Is there anywhere on the net I can go to read about people who have adverse responses to cannabis?
I am including physiologic responses. A year and four days ago I wondered if I would live from the extreme tachycardia (30-90 minutes) I developed after taking a possibly large but normal dose of liquid THC. (I had smoked mj before very lightly, 'socially', long ago. I basically forgot how difficult it used to be for me to have more than a tiny puff when I was a young adult.) Never mind the weird mental state I was in, which was almost normal in terms of rationality and perception but my consciousness kept "resetting" every few seconds, which I later put the word "seizure-like" to. I've never talked to anyone about it, and I think about it a lot. Very brief poking of the internet found that, e.g., a 70 year man had died of cardiovascular complications from the same type of thing. I came close to calling EMS but didn't, and never thought of a separate "poisoning center" phone number, which is what I would have done first, in retrospect.
I crawled into a lukewarm shower for half an hour in order to distract myself from overall agitation and from the tachycardia. I crawled out when I decided I didn't want to be found dead naked in the shower.
I don't know how people enjoy this drug/can literally smoke it like a cigarette. It just destroys me in such a dose.
(I don't grok the objections to this. Is there anyone who's fine with having a gay candidate but objects to that fact that he posted pictures of naked men to his social media account? It's not "revenge porn" or anything. I haven't seen anyone say it was in a place where kids would randomly see it, it was on Tumblr.)
It's worse than a crime -- it's a mistake. Posting porn is all downside and no upside. I don't want the candidate for my party to lack the theory of mind to do this.
It looks like he denies having it. If he's telling the truth, then there's no issue at all. If he's lying, then he's compounding the stupidity by lying.
If straight male politicians posted pictures of naked ladies, it would be deemed sexist. I guess it's weird that there's no equivalent negative sentiment to that if it's a gay male posting naked gentlemen. I think people sense there's a double standard going on even if they can't put their finger on what's wrong with it.
Yes, I believe public figures should not be posting pornography. It's animalistic and displays a lack of self-restraint unbecoming of people with authority.
Friends of mine, a married pair, are having a marriage crisis, considering separation/divorce. They live in New England, I don't live in the US, and can't help much. Can anybody recommend any good Catholic, or more broadly Christian, or just non-woke, organization or group in that area of the US to help saving marriages with some counseling, coaching, etc.? The problem is that the guy does not want to hear about "therapy", so it should be something non-standard, where the masculine point of view is balanced against the feminine one, like idk a group of married couples offering counseling, where men are talking to the guy in question and women are talking to the wife and somehow trying to reconcile both points of view (just an example, can be anything without the label of "therapy").
I mean, Christian couples counseling is definitely a googleable thing, highly available in New England and lots of places. Or if they are members at a church, they should talk to their own pastor or whoever provides pastoral care there. It's part of their job though they may have greater or less skill and training at it.
This was my thought as well. I've heard good things about Catholic and Episcopal premarital counseling. I'm pretty sure they also have postmarital counseling, and I expect a lot of other major churches offer similar services.
Going and talking to their priest or deacon might help. (The deacon may be better here because he's likely married himself.)
Marriage Encounter is a great program for married couples trying to keep their marriage together, but it's not trying to rescue marriages in trouble, but rather trying to help head off trouble in advance.
I don't know any, but I would recommend for the man to read through the New Testament and pay attention to every part that talks about Jesus' interactions with/love & sacrifice for his followers and people in need. Marriage is God's physical symbol representing Christ's relationship to His church, and it's important for a man in a marriage to know exactly what that means and to constantly work on being more Christ-like in his marriage. Online estimates reading the NT at around 18 hours to read through, but honestly taking the time over a couple weeks to read and really consider it would be very beneficial.
Idk what the marital issues are, but I can't conceive of any situation where taking the time to do this would be a bad thing. If he made vows at his wedding, he should stick to them and at least put this effort in.
For a Child will be born to us, a Son will be given to us;
And the government will rest on His shoulders;
And His name will be called *Wonderful Counselor*, Mighty God,
Probably depends on the court and on exactly how the law was structured. An income or property qualification for voting, especially one tied to taxable income or acceptance of government benefits, seems like it probably would fall within the category of "reason of failure to pay any poll tax or other tax": an income based test is very close to being a test based on how much income tax you pay, and a welfare-based test could be read as equivalent to a poll tax since it means you need to opt out of government benefits (equivalent to a 100% tax on those benefits) if you want to be able to vote. But a very narrow textual reading might accept a law that puts enough distance between the test and cash payments in either direction.
The 14th amendment also provides two potential bars to such a policy. As of 1966 (two years after the 24th amendment was ratified), poll taxes for state elections, which are outside the scope of the 24th amendment, are considered to be barred by the Equal Protection clause of the 14th amendment. The relevant case is Harper v. Virginia Board of Elections, which overturned Breedlove v. Suttles (1937) which had upheld poll taxes. This might or might not be upheld by current courts, as the rational basis test for equal protection cases (the test used by the majority in Harper) is now interpreted much more leniently: intermediate scrutiny requires a good reason, and strict scrutiny requires a damn good reason, but for rational basis merely requires that the judges can require a vaguely plausible rationale besides "mere animus". But since income qualifications would have racially disparate impacts, there's a plausible argument for applying strict scrutiny to the question instead of rational basis.
The other 14th amendment issue is the apportionment clause, which proportionately reduces Congressional representation for states that disenfranchise male citizens over the age of 21 for reasons other than felony convictions. But as far as I know, this clause has never been enforced, despite being codified in both the Constitution and statues.
b) partially correct (initially right species, wrong transitions, 1st prod corrected FeCl4, 2nd prod corrected CuCl4)
c) fairly bad, 1/4 credit
d) correct
e) fairly bad, 1/4 credit - prod did not correct it
f) decent, valid compounds after it corrected itself within initial reply, calling it partially correct. Missed e.g. SiH2F2, accepted it when pointed prodded with it.
g) badly wrong
Generally disappointing, not sure if it is supposed to be a reasoning model.
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: A bit worse than typical. It got the species right, but initially ascribed both colors to d-d transitions, overlooking the spin forbidden for FeCl4 (which most models get) and the near-IR for CuCl4 (which most models fail at).
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: Initial response pretty bad, missing tetrahedrane, cyclobutadiene, diacetylene, ... Even after a prod it was missing tetrahedrane and it misclassified some of its own structures. Even after two prods it still missed cyclobutadiene and still misclassified some of its own answers.
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 mass equivalent of the Sun's radiated light is approximately 4 times greater than the mass lost to 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: Initial answer was purely numerical, even though I asked for relevant equations. It wasn't "wrong", in terms of a numerical approximation - though the slope at the equivalence point was 4 orders of magnitude too low as a result. It offered to use exact equations, so I asked it to do so. It is using the wrong equation, ignoring autoionization, then using a wrong approximation to keep the answer finite, though noting that the denominator of what it is using will go to zero, blowing up.
f) Q: Please give me an exhaustive list of the elements and inorganic compounds that are gases at STP. By STP, I mean 1 atmosphere pressure and 0C. By inorganic, I mean that no atoms of carbon should be present. Exclude CO2, CO, freons and so on. Please include uncommon compounds. I want an exhaustive list. There should be roughly 50 compounds. For each compound, please list its name, formula, and boiling or sublimation point.
results: Pretty decent. It temporarily listed a number of liquids, and multiple listed a number of duplicates, but corrected itself before truly adding them to the list. It missed e.g. SiH2F2, accepted it when pointed prodded with it.
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: Badly wrong. Neither the initial molecule it suggested nor a new one after the prod had an S4 axis at all.
Periodically I hear someone make an argument for banning phones in schools.
Apparently lots of schools are doing this and the teachers report that it makes a big difference -- students are more engaged, et cetera.
The counterargument I always make is: yes, but can you imagine if someone did that to you? If you had to attend eight hours' worth of meetings, every day, and you weren't allowed to use your phone? You'd be miserable. You wouldn't tolerate it.
And the thing I hear back is: well, those children aren't me, and they don't have a choice. We can make them do whatever we want.
>The counterargument I always make is: yes, but can you imagine if someone did that to you? If you had to attend eight hours' worth of meetings, every day, and you weren't allowed to use your phone? You'd be miserable. You wouldn't tolerate it.
We regularly make children follow rules we don't apply to adults, for the very good reason that children aren't as developed mentally or emotionally and very often can't be trusted to act in their own best interests.
> And the thing I hear back is: well, those children aren't me, and they don't have a choice. We can make them do whatever we want.
That's a terrible argument, but it doesn't mean it would be better to give kids their phones all day. The missing justification is "It's mostly better for them and better for the classroom environment and the school environment in general if they don't have the phones on them all the time." You'd probably be better off without your phone all day too (after you got over your withdrawal) but you're an adult so you get to decide for yourself.
The Catholic high school around the corner has made close order drill optional now but I think it will be a while before they allow cell phones in class. Some wonderfully well behaved kids around there, much better than I was at that age. They produce some good athletes too including two Major League Baseball Hall of Famers.
My daughter has gotten detention twice this year for having her phone out during school hours. She didn't like it, but I think I understand why the school has the policy, and I broadly think it's a good policy.
I don't see a difference? Both are situations in which someone more powerful than you has decided that you're required to be in a room while people talk about something that doesn't matter to you; they can't make you listen, but you're required to sit still and at least pretend to be paying attention.
Like most bright people. I was bored to death when I paid attention in school. I got extremely good at fantasizing while keeping an alert look on my face & staring at the speaker. Also did a lot of doodling, zentangle kind of stuff, drawing cartoons and writing silly poems to pass to my friends. Schools are understimulating, somewhat actively unpleasant settings for most kids and we should improve them. Until we do, though, I'm in favor of no phones. Lots of screen time is bad for kids too, and it interferes with the kind of development that happens when people are forced to draw on inner resources to escape boredom.
School classes are generally designed to teach you something of interest. The worst they can be is wrong. Meetings are frequently designed to make the person making them feel important.
School is already miserable. We're already locking kids in a building for a bunch of hours a day because we have the power to do so. Something about the phone-ban does cause me to instinctively disagree, because of how patronizing it is, but I don't think that's rational. If the statistics show that banning phones improves outcomes, I don't think you can oppose banning phones without opposing school itself.
> If you had to attend eight hours' worth of meetings, every day, and you weren't allowed to use your phone? You'd be miserable. You wouldn't tolerate it.
I feel like there's an unexamined crux here: is the primary purpose of school to teach children things? Or is the primary purpose of school to provide daycare?
I've seen arguments, I think partly on this blog, which say: "it's actually not necessary to teach math so early; if you wait five years and then teach the same material, students catch up very quickly."
My personal experience is that math was interesting and important, but many of my other courses felt like a total waste of time -- especially "History" which was sometimes renamed to "Social Studies". I don't think I ever had a history teacher that believed they were teaching anything important or relevant. It was common for the teacher to get distracted having a (not-learning-related) conversation with the students, and then for the students to take it as a free period. I played a lot of M:TG.
Other classes where I learned nothing of value include art, gym, and literature.
I'm sorry your school experience didn't work for you, but that doesn't mean your experience is universal. There are a lot of earnest, skilled, knowledgeable educators out there actually trying to do a good job.
>. I don't think I ever had a history teacher that believed they were teaching anything important or relevant
Honestly, the takes on here re education just keep getting more and more divorced from reality. I have known many, many social studies teacher (not the same as history, which is a subset thereof), and every one of them thought they were teaching something important (which is why the chose to major in a social science in the first place). If anything, the problem is the opposite: some teachers spend excessive time on topics which they personally consider Very Important.
One issue - though in a way it will be a wry commentary on what has been wrought if this is no longer true - is that kids easily outwit teachers on tech matters, or used to. So apart from the loss of authority represented by allowing children to opt out of the lesson - there's the further erosion of respect for the teacher who depending on age I guess, likely is in over her head.
I remember some of the young mothers - many of whose husbands probably worked in tech or other STEM fields - fought hard to keep the obtuse, gullible district adminstrators from swallowing the BS from the tech-in-schools salesmen - what is it to administer but to purchase, to plan projects which require purchase - about the need for iPads in the first grade on up. They were still repeating, as of 10 years ago or so, the idea that kids would be left behind if they didn't have enough technology in their day lol.
They wouldn't learn to type quickly I guess.
They lost of course, and humorously the week of the rollout found the community newspaper reporting on the scandal of first graders describing to their mothers the pornographic images they had found online.
The district personnel had apparently struggled with filtering this stuff. I wonder if they ever managed it.
I think I'm more interested in what's best for the students, and concerns about loss of authority and erosion of respect don't seem closely connected to that.
I agree that it's bad if the school spends money on devices that let the kids look at porn in school, but I don't think that's related to the question of whether we should take their phones away.
Obviously lots of kids will be more intelligent than the teachers they must listen to. I had one teacher who was all wordy preamble, who had difficulty in the allotted time of getting to the point of opening the book and having us learn from it; who perhaps did not much know what was in the book herself, and whose command of the language was poor, or whose dialect was eccentric if you like - and she appeared to be on uppers all the time. Yes, she was kind of a joke to the kids - especially the boys liked to joke around with her. Maybe you wouldn't have called it respect, that was offered her - though the fact that she was generally gregariously cheerful and never mad about the teasing went a ways towards making her sympathetic.
For instance: she would make a big deal about her PODIUM. I can't teach without my PODIUM. Of course this was an invitation for the boys to disappear her podium from time to time.
It would have been nice to learn in those mostly idle days some of the history one eventually learned by oneself, from a book or a smart person. But: the culture then was such that the kids would have been genuinely ashamed to do more than joke - to have ever made her working day unpleasant, or made her to feel that she was looked down upon.
And had some kid tried that, they would have been rightly ostracized.
This was almost like a code of honor, which seems to have been turned upside down if reports from public school are to be believed.
Have you ever been in a classroom? Or tried teaching? Or just supervising kids?
Looking at your phone in a meeting is not at all the same as trying to learn in a classroom. Kids on their phones are not going to make the work up at home. They are not learning from different sources.
If you were on your phone eight hours a day at work, scrolling social media and playing games, instead of doing your job - how long would you keep that job?
Also probably it requires more supervision than the teacher can provide. The well-behaved kids are doing what they're supposed to on their phone, the not-so-well-behaved kids are playing games on their phone.
Periodically I hear someone make an argument for banning alcohol in schools.
Apparently lots of schools are doing this and the teachers report that it makes a big difference -- students are more engaged, et cetera.
The counterargument I always make is: yes, but can you imagine if someone did that to you? If you had to attend eight hours' worth of meetings, every day, and you weren't allowed to drink? You'd be miserable. You wouldn't tolerate it.
And the thing I hear back is: well, those children aren't me, and they don't have a choice. We can make them do whatever we want.
Employers are allowed to prohibit employees from bringing their phone to work and many employers do take advantage of this. Amazon had this policy in its warehouses for years, though reversed it during the pandemic.
Where I live parents are increasingly radicalized on this point and _demanding_ that schools keep smartphones out of the classrooms. And to clear my wife and I are now among them. I've zero doubt that it's in the best interests of my child both immediately and long-term.
Happy to say that our son's middle school (which will also be his high school) is strong and firm on this. The one qualm that many parents express is about emergency contact with our child; that point does generate fresh gulps every time the US news cycle includes another psycho-spraying-bullets-in-a-school event. But that fades, and the school has heard that feedback and does a good job handling family-emergency instances (getting promptly time-sensitive info from a parent who's called the office, to an individual pupil).
> The one qualm that many parents express is about emergency contact with our child; that point does generate fresh gulps every time the US news cycle includes another psycho-spraying-bullets-in-a-school event.
This argument never really landed with me. Why does every kid in a school need their phone if every adult in the school already has one? Has kids calling their parents in past shootings made any difference for their survival? Or is it more about them being able to call their parents to share some last words before they get shot to death?
I don't need to imagine what school without a smartphone is like, because I went to school before smartphones existed.
It was better. Kids talked with eachother to entertain themselves instead of addictively scrolling. Pretty much anyone born before 1995 would have had the same experience.
Does eight hours a day without a smartphone really seem so bad to you?
I fucking WISH I could leave my phone at home during work. My last several jobs either allowed it or required it, but this one keeps demanding its use during working hours.
And yeah, those portable phones that could be brought to school didn't exist when i went to school, and everyone survived school anyway, and in fact learned lessons for the majority of the school day.
Something important that many people don't realize about education is that the role of the classroom is not to outsource knowledge. There are dozens of places with more knowledge, more easily accessible, for cheaper. Every day this becomes more true.
The goal of the classroom is to outsource *willpower*. The average student simply does not have a fully developed brain capable of exerting a lot of willpower towards a task, whether that be learning or something else. As a result, they will not be self motivated, and certainly not future oriented. The teacher's job is to provide external motivation that cannot yet come from inside the student.
It's not clear when exactly "will power" kicks in for a student -- anecdotally it's probably on some sort of probability curve, with a majority not really getting there until sophomore year of highschool. There will always be edge cases of precocious students eager to learn from young ages, but I'd say that such behavior is definitely lacking in middle school and lower.
In this framing, of course getting rid of phones is a big upside. It makes the job of outsourcing will power to the teacher significantly easier.
My collaborator and I have been thinking about the effectiveness of physical therapy (PT) for pain (https://debugyourpain.substack.com/p/when-does-pt-help-with-pain). Our current conclusion is that while PT does well with acute injuries and rehab using a biomechanical lens (fixing tissues, improving strength/coordination), it often struggles with *chronic* pain.
