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.
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.