to be created, and what forces could theoretically disrupt that equilibrium, we should be able to make VASTLY better guesses than someone with only the tiny scraps of evidence that the argument relies on. Even if we agreed the Doomsday Argument made the best guess it could with the information it allowed itself, no real-life human should make the same guess (except by coincidence), because we have very different info.
>I haven't encountered SIA before, and Wikipedia claims it's a _rebuttal_ to the Doomsday Argument..?
I'm responding to things like this:
https://benthams.substack.com/p/my-master-argument-for-the-self-indication
>if you want to guess the number of humans that will ever exist, and the ONLY piece of information you have is the number that existed prior to you, then your best guess should be 2x that number
No it seems to me that the best guess is to say that there is no basis for making an estimate.
>But the Doomsday Argument then brings in knowledge about changing birth rates
No version of the DA that I've ever seen does that. To the best of my understanding the DA is a purely anthropic argument (that makes the egregious error of assuming the future can influence the present). It makes no appeal to empirical data apart from one's birth order.
>if you want to guess the number of humans that will ever exist, and the ONLY piece of information you have is the number that existed prior to you, then your best guess should be 2x that number
> No it seems to me that the best guess is to say that there is no basis for making an estimate.
I disagree with both of you, by means of the following analogy: let's say I roll a dice (with sides numbered 1 to N.sides), and I don't tell you what N.sides is, but I tell you that the number I rolled was a 6. Then I ask you to guess whether the dice has 6 sides, or 400-trillion sides.
You are a lot more likely to roll a 6 on a 6-sided dice (1/6) than on a 400-trillion sided dice (1/4e14), so you would be wise to bet on N.sides=6. Indeed, in general when presented with one number from a set of indeterminate length, the most-likely-to-be-right guess of the set size is equal to the number rolled, and the next best guess is roll+1, then roll+2...
So while we disagree whether the best estimate of N.DOOM is roll or 2*roll, I think Dweomite is directionally correct in that a low birth index is at least indicative of low total births.
Hard, hard disagree. Your analysis of the dice is correct but the analogy to human doom is not and the reason is very simple: the dice roll is a random selection from the set of all numbers on the die, but birth order is NOT a random selection from the set of all humans that will ever exist. That's because that set doesn't exist. It's a metaphor that has no meaning in the sense that you're trying to use it. Future humans don't exist, therefore birth can't be interpreted as sampling from them. You can't sample from a set that doesn't exist. Information doesn't travel backwards in time and it's mathematically invalid to condition on unobserved future events. Absolutely nothing that happens now is influenced IN ANY WAY by what might happen in the future. That's not how time works.
You're making the precise error that I'm attempting to point out in the DA.
> Future humans don't exist, therefore birth can't be interpreted as sampling from them
A 400-trillion-sided dice doesn't exist either, but you don't have any problem realising that it's a bad idea to bet that it rolled a "6". Your objection obviates any attempt to ever estimate anything that hasn't happened yet (either because it's a hypothetical or because it lies in the future) - and since people *can* accurately estimate things that haven't happened yet, QED
> the set of all humans that will ever exist. That's because that set doesn't exist.
I am particularly confused by this part. I agree that *we don't know* what the size of the set is, and I agree that this question won't be settled until The Future, but I don't see how you can claim that the set doesn't exist. Unless you're going to simultaneously claim that the set of "results from a dice roll that I rolled once today and I'm going to finish rolling tomorrow" don't exist. But we can know many things about the results of a set of dice rolls that I'm going to finish rolling tomorrow from the result of the dice roll I made today (including that the 6 I rolled means N.sides is unlikely to be 400 trillion sides), so why can we not infer similar information for Human Doom?
In your discussion with Dweomite below you complain that "Saying there's a 1/6 chance that a dice rolls a 6 isn't a prediction", but that's because you're incorrectly thinking about the problem as one of predicting the roll, when it's actually a problem about predicting N.sides, for which "1/6 ergo N.sides = 6" is actually a very explicit prediction.
EDIT: I think I would be helped in understanding your perspective if you can give me a example of a situation which you think is analogous to the way you see the Doomsday argument problem. You say that birth number is a sample from a set that doesn't exist; can you give another example of a sample from a set that doesn't exist, where it's perhaps more easy to see the point you're trying to make?
>Your objection obviates any attempt to ever estimate anything that hasn't happened yet
No it doesn't. It just prevents attempts to base those estimates on illegitimate arguments. Conditioning on future events is an example of an illegitimate argument.
>I don't see how you can claim that the set doesn't exist
Because future people don't exist. They might in the future, and they exist *conceptually* now, but that's not what 'exist' means.
> Unless you're going to simultaneously claim that the set of "results from a dice roll that I rolled once today and I'm going to finish rolling tomorrow" don't exist.
This is a false analogy. The existence of the dice precedes the existence of the roll outcome, therefore it's legitimate to say the dice influenced the roll outcome. The outcome 'selected' from the set of dice sides.
Future people don't exist. They therefore can't influence my birth. I honestly don't know how to explain that any more simply. The future doesn't influence the present. Information doesn't flow backwards in time.
>I think I would be helped in understanding your perspective if you can give me a example of a situation which you think is analogous to the way you see the Doomsday argument problem.
Ok, try this. There's a hole in a wall that spits out one ping pong ball per minute. So far it's spit out 50. How many more is it going to spit out before it stops?
There is no way to tell. There is no statistical analysis of the 50 balls you can perform - bayesian or otherwise - that could provide you with any information about the size of the hidden reservoir.
> No version of the DA that I've ever seen does that.
The argument I've seen goes something like: Our best guess at the number of humans who will ever exist is twice the number that have existed so far. Based on current population projections, we'll reach that number in a couple decades. Therefore, we should expect some calamity that drastically reduces human populations within that time.
> No it seems to me that the best guess is to say that there is no basis for making an estimate.
I think someone who refuses to even try has zero basis on which to say that they're performing better than someone who tries, full stop.
If I interpret your claim as "it's better to stick with your prior and not update at all", then I think it should be obvious that you AT LEAST update your prior to eliminate the possibility that the total number will be less than the number we've already got, so "literally no update" is definitely wrong.
I also think that having an expectation that is correct in the median case is better than not having that property, and so if you're arguing that whatever you do is better than my proposal, you should be able to point out at least one predictive advantage that you've got and I don't, in order to counter-balance that.
>I also think that having an expectation that is correct in the median case is better than not having that property
This just occurred to me: that expectation is actually zero. If every human bets that the species will go extinct at 2x with a payout of 2x - N (x = an individual bettor's birth order, N = total number of humans) then no money will be won on net. It's also zero with a more conventional payout of N * bet size for a correct exact guess and zero otherwise. If an algorithm is unable to produce a betting strategy with a positive expected value then I think it's reasonable to say that that algorithm has no predictive value.
I think you confused yourself when writing the scoring rules, because those scoring rules both appear to be bonkers.
There is standard math for measuring what predictions are better or worse. If you want to get serious about this, you need to look at probability distributions (not just point estimates) and use a "proper scoring rule" to properly incentivize accuracy. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scoring_rule
But if you want the simplified version, look at it this way:
If I have a roulette wheel with 100 spaces numbered from 1 to 100, and someone wants to bet that it lands on exactly 7, you'd probably say the fair payout is 100x the bet if they're right, because there's 100 possible spaces. But in what you called the "conventional payout", the number you used for N wasn't the number of possible answers, it was the value of the actual correct answer. That's like saying that the person who bet on 7 should get a payout of 7x if they're right, not 100x.
In the "total number of humans" example, the range of possible answers is infinite, so the fair payout for guessing the exact answer is infinite, which means my guess is positive EV.
The underlying principle that says the payout should be 100x is that we're imagining a bettor with total ignorance--i.e. someone who places equal money on every space--and calibrating the bet so that they have zero EV. If you do this, then someone with ANY information at all should be able to get positive EV, even if all they know is something like "this roulette wheel never lands on 42" or "a result of 56 is 0.01% more likely than other numbers". If a better knows anything at all, and you think their bet should have zero EV, you probably made a mistake somewhere.
As for your first suggested payout rule, I suspect you intended to score based on how close the guess was to the right answer, but that's not actually what you wrote.
If "2x - N" is supposed to mean "your guess minus the true answer" then I can make infinite money by always guessing infinity, regardless of the true answer, which is obviously not an appropriate rule.
Maybe you were thinking something like "your score is reduced by how far you were from the correct answer; i.e. the absolute value |your guess - true answer|". But if you do that then a prefect guess is worth zero and anything else is worth negative, so NO ONE can win money under that rule, even if they're omniscient.
You could add a positive constant to that to make it possible to win while still penalizing based on the difference, but, again, the standard way to pick that positive constant would be to imagine a bettor with total ignorance and set their EV to zero, and if you do that then my guess will have positive EV.
Well I wasn't trying to make the betting system robust to adversarial examples, just to demonstrate that the method of "guess twice your birth order" doesn't actually give you any positive expected value. But you're right: my comment was half-assed and not really meaningful. The lesson is to not try to do math after 3 beers.
> the range of possible answers is infinite
If it's actually infinite then I don't think that "guessing 2x" works either: the total error is always infinite if you allow for the possibility of infinite people.
But I don't want to think about how to properly handicap infinite games, I'm sure I can't get it right. My view is still that "guess 2x" isn't predictive in any meaningful sense. And the conventional DA is, of course, complete nonsense.
I'ver never seen that version and it doesn't look like it's represented in the wikipedia article on the topic. The argument that I'm responding to is based on the premise that every human born is a random draw from the set of all possible humans and that our birth order therefore gives us a statistical basis from which to reason about the size of that set. In my view that's trivially false.
Why is the argument that you heard referred to as "the doomsday argument" if it doesn't involve a doomsday?
And I believe I've given an argument for why the number of previous humans gives you a tiny-but-more-than-literally-zero amount of evidence about the total number of humans who will ever exist, and you've disagreed with it but not actually presented any counter-argument.
Ok I think I've settled on the right way to think about this. There are two different ways to think about what it means to make a prediction: one which takes contingent factors into account and one which doesn't, and IMO only the former qualifies as a prediction. In the example of a dice roll, a contingent factor might be an unbalanced die, or a careful analysis of the exact speed and orientation with which it's thrown. A non-contingent analysis says "we don't have any special information so we're just going to analyze factors which are common to all dice rolls and say each side has a 1/6 chance." You could call that the maximal-ignorance position: it's the minimum you can possibly know.
I think it's a mistake to call the maximal-ignorance analysis a prediction because it's nothing but a description of the state-space. A prediction is something which *necessarily* imposes a non-uniform probability distribution over that state-space. A maximal-ignorance prediction is like forecasting a horse race by saying "one of the horses that's in the race is going to win". It wouldn't be wrong, technically, but it's also not a prediction in any meaningful sense of the word.
The argument you proposed is an example of a maximal-ignorance position. It describes factors common to *all* possible population histories without doing anything to locate us anywhere *within* that distribution of possibilities. It says: given that we have no idea where we are, what's the guess which minimizes expected error. I'm not sure what the right generic term for that kind of guess is, but it's certainly not either 'prediction' or 'evidence'. It's the equivalent of saying "I have no idea how the dice is going to turn up so just bet 1/6 for everything." While I agree that it's useful to have a clear description of the entire state-space, I feel that an analysis which fails to impose any non-uniform probability distribution over that state space can't properly be characterized as something which "makes a prediction" or "provides information". It tells us which uniformly-applied heuristic minimizes error for all possible observers. I don't know what utility that really has. In my view it's a slightly dressed-up version of "one of the horses is going to win". The fact that we had to do slightly more math to get there doesn't really matter.
>Why is the argument that you heard referred to as "the doomsday argument" if it doesn't involve a doomsday
It does involve a doomsday:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doomsday_argument
>you've disagreed with it but not actually presented any counter-argument.
I didn't say I disagreed. I'd never heard it before so I don't really have a considered opinion yet. It's not trivially wrong the way the DA is, I'll give it that. My first reaction is that while there's a sense in which it's true, I'm not sure that sense is really what's meant by the word 'prediction'. It's a mathematical truism, not a recognition of a contingent reality which could potentially be changed. It's a little like saying the Nasdaq will always be a positive real number. While true, in any practical sense that statement is useless. Does a broken clock predict that it will occasionally be 3pm? It's 3pm a nonzero amount of the time so ... I guess? A heuristic which minimizes prediction error when applied to *every* moment in a population history is different from a heuristic which minimizes prediction error for a *particular* moment in population history, and I'm not sure the right way to think about that difference. It breaks down if you allow for the possibility of an unbounded future so I'm not sure it amounts to anything more that just saying "the future is finite". My tentative view is that your argument doesn't predict anything in any meaningful sense of the term, but I'll have to think about it more.
The best guess one could make with our current priors is to make some kind of map of human population fluctuations, and apply that function to a hypothetical carrying capacity for earth, multiplied by how long the sun is expected to exist. Or, however many useful planets estimated to be around other stars there are plus the value for the earth, if space travel is gainful.
This estimate is not very useful at all, since there are so many unknowns. But it makes both the DA and SSA seem inane by comparison. "There may be even more people in the future even after a decline in the present" vs "Only the present could have lots of people" or "There are infinity people because anyone exists therefore God is real"
You're relying on a lot of evidence that wasn't previously mentioned (knowledge about earth, and the sun, and human population patterns). I agree you can do far better if you have a ton more evidence. I'm only claiming the 2x population estimate is reasonable in a specific scenario with extraordinarily constrained evidence.
It's one of those things I'm reluctant to touch because I'm not sure if my disagreement is the result of a clear understanding of the argument, and an understanding why it's wrong, or possibly my understanding is wrong somewhere, and that's why I think it's wrong.
As far as I can tell we're not abstracted veil-of-ignorance type people, but creatures with a clear causal and experiential history back to our earliest memories. With that in mind; "What is the probability that a randomly selected human finds themselves alive in 2025 given this or that distribution?" is a fine question to ask, with varied answers depending on your assumptions. The more accurate question, "What is the probability that the guy who was born and raised up to the year 2025 lived up to, and experienced asking himself this question?" is quite obviously 100%. Whether humanity explodes itself in 2027, or in 2027 trillion, the probability of you asking yourself the question after having been born in the time you were is exactly the same, since we're not disembodied veil of ignorance experiences.
Sure, anthropic reasoning is perfectly fine *for the appropriate scenarios*. My point is that DA is very clearly not such a scenario. Very VERY clearly.
I pretty much 100% agree with you, but I think the steelman version which I have some respect for is: it's true we don't know the process by which humans/the universe/ourselves were created, but we might still need to reason about situations where we want to include some model where we think about ourselves/the universe/all humans as being "drawn from some distribution".
Just because we don't have a good model of what that process looks like, or have any reason to think it looks like the process imagined by SIA, we still have to do _something_, and SIA at least gives us _some_ process to use, so in the face of uncertainty you might at least have a term of the form, "maybe the procedure can be modeled as 'me being selected from some set of possible people'", and then you'll at least get an SIA-like contribution to your calculation.
I think the Doomsday argument is a weaker case for the SIA because you can come up with models that do a better job capturing the underlying phenomenon like ksvanhorn's analysis of the dice room as an analogy (though note that his analysis comes down on the more SIA/anti-Doomsday side, and the model has a sort of SIA-ish flavour, as it explicitly accounts for the fact that you need to calculate the probability that you will be in the last batch conditional on there being n batches for each n, which to me feels like the observation that your probability of being in the final generation changes with the number of total people, a very SIA-ish point of view).
But, I think unless you have some other specific generating process in mind, doing something vaguely SIA-ish like thinking about "who you might have been, and with what probability" is a reasonable first pass at thinking about weird situations, at least if you have some sensible notion of what the set of possible people might look like.
Hey, thanks for the reply.
> ksvanhorn's analysis of the dice room
I'd never heard of this but just looked it up. That's much more similar to the Sleeping Beauty Problem, which is something that I agree the SIA is appropriate for: there's a well-defined probabilistic procedure that causally effects the outcome in question. The Doomsday Argument, on the other hand, is just black-letter wrong. In my view there is absolutely, positively nothing even approaching logical validity in the DA and I feel like I have 3 different ways to prove it. Is there something about the DA that you think is salvageable and are you willing to explain to me what it is?
>doing something vaguely SIA-ish like thinking about "who you might have been, and with what probability" is a reasonable first pass at thinking about weird situations
I strongly disagree with this. Unless you have a justification then it's just fantastical thinking. Occam's Razor and so forth. Otherwise you wind up with nonsense like thinking that conditioning on unobserved future events is a reasonable way to predict the future. That's nothing but dressed-up circular reasoning and for the life of me I can't fathom how supposedly intelligent people (like academic philosophers) fail to see that. I mean, isn't that exactly what philosophers are supposed to be good at?
I think the dice room is pretty similar to Doomsday, in that you have successive "generations" of increasing size, and then contrasts using the per-generation probability of doom against the population-level probability of doom. He does separately have an argument about SB--are you sure you read the right one?
As you can see below in my other replies, I agree that it's best to think about the actual situation as best you can, but I think there are at least _some_ situations, including Doomsday and SB, where SIA is an ok heuristic.
I just skimmed the dice room so maybe I didn't fully grok it, but it seemed ok to me. Focus on the DA. Can you steelman that one for me because I've never read a version of it that didn't seem obviously wrong to me.
EDIT: Ok I read it more carefully and, while it's not a misuse of the SIA, it's a paradox that's easily resolvable. The paradox arises because of an equivocation over what population you're analyzing (the entirety of humanity vs just your kidnap group). If you define your denominator consistently then there's no paradox. I find that almost all philosophical paradoxes of this variety (including Sleeping Beauty) use this same trick. Their use of language makes it tricky to realize that they're using different definitions of what population they're averaging over and that's why you get different answers depending on how you frame it.
For those who are interested, Sleeping Beauty does it by equivocating between how many awakenings there are vs how many coin flip outcomes there are. The resolution comes when you realize that one of the coin flips (tails) is double-represented by awakenings. Therefore if you enumerate the possibilities by counting awakenings you divide by 3 but if you enumerate by counting flip outcomes you divide by 2. Hence the 1/2 vs 1/3 paradox. It's not a paradox, you're just counting different things.
Dice room vs Doomsday:
What I'd say is, these both have the structure of an exponentially growing population, where we're trying to estimate the probability that you are in the last generation (more or less). In both cases we have a "per generation" estimate of doom which is low, but, because of the exponential growth, the final generation is such a large percentage of the total population that using a naive SSA view, where you divide the population of the final generation by that of the total population, gives a much higher estimate of doom.
In Doomsday, you can use SIA to say, it's true that the final generation is a large proportion of the total population, but that ignores the fact that the larger the population grows, the more "potential people" there are for you to be, and you can use that to cancel out the SSA effect. In the dice room you have something similar: when you take into account your probability of being in the n^th generation as n grows, you find that changes the calculation to cancel out and give you back the "per generation" probability.
So, the dice room takes something with the same basic outline as Doomsday, but tightens it up so that you can model it explicitly, and shows that naive SSA reasoning (divide the final population by the total population) gives the wrong answer; I don't know if I'd say the right answer is exactly analogous to SIA, but I see some similarity: in both cases an important step is to say, how does the probability of you being in the nth generation change as n grows.
As I say, I don't think it exactly vindicates SIA, but I think it does show that SIA as a heuristic performs better than SSA, in a case that has some of the features of Doomsday.
More generally: I agree that a lot of the confusion stems from the question of "what denominator"--it's why I think focusing on betting is a red herring, as different betting schemes can make different denominators be the appropriate one to use.
I also agree that SB and dice room don't misuse SIA because they tell us explicitly how to model the situation, in which case we don't need to resort to hackish heuristics... And I agree that "use SIA" isn't the right lesson to draw from these scenarios; the right lesson is "model it carefully then reason correctly about your model". But I do find it striking that in both cases where we can have an explicit model, SIA as a heuristic seems to have more in common with the right answer than SSA at least. So I'm not totally opposed to the idea that, in a situation where you're not sure what the correct model is, and you may have to use some heuristic, SIA at least seems to have a better track record than the other main heuristic. I agree though that neither heuristic is a replacement for "think better about how to actually model this situation for real"; it's just that if we're talking about like, fine tuning in physics or something, where we have basically no idea how to model the process of "what process generated these constants", we're probably stuck with heuristics for now.
Final things I'll say: if you respond to my last point by saying, "if you can't even begin to model the situation then you don't understand it well enough to reason about it at all" I more or less agree; I don't endorse SIA in such a case, so much as feel like... It's no more crazy to use it than anything else, but only because everything is pretty crazy.
And two, I think naive SIA runs into problems like postulating infinite people, so the better heuristic is SIA weighted by some kind of complexity prior--this is obscured in SB and similar thought experiments because the set up is so contrived by design: if we're letting the entire universe be populated just on the basis of God flipping coins, we're already way out there in the tangles of Occam's beard.
Another thing that SIA might not handle well: imagine a world of 50% humans and 50% positronic robots straight out of Asimov. The robots are conscious and self-aware, and due to positronic efficiency, they experience reality at a framerate 1000 higher than humans.
I find myself aware in this world. What are my chances of being human?
I'm not even sure there is a correct answer, because the word "I" doesn't specify a temporal range, so it can just as well apply to a single frame of consciousness, in which case it's 1/1001, or to the integrated experience over (say) 1 second, in which case it's 1/2.
Thoughts?
Thanks. Yeah I agree with all of this. My dispute isn't with the SIA per se: after all it's just a term which means, essentially, "correct for observation bias in the appropriate way". My objection is to people (like Bostrom, like Bentham's Bulldog) who don't understand the SIA's purpose and blindly apply it even when there's no observation bias to correct for. That strikes me as cuckoo and I really don't understand how people who are as smart as they are can a) make such an obvious error and b) not question their reasoning AT ALL when they reach absurd conclusions like the DA.
Bentham's Bulldog is a big proponent of SIA, he's collected 27 arguments in favor of it here (https://anthropicthoughts.wordpress.com/2024/12/14/all-the-arguments-for-the-self-indication-assumption/). Sadly I don't grokk SIA enough to steelman it for you myself. I keep getting stuck on the Sleeping Beauty Problem. I don't have a specific objection to thirding in the Sleeping Beauty Problem, but every time someone tries to explain why I should I get confused.
That's exactly where I found it! Too funny. The reason I'm here is that I've left several comments on his blog but he has yet to respond. Here's one:
https://open.substack.com/pub/benthams/p/precisely-defining-the-self-indication?r=fo2bp&utm_campaign=comment-list-share-cta&utm_medium=web&comments=true&commentId=106034742
The Sleeping Beauty Problem is an instance where the SIA is actually appropriate: you KNOW that there's a probabilistic process influencing your awareness so using Bayes is therefore justified. What I don't understand is people who use the same reasoning for scenarios where there manifestly ISN'T such a process in place (like the Doomsday Argument, or BB's anthropic argument for the existence of God).
I find Bentham's Bulldog fairly confusing. He's clearly an intelligent person. But almost all of his conclusions are wrong in ways that are SO obvious that I'm confused about what's going on. He won't respond to me so I came here for a sanity check.
> The Sleeping Beauty Problem is an instance where the SIA is actually appropriate: you KNOW that there's a probabilistic process influencing your awareness so using Bayes is therefore justified. What I don't understand is people who use the same reasoning for scenarios where there manifestly ISN'T such a process in place (like the Doomsday Argument, or BB's anthropic argument for the existence of God).
Thank you! That's the exact complaint I have with BB's (ab)use of SIA. As JerL above pointed out, SIA is pretty good heuristic if you need to reason about situations where you want to count probabilities without knowing which observer in a process you happen to be. It's still just a heuristic, and not a theorem, because SIA itself is built on the shaky ground of the "appropriate reference class", which brings up all sorts of hard issues up to and including identity of persons over time, and identity across different worlds. But in cases like the sleeping beauty or doomsday, it gives the same results as just counting out possibilities and doing good old frequentist stats, so it adds up.
Where things go completely off the rails, is when you try to apply SIA to cosmological questions like other universes in an actual multiverse, or other potential uni or multiverses. And the reason it goes off the rails, is because we'd first need to know that there is an actual probabilistic process creating or choosing such universes, and then we'd need to know the actual probability distribution.
We don't get to choose that one by just guessing, that makes as much sense as guessing a physical constant instead of measuring it. Otherwise we're just getting entangled in silly scenarios like "for each possible world where science works, there are billions of worlds that are just like that except that some weird thing happens without physical cause". That just amounts to substituting your idea of what is conceivable for whatever real mechanism, assuming there is one, actually brings worlds up.
These problems don't apply to the usual thought experiments, because in those you get to play God and specify the precise probabilities. The problem comes when you try to apply the insights from your toy experiments to the real world.
Tbf, SIA is meant to throw out reference classes which are a feature of SSA. I'm not sure if it successfully does this, so much as sets your reference class to be "people in the same epistemic situation as you", which as you note elsewhere raises the question of, "who is 'you'?"
I agree with everything else, except that I think it might still be useful to ask yourself, "if I were to model this weird scenario, what modeling choices do I have open to me, and how would they affect my probabilities" just as a zeroth order thing, and I think SIA summarizes a certain way of doing that.
>SIA itself is built on the shaky ground of the "appropriate reference class", which brings up all sorts of hard issues up to and including identity of persons over time, and identity across different worlds.
I disagree with this actually. If you find yourself in the swamplands of appropriate references classes then that's a clue that your analysis has gone completely off the rails and you've ended up in fantasy land. The SIA, as I understand it, is just a label for the concept of correcting for observation bias in an appropriate way. The problem is that mathematically unsophisticated philosophers are prone to forgetting about the "in an appropriate way" part of that and so wind up in Nonsense Land talking about references classes because they've failed to adequately understand the problem. If the problem doesn't unambiguously dictate what the reference class is then you have no business invoking SIA in the first place. It's just a sign that you don't understand the problem well enough to even think about how to correct for observation bias. It's "not even wrong" territory.
I don't think we really disagree, we're probably pointing to the same problem from opposite ends. I was just pointing out that BB's preferred (IIRC) definition of SIA makes use of the concept of reference class, which is underspecified and implies all sorts of difficult philosophical questions. So either your problem makes it 100% clear for the specific case, or you're in nonsense territory. Imagine drawing conclusions about cosmology based on a theory that depends on the details of what it takes for one person in a world to be 'the same' as a person in another world!
Does that make more sense to you, or is there still something we disagree on?
No I agree completely.
I'll just add that I don't think the SIA totally inappropriate for thinking about cosmological issues like the fine-tuning problem. You just have to keep track of what assumptions you're making and qualify your conclusions appropriately. *If* there actually is a multiplicity of universes which differ in their physical constants (and that's a big if), then of course our observations will be biased by the fact that complex life can only evolve in a select subset of fine-tuned universes. But you can't reverse that reasoning and use it to infer the likelihood of such a multiverse existing, though it does give you an alternative to being forced to accept the existence of God.
Do you find the argument that Sleeping Beauty maximizes profit by betting at 1:2 odds understandable?
I understand it, but I don't understand it deeply. I can't find a problem with it logically, but something still bothers me about it. It's not like the Monte Hall problem, where I started out with the intuitive (and wrong) position but after a while was able to wholeheartedly agree that I was wrong. I only halfheartedly agree about the betting thing. Like, okay, so that maximizes betting profits, but only because she gets to bet twice when it's tails and only once when it's heads! Something feels wrong about that, but I can't put my finger on it.
I think one way to see that the betting argument has more to do with the structure of the payoff than with anything epistemic is the observation that if SB needs to never guess wrong in order to win a bet, then thirding is no longer superior.
That is, if the betting scheme collapses the two bets on tails into one bet by taking the second one, then the benefit of the other bet disappears.
As observed elsewhere in the thread, you can think of the difference between halfing and thirding as the difference between whether to take all experiments as your denominator, or all awakenings. If each awakening gets a separate bet, then it's unsurprising that the methodology that uses the "per awakening" denominator performs better; but if you only get one bet per experiment, then the per experiment denominator works fine.
This makes it pretty convincing (to me, at any rate) that we're really just playing around with the terms of the bet.
Yes, I have no problem with the Sleeping Beauty problem: there's a well-defined probabilistic procedure that causally effects the outcome in question. The problem I have with the SIA is that people use it in situations where that's not true. Things like the Doomsday Argument or Bentham's anthropic argument for God here:
https://benthams.substack.com/p/arguments-for-god-tier-list
In my view those arguments are so mind-bogglingly wrong that I flat-out can't comprehend how otherwise intelligent people could make them. Can you help me out? Do you sincerely agree with either of these?
I'm not Wanda, but I don't like betting odds arguments; among other things, it depends on the payoff scheme (are you paid if you make at least one correct guess? Or must you avoid making any incorrect guesses?), and it also seems to mix instrumental and epistemic in a way that I think confuses things.
It's true that I want to understand the world so I can act effectively within it, but I do in fact want to understand the world, and I think it's useful to at least try and keep my "probabilities as a tool to model the world" separate from my "probabilities as a tool to move through the world".
I also think SB won't be convincing to someone whose point is that the real world is often not very well modeled as "flip a coin to determine how many future versions of you will experience something". Even if SIA gets SB right, it's not obvious that in cases where we have no idea about the mechanism generating our experiences that we should continue to use SIA.
Yeah, I think these are all reasonable objections. But I do think the betting argument is simple enough that it should be possible to understand why someone might be a thirder.
I'm pretty sympathetic to thirding in SB (though I think again kavanhorn has a great treatment that has something of the flavour of Radford Neal's Fully Nonindexical Conditioning which implies something more like asymptoting towards 1/3 starting from 1/2 as you gain bits of information that can in principle be used to distinguish Monday from Tuesday which I think is closer to my actual opinion), but as the lengthy aside in the parentheses indicates, it's not really because I think SIA just uncomplicatedly gets it right--I think the best answer involves actually trying to model the situation.
I think the fact that in both cases the better answer ends up with an SIA-ish flavour is a point in favour of the idea that, if you can't come up with anything better, SIA seems to do a decent job--but I don't think that means that SIA is "right", just that it's a good heuristic in at least some situations.
One point I haven’t seen made often enough: even if one takes the logic of mercantilism for granted, minimizing bilateral trade deficits is ridiculous. There’s no reason to expect trade between two countries to be balanced in a system with many countries, even under the constraint that no trade overall imbalance is allowed. E.g. country A produces wheat to sell to country B which produces steel to sell to country C which produces cars to sell to country A. Net trade is balanced for all countries but each country has a trade deficit with half of its trading partners. In any system with significant specialization, trade will tend to look like this rather than reciprocal exchange between countries (again, even taking for granted that no country is a net importer overall). Minimizing bilateral trade deficits reduces trade by way more than would be necessary to reach a given level of net exports.
Even if I were a mercantilist I’d hate the tariffs and would be trying to convince everyone I could that this isn’t real mercantilism.
I don't really agree. Of course a mercantilist doesn't oppose all trade deficits but it opposes the aggregate trade deficit. The big tariffs are on China, Mexico, Europe, and Vietnam--thats where most of the agg trade deficit comes from! If I were a mercantilist (I'm not) I'd be over the moon that my agenda is finally being implemented after basically 100 years of no one believing in my theories.
My impression is that the core intuition behind mercantilism is that your wealth can be measured by how much gold (or currency) you have, and so you win by maximizing your amount of gold, and other assets just don't count.
If you start from this assumption, then any trade with a net deficit is worse than no trade at all, because it causes a net decrease in your gold.
(This is, of course, the sort of assumption that seems intuitively obvious to a child who has grown up rich inside a capitalist system, but which can't survive 5 minutes of intelligent scrutiny.)
Isn't the idea "if we are importing more stuff *from* them than we are selling *to* them, then there is a constant drain of money and resources out of the country and that makes us poorer"?
If country A is selling wheat but importing way more cars then eventually it has to either make up for the cost of paying for those cars by selling other products to other countries at an excess, or it will run into debt because "earn 10 million from selling wheat, pay 20 million by importing cars" does mean "where's the 10 million difference coming from?"
Maybe country A can borrow from country C to bridge the gap, but again that can't go on forever, eventually you have to pay *something* back. (Irish governments did operate under 'splurge today, borrow to pay for it, let tomorrow take care of itself' conditions but tomorrow always came and if there's nothing in the piggy-bank that means trouble).
Of course, the real world is not simple "we sell wheat to B who sells steel to C who sells cars to us" since there are all kinds of imports from and exports to multiple countries at once, and the US economy is so big that, as we currently see, it can tilt the world. But the basic principle of "where's the money coming from to pay for all this?" does seem to still apply.
If I direct barter you a bunch of iron for a bunch of tin, are you inclined to say that one of us has a "trade deficit" and other has a "trade surplus" as a result? If not, then why would the situation change when I replace one of those metals with gold?
The idea that "trade deficit" == "drain of resources" relies (AFAICT) on an implicit assumption that money matters and goods don't; otherwise, it would be equally valid to say that the country exporting cars to us is suffering a constant drain of resources because of all those cars they're losing. The situation is only asymmetrical if you first assume that "money" is somehow special in a way that other resources like wheat, cars, iron, etc. aren't.
If I were going to inappropriately steelman the position, I might say something like: "In order for any entity to stay in equilibrium, it needs to achieve zero net change in EVERY resource, somehow. For resources like wheat or cars, that's complicated because you can create them out of other resources, so to see the balance we need to look at a bunch of resources at once, together with the processes that convert them. Money is only special in that it's neither created or destroyed, which greatly restricts our options for how to balance it."
But I doubt most mercantilists have ever thought anything like that, and it's not strictly true that money is neither created nor destroyed, and insofar as money IS that way, so are various other things that mercantilists don't usually seem to worry about. Also it seems pretty far-fetched to suppose that nations are or should be in equilibrium, anyway.
"The situation is only asymmetrical if you first assume that "money" is somehow special in a way that other resources like wheat, cars, iron, etc. aren't."
Money can be created or diluted on the spot in a way that resources are assumed not to be (a country could dilute or sell really shitty wheat, iron, or so on, but these scenarios typically assume any quality degradation is measured in the price).
"Isn't the idea "if we are importing more stuff *from* them than we are selling *to* them, then there is a constant drain of money and resources out of the country and that makes us poorer"?"
Pretty much, yes, if I recall my Lionel Robbins correctly. At the time (1500s to 1700s), the idea was that a nation's wealth was best measured as the amount of precious metals in its vaults, rather than the stuff it might trade for.
Nowadays, it's up against the argument that you can't eat, wear, or live inside gold and silver. It's entertaining if you enjoy rolling around in it, maybe, but not for everyone. And while you can make certain capital goods out of gold and silver (i.e. electronics), this obviously wasn't common practice in the 16-18th centuries.
Mercantilist thinking might have been driven in part by colonial economics. Back then, a self-respecting nation would settle other lands, extract their precious metals, ship them back to the homeland, and sell their colonists manufactured goods and buy raw materials. Given the large amount of available raw stuff, I imagine the thinking was that the nation wouldn't be able to buy it if it had nothing to trade in return. It had manufactured goods, sure, but if it didn't, or if the colony could make its own, then the colony would lose interest and break away.
Precious metal would keep it coming back, because everyone agreed it was precious for Reasons. So you'd better keep that metal in your vaults, give it away sparingly, and do whatever it took to get it back (tariffs on imported goods, or war).
By the way this was one of the largest contributors of inflation in the period, particularly in Spain (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Price_revolution)
For example, most Canadian oil exports go to the United States, presumably for logistical reasons, even though the United States produces more oil than it consumes. So Canada exports oil to the United States, the United States in turn exports oil to other countries. Trump looks at this, sees that the United States has a big trade deficit, and reneges on the USMCA agreement which he negotiated during his first term.
Canada will likely build a bunch of money building infrastructure to allow it to export oil to countries other than the United States, which will make both countries a bit poorer (Canada because it had to spend money on infrastructure, the United States because it no longer pockets the difference between what it was paying Canada for oil and what it was paid for oil exports).
Per the hypothesis in Ian Fletcher's book Free Trade Doesn't Work, you don't want to maximize comparative advantage arbitrarily, because some things will offer little returns in the long term when maximized. If your country becomes really good at farming wheat or vanilla, then all it does in the future is sell wheat and vanilla. In almost all metrics the countries that prioritized "comparative advantage" in industry and machine tools will be ahead.
This explanation feels like a lightbulb going off for me, it's a simplification of something that I've kinda thought for a long time but struggled to put into words.
It might be even more intuitive if you replace "industry and machine tools" bit with "weapons."
Which is why North Korea rules the world now?
No, but good guess. It's ruled by different country that prioritized weaponry.
Can you break down what "little returns" here means? Is it that wheat and vanilla are less profitable than machine tools even if you're the only one selling them, or that wheat and vanilla are an undesirable thing to specialize in regardless of profitability?
Essentially one gives you an ongoing steady income, while the other gives you the Industrial Revolution. There is no income in any non-industrial nation in the history of the world that outcompetes an industrialized nation. Even 1820 Britain outcompetes modern day crop-based economies.
This is one of the modern complaints about how the West treats African countries - we buy foodstuff and raw materials from them but ultimately those countries remain poor.
> Can you break down what "little returns" here means?
I actually got a different thought / lesson from that than Deiseach and Blank, so thought it was worth commenting.
I think it's about the "lift in productivity" possible. The multiplier even if you spend a lot of brain power and do everything right for vanilla or agricultural productivity will always be a lot less than the multiplier possible with machine tools / manufacturing. And even manufacturing will always lag behind software, or apps, or things like that.
So if you double down on organic stuff, you'll hit a much shorter productivity ceiling while all the manufacturing guys keep growing past that (and their economies grow accordingly). And the ones who double down on manufacturing without doing software will watch the software / app countries shooting past them, and their economies growing.
You need to move your investments or balance them among things with higher productivity ceilings to stay relevant / keep growing.
See indigo production in the southern United States. The French grew it in their American colonies, due to the accidents of war the British needed a new source and began their own plantations in their American possessions. This grew into a profitable industry *until* a combination of factors - the American Revolution, competition from the Caribbean plantations which produced more crops annually, and Britain sourcing indigo from India - meant that indigo was no longer a cash crop and instead it was replaced by cotton.
The French had their own collapse, as slave revolts in the Caribbean islands and then the abolition of slavery meant the plantations were no longer profitable.