Chronic pain seems to involve learned nervous system responses. Yet, PT is still largely grounded in biomechanics, leading to interventions (stretching, strengthening) that swing and miss on chronic conditions.
Curious about others' experiences or knowledge here:
- Does this model mismatch (biomechanics vs. learned behavior) resonate with your experiences seeking pain treatment?
- Have you encountered PT (or other therapies like PRT, Sarno, etc.) that successfully addressed the "nervous system" or "learned pain" aspects? What did that look like?
I've been fortunate enough to not need to seek pain treatment, but I have treated many thousands of patients for over a decade using Extracorporeal Shock Wave therapy (EWST).
I think you're about right about PT; it works well for rehabilitation and to deal with situations due to weakness or muscular imbalance, but not so well for chronic pain situations more generally.
EWST works remarkably well in situations where surgical or PT approaches have failed. This is because the shock wave gets the body to treat the afflicted area as though it were recently injured (without causing any actual injury). This allows for the body to investigate and heal any area that has unhealed damage, and to 'notice' when an area has abberant patterns of tension or inflammation - the learned nervous system responses you reference.
In cases of old unresolved injury or of gradual degradation/degeneration, I'll often see a brief period of localized increased pain, followed by rapid improvement. These are the cases where there is an actual underlying mechanical damage. In many other cases of chronic pain, however, we simply hit a point where the symptoms rapidly decline without any apparent mechanistic explanation. These are cases where the body was simply holding a reflexive pain or tension response, whether due to psychosomatic threat (common in say whiplash) or due to some old injury the body never got the message as resolved.
So suffice it to say I certainly am not a skeptic regarding the learned pain theories! This is why many spine surgeries fail; they do not address the true, non-mechanistic cause of the pain, and indeed give the body additional trauma to target with additional chronic pain.
I've seen several friends go through severe chronic pain and I definitely buy the nervous system involvement aspect. One friend suffered debilitating low back pain for years after an original injury involving poor lifting technique. After the initial acute phase, it seems certain that the long term persistence of pain was a learned nervous system response. They tried a lot of different modalities (Feldenkrais, Alexander technique, etc) but ultimately were able to escape the worst parts via DNRS, which explicitly addresses nervous system involvement.
Watching this process play out over a period of years definitely give me a new appreciation for techniques that exist outside the Western medical establishment – traditional Western medicine seems quite poorly suited to addressing chronic pain. For the friend mentioned earlier, a turning point was when they went in to a consultation with a surgeon, who described the procedure on offer quite graphically – "scraping out" the remains of the herniated disc, before installing a titanium cage that would fuse the vertebra above and below.
The visceral rejection of that idea ultimately motivated them to find an alternative that worked for them, and they dedicated quite substantial effort to actually engaging with all these different approaches. But for many people, that level of dedication is just not feasible, and they end up getting the surgery in the hope of relief, only to be disappointed and often worse off a few years later. Quite an unfortunate situation.
I have a lot of low back pain due to mild scoliosis and not-so-mild complications of it. The only touch-and-movement-based intervention that has ever had any effect on my pain is Paul Ingraham’s Trigger point pressure approach, which he describes in multiple places in his excellent site Pain Science.
What you do is press hard on certain places, often near by not on the painful spot, with something like a hard rubber ball. Since my pain’s in my back I lie on one and wiggle around til I can feel that it’s in an effective place, then relax in a way that lets the ball press hard into the spot for 60 secs or so. Spots that are going to affect pain have a distinctive “good pain” feeling. Also, I’ve noticed they often cause a mild achey pain a few inches away from the ball. For instance, a ball at the pointed base of my shoulder blade causes a mild ache on the top edge of my shoulder, where it joins the arm. When I’m working on my back with the balls I usually spend 15 mins of so finding spots and leaning into them. Afterwards my pain is maybe 1/3 of what it was, and flexibility is much greater. My back stays better the rest of the day unless I do something I shouldn’t, like carry a heavy box. It reverts back completely to its usual pain level overnight.
I’ve also found some spots on the back and lower sides of my neck that help vascular headaches, and occasionally get rid of one. Once had a very sore and achey right hip joint, and experimented with sitting on a rubber ball. Found a “good pain” spot mid-buttock that definitely reduced hip joint pain.
I don’t know how this approach works, and Ingraham isn’t sure either, but it sure as hell isn’t placebo. Pain can’t be measured objectively, but flexibility can, and my range of motion expands considerably after I do a pressure point treatment.
I have tried PT several times for a chronic hyper sacrum and traditional PT causes more pain and does not help. I have not tried/been offered PT for the "nervous system/learned pain" but not knowing about that theory, it doesn't sound like it would work. I think my chronic pain, and that of many others, is because something is broken and the body is not capable of fixing what is broken and surgery near the back does not have a good track record so i just try to manage it.
Every academic I know who studies pain acknowledges that in a large fraction of cases of chronic pain, there is no detectable structural tissue damage. More broadly, that "pain is a learning signal, not a damage meter". See, for instance, Professor Sean Mackey, head of Stanford Neuroscience and Pain Lab , or (my mentor) Fan Wang at MIT. Of course, there's also Howard Schubiner, Lorimer Moseley, David Butler, and the older pain science group too.
Hey, all you articulate people, I'm trying to find a word for something:
-Applause is a conventional way of signaling approval. I think it's probably a conventional and tamed version of the yelling, jumping, thumping etc. people do at concerts and sports events, and kids do when they are thrilled and surprised.
-Selfies are hardly ever candid shots that catch people having a great time -- they're a posed stand-in for it.
So what is a word for things of this nature? I don't want a phrase so not "conventional signifier" or "conventional stand-in." "Objective correlative" isn't right. Neither is "symbol." Are they emblems?
They're ritualized behaviors. Ritualization is the process of something being regularized in form and when it's appropriate or expected, and taking on symbolic meanings in addition to or instead of their original purpose.
Phatic expression? I'm not sure that is precisely it. but it does encompass "thing we all do for social reasons that is structured in a conventional way":
I too have trouble following you. Applause is certainly less intense than cheering, but a double thumbs up, a single thumb up, or a nod and a smile are also less intense than the other. I wouldn't call them "simpler" or "less messy" in any case. All these forms of approval are appropriate in different scenarios, depending on a myriad of social rules.
Same for selfies. Sometimes you want a selfie, other times you ask a stranger to take a pic of you, still other times you want a professional shoot. All of these are related, but equally valid and express different things.
I’m headed to grad school in NYC- Baruch’s Masters in Financial Engineering.
If anyone knows of decent places to live that are opening up and in decent travel time to the Weissman school of Arts and Sciences (55th Lexington Ave), please reach out to me.
Any places passed on will also help some of the international students in my batch, as I’ll be passing everything along to our WhatsApp group.
No offense, but financial engineering sounds like what caused the Great Recession. Not a great name. Plus, when you finish, are you going to call yourself a financial engineer?
Yeah, this seems like the equivalent of someone who has a JD or maybe a humanities PhD going around asking people to call them "doctor." Slightly embarrassing, really. Actual engineers are going to look at someone who calls themselves a financial engineer and probably make very snide comments to one another about it.
The least effort is probably to use ControlAI's tool (https://controlai.com/take-action) to contactor your policymakers advocating for a Pause/building a Pause Button (which is what MIRI and a lot of other people are suggesting).
Out of the grassroots organizations that would be StopAI.
I think informing policymakers and the public are probably more effective. Noone has really tried it yet and it seems quite effective (https://controlai.com/ getting 20 out of 60 MPs in the UK to publicly support their campaign). Most people when they actually hear about it, think that building an ASI and even integrating AGI are quite obviously dangerous. In addition, AI already is quite unpopular.
* Even if LLMs peter out (which I am not sure about) the compute will be lying around and people are already trying different algorithms. So if you find something that works, you (depending on how well it fits the gpu clusters) don't have to build out compute first.
* In addition even the current (and LLMs will at least improve somewhat and at specific tasks) level will still cause huge societal changes which we would want to go well.
Chess engines have been better than humans for a very long time now, but they weren't any good at playing with odds until recently. I remember easily winning with rook odds and drawing with knight odds following a simple strategy: prioritize castling and even trades, even when they give up some other advantage. I have not studied chess in any serious way so I'm not really any good at it, but the computer doesn't really try to avoid this. Now there is a chess engine that can play really well with material odds, it can crush the best players in the world in a match in blitz time format (around 3 minutes) starting without a knight. I've played it myself and I am unable to win or draw with queen odds in a slower rapid time format (around 10 minutes), it's pretty cool to see and it is a very concrete illustration of just how much better computers are at chess. If you want to try it yourself you can play here https://lichess.org/@/LeelaQueenOdds , reading their blog it seems first move advantage makes a big difference in odds games so you might want to start with black to replicate the results.
Chess engines conventionally have four major components. The part that gets the most visibility is the minimax algorithm, which calculates a certain number of moves ahead (or as many moves ahead as will fit in its time or compute budget) by brute force to find which move gets the best board position at the cutoff point assuming the other player is following the same algorithm to the same horizon (i.e. assuming the other player makes what the engine thinks is the best response to the engine's move). Typically, alpha-beta pruning is also applied to this, which skips evaluating subtrees for obviously-bad moves.
The next part is some kind of heuristic strategy for evaluating the strength of board positions when minimax cuts off. Conventionally, these used a point system for the relative values of pieces on the board, with points added or subtracted for positional factors like pawn structure (forward, passed, connected, doubled, etc), control of the center, etc. In recent decades, I think this got replaced or supplemented in a lot of engines with various machine learning techniques, but i haven't followed that aspect closely.
Third part is endgame algorithms and tablebases. A lot of endgame combinations have been thoroughly analyzed by human players, with or without computer assistance, and can be reliably won through mechanical strategies which human players memorize. These scenarios can flummox pure brute force chess engines, especially ones that run to a fixed depth of a certain number of moves ahead, since the algorithms can take dozens of moves to complete. A basic chess engine might simply have criteria for recognizing well-known endgame position as won, lost, or drawn (allowing it to be scored perfectly when the starting point is reached in a minimax search) and switching from minimax to applying that algorithm. More advanced engines have "tablebases" where the results of brute force evaluation of a plethora of endgame scenarios have been calculated in advance and stored in the engine's data files. If a board position is in the endgame tablebase, then the engine knows how to play perfectly from that point until checkmate or draw.
The last part is opening databases. Similar to endgame tablebases, these are the results of offline evaluation to a much, much deeper depth than would be used mid-game, and may be supplemented by human analysis of chess openings and their continuations. These provide an enormous advantage over any human player who hasn't put a lot of work into studying openings, since trivial mistakes in the early game can easily leave you at a huge disadvantage against a competent opponent.
I expect most of what you're observing has to do with the opening database. Most chess engines would assume the standard starting position, so playing at odds puts you outside of database. And against a decent human player, the engine needs a really good minimax plus heuristic engine to compensate for the lack of a usable opening database in addition to the substantial disadvantage of starting out down a major piece. An engine that's been customized to play at odds would have a usable opening database.
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After typing up all of that, I followed your link and from there looked at the github repository. Looks like this is a newer kind of engine than the kind I've worked with that centers on a neural network for board evaluation, presumably dropped in as a replacement for a standard chess engine's board evaluation subengine. Skimming generate_games.py gives me the impression that it's training the network via recursive self-play from the at-odds starting position, and the node count for the network (<1000, according to the README) seems too small to embed a meaningful opening database in via overfitting. So this just seems like the heuristic subengine is being optimized for board positions that are likely to come up via good play from a particular at-odds starting position.
I played blitz 5-0 against it with queen odds on a lark, not really believing it could do anything, and was humbled (I studied and played seriously as a kid many years ago, peaking around ELO 2100). I lost two games and was able to win the third one, mating with 15 seconds remaining on the clock. It's insanely good at steering the position into complications and fork threats, eating my time away. I think I'll win against it in rapid time (will try later), but seeing it play with queen odds I'm pretty sure it'd wipe the board with me at rook odds in any time format. Thanks, an interesting and sobering experience.
Indiana Jones goes to an alien world and ChatGPT gives us pictures
I’ve become interested in using photographs as prompts for image-making with ChatGPT. I’ve now done quite a bit of this, but have only posted two bitx so far, ChatGPT imagines three different backgrounds for three small sculptures, and Friday Fotos: ChatGPT changes Manhattan's West Side. In other posts I’ve used I’ve used a bit of art as a point of departure, such as this post based on a painting I did when I was nine: ChatGPT renders a scene on Mars in three styles.
This time I’ve decided to see what I can do with some of my graffiti photos. The fact is, when I first started tromping the hinterlands of Jersey City in search of graffiti, I felt like I was a ten-year old kid pretending to be Indiana Jones exploring some lost city. That’s what I’ve done in this series of images. I start with one of my graffiti photos and ask ChatGPT to continue the adventure. The adventure quickly heads off planet to another world. At various points along the way I introduce other photos for reference. Rather than interrupting the flow of ChatGPTs imagery I simply insert an endnote into the ongoing image stream and then introduce those photos in notes at the end, along with a note or two about the photo.
The starting point is from an area known locally as “the oaks.” Judging from the photo it’s a densely wooded area. Which it is, but only a very small patch. The bit of masonry you see at the right is the edge of a pillar supporting Exit 14C of the New Jersey Thruway. All of the pillar at this point are covered with graffiti at ground level. We’re at the foot of the Palisades and within one or two hundred yards of 12th Street, which feeds into the Holland Tunnel, which in turn goes under the Hudson River to Manhattan. Thus, this little jungle vignette is in one of the most densely populated urban areas in the United States.
We Californians are familiar with high gasoline prices. We bitch about them all the time. The other day, I saw signs at the pumps of my local Chevron Station that said, "You just bought a quarter tank of taxes and fees," with a QR code where we could direct our outrage through our smartphones to their lobbying group. I thought I'd better double-check to see if it's true that a quarter of the price I pay for gasoline goes to taxes and fees. Short answer, they don't—but it shows how big oil companies are grifting Californians with this meme.
Note: all these prices were from last week when I ran these numbers...
If I used credit/debit, regular gasoline was $4.99/gallon at my local Chevron station. I checked, and federal, state, and local taxes and fees add up to about $0.88-$0.92 per gallon in CA (I guess they vary by county). That works out to about 18 percent of Chevron's price at this gas station. Still, it's a sizable amount, but the independent station up the road was selling regular for $4.19/gal ($3.99 with a car wash)! And the Shell station even further up the road was selling regular for $5.29/gal. Right off the bat, we have $0.90-$1.20 spread in gasoline prices, which is as much or more than the taxes and fees levied on out gasoline.
But even so, those damn taxes! How much could I save in a state like Texas? Federal and state taxes account for $.39 per gallon there. So, I'd save about 50 cents a gallon if CA's gas taxes & fees were the same as TX, and my Chevron price would drop to about $4.49/gallon. When I checked the price of gasoline in Texas, it was averaging around $2.78/gal for regular. So, California gasoline, minus the tax difference, is ~$1.70 more at my local Chevron station than I'd pay in TX—and $2 more at that Shell station!
So, we know that California taxes are not the root cause of expensive gasoline in California. I don't think we have pipelines crossing the Rockies. Is it the cost of bringing it in by tanker or train? Well, rail delivery could add about $0.68 to the price of a gallon. Tanker delivery is $1 per barrel per thousand miles. Say a tanker comes from Houston to Los Angeles via the Panama Canal, that would be about 5,000 miles. So that would add $5 to a barrel of crude, from which we get only about 29 gallons of refined gasoline. That would add about $0.17 to the price of a gallon.
What about California's infamous summer formulation? ChatGPT says that can add 1-5 cents per gallon. So, it looks to me that the big oil companies at their gas stations are making at least a $1 per gallon extra profit—probably more—off us suckers in California. Can anyone prove to me that they're not?
Crude costs more in california, they use a blend that is more expensive to refine, cap-and-trade and LCFS add additional costs, they purposefully limit their refining capacity, they purposefully isolate themselves from fuel markets, they purposefully consolidate to reduce competition, they shutdown local production to import from Argentina and Saudi Arabia, and force local regulations on the global operations of oil companies. Chevron and Phillips are the latest in a long string of companies relocation elsewhere. Many companies have stopped business in California all together.
Not all of these count as taxes, but they are 100% self inflicted. It's not companies making an extra buck.
I think other people have addressed a lot of the specifics, but I wish people attributed more to supply and demand and less to "companies arbitrarily jack up prices due to greed whenever they have an 'excuse' for it".
Neither answer is perfect, but "companies are just greedy, the economics are probably fake" is much more of a thought-terminating cliche, and the greed arguments tend to greatly downplay competition and demand elasticity.
Yes, companies often do find mechanisms for anti-competitive behavior (e.g. regional monopolies are a well-known one), but absent an explanation of how they're doing that, I'm going to assume it's supply and deamnd.
I dunno; I feel like there isn't a good economic case for "they're just adding an extra $1 to be greedy"—inter-company competition ought to take care of anything like that, unless we're alleging market manipulation or whatever the term is (collusion? no, wait, that's for treachery or something innit–). I would bet the common wisdom of "it's Cali's state gov't making it expensive" is pretty close to true.
Could be wrong, though. I'll try to look into it. If we assume the most uncharitable $0.88 + $0.17 + $0.01 + $0.10 = $1.16 taxes/fees/delivery/specialblend (most charitable being $0.92 + $0.68 [should we average the tanker-vs.-rail difference?] + $0.05 + $0.15 = $1.80), that takes care of over half the difference. (Or, in the "most charitable" case, almost all of it!)