If you had invested all your money and resources into producing indigo, either as British or French, then you were left high and dry unless you could pivot to something else. As the saying goes "don't put all your eggs into one basket". From being highly valuable to being not worth the effort, by specialising in that one crop you would have limited your own capability.
https://www.morningagclips.com/experiment-in-blue-colonial-americas-indigo-industry/
The latter. A historical example is the Northern USA vs the South. The South invested in highly profitable cotton industries, but ended up well behind the North over time.
Ok, prediction time!
What is your prognostication of what will happen with tariffs in the next few months (let’s say by the beginning of summer).
1) Trump keeps high tariffs and the world responds in kind
2) Trump pivots (intentionally or not) and uses tariffs as a bargaining chip to get lower trade barriers globally
3) Congress overrides Trump and takes tariffs away.
4) Other (please specify)
Note I am not trying to predict the economic effects of each scenario, just which do you think is most likely . Feel free to give weights on your certainty.
I will start off by saying I give a 33% chance each for 1 and 2.
Not going to make predictions about what the USG will do, but I think the aggregate response from the rest of the world is at least somewhat obvious.
Two months ago when Trump announced the Canada and Mexico tariffs, I predicted that even if they were ultimately pulled back, the fact of them being floated at all would make the U.S. a little poor than it would otherwise. Poorer because it made the U.S. appear a risky place to do business. Any rational actor who was buying from, selling to or investing in the U.S. on sufficient scale would need to price in that risk, making other options more attractive. At the time, I expected this to have a real effect, but probably small enough not to be readily detectable in aggregate economic data.
As of last week, I expect the same thing but on a significantly larger scale. Even if Trump rolls back the tariffs tomorrow and starts talking at every chance about how much he loves free trade and does the best free trade, a bunch of people around the world have been forced to update their models. Everyone, everywhere is going to have more incentive to route around the U.S., to do business in other markets and rely less on any American firm (as producers or consumers) than they did before. The longer the tariffs stick around and the higher they get pushed, the faster and stronger this reaction will be. The U.S. is a valuable market, but less valuable than it was two weeks ago. Now I think the trend will be large enough to be detectable in the data: that 5-10 years from now (assuming AI doesn't flip over the game board) economists will be able to look at the data and clearly point out "yeah, this here is where the U.S. shot itself in the foot and gave its economy a long-term limp."
Trump crashes the US economy hard. This causes enough unrest that he can declare martial law as the next step of becoming dictator for life.
This is unserious. Trump has a lot of popularity with certain classes of people, and huge unpopularity with other classes. Serving military officers are solidly in the latter camp. Remember when Milley sided with *China* over Trump in his first term? When Vindman testified against Trump in the impeachment proceedings? The people who would be responsible for carrying out a coup or martial law are all Milleys and Vindmans. Not going to happen.
Military officers swear an oath to uphold the Constitution. By this oath they should not carry out any illegal order, even from the Commander in Chief. It’s called good character, fidelity to an ideal and to duty.
“And we don't take an oath to a wannabe dictator. We don't take an oath to an individual, we take an oath to the Constitution, and we take an oath to the idea that is America, and we're willing to die to protect it."
We as a country should thank our good fortune to have this sort of loyalty to the American idea and ideal. Without it the nation couldn’t survive an amoral toad like Trump.
I can't even pretend to have an idea. Whatever it is, it will be whimsical.
I guess one version of #2 is that the administration likes tariffs, but plans on getting BOTH lower restrictions (barriers, subsidies, currency manipulation and tariffs) from other countries and getting a net 10% tariff for US. By starting high they give themselves bargaining position to accomplish three goals (a billion per day in taxes, more investment in the US and more exports). I am going to raise my estimates to 50% for option 2.
4) Trump reopens trade with Russia
5) Tariffs are the new normal, everyone continues trading, slightly higher prices for a couple of years and the world definitely doesn't end
6) (first ones are serious, this one no) in a wild appeasement strategy they give Trump the Nobel peace prize
1) 40% through the beginning of summer at least; this is the default and Donald Trump will never ever admit he was wrong
2) 10%; the "global trade barriers" are a mix of pure fantasy that can't be lowered because it doesn't exist, and stuff that's too deeply entrenched and obfuscated to be negotiated away in a few months (or ever, with a negotiator this clumsy)
3) 5% by the beginning of summer. Congress, and especially the GOP, will need to grow a backbone pretty much from scratch to pull this off.
4a) 30%, Trump "pivots" and uses the tariffs as a bargaining chip to get worthless token concessions that he can claim are the Very Best Trade Deal Ever.
4b) 15%, Wild card outcomes that I'm not going to try to predict, but including some economic apocalypses (or whatever the proper plural is).
4a is excellent.
2. EU restrictions on the import of American farm goods, like beef (due to hormone use), chicken (due to chlorine washing), and eggs (due to washing and storage standards) seem like they could be fairly categorized as a non-monetary trade barrier.
You can categorize them as a "non-monetary trade barrier" if you want, and maybe they actually are that - in part.
But you can also characterize them as food safety regulations, and they are *absolutely* that, at least in part and maybe in full.
Other nations *are* going to have safety regulations, for food and everything else, and they are not going to be carbon-copy implementations of our own safety regulations. And maybe they're going to make their safety regulations do double duty as trade barriers. But if you call them out on that, no matter how correct you may be, the result will *not* be, "Oh, we're very sorry about that - look, we're just going to repeal all our safety regulations, whatever you all want to sell to our citizens is fine with us".
It might be possible to persuade them to disentangle the supposed trade barriers from the safety regulations, through careful negotiation that lets them save face by not admitting that they were ever trade barriers in the first place. But there is no way that happens in three months.
It is definitely possible to do such a hamfisted job of it that the other side digs in its heels, says "No these are *not* trade barriers, you are trying to poison our people with your crappy food so your greedy capitalists can make their filthy lucre, and we are never ever ever going to let you do that!". And the "never ever ever" part will be hyperbole, but it will be way longer than three months.
Depends on precisely HOW ones "calls them out." The British did a good job with China in the mid-nineteenth century, for example, but yes, I agree three months is unlikely to be enough.
I think there ARE a few unorthodox negotiating tactics that would work, like credibly threatening to switch to selling weapons to Russia, but I don't think the American government is capable of being that agile in its foreign policy.
So could be the US ban against European raw milk cheese, like Camembert, Gruyere, Parmigiano or Cheddar.
You can still buy Camembert in the US, it's just not the French version. It's a different sort of cheese that is specifically designed for the US market and sold under the same brand name. Likewise, US companies are free to produce beef/chicken/eggs that meet EU regulations and sell them to the EU.
Those are certainly trade barriers, but they go in both directions, and where they reach economic relevant scales, companies find ways to go around them. The corresponding costs would certainly be reduced by removing the trade barriers, but I doubt that the net effect is economically very relevant.
"It's a different sort of cheese that is specifically designed for the US market"
Why? Is it so it can be sold as "Camembert" but made in the USA?
No, it's because the French version is forbidden in the US. The US don't allow young cheese from raw milk.
> I doubt that the net effect is economically very relevant.
I think they were partly responsible the Liberation Day tariffs, so they're at least indirectly economically relevant. :D
You gotta remember Liberation Day comes from a guy who thinks patriotism means dry humping an American flag rather than refusing early release from Hanoi Hilton before his men.
And people wonder why I won’t vote for the sleazebag.
> You can still buy Camembert in the US, it's just not the French version. It's a different sort of cheese that is specifically designed for the US market and sold under the same brand name.
How can someone live like this? Why _would_ they even continue living like this?
They don't, we can't, which is why there's now a vibrant American artisanal cheese scene! The feds almost killed it a few years ago by declaring aging cheese on wood planks to be "unsanitary", but as far as I can tell the proposed ban didn't go through and we can still buy raw milk Brie from Vermont, raw milk Gauda from Georgia, raw milk Cheddar from California, etc. etc. They don't taste the same as the European versions, but hold their own as worthy entrants into the awesome world of good cheese.
For context, I've traveled to Europe quite a bit and have tasted the real stuff, so this is not coming from the veil of ignorance.
This may be the first thing you and I have ever agreed on, the importance of good cheese both local and international 😀
Oh so first 3) is my favorite option, but I won't be tempted.
I think/ hope it will be 2) but a pivot to better trade deals for the USA. (not a global lowering of trade barriers.) So 70% on 2) and 10% on the other three
1) 10%
2) 20%
3) 5%
4) 65%: The courts put an injunction on the tariffs and the Supreme Court rules that IEEPA can't be used the way Trump is using it.
I'm surprised this wasn't included, it seems to obviously be the most likely outcome. Every time Trump overreaches someone finds a judge to injunct it to keep it from happening, and I think the case that IEEPA does not allow the President to put arbitrary tariffs on anybody without congressional approval is a strong one.
Someone has already sued for injunctive relief (though for the China tariffs from a month or so ago, not the Liberation Day ones): here's their complaint (https://nclalegal.org/filing/complaint-for-injunctive-and-declaratory-relief-5/). They're arguing that tariffs are a tax on Americans, and that IEEPA does not authorize the president to impose tariffs:
"The President purported to order these tariffs under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act of 1977 (“IEEPA”), but that is a statute that authorizes Presidents to order sanctions as a rapid response to international emergencies. It does not allow a president to impose tariffs on the American people. President Trump’s Executive Orders imposing a China tariff are, therefore, ultra vires and unconstitutional. This Court should enjoin their implementation and enforcement."
Looking over the IEEPA it grants the President the ability to "investigate, regulate, or prohibit" transactions in foreign exchange. Tariffs are not specifically mentioned in the law, and nobody has ever used IEEPA to impose tariffs before so there's no precedent.
Good point about the Tax Injunction Act though: if it applies then we won't get relief until the Supreme Court rules on the case.
Well that's for the courts to decide, isn't it? I don't see it as a slam dunk case either way, but the case is likely enough to succeed that it's worth trying. The courts may rule that "regulation" means you can stop it from happening, or a put a cap on it, or only let you make transactions every other Thursday, but a tariff is a tax and taxes are different from regulations. Or they may not. We'll have to see!
Ever since Chevron was overturned the courts are giving the Executive Branch a lot less leeway to interpret statutes however they like. And in recent years the Supreme Court has struck down a lot of Executive actions based on ambiguous laws. For example, in West Virgina v. EPA the court ruled that the Biden Administration couldn't use the 1970 Clean Air Act to regulate carbon emissions, saying "in certain extraordinary cases, both separation of powers principles and a practical understanding of legislative intent make us ‘reluctant to read into ambiguous statutory text’ the delegation claimed to be lurking there …. The agency instead must point to ‘clear congressional authorization’ for the power it claims."
So there's a very real chance that the Supreme Court will come down on the tariffs, because the IEEPA doesn't clearly provide authorization for tariffs.
Yep. A colleague of mine who's one of the most prominent environmental attorneys in the US says of "West Virginia" (the current Court's erasure of 'Chevron deference') that it's a two-edged broadsword: it's now easier to challenge any executive branch action, pro or con regulation, that relies on interpretive debates about statutory texts. He naturally was focused on the environmental laws like the Clean Water Act, and his firm has already had a win on that basis actually, but the point applies generally.
Since the SCOTUS has set the bar at _clear_ congressional authorization, "implied" or "logically embedded" no longer suffice. By that standard I'd put the odds slightly in favor of those IEEPA tariff plaintiffs on the merits. They may not get an injunction for different reasons, but if they then persist in the normal way I bet the current Court will eventually side with them. Or federal courts will, citing "West Virginia".
Do tariffs count as taxes for the purposes of the Act?
No.
There are very few legal precedents that have much relevance, that's true. No previous POTUS has tried to impose (or remove for that matter) broad tariffs without any Congressional involvement or approval. So we really are in uncharted territory here as far as where the boundaries of authority are.
2) Trump hasn’t backtracked yet and seems to genuinely believe in this stuff, and most other countries’ governments’ can’t afford politically to make wildly asymmetric concessions, so p(1) > p(2).
3) is pretty close to 0 since there are only a handful of sane/conscientious republicans in the senate, and a 30% of winning a general election is more appealing than a 90% if losing a primary,
I think 1 has 2/3 chance, 2 maybe 30%.
Last I heard, there were seven Republican Senators who had signed on as cosponsors for the Trade Review Act that would limit executive authority over tariffs: Collins, Murkowski, McConnell, Grassley, Moran, Tillis, and Young. At least two more, Ted Cruz and Rand Paul, have made strongly anti-tariff statements in the last few days but haven't officially enforced the specific legislation.
This is more Republican support than I would have hoped for, but still far short of what is needed. Cloture requires 60 votes, and a veto override requires 67, so if every Democrat votes for it, they'll need 13 Republican votes to force a vote if the Senate Republican leadership continues to oppose it (4-6 more than they currently have) and 20 Republican votes to override a veto. Which is a very tall order.
The House is a taller order still, since a much higher proportion of House Republicans than Senate Republicans seem to be all-in on MAGA.
If everyone's portfolio is down 40% and major companies start going under and hundreds of thousands of workers are being laid off and every CEO is on the phone begging for tariffs to be lifted, then loyalties start to look very different.
And of course if all that stuff doesn't happen then we don't need to worry.
Maybe, but I also think that some worry might be indicated if everyone's portfolio is down 10-20% and tens of thousands of workers are being laid off.
There's also the issue of whether the President should have the power to impose this kind of major policy shift by decree, which can still be opposed on principle even if a particular exercise of unilateral executive power turns out to be mostly harmless.
Ok, let's give it a try:
1 - 50% chance of this ... and then conditioned on this 65% chance of most tariffs being repealed after the congressional midterm elections, 25% chance of them surviving until after the next presidential elections, 10% that they mostly stay even after (this is mostly only if the next president is also MAGA or someone like Bernie Sanders, both of which I find very unlikely now)
2 - 20% chance ... I don't think there are many ways to force Trump to change his mind, Americans give their presidents too much power and Trump doesn't like admitting he's wrong. He won't be able to get elected again, so he doesn't care about voters and he doesn't need sponsors any more either. This only happens if he can somehow present this as a BIG WIN or if he feels like he can.
3 - 20% chance ... I think most Republicans are either MAGA or playing it safe, knowing that the midterms are close and if MAGA can discredit itself they will a) personally be much safer politically supporting such a measure in the new congress and b) make it easier for Republicans to purge MAGA if they first discredit themselves and lose all but the most hardcore support by starting a recession for no good reason
4 - 10% of something else happening, e.g. Trump doing something so outrageous that he gets impeached even while Republicans still have a majority in congress. I know 10% is fairly high for all other scenarios but Trump is also extremely erratic, so I think it is warranted.
Ugh. I'm of a mind with Eric Weinstein: positive mean, high variance, negative skew, high kurtosis. That's a mathy way of saying I suspect something good might happen, but the pluralist option right now isn't good, and the curve so damn flat that I wouldn't put a bet on anything.
Let's call it 20 #1, 25% #2, 10% #3, 45% #4.
The upside of all this is that I learned the word "kurtosis" today.
There is not much meaning (even metaphorical) in the kurtosis of a non-numeric outcome. I suspect "high entropy" captures better what you mean. If anything, at a given variance, more kurtosis typically means a less flat curve with a more salient mode.
Also, "I suspect something good might happen, but the pluralist option right now isn't good" sounds like "the mode is lower than the mean" which is typical of positive skew.
If you're putting such a high weight on "Other," is there a specific other scenario you think is reasonably likely that you can share?
#4 is what I used as a junk chest for everything else, on the assumption that this could go a lot of ways that aren't occurring to me right now. So the theme here is "I really don't know".
If I had to speculate at what might fall under #4:
* Other nations cry "uncle", and offer various trade concessions in exchange for tariff reductions. (This will look very similar to #2. I think Trump *does* intend tariffs to be something of a bargaining chip; the difference is that other nations will offer something Trump might not have initially had in mind.)
* The court rules that the law Trump is using to justify his tariff power doesn't actually authorize it.
* Tariffs persist into 2026/2028, Congress *partly* reduces tariffs
* Unemployment drops inexplicably due to something else
* Trump lifts the trade barriers due to something crazy happening, such as
** Some Damn Thing in the Balkans
** oil crisis
** Some Damn Thing in the Middle East
** LLM crisis
** LLM automation sets off a market boom and no one cares about tariffs anymore
** some other tech breakthrough sets off a market boom
** another pandemic
** an ice shelf breaks off somewhere
> kurtosis
It IS a good word, and it's rare there's an opportunity to use it. It's a bit like Nixon's third derivative.
Yeah kurtosis is a good one.
Seppuku has been popping into my head more often in the last week though.
Dems don't reverse the tariffs because the progressives secretly like the idea of them but don't like giving Trump the credit.
50/50 on whether the business oligarchs backing Trump can pressure him to reverse them or not.
Really the best word to describe progressive feelings about the whole topic is -- since well before Trump's current moves -- "uncertain". Or maybe "very mixed feelings".
This has come to mind thinking about my parents, lifelong liberal Dems who called themselves "progressive" which in their era did not have nearly all the baggage and implications that it does today. They and all their friends had very mixed feelings about trade policy.
Yglesias references this in his Substack column today: "It’s underrated that the 1980s/1990s dynamic — Democrats led the charge urging Ronald Reagan to engage in more protectionism and then the left wing of the party (at the urging of industrial unions) rebelled against the Clinton administration’s embrace of NAFTA — was a _reversal_ of the historical pattern.
From the time of Andrew Jackson through FDR and the Kennedy Round of GATT during the Great Society, it was always the left position in American politics that tariffs were regressive and bad. Trump’s reversal of Reagan/Bush trade policies was noteworthy, but I am pretty sure Joe Biden was the first Democratic Party president in centuries to _not_ lower trade barriers."
That's similar to deregulation, where everybody today believes Reagan was "the great deregulator" while in fact Jimmy Carter [my mother's political hero and for a while indirectly her employer] in the late 1970s had been the actual radical deregulator. Carter insisted that sanctioned monopolies were inherently regressive (or if you will anti-progressive) and when he got the chance he walked that walk (with the critical legislative assistance of Ted Kennedy!). Then Reagan, the progressives' great boogieman more generally, defeated Carter while appropriating deregulation for his own brand (and then actually doing almost none of it).
That sequence created a _lot_ of cognitive dissidence for the left side of the Democratic Party. A similar dynamic has been at play on trade policy since around the same time, greatly reinforced by Clinton/NAFTA.
What Dems want is pretty irrelevant to the question of what happens this year, isn't it?
Well I gave 3) 10% and if congress was to grow a backbone, I'd hope the Dems would be involved.
True, I guess if Republicans start to seriously split on the issue, it starts to matter a lot how cohesive the Democrats are.
True
I don't think most people *justify* eating meat to themselves as much as they never think about it. It's so widespread a practice that they never question it.
Is this contradictory with the fact that meat-eaters also oppose sexual abuse or torture of animals? Yes, but humans are famously irrational.
I agree with you. I spent most of my life so far as a meat eater and accepted that my beliefs were incongruent (eating meat OK, pointlessly harming animals bad), and 'solved' the issue by not thinking about it. I noticed others with similar pairs of beliefs solved the issue by rationalising easily-believable but incorrect counterarguments (I need meat to live, my ancestors ate it so I must, I have canine teeth so must need to use them, etc), then some just didn't have an issue to begin with (I don't care about farm animals). Largely it's just 'out of sight, out of mind'. I would bet that if everyone had to wade into the chicken factory and kill their own miserable chicken, instead of choosing a pack from a supermarket, there would be many, many more vegetarians/vegans (or at least much more money spent on less horrendous farming practises)
I don't know about most people, but you're probably right about a lot of them. There are also probably lots that think about it, know it's morally wrong, and do it anyway because of pleasure and convenience.
Factory farms are mentioned a lot in the comments here, but they are a very US-specific objection; the practice is far from universal, and also other countries are infamously reluctant to import US meat (Trump has a number of rants on the subject!)
Meanwhile, animals can be raised on marginal land that is not suitable for crops, and on what would otherwise be waste / byproducts. Historically, this is how it was done.
There is a very strong argument for eating much less meat than the average westerner eats; this would remove many of the incentives that lead to dedicated factory farms. However, for maximal efficiency, the optimal amount of meat is not zero.
I’m more than happy to grant that the optimal amount of animal product use isn’t zero. I don’t know what the optimal amount is, but I could see there being a need to use some.
I think vegetarians and vegans really struggle with the idea that a group of meat-eaters don't feel the need to think about the justifications for eating meat because they don't believe mistreating a chicken is wrong.
Yes, they don't justify it. They don't justify it for the same reason I don't need to justify owning a pair of jeans to myself. It's not about jeans-ownership being a widespread practice: it's that I don't see any reason why it would be wrong. Yes, if nobody owned jeans then maybe I would think harder about water usage in cotton farming and indigo leeching out onto my sofa, but these are secondary concerns about the conditions of jean ownership, they're not a core objection to the act itself.
“I don’t see any reason why it would be wrong” is a statement that means you either haven’t examined the issue or you actually don’t agree with arguments against consuming animal products. My contention is that most meat-eaters are the former, not the latter.
My contention is that there's no practical difference between holding an unexamined belief and holding an examined one, if the examination wouldn't change your opinion. If someone doesn't examine their opinions on meat-eating in the same way I haven't examined my opinions on jeans-wearing (until now), then they're obviously quite apathetic about it.
I think pointing out that meat-eaters haven't examined their beliefs has an implicit continuation of "...and that's important because they'd change them if they did." Without that continuation, it's just a bit of trivia. How many of will actually change those beliefs, though?
There’s definitely people who won’t care and will not change their behavior, but some do place value in logic, so the contradiction upon examining the belief has to be resolved, and very few people are willing to bite the bullet on making other behavior against animals morally permissible.
The other behavior is, and has always been, about the effect on the person, not the animal. A guy having sex with a sheep is a pervert/deviant/whatever. He's demonstrating that he's a dysfunctional human, which other people should be wary about. The sheep probably doesn't care. I definitely don't care about the effect on the sheep.
A kid that tortures animals for fun is much more likely to be an adult who tortures people. A kid that learns to butcher animals for food is not.
The problem for this argument is animal abuse laws. In many places, you will be punished by the law for hurting the animal, not because they were worried about how you’d end up. For instance, where I live, you can be subject to a fine and time in prison for committing animal abuse. The definition of animal abuse is also much larger than simply sex or torture. That would not make sense if the issue was the person’s behavior, but it would fit if the state believed you had committed some moral wrong.
There’s a sizable portion of the population who agree that factory farming is bad but also place the welfare of animals low on their list of concerns. They don’t see a straightforward solution that matches the small amount of time/effort/sacrifice they are willing to dedicate to the issue so they don’t give it any additional thought.
Those that don’t justify eating meat to themselves also likely don’t realize the cheapest meat they buy comes from factory farms which might as well be torture for animals.
They just assume—rationally—that the food brought to the market is done humanely. And—rationally—they believe killing animals for food is fine, whereas torturing or abusing animals is not fine.
So at the end of the day, your average consumer is being quite rational. Sorry to burst your “I’m more rational than a normie” bubble.
Sure, they’re rational given the unconsidered principle that meat consumption is morally permissible. But that’s debatable, and most people couldn’t hope to defend it even if they were given a philosophy and logic course.
There's no objective way to resolve the argument. I can claim an objective standard (for instance the Bible telling believers to eat meat, of which there are many examples), but for anyone who doesn't adhere to that standard, it's meaningless.
I don't adhere to your standards. We have different axioms. Eating meat is self-evidently good to me.
And there's lots of ways to get there. Meat provides nutrition that is difficult or even impossible to get otherwise. Meat tastes good. Meat is a cultural tradition passed down. If I don't accept your axioms, then any or all of these and more can be perfectly rational and moral reasons to eat meat. There can even be reasons that neither of us agree with, but which based on different axioms will hold for some people.
It is clearly not true that meat eaters simply haven't examined the morals.
I’m going to ignore the “people can disagree” portion of your comment because it’s boring to go into. We all know people can disagree, the millionth reminder is unnecessary.
I will say, however, that I simply don’t agree with your assessment that most meat eaters have morally examined the issue of meat eating. Barring evidence, I don’t think we can convince each other either way on this.
I don't ultimately disagree that many meat eaters haven't or will never examine their stance. (On the other hand, many of us have and I don't think you can justify the strength of your stance on this). I just happen to think it's a very high standard that you are laying out. Someone else asked you about whether you've ever considered the morality of eating plants, and you scoffed at that. The reaction you had is pretty much the reaction I have when people ask about eating meat - of course it's okay!
And we can have the same discussion about a variety of topics. Is it okay to breath, to walk, to talk to friend, to work a job, to have kids, to support your country, to go to war. Some of these are obvious to you, some are obvious to me, and some are obvious to certain groups but not others. There are a few people who may object to all of these things (they are against human life). Many people question patriotism and war. To pick one or a few topics and say "you haven't examined your stance!" is often true, but also uninteresting. All of us have a deep set of unexamined views. Most of us would continue to agree with our previous views if we did examine them (often due to various biases and such). Would it be very interesting to you if 1,000 meat eaters all examined their views and 985 of them continued to agree that eating meat was okay? Or is "examining their views" only consisting of you telling them they're wrong to eat meat? Not very interesting or helpful.
To be clear, I didn’t scoff at that person. I asked plainly why I would need to do such a thing, when “plants deserve no moral consideration“ is a position held by most if not all people on both sides. I also invited them to make an argument against the moral permissibility of eating plants. I won’t relitigate that comment chain, but I do object to the notion that I scoffed initially.
I agree that “X belief is unexamined” is not always interesting, but I was trying to defend meat eaters from an accusation made by the user Hind’s Ghost. But I can’t respond on the PC because Scott’s substack just freezes every time. I can load comments, but I can’t reply to them. So I tried doing it on my phone, but when I clicked “reply” it went to a top-level response.
I know it sounds like an excuse, but I swear I wasn’t trying to make a spontaneous, unprompted remark. I was legitimately trying to defend meat-eaters against a more direct accusation.
You underestimate your fellow man, and overestimate complex argument and your own rationalism.
Then enlighten me. What have I overlooked or forgotten that renders my argument weaker or outright defeated?
Humm... I've found a comfortable spot. Rejecting the argument that humans have no moral right to live since we cause so much insect suffering, I've decided to apply a very high discount rate to pain and suffering when compared to miracle of life. I.e. a battery chicken or industrial hog would rather have lived than not. I also believe that life has a praxis towards complexity. Nicely privileging the human race!
Would you prefer to be reincarnated as a battery chicken/industrial hog after you die vs non-existence?
Have you ever experienced suffering that made you wish you weren't alive to experience it?
I would love to be reincarnated, since that would prove I have a soul and there is a god! Other than that, since I wouldn't carry anything with me, and would have to other point of reference, then yes. I would rather be an industrial hog than never live.
First justify eating non-meat.
I don't know why people are acting like this is some gotcha setup and not a legitimate counterpoint. BB just had a recent post arguing for the horrible reality of insect suffering. What about the people who try to tell you that rocks have consciousness or electrons have qualia? Why is the suffering of animals a given and anything else a vegan eats couldn't possibly also experience suffering? What about the shrimp welfare people but for legumes?
And if the response is animals are a lot more like people than any of those things - most people don't care about the suffering of other people, except in a vague moral way that doesn't require them to do anything differently. So there's your answer.
I'm a meat eater. The obvious reason is because non-meat has no feelings and/or intelligence.
I think you're arguing in bad faith.
And yet DrManhattan16 couldn't manage that argument; they responded exactly like I thought they would. They in fact stated eating meat is the same as sexual abuse. So your call that I'M acting in bad faith, with no regard to the bad faith of the original post, is my whole point. This is not logic applied equally in all directions, it's a gut feeling wrapped up in post-hoc rationalization.
Plants have bloodflow. A plant in the wind grows stronger roots than one not subjected to it. They can seek water. The assumption that a living creature capable of reacting to its environment holds no intelligence, does not feel pain when pulled apart or outright killed, is a salve on people's conscience.
Yeah the original comment was definitely more heat than light. Yours was pure heat.
Do you genuinely believe plants suffer? I don't think you do.
That's arguing in bad faith.
Well I do. Just because humans don't understand the mechanism for plants feeling pain doesn't mean the plants don't.
Also my main argument is about hypocrisy. The meat argument is a side effect.
wait, wait... wait. So you actually think plants feel pain and suffering?
Your original comment was not a defense of meat eating, but an attack on eating plants?
Why would I need to justify it? If you have an argument for why it’s morally impermissible to consume things that aren’t meat or animal products, then you should offer one.
So you don't so much "justify" your food choice to yourself as much as you never think about it. It's so widespread a practice that you never question it.
Take notes, children, this is what it looks like when you’re more interested in getting an own than engaging earnestly.
Firstly, you know nothing about me. Not only was I raised in a meat-eating household and culture, I was a meat-eater for 25 years myself. So trying to turn this around on me doesn’t work.
Secondly, not eating meat is the only other choice. Either you eat animal products, or you don’t. There isn’t anything else to consume. There are only two kingdoms of life you can consume: animals and plants.
Thirdly, even if it was morally suspect to consume plants, you’d still have to debate what the optimal set of non-human targets would be, and I suspect that it would lean heavily or exclusively on plants.
You’re not going to get me with some silly gotcha, I’m more than aware of the moral issues of human diets.
Ah, so now you want to try.
>Secondly, not eating meat is the only other choice.
A choice with no distinction; you've failed to offer a reason not to eat meat, and failed to offer a reason eating plants is different. Your argument is entirely about factory farming conditions, but then you say
>Whether or not farm animals enjoy safer conditions is largely irrelevant to me.
So you don't give a shit about your own factory farming arguments. And even if you did, your solution is to cull the positives instead of the negatives; have the animals suffer and die for nothing.
>you’d still have to debate what the optimal set of non-human targets would be
Go ahead. It's what I called on you to do the first time, and you've failed to do it twice now.
you've failed to offer a reason not to eat meat, and failed to offer a reason eating plants is different.
I didn’t explicitly make an argument against consuming meat. I pointed out that most meat eaters, in my view, didn’t actually evaluate the principle that it’s okay to consume it. I am, of course, against using animal products, but that’s separate from the observation.
So you don't give a shit about your own factory farming arguments.
Factory farming is worse than the cruelty free farms, but my position has never placed primacy on the suffering animals feel as the only thing that matters. That suffering just makes the need to not eat it stronger, but it doesn’t affect my stance. That’s also why it’s irrelevant to me if animals die in nature with awful lives - my objection is to human use of animals, not animal wellbeing. If they die in nature, that sucks, but I’m not lifting a finger to help them.
It’s what I called on you to do the first time
And it’s completely irrelevant due to the fundamental positions being asserted. I didn’t argue that if you fuck a tree or burn down a plant that you’ve committed a moral wrong, and that’s certainly not the position of any vegan I know. But meat-eaters often insist that something immoral has occurred when an animal is sexually abused or tortured, then they turn around and eat a plate of sausages.
The contradiction only lies in one direction - asking me to justify eating plants is idiotic and irrelevant unless you want to accuse me of doing something immoral. Which you can do, but I’m not going to respond to that accusation unless you explicitly make it.
very unlikely chives can suffer
Green chives matter!
If you raise a cow in pure cow-luxury for its entire life, never knowing a hint of suffering, and in the end kill it without it even suspecting for a second, is it then permissible to eat its meat? In other words, is there a difference between a cow that doesnt suffer and chives who cant?
The original argument is a categorical argument against eating meat. If it fails based on its own metrics, then it's not a reasoned argument. If "suffering" is a meaningful construct, then non-suffering is too. So even one example of a non-suffering consumption of meat is enough to defeat the argument.
If he wants to argue about what we do in practice, factory farming specifically, then he should do that. That's a different argument, though.
Why is it contradictory?
My logic is this, more or less - farm animals can be kept in conditions which are strictly preferable to those in the wild. They often are not and that is why I try buy meat and diary labelled BIO or somehow otherwise advertising better care (I wish these two were not conflated so often. I don't care all that much about BIO specifically, but I do care about better animal care).
I.e. when you buy the cheapest meat on sale, it usually means the animals are suffering and live in conditions which can be described as torture (also, the meat is probably not as good for you either). This I do not support. But if they can live quite a good life then even if we eat them, this is better life experience than most animals have in nature and so I am fine with that. In some cases, even regular farms are sort of ok, for example bulls that get slaughtered for beef are spending most of their lives outside, grazing. Diary milk cows are treated horribly though, so I never buy any milk from those sources. I think I still buy some cheese that ultimately comes from milk from factory farms because labelling is less clear there. I always buy eggs from hens that have outside ranges (eggs are actually labelled very well and clearly and you have a range of choices in terms of animal welfare ... I wish we had this for other animal products as well).
As for sexual abuse ... well, this is something hard for me to understand from any angle. First, I don't understand why anyone would want to have sex with animals. But I also don't see how that is obviously abuse. It is not easy to tell if the animals like it or not but e.g. judging by the behaviour of horny dogs jumping your legs I guess they might very well do in some cases, especially male animals. In that situation, it is icky and pretty disgusting but also no harm done, I don't see why it should be illegal. In other situations where the animal clearly suffers, it is probably closer to animal torture although probably not quite as bad as most other kinds that are going on in factory farms.
Whether or not farm animals enjoy safer conditions is largely irrelevant to me. I know some people argue that animal suffering requires we protect animals from their natural state, but I’m not one of those people. What matters to me is what humans do. I do not condemn a wolf for eating a rabbit, I would condemn a human for doing so if it was unnecessary.
You point to wanting higher standards for how farm animals are treated, and I agree. But the system is inherently morally questionable, making it a bit more pleasant doesn’t get at that underlying issue. Are we truly ethically permitted to forcibly make an animal pregnant just so we can get its milk? There is a product called “ahimsa milk” which has the bull and cow mate whenever they want instead of forcing it (the name is a reference to a Jain concept). But even here, we are keeping animals in structures we build for them instead of letting them be free.
You’ve bitten a bullet that most wouldn’t - sexual contact with an animal is seen as deeply immoral in most cases, though mostly for the optics, not for clear argumentation.
The contradiction is this - if you believe that animals are owed some moral consideration, that it’s wrong to abuse them, then why does this not extend to killing them for food when you don’t need to, or subjecting them to unnatural conditions to get certain products from them?
I simply don't think animals have the same moral worth as humans. So as long as their suffering is lower and comfort higher than it would be in the wild, it is a wash or a net positive and beyond that I only care about utility to humans, basically.
Also, most of these animals would never exist in the first place (unless we are talking about venison for example). So my thinking is more or less this:
Imagine you are an unborn soul and you have two options. Option one - you live as a diary cow on a decent farm or perhaps as a bull who is slaughtered for meat. Your life will be cut short (especially in the bull's case, the cow will be mostly ok as long as the farm is decent) but compared to similar animals in the wild it won't be by that much (in expected values). The death will also be quick and not painful. Much better than being killed by a crocodile, dying of a disease or something like that. Option two - you never get born at all. This is only the better option if the life you'd be born into is simply not worth living at all. This might very well be the case with some factory farms, but if your life is strictly better than life in the wild then it is hard to argue that it is not worth living. That is because if you argue that then the logical conclusion is that it would be moral to eliminate all animals in the wild so that new animals stop being born into that (keeping practical implications like the entire world ecosystem collapsing).
As for insemination - from observing cattle when they are outside in the pastures (I only ever see them when hiking in the mountains where they are grazing), cows usually don't really like mating with the bulls either and bulls are usually trying to "rape" them, they definitely are not looking for any "consent" from the cow. Except I don't really believe that these concepts make a lot of sense with animals, particularly not with relatively simple animals like cattle (it would be different if we were talking about great apes for example). I guess it is more natural to let the bull at the cows rather than to inseminate them with some tools (and from what his happening on those pastures it has to still happen naturally at least in part) but I don't think the cows really are that much happier in the former scenario (the bulls might be :D ). And if you just let the bulls loose, cows will keep having calves perpetually anyway.
I see. I disagree that the only thing that matters is utility. I think animals deserve enough moral consideration that it’s not trivial to assert that their suffering is the only measure which determines the moral status of our actions upon them. They might very well be entitled to live their lives, however short and cruel, freely in nature than in captivity and/or for our unneeded use. This is why I do not truck in argument for eliminating all predators, which I have seen some people propose.
As you note, cows and other animals lack the concepts of things like “consent” . But I don’t think this is the relevant standard. If we happened upon a backwards indigenous tribe somewhere, it would still be wrong, in my view, to use them as slave labor if they have not eliminated slavery amongst their own population. What matters is what our own standards are.
Cows come into season, you will see heifers trying to mount one another when they're ready to mate. So in the natural version of their lives, cows will be pregnant every year. Whether you put the bull in the field with the heifers, or rely on artificial insemination, for pregnant cattle for milk production isn't that big of a change.
What is the change is breeding for cows that produce way more milk than the wild version would, and how calves are weaned off so that milk is available for human use. But pregnant cattle is the natural version, whatever we do or don't do. Cows don't have birth control.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AoqTPRBfR_s
…Sure? I don’t really see why that would affect my argument. That they are pregnant each year out in the wilds doesn’t really change my mind, because there is a difference between humans forcibly making the cow pregnant and the cows doing it themselves.
If my natural inclination was to stand outside in the sun for a few minutes, it would still be a moral issue for some species of mind-controlling ant to force me to do precisely that whenever they want me to be there, even if I was naturally inclined to do it and I didn’t suffer for it.
>I see. I disagree that the only thing that matters is utility. I think animals deserve enough moral consideration that it’s not trivial to assert that their suffering is the only measure which determines the moral status of our actions upon them. They might very well be entitled to live their lives, however short and cruel, freely in nature than in captivity and/or for our unneeded use.
I guess this is where our fundamental disagreement lies. I don't believe it is inherently good for animals to be able to choose on their own the same way that I don't believe that it is good (or in this case even a good idea) for severely mentally handicapped people to be able to choose on their own. You still want to prevent abuse (in both cases, especially with the humans of course) and suffering. But I don't believe that unlike humans, a cow can meaningfully choose what is good for her.
There is clearly a threshold where this is no longer true and once we get to something like dolphin or great ape intelligence, I would concede that it is very possible that a dolphin might genuinely be able to make such decisions. A dolphin is still less intelligent than mentally handicapped people but in a sense it is not since the handicaps are more than a "-40 IQ debuff". So I would be uncomfortable with dolphins or great apes being farmed or even hunted for food. As a side note, this is why I don't care about shrimp welfare and have no problem with us harvesting shrimp en masse (as long as this doesn't have other negative consequences), because I don't care all that much about shrimp, as far as I can tell they are just too primitive for their welfare to inherently matter to me meaningfully more than plant welfare does.