The other ~half... operating costs? The gas to drive a semi to the station & fill up the underground tanks will cost more, too, after all. Wouldn't doubt there are more taxes & fees levied on the business end, it being CA.
Also worth noting that we can't assume Chevron gas is the average $2.78 in TX—I bet the inter-state spread for Chevron is lower than you've calculated here. The mechanics at my old workplace claimed that Chevron's additives are actually slightly superior to those from other companies—or, at least, /were/ superior for many years & are now finally just roughly equivalent—so that could be a (putative) justification for Chevron prices being higher in general.
IIRC, Chevron is also a member of the "Top Tier" gas standards org.—although many other brands are too; still, this may account for some of the difference between "all average" & Chevron-in-particular price.
> "they're just adding an extra $1 to be greedy"—inter-company competition ought to take care of anything like that
As others have said, California uses a special blend, which isn't that much more expensive itself. But it means that while California gas can go to Nevada, Nevada gas can't go to California. (I'm not 100% on Nevada's laws but roll with it.) There are only a few companies with in-state refineries making this blend.
A charitable take that better fits their fractions. If it was $5 a gallon, of which $1 cents was taxes, that means tax-free gas would be $4, so they'd be right. Depends whether you consider the cost of gas pre or post tax.
California also has a "special blend" of gasoline that is not the summer formulation. It is cleaner year round. This is supposed to add 10 - 15 cents to each gallon. Still doesn't account for the difference between CA and Texas, but you want to include it.
One big thing is that California *land* costs more. If I put a Wal Mart in the middle of some random Texas town the rent will be lower than if I put the same building in the middle of Palo Alto. Then consider the differences in minimum wage. Gas prices in Bakersfield seem to be around $4/gallon while Gas prices in Mountain View are closer to $5 (note I'm more confident about the MV prices ...). Higher rent isn't a tax in any sense, but it adds to the cost of gasoline. Same for minimum wages.
As was mentioned above, this also means that you have to get California blend from California refineries, of which there aren't nearly enough. Texas can get gas from any US refinery (at minimum).
Do California localities still have their own special blends? That really restricts buyer choice (buyer == gas station in this case) if the producers have to specially prepare to sell to you.
Hi, I have a question if anyone with insuline resistance uses monitoring of blood glucose levels. Did you find any value in this? If yes, from commercially available glucose monitors which one would you recommend for casual use for someone who has pre-insulin resistance? Is there a link with explanation how do they work and pros/cons for their use in non diabetic people.
It is helpful to control overall spikes, it does give you a good idea of how and what raises your blood sugar after eating (some things will surprise you). Good to see when you're going too high, and when your readings are staying in range.
Cons are that if you test before and after a meal three times a day, that's sticking your fingers six times, which means you rapidly get sore fingers. If you're pre-diabetic, you wouldn't need to test that often, but it will help you get an idea of "eating at these times/eating this item makes my blood sugar go whoosh".
I have used Dexcom in the past, and am currently using Freestyle Libre 3+. I like the Freestyle a little better for a few reasons:
* Longer monitor time - Dexcom had a 10 day limit, whereas the Libre 3+ has 15 days. Libre 3 only had 14 days.
* Cost - I don't remember how much Dexcom was, but Freestyle is about $20 per sensor, with insurance. I believe Dexcom was significantly more expensive.
* More frequent updates - Freestyle seems to update about once per minute, and Dexcom every five minutes.
* Reporting - I can check my % GMI (approximate A1C) for 7, 14, 30, and 90 day averages. I don't recall this being possible on Dexcom.
* Application of sensor - I remember finding Freestyle to be easier to apply, with nothing else to add to the outside of the sensor: just click into place, and some magic glue keeps it there. I remember Dexcom had something to apply outside of the sensor to help keep it attached.
* Removal of used sensors - Dexcom was a chore to remove, for I have significant body hair. Freestyle's magic glue doesn't seem to cause such painful issues.
Dexcom WAS better in a few ways:
* Longer chart - Freestyle only shows the past 12 hours, whereas Dexcom showed the past 24. One could probably view more information somehow on both, by linking to the data.
* Separate monitor - Dexcom had an extra device to view the current glucose, whereas Freestyle only has a phone app.
I believe one needs a prescription to get either one, so I'm not sure how you would get a doctor to prescribe one for you if you're only pre-diabetic, or non-diabetic.
On the other hand, if you just want to check what your glucose is currently, you don't need a continuous glucose monitor (CGM). I've used a few different ones in the past, and they all seem the same, and are all similar to the ones they use in the hospital. You would need the device, test strips designed specifically for that device, lancets to get a finger-prick, and the lancing device itself (which may come with the monitor).
Personally I've found wearing a CGM very helpful, in terms of understanding how different foods affect my blood glucose. The results were somewhat counterintuitive in the beginning, so this was pretty valuable information. It also provides a reminder whenever I exceed my glucose goals, which when I'm doing poorly is not great for my mental health.
For those without diabetes or prediabetes, I have been led to understand that CGMs aren't that interesting because they just kind of show a flat line most of the time. But I suppose there's no harm in giving it a try if you like.
I have only ever used the Freestyle Libre 3 (soon to be discontinued) so I can't really offer a compare/contrast to other products. Overall I think it works okay, it's easy enough to install and the app works fine. Some things I don't like about it are:
* When I'm sleeping on my side the sensor will often register low glucose levels. This is know in the business as a "compression low".
* You can't disable the low glucose alarms without disabling the app entirely. I understand why they did this, in the context of those who are taking insulin, but the alarms are kind of just an annoyance for those not at risk of severe hypoglycemia.
* The previous two bullet points interact in an obviously bad way. I just end up disabling the app if I'm getting compression lows.
* I'm not really sure how accurate the sensor is and at least once I'm pretty sure it was consistently way off. For casual use this seems fine but if I were taking insulin I'd want to get confident first by comparing to a glucometer.
IMO, it's better to do the easy thing, or the thing that is easiest for you, or do the thing that your good at, than to do the hard thing and struggle uphill all the time.
I guess I agree with the easy approach. I hate when there are motivational speeches to ask people to dream extra big and do the hard thing, especially when the implication is that they would have to do the hard thing for years on end with every subsequent decision. For some people, the hard thing is easy, for others it's just pain hard, always.
Do what you're good at doing. Sometimes that's the hard thing, but easy for you, sometimes it's the easiest thing. Sometimes, the easiest thing to do is the easiest hard thing. Have an easy life, if possible!
“Your mode of perceiving reality is a direct function of root prior beliefs about abstract value claims. These value claims determine what you consider relevant, which direct the scope of your attention and constrain the questions you consider it worthwhile to investigate. Therefore, unless you place the highest value on perceiving reality accurately (ie over all other goals), and a high prior probability on you being wrong in your beliefs, you’re going to get locked into a mode of perception that is instrumental to whatever goals you place over perceiving reality accurately. If any goal is more important to you than having true beliefs, you’ll adopt false beliefs to advance that goal, and not realize you’re doing it because that realization would impede your pursuit of the goal.”
So, I would rephrase a bit: our perception of reality is a direct function of our sensory organs, our eyes, ears and so forth. I think more accurately what you are talking about are our beliefs about the world, the attitudes we have regarding society and our place within it.
And yes, I think you are correct that the belief systems we currently have have grown organically out of the beliefs we had previously, how else would we develop them? No one is or could ever be perfectly objective, we can only formulate new beliefs by "looking through the lens" of our current ones. I'm not sure "accuracy" is something that applies to attitudes or beliefs about the world--they mostly consist of opinions. Since we only perceive reality at all in order to accomplish our goals, we believe whatever was most useful in achieving our goals in the past.
Say you have an attitude about President Trump (good or bad, it doesn't matter). You only have an attitude about him because having one helped you accomplish some goal of yours previously (perhaps it gives you an opportunity to express strong opinions that your friends agree with, thus strengthening your relationships). Now Trump does some new things, and your opinions about that new thing he did will grow organically out of the opinions you had about him before. That's how the mind works.
You could set yourself a goal to deliberately seek out new sources of information, sources that do not necessarily agree with your past opinions, and make a good faith effort to engage them productively. That is likely to result in an increase in sophistication and complexity of your beliefs. That should be a good thing, but "accuracy" doesn't play into it.
Now, one could adopt a standard of accuracy such that
I wrote about Chinese military data centers on my Substack, if anyone is interested. Open question how much the PLA builds its own compute to meet growing AI ambitions or relies on civilian clusters. Plan on writing more on PLA AI integration in the future. https://ordersandobservations.substack.com/p/where-are-chinese-military-data-centers
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I'm reading a firsthand account of a US Marine in Pacific combat in World War 2, and I'm struck by how tough they say the Japanese are. Respect for the lethality & fighting spirit of the Japanese is suffused throughout the book. At one point an NCO explains to new recruits that they can expect Japanese raiders to jump in their foxhole at night and try to stab them in brutal one-on-one combat. The author specifically says (maybe this is not accurate) that the Germans don't do this, so the Army guys in the European theater don't have to deal with this exact problem- it's only the Japanese who love this kind of hand-to-hand combat.
It's kind of fascinating to read this, about a country that is not exactly very martial today. I don't even think the Japanese can find enough recruits for their military these days, and that's with rising threats from both China and North Korea. At one point I could've sworn I read that the homicide rate in early 20th century Japan was just as high as in America, whereas now it's just a tiny fraction. Some cultures just lose that martial spirit I guess
Fun fact: back in the olden days, there were enough people murdering random people in town just to test their swordsmanship that there's a term for for it: "tsujigiri". https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tsujigiri
That seems to me to likely be the same kind of thing Jus primae noctis: not LITERALLY true, but illustrative of the power of the feudal lords/samurai over the commoners.
Yeah, it's almost like an occupying force set out deliberately to break the former martial spirit by sweeping changes to society so Japan would not be a military threat again!
"The first phase, roughly from the end of the war in 1945 through 1947, involved the most fundamental changes for the Japanese Government and society. The Allies punished Japan for its past militarism and expansion by convening war crimes trials in Tokyo. At the same time, SCAP dismantled the Japanese Army and banned former military officers from taking roles of political leadership in the new government. In the economic field, SCAP introduced land reform, designed to benefit the majority tenant farmers and reduce the power of rich landowners, many of whom had advocated for war and supported Japanese expansionism in the 1930s. MacArthur also tried to break up the large Japanese business conglomerates, or zaibatsu, as part of the effort to transform the economy into a free market capitalist system. In 1947, Allied advisors essentially dictated a new constitution to Japan’s leaders. Some of the most profound changes in the document included downgrading the emperor’s status to that of a figurehead without political control and placing more power in the parliamentary system, promoting greater rights and privileges for women, and renouncing the right to wage war, which involved eliminating all non-defensive armed forces."
Yes, but it's remarkable that it actually worked. If I didn't have the benefit of hindsight, my guess would have been that this level of pacification was achieved by killing every male Japanese, and repopulating the home islands with half-Americans.
Japan is said to be a collectivist society where social pressures keep everyone in line (citation needed) so I think a deliberate root-and-branch overhaul of society, where the army was dismantled, being in the military was not alone downgraded but actively harmful to your career prospects, and social engineering around being good citizens who wanted to modernise and co-operate with the occupying administration would have a better chance of working.
I don't know how the population balance worked out, that is, how many men were killed and if this meant the kind of lopsided gender ratios seen in other countries after wars. But I imagine if a good chunk of your military age male population had been killed, that makes it easier to raise the new generation to be more pacifistic.
"While the sex ratio in the pre-war period stayed around 1.03, it declined to 0.92 in 1947, indicating the substantial wartime losses of males. Moreover, the sex ratio stayed below 0.95 until 1970, and began to recover from the late 1970s. This historical fact is striking because it suggests that the larger exogenous losses of males than females during the war had highly persistent effects on the gender composition in postwar Japan.
…As discussed in Subsection 2.1, the sex ratio, defined as the number of males aged 20– 59 divided by the number of females aged 20–59, dropped sharply from the outbreak of Second Sino–Japanese War in 1937 to the end of the Pacific War in 1945. The sex ratio decreased by 0.24, from 1.03 in 1935 to 0.79 in 1945. Then, the sex ratio increased by 0.13, from 0.79 in 1945 to 0.92 in 1947, owing to repatriated soldiers. Almost all of the repatriation was finished by 1947, and the sex ratio remained much the same until after 1948. The sex ratio of people aged 20–59 stayed below 0.95 until 1970, after which it began to recover. Nevertheless, the sex ratio was affected by the internal migration after the war."
So it looks like the sex ratio between men and women remained low (fewer men) up until the 70s. Fewer men = better able to find wives = less militaristic, if we take the idea that "lots of young men with no chance to marry means more fodder for armies"?
Well, keep in mind that Japan's defeat kinda discredited the old order in the eyes of a lot of average people. If you build your society around authoritarian militarism and ethno-chauvinism, such that your government is basically a military dictatorship bent on conquest and exploitation of supposedly inferior peoples, you better actually follow through on it. But instead they went out and not only failed in those conquests but got millions of people killed and their home country bombed into the stone age. Reasonable people started to think "hmm....probably time to go in a different direction. Maybe this McArthur guy and his democracy talk might be worth a try."
I read a WWII book--I believe it was "The Taste of War"--that left me similarly impressed with the Japanese troops. Many of their units were stuck on Pacific islands and in New Guinea, cut off from resupply and bypassed by the Allies on their way to Japan. Those isolated units usually held together until the end of the War, maintaining discipline and order in spite of disease, starvation, and other problems that would see people from any other country put up a white flag.
I think it is quite likely that DPRK troops (well, if not all, but at least 30-60% of them) would act in a similar manner, and something like that was also true for Chinese troops in Korea (In the second case, some of them may have been better trained/experienced than US troops, but were outgunned).
Sure, seems likely, at least until it seems the regime will fall (even to them). Then it will come tumbling down super hard and fast (unlike the Japanese, who genuinely believed the ideology and weren't merely ground down and terrified).
Would someone be willing to steelman the position of zoonotic theory supporters regarding the DEFUSE grant?
- A year before the onset of COVID-19, the EcoHealth Alliance submitted a grant proposal describing its intent to engineer bat coronaviruses to make them more easily transmissible to humans.
- The plan was to introduce a highly specific mutation later found in COVID-19 (insertion of a proteolytic cleavage site able to interact with furin).
- A significant part of the experiments was planned to be carried out at the Wuhan lab.
Obviously, you haven't read DEFUSE grant proposal. Or, if you did, you understand what it said.
> EcoHealth Alliance submitted a grant proposal describing its intent to engineer bat coronaviruses to make them more easily transmissible to humans.
From the proposal:
...we will intensively sample bats at our field sites where we have identified high spillover risk of SAR rCoVs. We will sequence their spike proteins, reverse engineer them to create binding assays, then into bat SARS rCoV backbones... to infect humanized mice and assess the capacity to cause SARS-like disease. Our modeling team will use these data to build machine-learning genotype-phenotype models of viral evolution and spillover risk.
So they proposed taking wild spike proteins and seeing how well they bound to humanized mice cells. No GoF there.
> The plan was to introduce a highly specific mutation later found in COVID-19 (insertion of a proteolytic cleavage site able to interact with furin).
Nope. That wasn't in their grant proposal. In fact the mechanism of the SARS-CoV-2 furin cleavage site was unknown at the time. It wasn't until after a year analyzing the virus, that virologists and biochemists understood how it worked.
> A significant part of the experiments was planned to be carried out at the Wuhan lab.
"Dr. Shi, Wuhan Institute of Virology will conduct viral testing on all collected samples, binding assays and some humanized mouse work."
The majority of the work would have been done in the US.
I looked into it at some point. I may not have gotten everything right, but those were my best estimates for GoF for corona viruses. Around 2019 there were 2-3 labs world-wide, depending on what you count, two of which were the ones involved in that proposal (the Wuhan WIV and a US lab). Ironically the third was also in Wuhan, but was never a suspect for a lab leak because its research was too different.
Until a couple of years earlier (2010-2015 or so, I don't quite recall the details) there were more labs, something in the order of 5-10, for example two in Japan and one in Spain. But then there were some public discussions that this type of research should be paused, and those other labs abandoned it.
It appears the proposal was rejected. What's the argument for then? That they got money from somewhere else and did the experiment anyway? Is there any evidence to support that idea?
It's not meant as definitive proof when taken alone. It is meant to show that the type of research that could lead to an outbreak of this type was proposed in the past, as part of a larger picture.
The argument is something like this: 1) The DNA of the virus has multiple characteristics that are common in engineered research viruses but rare in nature. 2) We know that research on bat coronaviruses likely to produce a virus with these characteristics was proposed to take place at WIV in the past. (The furin cleavage site was specifically mentioned in the EcoHealth Alliance proposal.) 3) There is a separate confirmed instance of EcoHealth Alliance engaging in gain-of-function research on bat coronaviruses at WIV and failing to comply with the conditions set by NIH when it was approved.
I think the counterargument is that 1) is false, or at least, misleading: that the features that supposedly it has in common with engineered viruses are only superficially similar
2) is also incomplete: the insertion of the FCS was *not* proposed to happen at WIV; it was supposed to happen in North Carolina. Also, there are differences between the grant proposal and what is actually observed in COVID, so while some of the characteristics of COVID would be expected from the DEFUSE grant, not all would.
How much those two counterarguments are true, and how much they reduce the degree of coincidence, can still be debated, but I think it's at least plausible that it reduces it below the level of coincidence required for the virus to leak from the lab, but infect no one until it makes its way to a wet market that had previously been identified (down to the stalls, more or less) as a likely location for a coronavirus pandemic to emerge.
The Furin cleavage site within COVID looks natural. Then you still need to explain multiple strains of COVID in the animal storage areas of the wet market early in the pandemic. The lab story really doesn’t hold together well unless you discredit the data from the market.
Peter’s argument here does not explain the extremely low odds of these coincidences. Instead, he tries to build an alibi for the lab based on technical arguments that cannot be judged by non-experts. Even assuming that these arguments are correct, the logical conclusion would be that someone else engineered the virus and tried to frame the Wuhan Lab for it (otherwise, we are still left with explaining the impossibly low odds of these coincidences).
Not really. Improbable things happen every day, just not in any one place. But if something is self-reinforcing (like contagion) then it only needs to happen once.
Also, I'm not really sure that it happened first in WuHan. It seems to me that that was where it was first detected, which is a very different statement. I expect it happened (i.e. the final mutation necessary to turn it into "very contagious in humans") somewhere in rural China that did business with WuHan. And that it spread for quite awhile without being noticed. (Atypical pneumonia I believe was a typical diagnosis.)
Zoonosis believes the pandemic started in Wuhan, but not necessarily that spread of COVID-19 did; just that the pre-Wuhan spread never found a big enough population to go pandemic. I'm not sure how far from Wuhan it's reasonable to push that early spread, though, so you might be agreeing: "rural China that did business with Wuhan" and "or near Wuhan" might be two different ways of describing the same scenario.
True; I just expect them to have good reason for it—although I've not followed anything about COVID very closely (viruses are interesting but the debate quickly reaches a point whereat I can only shrug & say "okay, sounds good", heh).
What I want to know is, not did this cause Covid, but why would you want to make bat viruses more easily transmissible?
There's got to be a reason, someone please tell me why, because this sounds like "we want a grant to study what happens when you pour accelerant all over the flammable materials in your house, then ignite it with a flamethrower".
One reason is to understand better which stuff is dangerous and which is not. Mind that the WIV was very active in screening which viruses exist in nature, and was also involved in monitoring spillover infections in humans.
If this research would have improved their understanding of dangerous vs non-dangerous corona viruses, that would have been a good outcome, and likely an implicit aim of the proposal. Imagine that a few years later (in a hypothetical world without SARS-CoV19) they detect some human being infected with a new corona virus, and that they can ideally look at the genome and discriminate between
- "Yeah, this sucks for you personally, but it's unlikely to spread in humans, no need to worry."
- "Oh, this cleavage site makes it really dangerous, it could be transmittable from human to human, we must act immediately, kill all animals in the district and shut down everything until it's under control."
Yes it has. Killing all animals is routinely used to fight animal diseases like BSE, foot-and-mouth disease, swine fever, and (in many countries, unfortunately currently excluding the US) bird flu. Most of the time it's very successful.
This is the proposal, as far as I can tell. The reasons why they wanted to do this kind of research are inside. It wasn't approved, for what it's worth.
It's the same principle as making extremely cancer-prone mice to test potential cures: you COULD just have normal mice and wait for them to develop it naturally, but that makes it much harder.
Well, both dogs and Tasmanian devils have developed contagious cancers. I suppose a humanized mouse could develop a cancer that was contagious to humans. (But it does seem improbable.)
What was different about the social architecture that meant that providing most people with publicly available phone numbers didn't degenerate into stalking and harassment?
I believe at one time addresses were in there too.
My mother for some reason was in the local paper a good deal as a child. Perhaps everyone's children in that small city were, but I've got what seems to me an unusual number of clippings. (She does love to be in pictures.)
A handful are in an envelope with a little note enclosed.
A couple of local businesses evidently marketed this way! They would scroll through the paper, cut out the clipping, attach it to their letterhead and send it you in the mail. So-and-so at ACME tire shop wishes you a good day and congratulates you on your ... lovely child being pictured in the paper.
And of course as has often been noted, people mentioned in news articles were often identified with their address.
"We spoke with juror Shelby Smith, an attractive young blonde, of 1210 Vine St., after the murder verdict was delivered ..."
My guess is the phone books weren't on the internet. Without that, the only people getting your number are the people who live in the same city or town as you, which includes neither Nigerian princes nor Indian scammers.
I remember having a phone book with my neighbor's numbers as late as 2005 or 2010. Back then there was hope the National Do Not Call Registry might actually work.
Got my first job when a magazine editor picked up a zine I’d left in a local shop. He looked up my name in the phone book and called me at home. Good thing I was there to pick up. It was a different time.
Well, recorded prank calls by people like the Jerky Boys and Adam Sandler were definitely a thing, so there was probably a smaller subculture of weirdo harassers, but not amplified like it is on the internet.
Various creeps/bored kids would make obscene phone calls sometimes, too.
And a whole generation of (now retiring/retired) tech-oriented kids got their start understanding engineering and technology by f--king around with the phone system.
I wonder if phone books made people more polite, in addition to anonymity being much more difficult back then. It seems like it'd harder to be a jerk if everyone could easily figure out your phone number and address.
Phone calls cost money, people didn't have as wide access to phones as they do now, and the culture before the Internet enabled anonymous harassment meant few people thought of using the phone that way. Like poison pen letters - some people did that but the vast majority of people just wrote letters for business and family and friends.
I'm sure some people did call up random numbers to harass people, but it would have been much harder to figure out if Susan Smith was single or married to a guy who could break your kneecaps if he found out who you were.
There certainly were boiler-room operations to call people and offer them scams of various kinds--investments, retirement properties, etc. I think one thing that limited the damage was just that you had to pay someone to talk to each target of your scam individually. Spam and telemarketing and the like become a lot worse overall when the cost of making each attempt drops to a fraction of a cent. Why not send you Nigerian prince spam to every single person on Earth every day, if that increases your expected take by more than it costs?
Local phone calls were free. Long distance phone calls were expensive.
You're right that there was more social trust. I'm not sure anonymity was a major issue because I'm not sure it was that easy to trace a phone call back-- and remember, for a long time, there was no convenient way to record phone calls.
It was possible to get an unlisted phone number, but there was a fee and most people didn't do it.
The scams, the spam, and the harassment just weren't there. Thanks for the reminder of a specific way things were better.
What actually starts the harassment/stalking in modern cases?
Maybe Person A is browsing twitter/facebook/instagram/reddit/etc. and comes across Person B making a statement on a political issue that Person A disagrees with vehemently. Person A feels strongly enough that they track down Person B's name/phone number/address and stalk/harass them through internet sleuthing.
Other options are if Person A finds Person B very attractive and decides to stalk them or engage in a parasocial romantic relationship via twitch which escalates to stalking.
Sure phone books that have everyone's full name, address and phone number makes the stalking/harassing part easier but how does the initial encounter happen without the internet?
If Person A sees Person B walking down the street in 1970 and thinks "I'm gonna harass/stalk this person" the phone book is not immediately useful because there's no photos.
Person A has to follow Person B back to their house which is risky and carries the possibility of being noticed. Much riskier than internet sleuthing so a lot of Person A's maybe don't bother.
One part must have been that long distance calls were expensive until relatively recently which would limit things. Also since this was before widespread cell phones, most people used to have just one phone at home, sometimes without an answering machine. So spam calls ran a big risk of having no one pick up since people might not be home for much of the day. But I'm sure there's more to it than that. I wonder if the phone monopolies back then made it harder to make repeated calls from a blocked/untrackable number? It's an interesting question.
Also, there was one nationwide phone company and one local phone company, which probably made it easier for them to coordinate when they wanted to shut down some number with scam calls, and you didn't get a phone number to call from unless you had signed up and were getting a bill, so they could probably figure out who you were.
On the eve of another supply chain disaster, I've thought a lot about what the early days of covid were like. Then I realized, wait a minute - I *did* have advanced notice that it was going to be bad. I saw the news stories coming out of China and Italy. I *did* have a good info diet. My online network *was* encouraging me to prepare, and I *had* an opportunity to prepare. And... I didn't take that opportunity to stock up on essentials. Because I felt some shame about panicking. But it turned out that the random coworkers and family members being naysayers were wrong, and my online environment was right.
Well, not this time. I'm seeing smoke. The toilet paper/paper towels/tissues section at the store was already sparse when I went yesterday to stock up.
...Meanwhile I'm still in the middle of a renovation. I've bought what I could. I know for a fact that it won't be enough, but it's a start. I'll manage. Sigh.
Covid showed how strong are our supply chains actually.
The covid panic was totally unnecessary and it was the real cause for many disruptions later on. And yet, somehow all supply chains survived. I was right to buy stocks when they were low during covid because I didn't see any real danger from covid and my trust was that industries will survive and recover easily.
I recall going to Target and beginning to stock up on stuff when Covid was still in the "it's just a bunch of techbros panicking, LOL" stage. I got a few odd looks, but also there were other people doing the same thing, and I certainly was glad I'd done it later on.
I did my panic buying a week early, my wife thought I was crazy but later thought I was clever. In the end it didn't make much difference really, nothing except toilet paper was ever in genuinely short supply.
But one of my memories from that time is I remember seeing someone unloading their SUV, the back entirely filled with canned vegetables. Not appetising-looking ones, just hundreds of cans of mixed carrot-corn-pea blend. Sometimes I think about how they're doing. Did they ever get through it all?
I ended up with some masks and hand sanitizer ahead of time out of sheer blind luck.
I had surgery in Nov 2019, and my parents visited to take care of me. My mom insisted (*insisted*) on buying me two giant pump bottles of green aloe hand sanitizer at the time. I still have no idea why. She simply brought them back from the store when she went to get groceries one day.
Then in Feb 2020 I was paranoid I had bed bugs, so I got some diatomaceous earth bed bug powder and some masks to wear while applying it. I spent a day disassembling my bed frame and rubbing the stuff in with paste wax in all the joints. To this day, I think I was just being paranoid and was itchy from dry skin.
In the early phase, all the expert and authorities were trying to avoid panic at all costs, hugging Chinese people, warning that limiting transportation would have been racist, etc. Except for reflex contrarians that always distrust the experts on principle, it wasn’t an easy call.
Personally, the one thing stronger than my reflex contrarianism is my belief that nothing ever happens, and in that case it actually served me better: I didn’t stock up on anything, and I didn’t see any adverse consequences.
Are you saying the Chinese even manufacture all the loo rolls these days?! I can well believe it. What a sad commentary on our times.
I'd also stock up on cans of tuna in sunflower oil, and potassium iodide pills, in case the balloon goes up. (That's a serious point by the way. I have! )
Most toilet paper in the US is made domestically. I mostly used it as a stand-in because of the association. I also genuinely needed to stock up, and I knew it might be the first thing to go once people start panic buying, due to people's memories from covid.
And don't forget, the industrial machines at those US factories are probably made abroad. These machines need regular maintenance. Replacement parts come from all over the world, but probably majority China.
No, the main exporting nations for loo rolls are actually in Europe, together exceeding China by a factor of 4 or so (though likely most of that is exported into other European countries).
Regarding seeing the smoke, I saw in a few rat. online spaces the advice was "a covid-induced economic dip is coming - sell stocks now and buy when lower" which turned out to be very correct.
So with what Trump is claiming etc, what is everyone's thoughts on if stock market is going to go up or down significantly in the next couple of months?
The problem is knowing if this is "when lower" or not.
I've been pushing money into international stocks. I want to push some of my Vanguard money into their utilities index, since that's typically a stable thing in time of distress, but there's a minimum $100,000 buy-in for VUIAX in my retirement account, and I didn't want to do that much at once.
> Americans are starting to get very angry about the tariffs, as they ought to. But so far the actual economic pain from Trump’s policies hasn’t hit — there’s been no big rise in unemployment, no cratering of GDP growth, no empty shelves and only a modest increase in inflation. So far it’s all just market movements, gloomy forecasts, and anger in the media.
> So we’re in this strange holding pattern, a little like the period in World War 2 before the conquest of France. Humanity’s great superpower is that our intelligence allows us to see disasters coming before they strike. [...]
> A lot of Americans realize that tariffs mean that pain is heading their way
It's now been a week since Noah's post, and there *are* empty shelves here and there at the store now. I don't know yet if that's from people panic buying and the store hasn't restocked yet (but the company still has plenty at the warehouse) vs. a genuine decrease in available stock.
Supply chains cannot simply be turned off and then back on again. The shipping "pause" from this month is already baked in. Even if the tariffs end tomorrow, there will still be a huge ripple effect. And every day that the tariffs stay in place, the longer the damage will compound.
It's probably panic buying. I don't expect supply chain to break so easily that the US experiences serious shortages so quickly. Rather, it will be that prices will creep up slowly and selection of products will decrease slightly. In 4 years the results might be considerable but sometimes people don't notice changes if they happen slowly.
In 1992 Argentina was richer than post-Soviet Latvia. Today Argentina is at about the same level as in 1992 while Latvia is much richer than Argentina. Wrong economic policies take time to have deep effect. There is a hope that damage of 4 years can be reversed more quickly.
It's the tariffs. Cargo ships leaving China and bound for the US are way down. Any boat that left China after April 9th is subject to the ~145% tariff (unless your company got some kind of exception. Too complicated for me to list them all out.) The last few boats from before 4/9 have been arriving in California this week. We're still a couple weeks out from other ships arriving in Houston/Florida/New York.
"Impending" is relative here. More of a slow moving train wreck. The predictions I've been seeing from Noah Smith are mid-late May when the issues start percolating. They'll get worse from there. Items that people buy for Christmas gifts will need to ship soon, in order to get through all the corporate logistics networks and onto shelves by October/November. So Christmas season is probably going to be bad unless the tariffs go away immediately.
It's weird, because a lot of our essentials (like toilet paper) are produced domestically. I'm not worried about running out of food. But durable goods like electronics? Especially my renovation supplies, like flooring and light fixtures? That's almost all from China.
I'm a bit confused about the therapeutic (folk?) wisdom that one should be "vulnerable".
I feel like I'd have no issue asking for help from close friends if I really needed it, but mostly it just doesn't... help, to discuss my issues with laymen? Most of my personal issues stem from a not very common mental disorder with pretty counter-intuitive therapeutic treatment (OCD. OCD therapists will often stop you from venting and confessing too many of your thoughts, because that becomes a compulsion in itself). Normal people give shit advice on that. I could discuss my mom's early onset Alzheimer's and how that's upsetting and frightening, but I just don't... want to? Or feel like it would help?
However it's one of those things people often emphasize, that you need to learn to be vulnerable. Apparently many also see it as rude and as if you don't like them if they talk about vulnerable personal stuff with you, and you don't confess something yourself.
I'm female which makes this a bit harder, seems like it's totally socially fine if men are never emotionally vulnerable lol.
I think the distinction is, that one “should” be vulnerable in personal intimate relationships is true, but that doesn’t mean one has to walk around the world being vulnerable to any Tom, Dick and Harry.
Vulnerable is kind of a difficult word in this context. It’s sort of implies weakness, but that’s not the point.
Mutually sharing vulnerability is a bit of a bonding ritual. If you wanted to be cynical, you could: both sides make it easier for the other side to destroy them, thus providing evidence that they trust the other side to not do that, and because if they both have a hold on each other, betrayal becomes more costly for both. If you don't want to be cynical, you can just say that knowing the inner lives of others, and being known in turn, creates a stronger and more intimate relationship.
So yeah, not confessing is rude: you're flouting the ritual! Non-cynical version: they've offered a chance to grow closer, and you declined. Cynical version: they gave you power over them as a sign of trust, and then you didn't equalize things, showing that you don't trust them and are trying to create a power imbalance.
(Yes, this is very easy to abuse, since by being vulnerable you can force others to do the same or be rude. I think this is why "oversharing" is considered a faux pas, and why some communities have explicit norms against "trauma-dumping".)
Does it help for mental health? I don't know. Probably it's different for different people. Probably it helps you less than it helps most others. For me personally, sharing personal weaknesses or emotions *feels* good, but I don't think it actually helps me.
Besides what Rockychug said, vulnerability is also an essential part of intimate relationships (sexual or otherwise). It's hard to get close to someone if they aren't sharing who they are, or what they're feeling and going through. And close relationships is one of the main keys to a happy life.
Is there really such idea that one should be 'vulnerable'? Personally I rather see it as, when there are some issues affecting you, to not pretend to others or to yourself that these issues do not exist and instead to seek for help/advice.
I dunno, as a man I see this having some pretty terrible failure modes where some men never admit anything is wrong and then suffer terribly over it.
I'm pretty up-front with my coworkers about how my ADHD affects me and how sometimes specific things can help me with it, and they're generally understanding. (I've had jobs where I judged this was not a good plan, though.)
Hans-Georg Maaßenwas the president of the German Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution, an intelligence agency that monitors allegedly anti-constitutional activities, from 2012 to 2018. After that, his life took an interesting turn:
"After departing from the BfV, Maaßen radicalised, increasingly using far right terminology about "globalism", a "New World Order", and the "Great Reset". In 2019, he told Swiss newspaper Neue Zuercher Zeitung that the term conspiracy theory had been "invented by certain foreign intelligence services" in order to "discredit political opponents." He described public health measures in Germany against the COVID19 pandemic the "most serious human rights crimes we have experienced". In 2021, Stephan Kramer, head of the state intelligence service in Thuringia and former general secretary of the Central Council of Jews in Germany, accused him of using “classic antisemitic stereotypes”."