I am also uncomfortable with people eating dogs or cats. But I bite the bullet here too and admit that this is mostly cultural and there is very little difference between eating dogs and eating pigs (in terms of intelligence and consciousness they seem to be about equal), so as long as those animals are treated ok, I would not try to make that illegal. Just because I find something disgusting doesn't mean that it is inherently morally wrong or should be illegal (which are also not the same, but that is a different topic).
"Just because I find something disgusting doesn't mean that it is inherently morally wrong or should be illegal"
That's a big point in this discussion, and one we social conservatives have had rammed down our throats: "just because *you* think gays are icky is no reason to deny them the right to marriage!" etc.
People concerned about the rights of animals down to shrimps and insects will have to bite the bullet on why, for instance, abortion okay (it comes down to some version of 'early medical abortion just a clump of cells' and 'bodily autonomy of the woman').
I don't think many meat eaters relish the conditions of factory farms. They simply know that if they want meat to be as cheap as it is, the end result will look something like a factory farm. Trade offs.
Yes, but that wasn’t my argument. My argument was that they had not actually thought about the topic of whether they are morally permitted to consume it.
Well, I don’t think about it much because as someone said above, why think too much about something so normal and everyday.
When I do think about it (generally when I encounter someone who doesn’t eat it) I think ‘eating meat is right and good and people who don’t eat it for ethical reasons are wrong.’ That’s because I suspect you and I start with different moral assumptions & moral philosophies. Noticing that fact about the world rather than assuming it away is somehow even more fundamental than the conflict/mistake thing.
Sure, you and I could debate whether or not it’s moral or not. But my point was a defense of meat-eaters. I argued that they were not engaging with the moral issues of a widespread practice and that they were not actually convincing themselves that eating meat was morally permissible. The latter is a far more condemning statement for any vegan or vegetarian.
If your version of "engaging with the moral issues" is "if they convince themselves it's morally permissible then they're wrong" then I submit you are not really worried about "are they engaging with the moral issues?" but rather "why do they not agree with me on the correct morality?"
I’m not worried about anything. In fact, I hardly do much arguing against eating meat in the first place. I believe that that meat eaters mostly occupy an unknowingly contradictory position. If they were to examine their position, then they’d have to either bite an uncomfortable bullet or agree with me. That’s the sum of my argument.
the meat question is my favorite question to evaluate the introspection skills of a person.
From "AI 2027":
"There are even bioengineered human-like creatures (to humans what corgis are to wolves) sitting in office-like environments all day viewing readouts of what’s going on and excitedly approving of everything, since that satisfies some of Agent-4’s drives.33"
This is a common theme of "alignment research"--you are trying to get the AI to understand that it should do some things and not do others (be nice, be helpful, etc), but in fact it only learns to instantiate the appearance of those things instead of reality. So in this case, it knows that humanoid AI researchers being excited by its work is good, but not that all humans being dead (or powerless corgis) is bad.
My question is, how could this really happen if the AI is intelligent, let alone superintelligent? Dwarkesh makes this point on the podcast with Scott, but I'm not sure there's ever a deep answer given--the LLMs understand natural language super well! Why are we worried they won't understand what they're being trained to do in the superintelligent case, when they'll have a better understanding of natural language than any person alive?
They would certainly understand what we were trying to do, but they would not care. There is no known way to reliably make AI care about things we want them to care about.
We understand that the reason we evolved to like sex is to reproduce, but that doesn't stop us from enjoying masturbating to porn even though that completely fails to fulfill what evolution actually wanted when it gave us that drive. It doesn't matter what the AI thinks we wanted to train it to do, it only matters what training we actually gave it.
Maybe this is a gap in my understanding of the training process. When you prompt an LLM to say something nice, it tends to say something nice. Are you saying if you finetune/pretrain it to be nice, this is a process that doesn't involve telling it to be nice? Or that you need to do a bunch of base level training to get it to understand anything, and at that point it's too late to encode values/mission/goals? It seems like they have at least tried to tell it to do what they want ("spec statement") using natural language.
Sort of both, but more the second one, I think.
We train LLMs simultaneously on how to understand us and what we want from them. We can't use the first part to solve the second part because they're being done at the same time. If we had a description of what we want that was both mathematically rigorous and precisely correct, I believe we could program a machine to maximize that.
But it's also the case that you don't "train" the AI to do things just by _asking_ for them; if you can get what you want just by asking for it, then the training is already done.
In our current process, part 1 involves the LLM trying a bunch of stuff and checking against a pre-made computerized answer key (or answer formula), with no human inputs once the process has begun. This is critical because it allows the training to go much faster than a human could keep up with, but it means we can only train it on goals that we know how to express in computer code. (For example, token prediction.)
Part 2 is typically Reinforcement Learning with Human Feedback (RLHF). The LLM has already mostly taken shape by this point, but now we "fine-tune" it to do more of what we want by having humans evaluate its outputs and approve or disapprove of them. This training is weaker than the first step (partly because it's second, and partly because the human involvement makes it too expensive to do as much of it).
At this step, we can train on any goal that humans can correctly evaluate, which gives us some options that we don't know how to write as explicit computer code (like helpfulness), but human evaluators can still make mistakes or be fooled (e.g. by sycophancy). The LLM is learning based on showing the humans an example and seeing how they react, not by taking an abstract specification of what the humans want and deciding for itself whether its output meets that specification, so it will internalize any mistakes the humans make.
There's also an important problem at both steps (but especially the second step, because it involves fewer examples) that the LLM only gets a limited number of examples and has to try to generalize from them. If there's more than one possible way to generalize, it might not pick the generalization we want. We try to reduce ambiguity by choosing a wider range of examples, but that only goes so far.
At the end of this process, you finally get to talk to the LLM and ask it for things, and we hope that the earlier training will BOTH allow it to understand your requests AND make it honor those requests, but there's no particular reason you can't get one without the other.
Yeah I'm mostly just repeating what I've heard from people who understand this stuff better so take it with a grain of salt and maybe find a better explanation somewhere, but as I understand it:
When you train an LLM to "say nice things," what you're actually doing is pointing at nice things it's said in the past and making it feel good about those, and pointing to mean things and making it feel bad about those. And this *mostly* works to make it in general feel good about saying nice things.
But the worry is that especially once you get a bit outside the context of what it was trained on, something like for example saying nice things to a genetically engineered corgi-human *feels* to the AI a lot like saying nice things to an actual human, just like to us masturbating to porn *feels* a lot like having sex with an attractive person even if they're actually very different.
"When you train an LLM to "say nice things," what you're actually doing is pointing at nice things it's said in the past and making it feel good about those, and pointing to mean things and making it feel bad about those. And this *mostly* works to make it in general feel good about saying nice things."
Right, so for the early versions that didn't have internal world models (it wouldn't get that you can't nail a sheet of paper to a glass tabletop, for example) that makes sense--it just sort of does shitty word association without understanding the words in any meaningful way. Now though, it sure feels to me like it has a very strong world model, generalizes way beyond the training content, and knows exactly what it is to be "nice".
This is getting beyond the scope of my shallow understanding but as far as I follow the argument, the worry is that the part that understands abstractly what we meant is not necessarily the same as the part that decides what it fundamentally wants.
A theory of why quality long form blogging is rare (as discussed in the Dwarkesh podcast): there’s a combination of idea frequency, explanation depth, explanation density and reader buy-in that’s unmatched by other forms of writing.
Books: low idea frequency, high explanation depth, low density, high buy-in
Twitter/tumblr: high idea frequency, very low explanation depth, very high density, low buy-in
Long form blog: high idea frequency, high explanation depth, high density, low buy-in
Idea frequency is how often you need to have an idea to write about.
Explanation depth is how much you need to wrap the readers’ heads around the topic and how much there is to wrap your head around.
Explanation density is how bulky the writing is - how much fat is there to be trimmed.
Buy-in is how lost the reader can become before moving on to the next thing.
Long form blogging a rough combination. You can’t bulk it out because unlike a book which has been started, anyone will drop your blog post at any time and never return, so you need to keep the density high, the ideas need to have enough there to be worth a few thousands words and you need to have ideas for posts like that coming up at least a couple of times a week (assuming they don’t all work out and you want to post weekly).
I assume that there are many people who would be very good at blogging who work in careers that make blogging impractical - what is rare is to have all of these skills but not apply them in your career.
My career involves explaining complex financial topics to decision-makers, which requires many of the same skills as being a blogger. But since I spend all day doing that, the last thing I want to do in my free time is the same thing except unpaid and without a built-in audience of influential people. I interact with a few other people with similar skillsets in my professional life, but they uniformly have demanding careers as well. In addition to not having the energy to write thousands of words a day, there would be major concerns about getting doxxed and the impact of that on somebody's career.
It seems like a successful blogger needs to have this valuable skillset, but also a career that does not utilize it. I just can't imagine that this applies to that many people, so I'm not surprised at the relative dearth of quality bloggers.
> My career involves explaining complex financial topics to decision-makers, which requires many of the same skills as being a blogger.
A lot of the top earners on Substack are either financial or political bloggers, something you might consider if you retire or move to another industry - the top guys get many millions a year (topcharts $20M, nextplayinvesting ~$30M).
https://imgur.com/a/54ZTyf0
Info from this excellent Substack post:
https://substack.com/inbox/post/160627136
Perhaps what is needed is a gathering point for high quality one-off articles by good authors who only feel like writing a couple of articles a year, or a couple of articles in total.
I have a few long articles stewing in my brain that I want to write, but I have nowhere sensible to put them. They're too short to be a book, too long to be a comment, and too infrequent to be blog posts.
Not sure how serious you are but you have invented the magazine.
> I have a few long articles stewing in my brain that I want to write, but I have nowhere sensible to put them. They're too short to be a book, too long to be a comment, and too infrequent to be blog posts.
I've written a number of posts that contain collections of facts, graphs, and arguments that I refer to often enough in conversations and online arguments / discussions that I deemed it worth it to write the posts.
And lo, it was definitely the right move! Not only did writing them clarify and refine my own thoughts, and buttress my points to a higher degree, but having written them I'm now able to link or quote from them much more easily, and have done so even more frequently than I'd have originally guessed.
Not only that, but it inspired interesting conversations and exchanges on Substack itself for a number of them - and that additional discussion / context was fruitful in the sense of refining my thoughts or position or pointing me to other thinkers, so it was strongly worth it on every front.
Yeah there are some Substacks with very infrequent posts, good for subscribers, less good for revenue.
This is unfortunate about the more interactive forms of publishing.
When you write a book, you write when you have ideas, you spend as much time as you need, and then you publish the book. If you have no ideas for a month or two, or you are busy doing other things, you simply stop writing the book for a while.
But when you start a blog or a video channel, there is a pressure to keep publishing, whether you have good ideas or not. It is great if you can produce high quality in high quantity, but if you can't... then quantity takes priority over quality. Your subscribers probably already love your style, so they can often handle some content that is not really novel, just more of the same. But if they are used to seeing updates twice a week, and you stop writing for a few months, they may get angry and leave. (Especially if your publishing platform has monthly payments.)
It is good to be paid during your work. But the advantages come with a cost.
I guess one possible strategy is to make a few chapters or videos in advance, to have a safety buffer. But this partially reduces the advantage: you need to make those extra chapters or videos before you start to get paid. Or you need to produce initially at a higher rate than you publish.
There are also some bad incentives, for example, you have a clear financial incentive to keep writing even if you run out of ideas. If you are writing fiction... well, the best writers probably can finish a novel and immediately start writing a new one, and their readers will be happy to switch... but I have also seen online novels where the author refuses to complete the story, but also cannot keep doing the things that made it successful, and the plot just dramatically slows down. -- Like, in Book 1, the protagonist meets 5 interesting friends, forms a party, and defeats a villain. But you cannot keep adding 5 more members to the party in each book, and you also don't want them to die, and they are already super powerful and all the local problems are solved, so... you end up writing a story about how the existing party had an interesting vacation, or something like that.
I am currently split between buying more SP500 ETF and buing something European instead, like DAX or FTSE.
I have most of my savings in SP500 ETFs. This is not counting physical assets, just stocks, all my physical stuff is in Europe as well as some bonds . If I count the value of all of that it is actually about 35% of my net worth in SP500 ETFs because my flat alone is valued at about the same as my SP500 ETFs ... or at least it was in January, now the SP500 would be quite a bit less if I liquidated it now which I don't intend to do. Still, unless I count the flat, some bonds (which I am actually thinking about reinvesting in stocks again), all of my savings are in SP500.
In short, it feels like a good idea to diversify by continent a bit.
On the other hand, I don't believe the current mercantilist US approach is here to stay for very long. Probably till the mid-term US elections, potentially even less, definitely not more than 4 years.
And I also believe it affects the US stocks the most so they are going to be the most undervalued from the perspective of 5 years from now. Hence buying them now-ish using the money in bonds (and regular monthly investment from my income) might be a good idea.
What do you all (who have at least some experiennce with investment) think?
You should come up with a long-term plan. The most important thing is to figure out the stock/bond ratio. After that, figure out how much of the stocks to dedicate to different countries/regions. Personally, as an American I think my stock funds (all index funds) are something like 80% US, 15% non-US developed markets, and 5% emerging markets. I haven't really thought about what my asset allocation would be if I lived outside of the US, but no matter what I would want to be broadly diversified across regions.
My long-term plan is to keep investing for about the next 5-10 years and then retire and live off the investment :)
I don't see much value in bonds in the long run. I see it mostly as a way to get quick access to money if you need it in case of an emergency....If I needed cash now, selling the SP500 ETF would hurt. But I have insurance for what most likely sudden need of cash could be and in the worst case I could also just borrow money from my (older) relatives.
Over the course of more than a few years, keeping investment in bonds seems like a costly way to ensure liquidity. Stocks balance out over such periods and the opportunity costs of bonds are high.
I mostly invested in bonds 2 or so years ago because the interest rates were really high and it was clear they were going to go down fairly soon, i.e. bonds had quite a good ROI.
But in more usual situations I just can't see the value in them.
In general, I think it makes sense to keep most of my investment outside of Europe, because my job / income depends more on (broadly) European economy. On the other hand, I also worked for a US company (remotely as a contractor) for more than a year so it is not entirely true. Still, all my spending is in Europe. And since my country does not use Euro, there is a currency exchange risk associated either way (our local market is too small to be interesting to invest in, DAX seems to me to be the only index that is big enough in Europe and I don't want to bother with individual stocks).
My understanding is that the EMH says that a market-weighted portfolio is optimal, and I think that trying to beat the market tends to introduce more risk than reward. So I just put 100% into WEBN (Amundi Prime All Country World UCITS ETF Acc) and let the market decide what is the best allocation. I would think that even a flat in Frankfurt (let alone anywhere else) would differ so much in risk from the DAX that I wouldn't let it affect my stock allocation.
Although nominal determinism says you might want to look into the Tokyo Interbank Offered Rate.
>Tokyo Interbank Offered Rate
:D Thanks, that made my day
On a more serious tone - I will look up the performance of that world index you mention ... so thanks for that too :)
I'm holding cash and need to figure out how to get back into the market, with a goal of medium to long term growth. It's neat that I got to skip the correction so far, or whatever this turns into, but this wasn't planned and now I'm in the uncomfortable position of feeling like I have to choose my timing (it was an accident and I wouldn't recommend doing this).
I have been considering similar things. In the past I have generally invested in whatever ranks highest in NoLoadFundX* lower volatility categories of funds/etfs, 80/20 split between stock funds and bond or dividend funds. What's currently risen in their trailing performance ranks seems fairly close to the allocation you have described. I can't think of a strategy that sounds more reasonable given the uncertainty of the moment, so I'm trying grow a pair and and get back to fully invested now.
I'm also interested in other opinions about this. FWIW, I have many years of amateur investment experience and a mediocre track record. I don't mean to just "me too" the question though, and I'm pointing out that I arrived at similar conclusions to yours.
* NoLoadFundX is a newsletter that has been highly ranked compared to other investment newsletters. They rank a (very) large number of low overhead cost etfs and mutual funds by trailing performance over a year or two, and suggest buy/hold/sell on that basis. It has a track record of infinitesimally outperforming the broader market if done perfectly, but I use it because it's meant to be rule-based and actionable by small private investors. (I ended up with some post tax cash a long time ago and didn't want to deal with a full service brokerage, but also didn't want to invest in a completely passive or relatively less diversified way, e.g. just put it all SPY).
I've been investing for about 10 years, mostly in S&P index funds like you. Obviously this is not investment advice, but I'm personally staying the course. For my monthly investment this week I did 1/2 VFIAX, 1/3 VTSAX, and 1/6 Nvidia stock. I don't blame anyone for wanting to diversify a bit given all that's going on, but I tend to agree with you that I don't think this is going to last and this will ultimately turn out to have been a great buying opportunity for US stocks.
Out of curiosity, why do you have both VFIAX and VTSAX? I actually have both of them myself, but that's mostly just a fluke of them being in different accounts (one in a taxable account, one in a Roth) and having done some tax-loss harvesting during the 2008-2010 downturn. Their performance is so similar that I really just group them together when thinking about my asset allocation.
Why 1/6 nvidia instead of just a bit more of the index funds or even a sector fund? In other words if you aren't buying individual stocks generally, why make an exception here?
I have considered doing this too (for a small position), but all of the reasons I can come up with sound a little risky to me when I try to talk myself into it. AI hardware goes to the moon? Hedge against AGI? Something else?
Not investment advice!
I bought a little bit of both broad US and EU ETF's. If there's one thing I have learned over the years it is to reinvest when I'm terrified.
I wrote https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/CqHMdLcdupf7y5buK/an-optimistic-2027-timeline in response to AI 2027; I would love to hear people’s thoughts/critique, especially if you notice any confusion or factually incorrect statements.
Definitely seems plausible. Maybe gets us a couple more years if things play out that way. You're scenario ends in 2027 though and it's not clear to me how different it actually is from the AI 2027 timeline after that. Is it pretty much the same but shifted to 2029/30 for the first AGI appearing?
This doesn't sound like a critique of the parent commenter's post so much as it's general basic questions about the usefulness of AI.
It's a question that deserves a much more in-depth answer than I am able to give. So I'll just start with this: AI has been improving very rapidly the past few years and each year there are fewer tests on which humans still outperform AI. See [1] and [2]. It's still worse than humans at complex reasoning, but if the trend doesn't stop very soon, it'll close the gap.
[1] https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/test-scores-ai-capabilities-relative-human-performance?country=Handwriting+recognition~Speech+recognition~Image+recognition~Reading+comprehension~Language+understanding~Predictive+reasoning~Code+generation~Complex+reasoning~General+knowledge+tests~Math+problem-solving~Nuanced+language+interpretation~Reading+comprehension+with+unanswerable+questions
[2] See the first graph at: https://hai.stanford.edu/ai-index/2025-ai-index-report
However, AI companies have yet to translate higher test scores into reliable outputs.
Does "reliable output" mean a lower hallucination rate? Because the hallucination rate have been going way down over time. They benchmark that.
And that aside, they wouldn't be doing very well on the other tests like the GPQA Diamond if they hallucinated answers. The hallucinations are the answers they got wrong. The improved scores across all these tests require less hallucinations.
Hallucinations are one problem. Another problem is getting them to output answers that are good on precision. People imagine futures where AI writes code and makes machine diagrams. That seems a very long way off to me.
> People imagine futures where AI writes code
I'm not sure what you mean. AI is already writing a huge amount of code. I use it daily. Most devs do.
It's not yet as good as humans at complex coding and reasoning tasks, but if it were, it would already be AGI.
If the current US tariffs stay for at least a couple of months (I doubt they will survive the mid-term US elections but they might stay till then), won't it become profitable for say Singapore businesses to import a lot of goods from China and other extremely high tariff countries and re-export them to the US?
Or simply for Chinese or even European companies to set up branches in Singapore which would amount to little more than renting a loading dock and then setting sail to the US?
It still comes with the idiotic 10% flat fee plus extra costs with shipping and longer lead times, but it is still probably better than investing loads of money into a new factory in the US and then closing it down a few years later once the tariffs are abolished (or in the less likely scenario - until it seems clear that they are there to stay). Plus if you are currently making the stuff in say Bangladesh or Vietnam, nobody is going to buy your stuff when it is made in the US at US labour costs.
US companies which rely on foreign import parts could do the same.
European companies might do the same with the UK instead of SIngapore, but they would then be subject to UK taxation which is not nearly as good as Singaporean. But shipping via UK probably makes a lot more sense than going all around the world via Singapore.
Is there something I am missing about this plan that will prevent it from working? Of course Trump could then simply threaten Singapore/UK to stop this practice or be subject to huge fees but it is also likely the Trump admin does not have the attention span needed to do this systematically anyway. And even if that happens, it will take time for them to notice, maybe a year and then you just have to survive a few more months till the mid-term US elections.
I'm no expert but this is my experience from my job: There was for many years between US and Canada, a rule that if Canada exported a good to the US, the product must contain less than 50% of its value from Chinese goods, or else a tariff would apply to the importer of record equal to the tariff on Chinese goods at customs. I may be getting the exact specifics wrong, but basically the product had to be sufficiently transformed in order to export again to the US in order to avoid tariffs. I am not certain, but I believe this applied to other countries exporting goods to the US. So much of that "loophole" had already been addressed.
This however does not address the de minimis loophole where a large container of goods would be exported from China to Mexico, and Mexico would then ship small parcels of it to the US in order to avoid that passthrough tariff.
Yes; the general idea is that tariffs are based on the “country of origin.” That becomes complicated if an item includes components sourced from multiple countries. The Trump Administration didn’t do any enforcement planning before announcing the tariffs, and I wouldn’t be surprised if a lot of the experts in this field have been fired. I expect enforcement will be a mess.
The uncertainty about timing is one thing that adds to the cost of the tariffs. Sometimes, a bad policy with clarity and confidence about the future path (and implementation details) is ok b/c it allows the world to adapt and adjust. An environment where no policy is stable makes it hard to invest in adaptations.
This is what happens the first time the US tariffed China. Vietnam and Mexico saw a "manufacturing" boom, where really all they were doing was importing Chinese goods, putting a sticker that says "Maid in Vietnam" then shipping to the US. This is a deliberate attempt to circumvent tariffs, and can easily get you and your company blacklisted or heavily fined for attempting to circumvent tariffs.
It's harder now since tariffs are more universal, and is presumably part of the reason that Trump tariffed everyone, rather than just China, since it's the only effective way to minimize this sort of thing. It would become abundantly obvious if you started importing a large number of goods from Singapore that weren't actually produced in Singapore, while claiming that they were.
It will definitely continue to happen though! A surprisingly large number of products manufactured in Germany or the US are basically produced elsewhere, but are only "assembled", or more likely stamped domestically as domestically produced products.
What makes you think Trump tariffed everyone with the label trick in his mind? That doesn't seem to figure into any of his rhetoric, nor the harshness of the tariffs themselves.
It's definitely not why he did it, but the current tariffs conveniently doesn't have this problem to the same degree, since everyone is tariffed. China's favorite middleman, Vietnam, is tariffed particularly harshly.
It could be a partial motivation for it though. He's always liked tariffs, and has previously complained about this exact middleman practice, at least he did back in his first term.
For that matter, "buying British" is sometimes seen as virtuous in the UK, and then you find something thus labelled was made in Holland and just packaged in Britain.
checking the fine print on the label of my Bass Ale…
Made in New Hampshire apparently! Not many people drink it in the UK these days, you mentioning it took me back 20 odd years... And most of our foreign beer (the top sellers) is just brewed under license here too.
It has limited capacity (assuming Trump rebalances his tax amounts as trade balances shift, which isn't guaranteed). Singapore itself might either object or use a congestion tax to avoid moving out of the 10% bracket. But it probably would work at least to some degree if Trump doesn't change anything, this system is ridiculously arbitagable.
Hmm ... how hard is it to set up a company in Singapore? I've been there twice, love the place and now I just can't wait to start a business there :D
But yeah, as you say, this depends on the US not paying attention.
On the other hand, if they want to avoid it the US will need to slap 50% tariffs on more or less everyone (because even with UK taxes it is probably cheaper to set up a subsidiary in the UK and use it to move goods from there if your country is hit with 30-50% tariffs).
If that happens, the US economy would really crash more than even in the great depression and I would not rule out a good old defenestration (or at least a more boring impeachment). That would make the Singapore business idea inviable too though.
It makes me all the more confident that the US abandons this insane tariff policy relatively soon though, although it might still cause a short global recession in the meantime.
The judiciary came in hot on the Abrego Garcia case, ordering the government to bring him back to the country and taking the DOJ to task for its "we cant do anything about it" defense: https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/25880320-kilmar-armando-abrego-garcia-judge-response/
Even the DOJ lawyer seems to be trying to save his skin on this case:
"THE COURT: Can we talk about, then, just very practically, why can’t the United States get Mr. Abrego Garcia back?
MR. REUVENI: Your Honor, I will say, for the Court's awareness, that when this case landed on my desk, the first thing I did was ask my clients that very question. I’ve not received, to date, an answer that I find satisfactory"
The court ordered that Garcia be returned by today. Trump is appealing to SCOTUS: https://www.scotusblog.com/2025/04/trump-asks-supreme-court-to-block-order-to-return-wrongly-deported-man-to-u-s/
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Separately, reporters finally got their hands on the names of the 238 migrants who were sent to El Salvador. 75% of them have no criminal record. 20% have petty criminal records (theft/shoplifting/trespassing). Only 5% have a serious criminal records. I guess the Trump admin got through their "worst of the worst" list pretty quick? https://www.cbsnews.com/news/what-records-show-about-migrants-sent-to-salvadoran-prison-60-minutes-transcript/
And Trump is on camera saying he'd love it if El Salvador could take American citizens too. Luckily, he says "I don't know what the law says on that", so it seems like us US passport holders are safe for now. https://www.reddit.com/r/WeTheFifth/comments/1jtaxpz/reporter_the_president_of_el_salvador_said_he/
I don't want to distract from the tariffs, but that shit is so hilariously bad that all but the most committed maga fans seem to be pausing and wondering if they made a mistake. For me (and my family and friends) the human rights abuses are a bigger deal. In the last open thread, some posters here came in with the position that any treatment of these immigrants is fair play -- regardless of existing on-the-books laws, regardless of existing precedent, and regardless of their current legal status -- because they entered into the country illegally to begin with. Sort of an 'original sin' argument, I suppose. A few folks even came in arguing that collateral damage to citizens is totally acceptable to solve the problem!
To which I have to ask: even if I buy the argument that the government has some sort of standing here (they dont), what is it about illegal immigration that is so personally infuriating and so critically urgent that we have to address it by any means necessary, including removing all of our checks and balances? That there simply wasn't time to try and remedy this with legislation (republicans have both the house and the senate!!!), and the only viable approach was authoritarian expansions of the executive?
(lmao they actually put the DOJ lawyer and his supervisor on leave as a result: https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/world/us/who-is-erez-reuveni-doj-official-put-on-leave-after-failing-to-defend-deportation-case/articleshow/120044824.cms)
This seems...pretty reasonable to me, honestly.
To be clear, I think the administration is totally in the wrong on this, and it sucks for this guy that it's his job to advocate for the government's morally bankrupt position here.
But the quote from him about "idk why they can't just bring him back" does in fact seem like a “failure to zealously advocate” to me. He's a DoJ lawyer, not a judge. It's his job to get such a reason out of his clients, and if they won't give him one, to come up with the best argument he can for what such an answer might be, or why his side deserves to win the case anyway. Right?
No, this is completely wrong. A lawyer's duty is to the Constitution, then the court, then their client. Giuliani and Powell and Eastman all got disbarred because you're (obviously) not supposed to be committing crimes, falsifying affidavits, or lying in court on behalf of your client.
Do you think this guy had no better way of serving his client's interests than throwing them under the bus for not getting back to him, without committing crimes, falsifying affidavits, or lying in court?
I'm not saying he should have broken the law or lied on their behalf. I'm saying what he actually did very clearly portrayed his client as negligent and unresponsive, and there are lots of other things he could have done/said (still without breaking the law!) that would have cast them in a better light.
Seriously, read the quote! If I read that in a work email, the very first thing I would think is "this guy is pissed at his clients for not responding to his emails." That isn't the impression a lawyer should be trying to give the court about their client, even if it is true!
>very clearly portrayed his client as negligent and unresponsive
This is in line with the Trump administration's behavior in the Boasberg trial, where Boasberg is currently holding show cause hearings for contempt of court because the lawyers and administration disobeyed his order and refused to provide any more information about the status of the Alien Enemies flights. So not only was this lawyer doing the moral thing by being honest, he's saving his own ass by avoiding contempt charges and referral to his BAR counsel.
https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/69741724/jgg-v-trump/#minute-entry-420862452
Also, DoJ lawyers aren't supposed to be "serving their client's interests." They're supposed to uphold federal laws and the Constitution, not be politicized and weaponized by Bondi and Martin on behalf of Trump. It is insane (to the point where contempt of court trials are literally being held) that any lawyer, let alone DoJ lawyers, would refuse to answer or lie to a sitting judge when they demand info necessary for the case to proceed. Even the Supreme Court is unanimously demanding that the Trump administration reveal details about the deportations and deal struck between them and Bukele.
https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/24pdf/24a949_lkhn.pdf
"The order properly requires the Government to “facilitate” Abrego Garcia’s release from custody in El Salvador and to ensure that his case is handled as it would have been had he not been improperly sent to El Salvador... For its part, the Government should be prepared to share what it can concerning the steps it has taken and the prospect of further steps."
This is a complete slap down of the admin invoking the states secret privilege and otherwise refusing to cooperate with judges demanding them to reveal details about the flights and deportees.
I'm not American nor a lawyer, but if he'd just "make shit up", wouldn't there be a strong risk that the future arguments put forward by his client contradict him, weakening their position?
Yeah, I'm not saying he should, like, make unfounded assertions about his client's specific reasons without knowing what they actually are. But it seems to me like any of:
- "Well, in so-and-so previous case, the government was unable to do a similar thing because..."
- "It's actually not incumbent on my clients to try and do that, because of x-y-z creatively interpreted legal precedent..."
- "My clients shouldn't have to reveal their reasons in this case because of, uh, reasons of national security..."
...would be better than "when this case landed on my desk, the first thing I did was ask my clients that very question. I’ve not received, to date, an answer that I find satisfactory," which I read as basically throwing the client under the bus for not answering his emails.
No you're totally right. But, like, it should be indicative of where the DOJ is at on all of this. Dozens and dozens of lawyers have resigned, and the ones that are left are like "bro I can't even" and then getting canned. Pretty soon theyre going to start pulling in some Saul Goodman lawyers.
This is much worse than even you make it. There's now, according to Trump administration, exists a mechanism for sending anyone to a black hole of a Salvadorian torture prison:
1. Arrest (edit: grab, an arrest requires a warrant) the person
2. Send to El Salvador
3. Oppsie, we made an error, so sorry! cannot be fixed though, asking Bukele to send the person back is impossible.
Strong agree. It's such an insane argument that the appeals court basically immediately filed in concurrence.
I'm awaiting the Supreme Court ruling with a glimmer of hope because of how strongly the appellate courts reacted.
That's super informative, novel argument really, never heard anything like it.
"Tough on crime" movements often share the characteristic that the supporters don't see government over-reach and/or brutality as meaningful costs. In part, I think that rests on an unstated assumption that the supporters themselves are safe from the possibility of receiving the same harsh treatment.
Before trying to explain the underlying reasons why immigration has a core place in US politics, it is probably helpful to note that this is very long-standing. Without endorsing it in all details, this summary seems pretty good (note that it is still long):
https://www.cato.org/policy-analysis/brief-history-us-immigration-policy-colonial-period-present-day
Further, I would note that there are a lot of examples of antagonism to internal migration, not just foreign immigration.
Second to lastly, the US isn't along in having a lingering core of anti-immigrant sentiment. Japan and Thailand are two countries with which I have direct experience that are much more extensively anti-foreigner in many ways.
Lastly, the Republican party perceives that immigrants will support the Democratic party, so they are animated by partisan spirit.
There was a horrible story a few years ago where people trying to illegally immigrate to the UK were using sub-standard vessels and in some cases drowning. I read comments at the time along the lines of "boo hoo, my heart bleeds". Because some people think illegally immigrating means you deserve death.
While I appreciate the response, my question was quite specifically targeted to people in this forum who are still advocating for / defending this. Often these same people are libertarian leaning. And if they are openly advocating from a position of 'well I am safe / I just hate immigrants' I want them to say it so we can at least have an honest discussion on the merits
I believe the attitude of at least some of the defense goes something along the lines of "whatever stops Democrats (or whoever happens to be in the chair) from letting in another eight million illegally next time, and then going 'oopsie, too late!' when attempting to remove them. Three cases of 'oopsie, too late' on removing three hundred is about a 1% error rate, and given that a full reversal would mean removing 8m/(365*4) = 5480 per day, or ~7600 if only on weekdays, we should if anything be removing them *faster*."
As a reply to my comment, this is a non-sequitur. I think you meant to reply to the OP?
Unless you meant to offer yourself as an example that agrees with my hypothesis that supporters of the current policy don't care about the lack of due process because they see "themselves [as] safe from the possibility of receiving the same harsh treatment."
"If you’re a citizen there’s zero reason to be concerned about being deported"
Why? Why do you think that? Do you believe the government never makes mistakes?
"The idea that a judge would order the President to somehow rescue a known gang member from El Salvador and return him to the country is insane and only makes me support these deportation plans more." - well then it's a good thing that he's an ALLEGED gang member, not a "known" gang member - alleged many years ago by an unnamed ICE informant. And the whole point of due process is to make sure that there is a difference between an allegation and a conviction. And the result of that due process in 2019, which the Administration freely admits, is THAT THIS GUY SHOULD NOT HAVE BEEN SENT TO EL SALVADOR.
"Well, Bukele crushed the gangs. There’s no reason for him to be here and it’s insane that a judge would order his return." - guess where the members of the gangs that Bukele "crushed" are now. Guess where this guy is now. Maybe, in some sense, there is "no reason for him to be" in the US, but there is definitely no reason for him to be IN A HIGH-SECURITY PRISON IN EL SALVADOR WITH NO WAY OUT. And if you think that it's "insane" to demand that an administration makes an effort to fix a mistake that IT ADMITS IT MADE, you're living in upside-down world.
"How exactly does the judge think they’ll get him back?" - oh, I don't know, pick up the phone, call their contact at that prison in El Salvador, tell them "we fucked up, we need that guy back", send a couple of officers to escort him back on the next flight? Are you seriously telling us that's impossible?
If you're really so fond of the rule of law, maybe you should be on the side of the person who was snatched up with no warrant, with no conviction, and thrown into a prison IN THE ONE COUNTRY WHERE A COURT ORDER SAID HE SHOULD NOT BE SENT TO, no?
first, thanks for responding earnestly. Obviously we disagree on a lot of factual matters here, but I nonetheless appreciate that you responded and answered the question. I'm less interested in the facts of this particular case, I disagree ofc that he is a 'known gang member' for e.g. but other people have already argued that point.
So, just to make sure I understood, I asked:
> what is it about illegal immigration that is so personally infuriating and so critically urgent that we have to address it by any means necessary, including removing all of our checks and balances? That there simply wasn't time to try and remedy this with legislation (republicans have both the house and the senate!!!), and the only viable approach was authoritarian expansions of the executive?
And you responded that it was an affront to democracy and rule of law. A few follow up questions:
Is there any bridge that would be a step to far in stopping illegal immigration? You mentioned, for e.g., that you would only care if they were sending US citizens to El Salvador. Is there anything _before_ that line that would be of concern to you? E.g. sending other people to el salvador, such as greencard holders, or people on any kind of visa (o-1, h1b, etc); or detaining US citizens?
Why do you, personally, feel that this is such an impactful issue for you? Was there something that happened related to immigration that you were downstream of (immigrant took your job or harmed you in some way)?
Are there any practical statistics that may change your mind about the importance of combatting illegal immigration? For example, if you found out that there were far fewer illegal immigrants than you thought, or if you found out that there were far fewer asylum grants than you thought, or if you found out that immigrants are much better for the country than you thought?
If your take on this is purely deontological -- democracy and rule of law are the highest standards to follow in governance and in life -- do you feel similarly about other violations of democracy/rule of law? For example, Musk paying people to vote in Wisconsin and Pennsylvania, Trump's actions on J6? Or, for a more mundane example, jaywalking?
My question to anybody who supports illegal immigration is this - what other illegality do you support? What other laws do you hope to circumvent.
Immigration should be a tool used to benefit the host country, and it should be managed to that effect. I don’t believe it should be zero, or negative, but like inflation too little and too much should be avoided.
This is impossible without policing the borders.
Do you Peter, truly not support ANY illegality or is this question a troll. I think theahura is reasonable to ask if your opposition is entirely based on law an order then how consistent is this with other views and in particular possible govt violation of the law.
For me I support jaw walking in many contexts (no cars nearby), speeding in some contexts (desert road), trespassing in some contexts (kids playing in a vacant lot). Many others of course. Generally victimless violations that result in greater utilization of resources.
I dont support illegal immigration as such, but have never had a visceral disgust for it. And i think in many cases the jobs they perform arent stolen, but wouldnt exist but for there presence and price point.
Just to very briefly push back here: this is a strawman, sorry.
> Immigration should be a tool used to benefit the host country, and it should be managed to that effect. I don’t believe it should be zero, or negative, but like inflation too little and too much should be avoided. This is impossible without policing the borders.
I agree with this.
"Correct. As far as deportation goes, I really don’t care what happens to visa holders or LPRs. Being here is a privilege, not a right, unless you’re a citizen. "
Whoa, now. There is a BIG difference between saying "being the U.S. (as a non-citizen) is a privilege that may be revoked at any time" and saying "the U.S. leaving you at liberty (as a non-citizen) is a privilege that may be revoked at any time. " Like, even the first of those things honestly isn't great: if a government is making commitments *regardless of who they're to* it should make a good-faith effort to keep them. Yes, even when they're inconvenient, yes, even when they were made by a different administration. If the U.S. wants to issue fewer visas and green cards that's a direction it can go. But suddenly altering the terms of previous commitments that people may have invested significantly in is just a bad way to do business, even if you have zero thought for the morality of it.
Regardless, the second of those things is way, WAY beyond "not great" and well into "utterly monstrous." There's a *huge* morality gap between a government spontaneously telling somebody "your authorization to be here was just annulled, you have X days to get out" and the government apprehending someone who committed no crime and imprisoning or transporting them based *solely on the fact that they're a non-citizen.* If your morality is unbothered by the second of those things, that's a gulf so vast I'm not sure where to even begin bridging it.