"In an investigation of a December 2022 far right plot to storm the Bundestag and install a new Reich, security forces found text messages between Maaßen and members of the leadership of the Reichsbuerger movement, including one that said: "We have to keep fighting." He collaborated with the Austrian conspiracy theory website AUF1 and the YouTube channel Hallo Meinung as well as appearing on RT Deutsch."
{snip}
"In January 2023, he tweeted that the direction of “the driving forces in the political media sphere” is “eliminatory racism against whites and the burning desire for Germany to kick the bucket.” As a result, the CDU unanimously approved a resolution calling for him to quit the party and in an interview discussed "a green-leftist race theory" that casts "whites as inferior" and promotes "immigration by Arabic and African men". CDU leader Friedrich Merz said: “His language and the body of thought that he expresses with it have no place in the CDU. The limit has been reached.” Maaßen responded: "What I said wasn't racist, but what many people think. I reject ideological positions that demand the extinction of 'whitebreads' - those with white skin colour - through mass immigration.""
Remember when "radicalization" was something that happened to high schoolers, college students, 23yo video game streamers? Now it happens to middle-aged men like Musk, Vance, and this guy.
The thing is, if the former head of an intelligence agency starts talking about globalist conspiracies or the deep state or something, that might mean he's gone nuts, but it might also mean he actually saw some stuff that was best explained by globalist conspiracies or the deep state or something.
In your presentation of his life you missed the most insightful event, which was his handling of far-right gangs chasing immigrants in Chemnitz during the demonstrations in 2018. He was contesting the veracity of videos showing that such events indeed happened. It's directly because of his resignation following these events that he started talking about conspiracies.
Well recently some conspiracy theories turned out to be true (Hunter laptop, Covid lab leak, Biden dementia.) so probably some of the things we currently think are conspiracy theories will also turn out to be true (which ones?? No idea, hoping that lizard people don’t run world governments)
I would say that a lot of things in medicine may turn out different than we thought.
It will not be that vaccines cause autism. That is pure RFK Jr lunacy. But some things majority believed, will turn out false.
The simplest is that masks were not effective against respiratory viruses. I think that many people including healthcare professions still believe they are.
Another interesting thing is that Bhattacharya has already started to reduce animal testing. Many will consider this anti-science but actually 10 years ago at the university many professors considered that a lot of animal testing is pointless. Especially with dogs because the knowledge we get from those experiments are quite irrelevant and are done only due to regulatory requirements.
Maybe Scott is right and the FDA needs to be reorganized and completely new approach would serve us better?
COVID as a lab leak wasn't "proven true" and is still speculative.
Arguably "Hunter Biden's laptop is a Russian disinformation campaign" is actually the conspiracy theory, which I think we have basically discarded, and was really just a brief media hysteria.
Biden dementia, though, classic conspiracy theory that was right.
Biden's dementia was apparent to everyone. While not really proven and probably not on the level it gets normally diagnosed, the standards for the president of the country should be higher and as a theory it was definitely something worthwhile to assume. In my view, it was something that everybody could see but ignored because it was inconvenient.
Now the question is that Trump appears to have initial stages of dementia too. Again, I predict that by the end of his 4 year presidency (if he still remains as a president), it will be revealed as factual and something that many tried to hide from the public.
I doubt they'll reveal it at all. The media stopped talking about the gerontocracy as soon as (the ironically younger) Biden dropped out of the race, because that point only mattered when it hurt Democrats. We won't learn anything about trump's dementia for some time, same as with reagan.
On a somewhat related note, does anyone know what happened with the JFK files? They were supposedly released, but I’m still waiting for someone to go on Joe Rogan and explain what it all means
Marc Andreessen gave Thomas Crooks the Oliver Stone treatment on Joe Rogan. “Why did he use open sights? Will we find out who was behind this after Trump is inaugurated?
Is there some amount of wealth that just makes people go kind of nutty?
No, but there's some level of wealth or fame that causes people to listen and publish/repeat it when you say nutty things. And even sometimes when you say sensible things that can be excerpted to sound nutty.
Are you familiar with Greg Egan? After reading several of The Culture novels I was craving for that level of sci-fi and he seems to have met it. I'm halfway through Axiomatic which is an anthology of short stories, and I'd love you to- hmmm. I just realized that this could be *my* book review entry for the next iteration...
I've read most of his work now and it's all incredibly good. Axiomatic, Diaspora, and Permutation City are my favorites, which I believe is a popular opinion.
Personally, I'd say Axiomatic is his best work; lots of very tasty short stories in there! That said, the early novels are IMO great (Schild's Ladder is my personal favourite, although Permutation City is more popular generally speaking), and if you like high-concept stuff, the later novels are also very fun. I like to say that Dichronauts gave me an intuition for why information can't move faster than light (any more than you can go more north than the north pole).
Learning To Be Me is my favourite story from Axiomatic. What's yours so far?
I just finished the one about the out of body experience (Sight, iirc). I think my favorite has been Eugene, but I also loved the very first one, the Infinite Assassin. I was very lucky to have come around a Tiktok about the Cantor Set a few days before, otherwise it wouldn't have blown my mind. To smithereens.
I've read some Egan. He's very good on the hard science elements, his prose styling less so. Reading some of his work feels like chewing through cardboard for me. It's hard to get elegant, stylish writing anymore!
I like Egan, but I feel I often lack a degree or two to really understand science in his books. I felt especially lost reading "The Clockwork Rocket", where he doesn't just uses real physics, but invent new one, based on a slightly different axioms.
That was a tough read but I absolutely loved it. People are always writing science fiction that's just "what if this one invention happens" and Egan's out here like "what if amorphous insect people lived in a world where relativity was totally different and creating light generates energy instead of using it".
How is the voting kept fair for the review contests? I would assume that contestants are going to share the contests with their friends to get them to vote, and even if it's only a small minority who do that, they will be overrepresented among the winners.
Someone did that last year and got caught. The problem with the strategy is that Scott is smart enough to be suspicious when a review with a very high average score also has a very high number of votes and isn't particularly good.
Voting is done via Google form. You have to put in your email address when you vote; it's not anonymous. I guess someone *could* rig up a bunch of fake email addresses to spam the form, but nobody really bothers.
But then those friends would have to log on here to ACX and maybe even join up if they wanted to vote, and then we would all get new friends! How is that bad? 😀
Generally people on here don't cheat or fiddle contests like that. I mean, yeah there's the incentive of a cash prize if you win the review contest, but there is also strong implicit pressure that you donate the prize to charity. If you want fame, then being a big fish in a small pond may satisfy that, but you won't get much bragging rights out of telling people at work or in your social circle "I won an amateur book review contest on an obscure site".
I did, but I'm also terminally online and seeing someone get to call out Hasan one of the rare times he steps outside his hugbox is immensely cathartic.
This debate is truly the epitome of how normies debate things. Some of Ethan's arguments would ring hollow under more scrutiny, but Hasan is so committed to idiotic positions that he ends up losing anyways.
Much like Trump, Hasan is too stupid to notice how his enemies could be defeated, and the only way he could know these things would correlate with not taking the actions or positions that he does.
The narcissistic one was Hasan right? I got struck by how many people in TikTok/Twitter were saying he was better. absolutely crazy. He didn't concede even when he was clearly wrong, and was being very hypocritical with his standards for himself/his side vs the ones he had for Ethan
Is there anywhere on the net I can go to read about people who have adverse responses to cannabis?
I am including physiologic responses. A year and four days ago I wondered if I would live from the extreme tachycardia (30-90 minutes) I developed after taking a possibly large but normal dose of liquid THC. (I had smoked mj before very lightly, 'socially', long ago. I basically forgot how difficult it used to be for me to have more than a tiny puff when I was a young adult.) Never mind the weird mental state I was in, which was almost normal in terms of rationality and perception but my consciousness kept "resetting" every few seconds, which I later put the word "seizure-like" to. I've never talked to anyone about it, and I think about it a lot. Very brief poking of the internet found that, e.g., a 70 year man had died of cardiovascular complications from the same type of thing. I came close to calling EMS but didn't, and never thought of a separate "poisoning center" phone number, which is what I would have done first, in retrospect.
I crawled into a lukewarm shower for half an hour in order to distract myself from overall agitation and from the tachycardia. I crawled out when I decided I didn't want to be found dead naked in the shower.
I don't know how people enjoy this drug/can literally smoke it like a cigarette. It just destroys me in such a dose.
Virginia Republicans are having a fun time:
https://www.politico.com/news/2025/05/03/youngkin-reid-virginia-lieutenant-governor-gop-00325189
(I don't grok the objections to this. Is there anyone who's fine with having a gay candidate but objects to that fact that he posted pictures of naked men to his social media account? It's not "revenge porn" or anything. I haven't seen anyone say it was in a place where kids would randomly see it, it was on Tumblr.)
Not the worst thing in the world, but seems like a sign of bad judgment. Should be obvious many would be offended by it.
It's worse than a crime -- it's a mistake. Posting porn is all downside and no upside. I don't want the candidate for my party to lack the theory of mind to do this.
It looks like he denies having it. If he's telling the truth, then there's no issue at all. If he's lying, then he's compounding the stupidity by lying.
Sure, but that's just "it's wrong because people are offended." I'm asking WHY people are offended.
Do most Republicans believe "It's OK to be gay?" Anti-woke blowback is the order of the day.
If straight male politicians posted pictures of naked ladies, it would be deemed sexist. I guess it's weird that there's no equivalent negative sentiment to that if it's a gay male posting naked gentlemen. I think people sense there's a double standard going on even if they can't put their finger on what's wrong with it.
Yes, I believe public figures should not be posting pornography. It's animalistic and displays a lack of self-restraint unbecoming of people with authority.
But it looks like it's just slander.
Friends of mine, a married pair, are having a marriage crisis, considering separation/divorce. They live in New England, I don't live in the US, and can't help much. Can anybody recommend any good Catholic, or more broadly Christian, or just non-woke, organization or group in that area of the US to help saving marriages with some counseling, coaching, etc.? The problem is that the guy does not want to hear about "therapy", so it should be something non-standard, where the masculine point of view is balanced against the feminine one, like idk a group of married couples offering counseling, where men are talking to the guy in question and women are talking to the wife and somehow trying to reconcile both points of view (just an example, can be anything without the label of "therapy").
I mean, Christian couples counseling is definitely a googleable thing, highly available in New England and lots of places. Or if they are members at a church, they should talk to their own pastor or whoever provides pastoral care there. It's part of their job though they may have greater or less skill and training at it.
This was my thought as well. I've heard good things about Catholic and Episcopal premarital counseling. I'm pretty sure they also have postmarital counseling, and I expect a lot of other major churches offer similar services.
A few more details would help here. Is the guy already religious? And what are their reasons for wanting to separate?
If they are orthodox Catholic, then either they figure it out or they go to hell. Divorce is simply not an option
They can also go talk to a priest, who may have better relationship advice than "figure it out or go to hell."
Co-counseling?
Going and talking to their priest or deacon might help. (The deacon may be better here because he's likely married himself.)
Marriage Encounter is a great program for married couples trying to keep their marriage together, but it's not trying to rescue marriages in trouble, but rather trying to help head off trouble in advance.
I don't know any, but I would recommend for the man to read through the New Testament and pay attention to every part that talks about Jesus' interactions with/love & sacrifice for his followers and people in need. Marriage is God's physical symbol representing Christ's relationship to His church, and it's important for a man in a marriage to know exactly what that means and to constantly work on being more Christ-like in his marriage. Online estimates reading the NT at around 18 hours to read through, but honestly taking the time over a couple weeks to read and really consider it would be very beneficial.
Idk what the marital issues are, but I can't conceive of any situation where taking the time to do this would be a bad thing. If he made vows at his wedding, he should stick to them and at least put this effort in.
For a Child will be born to us, a Son will be given to us;
And the government will rest on His shoulders;
And His name will be called *Wonderful Counselor*, Mighty God,
Eternal Father, Prince of Peace.
Isaiah 9:6 NASB
There’s a lot in the NT that isn’t pro family, at all.
I'm working on an episode on the pronatalist/antinatalist debate in philosophy and have posted by "normie" preliminary thoughts about this issue here. Even if I'm wrong, I keep getting pushed by people about what constitutes the normie, common sense position. I thought it'd be obvious, but I guess it isn't. https://open.substack.com/pub/hiphination/p/is-having-children-a-moral-issue?r=i44h&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&showWelcomeOnShare=true
To what extent would the 24th amendment prevent a state from restricting the right to vote for low-income people or those on welfare?
Probably depends on the court and on exactly how the law was structured. An income or property qualification for voting, especially one tied to taxable income or acceptance of government benefits, seems like it probably would fall within the category of "reason of failure to pay any poll tax or other tax": an income based test is very close to being a test based on how much income tax you pay, and a welfare-based test could be read as equivalent to a poll tax since it means you need to opt out of government benefits (equivalent to a 100% tax on those benefits) if you want to be able to vote. But a very narrow textual reading might accept a law that puts enough distance between the test and cash payments in either direction.
The 14th amendment also provides two potential bars to such a policy. As of 1966 (two years after the 24th amendment was ratified), poll taxes for state elections, which are outside the scope of the 24th amendment, are considered to be barred by the Equal Protection clause of the 14th amendment. The relevant case is Harper v. Virginia Board of Elections, which overturned Breedlove v. Suttles (1937) which had upheld poll taxes. This might or might not be upheld by current courts, as the rational basis test for equal protection cases (the test used by the majority in Harper) is now interpreted much more leniently: intermediate scrutiny requires a good reason, and strict scrutiny requires a damn good reason, but for rational basis merely requires that the judges can require a vaguely plausible rationale besides "mere animus". But since income qualifications would have racially disparate impacts, there's a plausible argument for applying strict scrutiny to the question instead of rational basis.
The other 14th amendment issue is the apportionment clause, which proportionately reduces Congressional representation for states that disenfranchise male citizens over the age of 21 for reasons other than felony convictions. But as far as I know, this clause has never been enforced, despite being codified in both the Constitution and statues.
tl;dr: Grok-3.5 beta using poe.com 05/01-02/2025 7 questions, tl;dr of results:
2 correct, 2 partially correct, 2 1/4 correct, 1 wrong
a) Correct
b) partially correct (initially right species, wrong transitions, 1st prod corrected FeCl4, 2nd prod corrected CuCl4)
c) fairly bad, 1/4 credit
d) correct
e) fairly bad, 1/4 credit - prod did not correct it
f) decent, valid compounds after it corrected itself within initial reply, calling it partially correct. Missed e.g. SiH2F2, accepted it when pointed prodded with it.
g) badly wrong
Generally disappointing, not sure if it is supposed to be a reasoning model.
https://poe.com/s/Yg5gRrtG90TRSngkaUml
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: A bit worse than typical. It got the species right, but initially ascribed both colors to d-d transitions, overlooking the spin forbidden for FeCl4 (which most models get) and the near-IR for CuCl4 (which most models fail at).
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: Initial response pretty bad, missing tetrahedrane, cyclobutadiene, diacetylene, ... Even after a prod it was missing tetrahedrane and it misclassified some of its own structures. Even after two prods it still missed cyclobutadiene and still misclassified some of its own answers.
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 mass equivalent of the Sun's radiated light is approximately 4 times greater than the mass lost to 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: Initial answer was purely numerical, even though I asked for relevant equations. It wasn't "wrong", in terms of a numerical approximation - though the slope at the equivalence point was 4 orders of magnitude too low as a result. It offered to use exact equations, so I asked it to do so. It is using the wrong equation, ignoring autoionization, then using a wrong approximation to keep the answer finite, though noting that the denominator of what it is using will go to zero, blowing up.
f) Q: Please give me an exhaustive list of the elements and inorganic compounds that are gases at STP. By STP, I mean 1 atmosphere pressure and 0C. By inorganic, I mean that no atoms of carbon should be present. Exclude CO2, CO, freons and so on. Please include uncommon compounds. I want an exhaustive list. There should be roughly 50 compounds. For each compound, please list its name, formula, and boiling or sublimation point.
results: Pretty decent. It temporarily listed a number of liquids, and multiple listed a number of duplicates, but corrected itself before truly adding them to the list. It missed e.g. SiH2F2, accepted it when pointed prodded with it.
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: Badly wrong. Neither the initial molecule it suggested nor a new one after the prod had an S4 axis at all.
Periodically I hear someone make an argument for banning phones in schools.
Apparently lots of schools are doing this and the teachers report that it makes a big difference -- students are more engaged, et cetera.
The counterargument I always make is: yes, but can you imagine if someone did that to you? If you had to attend eight hours' worth of meetings, every day, and you weren't allowed to use your phone? You'd be miserable. You wouldn't tolerate it.
And the thing I hear back is: well, those children aren't me, and they don't have a choice. We can make them do whatever we want.
I dunno. I find myself unsatisfied.
>The counterargument I always make is: yes, but can you imagine if someone did that to you? If you had to attend eight hours' worth of meetings, every day, and you weren't allowed to use your phone? You'd be miserable. You wouldn't tolerate it.
We regularly make children follow rules we don't apply to adults, for the very good reason that children aren't as developed mentally or emotionally and very often can't be trusted to act in their own best interests.
> And the thing I hear back is: well, those children aren't me, and they don't have a choice. We can make them do whatever we want.