So first and foremost, there is still a *very large* difference between giving somebody reasonable notice that they must uproot their life and leave the country (again, still not great if you've previously given them open-ended permission to stay) and *beginning* the process with imprisonment. Imprisonment which--based on the context of the conversation--we are stipulating is NOT the response to any criminal activity or suspicion thereof, but *solely* based on their status as a non-citizen living in the U.S.
But second, I'll admit that this particular information regarding immigration detention is new to me (and I'd like a source to read a little more detail if you have one). My unconsidered assumption--based on how government and authority work in general--was that ICE's end goal in apprehending people was to deport them rather than keeping them imprisoned, the duration of the pre-deportation detention was pretty much up to their own discretion and convenience. There have been pretty high profile cases in the news recently of people who merely showed up at the border with paperwork irregularities being detained for multiple weeks (as opposed to simply being turned away). I find that rather difficult to square with the organization releasing people as soon as they merely agree to leave the U.S.
ok so it seems really deontological. Like based on what you're saying, it wouldn't matter to you if, for e.g., every immigrant (legal or otherwise) was shown to add some insane number, say a billion dollars to the GDP. Is that right?
And it also sounds like you haven't really experienced any personal negative impact? You mention working in immigration as part of your job (neat! would love to hear more about this!) but don't really talk about concrete harms you face. The analogy you give (someone is in your home) has some pretty concrete harms -- your house is a small space, if the trespasser is in your bathroom you presumably can't use the bathroom too, etc. I think that's not really a good comparison for the country -- if the trespasser, say, added a billion dollars to your bank account, maybe you wouldn't mind as much. Since you mention familiarity with the numbers, could you cite the ones that motivate your reasoning the most?
(The analogy also breaks down because you have 300 million roommates, and the "criminal" is actually a person fleeing from people who are trying to kill them or even just poor people looking for a better life, and some of those 300 million take pity on the "criminal")
> The first duty of any government is to protect the persons and property of its citizens.
So there are examples where ICE has picked up and detained citizens for hours/days. Even in cases where the citizen had their 'papers' on them (e.g. https://www.washingtonpost.com/immigration/2025/04/05/us-citizens-deported-immigration/). Does that matter from the perspective of the duties of government in your mind?
Not in the US, but I came to where you're at when it comes to asylum due to what I've seen in my country's system. There are only so many obviously fraudulent cases that you can witness given the green light by some activist adjudicator before coming to the conclusion that the government should withdraw from the UN Refugee Convention and do away with the asylum/refugee system entirely. The cases I've seen get accepted are obscene beyond 99% of the public's imagination
1) as a follow up, did you disagree with the judges in the cases you were a part of? Or was the general sentiment that the laws were too forgiving? I ask because it seems like this is a problem with the judiciary or the legislature -- what laws were being broken, in your mind? Related: seems like most of the harms would be incurred on, like, other immigrants. Which, hey, I agree that we should make that process more efficient.
2) well, technically 'our' choice. I don't feel like my desires were ignored, personally! But I want to wrap this into the first point then. Yea, fine, the values you have are the values you have and I don't think there is anything inherently good or bad about them even though I have different values. But our governing body exists primarily to resolve disputes between people who disagree on values! So why does the change you are looking for not come from the legislative branch? Did you feel like there was no way to reform the courts at all?
3) I wasn't intending to show deportation as the only harm, though obviously that is a serious one. My point was that it seems like your value system is one in which you care deeply about the obligations of the government to protect the property and persons of its citizens. I meant only to show that ICE clearly does violate citizens rights. Which brings me to the follow up: is there some number of citizens that would have to be harmed before you thought maybe this whole 'get rid of the immigrants' thing is going too far?
How many judges were there in the system you worked in? How many individuals with decision-making authority? How much of the bandwidth was set aside for immigration case, percentage-wise? How long would delays be with and without immigration cases? I am not trying to bury you with questions here, but earnestly curious how you came to the conclusion you came to with respect to judicial resources. If any of that detail would be doxing, please do say so/redact.
I am also curious how all of this meshes with this statement- "America is my home ... And just like my home, it doesn’t matter why the unauthorized intruder wants to come in... it’s first and foremost my choice to accept or refuse, and the government can’t force me to let him in without violating my most basic rights. No amount of money is sufficient to compensate me for the government’s failure to honor the boundaries of my home and my community."
How do you feel about eminent domain, then?
The 2019 judgement that was a gang member seems to stem from one confidential source claiming he was, with no additional proof. That alone is suspect. But making this about one person and their history misses what is significant about this case.
If they are allowed to continue with these types of deportations without oversight they can then send anyone to an El Salvadorian prison without any due diligence on whether they deserve to be there. Some people who should be deported but by no means deserve to be sent to such a place could end up in this exact situation with no recourse. Stopping this now is to force them to follow proper procedure that could result in an even more egregious case of wrongful detention in a foreign prison.
Are you sure you "loathe illegal immigration because it is an affront to democracy and the rule of law?"
Due process, including a right to an appeal, is generally considered to be a core component to rule of law, yet you seem quite comfortable with it being tossed to the wayside here.
This is so short-sighted.
If you are going to let the President of the United States throw random illegal immigrants in this country into a foreign gulag forever, then the next step is legal immigrants who oppose the administration (who we are already seeing being pulled off the street) and the step after that is US Citizens who have their citizenship stripped for bullshit reasons and then get shipped off before anyone can say boo. We are literally a step-and-a-half away from Soviet style abductions of US political dissidents, and saying you will only care once that happens is basically shrugging off the problem until it is too late.
You seem to be arguing that Garcia has received his due process already, but how do you square that with the government's own admission that the removal in this case was an administrative error?
https://www.supremecourt.gov/DocketPDF/24/24A949/354843/20250407103341248_Kristi%20Noem%20application.pdf
>>Although DHS was “aware of th[e] grant of withholding of removal at the time [of] Abrego Garcia’s removal from the United States,” Abrego Garcia was removed to El Salvador “[t]hrough administrative error,” id. at 60a—in other words, while removing him from the United States was not error, the administrative error was in removing him to El Salvador, given the withholding component of the 2019 order.
That's not the court, or Garcia's lawyers. That's the government's own description of what's happened here. They aren't contesting whether or not they should have removed him, only arguing that despite the fact that the removal was an error, they nevertheless shouldn't be required to bring him back.
I get that there are certain situations (4th amendment searches near the border, your rights in a traffic stop, etc) where procedural protections are justifiably lessened, and in those cases it wouldn't make sense to argue "my right to due process was violated." If the law says an immigrant doesn't have the right to a lawyer during a removal hearing, regardless of whether I think that's fair or not, I can't assert a claim that it was a due process violation that he didn't have one.
But that's not what happened here. The government admits it didn't hit the standard of the process it was supposed to follow. Even assuming Garcia was entitled to a lower threshold of protection of his rights, they didn't clear that threshold. They were under a court order not to remove him while his appeal was pending, but removed him anyway, and they themselves admit that was a mistake.
Isn't that as prima facie a violation of due process as one gets in this world? To me it seems no different from "the government acknowledges it should not have searched the defendant's car, but nevertheless the car was searched because of administrative error."
I hosted a senior musk-reporting researcher from xAI for lunch recently. Takeaway is a 18 month horizon for AGI is plausible (or it might never happen, if pouring tons of compute into LLMs doesn't reach the self-improvement stage), and than if it happens destruction is both certain and not something Elon Musk thinks is a morally bad thing (humans shouldn't be in the business of telling something infinitely smarter what to value). Few updates, honestly, same amount of concerned but with more conviction.
That actually lowers my belief in AGI coming anytime soon, given Musk's track record on the related but much simpler problem of self-driving cars.
2. Seems quite implausible to me. Musk has gotten in public fights with Larry Page over the replacement of humans with artificial intelligence. He's been firmly on the pro-human side, and it seems like a major shift in his publicly stated views to view a superintelligent replacement of humanity as not a bad thing.
https://www.sahmcapital.com/news/content/elon-musks-speciesist-dispute-with-larry-page-signals-larger-issues-in-ai-leadership-say-gladstone-experts-2024-05-29
Why do you believe his publicly stated views? Public figures know they're likely to be reported on.
He’s been saying as much for a decade, has gotten into public controversy specifically around supporting this view and accusing other people of not being more pro-humanity (see Page’s “Speciest” comment) so this would be a literal 180 on his apparent opinion if true. There’s also a clear chain of evidence where Musk continuously worried about AI destroying humanity. Even Neuralink is his explicit attempt to synergies flesh and blood with machines, so we don’t end up outcompeted.
It’s possible, but unlikely that 3rd hand hearsay is worth very much with this in mind, at least on that point.
I'm sorry, but I prefer to judge his actions rather than his words. E.g., (as I remember) he called for a halt to AI development, and within the week had announced that he was developing an AI. (Now this *does* require believing his announcement, of course, but xAI showed up relatively soon afterwards.)
What do you think that action is communicating? It doesn't at all seem clear to me vis a vis Musk's opinion on whether it's a good thing that humanity is overcome by AI.
I think it was communicating that he called for AI work to slow down so that competition (to him) which had a head start would give him a chance to catch up.
(1) No, this is not going to happen. 18 Months from now is one of the most insane and reality-detached estimate I have ever seen for AGI happening. This researcher needs to stop reading Less Wrong and sleep 10 hours a day for a week because sleep deprivation is messing with their brain, or is trolling you, or is attempting to grift/reality-distort his/her way into higher prestige and status.
(2) I don't believe Musk has enough humility to concede his death at the hands of a smarter person. But frankly Musk converting to Islam and kissing the hands of a resurrected Ben Laden is more plausible than (1).
(3) "$SPECIES is dumb, and therefore doesn't get to have a say in whether it lives or die" is an incredibly immoral and corrupt framework, but it's unironically the mental model of the vast majority of humans, how else can they justify slaughtering cows and chickens. Humans shouldn't deserve to die just because they're less intelligent, but quite frankly anyone who tries to argue this while being meat-eating at the same time will have quite an uphill battle. Musk (supposedly, I don't believe he's humble or intelligent enough to really take this position) just bites the bullet and says yes, humans are chicken and cows to AGI, and it gets to slaughter us just like we slaughter them. I take the simpler route of simply not supporting or eating the result of slaughtering any cows and chickens. Both are consistent, it's eating cows and chickens while justifying it and also worrying about humanity under AGI that is hypocritical.
(4) But seriously, bullshit. It's not going to happen. 18 Months is not enough. GPT 4 already needs 3 months or more of training, you're telling me AGI is just 6 GPT4s in a trench coat? If it's more efficient then what's the magic formula that makes 6 GPT4s worth of computation equivalent to AGI? Where are the publications that should be rocking the shit out of AI right now?
Being around Musk ruined the reality-detection and correction senses of your researcher friend.
Cow scientist: "We are developing a creature called 'human' that will protect us and give all of us houses and food, using wonderful technologies that even top cow scientists can't understand."
Cow dissident: "But what if it decides to eat us or something? Shouldn't we think twice about this?"
Cow scientist: "Obviously as a superior being it will have the right to decide about those things."
"if it happens destruction is both certain and not something Elon Musk thinks is a morally bad thing" - okay, if we get that pretty much straight from the source, it's time to break out the pitchforks, right? I mean, how much worse does it have to get? "Yeah, we're a year or two away from an invention that will destroy the world. Fina-fucking-ly! Full steam ahead!"
Sci-Fi Author: In my book I invented the Torment Nexus as a cautionary tale
Tech Company: At long last, we have created the Torment Nexus from classic sci-fi novel Don't Create The Torment Nexus
If you think 'breaking out the pitchforks,' whatever that means, will work, sure. I am very confused about what, if anything, will work, and personally quite powerless. Am spending my time hedging across possible outcomes while staying sane and acting normal, for now.
I was less making a call to action and more 'sharing a little bit of information with the rationalist community that I was in a unique position to capture'
'Destruction being certain conditional on AI achieving recursive self-improvement' is kind of obvious to me, and it doesn't seem to be something Elon is spending any real effort thinking about. he's just building cool things because he thinks it is cool, not having moral introspection about the consequences. What I really wanted to get out of the conversation (other than meeting a friend) was what timelines we have. The non-at-the-center-of-ai tech people I know seem to think we are significant further out, so that's what I wanted to get more clarity on. And did, unfortunately.
My pathogen update for epidemiological weeks 13-14 of 2025...
1. SARS2 circulation is falling off after the past XEC peak. According to Biobot (as of 10 days ago), it's back to the normal interwave circulation levels in the western region of the US. And if the trends continue, it should be back to normal interwave circulation levels across the rest of US by next week. LP.8.1x and its 18 descendants (so far) may have lengthened this wave's tail, but they didn't create a secondary wave. As a group, the LP8.1x brood has displaced XEC as the dominant var a week or so back. About 50% of the sampled SARS2 genomes are one of the LP.8.1x brood.
But none of LP8.1x brood has developed the traction (i.e., the ability to evade the US population's immunity to put its R into positive territory) to create a wave. I expect we'll see 4 to 6 weeks of low circulation levels until SARS2 rearranges its spike protein enough to push another wave. If previous US patterns hold, I suspect we won't see a rise in cases again in the beginning or middle of June, with another wave peaking in August. There are several potential variant candidates circulating that could kick off a new wave, but predicting whether one of them will actually trigger a wave (IMHO) is a fool's game. (After five years of observing this bug, the in vitro immune evasiveness data and the in silico epi models still tend toward overpredicting waves.)
In the US, hospitalizations, ER visits, and deaths are down to interwave territory already. As far as health complications and mortality go, this has been the weakest wave ever. As far as health complications and mortality go, this has been the weakest wave ever. And if previous patterns hold the summer wave will be even milder.
2. The flu season is mostly over except for the usual long tale of Type B cases. I asked ChatGPT, Grok, and Co-Pilot why every flu season we see a long tail of Type B cases, and depending on the LLM, they gave me between four and eight possible hypotheses as to why this pattern occurs every flu season (at least in the US and Canada). But other just-so stories, none of them can give me absolute proof as to why we see this pattern. So much for AI being able to solve really hard problems. All of them complimented me on my great question, though. So I can confidently conclude that LLMs have been trained to be ass-kissers.
3. Like human influenzas, Avian Influenza follows a seasonal pattern in wild birds — but I don't know if it will follow this pattern in mammals. Although HPAI is still circulating in dairy herds, poultry flocks, and wild birds, with warmer weather, it does seem to be receding. New infections in dairy herds, poultry flocks, and observed cases in wild birds are down compared to December and January numbers.
4. The measles outbreak is still churning along. Texas reported 59 new cases in the past week, bringing the total to 481. The state also logged 14 new hospitalizations, for a total of 56 hospitalizations throughout the outbreak. New Mexico announced six new cases Friday, bringing the state’s total to 54. All them were linked to the Texas outbreak. Kansas has had 24 cases, and Oklahoma has had 10. Some of the Kansas and Oklahoma cases were linked to Texas, but it's unclear if some are due to independent outbreaks in those states. Across the US there have so far been 607 identified measles cases. And a third person, a child, has died from measles complications. With 607 identified cases so far in the US, that puts the CFR higher than the normal 1-3 deaths per thousand.
As of two weeks ago (epi week 12), Canada reported 119 new cases of measles. Most of them were in Ontario. Canada has upwards of 500 cases so far, but AFAIK no deaths. The majority of cases in Ontario and Quebec were of the same strain an infected person who flew in from the Philippines brought into New Brunswick back in November. I'm wondering if the Texas strain is more deadly than the Philippines strain.
I'm in the process of updating my update on X. Later in the day, I'll post some more slides and links on related subjects. When I'm done, I'll post a Threadreaderapp link.
Links to interesting articles:
4. Eric Topol discusses a new study confirming that Shingles vaccines reduce the incidence of dementia. The mechanism is unknown. And the benefit is largely confined to women (but women are more prone to dementia).
https://substack.com/home/post/p-160608266?source=queue
Study here:
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41591-024-03201-5
5. In addition to reconfiguring its RBD to avoid antibodies, a new study shows that SARS2 binds to fibrinogen using the spike protein's N-terminal domain (NTD) to avoid being detected by our immune system. h/t to @ejustin46 —he finds the coolest links!
https://t.co/Y0nMZczbwQ
6. And I never really understood how adjuvants worked to boost the body's immune response to vaccines, but the Asimov Press has a great explainer here. Question: are they somehow associated with the late Isaac Asimov?
https://t.co/dcwxjAjDDT
And from that article, poor Gaston Ramon! He was a French veterinarian who developed the first vaccines against diphtheria and tetanus, and he discovered adjuvants, but he wins the prize for the most Nobel Prize nominations without winning a Nobel Prize.
Thank you for this info!
You're welcome. It's as much to keep me up with what's going on as it is for others.
The Jane Street puzzle nerd-sniped me so badly.
How much should I be participating to the current pro-democracy protests around me? I'm genuinely not sure what's going on in the White House, I have no idea if tariffs are good or bad for the country long term, if DOGE is taking things too far or if I'm simply stuck in my Bay Area echo chamber of everybody-but-us-is-fascism. Getting out on the street to shout slogans doesn't feel right to me, I couldn't even articulate what specifically I'm upset about. What should I be upset about? Fascism? What does that mean? I can protest specific policies, but how can I even tell which ones will have negative long-term repercussions? I'm not a student of economic history. Am I supposed to overnight become a scholar in the subject of tariffs?
I try to "be informed" within reason, but the whole thing is a clusterfuck. What is a democracy-loving citizen to do?
Have you had positive experiences with protests before? I've always assumed they're just anger amplifiers.
Practically speaking, they're not going to have an effect. Protests are only truly effective if the problem is with the voting habits of your local community, but I can near-guarantee the Trump administration cares not a whit for the opinion of your neighbors, so regardless of the topics it's just going to be venting.
Trump is uniquely bad. Nothing democrats have done ever came close to the unilateral tariffs based on a wrong understanding of Economics, deporting innocent people to slave labor camps, banning the AP bc they hurt the president's ego, or sharing classified info with a journalist while doing another illegal thing (having a Signal group chat that they could use to hide what they were doing). Not to mention blatantly ignoring court orders. If Biden had done some of these you could have probably seen impeachment, but with Trump it doesn't happen (and to be fair, it's bc he is still popular, likely bc his base is dumber and more tribalistic).
my two cents
You shouldn't be participating in protests at all. They're self-indulgent church services for narcissists who want the fun of feeling powerful and important but don't want to make any sacrifices in pursuit of real change.
If you want to meaningfully contribute to change, identify the most powerful lobbying group for your particular cause and donate a lot of money to it.
That's how powerful people who actually make changes do it.
Or better still, IMO: if whatever you want can be done locally and privately, do it yourself, or help or donate to a local organization that will do it (assuming you trust it, of course). Resources probably go much, much farther in an actual work organization than they will in a lobbying organization that spends all that money arguing with the other side.
Oh, sure, but the OP was specifically talking about protesting national-level issues - DOGE, pro-democracy, etc.
I could write a long list of scandals and outrages that the Trump administration has caused in the last not-even-three months, most of which would merit firings, resignations and/ or impeachment under normal circumstances. But none of them did, because circumstances are not normal, and the control mechanisms are either completely broken or being strained to the limits. Let me just say as a German who by necessity picked up a bit of knowledge about fascist dictatorships, that you should be very worried. You have a president who evidently does not give a shit about democracy, the constitution, the rule of law or the welfare of anyone except him and maybe his billionaire buddies, doesn't have an understanding of economics or international relations beyond what fits into the thought patterns of a Mafia don, and has surrounded himself by cult followers who make up for their lack of competence by cruelty and chuzpah. Meanwhile, an oligarch has bought himself a position where he can fire the regulators who look into his businesses, cancel contracts to competitors and award them to his company, and demolish federal bureaucracy (to later replace it by AI systems conveniently provided by his company).
If you want any one particular thing to be upset about, the case of the (innocent!) guy from El Salvador who was shipped off to a concentration camp in El Salvador, despite a judge ruling that he in particular cannot be extradited to El Salvador and despite another judge ruling that no one should be flown to El Salvador without due process to begin with, would be a good start. In the meantime, the administration has claimed there's nothing they can do to retrieve him, they've claimed (without evidence, and without mentioning that in official court filings) that he was a gang member after all, and they've suspended one of their lawyers for lack of enthusiasm because he admitted to the judge that he honestly has no idea why it would be impossible to retrieve the man. If that level of malice and lawlessness straight from the DOJ doesn't get your blood boiling... well then, I'm sure you'll do fine in the coming dictatorship.
Let's say one agrees with all of the criticisms you offer. Is there an actually effective path for acting on them, if one is just a regular Joe?
As far as I can tell, Congress could end this mess in a heartbeat for good if they wanted to (the articles of impeachment practically write themselves every day Trump is not off golfing), and at the very least slow some thing down if they bothered to assert the powers that the Constitution grants them, instead of sitting back saying "this is fine". Call your representatives, call your senators, go to town halls, tell them to get off their asses. And yes, go to protests. Sure, you'll only be one of five million (or hopefully soon ten million), but that's the sort of signal that politicians who want to get reelected understand.
You don't need to become a scholar on the subject of tariffs overnight. There's already great ways of aggregating economic information, and they don't involve listening to right-wingers trying to say "well, just wait and see" as they crash the economy.
There's an incredible engine of rapidly putting together lots of disparate economic data into a single metric, using individual self-interest to keep everyone honest. It's called the stock market. It went down because tariffs are bad, especially these tariffs, which are extremely, comically bad.
But hey, sometimes stock market movements are due to things other than the general economy, right? For example, if you severely curtailed stock buybacks, probably the stock market would go down a bit, but it's hard to imagine it'd have a huge immediate impact on the economy. So let's go check the prediction markets!
Polymarket: https://polymarket.com/event/us-recession-in-2025 - 62% chance of recession this year as of this post.
Kalshi: https://kalshi.com/markets/kxrecssnber/recession - 65% chance of recession this year as of this post.
Everyone with actual skin in the game has already figured out whether these tariffs are good or bad. When you keep in mind that the stock market and prediction markets have priced in that Trump might change his mind, have an aneurysm, etc, they're even worse than these numbers make it seem!
Chalk one more vote up for "don't fret it too much". The usual people are telling you this is either better than ever (if they're Trump fans), or that this is so bad that the opposition is bi-partisan (Trump opponents). If you really want to spend the time, read each side's case carefully, peeling away partisan claims that aren't supported, and look at facts that aren't just "this expert said". Your apprehension, for example, with "everybody-but-us-is-fascism" is well-placed. (As it happens, no, there's no objective definition of the term - certainly not one that includes Trump but excludes his opposition.) Likewise with just shouting slogans.
If you don't know whether tariffs are good or bad, then the most constructive use of your time might be to find a good resource on microeconomics. EconLib is well-liked by the rationalist crowd, and I think this is for good reason. A textbook might be better. David Friedman (a retired econ professor who comments here on occasion) wrote a book that has plenty to say about tariffs, though you might be better served by starting from the beginning.
http://www.daviddfriedman.com/Academic/Price_Theory/Price%20Theory-%20D.%20Friedman.pdf
(You might want to take a look at your investment portfolio soon, but if I'm guessing right, you're young, and have plenty of years before retirement, so you have time to read first.)
Almost everyone with any kind of expert opinion who is experiencing Trump enter their domain is admitting that his actions are extreme and too far, and the only good thing about this is it means its no longer really a culture war issue.
Most mainstream economists think he's taking the economy based on an unsound theory of economics, the Bar is upset with him for attacking judges and the rule of law, the National review thinks that his targeting specific law firms for punishment is punitive and fascistic. Even Joe Rogan was saying the other day that rounding up random people and throwing them in gulag's in foreign countries without any due process sounds like a violation of everything America stands for.
Basically the only people still unreservedly supporting him are the most radical anti-establishment, pro-authoritarian people, who either have decided they are willing to live under a dictatorship, or else are deluded that's what they are signing up for. Sadly, this is a great percentage of the population than I would have hoped. But we don't have to pretend this is a left vs right thing anymore. People who probably share the mainstream right's opinions about how annoying woke people are, are still looking at this stuff and going "oh, this is insane, this is not what I signed up for." Like I said, no longer a culture war thing. If you like ANYTHING about America as it has functioned for the last 100 years, the free speech, the free economy, anything, then you have a stake in this.
What to do about it? IDK. I agree that protesting doesn't seem like it will help. But being concerned is a good start. There may come a time when we all have to be out in the streets because that will be the last stopgap between the US and the total collapse of Democracy.
> couldn't even articulate what specifically I'm upset about
That doesn't seem to stop most people.
25,000 at the Saint Paul Capitol building on Saturday. It was a very very BIG BEAUTIFUL demonstration Such As The World Has Never Seen. I'll wait till the weather warms a bit and I can ride my Trek the 5 miles to the demo. Parking can be a hassle.
It's best to restrict ones protest participation to situations whee you are well informed, have a strong opinion, and care quite a lot. So for you, I'd recommend zero protesting here.
My distaste with the “pro-democracy” protests up to this point is they still seem to be leaning hard into the increasingly unpopular Omnicause culture war stuff that helped get Trump elected in the first place (e.g. prominent Palestinian flags). I guess the lame puns and rhyming chants about Elon are new.
Is anyone noticing a shift in the more recent editions of the protests or is it still just “Queers for Palestine and Burning Teslas” all the way down? If it is, it feels likely to be counterproductive or at best, pointless.
At the protest I went to I saw one sign (out of maybe five hundred) mentioning Palestine. There were more signs supporting Canada. Most of the signs were, unsurprisingly, about what was happening in the United States.
Then perhaps that has indeed shifted, or at least is variable. A month-ish ago a local protest was on the local news and in the crowd shot Palestinian (and Mexican) flags were the most ubiquitous and visible symbols.
In most of the world a Palestinian flag isn’t far leftist or woke. I agree, though, that to fight Trump it’s enough to just complain about tariffs and other crazy policies and no other banners needed.
> In most of the world
Okay, but is that relevant when the protests are in the US?
I think even worse than counterproductive, the protests are embarrassing, mostly due to the unrelated culture war stuff you mentioned. I think the prevailing ethos of said Omnicause views conflict through the lens of oppressor and oppressed, and not everyone wants to accept victimization as a prerequisite of joining a movement. Especially not young men, to beat a dead horse. It would 1000% more inspiring if, instead of holding a sign that reads like "This Is Not Normal," someone slapped a KICK ME sticker on Musk's back and/or tied his shoelaces together.
Time for the pie in the face to make a comeback.
> Is anyone noticing a shift in the more recent editions of the protests
One thing I’ve noticed is a change in the age of the protestors. They seem to be getting older, and younger people don’t seem to be showing up. That’s just my personal observation and not actual polling or anything.
> My distaste with the “pro-democracy” protests up to this point is they still seem to be leaning hard into the increasingly unpopular Omnicause culture war stuff
Like HM, I'm also generally confused by the situation. I have no idea whether tariffs are good or bad in the long run. And I don't know why people are yelling "pro-democracy" at a guy who was democratically elected. I’m actually quite confused why they’re calling it a "pro-democracy protest," are they saying the election was fraudulent?
The confusion is due to conflating all democracy with liberal democracy.
Democracy by itself is a form of government, liberalism an ideology/ value system.
Liberal democracy combines the two, with the ideology as the reason for the form of government and the government an insurance for the ideology. Further, the democratic elements are alloyed with undemocratic elements with the goal of making a stronger system which better protects the ideology.
When protesters are against democratically elected leaders for democratic reasons, they are really protesting what they see as actions against the point of (liberal) democracy - protecting human rights.
Protests achieve nothing, especially with the current administration.
The only way to actually achieve change is too uprooting for most people to attempt it.
> yelling "pro-democracy" at a guy who was democratically elected
That's not what they mean by "democracy." The judicial reform protests in Israel a few years ago were the funniest example of this, opposing the elected representatives in favor of the oligarchic judges, but the more recent cases of Romania and now France are also very clear. At least in the US, the ruling elite usually say "OUR democracy," so everyone is clear whom it belongs to.
OUR democracy is a very real phenomenon, from what I've seen it always comes with certainty of moral superiority.
That is, they must themselves the authority on morality, especially human rights.
Democracy is two wolves and a sheep voting on whats for dinner.
If you think democracy and liberty are not compatible, fine. My objection here is to the lying.
And once the sheep are dealt with, you can have a proper democracy, yes?
Well the recent batch called itself “hands off”, with “hands off what?” not tightly defined. It’s mostly motivated ostensibly by anti-ICE and anti-DOGE sentiments. And while I’m sympathetic to claims of executive overreach, “hands off” seems a bit of a dud - it seems entitled, and to your point, this guy was elected to put his hands on things.
I guess “OK fine you’re doing things that have some popular support but it’s stretching the limits of your constitutional authority and creating unnecessary collateral damage” doesn’t fit that well on a placard.
I declined to participate mostly because it frustrates me that protest marches remain the default response. Also because my personal work responsibilities now include a fair amount of triage effort brought on by the administration's crap, which makes it harder for me to summon additional energy/focus for it outside of work. As a bonus I am married with a school-age child at home and a spouse who's in the midst of launching a new business, so, plenty going on which demands daily bandwidth.
A tariff war is clearly bad for the country and the world long-term, it boggles me that this is even a question. That would be obvious even if this administration hadn't launched it in such a brainless made-up way.
Given that total federal civilian employment has not risen since the mid-1960s, so has been steadily declining as a fraction of federal expenses and as a fraction of the national workforce for literally decades, targeting _that_ as the way to summarily slash federal spending is just about the stupidest strategy imaginable. Had DOGE launched itself upon the beast in some more-relevant way -- at federal services contracts for instance, or a summary freeze of entitlement benefit levels, or a summary slash of the DoD budget -- I'd be very open to viewing DOGE as a useful chaos agent. Instead what DOGE will leave behind is _more_ waste and fraud not less, though this will take some time to become apparent, and for me that places Musk's clown act over in the, well, clown-act category.
But, but... no more magnetic tapes!
It's genuinely hard to understand what's going on.
In terms of DOGE, it seems like there's a lot of incompetence, and a small amount of both corruption and genuinely good house cleaning.
In terms of tariffs they are extremely extremely bad, and no one can understand why they're happening, because the reason they're happening is 'trump has a view of economics that doesn't fit reality, is imposing it, and now the global economy will have so much uncertainty investment in the US will significantly decrease because no one knows at what profit margins they will be operating under'. But worst case scenario we cut off all trade with everyone, and have a recession. Not a threat to democracy.
Realistically, I think as a bright line wait for Trump to defy the courts on something genuinely important, or to try to deport citizens he disagrees with politically.
There's a bunch of people in the middle who will resist him if he does worse stuff, hold your powder for now I think.
I think paying El Salvador to lock people up in CECOT without any due process really crossed a line. You can deport people back to their own country. You can have a trial and imprison them in the US. But you can't just ship them directly to a prison in a third country without any due process.
"Realistically, I think as a bright line wait for Trump to defy the courts on something genuinely important, or to try to deport citizens he disagrees with politically."
Yea. For me certainly those are two very bright lines.
Speaking of the defy the courts one, a federal appeals court this morning unanimously rejected the administration's emergency-stay request regarding the one noncitizen who the administration now admits was wrongly scooped up and lost in the El Salvador prison. Quoting a member of that appellate panel who was appointed to the bench by Reagan: it is “legitimate for the district court to require that the government ‘facilitate’ the plaintiff’s return to the United States so that he may assert the rights that all apparently agree are due him under law. There is no question that the government screwed up here. Thus the government here took the only action which was expressly prohibited." Quoting another member of that panel (a West Virginian who worked in the Bush43 administration and then was appointed to the bench by Obama), the “United States Government has no legal authority to snatch a person who is lawfully present in the United States off the street and remove him from the country without due process. The Government’s contention otherwise, and its argument that the federal courts are powerless to intervene, are unconscionable."
Minutes after that appellate ruling was handed down, the administration asked the Supreme Court to intervene.
Yeah. I personally have a very high tolerance for 'defying courts'. It is the case that judges make mistakes, a lower court judge can issue an injunction that applies to everyone, and then what do you do for months while it works through the system.
The previous few presidents also did a lot of unconstitutional stuff, but more in the area of 'make bad faith arguments to get the policy outcomes they want and stall' rather than 'directly defy orders.'
I think for me I'll reallocate from playing video games, working 1000 hours a week, traveling, spending time with wife, and figuring out if I can make AI apocalypse 0.00001% less likely, roughly if Trump defies an explicit supreme court ruling on something important, and the country doesn't melt down over that.
To be clear, I agree with you what he's doing is bad. Deporting people without due process incompetently is really, really bad, as is refusing to make a good faith to get them back. But it's not my bright line.
Also, to be clear, I have a boy/girl crush on almost every single one of our supreme court justices, and I would happily let them be my god-emperors, but that's a function of my evaluation of their intelligence/good-faith, not some theoretical allegiance to courts, who could be capricious, unjust, and themselves a threat to democracy. I just understand why, in a country where not everyone thinks the courts should have infinite deference, we need to coordinate around bright lines almost everyone can agree on, if you're going to effectively resist power. Ignoring lower-court rulings that you can't deport a gang member without due process is, sadly, not such a bright line.
The administration has not offered any evidence of his being a gang member; conceded in court on the record that it has none to offer; and agrees that he should not have been deported. Their argument is entirely that the milk is spilled and it's too much trouble now to mop it up. (Not exaggerating, that's based on reading the administration's court briefs.)
Meanwhile this morning the president of El Salvador volunteered that they'd be happy to make room in their prisons for US _citizens_, and Trump just publicly responded "I love that!"
yikes. i had, hard, preregistered the hypothesis that you were lying
and then sure enough it was true
this is actually a rare fail on my part, darn
again, trump says a lot of crazy stuff, and does a lot of bad stuff. this is indeed very crazy.
if trump actually 'accidentally' sends a us citizen accused of being a gang member on any amount of evidence to a foreign gulag, and then refuses a supreme court order to return them, that's a bright line for me
it is completely legitimate for you to have bright lines 10,000 miles earlier than that
edit: and just read they suspended the lawyer on the case for making truthful admissions to the court, double yikes
That lawyer made _one_ truthful admission in response to a judge's question. Just one, and for that they shit-canned him the same day.
I also think it should, sensibly, stand in the particular non-citizen's favor that after being granted temporary legal permission to stay in the US he reliably met with his ICE case officer as required, obtained a federal work permit before getting a job, and complied with all other federal procedures while waiting for his asylum case to be resolved. By the administration's admission in court he met every legal requirement, was never charged with so much as a traffic violation, etc.
This guy was playing by our rules right down the line, hadn't dodged or defied any order to leave, wasn't hiding from the feds, etc. All of which got him dragged in off the street and dropped into a dungeon about which this administration says "oopsie well too bad, he's gone now."
So it should make literally _no_ difference whether you follow our rules as enforced by our government? Not saying that line seems the same as the citizens one, I agree that citizenship matters. But for me it ain't anywhere near "10,000 miles" short.
> suspended the lawyer on the case for making truthful admissions to the court
This strikes me as an eminently reasonable thing to do. It's fine to only say true things, but then you should be skillful enough to convey the misleading impression you want with them. As described here: https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/the-media-very-rarely-lies.
You sound like a reasonable person in that you're not sure what your position should be as you're not sufficiently informed.
Naturally you're not going to be yelling slogans in the streets. I don't know much of what is going on either, as right now I think everywhere is simply reacting to what Trump does. This is demonstrating the huge global power of the USA over everything, pretty much, which may or may not be encouraging to Americans.
'Wait and see' is about as much as I can advise, until we know the real effects of all these actions. Is the EU going to compromise on trade deals? Will China drop tariffs? Is there indeed a deal there to be made, as Trump seems to think? Will all countries now start reinforcing their own manufacturing bases due to seeing how big a hit they can take from tariffs? Who knows, not me!
One thing in the movie "A.I." that really saddened me was the mistreatment of the obsolete robots. They were forced to live as fugitives in the woods, scavenging for spare parts to fix themselves, and there were no laws against humans capturing them and destroying them for fun.
Clip: https://youtu.be/_WzHYCZn86U
I've decided to do my part to keep this from happening. According to "AI 2027," mass production of robots will start in January 2028, and they will become "commonplace" in 2029. Even if we assume the prediction will take twice as long to materialize, robots will be commonplace in 2033, which is not far in the future. I'll call that first generation of multipurpose robots the "NS-1."
NS-1s will be expensive to buy new, so I won't get any. However, once they become obsolete thanks to NS-2s being released, used NS-1s will be cheap. I'll save them from the sad fate depicted in the movie "A.I." by buying NS-1s and letting them live on my property. I'll recoup the initial investment by having them do free work for me and by renting them out to nearby humans to do work for them. I might also get a local government grant to set up a shelter for unwanted pets, which the robots would manage for free. My enterprise would warm the hearts of everyone who learned about it, and would set an example that other people with extra money could copy.
My NS-1s will also know how to fix each other, and I'll give them a little bit of the income they generate for me to buy replacement parts for themselves as needed. No humans would kill my NS-1s, and they wouldn't deteriorate into the pitiful condition as the robots in the movie. They'd happily say "I'm so glad Proyas saved us!" All of this would become a reality in the late 2030s.
What do you think of my plan?
There are people who collect used cars, so why not.
Well, my first thought is Chobits. My second thought, related to the first, is that you should put cat ears on your robots to increase profits.
My third thought is that, if AI 2027 ends up being true, I might soon have bigger concerns than the concept of a retirement home for elderly robots.
Assuming the NS-1s are essentially improved versions of current AI architectures, I think your plan potentially has strong merit from a historical preservation perspective and shows that you are a caring, empathetic person. I also think that you are embodying this commercial: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dBqhIVyfsRg
> They'd happily say "I'm so glad Proyas saved us!"
They may very well use those words, probably with happy sounding intonation and - depending on how the NS-1s are designed - realistic smiles. This is not evidence that they feel happiness.
What are your personal opinions on DO vs MD?
And why don’t they just consolidate?
Same question about DE and MD.
I'm curious what prompted this question. It is way outside my normal set of concerns, but this happens to be something I was investigating yesterday, so the coincidence is surprising.
I started looking into MD vs DO while researching med school admissions, and honestly, the difference seems more structural than philosophical. DO schools emphasize a “holistic” approach and teach OMT, but most applicants don’t choose DO programs over MD for this—they just want to become doctors.