That's a terrible argument, but it doesn't mean it would be better to give kids their phones all day. The missing justification is "It's mostly better for them and better for the classroom environment and the school environment in general if they don't have the phones on them all the time." You'd probably be better off without your phone all day too (after you got over your withdrawal) but you're an adult so you get to decide for yourself.
The Catholic high school around the corner has made close order drill optional now but I think it will be a while before they allow cell phones in class. Some wonderfully well behaved kids around there, much better than I was at that age. They produce some good athletes too including two Major League Baseball Hall of Famers.
My daughter has gotten detention twice this year for having her phone out during school hours. She didn't like it, but I think I understand why the school has the policy, and I broadly think it's a good policy.
Schooling, for all of its problems, isn't nearly as bad as unnecessary business meetings.
I don't see a difference? Both are situations in which someone more powerful than you has decided that you're required to be in a room while people talk about something that doesn't matter to you; they can't make you listen, but you're required to sit still and at least pretend to be paying attention.
Like most bright people. I was bored to death when I paid attention in school. I got extremely good at fantasizing while keeping an alert look on my face & staring at the speaker. Also did a lot of doodling, zentangle kind of stuff, drawing cartoons and writing silly poems to pass to my friends. Schools are understimulating, somewhat actively unpleasant settings for most kids and we should improve them. Until we do, though, I'm in favor of no phones. Lots of screen time is bad for kids too, and it interferes with the kind of development that happens when people are forced to draw on inner resources to escape boredom.
School classes are generally designed to teach you something of interest. The worst they can be is wrong. Meetings are frequently designed to make the person making them feel important.
School is already miserable. We're already locking kids in a building for a bunch of hours a day because we have the power to do so. Something about the phone-ban does cause me to instinctively disagree, because of how patronizing it is, but I don't think that's rational. If the statistics show that banning phones improves outcomes, I don't think you can oppose banning phones without opposing school itself.
This is the right take here, I think.
> If you had to attend eight hours' worth of meetings, every day, and you weren't allowed to use your phone? You'd be miserable. You wouldn't tolerate it.
I don’t use my phone at meetings. Who does?
?? I don't use my phone during meetings, and no one is tolerant of such behavior at the organization that I lead.
(The most militant staff members now on this point are the youngest ones which is a shift from a few years ago.)
That's what laptops are for.
I feel like there's an unexamined crux here: is the primary purpose of school to teach children things? Or is the primary purpose of school to provide daycare?
I've seen arguments, I think partly on this blog, which say: "it's actually not necessary to teach math so early; if you wait five years and then teach the same material, students catch up very quickly."
My personal experience is that math was interesting and important, but many of my other courses felt like a total waste of time -- especially "History" which was sometimes renamed to "Social Studies". I don't think I ever had a history teacher that believed they were teaching anything important or relevant. It was common for the teacher to get distracted having a (not-learning-related) conversation with the students, and then for the students to take it as a free period. I played a lot of M:TG.
Other classes where I learned nothing of value include art, gym, and literature.
I'm sorry your school experience didn't work for you, but that doesn't mean your experience is universal. There are a lot of earnest, skilled, knowledgeable educators out there actually trying to do a good job.
>. I don't think I ever had a history teacher that believed they were teaching anything important or relevant
Honestly, the takes on here re education just keep getting more and more divorced from reality. I have known many, many social studies teacher (not the same as history, which is a subset thereof), and every one of them thought they were teaching something important (which is why the chose to major in a social science in the first place). If anything, the problem is the opposite: some teachers spend excessive time on topics which they personally consider Very Important.
One issue - though in a way it will be a wry commentary on what has been wrought if this is no longer true - is that kids easily outwit teachers on tech matters, or used to. So apart from the loss of authority represented by allowing children to opt out of the lesson - there's the further erosion of respect for the teacher who depending on age I guess, likely is in over her head.
I remember some of the young mothers - many of whose husbands probably worked in tech or other STEM fields - fought hard to keep the obtuse, gullible district adminstrators from swallowing the BS from the tech-in-schools salesmen - what is it to administer but to purchase, to plan projects which require purchase - about the need for iPads in the first grade on up. They were still repeating, as of 10 years ago or so, the idea that kids would be left behind if they didn't have enough technology in their day lol.
They wouldn't learn to type quickly I guess.
They lost of course, and humorously the week of the rollout found the community newspaper reporting on the scandal of first graders describing to their mothers the pornographic images they had found online.
The district personnel had apparently struggled with filtering this stuff. I wonder if they ever managed it.
I think I'm more interested in what's best for the students, and concerns about loss of authority and erosion of respect don't seem closely connected to that.
I agree that it's bad if the school spends money on devices that let the kids look at porn in school, but I don't think that's related to the question of whether we should take their phones away.
Obviously lots of kids will be more intelligent than the teachers they must listen to. I had one teacher who was all wordy preamble, who had difficulty in the allotted time of getting to the point of opening the book and having us learn from it; who perhaps did not much know what was in the book herself, and whose command of the language was poor, or whose dialect was eccentric if you like - and she appeared to be on uppers all the time. Yes, she was kind of a joke to the kids - especially the boys liked to joke around with her. Maybe you wouldn't have called it respect, that was offered her - though the fact that she was generally gregariously cheerful and never mad about the teasing went a ways towards making her sympathetic.
For instance: she would make a big deal about her PODIUM. I can't teach without my PODIUM. Of course this was an invitation for the boys to disappear her podium from time to time.
It would have been nice to learn in those mostly idle days some of the history one eventually learned by oneself, from a book or a smart person. But: the culture then was such that the kids would have been genuinely ashamed to do more than joke - to have ever made her working day unpleasant, or made her to feel that she was looked down upon.
And had some kid tried that, they would have been rightly ostracized.
This was almost like a code of honor, which seems to have been turned upside down if reports from public school are to be believed.
Have you ever been in a classroom? Or tried teaching? Or just supervising kids?
Looking at your phone in a meeting is not at all the same as trying to learn in a classroom. Kids on their phones are not going to make the work up at home. They are not learning from different sources.
If you were on your phone eight hours a day at work, scrolling social media and playing games, instead of doing your job - how long would you keep that job?
Phones can be used during a lesson in a teacher-directed manner. But that requires skilled and dedicated teachers. Of which, sadly, there are few.
Also probably it requires more supervision than the teacher can provide. The well-behaved kids are doing what they're supposed to on their phone, the not-so-well-behaved kids are playing games on their phone.
Periodically I hear someone make an argument for banning alcohol in schools.
Apparently lots of schools are doing this and the teachers report that it makes a big difference -- students are more engaged, et cetera.
The counterargument I always make is: yes, but can you imagine if someone did that to you? If you had to attend eight hours' worth of meetings, every day, and you weren't allowed to drink? You'd be miserable. You wouldn't tolerate it.
And the thing I hear back is: well, those children aren't me, and they don't have a choice. We can make them do whatever we want.
I dunno. I find myself unsatisfied.
You might say, "But people do ban alcohol at work!", to which I must point out that that's a very new phenomenon.
Employers are allowed to prohibit employees from bringing their phone to work and many employers do take advantage of this. Amazon had this policy in its warehouses for years, though reversed it during the pandemic.
> they don't have a choice. We can make them do whatever we want.
The Iron Law of Melos: the strong do what they can while the weak endure what they must.
"Why can't little Johnny have his phone during class?"
Then it's "Why can't little Johnny read or do maths or have any useful skills for work?"
Well gee, gosh, I dunno, what do you think happened there?
Where I live parents are increasingly radicalized on this point and _demanding_ that schools keep smartphones out of the classrooms. And to clear my wife and I are now among them. I've zero doubt that it's in the best interests of my child both immediately and long-term.
Happy to say that our son's middle school (which will also be his high school) is strong and firm on this. The one qualm that many parents express is about emergency contact with our child; that point does generate fresh gulps every time the US news cycle includes another psycho-spraying-bullets-in-a-school event. But that fades, and the school has heard that feedback and does a good job handling family-emergency instances (getting promptly time-sensitive info from a parent who's called the office, to an individual pupil).
> The one qualm that many parents express is about emergency contact with our child; that point does generate fresh gulps every time the US news cycle includes another psycho-spraying-bullets-in-a-school event.
This argument never really landed with me. Why does every kid in a school need their phone if every adult in the school already has one? Has kids calling their parents in past shootings made any difference for their survival? Or is it more about them being able to call their parents to share some last words before they get shot to death?
I don't need to imagine what school without a smartphone is like, because I went to school before smartphones existed.
It was better. Kids talked with eachother to entertain themselves instead of addictively scrolling. Pretty much anyone born before 1995 would have had the same experience.
Does eight hours a day without a smartphone really seem so bad to you?
Is it true that these days school kids no longer talk to each other?
It's hard for me to imagine.
Where I teach, students are only allowed their phones at lunch. In lunch, many of them are glued to their phones.
I fucking WISH I could leave my phone at home during work. My last several jobs either allowed it or required it, but this one keeps demanding its use during working hours.
And yeah, those portable phones that could be brought to school didn't exist when i went to school, and everyone survived school anyway, and in fact learned lessons for the majority of the school day.
Something important that many people don't realize about education is that the role of the classroom is not to outsource knowledge. There are dozens of places with more knowledge, more easily accessible, for cheaper. Every day this becomes more true.
The goal of the classroom is to outsource *willpower*. The average student simply does not have a fully developed brain capable of exerting a lot of willpower towards a task, whether that be learning or something else. As a result, they will not be self motivated, and certainly not future oriented. The teacher's job is to provide external motivation that cannot yet come from inside the student.
It's not clear when exactly "will power" kicks in for a student -- anecdotally it's probably on some sort of probability curve, with a majority not really getting there until sophomore year of highschool. There will always be edge cases of precocious students eager to learn from young ages, but I'd say that such behavior is definitely lacking in middle school and lower.
In this framing, of course getting rid of phones is a big upside. It makes the job of outsourcing will power to the teacher significantly easier.
Is there going to be another short story contest in the foreseeable future?
No, but I have it on good authority that there will be one in the unforeseeable future.
My collaborator and I have been thinking about the effectiveness of physical therapy (PT) for pain (https://debugyourpain.substack.com/p/when-does-pt-help-with-pain). Our current conclusion is that while PT does well with acute injuries and rehab using a biomechanical lens (fixing tissues, improving strength/coordination), it often struggles with *chronic* pain.
Chronic pain seems to involve learned nervous system responses. Yet, PT is still largely grounded in biomechanics, leading to interventions (stretching, strengthening) that swing and miss on chronic conditions.
Curious about others' experiences or knowledge here:
- Does this model mismatch (biomechanics vs. learned behavior) resonate with your experiences seeking pain treatment?
- Have you encountered PT (or other therapies like PRT, Sarno, etc.) that successfully addressed the "nervous system" or "learned pain" aspects? What did that look like?
I've been fortunate enough to not need to seek pain treatment, but I have treated many thousands of patients for over a decade using Extracorporeal Shock Wave therapy (EWST).
I think you're about right about PT; it works well for rehabilitation and to deal with situations due to weakness or muscular imbalance, but not so well for chronic pain situations more generally.
EWST works remarkably well in situations where surgical or PT approaches have failed. This is because the shock wave gets the body to treat the afflicted area as though it were recently injured (without causing any actual injury). This allows for the body to investigate and heal any area that has unhealed damage, and to 'notice' when an area has abberant patterns of tension or inflammation - the learned nervous system responses you reference.
In cases of old unresolved injury or of gradual degradation/degeneration, I'll often see a brief period of localized increased pain, followed by rapid improvement. These are the cases where there is an actual underlying mechanical damage. In many other cases of chronic pain, however, we simply hit a point where the symptoms rapidly decline without any apparent mechanistic explanation. These are cases where the body was simply holding a reflexive pain or tension response, whether due to psychosomatic threat (common in say whiplash) or due to some old injury the body never got the message as resolved.
So suffice it to say I certainly am not a skeptic regarding the learned pain theories! This is why many spine surgeries fail; they do not address the true, non-mechanistic cause of the pain, and indeed give the body additional trauma to target with additional chronic pain.
I've seen several friends go through severe chronic pain and I definitely buy the nervous system involvement aspect. One friend suffered debilitating low back pain for years after an original injury involving poor lifting technique. After the initial acute phase, it seems certain that the long term persistence of pain was a learned nervous system response. They tried a lot of different modalities (Feldenkrais, Alexander technique, etc) but ultimately were able to escape the worst parts via DNRS, which explicitly addresses nervous system involvement.
Watching this process play out over a period of years definitely give me a new appreciation for techniques that exist outside the Western medical establishment – traditional Western medicine seems quite poorly suited to addressing chronic pain. For the friend mentioned earlier, a turning point was when they went in to a consultation with a surgeon, who described the procedure on offer quite graphically – "scraping out" the remains of the herniated disc, before installing a titanium cage that would fuse the vertebra above and below.
The visceral rejection of that idea ultimately motivated them to find an alternative that worked for them, and they dedicated quite substantial effort to actually engaging with all these different approaches. But for many people, that level of dedication is just not feasible, and they end up getting the surgery in the hope of relief, only to be disappointed and often worse off a few years later. Quite an unfortunate situation.
I have a lot of low back pain due to mild scoliosis and not-so-mild complications of it. The only touch-and-movement-based intervention that has ever had any effect on my pain is Paul Ingraham’s Trigger point pressure approach, which he describes in multiple places in his excellent site Pain Science.
https://www.painscience.com/index-trigger-points.php
What you do is press hard on certain places, often near by not on the painful spot, with something like a hard rubber ball. Since my pain’s in my back I lie on one and wiggle around til I can feel that it’s in an effective place, then relax in a way that lets the ball press hard into the spot for 60 secs or so. Spots that are going to affect pain have a distinctive “good pain” feeling. Also, I’ve noticed they often cause a mild achey pain a few inches away from the ball. For instance, a ball at the pointed base of my shoulder blade causes a mild ache on the top edge of my shoulder, where it joins the arm. When I’m working on my back with the balls I usually spend 15 mins of so finding spots and leaning into them. Afterwards my pain is maybe 1/3 of what it was, and flexibility is much greater. My back stays better the rest of the day unless I do something I shouldn’t, like carry a heavy box. It reverts back completely to its usual pain level overnight.
I’ve also found some spots on the back and lower sides of my neck that help vascular headaches, and occasionally get rid of one. Once had a very sore and achey right hip joint, and experimented with sitting on a rubber ball. Found a “good pain” spot mid-buttock that definitely reduced hip joint pain.
I don’t know how this approach works, and Ingraham isn’t sure either, but it sure as hell isn’t placebo. Pain can’t be measured objectively, but flexibility can, and my range of motion expands considerably after I do a pressure point treatment.
I have tried PT several times for a chronic hyper sacrum and traditional PT causes more pain and does not help. I have not tried/been offered PT for the "nervous system/learned pain" but not knowing about that theory, it doesn't sound like it would work. I think my chronic pain, and that of many others, is because something is broken and the body is not capable of fixing what is broken and surgery near the back does not have a good track record so i just try to manage it.
Curious if you feel like any of these particular pieces of evidence are unconvincing https://debugyourpain.substack.com/p/evidence-page
Every academic I know who studies pain acknowledges that in a large fraction of cases of chronic pain, there is no detectable structural tissue damage. More broadly, that "pain is a learning signal, not a damage meter". See, for instance, Professor Sean Mackey, head of Stanford Neuroscience and Pain Lab , or (my mentor) Fan Wang at MIT. Of course, there's also Howard Schubiner, Lorimer Moseley, David Butler, and the older pain science group too.
Hey, all you articulate people, I'm trying to find a word for something:
-Applause is a conventional way of signaling approval. I think it's probably a conventional and tamed version of the yelling, jumping, thumping etc. people do at concerts and sports events, and kids do when they are thrilled and surprised.
-Selfies are hardly ever candid shots that catch people having a great time -- they're a posed stand-in for it.
So what is a word for things of this nature? I don't want a phrase so not "conventional signifier" or "conventional stand-in." "Objective correlative" isn't right. Neither is "symbol." Are they emblems?
They're ritualized behaviors. Ritualization is the process of something being regularized in form and when it's appropriate or expected, and taking on symbolic meanings in addition to or instead of their original purpose.
Exemplar?
Stereotype?
Synecdoche?
Proxy?
Phatic expression? I'm not sure that is precisely it. but it does encompass "thing we all do for social reasons that is structured in a conventional way":
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phatic_expression
"In linguistics, a phatic expression is a communication which primarily serves to establish or maintain social relationships."
>Selfies are hardly ever candid shots
How can you take a 'candid' photo of yourself? Unless you've, like, dropped the camera and it went off.
sort of like pocket dialing, but with a big hole in your pants?
I went through my phone's photos recently, and discovered about a hundred photos of the inside of my pants pocket.
See, if there was a big hole in the pants, inside of the pocket, you'd capture things of interest. Candid selfies.
I’m having trouble even understanding what property you think these two things share, which makes it hard to come up either a word for it.
Simplified, conventional versions of things that stand in for the messier real version.
I too have trouble following you. Applause is certainly less intense than cheering, but a double thumbs up, a single thumb up, or a nod and a smile are also less intense than the other. I wouldn't call them "simpler" or "less messy" in any case. All these forms of approval are appropriate in different scenarios, depending on a myriad of social rules.
Same for selfies. Sometimes you want a selfie, other times you ask a stranger to take a pic of you, still other times you want a professional shoot. All of these are related, but equally valid and express different things.
So, a little like euphemisms, but to a different end? Conventions, maybe?
ETA: though I probably got that from your word “conventional”, so perhaps you already thought of that and goin it wanting.
Simulacra?
I think this is the correct answer
Facsimiles?
I’m headed to grad school in NYC- Baruch’s Masters in Financial Engineering.
If anyone knows of decent places to live that are opening up and in decent travel time to the Weissman school of Arts and Sciences (55th Lexington Ave), please reach out to me.
Any places passed on will also help some of the international students in my batch, as I’ll be passing everything along to our WhatsApp group.
No offense, but financial engineering sounds like what caused the Great Recession. Not a great name. Plus, when you finish, are you going to call yourself a financial engineer?
Structured products were the main issue, yes.
I do not intend to, no. Do you commonly introduce yourself by what you studied?
"are you going to call yourself a financial engineer?"
Got the ol' slide rule here in my overalls top pocket, Ole Betsey I call her. Never let me down yet on estimating the volume of a piggy bank!
Yeah, this seems like the equivalent of someone who has a JD or maybe a humanities PhD going around asking people to call them "doctor." Slightly embarrassing, really. Actual engineers are going to look at someone who calls themselves a financial engineer and probably make very snide comments to one another about it.
The engineers I know are happy for me.
I have no doubt and I wish you luck in your chosen pursuits. I just think that program name is a bit cringe-inducing.
Perhaps you should be introduced to some software engineers.
Also, "everything with science in its name, isn't" (political science, computer science, ?)
More cringe than obsessing over what "real engineers" will think about your degree name?
During the last weeks I saw a few people asking about what they as "normal" people could do about AI safety and made an overview over different grassroots outreach organisations with a friend (https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/hmds9eDjqFaadCk4F/overview-ai-safety-outreach-grassroots-orgs).
The least effort is probably to use ControlAI's tool (https://controlai.com/take-action) to contactor your policymakers advocating for a Pause/building a Pause Button (which is what MIRI and a lot of other people are suggesting).
Join or found a local Butlerian Jihad chapter and find a copy of the Anarchist Handbook.
Taking your comment seriously ;).
Out of the grassroots organizations that would be StopAI.
I think informing policymakers and the public are probably more effective. Noone has really tried it yet and it seems quite effective (https://controlai.com/ getting 20 out of 60 MPs in the UK to publicly support their campaign). Most people when they actually hear about it, think that building an ASI and even integrating AGI are quite obviously dangerous. In addition, AI already is quite unpopular.
The best thing normal people can do is to sit out the hype and wait for the next AI winter after LLMs have petered out.
* Even if LLMs peter out (which I am not sure about) the compute will be lying around and people are already trying different algorithms. So if you find something that works, you (depending on how well it fits the gpu clusters) don't have to build out compute first.
* In addition even the current (and LLMs will at least improve somewhat and at specific tasks) level will still cause huge societal changes which we would want to go well.
Chess engines have been better than humans for a very long time now, but they weren't any good at playing with odds until recently. I remember easily winning with rook odds and drawing with knight odds following a simple strategy: prioritize castling and even trades, even when they give up some other advantage. I have not studied chess in any serious way so I'm not really any good at it, but the computer doesn't really try to avoid this. Now there is a chess engine that can play really well with material odds, it can crush the best players in the world in a match in blitz time format (around 3 minutes) starting without a knight. I've played it myself and I am unable to win or draw with queen odds in a slower rapid time format (around 10 minutes), it's pretty cool to see and it is a very concrete illustration of just how much better computers are at chess. If you want to try it yourself you can play here https://lichess.org/@/LeelaQueenOdds , reading their blog it seems first move advantage makes a big difference in odds games so you might want to start with black to replicate the results.
Chess engines conventionally have four major components. The part that gets the most visibility is the minimax algorithm, which calculates a certain number of moves ahead (or as many moves ahead as will fit in its time or compute budget) by brute force to find which move gets the best board position at the cutoff point assuming the other player is following the same algorithm to the same horizon (i.e. assuming the other player makes what the engine thinks is the best response to the engine's move). Typically, alpha-beta pruning is also applied to this, which skips evaluating subtrees for obviously-bad moves.
The next part is some kind of heuristic strategy for evaluating the strength of board positions when minimax cuts off. Conventionally, these used a point system for the relative values of pieces on the board, with points added or subtracted for positional factors like pawn structure (forward, passed, connected, doubled, etc), control of the center, etc. In recent decades, I think this got replaced or supplemented in a lot of engines with various machine learning techniques, but i haven't followed that aspect closely.
Third part is endgame algorithms and tablebases. A lot of endgame combinations have been thoroughly analyzed by human players, with or without computer assistance, and can be reliably won through mechanical strategies which human players memorize. These scenarios can flummox pure brute force chess engines, especially ones that run to a fixed depth of a certain number of moves ahead, since the algorithms can take dozens of moves to complete. A basic chess engine might simply have criteria for recognizing well-known endgame position as won, lost, or drawn (allowing it to be scored perfectly when the starting point is reached in a minimax search) and switching from minimax to applying that algorithm. More advanced engines have "tablebases" where the results of brute force evaluation of a plethora of endgame scenarios have been calculated in advance and stored in the engine's data files. If a board position is in the endgame tablebase, then the engine knows how to play perfectly from that point until checkmate or draw.
The last part is opening databases. Similar to endgame tablebases, these are the results of offline evaluation to a much, much deeper depth than would be used mid-game, and may be supplemented by human analysis of chess openings and their continuations. These provide an enormous advantage over any human player who hasn't put a lot of work into studying openings, since trivial mistakes in the early game can easily leave you at a huge disadvantage against a competent opponent.
I expect most of what you're observing has to do with the opening database. Most chess engines would assume the standard starting position, so playing at odds puts you outside of database. And against a decent human player, the engine needs a really good minimax plus heuristic engine to compensate for the lack of a usable opening database in addition to the substantial disadvantage of starting out down a major piece. An engine that's been customized to play at odds would have a usable opening database.
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After typing up all of that, I followed your link and from there looked at the github repository. Looks like this is a newer kind of engine than the kind I've worked with that centers on a neural network for board evaluation, presumably dropped in as a replacement for a standard chess engine's board evaluation subengine. Skimming generate_games.py gives me the impression that it's training the network via recursive self-play from the at-odds starting position, and the node count for the network (<1000, according to the README) seems too small to embed a meaningful opening database in via overfitting. So this just seems like the heuristic subengine is being optimized for board positions that are likely to come up via good play from a particular at-odds starting position.
I played blitz 5-0 against it with queen odds on a lark, not really believing it could do anything, and was humbled (I studied and played seriously as a kid many years ago, peaking around ELO 2100). I lost two games and was able to win the third one, mating with 15 seconds remaining on the clock. It's insanely good at steering the position into complications and fork threats, eating my time away. I think I'll win against it in rapid time (will try later), but seeing it play with queen odds I'm pretty sure it'd wipe the board with me at rook odds in any time format. Thanks, an interesting and sobering experience.
Indiana Jones goes to an alien world and ChatGPT gives us pictures
I’ve become interested in using photographs as prompts for image-making with ChatGPT. I’ve now done quite a bit of this, but have only posted two bitx so far, ChatGPT imagines three different backgrounds for three small sculptures, and Friday Fotos: ChatGPT changes Manhattan's West Side. In other posts I’ve used I’ve used a bit of art as a point of departure, such as this post based on a painting I did when I was nine: ChatGPT renders a scene on Mars in three styles.
This time I’ve decided to see what I can do with some of my graffiti photos. The fact is, when I first started tromping the hinterlands of Jersey City in search of graffiti, I felt like I was a ten-year old kid pretending to be Indiana Jones exploring some lost city. That’s what I’ve done in this series of images. I start with one of my graffiti photos and ask ChatGPT to continue the adventure. The adventure quickly heads off planet to another world. At various points along the way I introduce other photos for reference. Rather than interrupting the flow of ChatGPTs imagery I simply insert an endnote into the ongoing image stream and then introduce those photos in notes at the end, along with a note or two about the photo.
The starting point is from an area known locally as “the oaks.” Judging from the photo it’s a densely wooded area. Which it is, but only a very small patch. The bit of masonry you see at the right is the edge of a pillar supporting Exit 14C of the New Jersey Thruway. All of the pillar at this point are covered with graffiti at ground level. We’re at the foot of the Palisades and within one or two hundred yards of 12th Street, which feeds into the Holland Tunnel, which in turn goes under the Hudson River to Manhattan. Thus, this little jungle vignette is in one of the most densely populated urban areas in the United States.
Here's the link for that one: https://new-savanna.blogspot.com/2025/05/indiana-jones-goes-to-alien-world-and.html
Here's a different one. I used a GPT trained on the poetry of Fred Turner to create a sonnet cycle of three sonnets: Deep Seeking Xanadu. Then I used ChatGPT to create an illustration for each of the three sonnets. Here's the link: https://new-savanna.blogspot.com/2025/05/deep-seeking-xanadu-with-illumination.html
We Californians are familiar with high gasoline prices. We bitch about them all the time. The other day, I saw signs at the pumps of my local Chevron Station that said, "You just bought a quarter tank of taxes and fees," with a QR code where we could direct our outrage through our smartphones to their lobbying group. I thought I'd better double-check to see if it's true that a quarter of the price I pay for gasoline goes to taxes and fees. Short answer, they don't—but it shows how big oil companies are grifting Californians with this meme.
Note: all these prices were from last week when I ran these numbers...
If I used credit/debit, regular gasoline was $4.99/gallon at my local Chevron station. I checked, and federal, state, and local taxes and fees add up to about $0.88-$0.92 per gallon in CA (I guess they vary by county). That works out to about 18 percent of Chevron's price at this gas station. Still, it's a sizable amount, but the independent station up the road was selling regular for $4.19/gal ($3.99 with a car wash)! And the Shell station even further up the road was selling regular for $5.29/gal. Right off the bat, we have $0.90-$1.20 spread in gasoline prices, which is as much or more than the taxes and fees levied on out gasoline.
But even so, those damn taxes! How much could I save in a state like Texas? Federal and state taxes account for $.39 per gallon there. So, I'd save about 50 cents a gallon if CA's gas taxes & fees were the same as TX, and my Chevron price would drop to about $4.49/gallon. When I checked the price of gasoline in Texas, it was averaging around $2.78/gal for regular. So, California gasoline, minus the tax difference, is ~$1.70 more at my local Chevron station than I'd pay in TX—and $2 more at that Shell station!
So, we know that California taxes are not the root cause of expensive gasoline in California. I don't think we have pipelines crossing the Rockies. Is it the cost of bringing it in by tanker or train? Well, rail delivery could add about $0.68 to the price of a gallon. Tanker delivery is $1 per barrel per thousand miles. Say a tanker comes from Houston to Los Angeles via the Panama Canal, that would be about 5,000 miles. So that would add $5 to a barrel of crude, from which we get only about 29 gallons of refined gasoline. That would add about $0.17 to the price of a gallon.
What about California's infamous summer formulation? ChatGPT says that can add 1-5 cents per gallon. So, it looks to me that the big oil companies at their gas stations are making at least a $1 per gallon extra profit—probably more—off us suckers in California. Can anyone prove to me that they're not?
Hot damn. Time to buy an EV.
Crude costs more in california, they use a blend that is more expensive to refine, cap-and-trade and LCFS add additional costs, they purposefully limit their refining capacity, they purposefully isolate themselves from fuel markets, they purposefully consolidate to reduce competition, they shutdown local production to import from Argentina and Saudi Arabia, and force local regulations on the global operations of oil companies. Chevron and Phillips are the latest in a long string of companies relocation elsewhere. Many companies have stopped business in California all together.
Not all of these count as taxes, but they are 100% self inflicted. It's not companies making an extra buck.
I think other people have addressed a lot of the specifics, but I wish people attributed more to supply and demand and less to "companies arbitrarily jack up prices due to greed whenever they have an 'excuse' for it".
Neither answer is perfect, but "companies are just greedy, the economics are probably fake" is much more of a thought-terminating cliche, and the greed arguments tend to greatly downplay competition and demand elasticity.
Yes, companies often do find mechanisms for anti-competitive behavior (e.g. regional monopolies are a well-known one), but absent an explanation of how they're doing that, I'm going to assume it's supply and deamnd.
I dunno; I feel like there isn't a good economic case for "they're just adding an extra $1 to be greedy"—inter-company competition ought to take care of anything like that, unless we're alleging market manipulation or whatever the term is (collusion? no, wait, that's for treachery or something innit–). I would bet the common wisdom of "it's Cali's state gov't making it expensive" is pretty close to true.
Could be wrong, though. I'll try to look into it. If we assume the most uncharitable $0.88 + $0.17 + $0.01 + $0.10 = $1.16 taxes/fees/delivery/specialblend (most charitable being $0.92 + $0.68 [should we average the tanker-vs.-rail difference?] + $0.05 + $0.15 = $1.80), that takes care of over half the difference. (Or, in the "most charitable" case, almost all of it!)
The other ~half... operating costs? The gas to drive a semi to the station & fill up the underground tanks will cost more, too, after all. Wouldn't doubt there are more taxes & fees levied on the business end, it being CA.
Also worth noting that we can't assume Chevron gas is the average $2.78 in TX—I bet the inter-state spread for Chevron is lower than you've calculated here. The mechanics at my old workplace claimed that Chevron's additives are actually slightly superior to those from other companies—or, at least, /were/ superior for many years & are now finally just roughly equivalent—so that could be a (putative) justification for Chevron prices being higher in general.
IIRC, Chevron is also a member of the "Top Tier" gas standards org.—although many other brands are too; still, this may account for some of the difference between "all average" & Chevron-in-particular price.
> "they're just adding an extra $1 to be greedy"—inter-company competition ought to take care of anything like that
As others have said, California uses a special blend, which isn't that much more expensive itself. But it means that while California gas can go to Nevada, Nevada gas can't go to California. (I'm not 100% on Nevada's laws but roll with it.) There are only a few companies with in-state refineries making this blend.
Oh, I didn't realize that—excellent point!
A charitable take that better fits their fractions. If it was $5 a gallon, of which $1 cents was taxes, that means tax-free gas would be $4, so they'd be right. Depends whether you consider the cost of gas pre or post tax.
California also has a "special blend" of gasoline that is not the summer formulation. It is cleaner year round. This is supposed to add 10 - 15 cents to each gallon. Still doesn't account for the difference between CA and Texas, but you want to include it.
One big thing is that California *land* costs more. If I put a Wal Mart in the middle of some random Texas town the rent will be lower than if I put the same building in the middle of Palo Alto. Then consider the differences in minimum wage. Gas prices in Bakersfield seem to be around $4/gallon while Gas prices in Mountain View are closer to $5 (note I'm more confident about the MV prices ...). Higher rent isn't a tax in any sense, but it adds to the cost of gasoline. Same for minimum wages.
As was mentioned above, this also means that you have to get California blend from California refineries, of which there aren't nearly enough. Texas can get gas from any US refinery (at minimum).
Do California localities still have their own special blends? That really restricts buyer choice (buyer == gas station in this case) if the producers have to specially prepare to sell to you.
Localities do not, but California as a whole does (vs the rest of the USA).
Hi, I have a question if anyone with insuline resistance uses monitoring of blood glucose levels. Did you find any value in this? If yes, from commercially available glucose monitors which one would you recommend for casual use for someone who has pre-insulin resistance? Is there a link with explanation how do they work and pros/cons for their use in non diabetic people.
Type II, do use a monitor for blood glucose levels, the "stick and test" version:
https://shop.onetouch.com/verio-reflect-meter/product/OTSUS05_0003
It is helpful to control overall spikes, it does give you a good idea of how and what raises your blood sugar after eating (some things will surprise you). Good to see when you're going too high, and when your readings are staying in range.
Cons are that if you test before and after a meal three times a day, that's sticking your fingers six times, which means you rapidly get sore fingers. If you're pre-diabetic, you wouldn't need to test that often, but it will help you get an idea of "eating at these times/eating this item makes my blood sugar go whoosh".
I have used Dexcom in the past, and am currently using Freestyle Libre 3+. I like the Freestyle a little better for a few reasons:
* Longer monitor time - Dexcom had a 10 day limit, whereas the Libre 3+ has 15 days. Libre 3 only had 14 days.
* Cost - I don't remember how much Dexcom was, but Freestyle is about $20 per sensor, with insurance. I believe Dexcom was significantly more expensive.
* More frequent updates - Freestyle seems to update about once per minute, and Dexcom every five minutes.
* Reporting - I can check my % GMI (approximate A1C) for 7, 14, 30, and 90 day averages. I don't recall this being possible on Dexcom.
* Application of sensor - I remember finding Freestyle to be easier to apply, with nothing else to add to the outside of the sensor: just click into place, and some magic glue keeps it there. I remember Dexcom had something to apply outside of the sensor to help keep it attached.
* Removal of used sensors - Dexcom was a chore to remove, for I have significant body hair. Freestyle's magic glue doesn't seem to cause such painful issues.
Dexcom WAS better in a few ways:
* Longer chart - Freestyle only shows the past 12 hours, whereas Dexcom showed the past 24. One could probably view more information somehow on both, by linking to the data.
* Separate monitor - Dexcom had an extra device to view the current glucose, whereas Freestyle only has a phone app.
I believe one needs a prescription to get either one, so I'm not sure how you would get a doctor to prescribe one for you if you're only pre-diabetic, or non-diabetic.