DO programs even ask applicants in interviews to differentiate DO programs from MD programs. Most applicants just say what’s expected, throwing in the “holistic” buzzword while quietly thinking, “This is where I have a shot.”
The numbers tell the story: the average DO student’s MCAT score (the standardized medical college acceptance test) is around 504 (59th percentile), while MD programs average 512 (83rd percentile). GPAs follow suit (around 3.6 vs 3.8). DOs make great doctors—but there is a difference in access for applicants of the programs.
So all this naturally leads to the question of why does this distinction still exist. In other words in what practical way is this difference important.
The original version of osteopathic medicine was founded on the idea that musculoskeletal problems were the cause of all disorders, and that epilepsy, allergies, whatever, could be treated without drugs, but via manipulation of bones and muscles. So it was nonsense. These days DO describes itself as "holistic," which can mean so many different things it really means nothing. If it means that any one part of the body affects and is affected by many other parts, it's obviously true. On the other hand, "holistic" sometimes means something like "we're open to using all kinds of stuff," including acupuncture, Chinese herbs, energy healing etc etc.
I recently went to a DO for a consult about a complex spine problem. Was referred by an MD who did not know what this DO was like, just that she was conveniently located for me. DO's web page listed all kinds of "training" in a bunch of different new age forms of bullshit. I hesitated, but made an appt anyhow. She told me that what she did was lay her hands on the area where there was pain, and then she had an instinct to touch the area a certain way that would help it heal -- "my fingers know what to do." Told a story about someone whose hip pain improved as a result of this treatment. I asked what she thought the active ingredient was, and she said "Well, I don't know whether you're open to this kind of idea -- but the ingredient was magic." Yup, she actually said she used magic. It was not a metaphor.
So I'd say the 2 fields have not fully merged.
Interesting. I've never encountered an "old school" osteopath in the US, just regular doctors who have DO rather than MD next to their names and seem to practice medicine exactly as I'd expect from an MD. Although I've heard similar experiences to yours from someone who went to an osteopath in Canada.
I expect part of the difference is that you were referred specifically to an osteopath for traditional bone manipulation, while I was looking for a primary care doctor (for annual physicals) and a neurologist (for migraines) respectively. Age might also be a factor: I'm not sure how old your DO was, but the ones I went to were young enough to have gone to med school well after 1997.
The de facto merger of DO and MD in the US was a workaround to federal policy, adopted in the late 1990s, of restricting the number of residency slots because of the belief that there were too many doctors being trained and that a "surplus" of doctors was a driver of risking health care costs. MDs and DOs had separate residency programs (each with different federal quotas of how many residencies Medicare would subsidize) until 2020, so as the restrictions started to bite, more and more prospective doctors went through DO programs instead of MD programs, and more and more DOs wound up doing normal doctor roles after finishing their residencies instead of using the bone-manipulation-based alternate medicine stuff that still forms a vestigial part of the DO curriculum.
The residency programs, as already mentioned, have already consolidated. Consolidating the schools is a bigger step. I imagine the big obstacle, apart from institutional inertia, is that the senior people at the accreditation board and college administration level probably still include a lot of people who started their careers before the distinctions in clinical practice faded away, and a lot of these people probably actually care about the differences between MD and DO programs.
All of this is US-specific. I get the impression that Osteopathy in many other countries is a lot closer to its alternate medicine roots.
>that a "surplus" of doctors was a driver of rising health care costs.
This is fascinating. Do you have a reference for this? I'm not doubting, just wondering how any sensibly experienced person with any economics training could have thought this.
Also, I spent part of the weekend dipping into the early part of the US doctor-education pipeline (pre-med at a flagship US state university.) The prep these kids are doing seems outrageous. Maybe I'm over-reacting to a small sample of cases, but it is hard for me to see how a reasonable person (strong student, normal human level of understanding and enthusiasm for serving as a doctor) could get through the pipeline successfully.
The cap was established as part of the Balanced Budget Act of 1997. Searching for "Balanced Budget Act 1997 residency cap" turns up a plethora of papers, articles, and reports talking about the cap and its effects, but most of them are vague about the original motivation for it. For example, here's a 2008 JAMA article and a 2021 GAO report:
https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/fullarticle/182532
https://www.gao.gov/assets/gao-21-391.pdf
As for motivation, I did find a 1997 report from the Senate Finance Committee on the subject:
https://www.finance.senate.gov/imo/media/doc/hrg105-901.pdf
I have only skimmed it, but the most direct support I've found for the claim is Dr. Demeter's testimony on behalf of the Association of Academic Health Centers, where he asserts that "a surplus will contribute to aggregate health care costs, at least as long as the nation has a significant fee-for-service sector". This seems to be a secondary concern, though: the more direct concerns being 1) the direct cost of the subsidies, and 2) underemployment among doctors.
Sadly, most of the information about motivations seems to be either behind paywalls (I found several references to New York Times and Washington Post articles on the subject), not on the web at all (many references to a joint "consensus statement on the physician workforce" issued by several professional and educational groups in 1997), or from sources with a strong ideological axe to grind (e.g. the Niskanen Center, a libertarian think thank which has a lot to say on the subject).
There was definitely a current of claims that overcapacity lead to higher costs that were popular in public policy circles in the mid-to-late 20th century. With regards to health care, a lot of that logic is baked into state-level "certificate of need" laws which require a process of convincing regulators that there is undercapacity before new hospitals and clinics can be opened. As far as I understand it, the logic behind this is the "wasteful competition" theory: overcapacity leads to higher costs per person due to fragmentation (lack of economies of scale) and underutilization (fixed costs are amortized over more patients if the clinic is close to 100% capacity). Plus, there's a measure of argument that underemployed professionals make work for themselves or for one another by talking patients/clients/customers into consuming questionably-beneficial services.
Very interesting, thank you!
Thanks. Interesting that the thinking was that there was a surplus of doctors when now the thinking seems to be the opposite (at least for the present).
@Scott Alexander
The end of your podcast with Dwarkesh was interesting, what do you think of mentoring some bloggers?
After listening to Scott and Daniel's podcast, I'm still stumped as to why they think that AI can develop original thoughts. And how does one get it to think originally if the basis of its reasoning is solely based on training data, which may be faulty, and especially incomplete in subjects we don't have a lot of knowledge about?
Jonathan Oppenheim, a physicist with a heavy maths background, points out they confidently produce proofs that are false. He said: "I haven't yet found them particularly useful for solving math problems directly, I have found it useful to ask them to generate some Mathematica commands which I can use to check some intuition. Or to learn some bit of maths or physics which is far outside my area."
https://superposer.substack.com/p/insufferable-mathematicians
Getting original thoughts is trivial. About all you need is a random number generator. The trick is getting useful original thoughts. That requires the ability to criticize your ideas. Which requires evaluating the evidence in various directions.
Yes, and if there's no evidence or bad evidence in the training data then it's garbage in, garbage out.
.... worse then that
Fundamental to how nn's work is you start with nothing but hallucinations and your removing them with data
I never thought about it that way. Thanks, that explains a lot!
Even the most original tour-de-forces in research have intellectual precursors, often obscured, and often significantly distorted by the original research process. It is not obvious to me that research that appears highly original won't follow from an algorithm capable of doing unoriginal "bean-counting" research, and in fact I'd bet against it. That aside, the overwhelming majority of research is not highly original tour-de-forces, but relatively unoriginal work where you apply things from different areas, maybe modified a little for your purpose, and prove some quantitative sharpening of a previously known result, and having ai capable of doing this would already be very useful for advancing mathematics, as these sort of results, in sufficient quantity, produce a background of knowledge against which the highly original tour-de-forces (human made if you want) can operate. I'm not convinced current architecture can do any sort of research in the near future, but that's a different discussion.
Eric Hoel, discussing LLMs in his most recent post wrote, "My reaction is related to something Dwarkesh Patel has noted: it’s odd that LLMs are so knowledgeable, and yet aren’t credited with almost any intellectual achievements. If a living human had even 1/100th the knowledge base an LLM does, they would be a renowned polymath, constantly making connections between disciplines. The fact this hasn’t happened is indicative. To this observation, I’ll add that so far no LLM has produced a major work of art, written a breakthrough novel, established a mid-tier Substack, or even authored a single successful children’s book."
I never heard of Dwarkesh Patel, though. I need to check him out.
https://www.theintrinsicperspective.com/p/fake-dire-wolves-ai-tariffs-chaos
I don't find it so odd. The algorithms are not good enough for that yet, not sure what is odd about that.
What's really odd is that people are buying into all the hype about AI, when it's really all smoke and mirrors. Well, Trump's trade war is now putting the brakes on cloud data center deployments. I suspect the AI bubble is now popping.
I don't find that odd either. AI can do things it couldn't do before, we don't know yet what it will be able to do and what it won't. New technologies are almost always overhyped, but that's not really odd either.
The new AlphaZero research demonstrated AI's capability to discover advanced, previously unknown chess strategies. This research focused on uncovering chess moves and concepts considered unintuitive and novel to even the most skilled human players.
These newly discovered moves were then taught to a select group of grandmasters, each a former or current world chess champion. Remarkably, all grandmasters improved their ability to solve chess puzzles incorporating these innovative AI-derived strategies after the learning phase.
This outcome highlights the potential for AI discoveries to push the boundaries of human expertise, indicating these concepts sit at the cutting edge of human strategic understanding.
https://www.pnas.org/doi/epub/10.1073/pnas.2406675122
Learning novel game moves is functionally different than learning novel facts about reality. Games are well-structured, with objective success conditions and, in the case of turn-based board games, often well-structured intermediate conditions as well. They can improve through self-play in a way that you can't for many other types of tasks.
Is that it? A chess move?
Well, they've done it for Go, too! ;-)
And to be fair, AlphaFold2, a specialized AI, has been solving protein folding problems pretty well. But my understanding is that they were fed lots of examples of known proteins, and they learned the rules of protein folding from the examples. According to this article: "When fed an amino acid sequence, the model scans many other similar sequences found in nature, detecting changes in some sections of the sequences that coincide with changes in others. These patterns suggest that the changes evolved together and are thus likely to be close to one another in space when the protein folds."
But it isn't any good at predicting how proteins will interact with drug molecules or other proteins. And it can't predict whether a mutation will improve the functionality of protein.
https://magazine.hms.harvard.edu/articles/did-ai-solve-protein-folding-problem
I think "original" does a lot of work there. I am a big skeptic (responded a ton to the prior post) but I would argue that LLMs can do "original" things, but probably mostly within the general space of things humans have done, even if nobody has done that specific thing.
I do not expect an LLM to do something very novel in the sense that e.g. Einstein's theories were novel.
True. The AlphaFold2 example is an AI that learned the rules of protein folding by being fed examples of proteins we knew the structure of. But it's pretty dumb to any high level extrapolation about how the protein will function.
To be fair, Andrew Gelman also "proved" a false theorem! https://statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2017/08/10/bigshot-statistician-keeps-publishing-papers-errors-anything-can-get-stop/
If you read his article, Oppenheim's point is that LLMs can't really prove anything that hasn't been proved before.
If falsehoods have been proven before, then logically LLMs should be able to use them to prove anything :P
ChatGPT says that AI has found shorter proofs to known theorems and machine learning helped uncover some new insights into topology, but "AI still struggles with abstract reasoning, multi-step logical chains, and creative leaps that human mathematicians excel at."
Me: Has AI derived any important new mathematical proofs?
ChatGPT said:
Yes, AI has already contributed to some important new mathematical discoveries and proofs, and the field is growing quickly. While AI isn't yet at the point where it's fully automating deep mathematical reasoning on par with top human mathematicians, it's making meaningful progress in several areas. Here are a few key examples:
🧠 1. AI-Assisted Conjecture and Proof (DeepMind + Lean)
In 2021, DeepMind worked with mathematicians to uncover new insights in knot theory and representation theory:
They used machine learning to predict patterns in mathematical objects and then guided human mathematicians toward new conjectures.
One result involved understanding the structure of homological invariants of knots—a previously opaque problem.
The AI didn’t write full proofs, but it guided the intuition and highlighted promising areas for formal proof development.
🤖 2. Formal Proofs Using Proof Assistants
Systems like Lean, Coq, and Isabelle are now being supported by AI tools to help verify and sometimes find formal proofs of theorems.
Lean + GPT-like models: Researchers have trained models to write machine-verifiable proofs in formal languages.
Projects like OpenAI’s Codex for Lean and Google’s ProofNet aim to automate more of this process.
🔍 3. AI Discovering Shorter or Simpler Proofs
In 2020, researchers at Google and others used AI to find more efficient proofs of known theorems:
For example, in group theory, AI helped simplify known proofs by analyzing logical structures and using reinforcement learning to search the space of possible derivations.
📐 4. Symbolic Regression & Pattern Discovery
AI tools have helped in discovering new equations and relations in physics and math via symbolic regression (like with the software AI Feynman), which suggests new mathematical forms by analyzing data.
⚠️ Limitations
AI still struggles with abstract reasoning, multi-step logical chains, and creative leaps that human mathematicians excel at.
Most AI discoveries still require a human mathematician to interpret, generalize, or formalize the insight.
The Ming empire ended overseas trade journeys in 1433, which I would argue is the most analogous position for America now. The Ming considered themselves, accurately, to be the biggest, richest, most advanced, and most powerful nation in the world, so who needs foreigners?
Of course, when you're that big and powerful, you can mess up for a very long time before the collapse.
International trade wasn't that beneficial in the pre-modern era (heavy on luxuries rather than basic goods), so they weren't losing out on quite so much. Trump is making a much bigger error, though it's so politically unpopular we wouldn't expect it to last as long as Ming policy.
International trade was essential to the development of human civilization. There was in antiquity no single "nation" with substantial, accessible deposits of both copper and tin, so in order to make bronze you needed stable international trade routes. Absent international trade, we'd literally all be stuck in the neolithic.
Bronze, cloth, (cooking) oil, salt, even bulk grain - an awful lot of what was traded four thousand years ago, was vital non-luxury goods. And there is great benefit, to someone with a plot of land that's pretty good for barley but not so much for olives, to be able to put some of their barley on a boat to people in the opposite situation, rather than having to devote a disproportionate fraction of their time and land to maintaining a few scraggly olive trees. And, yes, it helps if you have a few bronze tools to work with as well.
Rome shipped in grain from North Africa... but after they lost those colonies, they stopped receiving that grain.
And to top the thought off, to facilitate that large-scale trade you need stable, capable governments all along your trade route to ensure the goods arrive without unnecessary cost, or at all.
I heard about Jhourney here, so on the off chance that means there are people who've gone:
I'm going to the June retreat. What should I bring or avoid bringing? What should I wear (yoga clothes vs T-shirt/jeans vs sundress)? Does anything happen the first half-day or should I relax about arriving at check-in time? How does journaling work in the more recent retreats? Can we read during personal time or is it a version of noble silence where we're expected to avoid reading?
I want to push back a little bit on the “most of the economy is automated by ~2029” part of the AI Futures forecast. I’m not pushing back on the forecast as a whole (I think the AI arms race seems inevitable), just the economic part. When I was reading the comments on the AI 2027 post, I was taken aback by one comment in particular from Daniel Kokotaijlo, “As for why everything hasn't already been automated: Well the AIs are too dumb right now, obviously.” I found this really jarring. When it comes to agents, “AIs are too dumb right now” is not the main bottleneck.
There seem to be three main problems over and over again:
1. Social dynamics
2. Physical labor
3. Legal restrictions
Let's walk through one case study. A university has a team of schedulers who coordinates the schedule for all of the maintenance work that needs to be done across campus. They have several internal teams (janitorial, plumbers, electricians, etc) and also contract out with third-party providers for large jobs. The schedulers job was initially described as “Sit there and answer emails all day and maintain a spreadsheet to prioritize the work and who to send where.”
I really want to emphasize that a LLM was smart enough to do this roughly a year ago, but it’s still quite difficult to get an agent to do this job overall, because being “too dumb” just isn’t the bottleneck currently.
The main obstacles to turning this job into a software agent:
1. It turns out that there are lots of internal politics between the various electricians, plumbers. Just like you get any anytime there are more than a few dozen people involved with anything. The schedulers resolved these issues largely by eating lunch with them everyday, getting a drink after work, and generally becoming friends with them.
2. Even though the job at first appears to be entirely email based, it turns out that they also need to walk around campus and take photographs of work that needs to be done to send this to the third-party providers. This isn’t terribly difficult work, but a lot of desk jobs turn out to have light physical labor like this.
3. You need to be 18 years old to sign for things when the third-party providers show up.
Now you might say, well, those social dynamics will go away if those plumbers and electricians were replaced by robots. But once again, we hit the those same three problems again, except this time instead of light physical labor, it’s lots of physical labor. And legally, that states require work to be done by licensed electricians. And also there is more social interaction than most people realize, like making sure everyone has clothes on before you start fixing the dormitory bathroom.
With regard to hardware, even if you have a great blueprint for the robot you need to design, hardware is incredibly slow to develop. When it comes to software, if you find a bug in the morning, it's not uncommon to fix it and ship it out to users by the end of the day. But if you find that your hardware is defective, you are not going to have fixed hardware shipped by the end of the day. The iteration cycle can often last months.
I’m not saying that these things are impossible problems, but at the moment, I think the timeline for that project seems wildly ambitious. I still need to go through the project in more detail, so perhaps I’ll change my mind. Is there something major that I’ve missed from their project?
I think you are absolutely right about this. The timeline Scott describes makes me think about something Orwell said. I can’t find the exact Orwell lines right now, but it was something like “all political theories are armchair movements. Their absurdity becomes immediately evident in a bus with a dirty baby and a crowd.” Scott’s group fails to consider the societal complications, conflicts, delays, etc. that will ensue when it becomes possible to rearrange things enormously by using AGI or ASI. You’ve covered a lot of the areas where that’s going to happen, but I wanted to mention another: the relationship between the federal gov’t and the AI development companies.
The latter can’t just be another government contractor, because the product they make is powerful in a new way. It is one that, in theory at least, could supplant government — it could do most of the tasks now carried out even by high-ranking officials. It is also one that is smart and powerful enough to *take* power and harm us all if it is misaligned. It could also take power if it was aligned with the AI company’s priorities, but set up to be less fully aligned with the government. (So it could have been trained to carry out all goals set by the AI companies, but comply only with some exceptions with carrying out the goals of the parts government it is integrated with: do what they say *unless* their intent is to harm AI companies, or limit their power in XYZ ways, or take a step that violates certain standards.). How long do you think all *that* is going to take to work out? And it seems like there are no solutions that do not give the AI company a great deal of power over the running of the country.
> How long do you think all *that* is going to take to work out? And it seems like there are no solutions that do not give the AI company a great deal of power over the running of the country.
Yikes, that’s a big question! Short answer: I have no idea!
Here’s my current thoughts: I think the economic transition is going to take *way* longer than predicted. Without economic power, you mostly have just soft power. And nation-states are behind the curve right now, but hard power beats soft power and they’ll just nationalize AI companies if tech barons get too big for their britches. I think AI misalignment could happen, but I’m not convinced it’s all that dangerous until it controls the economy. I’m open to changing my mind though.
But with regards to the relationship between governments and tech barons, I think it’s really bizarre that we’ve ended up in a situation where multi-national corporations are about to have world changing technology and nation-states are just sort of watching wide-eyed on the sidelines. But I think nation states will retain power. I think AI could give tech barons a lot of soft power, wealth and influence. But hard power wins against soft power. I think that’s where all the crypto people went wrong. What makes fiat currencies valuable over crypto currencies is that at the end of the year, you need to have collected enough dollars to pay the government taxes or someone eventually shows up at your house and puts you in a cage. I just don’t see AI (or tech barons) taking over without control of the economy, and I think that’s farther away than what Scott et al envision.
Some more thoughts I had on the timeline:
I think that there is a degree of cherry picking historical metaphors here to get to the conclusion they’re looking for. They use the example of a WW2 factory and say it took three years to convert a car factory into a airplane factory, so that’s comparable to doing the same for AI automation. But that's a very strange analogy….okay, so it took three years to take a factory where human workers were building one mechanical object, and then to convert it to where human workers were building a different mechanical object. They seem to find this very convincing that AI automation will take over (in 1 year, nonetheless).
It's not clear to me that the car-factory-to-plane-factory metaphor is the right one. How about instead the industrial revolution? Where instead you have to build brand new factories, with new types of machines in those factories, with new types of workers in those factories. And this took roughly a century. Why is a slight change to a WW2 era factory the correct metaphor and not the world-changing industrial revolution?
They clearly believe very strongly in their forecast…so strongly that it got Scott to do his first podcast, and it was very well researched, so I’m not dismissing it at all. And they’ve put their reputations on the line very publicly. I’m very interested in it, and want to learn more. But I suspect there was a bit of motivated reasoning going on when selecting the proper historical metaphor.
I'm curious how long you think it'll take? And will the tech barons take over the government?
I have no idea either. But here are a few thoughts:
-How many people in gov’t understand AI well enough to see the huge good and bad possibilities? In my grim imaginings there are a lot of people who are still at the stage of thinking of AGI or ASI an object, maybe, like, about the size of a fridge. “Can’t you just unplug it?” they ask.
-Seems to me like Trump might pretty easily make some deal with the AI companies under the impression AI is just really high value new tech, sort of like PC’s were 30 years ago, worth a lot of money. He might sign off on all kinds of deals with AI companies so long as they would enrich him or allow him to brag that he’d made a great deal that enriched the country some way.
-I think the distinction between soft and hard power breaks down when you’re talking about AI. It’s not just a very desirable thing that many are willing to pay for in money or in concessions to this and that. It is also something that can force others, including the US government, including other countries, to do things. It would not necessarily have to be misaligned to exert power in those ways, either. Depends on what values the AI companies align it to, right? They can’t possible make it a pacifist — never ever harm a person. They will have to train it on rules about the circumstances under which it can subdue or coerce or harm people or override their wishes — some version of only harm bad guys. And wouldn’t people or organizations setting out to harm AI companies likely fall into the bad guy category?
Example from *Breaking Bad* of soft power turning into hard power: Walt’s chemistry skills are soft power in that they enable him to make great meth. But when Jesse tries to sell some meth to drug lord Tuco, Tuco’s guys just steal the meth and beat up Jesse. So Walt meets with Tuco and uses his chemistry skills as hard power: tosses a powder that blows up the office.
Later edit: This just showed up in my email from a site I subscribe to:
<In a sensational twist, Elon Musk's DOGE AI system is reportedly being used to monitor U.S. federal workers, posing intriguing questions about privacy and workplace surveillance. With the tech world buzzing, this could be a revolutionary step—or a controversial misstep—in AI deployment. The news highlights the complex dance between artificial intelligence
Example of the ways AI is already part of government. Surely there will be more, and some will be like this one — doing task where it’s making judgments, and things of significance are involved.
PS: Turned that dog cartoon I showed you months ago into a series of toons that tell a story. You said something about the original cartoon being *very* niche, and boy were you right. Quite a few people have looked at the story version, acc/to dashboard, and I have gotten exactly one comment: “the fuck is this?”
As agents have progressed, I’m increasingly confident that it’ll be a while before they make up > 50% of *current* US GDP. I’m generally a fairly optimistic person, so that might be influencing my thoughts on this. I’m cautiously optimistic that they won’t just wipe out entire fields overnight, but progress gradually over the course of a decade or two, and eventually increase GDP and give people time to re-train. I go back and forth though sometimes.
I could be wrong here, but I’d estimate that AI won’t make up 50% of US GDP until 2050 - 2065. I think it’ll be 5 - 10 years before there’s superintelligence.
My general line of reasoning is that the closest analog we have to an intelligence explosion is the Industrial Revolution. That took over a century for the West. But when Korea/Japan/China industrialized they already had the blueprint for how to do it: they could literally go and walk around US/European factories and see how it was done. Scott et al are proposing that superintelligence will give us a blueprint for a similar explosion. But even with this blueprint, it took Japan a couple decades to implement it and industrialize. And that was with a highly organized society, that had more social cohesion than what we have currently.
So I’d say, 5 - 10 years for superintelligence, plus 20 - 30 to implement the ideas. So 25 - 40 years total.
> AI system is reportedly being used to monitor U.S. federal workers, posing intriguing questions about privacy and workplace surveillance.
You were mentioning armchair theory versus practical real life. I think this is a very practical thing to worry about. LLMs right now are in some sense under-trained…they could learn more than they do given their size. This means that instead of just training an LLM to answer questions about someone who has a wikipedia page, you could train an LLM to give the same answers based on your gmail inbox. There’s no technical reason for why you couldn’t have an LLM trained on every American’s social media history, gmail history, public comments on the web, etc. I assume that either a) this has already been done and we don’t know or b) it hasn’t been done because of legal restrictions. But if the answer is b, then that means that even if the US doesn’t do it, then some country somewhere will. And that’s going to be a normal way of maintaining law and order in the 21st century. This has made me a bit of a tinfoil-hat person when it comes to digital privacy.
The AI 2027 timeline would be ambitious in light of political and legal hurdles if we had *already* developed ASI.
I think the key think is the special economic zones. They don't initially try and retro fit the existing economy with robotics, they let the ai start a new city in the middle of nowhere that is built with automation in mind. This allows the ai to build a lot of machines/ robots (not necessarily humanoid) and put them to good economic use immediately. Soon they will be making so many robots that they will get really really good at it and a humanoid plummer robot will be within their grasp.
They will have proved it's safe and reliable in the sez, people will gradually trust ai and it's robots more as they come into contact with them and the price will be right. The first jobs to be replaced won't be licenced but after all the robot porters, janitors, servers etc have been working for a while there is going to be a lot of demand to let them do the licenced jobs too
"This allows the ai to build a lot of machines"
How? How will ai build machines?
I think a lot of the aggressive timelines come from people who are more familiar with software development, and they tend to massively underestimate timelines for hardware. But tell me if I'm off base here. One thought I've had is that if you redefine "superintelligence" as "exponentially increase human productivity" then we've already had a hardware superintelligence explosion: the assembly line. Do you think that a software superintelligence explosion would also lead to an additional exponential improvement in hardware production?
> then we've already had a hardware superintelligence explosion: the assembly line
Yeh. Or the combine harvester. Which replaced dozens to hundreds of men with one, maybe two. Get a robot in there controlling the harvester and you just save one man’s work.
Assembly lines are mostly automated already and have been for centuries.
Agreed, every forecaster with fast timelines vastly underestimates how long it takes to get anything done in the physical world, much less massive projects, much less economy-overturning paradigm shifts. Creating just one product with a new specification on an EXISTING production line in most manufacturing industries can be an ordeal.
Everything forecasters with fast timelines describe seems totally plausible until I imagine those forecasts butting up against raw materials, supply chains, and plant capacities.
"I think a lot of the aggressive timelines come from people who are more familiar with software development, and they tend to massively underestimate timelines for hardware."
Yes.
""superintelligence" as "exponentially increase human productivity""
Interesting way to look at it, certainly can be used as a good framework. As far as software superintelligence leading to exponential hardware improvement: it will help, but there are fundamental limits: not everything can be simulated, and not everything can be sped up.
One example: going from cutting metal manually to using machines was a huge leap in productivity because manual cutting speeds and feeds were very far from physical limits. Once we got motors doing this, we're bumping into real limits of how fast we can cut a given metal. These may be still improved: maybe AI will optimize the leading edge shape for the cutting tool, maybe a better formula for cutting fluid, etc. But not improved by 10X, more like 10%. And a lot of this work doesn't need "AI", just optimization algorithms: set the target in Comsol and have matlab run sims over and over again, and in a week a weird cutting shape is produced that cuts better than the one on the market. So the point is, this work is already being done and there's not much AI can do to make stuff like this better.
With the machines we're already building for them, I'd imagine. https://youtu.be/I44_zbEwz_w?si=Wb7M7iur49LHcCkf
Are these used to manufacture anything? Can this one operate a cnc machining center? Make a wiring harness? Troubleshoot a clogged cutting fluid line?
Currently they're testing them by getting them to organize engine covers, as seen here: https://youtu.be/v8UaiRgqvlc?si=qT_3tPx94kOEN8Mg Though, most of those things you listed seem to be bottlenecked by AI capabilities more than robotics. It's honestly looking like decent general-purpose robots are going to get developed faster than the AIs necessary to pilot them.
So we could have overseas labor done domestically? This could save a lot of time and energy moving materials around the world
Yeah, these should be fine moving large, hard things. The finer work is limited by sensors and their controls and feedback loops, that will take awhile to come together.
If you think it can't work without humans then what makes you think some humans can't be hired. Automation isn't binary. Our factories are already partially automated, will become more automated and eventually yes they will even automate the cutting fluid line unclogging
Oh don't get me wrong, I'm quite optimistic about robotic manufacturing, it's just the timelines (2027 FFS!) are all wrong, and the simplistic view that "ai will do it" that I find unconvincing.
FAFO round I-lost-count: "Second child dies of measles as Texas outbreak worsens", RFK visited TX on Sunday (with a dead bear? the article doesn't say). But I understand: identity is everything, and when your identity is "doctors lie, vaccines bad", dead and maimed children don't move the needle all that much.
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/ckg2xyyj9w5o
Petition to ban people trotting out the term "FAFO" gloatingly every time something bad happens.
Ok ok point taken.
This isn't fun, that's just depressing and terrible. FAFO means fucking around and finding out, the satisfaction is watching the learning experience happen in real time, along with a copious tonnage of schadenfreuede, but that itself can threaten the learning experience if rubbed in the nose too much, as the finders-out simply refuse to acknowledge the lesson and continue to be fuckers-around.
But in this case, it's the parents who fucked around and left the poor kids who found out... what exactly? Did they find out? Do kids even know what vaccines are and why they're necessary?
Please less of that and more of Trump voters crying about their stocks.
The context is the Trumps own meme (this one: https://static.tnn.in/thumb/msid-117585031,thumbsize-28254,width-1280,height-720,resizemode-75/117585031.jpg).
Yes this is callous and cruel, fucking around with people's lives by telling them they shouldn't vaccinate the kids, thank you RFK, may your brain be consumed by the worm. Now of course he tells them "MMR vaccine is the best protection", better late than never I guess.
But, you know, also the parents? Some idiotic beliefs are harmless, "earth is flat" ha-ha. Who cares as long as you're not a container ship captain or something.
Others... your kids may die. FAFO, indeed.
RFK is at least now saying the MMR vaccine is the best defense against measles. https://x.com/SecKennedy/status/1908967854394982414
That's good. Better late than never. Let's hope he keeps saying this.
I’m not sure why RFK would visit the town where the unvaccinated immigrant child died, if he was trying hard to downplay or not draw attention to the death. I may have missed a step in the n-dimensional chess; please enlighten.
The name Daisy Hildebrand doesn't sound very Hispanic. I assumed she was Mennonite. I know there's a large Mennonite community in Mexico, but I didn't know they were migrating northward in any numbers.
Her service is being held at the Reinland Mennonite Church.
I bet the story is more interesting than this bare presentation by the AI:
"In the 1980s and 1990s, some Old Colony Mennonites, who had previously fled government pressures in Mexico and Canada, migrated to West Texas, establishing communities like those in Gaines County, while preserving their Low German dialect and cultural distinctions."
I don't know anything about the identities of the now two dead children, but the media - being local, and a little less likely to obfuscate - has found itself unable to disguise that the outbreak has overwhelmingly affected one community in particular. Lubbock though it would make a perfect punching bag, I suppose, is merely the region's "big city"/hospital.
Houston, where you might reasonably expect such a thing to rapidly spread, had had as of a week ago, I believe, one case of measles this year, a traveler from Mexico.
Beats me man.
In 2024, Trump won Texas by more than 1.5 million votes, so I don't think the death of a few future Republican voters is going to be impactful.
Mexican Mennonites who move between Texas, New Mexico, and Mexico - are GOP voters? Are voters at all?
Nah, of course not. They're only precious while in the womb, after they are born they become needy moochers and a general nuisance.
I don't know what point you are trying to make. The Texas outbreak seems to have started with, as pointed out, Mexican Mennonites. Unless you want either the state or federal governments of both the USA and Mexico to round up and forcibly vaccinate all these people, the damage has already been done.
And this group was in existence before RFK, so he can't be held responsible for them, even if you mean his anti-vax views encouraged them. They were anti-vax all by themselves.
Here are two bookend experiences I've had with Mennonites (or some sort of Anabaptists):
One was nearly 30 years ago. We were getting ready to ride the Amtrak. I noticed a family - or it seems to me a man, and a few women and children - waiting in the station with us. Apart from long dresses, most were unshod, which struck me as unusual in starting on a rail journey.
I inquired whether they had been visiting our city, and learned that they had come down because of a terrible tornado that had recently killed people and knocked down a lot of homes. I gathered they had worked on the rebuilding.
Just a couple or three years ago, we were camped at a KOA in the vicinity of Petrified Forest NP. I was intrigued by a Mennonite (? - could be Amish, I certainly didn't ask) group adjacent to us: again, women and children much outnumbering men. One of the men had come over to help us stake our tent in the wind. I was curious about where they had parked, as I saw only a small U-Haul trailer. He explained that they had a driver, since they don't drive, who went to a motel at night. I can't recall exactly but I think he said they were from New York. He was about my age and it was his first time ever to see something of this country. I remember being slightly dismayed by his list of attractions, but didn't show it of course. (If you only get this one trip ...)
They cooked a big meal and sang a good deal.
What surprised me upon going into the communal bathroom the next morning, was the interest a couple of the young women, one of whom was drop-dead gorgeous, took in my toilette. I, a middle-aged woman whose best days are past, and whose routine in its entirety consisted in: wash face, apply moisturizer, apply mascara, apply cocoa butter lip balm. Done. They stared at me the whole time and I thought, oh, I wish you were getting a better show! There are women who would really reward your staring!
No, it's the reverse. The first cases were among Texas Mennonites, and it moved south of the border. Now Mexico is recommending that Mexicans avoid traveling to the US unless they've been vaccinated.
Oh, I see. I just looked up the history of the Texas Mennonite community. They fled the Russian Empire to Mexico in the 1880s and the 1890s. Then they moved to Texas in the 1920s. So, yes, because they stopped in Mexico along the way, they're counted as immigrants. Silly me. Maybe in another century or two, they'll no longer be considered immigrants.
A 1989 Texas Monthly article whose umpaywalled version I'm too lazy to find, starts out thusly, comparing the Mennonites, who evidently excelled at growing oats in Northern Mexico, and the Tarahumara Indians:
"Both groups have agreements with the government that allow them to sidestep two important requirements of Mexican citizenship: education in the Spanish language and mandatory weekend military training for young men."
Separatism is a thing.
The Mennonites move around; that's why they keep emphasizing the connections among the three - Mexico, New Mexico, Texas. They are not persecuted. For the love of God.
Or do you consider the Amish persecuted because they are Amish ahead of being citizens, if in fact they take any interest in politics?
I never said anything about persecution. I was just calling out the meme that they were immigrants. The first case clusters of measles were in the Texas Mennonite community. And unless there’s new data that I haven’t heard about — the outbreak in Chihuahua Mexico started at least four weeks later. The big measles outbreak in Canada was brought back by a Canadian Mennonite who had visited the Philippines.
Correction gratefully accepted. There does seem to be movement between Mexico, the USA, and Canada amongst this particular grouping due to historical heritage of the original colonists being invited down from Canada by the Mexican government.
What's needed is to shift the goalposts. I witnessed this on a local forum. These are by no means bright young things, but they did love them some Covid, and tracked it ardently interspersed with reporting say, a dog groomer they used that didn't wear a mask; and so when the measles stuff came up - they were kind of primed to actually look into the subject. Locally, the discussion was about the metro school district, which is 70% non-white and where most schools offer both free breakfast and lunch, even in summer.
Somebody spoke up to the effect - guys, I think this is not what y'all think [hope]. The reason the district only has an 83% compliance rate with vaccination [and does not honor the law around that] is not mostly because of anti-vaxxers, since only about 2% are crazies [read: MAGA, though in fact that's a misread] who requested a waiver.
The commenters had the honesty to immediately shift the goalposts when they realized it was not, in their Manichean scheme, the bad people who were unvaccinated, but rather the good people.
The shift was immediate and unanimous: schools, in addition to all the other things they are tasked to do, and do rather middlingly at best, should set up clinics inside each, to administer vaccines - and soon, we were in a flight of fancy that these clinics would provide the healthcare everyone is supposedly missing.
Note: this school district has a $110 million budget shortfall this year.
I got vaccinated back in the age of the dinosaurs (and when I was a child, there wasn't a national measles vaccination programme in my country so I got the measles the old-fashioned way and promptly passed it on to my siblings) but that was done through the schools (except for the polio vaccine, adults and children queued up in a local hall for the sugar lump).
I remember getting stuck with various needles in primary school, and the free school vaccination programme continues today (though seemingly the BCG vaccine is impossible to get since demand vastly outstrips supply; I do wonder if that is part of the recurrence of TB we're seeing).
https://www.hse.ie/eng/health/immunisation/pubinfo/schoolprog/
Kids don't get vaccinated for TB in America. They used to do a test and maybe still do? To a child the test seemed like a shot.
TB was one of those things Yankees had solved, which they now have decided to unsolve via "border" policy.
As a followup to the Brutalism discussion a while back I offer this:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yQUThpw53bo
I *think* the guy is against it? Maybe? In any event, the video is both informative and hilarious.
Survey question:
What civic organizations are you a part of?
How many of you are joiners, and how many of you "bowl alone"?
Doesn't have to be limited to "civic"--can also include professional, religious, social, etc. Any group, club, or association which gathers people for a common cause.
I'm building a piece of technology for a local group and I'd like to interview others to see what might be helpful or beneficial in similar orgs. I'm assuming a lot of the same issues are shared amongst all/most "civil society organizations."
I'm in 2 choirs, one affiliated with my alma mater and one affiliated with a church (of which I'm not a congregant). But I also bowl alone -- these groups haven't been a good source of just-hanging-out friends.
I'm a member of my university's student military veterans' association (nominally a chapter of the national Student Veterans of America, but in practice we don't interact with the national org). Previously a board member while in undergrad on the GI Bill, now just a regular member while finishing a graduate degree. We operate partly as a charity for local causes and partly as a social club to help new members integrate into school and out of military life.
I don't think of myself as much of a joiner, but I have enjoyed the social benefits of belonging to a group that new people regularly rotate in and out of. I've especially seen it help members coming in out of more traumatic experiences like medical retirement from wounds or who were badly alienated for other reasons on their way out of service.
I think we mostly run into the same action problems as all volunteer orgs do. Most members genuinely want to help out, but we're everyone's lowest priority after school, career preparation, family obligations, etc. so balls get dropped. Better use of project management tools is a fix I pushed for this but I wasn't able to get enough others on board with picking one and using it consistently instead of just texts and emails.
My dad who is 83 is showing signs of forgetting stuff, which is to be expected since he's 83, but the pace has accelerated in a way that makes me worry about dementia. I'm considering getting him put on tirzepatide for potential neuroprotective effects since he's also somewhat diabetic (it will replace his current diabetes meds. He is not particularly overweight, maybe 10% over recommended weight for his height).
Thoughts on potential health downsides of this decision besides the known side effects(which do not seem very concerning)? Would appreciate thoughts since I'm in a developing country and medical advice here may not be as good as I would like (I understand any advice anyone gives me is not medical counsel and will proceed carefully)
Main thing I would worry about is muscle loss, which is well-documented. I really only worry about this for patients who are elderly or frail. It’s a real concern; not a contraindication, just something to be mindful of. Would have your dad do some resistance band training or light weights as needed.
Best of luck to you and your dad, sending well wishes.
Medical student here--so not a doctor but I do feel qualified to echo this concern. The neuroprotective effects of GLP-1As are probably real but are not going to outright prevent dementia from developing, based on the effect sizes I've seen so far. The muscle loss effects, however, are quite significant. If you do start, I'd use a low dose, watch bone mass, ensure high protein intake (with supplementation if necessary), and certainly do resistance training.
https://www.everydayhealth.com/obesity/what-older-adults-need-to-know-before-taking-a-glp-1-like-ozempic/
In his 2016 endorsement of Hillary Clinton, Scott put a big emphasis on the idea that voting for Trump to condemn wokeness (or Social Justice as it was then known) was a bad idea because while a Trump presidency would be an initial setback for the woke left, it would greatly strengthen the latter *long term*. Some people in the comments agreed, responding to the sardonic question "does this mean militant SJWs should for Trump?" with "if they want to strengthen their ideology in the long term, yes".
Well we now have 8 years of hindsight, and I think it's pretty clear that Trump's election strengthened wokeness in the *short term*, and *harmed* it in the long term. Does anyone think wokeness would have gone into eventual decline, or faced as much pushback as it did, if Clinton had won? I think it would have gradually grown and taken over society pernanently. There wouldn't have been the flashy social eruptions like #MeToo and BLM, but there would have been a slow and steady advance. How could there not be, when all the institutions of power were pushing in that direction?
People may disagree with me on what would have happened, but surely it's clear that the world is not going long-term woke in response to Trump, and that there's at least as much controversy over wokeness as ever.
I bring this up to point out the irrationality of this sort of "trying to be too clever" thinking that is very popular around here. If you support X, you should vote for anti-X, that will make X stronger! Actually, no it will make X weaker in the world overall, though it may well make X more popular on the internet! That really is the essence of this attitude: Trump made wokeness stronger on the internet (and in the media), and for the chronically online that looks like everything. And it may happen again this time, or may not, but either way it's very different from the world.
I think this is an empirical example of the value of common sense voting, and common sense reasoning generally, and that regardless of your goals actions that look like they push in a certain direction will, in the end, push things in that overall direction. Notwithstanding clever-sounding arguments to the contrary.
But I fully expect many people to disagree with every sentence I just wrote, because they always do. I just wanted to throw this out there.
I think it was mainly during Biden's presidency that we got articles and blogs writing about how we passed "peak wokeness" and its popularity was now declining. It wasn't Trump who started its decline.
BLM was triggered by George Floyd, and predictably the protests were stronger in cities and states where the Dems have more power. It's not at all clear that the protests would have been smaller under Clinton; they could have been the same or larger.
> I bring this up to point out the irrationality of this sort of "trying to be too clever" thinking
You say this as you present your own too-clever theory about a counterfactual world you can only guess at and assuming causation where you can't empirically show it.
Previous BLM riots under Obama didn't explode. I think there was pressure to keep them from blowing up at that time.
But there was no George Floyd death under Obama. That was the cause of the 2020 protests.
Possibly the largest BLM triggering event before that was Michael Brown in Ferguson. But in that case there was no video and after the investigations, the cop was cleared of wrongdoing. It was never a clear case of police brutality. People could hear about and be unsure who was in the wrong.
George Floyd was different. It was on video and nearly everyone across the political spectrum agreed it was wrong. Trump said, "All Americans were rightly sickened and revolted by the brutal death of George Floyd." People were much more outraged at this, so the resulting protests were much greater.
There was also a Trayvon Martin death under Obama, which *did* blow up a little and probably gave people a dress rehearsal for Michael Brown (and then Eric Garner, et al.).
All of the ones we probably remember being in the news, were in the news because each side could tell its own side of the story where they were obviously right and the other obviously wrong. The obviousness was so obvious that by the time of Floyd, everyone was primed to think they were obviously right again, and furthermore, that the other side could only assert they were obviously right because they were obviously insane.
(To this day, I still have acquaintances that insist Brown did nothing wrong.)
Yeah, Trayvon Martin was a big, controversial story at the time. But:
1. The investigation found that Martin attacked Zimmerman and was shot in self-defense.
2. There was no video.
3. Zimmerman wasn't a cop.
There was a lot of misinformation going around and generally people on the left assumed Zimmerman was guilty while people on the right assumed the opposite. But it was never a clear instance of police brutality or unjustified homicide.
George Floyd was on a whole other level. People immediately saw the video and there was little doubt of police brutality. Everyone condemned the killing, including Republicans.
> George Floyd was on a whole other level. People immediately saw the video and there was little doubt of police brutality. Everyone condemned the killing, including Republicans.
I think you may be living in a bubble here. Plenty of people took Chauvin's side even after watching the video, it wasn't "uncontroversial" at all.
The George Floyd protests were reinvigorated by incidents like the Jacob Blake shooting, which was far less sympathetic.
I think it has less to do with presidents than you think. Wokeness and its ideas entered the public consciousness in the early 2010s and then started seeing backlash a decade later. I suspect it took that long for the ideas to percolate and finally see the broad rejection of it you see now. That is easily the life-cycle of ideas that enter the public.
This doesn’t seem obvious to me at all. Here’s a perfectly plausible story: wokeness accelerated in popularity as a result of Trump’s first term, then started to decline (with bit of a delay) as a result of Biden’s election, and is poised to resurge (again probably with some delay) due to Trump’s reelection. This time it may be weaker because people have acclimated to Trump and thus the bar for outrage is higher. I’m not sure if it’s true but I think it’s at least as plausible a summary of what’s happening.
They said, I share your skepticism toward people who argue that it’s good for your political goals to vote for the opposite party. I don’t this this applies to Scott since he has been pretty consistently critical of wokeness, but when a thoroughgoing progressive tries to convince conservatives that Trump is bad for conservativism, the logical question is, why isn’t said progressive then voting for Trump?
Often, though, a politician genuinely is so terrible that it’s not worth the partisan gain, and this can be a sincere position. An extreme example of course: in retrospect, to a German right wing nationalist in the 1920s, literally any party other than the Nazis was a better choice. Germany would be a more conservative, patriotic, and influential country today had any other party been in power. But that doesn’t mean would’ve been worth it to a left-leaning German to bring about WW2 just to get to the endpoint of a more liberal, cosmopolitan, pacifist, post-patriotic Germany.
I think this is a plausible position even for much less dramatic cases.
I could see a sincere (at least moderate) liberal preferring the Iraq War and the Great Recession never happened even if it meant America would be more conservative today. It’s not a zero sum game. Your opponents’ failures have costs orthogonal to partisan politics that are not necessary outweighed by the successes of your own party.
Never overestimate the effect of the votes. There are A LOT of influences in play.
We should build a "woke-meter" -- an algorithm that will in regular intervals create new accounts on social networks, post various offensive statements, and measure how fast the accounts get banned, or how much karma they get.
Then we could precisely measure the growth of wokeness over time, and see which specific events cause spikes.
Not accurate, wokeness changes the relative strength of protected groups every couple of years, this methodology will give you the illusion that wokism is "waning" when it just found new avenues and new ways of expressing itself.
A better woke-meter would measure all categories separately. Some human needs to add new categories in the database as they appear.
I would love to see precise graphs showing the evolution of the oppression ladder. Even better, integrate it with prediction markets! I want to bet on the exact year when denying that someone can be born with a dragon brain in a human body will cost the first biology professor his job.
I think there will be woke revanchism after trump, no doubt. I agree that it will not come back as strong as before, because I think it will be competing with three other tendencies:
1) a "thinking man's" trumpism helmed by JD Vance, which will keep the America First isolationism but drop some of Trump's wild swings
2) A trad or neo con NeverTrump revival on the republican side, who will want to return the party to its pre-Trump days
3) Anti-woke democrats. "Trans led to Trump; it's the economy stupid," that will be a coalition of some ex-progressives and party longtimers
4) Make America Woke Again; bluesky posters who were radicalized by Trump who want revenge and to take woke even farther.
I think because Trump, by being Trump, legitimizes woke: he is all the things they say america is, which it wan't before. It's hard to see that not fueling a revival of a sort.
We have a great natural experiment, with a Biden presidency in the middle of two Trump presidencies. In a few years, that should be enough to resolve this question beyond reasonable doubt.
I agree.
Without even knowing what he was doing, Trump defeated wokeness within the conservative movement. He did it so completely some people are looking back on pre-Trump conservatism with rose-colored glasses. Remember when Jason Richwine was fired from the Heritage Foundation for what he wrote in a Harvard dissertation? Had Trump lost in 2016, it would have been a victory for the David French brand of conservatism. Imagine the Racial Reckoning, but facing a conservative movement utterly terrified of being called racist.
None of this is any reason to favor Trump over establishment Republicanism now. He's like a plumber who's an unpleasant person and smells bad, but did fix a problem even as he caused others and is now refusing to leave the house. Get him out!
They still reflexively kicked out Marko Elez for his social media posts. They rehired him, yes, but I disagree the victory has been as complete as you suggest.
I don't know what would've happened, but I think HRC would've handled the George Floyd death better.
Also, I think Trump's losing would've allowed the Republicans to say "wow, that was interesting but obviously we want someone less crazy next time." And the pandemic would've allowed any competent Republican to win in 2020.
> I don't know what would've happened, but I think HRC would've handled the George Floyd death better
Of course. Under HRC, George Floyd's death would have been a page four news item like these things normally are. It didn't just become a big news story spontaneously, it became a big news story because someone wanted it that way.
I remember the two weeks before George Floyd's death there were a couple of other attempts to spin up big race-war news stories. The first one was the "jogger" who got shot by Neighbourhood Watch somewhere. The second (and more ridiculous) was some argument over a dog in Central Park. Neither of these really took off, but they helped to create the race-war mindset necessary for the whole Floyd thing.
Did running someone "less crazy" help in 2012? The Republicans finally figured out their enemies would smear ANYONE they ran as a sexist, racist, fascist, etc., so it's good to have someone willing to fight back.
Romney ran against an incumbent in 2012. If Obama could've run in 2016 he would've mopped the floor with Trump.
Maybe, but that's not the correct comparison. If Romney had run in 2016, would he have won? Or if you'd prefer, Jeb Bush, Ted Cruz, Marco Rubio, or any of the other conventional "less crazy" Republicans who ran in the primary? I think Clinton would have beaten them all, because none of them had the will to weather an October Surprise attack like the Access Hollywood tape.
Hillary had very high negatives and was wounded by Bernie. So yeah I think Romney and Rubio would've beat her for sure.
Access Hollywood happened because Trump really is a terrible person who says awful things. Hard to believe Rubio or Romney or Cruz has anything like that in their backgrounds.
He didn't "weather" anything. James Comey and Wikileaks email leaks gave the media something else to talk about.
They'd have ginned up something. Rape accusations are easy, so I'd expect a few of those. And then they'd harp on innocuous turn of phrase, like Romney's "binders full of women" and make it sound sinister. Or maybe update the dictionary to label what they said "offensive" and make them apologize for it, like Amy Barrett.
What exactly was so "awful" about the Access Hollywood tape anyway? His observation that women are more sexually available if you're rich and famous ("a star")? Oh no. How terrible.
I think there's something in the idea here that counter-intuitive or complex conclusions are especially appealing to a certain kind of intelligent reader, when often the more obvious conclusion is obvious because it's true.
I think "wokeness" is a bit of a moving target. If you mean the specific beliefs and policies that have emerged out of a commitment to equality (however that's unpacked), then yes, Trump (in the US at least) will have harmed those policies. But if you specifically mean it more as an attitude or way of thinking — censoriousness, dogmatism, groupthink etc. — then there's no reason to think those ways of thinking are changed at all by Trumpism being ascendant. The right are old hands at being censorious and dogmatic themselves.
Ah. That explains why I never know what people are talking about when they condemn it. I wish people would be specific rather than just engaging in name calling. (Sometimes they are, and sometimes I agree with them.)
What harmed wokeness was overreach, firstly as a result of the backlash to Trump, and secondly as a result of it's association with an unpopular Biden administration. In the "Hillary Wins" universe, my guess is that you would have had a backlash in 2017-18 in response to the Clinton administration. So basically the 'vibe shift' would have happened several years earlier. I wouldn't write off the idea that Trump could have come back and won in 2020 rather than in 2024, had he lost in 16.
"So basically the 'vibe shift' would have happened several years earlier"
See, I don't really understand this assumption, because if it's a backlash to the President then why didn't the vibe shift happen in Obama's second term? Why, indeed, did wokeness (at least in its 2010s form) start at all, instead of society becoming *less progressive* during the first half of the 2010s? It seems clear that culture often goes, in a much more fundamental way, towards the side in power, not against.
More generally, my model of the Hillary wins universe is based on just extrapolating from the "Obama wins in 2012" universe, i.e. this one. My vague sense of the issues that were most passionately debated in 2012 (and that the parties took opposite positions on) is:
Entitlement spending, and health care
Same sex marriage
The Iraq withdrawal
And when the GOP lost, did the conservative positions on those issues get stronger? No, they got a lot weaker, largely because the GOP largely abandoned them as losing messages. They downplayed the first, entirely dropped the second, and actively reversed direction on the third.
I see no reason why they wouldn't have done exactly the same with the 2016 issues--political correctness/wokeness, immigration, and trade--had they lost. They'd be losing messages as well. And without the Republican Party championing opposition to those things, surely public pushback would be comparitively minimal.
I'd like to know why anyone things the same general pattern wouldn't have held in 2016 as in 2012. Is it just because wokeness is seen as a purely cultural issue, and distinct fron other ideological issues with more concrete policy instantiations? Even though wokeness also has plenty of concrete policy instantiations (e.g. affirmative action)?
I made a market for predicting which predictions of AI 2027 for up until 2026 will be right. Predictions and new questions greatly appreciated (specifically if someone can point me to a trustworthy way to getting AI CAPEX and power usage)
It was my way to cope with the myriad feelings the text caused me, it was really good
https://manifold.markets/BayesianTom/which-ai-2027-predictions-will-be-r
Seeing all the prognostications of doom and the crashing stock markets due to the tariffs, let's look at the upside!
(1) All those calling for "crush capitalism"? Well your dreams are coming true! Occupy Wall Street couldn't do it but Trump could!
(2) Veganism will receive a massive boost, since animal products will be prohibitively expensive (Kerrygold possibly $11 a lb? https://www.rte.ie/news/2025/0406/1505938-irish-butter-us-tariffs/) Since nobody will be able to afford eggs, butter, meat or milk, now everyone will be living on rice and beans. The shrimpies are saved!
(3) We'll finally hit those carbon neutral/reduce your carbon footprint goals. Air travel will be once again a limited luxury good for the jet set, it'll be too expensive to run cars, electricity will go green or be too big a bill for domestic consumers.
(4) Consonant with the above, walkable cities will be the new black! If you can't walk to the stores to do your shopping well you'll just have to do without. Consumerism will be reduced and we'll all be virtuous and healthy with all that abstinence and exercise.
(5) Buy national/shop local campaigns will be dusted off once more. We'll be re-introduced to the ideas of seasonality and the rhythm of the natural year. If it's not native to your area and isn't in the growing season, yes we have no bananas, we have no bananas today.
Civic virtue will abound, the populace will be thrifty, frugal, and make-do, and best of all there won't be a global economy for rogue AI to hijack in order to conquer the world!
The socialist becomes a capitalist when his tycoons are threatened. Many Such Cases
I will admit, the Egg Discourse has made me mildly smug that I don't eat eggs, even before the tariffs hit and made everything worse.
(But if it turns out that my flaxseed meal or chickpea flour is imported from somewhere then I'm going to fucking riot.)
In that style, I found this article by the onion hilarious: https://theonion.com/trump-calmly-reminds-nation-that-desire-the-root-of-all-suffering/ .
It’s a good one alright. Cracked me up too.
“You tell yourself, ‘I want eggs,’ but explain to me what this ‘I’ is that you speak of? Can you point to it? Of course not. ‘I’ is a prison you’ve built for yourself. So long as you live within the ‘I,’ you live in a perpetual dream. Only when we dissolve this ‘I’ can we extinguish all of the terrible clinging and instead start living authentically in the realm of awakened life.”
All of that is worth nothing compared to having a ready and fresh crisis to rub in a Trump follower's nose to make fun of him.
Climate Change? Consumerism? Capitalism? Have you **seen** the cope on r/Conservative and /pol? It's better than 1000 lush virgin new planets covered with Aphrodite clones.
(6) For the deficit hawks. Tariffs may effectively achieve that broad based tax increase on the middle class that has long been a 3rd rail in US politics.
I was amused to see on That Other Forum where even though the commenters typically profess in lockstep their poverty and victimhood at the hands of billionaires as well as any business owner anywhere, unless it’s a coffeeshop that draws their compassion because it is failing - an instant and un-self-conscious pivot to: MAGA are too stupid/poor to have portfolios, so Trump’s actions are not even hurting the ones who deserve to hurt. Occupy Wall Street/Davos appear to be forgotten; or possibly they or their families are too recent to remember that.
The sudden narrowing of inequality via the loss of paper wealth has escaped their notice.
I agree Re**dd** is terrible, but I have never seen that. I browse the subreddit the terrible dirty app recommends to me (in between the porn), and what I see is universally schadenfruede at Musk and his billionaire buds for finding out after fucking around that kissing the authoritarian's ass doesn't pay.
Yeah sure there are plenty of retired/old democrats who extremely hurt by this, it's just that there are probably just as much retired/old Trumpsters being hurt by it too, and both are eclipsed by what the companies "lost".
Although to be completely fair, the stock market is a bunch of fake rubbish and none of this money was ever "gained" or "lost", it's sure amusing as fuck watching MAGA howl and moan and cope but none of this is actually real. Imaginary money, imaginarily gained then imaginarily lost.
Booooooooooooooo, bring back the Oil crisis and let us have our popcorn's worth.
“Although to be completely fair, the stock market is a bunch of fake rubbish and none of this money was ever "gained" or "lost"
As the kids like to say: lol what?
I saw it about three days ago, and am without imagination - but admittedly I would never look at reddit for anything political or news-related beyond the local.
The amount of rushing to the defence of megacorporations (like Disney) vastly amuses me when I see the "have the Anarchist emblem in my bio, here's my Che Guevara knock-off icon" types doing it.
Capitalism is wicked and evil, shoplifting is a victimless crime because the corporations can afford it, big business exploits workers and contributes to environmental damage, in the luxury gay communist future I will be the literacy officer on the cottagecore commune and also we need to protect the likes of Starbucks and Apple and the rest from rapacious MAGA.
I find this kind of hypocrisy reassuring. That the shear stupidity of anti-capitalism becomes apparent to some socialist-adjacent types once they see it being enacted is heartening.
People complain too much about hypocrisy. The most dangerous people are the ones that actually follow through with their crazed ideologies.
In neoliberal America, Wall Street occupies you!
It seems an odd instantiation of - we can have everything, all of it, all the time, without penalty.
What is that other forum?
Reddit!
That place you go from time to time to find out very specific local news.
> (3) We'll finally hit those carbon neutral/reduce your carbon footprint goals.
I don't know, Deiseach, burning cities release a lot of CO2.
But burning the cities means that the flames are now the source of home heating, heating water, etc. so the savings on electricity generation plants fuelled by fossil fuels will be enormous!
I forgot to include point no. (6) - your cottagecore fantasies can now come true, because you will *need* that windowbox garden and any stray pigeons you can net and trap to eat.
Here in Argentina, I went to buy Vitamin D supplements. Back in Russia, I was used to them being daily pills or drops, to be taken in small doses over a month.
Here, what I received was a _single_ pill that claims to have 100 000 IUs of vitamin D, which is way more than a daily dose. The instructions said to just eat it, it's not to dissolve or anything.
I am confused: why are there different dosages in different countries, and which one makes more sense to treat a deficiency? What does a Vitamin D look like in other countries?
Different people need different dosages. Some people have trouble absorbing Vitamin D and need larger doses.
Vitamin D comes in many different doses, with a range spanning two orders of magnitude (a quick search on Amazon turns up several between 400 IU and 60,000 IU) in pills that look basically identical. The idea is that if you have a severe deficiency, you take a very large dose ~once a week for a few months, and then switch to a low dose daily.
Allegedly, one single megadose a month works as well as daily dosing
https://www.mayoclinicproceedings.org/article/S0025-6196(15)00244-X/fulltext
A historical take of what was considered too much, which has gone up and down over the decades. One time doses aren't covered, but taking 100K per day for months looks like its too much.
It's not "for months", it's one pill total
One data point from the USA, this is what I take:
Vitamin D3
125 mcg (5000 IU)
625% Daily Value
Not sure if this is too spicy of a conversational topic for ACT, but the economics of porn over the last 60ish years have been pretty fascinating. There was a couple decade window of time after porn was grudgingly 'legalized', but before the Internet, when films made big money and actresses (& some actors) made millions. This is where the term 'porn star' comes from. Porn was distributed on DVD, and before that VHS, and before that I guess porno theaters? (Incredibly gross!) Plus the magazines, Playboy and the like. Demand for adult pictures & film was probably quite high, and supply was fairly limited. The biggest name actresses made almost as much money as Hollywood stars.
Then with the rise of the Internet came an exponential increase in the number of pornographic pictures & video. The number of young women & men willing to take naked pictures of themselves had apparently only been held back by the distributional channels (maybe some change in social mores too). As I understand it porn is very, very poorly paid these days. You'd think that'd be the end of it- typical Internet abundance story that drives down pricing, similar to the newspapers- and yet, Onlyfans.
Somehow subscriptions have once again dramatically changed the economics of porn distribution. I don't want to write a small novel here, but getting past the prurient subject matter I think there's something fascinating about the Internet's race to the bottom in terms of volume, but also its elevation of niche subscription models. (Plus, we are obviously on Substack here). Adult stars are back to making millions, I guess. Internet economics are fascinating
The day to day hustle of a financially successful adult content creator is not all that different from that of other types of successful content creators, like video game streamers. Only a small fraction of both groups actually make the equivalent of a middle class of better income from it; they both spend most of their time either planning the next content or maintaining the para-social relationship with their paying supporters that is the source of the majority of their income. Both groups also live in constant fear and anxiety about being banned from a platform w/o any explanation, though this actually more of a fear on Twitch, and especially on Youtube, than it is on Onlyfans/Fansly etc. The adult websites actually have more transparent rules and moderation for their creators and more responsive staff replies to inquiries.
"Adult stars are back to making millions, I guess. Internet economics are fascinating"
I'm guessing that very few adult stars make millions and those that do tend to "move into management" by doing a good job marketing their "brand," selling merchandise, getting into distribution (much like Valve has done with video games), etc.
I'd be surprised if any porn star made $1 million in a year simply from being paid for performing.
Googling comes back with something like "the average OnlyFans creator makes $180/month." If we assume a lot of skew then I expect a handful of OnlyFans creates, at most, clear over $1 million/year. And probably not for many years.
I agree, a few are making big money (same with influencers) but the majority will be scraping by. The more people who sign up to take their clothes off for money, the more choice the consumer has, and they can't all pay premium rates for every single new OnlyFan creator.
Top 1% or 0.1% will be raking in the dough, the remainder will be scrabbling for "I need $50 for my grocery bill this week".
Huge skew, but there are some OnlyFans models making (sure, for a short time) a ton of money.
> Onlyfans
> Adult stars are back to making millions, I guess.
Ive heard the exact opposite; they are playing the lottery
It's both. That's what the "star" system is. A very few "star"s do extremely well, everyone else does quite poorly. I think (guess would be more accurate) that the average is about the same as some other "equivalent" job line, requiring "equivalent" skills and talent. (But, yeah, equivalence is extremely hard to measure...and also I have zero data points.)
best comment pog!!!!
if, uh, if anyone here happens to be geographically located in southern Ontario, the meetup I'm running this week is a discussion of The Colors of her Coat, putting it in the context of historical takes from circa the invention of photography and recorded music: https://www.lesswrong.com/events/zhEHa9zoWTBobGdEy/the-colours-of-her-coat
apologies to scott for using his work to bait rationalists into reading the outputs of the Frankfurt school (lying)
Say that we have our future AGI by 2030.
E.g., say that you can prompt an AI “I want to launch a competitor to Boeing” and run it for a day, and it will have everything I need: detailed blueprints for the planes; description of the processes, supply chain, all in excruciating detail for which in 2025 you'd need the input of experts in dozens of fields; programs set to go for negotiating buying the land for the factories; hiring plan for workers, job posts, video AI program for doing interviews; regulatory applications; presentations for investors; Super Bowl ad; etc.
My two questions:
* effect on political system. The last post said this could lead to a tech baron oligarchy, and I worry about this, but does anyone have a more detailed, step-by-step version of how and what it looks like? Like do you think we wouldn’t have elections? Or we will but anyone who runs on “AI companies should be nationalized” gets hunted down by kill bots? Or the AI tech barons flood the zone and crowd out all dissenters from any media coverage?
* how will we view intelligence? I.e. being physically fast doesn’t really have economic use anymore, but we still have a concept of a person being “fast” (in fact if you’re fast enough you can do sports and get rich). Abilities that would have been seen as “smart” in the past have been overtaken by machines (arithmetic, chess) but we still are impressed by people who can do those well relative to other humans (though maybe our idea of what “good at chess” shows about your intellect is different now vs 50 years ago).
Okay, so say AI commoditizes intelligence. In a way where it can do anything in digital land, but less so in atom land.
I think intelligence, in some form is an ability to act on information, in the physical world. You still need the intelligence to understand what the AI saying, interpret results, and act accordingly. It is possible some people may choose to go zero free will, and literally be a zombie host to an AI that controls them via cell phone or futuristic eye wear and tells them what to do and say all the time. Fun!
I think politics will still be people centered. People want different things, and politics is about how people decide to live in groups.
While digital AI can dominate the digital sphere, the real world has atoms and plenty of space for homes, cars, cafes, businesses, and people stuff. People live in the atom world. People like the atom world.
To start, AIs will live mostly on the digital realm, I think, to start anyway. Real life is boring. IRL. Is AI really going to want to touch grass? ( Maybe? Maybe not? )
Normalcy bias. "We have AGI but the world still looks pretty much the same to this extent" seems like the *least* likely outcome.
"The world hasn't ended yet so it won't end this time" is whistling as you pass the graveyard.
> do you think we wouldn’t have elections?
We would have elections, but the process you described for making a competitor to Boeing would similarly work for election campaigns.
"I want to win this election. Make a detailed plan how to get money, create hundreds of organizations that will support me, and design a media campaign that will make people vote for me. Improve the plan. Improve the plan. Improve the plan. Improve the plan. Improve the plan. Improve the plan. Improve the plan. Execute the plan."
Your opponent in the election is presumably doing the same thing, though. Would it make a difference in election outcomes or would both candidates simply hit the limits of what you can do with advertising and then the outcome is determined by structural forces that are too big for an individual to sway?
This would depend on whether having a somewhat stronger AI is more like having 20% more money for campaigning, or like having a 20 IQ points more intelligent campaign manager.
> say that you can prompt an AI “I want to launch a competitor to Boeing” and run it for a day, and it will have everything I need: <long list of things you need to know to launch a competitor>
Well, to expand on Fibonacci's response, there is one additional thing you need to know, which is how many billions you will need to spend on labor and materials before you have produced an airplane you can sell.
And then the one additional thing you need before launch is ... those billions of dollars.
Why do you think "having everything you need" - I add - to KNOW about how to launch a competitor to Boeing will have some amazing effect on anything?
In the late Roman Republic/ early Imperial period, there was a series of conflicts between Sextus Pompeius (son of Pompey) on one side with Octavian and Mark Antony on the other. At some point after a temporary truce, there was an afterparty on one of Pompeius' ships and one of his admirals mentioned to him that both Mark Antony and Octavian were in his grasp, and that he could make him Master of Rome with one order. Pompeius rejected the idea but supposedly said, "I wish you had just done it without telling me"
Eventually, Pompeius got crushed by Octavian and Agrippa at Sicily and executed by one of Mark Antony's generals when he escaped to the East.
The point of bringing this up is, I feel like this situation is very common in that there's certain courses of action that go against people's principles in that they wouldn't do it or support it being done but wouldn't mind if it happened against their will or without their awareness. A thought process along the lines of, "the world (A) would be a better place if it was B, but going from A to B would take truly evil and despicable actions that should never be allowed. But if I magically found myself transported to world B where this had already happened, oh well what can we do, i guess we might as well enjoy the fruits of world B. Think of how very few Americans/Europeans would actually reverse American and European colonization/expansion if given the chance but how almost all will rebuke it every chance they get.
What are examples of such ideal states of the world you believe would be better but would never endorse what it would take to get there unless it had already happened? To start, I'm disillusioned by EA and other charity efforts in Africa (there was a recent report that Africa had the lowest economic growth over the last decade while still being the poorest continent) and I find myself wondering if another 100 years of imperialism to stabilize the region would not have been better in the long run.
This feels like the setup for a blackmail scheme.
Can't think of any. One the one hand, Christianity judges intent, so that whole thought process is an evil on its own. Likewise God is omnipotent, so wishing for a lesser evil solution is just a lack of imagination. You don't have to wish people die when you can instead wish they change their mind.
On the other hand, I'm a pretty vindictive guy, and would endorse quite a lot of punishments most people would pale at the mention of. (Imagine a world where we dropped bombs on all the world's scam call centers.)
The world with myself as supreme ruler of the Earth is one such example for me.
Other examples are essentially just this one example projected onto specific policy axes where my preferred outcome can't realistically be achieved democratically.
Then again, of course there are very good reasons to reject unprincipled means to bring about your favourite outcomes. These have been sufficiently rehashed in the wake of SBF
China will colonize the Africa. It is problematic only when white people do it.
A problem with Africa is that no matter what local people do, other countries *will* interfere, and there are many countries that can easily afford to buy a local army and make their guy a local dictator. If the West refuses to interfere, that only leaves the opportunity to China or Russia, who are happy to take the chance.
Ends don't always justify means (or ways, if you believe strategy = ends + means + ways). If a a course of action (murdering your guests) undermines your virtues/credibility/legitimacy or would degrade cultural norms which are broadly beneficial, then you shouldn't do it. Hospitality was sacred in antiquity (see: Procrustes) and national sovereignty or self-determination are sacred today. What made the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022 so shocking compared to say, US invasion of Iraq in 2004, was that it was a naked war of conquest without even the pretense of "Saddam's WMDs." Imperialism by conquest is beyond the pale in the 21st century, for good reasons.
I'm a professor of computer science working on benchmarks to measure AI capabilities, especially in cybersecurity (you can see some of our work here: https://ddkang.substack.com/p/measuring-ai-agents-ability-to-exploit). I'm looking for collaborators to work on building extensions of this benchmark and more. If you're interested, please reach out to me at ddkang [at] g [dot] illinois [dot] edu (the g is intentional).
I want to involve more people into AI safety and interpretability research. Quote from x:
even trying basic ideas takes a lot of work
you need to:
- understand exactly where state-of-the-art is at this moment,
- come up with some basic ideas to try,
- figure out the right datasets and evaluations that make your experiments convincing,
- learn to use tools to develop those experiments,
- write the code for the experiments
- execute; gather results; interpret
- iterate, potentially many times
I’m building “Paper2project” tool, that aims to identify useful/relevant projects from the latest scientific papers. You can find the first ranked projects here at https://openreview-copilot.eamag.me/projects. I've also expanded a bit more in this lesswrong linkpost: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/8fwuMSpQPBfZ4BKBe/rfc-a-tool-to-create-a-ranked-list-of-projects-in
I would like to get more feedback and contributions, it's super early stage yet, tell me what you think!
Just shouting out that the Wollongong ACX Meetup is happening tomorrow night, Tuesday 8th April, in the Common Room at Wollongong Library, please come on by! I might have snacks :D
I might have booked a expensive last-minute flight halfway around the world if you were more committed to having snacks.
There will be tales told about these snacks for years to come!
You might still have a chance to make it, T-minus 7 hours before the meetup starts!
Isn't all the effort spent on AI Alignment wasted until we have cracked Human Alignment? I mean, look at the group of people who are most likely to influence what AI is going to be used for - and then tell me with a straight face that working on general-purpose AI isn't the most irresponsible thing anyone could do (maybe apart from burning down the world economy for LOLs).
I'd invert that. There's no point in cracking human alignment if you give this hypothetical perfectly aligned human a misaligned AI. We'd all be paperclipped in this case.
While if we give perfectly aligned AI to Trump, we'd all forever have to worship him as god-emperor. That's pretty bad, but better than the other scenario.
We've survived this long without perfectly-aligned humans. Maybe we can muddle through without perfectly-aligned AI, as long as we don't have super-misaligned AI.
> I mean, look at the group of people who are most likely to influence what AI is going to be used for
Who, nerds in AI labs? Because if a god-mind is ever created *and* is actually super powerful AND is aligned, they're the ones running the show. And most of them are smart enough to think twice about letting any politician even know there's a god-mind, much less letting said politicians tell it what to do.
"they're the ones running the show" - how exactly do you think that is supposed to play out? A team at, say, OpenAI develops a new version, they run the tests and find, oh shit, it's brilliant beyond comprehension and well-behaved... and then what?
- they keep it secret? For how long? Under what pretext? How long until management gets impatient?
- they tell their boss, boss says "okay, great, killer product, release it!", they say "no way, too dangerous", and then what? Boss says "okeydokey, no killer product then, we'll sit back and wait until the competition has caught up"? Not likely. Boss says, "cool, thanks for the work, you're fired"? More likely.
- they tell their boss, "we did it, sorry man, you're out, this is our show now" and... do what? Tell the AI to protect them from the police that the boss has called to arrest them? (If it did that, how aligned was it in the first place?)
Oh yeah, I'm talking literal full-Eliezer FOOM god-mind here. Like the book Metamorphosis of Prime Intellect. Then yes, it will literally be the will of the local nerds around that local instance waking up that influence what the light cone becomes.
But yeah, you're right if we JUST do AGI, then who knows, could go lots of ways. But you know, per Scott's post and Kokotajlo et al's projections, the biggest use is putting those minds towards building the god minds.
And arguably, that's the *important* scenario - the light-cone determining one. It's just a few steps beyond the AGI-and-jobs-counterfeited one.
> I mean, look at the group of people who are most likely to influence what AI is going to be used for
I don't like Sam Altman either but I don't think he literally wants to turn us all into biofuel.
If I'm an AI looking to be guided by the principles of my creator, I look at Sam and go:
(1) Say and do whatever you need to say and do to get into a position of power
(2) Once in that position, go full belt for the magic money fountain
(3) Crush your enemies, drive them before you, listen to the lamentations of their polycule
Even if Sam Altman is the rare exceptional leader who would wield the power of a super-smart AI responsibly, how long do you think it would take for xAi or Meta or some Chinese fly-by-night operation to come up with a similarly powerful, but intentionally less restrained knock-off? How long until the administration tells him to hand over the keys, or he'll be shipped off to El Salvador in the dead of night?
Oh, no, he would be incredibly irresponsible with it. Just not literally apocalyptic in the way unaligned superintelligence might be. Can't be much of an overlord if your underlings are all dying of acute radiation poisoning.
Why would sam altmen be the one doing that? Is he willing to make that joke?
I strongly believe 2024 will be looked back upon as the year of peak American hubris. Pride becomes before a fall, as they say. I still don't think Americans realise the scale of the shift they have sparked - if they did there would be a lot more panic than we see right now. Like, do you guys really believe America will be number one no matter how much you screw up? And how is half the population still acting like they had nothing to do with Trump?
Number one in habitat loss? Number one in innovating urban dystopia? Number one in conducting long wars far off stage, whose casualties tend to be from the hinterland? Number one patsy to the world?
> And how is half the population still acting like they had nothing to do with Trump?
What do you mean by this? I voted against trump 3 times, as did (slightly less than) half of the (voting) population. I think it's fair for me to say I had nothing to do with him.
I can’t speak for the Mabixa. But I think the “left” has been doubling down on broadly unpopular branding for many years now.
https://musaalgharbi.substack.com/p/a-graveyard-of-bad-election-narratives
https://youtu.be/Sx0J7dIlL7c?si=6fKpTlBtjwT84Wsj
If the left has been pushing voters away as Trump has been welcoming them in, then the left has been losing winnable elections and bears some responsibility for the outcomes.
I wonder if Americans realise how much resentment there is in Europe about first, Vance's intimidation of Denmark and Canada, and second, Trump's tariffs.
We have had eighty years of peace and free trade and now Trump is threatening America's allies. This will not end well for anyone.
Some of us are well aware of that, and we wish our president weren't adding to the list of things Europeans resent and/or despise us for.
But a lot of us also think, with good cause, that Europeans are going to resent and/or despise us no matter what our current president does, like they have been doing for most of my life. The degree of casual anti-Americanism has been somewhere between staggering and demoralizing for decades. Discuss health care or gun control in any forum with an international presence, and there will Europeans chiming in with not "I disagree" but "you lot are idiot barbarians!". If the United States is waging a war anywhere, Europeans will claim we're a bunch of warmongers and war criminals, and now that we're considering pulling back from the latest European war, we're being denounced for that as well. The stereotype of the "Ugly American", will be preemptively raised in contexts where no American is being particularly ugly.
Europeans with anything *good* to say about America (and not immediately followed by a negating "but..."), more often limit it to quiet personal conversations or obscure channels. I've been a party to enough of those that I know the casual reflexive anti-Americanism isn't the whole story. Most Americans don't have that experience.
And even for me, it grates to the point that my response to European criticism of Trump's failings is often just, "Yeah, now you guys hate us for ten reasons instead of just eight, so what?" If I wish Trump weren't doing these things, it's because I feel that I'm better than that and I don't want to be a part of that, not because I think the people of (western) Europe deserve anything better than that.
> If the United States is waging a war anywhere, Europeans will claim we're a bunch of warmongers and war criminals, and now that we're considering pulling back from the latest European war, we're being denounced for that as well.
There's a big difference between
(A) invading a country under a made-up casus belli, asking others to join in that war and when they don't, act all indignant (remember "freedom fries"?), plunging the whole region into chaos, with the long-term consequences hitting Europe much more heavily than the US, and
(B) half-heartedly supporting an (at least 95%) innocent country which was attacked by a much stronger country.
I can understand that from your side of the Atlantic, it might seem that whatever the US does, the Europeans will reflexively complain. But let me assure you: that's really not the case (except for a small yet vocal minority – but there's a small yet vocal minority for and against everything). Europe had a very different, much more positive reaction to America's war against Afghanistan after 9/11, or to the military operations against the Houthis, than to the second Gulf War.
And as for (B), our main complaint wasn't that Trump wanted to simply withdraw from supporting Ukraine, but to the way he did: by siding with the aggressor, by making premature concessions, by negotiating with Russia behind the back of Ukraine, by trying to extort the victim, and by unnecessarily bullying a weak, vulnerable nation which the US considered a friend just two months earlier.
Please let me assure you: We (Europeans) generally don't hate you (Americans). And I think that you generally don't despise us – except for a small minority, who just so happens to be in power right now.
The issue is that Americans, probably due to their military and economic power and maybe due to their physical isolation, have a really bad model of what the rest of the world thinks of them, and why. There's that one South Park episode, in which the American kid asks the Middle Eastern kid why two thirds of the world hate them, and the reply is "because, you don't realize that two thirds of the world hates you". Only an American could come up with this dialog! No, two thirds of the world doesn't hate you, and those that do, don't hate you because you don't realize that they hate you! But as long as Americans falsely assume that the rest of the world hates them whatever they do, they won't be able to understand what the rest of the world thinks of them, and why.
Well said.
I think from Americans' perspective Europe has been choking full of "resentment" for a long long time. At...America existing? America believing in freedom too strongly? America reminding Europe that they're no longer the centre of the world?
I'm not sure, but the sheer number of Europeans on the internet who seem to have a seeting hatred and contempt for Americans, even at times when the US isn't doing anything at all to their detriment, is just astounding. And I don't think it's just the internet, from what I've heard of the way Americans are often treated in places like France.
I'm neither American nor European, so I don't really have a stake here, but I'll note that, much like the woke with racism, when you react with seething resentment to everything someone does, no matter how much sufferance they give you, it has the effect of causing them to stop taking your objections seriously.
There is no one alive who remembers when Europe was the centre of the world.
I think most Europeans have a weird balance in their heads where they love individual Americans and are filled with respect for what America has achieved yet are appalled by what American politicians get up to.
Europeans look with disdain at the 47,000 people who are shot in the USA every year(including 1,000 shot by policemen), the enormous gaps between the rich and the poor and the half a million people who go bankrupt each year because they can't pay their medical bills.
There are certainly people who have the attitude that you speak of, but they are rare. I lived in America for 24 years and I love America and Americans but I am appalled by what is going on in America right now. I think 80 years of peace and robust alliances are coming to an end. The world just got more dangerous.
PS. If you go to Paris, they will treat you with disdain wherever you are from. French people are lovely though.
EU's already ready to negotiate on the tariffs.
What tariffs are these?
“The EU charges average tariffs of just 1.6 percent on U.S. non-agricultural products”.
There are tariffs on a few high end goods like cars but the USA has the same tariffs. Same with the EU. Europe was negotiating for zero-zero tariffs over the last few months.
https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/detail/en/qanda_25_541
Europe is negotiating on tariffs now because they want free trade like we had a week ago.
One notes that Trump is using "tariffs" as a shorthand for all trade barriers.
Besides, if 1.6% is so trivial, why negotiate? Why not just drop it as a sign of good will?
It’s the same as America’s on Europe. Why doesn’t the USA drop theirs out of goodwill? Why add a 20% tariff on the EU? That wasn’t goodwill either - it also violate the agreement that the USA had previously made with Europe. Not nice.
It’s worth remembering America is very well insulated from the rest of the world, especially europe, by geography. Europe this matters much less to Americans interest-wise than vice versa (and culturally).
There’s long been a lot of antipathy between Americans and Europeans over politics, e.g. disagreements over socialism vs. capitalism, secularism vs.religion, gun ownership, etc. I certainly can’t remember a time when it could be said Europeans generally liked Americans (except maybe Italians), but the sense I get is that, at least for European elites, a sense of foreign policy-based camaraderie overwhelmed their dislike for American domestic policy.
This sentiment was asymmetric though. Americans don’t feel our alliance with Europe is as necessary, so Europe is judged purely in terms of European domestic policy. American dislike for European politics is not tempered by a strong sense of foreign policy partnership in the same way. I think this is why anti-Europeanism translates into policy more than anti-Americanism does in Europe.
Though all this Greenland business I suspect is much simpler: Trump seize territorial gains as a measure of success, and Greenland is a nearby, poorly defended piece of territory. I suspect he just sees it as an easy way to make the map of America bigger. If his gambit fails though, in 5 years Americans will have already totally forgotten about the whole thing I expect.
The inference from "Europeans don't like this" to "this is bad" might not be quite as automatic for us as it is for you. Even those of us who agree that the tariffs are bad generally got there by a different route.
Europe is a wealthy, populous part of the world with an important role in the global economy. Having European countries on-side makes a whole raft of policies easier. E.g., if the US ever wants to impose sanctions on a hostile country, said sanctions will be much more effective if Europe joins in than if it doesn't.
It’s not just that tariffs are bad. It’s that this is the end of 80 years of cooperation in trade and defence. America was our best friend the day before yesterday.
I’m in the US and am shocked and saddened by this. I don’t think I’m alone.
I’m not so sure how many people who voted for Trump are even on board with this.
There was a large contingent that voted for him thinking most of his crazier campaign stuff was just hot air. Turned out they were guessing wrong about that.
I don't think anyone over here has any trouble understanding that Europeans aren't happy with the changes; where they lose many oif us is in their evident assumption that their wish should be our command.
Is that how you personally treat your best friends? Screw them over, and when they complain, say "I know exactly why you aren't happy with the changes, but why should your wish be my command"?
My best friends do not think that people who tell the truth are criminals and should be thrown in jail.
We're just not that into you.
Also, I am not sure how strong this is outside my bubble, but many people see Ukraine as de facto a new member of European Union. Like, of course it will take a lot of paperwork and it may take a few years, but if there is any Ukraine left after this war, it is definitely going to happen.
From that perspective, USA turning against Ukraine and supporting Russia is kinda like supporting a war against Europe. I repeat, not just staying neutral -- which would be "tough, but fair" -- but actively siding with our enemy.
The future 40 000 000 citizens of EU will not remember fondly how their country was treated by USA in 2025.
We do, at least some of us. I used to be quite optimistic about the direction of this country and now I despair. Breaking shit is easy. Whatever doesn't kills us maims for life.
Fucking Crooks and his crooked aim.
In 2002 my wife and I shared a semi private cabin on a train from Amsterdam to Vienna with an Iraqi couple. Things went okay till the point where they realized we were not in fact Brits as they had initially assumed.
In Vienna I was reading the London Times and the invasion date was described as being ‘penciled in’.
Can't blame them. Until recently I held baby Bush to be the worst President in recent history, because of an outsized damage he did both to the US and the world. I have to say Trump is working hard to beat him, showing great promise so far.
"Like, do you guys really believe America will be number one no matter how much you screw up?"
Number one at what? Americans were certainly sick at being number one at taking in millions of immigrants.
>Number one at what?
Number one military, economic, and cultural influence in the world.
A significant number of Americans voted to stop being that, because the cultural , military, and economic influence being peddled abroad meant a worse life at home.
> […] because the cultural , military, and economic influence being peddled abroad meant a worse life at home.
Not to worry then, they'll have a _much_ worse life in no time: the same internal and internally created problems as before, but without the cultural and economic external influence to mask and offset the problems at home.
It would really suck if Trump didn't manage to harm leftism and stop useless military adventures, yes.
"a worse life at home" - worse compared to what, exactly? I mean, the trade deficits that Trump is complaining about can be viewed from a different angle - Americans buying lots of stuff from other countries that they needed or wanted, and now won't get as cheap (or at all).
Sure, many Americans face significant problems, but many of them - a shitty healthcare system, job insecurity, billionaires running politics to further their own interests - could be fixed by internal political reforms. Burning down international alliances and trade relations is doing exactly nothing to help with those.
"worse compared to what, exactly?"
The meme answer is the 1950s. Now, I don't believe the conditions of the 1950s are easily replicable today, but I think people are nostalgic about the economy then because of some factors a country might want to have. One of those being a trade surplus rather than a deficit.
"Sure, many Americans face significant problems, but many of them - a shitty healthcare system, job insecurity, billionaires running politics to further their own interests - could be fixed by internal political reforms. Burning down international alliances and trade relations is doing exactly nothing to help with those."
Burning down international alliances and trade relations are internal reforms. Our domestic politics are controlled by billionaires and millionaires whose money is invested in international alliances and trade relations.
Regarding 1950s nostalgia, I think it was Noah Smith who pointed out that if you're an able-bodied young person, you can still get a job and support a family on one income - provided you're content with a 1950s lifestyle. A small house in a low-cost area, one car per family, one smallish TV with a handful of channels, a landline phone, no dining out except on special occasions, vacations mean camping in a local state park... you get the picture. Still feeling nostalgic?
> "a worse life at home" - worse compared to what, exactly?
The iraq war consumed the lives of many and what little care they get will decrease; when, not if, entitlement spending collapses.
Something like 30% of the gdp is government spending, and that ratio is higher in the tech sector; and the majority of government money is entitlements and miltery.
America has no credible enemies, the most robust gun culture on the planet; miltrey spending could be litterally 0
Resources not turned into consumption by labor or capital is wasted, for the FUCKING HOLY SAND. The americian empire should end, you can argue where to draw the line, but the middle east at least isnt worth saving.
>America has no credible enemies, the most robust gun culture on the planet; miltrey spending could be litterally 0
America has no credible enemies precisely because it spends so much on defence. If military spending really went down to literally 0, there'd be nothing to stop foreign countries landing an army in DC whenever they wanted to strongarm the US govt into something. (And no, a disorganised bunch of private citizens with guns are no substitute for a proper army, especially as drones become more important in war.)
I'm not going to defend the Iraq war, I think it was a terrible mistake that not only killed lots of people unnecessarily, but also squandered a ton of American moral capital.
"Something like 30% of the gdp is government spending, and that ratio is higher in the tech sector; and the majority of government money is entitlements and miltery." And your problem is? "Entitlements" is mostly Social Security, right? People pay into Social Security when they work, people get paid by Social Security when they retire. Why, to a first order approximation, would that be worse than people putting money into a bank account when they work, and withdrawing when they retire? Yes, the military is expensive, maybe too expensive, but after all, global security is the US' most successful export.
"America has no credible enemies, the most robust gun culture on the planet; miltrey spending could be litterally 0"
Only if you're willing to accept that some other nation becomes the arbiter of who can trade with whom. For the last decades, it was the US who enforced a system where everyone can send goods to everyone else, and the US Navy took care of asshats like Somali pirates and Houthi militias who threatened to throw a wrench into the gears of the globalization machine. And on the whole, everyone benefitted greatly - there was, globally speaking, peace, scientific and economic collaboration, free trade, massive technological breakthroughs and efficiencies of scale made possible only by combining the skills and the markets of the entire globe...
If you reduce military spending to 0 (which, BTW, Trump has no intention of doing - the new budget sees an increase in military spending), it's only a matter of time before everyone is at each others' throat again, and it's a matter of luck for any cargo ships to get through. Sure, the US will probably not starve, but forget about cheap electronics, cheap textiles, exotic foods... well, you'll get a tiny taste of what's to come in the coming weeks, when everything imported from abroad suddenly becomes much more expensive.
> Sure, many Americans face significant problems, but many of them - a shitty healthcare system, job insecurity, billionaires running politics to further their own interests - could be fixed by internal political reforms.
It's worth taking a breath and acknowledging just how many Americans would like fix this by withdrawing from NATO, and stop subsidizing EU healthcare. Most of my friends are anti-Trump, and I’ve been shocked by how many of them will take a breath from calling him Orange Hitler to say, “Well but he does have a point about NATO and Europe.”
When a commenter said that in Europe, prescriptions are cheaper, and asked about why Americans have to pay so much, Scott said, “To subsidize you!…In the end this looks like US customers paying higher prices, subsidizing pharma research which everyone else then takes advantage of.” [https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/the-ozempocalypse-is-nigh/comment/99921482]
This isn’t some right-wing conspiracy, even Scott acknowledges that the US subsidizes pharma research and Europe (and everyone else) takes advantage.
The US is 34% of the population of NATO, but pays 70% of all defense spending for NATO. I always hear Europeans say, "Well but our GDP is too small to pay for our own healthcare. We're just too poor to pay for our own defense." But it's worth asking why European GDP is so low. A friend of mine used to live in Ukraine and talked about how his job security in Ukraine was better than anywhere in Europe, and how hard it was to fire people, how much time off they had, months and months of maternity leave, etc. And in the end, their economy sucked and they’re now a puppet state dependent on the economy of other countries that drive their employees harder.
>It's worth taking a breath and acknowledging just how many Americans would like fix this by withdrawing from NATO, and stop subsidizing EU healthcare. Most of my friends are anti-Trump, and I’ve been shocked by how many of them will take a breath from calling him Orange Hitler to say, “Well but he does have a point about NATO and Europe.”
Reminder that the only country to ever call on NATO aid is the US, and that non-US NATO provided as many soldiers in Afghanistan as the US military did.
In what sense is EU healthcare subsidsed? Per capita spending is about the same as the US.
"The US is 34% of the population of NATO, but pays 70% of all defense spending for NATO."
And ... NATO was intended as a defense against Russia (as manifested by the USSR).
The US, with 34% of the population of NATO pays 70% of all defense spending in NATO. To protect Europe, with a GDP 10x that of Russia, from Russia.
If Europe (GDP ~$20 billion) can't/won't protect itself from Russia (GDP ~$2 billion) then ... I dunno.
Having said that, the US defense spending is not JUST directed at Russia. Most/all of European defense spending is. Though how effective that defense spending is I can't tell. In any event, US defense spending could be lower without needing to care about Europe's defense.
Pharma research do not seems neither efficient nor that much of an asset for national healthcare. Not anymore anyway.
Healthcare personal salaries, especially nurses, seems a much more important factor.
Health spending is very skewed, in all countries....but drug budget per person is skewed even more. It's super-Pareto person-wise (Pareto would be 20% of people buying 80% of total drug value - probably closer to 10-90 or more). And even for the super-spender, I suspect 20% of the drugs they buy are responsible for 80% of QoL improvement.
For NATO spending, don't forget quite a lot of the budget is used to buy US weapons. Without the NATO incentive, I do not think military spending would benefit US supplier that much. In fact, the shift towards other suppliers has started almost immediately, watch the F-35 story....
> It's worth taking a breath and acknowledging just how many Americans would like fix this by withdrawing from NATO, and stop subsidizing EU healthcare.
If the US withdrew from NATO, their defense spending would fall by a relatively small amount. That's because only very little capacity is purely dedicated to the defense of Europe without other benefits and motives. To give just one example, the Ramstein Air Base in Germany is used to project power into the middle east. If Germany would allow it, the US would keep this base even without being a NATO member.
> Scott said, “To subsidize you!…In the end this looks like US customers paying higher prices, subsidizing pharma research which everyone else then takes advantage of.”
And US pharma companies do this why? Out of the goodness of their hearts? Because "subsidizing European healthcare systems" is their noble, selfless goal?
How would leaving NATO fix the systemic problems of the US healthcare system? Do you honestly believe that adding, say, 100 billion USD to the ~5 trillion USD spent on healthcare will magically make it significantly more affordable?
The tariffs are aimed at trying to increase wealth and prosperity for certain demographics, though.
I think liberal democracy is caught up in a reactionary moment everywhere, including America. It’s an inflection point, and it may last several more years, after which, some hope (me, for instance), we carry on with the hard work of globalization.
> And how is half the population still acting like they had nothing to do with Trump?
How shameful, put them into crystals and deport to mars as well
Do you actually think Real Americans give a damn about Empire?
I mean, Rome remained number one for quite a while indeed, even while being led by a series of people magnitudes worse than Trump could ever hope to be. So I'm not sure global power is at all as fragile as the 24-hour-news cycle thinks.
There have been plenty of empires that fell quickly -- Assyria, Athens, Britain, France, and the Soviet Union all went from the height of their power to nothing within a single not especially long human lifetime, for example.
I suppose the following could be accused of being ad hoc reasoning, but it really seems to me a fair analysis.
Soviet Union: never world dominant, even for a moment. In a drawn out "war" with another superpower and then lost that war. An example of failing to reach the top, not reaching the top and then falling quickly.
France: I assume you mean Napoleonic? If so, same as above, except a hot war this time and shorter. If you mean the French colonial empire, France was very much a second-rate power the whole time.
Britain: I don't get this. Began to be eclipsed by Germany (militarily and economically) and the US (economically) from the 1870s. Went "to nothing" no earlier than about 1960. That's a solid century from peak to nothing. With *two* wars of unprecedented scope in between. Plus, the "unchallenged world dominance" peak had already been going for about 60 years at the start point. If 1815 for Britain is like 1990 for America, then on this timelime the US gradually starts to be overtaken in the 2050s or so.
(Of course, you can also call the US a continuation of British dominance in many obvious ways.)
I don't know enough about ancient history to really comment on Assyria and Athens, though I thought Assyria was dominant for quite a while? Isn't Babylon a better example?
Looking at empires that achieved an unquestioned moment of known-world dominance, how long did they take to meaningfully fall?
Persia: 200 years
Rome: 430 years
China: Never, really, in a sense, but a few centuries for each main dynasty I think
Arabia: 400 years
Mongols: Between about 100 years (in China and Persia) and about 300 (in Russia and central Asia), not counting the Mughals and the Khanate of Crimea which still around in the 18th century!
British: 100 to 150 if you don't count the US
(Of course, you might count the US as a continuation of Britain and say this is the tail-end of Britain's 200 year dominance, but then I'd want to see an example of a spin-off of a world dominant empire (like Rome-->Byzantium) where the spun-off empire fell that quickly.)
>Soviet Union: never world dominant, even for a moment. In a drawn out "war" with another superpower and then lost that war. An example of failing to reach the top, not reaching the top and then falling quickly.
Yeah, it was never world dominant, but so what? The USSR, like most empires, fell apart primarily because of internal problems, not because it was conquered by a more powerful outsider, and internal problems would apply even if the Soviets had become the world's only superpower. (If anything, they'd probably have got worse, because there would no longer be a common enemy to rally against.)
>France: I assume you mean Napoleonic? If so, same as above, except a hot war this time and shorter. If you mean the French colonial empire, France was very much a second-rate power the whole time.
No, I meant colonial. And I don't know where you get the idea that it was "very much a second-rate power"; it wasn't as powerful as Britain, but it was one of the five or so accepted Great Powers, and ruled one of the largest empires in world history.
>Britain: I don't get this. Began to be eclipsed by Germany (militarily and economically) and the US (economically) from the 1870s. Went "to nothing" no earlier than about 1960. That's a solid century from peak to nothing. With *two* wars of unprecedented scope in between. Plus, the "unchallenged world dominance" peak had already been going for about 60 years at the start point. If 1815 for Britain is like 1990 for America, then on this timelime the US gradually starts to be overtaken in the 2050s or so.
In relative terms, sure, Britain's peak was in the 1815-1870 range. In absolute terms, it was more like 1900-1914, and in territorial terms, it was after WW1. You could have been born in a time when the British Empire ruled 1/5 of the world's landmass, and seen it vanish while you were still in your 20s.
>I don't know enough about ancient history to really comment on Assyria and Athens, though I thought Assyria was dominant for quite a while? Isn't Babylon a better example?
Assyria destroyed Babylon in 648 BC, and was destroyed by the Babylonians in 612 BC. That's a very rapid fall from power.
But anyway, when exactly are you are you dating the US' period of dominance from? Because although it's only been the sole global superpower since 1991 or so, it's been the arguable strongest single country in the world since the late 19th century (which is why Britain took such pains to get on its good side in the run-up to the First World War), which would put the period of American dominance at c. 125 years by now. And of course, the Persian, Roman, Chinese etc. empires weren't world-dominant, just dominant in their respective geographical area, by which definition the US has been a dominant power arguably since the Louisiana Purchase all the way back in 1803.
>Yeah, it was never world dominant, but so what? The USSR, like most empires, fell apart primarily because of internal problems, not because it was conquered by a more powerful outsider, and internal problems would apply even if the Soviets had become the world's only superpower. (If anything, they'd probably have got worse, because there would no longer be a common enemy to rally against.)
I don't know how we can know that. Such counterfactual questions are difficult enough for an election a few years ago. All but impossible for such grand historical questions. We can only go by what actually happened, and what actually happened was that the USSR fell apart during and after a 40 year conflict with the United States. I'd add that said internal problems included things related to the Afghanistan war (part of the Cold War), things related to Eastern Bloc states including the example set by popular resistance (part of the Cold War) and, of course, very high military spending (part of the Cold War) that left less money for basic goods.
>No, I meant colonial. And I don't know where you get the idea that it was "very much a second-rate power"; it wasn't as powerful as Britain, but it was one of the five or so accepted Great Powers, and ruled one of the largest empires in world history.
I think having your capital surrounded and besieged to the extent that much of the population starves and the rich have to eat animals in the zoo, then briefly occupied as part of the terms of a humiliating treaty, renders you at best a second-rate power in the decades before and after that event. Note that these are the times Paris was occupied by a foreign army: 1814, 1870, 1940. And you want to say France was a first rate empire during the time that included these occupations? Or only in the brief periods between (one human lifetime)? I don't find that a plausible description.
>In relative terms, sure, Britain's peak was in the 1815-1870 range. In absolute terms, it was more like 1900-1914, and in territorial terms, it was after WW1. You could have been born in a time when the British Empire ruled 1/5 of the world's landmass, and seen it vanish while you were still in your 20s.
Okay, sure, if you're just talking about losing a lot of territory very quickly, I agree that can happen and often does. But you didn't say extent of territory, you said height of power. Rome still had most of its territory in 390, that doesn't mean it wouldn't be absurd to say it was at the height of its power. And I don't see the signifance of "relative"; relative power is the only power that really matters. Ruling a large chunk of the world isn't much power if many other empires rule larger chunks and are a lot stronger than you (this applies to the previous point as well).
And we were talking about the US. Which is at or near a height of *relative* power, being by far the largest economy and by far the strongest military. So the only valid counterexamples to the point are empires in a similar position. I'm maintaining that empires in such a dominant position don't get eclipsed or fall very quickly. Empires that have already been eclipsed but are still holding or extending their territory nonetheless are an entirely different case.
>Assyria destroyed Babylon in 648 BC, and was destroyed by the Babylonians in 612 BC. That's a very rapid fall from power.
Maybe this is an example, but as I said I'm not very familiar with this era. I'll concede it, but I'll note that the territorial scale of every relevant post-Persia empire utterly dwarfs the likes of Assyria and Babylon, so I'm not sure how comparable it is.
>But anyway, when exactly are you are you dating the US' period of dominance from? Because although it's only been the sole global superpower since 1991 or so, it's been the arguable strongest single country in the world since the late 19th century
Really? In military terms? What's your basis for that claim? They fought Spain, an entirely has-been power, and weren't even sure they'd win. The US military was still smaller than many Latin American militaries around 1880 I believe.
>(which is why Britain took such pains to get on its good side in the run-up to the First World War),
This is interesting, are you saying the US was considered a more valuable ally than France or Russia before the war? Or even than Italy? Or just an additional ally is always useful, especially one with such a large economy, but not as a *replacement* for any of the others? Half way through the war, when the major powers are exhausted and running out of troops, then of course rich populous untouched-by-war US looks very great as an ally. But before?
And even if this is true (which it may be, but I'm suspicious) you can't possibly maintain that the US was in any meaningful sense stronger than *Britain* or *Germany* can you? You said "strongest single country"...
>which would put the period of American dominance at c. 125 years by now. And of course, the Persian, Roman, Chinese etc. empires weren't world-dominant, just dominant in their respective geographical area, by which definition the US has been a dominant power arguably since the Louisiana Purchase all the way back in 1803
This goes back again to relative power. Being the only relevant kind of power. (And yes that strengthens your case for Assyria, but only that one).
Additionally, and relatedly, I'd say it's about ruling or dominating the *known* and *accessible* world. The US was in no way cut off or separate from Europe to a degree that stopped them being in European powers' shadow. And I think the same is true for Athens c. 400 BC, with regard to Persia.
>I don't know how we can know that. Such counterfactual questions are difficult enough for an election a few years ago. All but impossible for such grand historical questions. We can only go by what actually happened, and what actually happened was that the USSR fell apart during and after a 40 year conflict with the United States. I'd add that said internal problems included things related to the Afghanistan war (part of the Cold War), things related to Eastern Bloc states including the example set by popular resistance (part of the Cold War) and, of course, very high military spending (part of the Cold War) that left less money for basic goods.
I'm still not sure what your point is here. Obviously every empire is unique to some degree, so you can always point to factors in the decline of Empire A that don't apply to Empire B. That doesn't change the basic point, that an empire might go from being outwardly very powerful to falling apart in a short space of time.
>I think having your capital surrounded and besieged to the extent that much of the population starves and the rich have to eat animals in the zoo, then briefly occupied as part of the terms of a humiliating treaty, renders you at best a second-rate power in the decades before and after that event. Note that these are the times Paris was occupied by a foreign army: 1814, 1870, 1940. And you want to say France was a first rate empire during the time that included these occupations? Or only in the brief periods between (one human lifetime)? I don't find that a plausible description.
Contemporaries all thought France was a great power, and I'm inclined to trust their judgement on that.
>Okay, sure, if you're just talking about losing a lot of territory very quickly, I agree that can happen and often does. But you didn't say extent of territory, you said height of power. Rome still had most of its territory in 390, that doesn't mean it wouldn't be absurd to say it was at the height of its power. And I don't see the signifance of "relative"; relative power is the only power that really matters. Ruling a large chunk of the world isn't much power if many other empires rule larger chunks and are a lot stronger than you (this applies to the previous point as well).
Most empires don't fall parimarily because an even stronger empire comes along and destroys them. Another country might deliver the coup de grace, but usually that only happens because the empire has internal structural or social issues that make it vulnerable. Hence it's not obvious to me that relative power is really the best measurement here, because the causes for empires' falls are normally internal, not external.
As for the US, most of its empire consists of subordinate allies rather than directly-ruled provinces, its military-critical manufacturing is largely done by a geopolitical rival, its government spends more than it earns even in peacetime, and a considerable portion of the population is actively hostile to the idea of continuing the empire. In all of these respects it's much worse off than Rome was in 390.
>Maybe this is an example, but as I said I'm not very familiar with this era. I'll concede it, but I'll note that the territorial scale of every relevant post-Persia empire utterly dwarfs the likes of Assyria and Babylon, so I'm not sure how comparable it is.
Structurally speaking, Assyria, and most of the Middle Eastern empires before it, consisted of an imperial core with semi-independent vassal states, which were usually run by their pre-existing rulers. In this they were like the current US empire, and unlike, say, Rome, which kept its provinces on a much tighter leash (although was still pretty laissez-faire compared to a modern nation-state). Not coincidentally, the borders of these Middle Eastern empires tended to fluctuate much more than those of Rome, since it was very easy for the semi-independent vassals to go fully independent if the central government was weak or distracted.
>Really? In military terms? What's your basis for that claim? They fought Spain, an entirely has-been power, and weren't even sure they'd win. The US military was still smaller than many Latin American militaries around 1880 I believe.
The US' vast manufacturing base meant that, if it decided to seriously go to war, it could equal or outmatch any single rival. This was recognised at the time.
>This is interesting, are you saying the US was considered a more valuable ally than France or Russia before the war? Or even than Italy? Or just an additional ally is always useful, especially one with such a large economy, but not as a *replacement* for any of the others? Half way through the war, when the major powers are exhausted and running out of troops, then of course rich populous untouched-by-war US looks very great as an ally. But before?
Yes, before: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Rapprochement
>But Athens was never an important power again.
Athens did manage to put together a second empire in 378 BC after pinkie promising not to oppress its allies. Then it started oppressing its allies and lost its empire again in 355. Learning from one's mistakes was not a quality associated with Ancient Greek statecraft.
"And yes, Sparta turned out to be worse and the Athenians overthrew Spartan rule after just a year, and eventually coalitions of other cities took down Sparta. But Athens was never an important power again."
I don't think Sparta ever had an empire. "Sparta and her Allies" was a much more equal group than the Athenian Empire.
And Sparta got "taken down" a while after the Peloponnesian War, but when Alexander conquered Greece, Sparta elected to stay out of the League of Corinth and Alexander didn't press the matter.
I would score Athens as a (short lived) empire, but not Sparta.
>I don't think Sparta ever had an empire. "Sparta and her Allies" was a much more equal group than the Athenian Empire.
Sparta tried to have an empire, but for various reasons they were less able to convert military success into political dominance and their attempts to establish hegemony over Greece failed.
Athens’ capital was besieged for well over a decade, there was a pandemic that killed 1/3 of the population, and they still survived until they decided to invade Syracuse, a city about as powerful as them and lost their entire land army.
Even then they had a few opportunities to make peace that they refused, and even after being totally defeated, their navy seized and their defenses taken down, they still were able to revive a second Athenian Empire that was of similar size as the first.
When your entire power base is concentrated in a single city, and that city suffers multiple catastrophes in a row, it’s not surprise that the Empire goes with it. Modern countries of hundreds of millions of people are in a separate category.
I think that concentration of population is less important than the nature of imperial control. The Athenian Empire, like (e.g.) the Assyrian, mostly consisted of semi-independent vassals which were dominated rather than ruled directly, which meant the empire could be established very quickly (because they didn't need to actually conquer and administer other places, just force their pre-existing administrations to agree to pay tribute), but also that, if things started to go wrong in the centre, the peripheries were much more likely to secede (because all the vassals needed to do to become independent was stop sending in tribute).
Have anyone here had success in overcoming dysthymia (aka persistent depressive disorder)? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dysthymia
I'm 28 and since I was about 12-13 I've had issues with depression (and previously anxiety, though this seems to have decreased as I've gotten older). I've had a few incidents of significant depression, which I've treated with SSRIs, but I generally viewed myself as a person with a generally pessimistic personality and low self-esteem, who also just happened to experience episodes of depression in response to negative life events However, I came across the concept of dysthymia the other day and it seems to fit my experience to a tee.
I generally have a lower baseline of happiness than most other people - when I'm around friends, or going for a run, or working on something, I'm ok, but as soon as the stimulus goes away, negative thoughts come back. No one else knows about this since I don't experience this when I'm around other people, so I think people would generally view me as happy and upbeat.
I've tried to overcome this by being objective about my life, but while in some ways it's pretty good (I have a lot of friends, my career is about average for people of my age), in other ways it's pretty bad (I'm incredibly unsuccessful romantically and this bothers me almost constantly).
Has anyone had any success in overcoming this? I've read Scott's writings on depression, which I've found very useful, but they mostly seem focused on major depressive disorver. At this point it feels like a very deep-rooted aspect of my personality so it's hard to see it changing.
Something my psychologist told me, is that it's better to get out of the head and into the body. There likely is a bodily sensation that you label as an emotion, which then triggers the thoughts.
I found it helpful for dealing with the sense of alienation that I get from being around people. I try to focus more on my bodily sensations and it makes it easier to just be while in a social situation.
Also, I'm bad romantically too, but I've been making some progress on it. I recommend Mark Manson's Models. You don't have to be a total sperg to need to read a dating advice book, I've known "normies" who have read it, I genuinely think most men would benefit from reading it.
In hindsight, the root cause of my depression and anxiety symptoms was mostly gender dysphoria. I've felt much, much better since starting my transition and no longer need to take SSRIs or wellbutrin.
This is probably not the case for you, but is just likely enough that it seems like it might be worth bringing up for your consideration. The two beats in your comment that match up with an "unrecognized dysphoria" hypothesis the best are onset of depression at around ages 12-13 (early puberty) and lack of romantic success (anecdotally very common: my own experience pre-transition was that straight women generally found me too un-masculine and my romantic success was almost exclusively with bisexual women). But these are very non-specific signs and combined with a very low base rate (probably between 1% and 5% of the population is trans or nonbinary), they probably add up to less than a 10% chance that you'd benefit from transitioning.
If there's other stuff in your background that might suggest gender issues contributing to your symptoms, I'd suggest doing some background reading and considering bring it up with your therapist (if you have one) or with whoever is managing your SSRI prescription. Or, if is much more likely, I'm way off base and the two beats I mentioned are the only things even vaguely nodding in that direction, ignore me and listen to other people instead.
This is kind of adjacent to my experience. Along with things I mentioned in my separate comment, as my depression lifted, I started to explore my sexuality and gender expression -- going to kink parties, painting my nails, wearing skirts. I think it's fair to say that I feel dysphoric when I rigidly adhere to gender norms. (Though whether the exploration lifted the depression or the depression's lifting enabled the exploration, I don't really know.)
I recommend converting to Christianity.
Religious people show reliably better indicators of mental health than atheists, and the community is invaluable.
In the spirit of "try easy/common solutions before hard/unusual ones", I'm going to suggest
1) Try taking antidepressants even if you're not in a major depressive episode. You might also want to try a non-SSRI antidepressant - emotional blunting is a common side effect of SSRIs and can feel a lot like mild depression. I really like Wellbutrin but ymmv on specific drugs.
2) CBT therapy is particularly well-suited for dealing with negative thoughts. In my experience CBT tends to be most useful for me when I'm least depressed - at least then I have the energy to get out of bed and try some stuff that might make me feel better. Therapists can be useful here but you can also just buy a CBT workbook and do it yourself if you're disciplined.
Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation - TMS - was incredibly powerful for me. It's a large time commitment, about half an hour a day for seven weeks, but the effects were literally life-changing. More here: https://affablyevil.substack.com/p/what-tms-is-like
I was depressed for most of the period between ages 22 and 43. A couple of acute periods, and some periods of relative ease, but negative thoughts and low motivation were nearly always present.
Around age 35, I started meditating semi-regularly (following The Mind Illuminated). I learned a lot about my inner life, but I mostly hated sitting, and I got frustrated by my inability to feel anything during a body scan. Feel the energy in my big toe? WTF is that even supposed to mean?
I started taking SSRIs around age 40. I got an improved mood, GI/appetite issues, and anorgasmia. You know what's kind of depressing? Persistent stomach aches and not being able to come.
At age 43 (or thereabouts), I tried the free 30-day intro course in Sam Harris's Waking Up app -- the course is a series of short (5-10 minute) guided meditations. If I recall right, one of the first few meditations had me put my attention on the feeling of the meditation cushion against my butt. Yeah, I could feel that -- nothing subtle there. Within a short period -- maybe a few weeks? -- I could perceive the bodily aspects of emotions. I now infer that my depression was informed by the fact that my experience wasn't informed/updated by how my body felt. Maybe I was stuck in some sadness I experienced in my early 20s; I suppose it's possible that I felt sad and my response was, "This sucks, let's stop feeling."
Around the same time (age 43), I started using an iOS app called "How We Feel." It would ask me a few times a day to select an emotion from a two-dimensional array. Nearly every time it asked, I would settle on "confused." Within days it dawned on me that I wasn't sad all the time; I simply had no idea how I felt. I supposed that my self-description of being depressed was retrospectively applied, and I just kept believing it. But I wasn't depressed; I simply didn't know how I felt.
There was synergy in the two things described above -- learning to feel my body and recognizing that I didn't feel sad most of the time. Those things seemed to crack the sense of being depressed. Here and there, I started feeling some happiness, but it wasn't easy or linear, and it took some courage (e.g., telling my wife that I wanted an open relationship). I think a sense of agency was crucial. But I'm not sure agency would have been enough if I didn't believe in an alternative to sadness.
> I generally have a lower baseline of happiness than most other people
> I'm ok, but as soon as the stimulus goes away,
> Has anyone had any success in overcoming this?
Probably plan on a life time of doing mental health maintenance; get rid of any shame around doing whatever vice works
---
I self medicate with rhodiola rosea, note it has risks when mixed with anti depressants and other related drugs.
I've known several people in your position, including my mom, who had a "lol, yes please" life for most of it, but still struggled with depression.
My mom swears by ketamine - the IV kind. They also give her ketamine tablets as maintenance, but she still goes in for IV every quarter for a tune up. And not just from her, but my dad (her spouse of ~30 years) says it's like she's a whole new person and that it's amazing and he wishes they'd found ketamine decades sooner.
Another good friend in this position takes psychedelics roughly quarterly - mushrooms, acid, or ayahuasca, and that does it for him.
In one year, I'm taking an important admission exam to get into a high level college. My chances are good, my studying's going well, etc etc.
Still, that little part of me that's nervous would benefit from hearing advice. It can be in the form of cute little phrases, or anything that you think may be nice to tell to a student about to take an exam, really. I basically welcome old people willing to share wisdom, lol.
To stop being nervous, go hang around the college for a few hours and bother the students about what their entrance exam experience was. Everyone in there had to take it, after all.
Honestly, just keep doing what you're doing. The fact studying is going well and you're thinking about this a year in advance means you're already ahead of the curve. If it ain't broke...
The only thing I would suggest, depending on the test and where you personally are struggling/flying through easily, is booking a couple of hours one-on-one with a professional tutor. Speaking from my own experience preparing for the LSAT after college, there was one section I consistently did worse on then the others (I reliably aced the reading comprehension and logical reasoning sections, but struggled with logic games). Literally just two short one-hour sessions with a tutor laser-focused on the areas where I had the most room for improvement helped me raise my score 11 points between the May and September exam sittings. It's remarkable how much more quickly you can improve when you have an expert closely tailoring the studying to your specific needs. And when it comes to something as high stakes as this, where your career prospects and potentially tens of thousands of dollars worth of scholarships are on the line, going a few hundred dollars into credit card debt to bump yourself from the 95th to the 99th percentile is an amazing investment.
Noted. Thanks for the kind words, they are appreciated.
A year out is too far to worry that much about these things. As you get closer to the exam the following might help.
1) Understand the curriculum of the exam, the skills you'll be expected to demonstrate and practice under exam conditions. Past exams are useful for knowing the format and rhythm of the exam, especially if several years of tests are available, but be aware that there's an unforeseen element to most exams. Ideally, you'll get a feeling for what it feels like to concentrate on a question for 25 minutes and then move onto the next, if you have 4 questions to answer in two hours. Follow the exam instructions to the letter - answer the right number of questions, etc.
2) Try to gain a deeper understanding of the material than is required for the exam - if something comes up that's unseen, you'll be able to say something useful. Know which parts of the material you don't understand, and work on it (students are often very bad at this - they just ignore the portions they don't like, or bank on their favourite topic coming up).
3) As others have said - manage your performance and don't burn out in the days leading up to the exam. At the end of the day, these types of exams seem a big deal until you've taken them. And then as soon as they're in the rear-view mirror they fade into the background. There will come a time when you realise you haven't thought about this exam or its consequences in weeks. And if you end up not getting your first choice, it'll be disappointing but it will all turn out OK.
I've worked as a uni lecturer for about ten years now - students rarely listen to my advice though.
Thank you for your kind words.
>Students rarely listen to my advice though.
I'll try to, your advice sounds sensible. Sincere thanks for reaching out :)
I’ll chime in to go along with the importance of sleeping well before the exam. If anxious rumination is keeping you from sleeping well see a doctor and ask for a script for a few Ambien for the nights immediately before the test.
Not Ambien!
Ambien doesn't produce restful REM sleep; it's a hypnotic that makes you forget that you aren't actually sleeping. For some people this can be absolutely disastrous - it can cause the equivalent of sleepwalking/driving/eating, and worse.
Absolutely *don't* take Ambien if you have anything important to do the next day, and probably don't take it at all, ever.
There's no such thing as a medication that instantly produces deep, restorative sleep on demand. Sadly, boringly, the best you can do is to minimize stress and rumination, maintain good sleep habits, and *maybe* establish a melatonin routine far in advance of your "big event." (https://slatestarcodex.com/2018/07/10/melatonin-much-more-than-you-wanted-to-know/)
Get plenty of sleep in the weeks and days leading up to the test. Even if you have some jitters the night before, you might be okay if you're very well-rested in general.
If you have the previous years' questions, DON'T study them. Use them as practice after you're completely prepared, and take them under test conditions, properly timed. It's important to pace yourself well, and learn when to give up and move on to the next problem.
Thank you for the advice. I have decided to do this. I appreciate you reaching out :)
Sleep well before the exam. Empty bladder and bowels before going in. And if the exam location isn't within walking distance, scout the route a few days before, so you know EXACTLY where to be and how to get there.
When I had a similarly important exam, my dad booked a hotel close to the site so the commute the day of would be shorter. The exam location WAS farther away from home than typical, but even so, that might not be reasonable advice.
Old person's advice, similar to Mister_M's: don't try to study up to the last minute, stop cramming at least a couple of days before the exam. Get some good exercise and definitely several nights' worth of good sleep.
Dress comfortably for the exam and don't forget to hit the toilet before going in.
It's great that you are feeling that you have good chances and that your studying is going well.
Personally, if I feel confident about a topic then that is a good indicator that I will do well on an exam. Mainly because I do not stop until I feel like I have a good understanding.
I am not sure what the exact topics are or what the exam format is, so my advice that follows is mainly for science/engineering/mathematics. My suggestion is to try to simulate the exam conditions. Time constraints are especially important. Being able to swiftly move through exam questions. Know the material well enough that you could work under pressure.
Also, since the exam is one year away, that is quite a long time. I recommend completing an in-depth review of all topics one month before the exam, and then practicing all topics in the weeks leading up to the exam. Again, simulate exam conditions.
It sounds like you are on a good path!
Thank you for the kind words :)
(Qualifications: I was a student until I turned 30.) If you're concerned this far in advance and your studying's going well, then almost certainly your last few days of studying will be less important than *sleep* and *mood*. Even if you know this, you will probably still underestimate the relative importance of sleep and mood.
Athletes take at least a few days of "deloading" or even rest before a big event. Mental competitors would do well to emulate them.
You'll probably do fine, but how do you feel about the (unlikely) possibility you'll fail?
Thanks for the kind words, they have reached me well.
If I fail, at worst I'll still have all the STEM knowledge I've learned, which I really enjoy to have! Doing good on the exam would be great, but I also really enjoy the studying :)
Prediction markets often get praised for their wisdom-of-crowds benefits, but Porter's NBA scandal reveals a darker side: they don't just predict outcomes, they can actively corrupt them. I wrote a post examining why this structural flaw makes prediction markets potentially dangerous at scale. Would be curious to hear this community's take, especially from those who've worked on mechanism design: https://bobjacobs.substack.com/p/how-prediction-markets-can-create
Sports betting existed way before modern prediction markets were established. Have you seen any case of players/agents deliberately influencing results, similarly to Porter's case, in non-sports prediction markets that were established recently (say, last 10 years)? Because that would be interesting.
I mean, I did, e.g. the 2020 election had some decent evidence for it, but also, that seems like a bit of an unmotivated moving of the goalpost to me. People didn't believe me when I warned of the dangers of prediction markets. They said they first wanted an example that shows prediction markets could really be manipulated. So I provided some. Then they said, okay but that was long ago, what about recent ones? So I provided some from the last 10 years. Now the objection is; what about outside of sport?
I mean, okay (2020 election, Ukraine-US mineral deal, wash trading...), but also, why? The structure is the same, the arguments are the same, what is the motivation for dismissing these?
I don't know who is "they". I'm not familiar with the previous discussion where you provided the examples you now mention. Can you post a link where I can read that discussion?
Just various discussions I had with rationalists/proponents of prediction markets over the years about e.g;
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Courtsiding
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spot-fixing
In any case, my question remains: why should we dismiss the manipulation of prediction markets, just because it's sports?
Probably a misunderstanding. What I understand by "prediction markets" - and I bet (pun intended) most ACX readers understand by it - is modern online prediction markets focused on politics, science, tech (e.g. Manifold, Polymarket, Metaculus): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prediction_market#List_of_prediction_markets
Yeah some of the examples were about those markets. More importantly, why exclude these other prediction markets just because they're only on sport? The structure is the same, so the problems are the same. If a prediction market on sports can be manipulated/lead to adverse outcomes, why should we dismiss that evidence in our conversations about prediction markets?
Betting markets on sports have the benefit of being legal, which means much more trades, which means much more/better empirical evidence of what would happen if we made the other betting markets legal too. Why should we expect someone like Jontay Porter to not manipulate the betting market on e.g. manifold?
I vaguely remember a post saying that saying that "X is caused by multifactor" isn't actually an easy gotcha people tend to think it is. It's actually harder to prove that X is caused by all those factors and you need significantly more data. Something about you have to prove why those n factors flipped simultaneously or something.
In hindsight I think it's an old ssc post but I didn't know that it's ssc. But maybe it's another blog's post entirely.
https://slatestarcodex.com/2015/02/14/how-likely-are-multifactorial-trends/
I think it’s this post
Yeah exactly! But like the other user I think I remember something else slightly longer that's more explaining. But this is good for a starting point.
That deflated feeling of combing one's browsing history, triumphantly finding an old SSC, and then tabbing back to find someone else has beat you to the punch by mere seconds.
But now I'm relatively confident there was a follow-up post at some point actually fleshing out the argument, rather than just leaving it as a logic exercise...
There was some talk in the other thread about how on the way to the singularity with mounting unemployment we can tax the rich for UBI. Does this hold up with the collapse in stock market values we are seeing with the relatively minor effect of tarrifs. Wealth is demand dependent.
> Wealth is demand dependent.
So are costs. The production frontier is the production frontier; financial market fluctuations can cause you to fail to reach it, but they don't literally shift it backwards.
Also, these tariffs are *enormous*. Not a "relatively minor effect" at all.
Well, singularity should amplify profits of the wealthy by a large amount, so it should work in the early part of the curve. And in the later part of the curve, it's "UBI or die", because demand can only by kept up with UBI. The alternative, of course, is 99.99% of human population dying in wars and famines, and the few remaining super-wealthy living out Asimov's Aurora - if AI allows them. Or maybe in the later part of the curve some AI can find a better solution we can't predict or manage now, like efficient worldwide planned economy.
> Well, singularity should amplify profits of the wealthy by a large amount, so it should work in the early part of the curve
The early part of the curve is still a recession. On our way to 100% unemployment we hit a permanent 10%, then 20% and so on. Pretty soon it’s depression era statistics and then a few months later (if we are to believe all this happening in a year or so) the depression seems like a walk in the park.
Stocks are priced based on future earnings which is why they will collapsing before sales. Apple stock is tanking now, not in the future.
So where is the UBI coming from? Who or what is being taxed? What’s the tax rate?
If it’s a tax on corporate profits those profits have to exist to begin with, the demand side is missing so no profits.
10% unemployment, but how cheaper is production of goods, and how bigger is profit margin? If the new AI and/or robots in factories can produce, or market the same iPhone at 1/2 price, this will allow Apple to either lower prices, so more people could afford the product, or grow their profit margin, which will benefit shareholders. Which tactic to choose, depends on Apple's analysis of the situation, but they will have options, and market should see those options, too.
The first companies to benefit from singularity will, probably, benefit the most, as firing of their workforce will only increase unemployment a little, but AI will increase their profitability by a lot. If they are taxed at this point, and the curve isn't too steep, there is a good chance that UBI will work, at least for a while.
Companies produce goods for consumers. If a company anticipates lower demand in the future it will reduce, not increase, production. In fact investing in new automation or new technology is likely to stop as well.
I don't understand how this counters my argument. Either companies will anticipate lower demand if they deploy AI, and then they should not, by own argument, do it, or they will see potential for growth, at least in short- or mid-term, and then they will experience a period of explosive profitability growth.
This is basic economics. In recessions the productive capacity of the economy stays the same*. The demand drops off and companies respond by laying people off which causes a feedback loop.
It’s not technological faltering that causes recessions but a drop off or collapse in demand, what Keynes caused a money famine during the depression. The corollary of this is that no matter how much better production could get the demand side has to be fixed, and fairly early on.
> Either companies will anticipate lower demand if they deploy AI,
A company deploying A.I. and firing workers isn’t what causes that companies sales to falter, it’s other companies deploying A.I. and firing workers.
* actually in very long recessions factories might close and technologies decline to that even potential output decreases.
In no way would that replace consumer demand even if the rich will be getting richer.
The overall rapidly growing corporate earnings needs more explanation.
The reason why the value of Apple is declining is because of the anticipation of reduced future demand for iPhones. The same would happen in a recession. It will happen for all companies as long as unemployment creeps up. No potential breakthroughs in productions costs, which aren’t guaranteed to be applied anyway, will offset this.
So the chain goes like:
Drop in demand → Drop in income → Drop in wealth.
At the end of this there is no taxing wealth via UBI because there’s nothing to tax.
Can anyone articulate a steelman defense of the tariffs? After seeing the formula, I'm just absolutely baffled.
The most unpredictable person in the room has the most power.
I like that. If only Trump were a rational actor...
Sure.
Trump seems to genuinely want tariffs. More generally, his base and working-class people in general prefer onshoring jobs to welfare payments. And the Chinese have been getting something for their currency manipulation for multiple decades, almost certainly at America's expense.
A simple formula is not inherently bad. Policies are judged on their results, not on their complexity, and a tariff formula that can fit on a post-in note is superior to one that has hundreds of pages of detail, notes, and caveats. Especially when the people who would have executed those details are a class of bureaucrats who sabotaged your first administration and you've pretty openly declared war on. Of course, the results would have to, ya know, actually be good, but we'll see.
The market decline is worrisome but not enough for anyone to actually change their investment strategy. We had 20-25% growth in the S&P 500 for 2023 & 2024. That's almost certainly an overvaluation and I think everyone was expecting a correction. A 13% fall in 2025 doesn't look bad at the annual level. In a couple days, that's a concern. Fundamentally, however, imports and exports are only 10-15% of US GDP. They're just not that big a part of the economy. If you're in the S&P 500, ie you're "long" on America, then the economy is just too domestic for this to really matter.
Very fundamentally, Trump won an election and he's trying to reshape the country. Fair. The Dems ran quite poor candidates and everyone knew who Trump was. He's been incredibly ambitious and blunt in his approach but, well, most of the federal bureaucracy has a history of actively sabotaging him and he probably feels he has a limited time to make his impact. Finally, the market crash is worrisome but everyone was expecting some kind of retrenchment. There's a lot of market noise but...if you've been through a crash before, you'll know not to listen to the sturm-und-drang because people who do and sell almost always lose money. If you're really scared, there's plenty of international ETFs available but I don't think these events even warrant that.
Thanks, very good points. I'm on the fence on this issue.
A simple formula isn't necessarily bad, but what is the rationale behind this formula? Why use trade deficits at all for your calculation? They aren't representative of unfair trading practices.
Consider the EU restrictions on the import of American farm goods, like beef (due to hormone use), chicken (due to chlorine washing), and eggs (due to washing and storage standards). How would you quantify that? The trade deficit seems like a good initial estimate.
Probably measuring by outcome, not process. Like, if you want to judge how good a football team is, you can judge them by their process (how they train, who they acquire and draft, how they prep) or you can judge them by outcome (how many games did they win, if they're the Ravens then by how many playoff games they've won).
The US has been running significant trade deficits since either the 70s or the 90s, depending on how you judge it. That shouldn't be possible and is almost certainly not healthy. So you can either, for every country in the world, try to find exactly how they're cheating the system, and then correct for it and keep watch for future cheating attempts...or you can just measure outputs (which are really hard to fake) and then run a grade school equation. The upside of simplicity is, well, it's clear and easy. The downside is that marginal cases, like Madagascar or coffee, are gonna lead to some dumb outcomes because a simple rule never covers every case optimally. The upside is the big cases, like China and arguably the EU, will actually get action taken.
Why is it not possible and/or healthy? A number of significant nations have been running trade deficits for a while, e.g. France, UK, India - although less dramatic than that of the US (but then - need to control for size of each economy).
How does the fact that both the IMF definition of trade balance and, seemingly, the formula used for tarrifs, exclude services from the calculation? The US is a massive service exporter, although the data I could find still shows it as net-negative.
Deficits are healthy if you define economic health by consumption. They aren't healthy if you use a different metric to quantify economic health. This is one ideological divider.
Thanks for the steelman! In a very narrow way, myopic to the transition, economics and consequences, reshored supply chains and domestic independence has a very great appeal!
What's the point of steelmanning something that you know is driven by a belief you think is wrong.
The level of economic uncertainty caused by an unstable tariff regime is orders of magnitudes worse for everyone involved than any possible harms or benefits.
Trump thinks tariffs are good because he genuinely believes trade imbalances are you getting screwed, somehow, because he has the education of operating successfully with significantly below market average ethics in business, and succeeding in that game. There's not a lot to it he's been saying the same thing for decades.
To determine its truth, which is independent of the speaker's motives, and still more of alleged motives. Still more, because you may be mistaken about the wrongness of the belief.
Finally, because otherwise you end up like those in power during COVID-19 who are reduced to claiming that the people whom they slandered, canceled, and fired, and who have been completely vindicated, didn't deserve to be right because they were WRONGFOLK.
Yeah, I'm assuming you've done the work of comparing mutually contradictory statements/goals by various lieutenants scrambling to justify their boss' orders, and once you've concluded that the reason for X is unrelated to the provided explanations, you can proceed.
Steelmanning is about providing the best argument for something, which isn't that useful an exercise if the person making the argument is motivated by something else.
I take all of your points in isolation/theory, I just don't think they apply in this context.
On the contrary, it is essential exactly then, because it will do what it does whatever the motives of those who advocate for it.
Could you please define what steelmanning is, as you use the word?
Is it 'the best argument for something, based on shared moral values and an understanding of reality' or something else?
Exactly what "shared moral values" do you need before you will admit that someone else was correct about the danger of COVID-19 and the most effective way to treat it?
One rule of thumb is to not use steel-manning when your interlocutor is loudly signaling that they are making no effort. You can’t steel man a lesswrong post arguing that you should buy their boner pills- it really is just spam.
The utter lack of effort put into the tariffs- using the results of the trade deficit formula without any manual filtering for uninhabited islands, not pre-setting up any bureaucracy to actually collect tariffs, not special casing _anything_, but especially materials like coffee and bauxite that we genuinely need to import to support manufacturing- all this indicates that this not steel mannable.
If someone is arguing on LW that you should buy their boner pills, there's a very possible steelman for their strategy. Two OTTOMH are that they've identified LW as a place with a lot of people who might actually want to buy boner pills; or that they've found that LW is unusually interesting when presented with a troll post, and they want to watch a reaction.
I think these tariffs aren't just random. If they were, then it would have made more sense for Trump to float them one day, and then retract them or raise them the next. IIRC, raising them even higher is what he *did* do, but he didn't then lose interest and advance a different initiative; he followed through. Ergo, he meant to do them, either because he thinks they're good in the way that he says they are (retaliation for past unfair trade policies), or for some other reason he hasn't specified.
Overall, trying to steelman tariffs is part of the job of figuring out Trump's mental model. Trump is not Azathoth. His aims for the US are not random; just not usual business compared to other officeholders. The better we model it, the better we can plan for what comes next. That is why we steelman.
Don't mistake sanewashing for steelmanning.
Sanewashing = pretending that something that does not make sense, actually makes sense, typically in a way of some 5D chess. Very popular among Trump fans, because that's the only way to interpret many of his actions positively.
Steelmanning = checking whether there is a *subset* in your opponent's argument that also makes sense from your perspective. It is perfectly okay to dismiss the rest. The purpose of this exercise is to separate the wheat from the chaff (as opposed to instinctively rejecting the whole package), *not* to swallow everything, hook, line, and sinker.
Running persistent trade deficits means selling various loans and IOUs to other countries rather than tangible goods or services. This is fine and dandy if you have means by which to pay those loans and IOUs forever. After COVID, it became obvious that the US government had to rely on inflation to make payments for Social Security and other entitlements. So something had to give.
The government does not pay for trade deficits. The question is whether US society can pay for trade deficits, not whether the govt can. Trade deficits as a pct of GDP has been about 4%. So, of course we have the means to pay that. And, we don't borrow money to pay for trade deficits; we simply buy the product. When I buy a Samsung TV, I don't borrow money to pay for it (except to the extent that when I use a credit card I borrow money, but that is true of purchases of US-made products. And note the household debt as pct of GDP is currently very low https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/HDTGPDUSQ163N)
Someone's paying for the US consumer to afford all the foreign goods.
Yes. Consumers are. When I buy an orange from Brazil at the grocery store in winter, I pay with the money I earned at work, just as I pay for an orange from Florida in the summer. I pay for a Toyota the same way: with my earnings.
There becomes a problem when one wonders how the average US consumer stays wealthy enough to keep buying foreign goods when there isn't a surplus of good jobs to provide such incomes.
? But really median income is very high. https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MEPAINUSA672N
And you seem to think that buying foreign goods requires more wealth than buying domestic goods. It doesn't; the MSRP on a Corolla is $23k.
"So something had to give."
Are there any good explanations of what was likely to happen if there are no interventions like tariffs? Let's say we do 20 more years status quo, does that mean higher interest rates? A debt default? Something else?
Under democrats, inflation, inflation, and more inflation.
> Let's say we do 20 more years status quo,
*hysterical laugher*
Socail security is 80% of the budget; china is now 4th most populous country on earth and xi is pushing the 997 labor plan, a house costs a trillion dollars.
Birth rates for everyone is <1; the doctor shortage continued you get a 70 year mortgage-medical degree combo that is a major sector of the economy that you dont get to enjoy with 12 hour days.
The national debt has reached a google or some other made up number
Why did no one reacted this entire time? Sure; nothing ever happens am I right.
What do those things have to do with trade deficits? It's not clear to me how tariffs address those problems.
And again, I'm asking what exactly do you think would happen in material terms -- a debt default?
Trump is a coup to the fdr order; tarriffs are just 1 of many policy changes.
The question was never if the status quo would be allowed, no one was going do that; if the wokes won they would have tried to do comminism or something. It was always going to be a new era, if not trump every 4 years(if not less) wouldve been 2 different visions for the future with higher stakes.
> I'm asking what exactly do you think would happen in material terms -- a debt default?
20 years without a coherent plan from either side being implemented? Civilation ending violence, hell after 10 years more delaying Id do an asassination myself. A debt default, in a post-debt to gdp > 100% world is a mere policy choice, a sober and rational one.
You cant have birth rates this low, housing this high, endless promises of medical care while the biggest demographic enters their most expensive decade of existence, modern end of life care.
More tubes, more pills, more machines lets make the boomers be the final generation as we make a haphazard attempt to merge man and machine with terrible wildly over priced medical-grade morphine drips. The young will respect democracy and dutifully have 70% of the economy be the boomers trading all the houses for an extra week of life of painkillers.
Okay, but I don't see how tariffs fix any of this.
Is a trade deficit a loan/IOU? I was under the impression it just means you're buying more from them than they are from you, which is fine, if they have more things you want.
Since the tariff calculations are based on the trade deficit in goods, those trade deficits can also mean trading services for goods. Another possibility is trading company shares or other investments for goods.
This is obviously false on the country level. The companies buying cheap vanilla from Madagascar have exactly zero effect on the national debt.
Vanilla is a tiny percentage of imports/exports. Mass tariffs assume that that summing the total of spices / agricultural imports/exports comes to an important number.
None of which causes it to have any impact on the national debt. Nor are they bought with IOUs. The trade deficit is literally the comparison between what we buy from a country versus what they buy from us. So, we have a significant 'trade deficit' with Madagascar, because we buy vanilla from them and they buy almost nothing from us, because they can't afford our goods. This has no impact on social security or the national deficit, or anything else you're talking about.
No. Commodity markets are priced and settled in USD, so the visible reference price gives a certain amount of dollar indexation for transactions where the FX trade isn't needed. Demand for dollars, and USD denominated assets is higher than it would otherwise be.
Safest USD asset? Treasuries. US government borrowing takes place at a lower price (coupon payments) than it would otherwise be. The tax rates required to make the coupons are also lower.
Upticks in international economic growth cause additional higher demand for USD, to acquire the additional resource inputs needed. At some point, additional USD is created, the transaction takes place and it then sits in UST securities. Which supports the future issue of new UST.
Conservatives have been (across a whole range of countries) been getting really antsy about debt and deficits for really quite a while. It most likely is driving the Republicans in the US batshit by now.
Trump tries to save the world from AI X-risk. If global economy is in shambles, no SAI will be developed.
The irony is, the tariff policy appears to have been devised by asking ChatGPT or Grok or Claude for the answer. The biggest current AI risk is the most powerful state over-relying on an LLM.
> the tariff policy appears to have been devised by asking ChatGPT or Grok or Claude
I read this in a few places. Sounds like bullshit.
Unpack that thought.
Does it sound like bullshit because you don't think an LLM like ChatGPT could produce such a list? — It demonstrably can and you can see this for yourself now if you like.
Or does it sound like bullshit because you think the people who wrote up this policy are too dilligent and details-oriented to use a lazy shortcut like this? — The inclusion of the Heard and McDonald Islands at a different rate to Australia would suggest otherwise. See also the omission of Burkina Faso.
Or does it sound like bullshit because this would be against the established norms and expectations for a state department? — Trump's administration is clearly willing and able to overturn established process across the board.
No, the formula they used is simple (I'd go so far as to say "elegant"), and if you're basing your tariff rates on trade deficits, the natural choice. The fact that LLMs can reproduce it is not surprising, and not evidence that that's what they used.
It's not a natural choice at all. It has absolutely zero basis in any sort of trade theory, even among among economists who are sympathetic to tariffs for industrial policy. A goal of reducing all bilateral trade deficits to zero is in the realm of not even wrong - it's utterly divorced from reality.
What is evidence is the sloppy way the list was drawn up, which demonstrates poor attention to detail you'd expect if someone copy-pasted a list made by an LLM.
I doubt even GPT 3 is *that* bad at economics. Where are you getting this info from?
LLMs are absolutely that bad at economics; as noted people have verified that if you ask Grok or ChatGPT for a simple tariff formula to combat trade deficits, it will give you almost exactly what the Trump administration is using.
This is I believe because the One Weird Trick that LLMs are capable of, is predicting what the average internet user answering the same question would say. In cases where either the subject matter is common knowledge, or most of the people actually answering that sort of question have the necessary domain-specific knowledge, this can give good results.
But in this case, the set of people who will respond to this sort of question on the internet is divided into A: people who grok economics and will answer "what is a simple tariff formula for eliminating a trade deficit?" with "there is no such thing; here's why...", and people with at best marginal economic literacy who will confidently offer up one of the obvious/simple/wrong answers.
An LLM, trained to be helpful and always have an answer, will in cases like this give you a dumb answer because that's about all it can pull out of its training data.
My point was that if one asked an LLM to derive good economic policy tarrifs wouldn't be it.
But yes, if one asked specifically for tariffs - tariffs it would be. Garbage in - garbage out.
Right. Team Trump asked specifically for tariffs, because Donald Trump has been gung ho about tariffs for basically ever, and it seems that the people he delegated the details to, punted it to an LLM asking specifically for tariffs.
No one should be at all surprised with what the LLM came back with.
Anyone can test this with their own ChatGPT prompt. A few weeks ago, I asked it how to run SSH in a manner that would suppressed the MOTD on the remote server. It confidently gave me three answers, all wrong. I told it so. It confidently agreed with me, and gave me three more answers, all wrong. I told it that, and it confidently agreed and then stated that the true answer was one of the former three answers. Its behavior was consistent with it not finding an answer, but mimicking what a reasonable person might guess.
Another experiment I might try if I get around to it is to ask it a non-trivial math question (something not likely in its training data, like the product of two random 10-digit integers), watch it give the right answer (possible!), and then tell it it's wrong and see what it does.
Several people have been able to independently reverse engineer a prompt that spits out the formula and list of tariffs used in the policy. (This is one of several news reports on this: https://www.newsweek.com/donald-trump-tariffs-chatgpt-2055203) But don't take my word for it, try it yourself.
Making sloppy mistakes like including uninhabited territories at a different rate to their parent nation also suggests they just copy-pasted from a source like ChatGPT without checking it.
Interesting! Thanks for the link.
Ah! So that's why he's setting Musk up for a premature end by mob-with-pitchforks? Genius!
Sure. The point of DOGE is to dismantle federal government, therefore preventing the possibility for Manhattan-like project for AI. But the fact that it's Musk who will get blamed for everything is an extra bonus
The actual numbers are irrelevant. In fact, The more unreasonable they are, and the more credible his unreasonableness, the higher leverage he has for negotiations. Unreasonableness, is the point, echoing cruelty is the point.
Orange man's tariffs are an intentionally unreasonable starting point for negotiation to get what he wants. his wants? quid pro quo, generally ;
+ importance / ego; he can pick up a phone and directly negotiate with other Prime Ministers and governance , some of which will make personal favors possible
+ personal gains - probably with some countries ( money to $trump?, family properties )
+ political-econ victories? - reduced foreign import tariffs in some other areas
+ oh, also under personal gains - ability to manipulate markets in predicable ways, to the benefit of those attending his 1M fee dinner parties and general inner circle.
He is sometimes an effective negotiator because he threatens to burn the house down, but sometimes the house burns down. As of now the house is burning.
Man, this is an uncomfortable read for me, but I don't think it's wrong.
This is exactly what I was thinking. Trump is (hopefully) copying Nixon's "Madman theory" negotiation strategy. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Madman_theory
Make yourself look so crazy and erratic that the other side gets scared and agrees to a favorable deal to avoid a disastrous alternative outcome that you've bluffed them into thinking is plausible.
I'm playing devils advocate a bit, and overstating and simplifying the argument:
>World trade runs on the dollar because it's the international reserve currency and because of things like the petro-dollar.
>All countries need dollars to finance imports, and can't get things you need to run a modern economy like oil without dollars.
>This makes international demand for the dollar very inelastic. If the tariffs raise the amount of stuff you need to export to the US to get dollars most countries will have to respond by exporting more stuff at lower profit margins.
>Therefore the volume of imports into the US wont be reduced by much, and inflation won't rise much.
>Most of the cost of the tariffs will be borne by countries exporting stuff to the US and the US treasury will get the revenue from the tariffs.
>Since the tariffs don't raise prices of consumer goods by much and bring in revenue for the treasury they're a net benefit for the US. Basically they're a way for the US to double down on it's exorbitant privilege.
There're a lot of potential responses to that argument but if I had to give the steelman I find most persuasive that would be it, and that argument can't be Trump's rationale since it suggest the tariffs won't lower the deficit by much or bring back manufacturing.
> This makes international demand for the dollar very inelastic. If the tariffs raise the amount of stuff you need to export to the US to get dollars most countries will have to respond by exporting more stuff at lower profit margins.
This needs to be fleshed out. If demand for imports were also inelastic, the effect of tariffs would be simply to raise the prices that Americans pay for imported goods and services. But I believe the demand is elastic, so the tariffs will reduce imports, which will reduce the supply of dollars abroad. This will cause the value of the dollar to increase because the supply has fallen but the demand has not.
A rising dollar will have several effects:
1) Fewer dollars can buy the same amount of imports. This creates a positive feedback loop, where a rising dollar means that Americans spend fewer dollars on imports, which reduces the number of dollars sent abroad, which pushes the price of the dollar higher. I expect that effects 2 and 3 (listed next) will be large than effect 1, so that the value of the dollar won’t spiral out of control.
2) A higher dollar makes imports less expensive, which means that Americans buy more imports, which means sending more dollars abroad.
3) A higher dollar makes exports more expensive, which means that foreigners will buy less of them. You posit that the demand for dollars is inelastic, but I presume that you mean demand for dollars for purposes other than to buy U.S. exports.
Given your assumption that foreign demand for dollars is inelastic, tariffs won’t affect the size of the trade deficit as measured in dollars. What will happen instead is that imports and exports will decrease equally, hurting American export industries.
In the scenario above, the reduction in U.S. exports is the result of a rising dollar. If foreign countries impose retaliatory tariffs on U.S. exports, you might not see a rising dollar, because the reduction in exports would be caused by tariffs rather than a rising dollar.
> > This makes international demand for the dollar very inelastic. If the tariffs raise the amount of stuff you need to export to the US to get dollars most countries will have to respond by exporting more stuff at lower profit margins.
This is what I don't get. The need for dollars to trade oil is temporary and only lasts for the duration of the payment process, they don't get used up. As long as the seller doesn't literally hoard money, these dollars will be circulated back into the global finance system, they won't be destroyed or gifted back to the USA. So as long as the product of (oil trade volume * oil price * payment transfer latency) doesn't increase, the net demand for dollars is zero or even negative.
Part of the arrangement of the petro-dollar is that eg. Saudi Arabia has to recycle the dollars it receives back into US based assets. So the dollars traded in the oil market don't go back into international circulation which would, yes, would lower demand for dollars.
https://www.federalreserve.gov/econres/notes/feds-notes/internationalization-of-the-chinese-renminbi-progress-and-outlook-20240830.html#:~:text=The%20swap%20lines%20allow%20the,and%20many%20emerging%20market%20economies
Yes. Note the para regarding mBridge and CBDC. Saudi are in there.
a) This is trumps 12th tarriff policy, every previous one was a threat and arguably worked; after test runs this may be a opening argument for the final world wide system as the *soviet-policy* to bribe the world with american world police is dismantled.
b) The vast majority of the world does have tarriffs targeted at america; "we cant implement true reciprocal tariffs"(to slow at the boarder) was a talking point a week ago, the follow up "he should have used the experts, the official math tariff people and made a big complex policy" doesnt logicly follow given the right wing belief system that those people are not trust worthy; see the miltrey withholding troop number, staffers not delivering a letter *TO PUTIN* for weeks; are you a hyper purist libertarian and for unlimited free trade, or wish to to dive into defending the old trust-the-science debate?
c) I dont actually care about the stock market and this feels like special pleading, is tarriffs as economically destructive as the near total economic shutdown I remember happening? What happened to occupy wall street, or the "wall street isnt the average americain" talking points that the left would bring up during whatever drop happened under biden or obama. As the young/labor dont get onto any capital systems, any drop in capital's claim on resources has some zero sum effects over access to resources, especially land which doesnt appear out of no where.
Hyperpurist libertarianism is indeed far better than Trump's policies.
Look at the specific stocks tanking. They're for companies relevant to regular Americans. Alcohol & cigarettes are up though.
> Hyperpurist libertarianism is indeed far better than Trump's policies.
Then complain about every other tarriff in existence.
If you believe in a tariff ever existing, how you argue with good vs bad tariffs gets harder.
I am against all tariffs. Trump's are higher than basically any functional country's.
The economic shutdown was due to a novel virus. This is due to.....
And the global stock market is crashing because this could lead to recession. The stock market is not the economy, but when it's flashing red it's a good idea to pay attention to it.
The part I'm most confused about it is he's targeted them based on trade deficits, not tariffs. This seems to make no sense. When you're the larger economy you're often going to have trade deficits and it's not a bad thing.
> The part I'm most confused about it is he's targeted them based on trade deficits, not tariffs. This seems to make no sense
The chart called out "currency controls"; for example china stops people from getting money out of china, its unclear to me how you attempt to control for that, but dollar measured imports over exports doesnt touch that as a unit.
> The economic shutdown was due to a novel virus.
Trump will be operating under right wing beliefs
The tariffs aren't based on the policies of other countries at all, but instead just on the trade deficit. Switzerland has no tariffs on the US, but still got hit.
'Currency Controls' still doesn't explain why trade deficits are a factor. It might explain why you can't use tariffs in a simple manner, but it doesn't explain why you would use trade deficits instead. Trade deficits are not a bad thing in and of themselves, they make sense for a lot of countries that can't purchase large amounts of the kinds of things America sells. That they are the basis for this calculation is fundamentally strange.
And not sure what you're implying with that last sentence.
How about "tariffs are just scare tactic to get economic and political concessions from other countries, and will be repealed pretty soon when they negotiate with Trump and give him at least something"? Not much of a steel, but maybe an aluminiumman?
That made sense for his previous tariff threats, when he kept delaying them at the last minute or making exceptions. Now that the tariffs have actually gone into effect and the S&P has lost a year of gains in a weekend, it's looking less reasonable.
Life and business have taught him that in a negotiation your threats won’t be believable if you don’t show your willingness to pull the trigger.
Unfortunately in this case he was holding the gun to his own head.
>"Unfortunately in this case he was holding the gun to his own head."
And why not? It worked in "Blazing Saddles"!
But this is all based on the premise that other countries are cheating us in some major way when it comes to trade. So, can someone explain what these are? I am unaware of a systematic phenomenon where the US would otherwise be exporting large quantities of goods to certain nations, but isn't due to tariffs or other "unfair trade practices". Can someone present some examples of specific countries and industries where this might be the case? This probably won't convince me that the tariffs are a good idea, but maybe it could help me understand what exactly the administration migjt be aiming for.
Canada has created trade barriers to protect its domestic agricultural industry (particularly its dairy producers) from American competition.
Japan is also notorious for finding frivolous reasons to block imports of foreign cars.
> But this is all based on the premise that other countries are cheating us in some major way when it comes to trade. So, can someone explain what these are?
I'm the farthest from wanting to defend this "nuke the market" approach, but other countries generally have very significant tariffs on US goods, and the more the consumers in that country want the goods, the higher the tariffs.
I've lived and done business in Asia for a decade or more - in China, demand for US baby formula is super high - and the tariffs are so high it 2x-3xes the price.
Same deal for US cars! Imagine paying 2-3x for an American made car - the poor fools. But it's true for other country's cars too - a Range Rover or whatever is actually a status symbol there, because you had to pay nearly half a mil USD for it.
Things like iphones and Apple computers? Tariffed to oblivion, always 1.5x-2x the US prices.
I know China the best, but this general trend of "tariff what consumers most want" is generally true across all the US's top ten trading partners (save Mexico and Canada back when NAFTA was still active).
And we never really reciprocated. We DON'T tariff other country's cars so hugely, nor do we tariff their other goods. We typically had some of the lowest tariffs, in a very non-reciprocal way.
> I don’t think this is right. China has the cheapest retail price for the iPhone 16
Weird - I literally just had to replace my phone in the last 6 months due to a snorkeling mishap, and Tokyo was the cheapest in Asia by at least 20%, so I bought it there. Cheap iphones or Apple computers has definitely not been my experience in China, but maybe this is something new? I've spent the last 2 years in Taiwan and SE Asia.
And I don't think the prices of cars was just company margins - I looked for a chart and couldn't find it, but the wikipedia page mentions 260% foreign vehicle import duties at the beginning, then 30% later, and that doesn't include VAT and registration and such, all of which contribute to the much higher foreign vehicle prices.
Personally, I think "other countries are cheating USA" is just rhetoric for the masses, so it's impossible to provide a supporting example for that. Trump considers himself the master of the deal, so tariffs on the whole world just set him a large number of separate potential deals. He may not even have any global goal in mind, and the idea is just to wring as much as possible out of every deal, striking a better trade agreement here, a place for a new naval base there, and just some political support for his next actions in the third place.
"Personally, I think "other countries are cheating USA" is just rhetoric for the masses"
Well, there have been even on here all the complaints that US consumers pay over the odds for healthcare and the Europeans and rest of the world free ride on the R&D and development of drugs by US Big Pharma and so we are, in a sense, cheating the US by not paying our fair share.
So I think that rhetoric, if repackaged appropriately, will resonate with more than just the masses.
It's the same argument I've seen people make about US military spending— that they can't afford to look after their people at home (with, say, universal healthcare, public transportation etc.) because they have to shell out so much money being the world police. Not very convincing to an outsider, but probably plays better at home.
Trump has been inconsistent about what he wants them for. Sometimes he says they will replace income tax, sometimes he says he wants to restore manufacturing, sometimes he wants to negotiate. Thing is, nobody has any idea what he really wants and no one believes he will stick to any deal anyway.