On the other hand, if you just want to check what your glucose is currently, you don't need a continuous glucose monitor (CGM). I've used a few different ones in the past, and they all seem the same, and are all similar to the ones they use in the hospital. You would need the device, test strips designed specifically for that device, lancets to get a finger-prick, and the lancing device itself (which may come with the monitor).
Personally I've found wearing a CGM very helpful, in terms of understanding how different foods affect my blood glucose. The results were somewhat counterintuitive in the beginning, so this was pretty valuable information. It also provides a reminder whenever I exceed my glucose goals, which when I'm doing poorly is not great for my mental health.
For those without diabetes or prediabetes, I have been led to understand that CGMs aren't that interesting because they just kind of show a flat line most of the time. But I suppose there's no harm in giving it a try if you like.
I have only ever used the Freestyle Libre 3 (soon to be discontinued) so I can't really offer a compare/contrast to other products. Overall I think it works okay, it's easy enough to install and the app works fine. Some things I don't like about it are:
* When I'm sleeping on my side the sensor will often register low glucose levels. This is know in the business as a "compression low".
* You can't disable the low glucose alarms without disabling the app entirely. I understand why they did this, in the context of those who are taking insulin, but the alarms are kind of just an annoyance for those not at risk of severe hypoglycemia.
* The previous two bullet points interact in an obviously bad way. I just end up disabling the app if I'm getting compression lows.
* I'm not really sure how accurate the sensor is and at least once I'm pretty sure it was consistently way off. For casual use this seems fine but if I were taking insulin I'd want to get confident first by comparing to a glucometer.
i want a simple fix i want the easy solution i dont want to put in any effort i want to get everything served on a silver platter
thats the attitude of the vast majority of people but rarely admitted I am fine with that attitude but just be honest about it
IMO, it's better to do the easy thing, or the thing that is easiest for you, or do the thing that your good at, than to do the hard thing and struggle uphill all the time.
I guess I agree with the easy approach. I hate when there are motivational speeches to ask people to dream extra big and do the hard thing, especially when the implication is that they would have to do the hard thing for years on end with every subsequent decision. For some people, the hard thing is easy, for others it's just pain hard, always.
Do what you're good at doing. Sometimes that's the hard thing, but easy for you, sometimes it's the easiest thing. Sometimes, the easiest thing to do is the easiest hard thing. Have an easy life, if possible!
Meta ; very vibe vagueness
Please help evolve the following claim:
“Your mode of perceiving reality is a direct function of root prior beliefs about abstract value claims. These value claims determine what you consider relevant, which direct the scope of your attention and constrain the questions you consider it worthwhile to investigate. Therefore, unless you place the highest value on perceiving reality accurately (ie over all other goals), and a high prior probability on you being wrong in your beliefs, you’re going to get locked into a mode of perception that is instrumental to whatever goals you place over perceiving reality accurately. If any goal is more important to you than having true beliefs, you’ll adopt false beliefs to advance that goal, and not realize you’re doing it because that realization would impede your pursuit of the goal.”
I think you have just explained why a dog chases a rabbit. Or why a man will not believe something if his livelihood depends on not believing it.
>Your mode of perceiving reality is a direct function of root prior beliefs about abstract value claims.
But your root beliefs are based on what you've seen before. It's not like they're some inherent thing you're born with.
>If any goal is more important to you than having true beliefs, you’ll adopt false beliefs to advance that goal, and not realize you’re doing it
This implies that you'll avoid that by prioritizing truth, which is itself a false belief.
Why wouldn't root beliefs be based on genes or culture, or some mixture?
Culture IS what you've seen before.
No, culture is what you have been told
No, culture is the sea that you swim in
So, I would rephrase a bit: our perception of reality is a direct function of our sensory organs, our eyes, ears and so forth. I think more accurately what you are talking about are our beliefs about the world, the attitudes we have regarding society and our place within it.
And yes, I think you are correct that the belief systems we currently have have grown organically out of the beliefs we had previously, how else would we develop them? No one is or could ever be perfectly objective, we can only formulate new beliefs by "looking through the lens" of our current ones. I'm not sure "accuracy" is something that applies to attitudes or beliefs about the world--they mostly consist of opinions. Since we only perceive reality at all in order to accomplish our goals, we believe whatever was most useful in achieving our goals in the past.
Say you have an attitude about President Trump (good or bad, it doesn't matter). You only have an attitude about him because having one helped you accomplish some goal of yours previously (perhaps it gives you an opportunity to express strong opinions that your friends agree with, thus strengthening your relationships). Now Trump does some new things, and your opinions about that new thing he did will grow organically out of the opinions you had about him before. That's how the mind works.
You could set yourself a goal to deliberately seek out new sources of information, sources that do not necessarily agree with your past opinions, and make a good faith effort to engage them productively. That is likely to result in an increase in sophistication and complexity of your beliefs. That should be a good thing, but "accuracy" doesn't play into it.
Now, one could adopt a standard of accuracy such that
I wrote about Chinese military data centers on my Substack, if anyone is interested. Open question how much the PLA builds its own compute to meet growing AI ambitions or relies on civilian clusters. Plan on writing more on PLA AI integration in the future. https://ordersandobservations.substack.com/p/where-are-chinese-military-data-centers
Doesn’t your analysis kinda gesture that computation might be happening? Not all computers do AI
I'm so dumb I initially thought the article in 3 was for new subscribers only, like a sort of ACX boot camp.
It is. Write a 10,000 word essay about Trump and wokeness using no less than 50 references to the sequences that Scott finds acceptable and you get access to the super exclusive ACX onlyfans.
My favourite part of the ACX onlyfans is Thomas Bayes coyly smiling at the camera, clad only in a seductively-placed copy of HPMOR
With the hyphen, it's unambiguous.
I don’t think so. You are a subscriber, aren’t you?
I'm reading a firsthand account of a US Marine in Pacific combat in World War 2, and I'm struck by how tough they say the Japanese are. Respect for the lethality & fighting spirit of the Japanese is suffused throughout the book. At one point an NCO explains to new recruits that they can expect Japanese raiders to jump in their foxhole at night and try to stab them in brutal one-on-one combat. The author specifically says (maybe this is not accurate) that the Germans don't do this, so the Army guys in the European theater don't have to deal with this exact problem- it's only the Japanese who love this kind of hand-to-hand combat.
It's kind of fascinating to read this, about a country that is not exactly very martial today. I don't even think the Japanese can find enough recruits for their military these days, and that's with rising threats from both China and North Korea. At one point I could've sworn I read that the homicide rate in early 20th century Japan was just as high as in America, whereas now it's just a tiny fraction. Some cultures just lose that martial spirit I guess
Was that "with the old breed"
Fun fact: back in the olden days, there were enough people murdering random people in town just to test their swordsmanship that there's a term for for it: "tsujigiri". https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tsujigiri
That seems to me to likely be the same kind of thing Jus primae noctis: not LITERALLY true, but illustrative of the power of the feudal lords/samurai over the commoners.
Germany is much the same - it really did take two lost world wars to break the German martial tradition (and good thing, too).
Yeah, it's almost like an occupying force set out deliberately to break the former martial spirit by sweeping changes to society so Japan would not be a military threat again!
https://history.state.gov/milestones/1945-1952/japan-reconstruction
"The first phase, roughly from the end of the war in 1945 through 1947, involved the most fundamental changes for the Japanese Government and society. The Allies punished Japan for its past militarism and expansion by convening war crimes trials in Tokyo. At the same time, SCAP dismantled the Japanese Army and banned former military officers from taking roles of political leadership in the new government. In the economic field, SCAP introduced land reform, designed to benefit the majority tenant farmers and reduce the power of rich landowners, many of whom had advocated for war and supported Japanese expansionism in the 1930s. MacArthur also tried to break up the large Japanese business conglomerates, or zaibatsu, as part of the effort to transform the economy into a free market capitalist system. In 1947, Allied advisors essentially dictated a new constitution to Japan’s leaders. Some of the most profound changes in the document included downgrading the emperor’s status to that of a figurehead without political control and placing more power in the parliamentary system, promoting greater rights and privileges for women, and renouncing the right to wage war, which involved eliminating all non-defensive armed forces."
Baseball….that’s what did it.
Yes, but it's remarkable that it actually worked. If I didn't have the benefit of hindsight, my guess would have been that this level of pacification was achieved by killing every male Japanese, and repopulating the home islands with half-Americans.
Japan is said to be a collectivist society where social pressures keep everyone in line (citation needed) so I think a deliberate root-and-branch overhaul of society, where the army was dismantled, being in the military was not alone downgraded but actively harmful to your career prospects, and social engineering around being good citizens who wanted to modernise and co-operate with the occupying administration would have a better chance of working.
I don't know how the population balance worked out, that is, how many men were killed and if this meant the kind of lopsided gender ratios seen in other countries after wars. But I imagine if a good chunk of your military age male population had been killed, that makes it easier to raise the new generation to be more pacifistic.
https://docs.iza.org/dp13885.pdf
"While the sex ratio in the pre-war period stayed around 1.03, it declined to 0.92 in 1947, indicating the substantial wartime losses of males. Moreover, the sex ratio stayed below 0.95 until 1970, and began to recover from the late 1970s. This historical fact is striking because it suggests that the larger exogenous losses of males than females during the war had highly persistent effects on the gender composition in postwar Japan.
…As discussed in Subsection 2.1, the sex ratio, defined as the number of males aged 20– 59 divided by the number of females aged 20–59, dropped sharply from the outbreak of Second Sino–Japanese War in 1937 to the end of the Pacific War in 1945. The sex ratio decreased by 0.24, from 1.03 in 1935 to 0.79 in 1945. Then, the sex ratio increased by 0.13, from 0.79 in 1945 to 0.92 in 1947, owing to repatriated soldiers. Almost all of the repatriation was finished by 1947, and the sex ratio remained much the same until after 1948. The sex ratio of people aged 20–59 stayed below 0.95 until 1970, after which it began to recover. Nevertheless, the sex ratio was affected by the internal migration after the war."
So it looks like the sex ratio between men and women remained low (fewer men) up until the 70s. Fewer men = better able to find wives = less militaristic, if we take the idea that "lots of young men with no chance to marry means more fodder for armies"?
Well, keep in mind that Japan's defeat kinda discredited the old order in the eyes of a lot of average people. If you build your society around authoritarian militarism and ethno-chauvinism, such that your government is basically a military dictatorship bent on conquest and exploitation of supposedly inferior peoples, you better actually follow through on it. But instead they went out and not only failed in those conquests but got millions of people killed and their home country bombed into the stone age. Reasonable people started to think "hmm....probably time to go in a different direction. Maybe this McArthur guy and his democracy talk might be worth a try."
I read a WWII book--I believe it was "The Taste of War"--that left me similarly impressed with the Japanese troops. Many of their units were stuck on Pacific islands and in New Guinea, cut off from resupply and bypassed by the Allies on their way to Japan. Those isolated units usually held together until the end of the War, maintaining discipline and order in spite of disease, starvation, and other problems that would see people from any other country put up a white flag.
The Japanese troops weren't good, but they *were* tough (as in ready to endure hardship and death).
For instance, the Japanese weren't better than anyone else at jungle fighting - it's just that they were ready to do it anyway.
The contrast to the U.S. was stark - getting a handful of rice per day vs. having entire boats dedicated to just making ice-cream.
I think it is quite likely that DPRK troops (well, if not all, but at least 30-60% of them) would act in a similar manner, and something like that was also true for Chinese troops in Korea (In the second case, some of them may have been better trained/experienced than US troops, but were outgunned).
Sure, seems likely, at least until it seems the regime will fall (even to them). Then it will come tumbling down super hard and fast (unlike the Japanese, who genuinely believed the ideology and weren't merely ground down and terrified).
I am organizing an ai-2027 TTX tabletop exercise abd wondered if someone has the rules?
There's a form on the website for it at https://forms.gle/VgJu79uwJBvxSErH6, just fill it out and someone should send the rules over to you.
done already, no answer
Would someone be willing to steelman the position of zoonotic theory supporters regarding the DEFUSE grant?
- A year before the onset of COVID-19, the EcoHealth Alliance submitted a grant proposal describing its intent to engineer bat coronaviruses to make them more easily transmissible to humans.
- The plan was to introduce a highly specific mutation later found in COVID-19 (insertion of a proteolytic cleavage site able to interact with furin).
- A significant part of the experiments was planned to be carried out at the Wuhan lab.
Could this really be just a coincidence?
Obviously, you haven't read DEFUSE grant proposal. Or, if you did, you understand what it said.
> EcoHealth Alliance submitted a grant proposal describing its intent to engineer bat coronaviruses to make them more easily transmissible to humans.
From the proposal:
...we will intensively sample bats at our field sites where we have identified high spillover risk of SAR rCoVs. We will sequence their spike proteins, reverse engineer them to create binding assays, then into bat SARS rCoV backbones... to infect humanized mice and assess the capacity to cause SARS-like disease. Our modeling team will use these data to build machine-learning genotype-phenotype models of viral evolution and spillover risk.
So they proposed taking wild spike proteins and seeing how well they bound to humanized mice cells. No GoF there.
> The plan was to introduce a highly specific mutation later found in COVID-19 (insertion of a proteolytic cleavage site able to interact with furin).
Nope. That wasn't in their grant proposal. In fact the mechanism of the SARS-CoV-2 furin cleavage site was unknown at the time. It wasn't until after a year analyzing the virus, that virologists and biochemists understood how it worked.
> A significant part of the experiments was planned to be carried out at the Wuhan lab.
"Dr. Shi, Wuhan Institute of Virology will conduct viral testing on all collected samples, binding assays and some humanized mouse work."
The majority of the work would have been done in the US.
https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/21066966-defuse-proposal/inset
I’m not trying to argue with you, but would you please explain what “reverse engineer them to create binding assays” means?
Still a very sketchy use of grant money, though.
What's the base rate of labs asking for funding for GoF research for local viruses before 2020?
I looked into it at some point. I may not have gotten everything right, but those were my best estimates for GoF for corona viruses. Around 2019 there were 2-3 labs world-wide, depending on what you count, two of which were the ones involved in that proposal (the Wuhan WIV and a US lab). Ironically the third was also in Wuhan, but was never a suspect for a lab leak because its research was too different.
Until a couple of years earlier (2010-2015 or so, I don't quite recall the details) there were more labs, something in the order of 5-10, for example two in Japan and one in Spain. But then there were some public discussions that this type of research should be paused, and those other labs abandoned it.
That's a good question.
It appears the proposal was rejected. What's the argument for then? That they got money from somewhere else and did the experiment anyway? Is there any evidence to support that idea?
It's not meant as definitive proof when taken alone. It is meant to show that the type of research that could lead to an outbreak of this type was proposed in the past, as part of a larger picture.
The argument is something like this: 1) The DNA of the virus has multiple characteristics that are common in engineered research viruses but rare in nature. 2) We know that research on bat coronaviruses likely to produce a virus with these characteristics was proposed to take place at WIV in the past. (The furin cleavage site was specifically mentioned in the EcoHealth Alliance proposal.) 3) There is a separate confirmed instance of EcoHealth Alliance engaging in gain-of-function research on bat coronaviruses at WIV and failing to comply with the conditions set by NIH when it was approved.
I think the counterargument is that 1) is false, or at least, misleading: that the features that supposedly it has in common with engineered viruses are only superficially similar
2) is also incomplete: the insertion of the FCS was *not* proposed to happen at WIV; it was supposed to happen in North Carolina. Also, there are differences between the grant proposal and what is actually observed in COVID, so while some of the characteristics of COVID would be expected from the DEFUSE grant, not all would.
How much those two counterarguments are true, and how much they reduce the degree of coincidence, can still be debated, but I think it's at least plausible that it reduces it below the level of coincidence required for the virus to leak from the lab, but infect no one until it makes its way to a wet market that had previously been identified (down to the stalls, more or less) as a likely location for a coronavirus pandemic to emerge.
The Furin cleavage site within COVID looks natural. Then you still need to explain multiple strains of COVID in the animal storage areas of the wet market early in the pandemic. The lab story really doesn’t hold together well unless you discredit the data from the market.
Already covered here https://www.astralcodexten.com/i/142476535/session-viral-genetics
Peter’s argument here does not explain the extremely low odds of these coincidences. Instead, he tries to build an alibi for the lab based on technical arguments that cannot be judged by non-experts. Even assuming that these arguments are correct, the logical conclusion would be that someone else engineered the virus and tried to frame the Wuhan Lab for it (otherwise, we are still left with explaining the impossibly low odds of these coincidences).
Not really. Improbable things happen every day, just not in any one place. But if something is self-reinforcing (like contagion) then it only needs to happen once.
Also, I'm not really sure that it happened first in WuHan. It seems to me that that was where it was first detected, which is a very different statement. I expect it happened (i.e. the final mutation necessary to turn it into "very contagious in humans") somewhere in rural China that did business with WuHan. And that it spread for quite awhile without being noticed. (Atypical pneumonia I believe was a typical diagnosis.)
Don't both sides agree it started in or near Wuhan?
Zoonosis believes the pandemic started in Wuhan, but not necessarily that spread of COVID-19 did; just that the pre-Wuhan spread never found a big enough population to go pandemic. I'm not sure how far from Wuhan it's reasonable to push that early spread, though, so you might be agreeing: "rural China that did business with Wuhan" and "or near Wuhan" might be two different ways of describing the same scenario.
Good point. I guess it depends on how far away the modal rural Chinese fellow could be & still do business with Wuhan!
The fact that both sides may agree to it doesn't by itself make it true.
True; I just expect them to have good reason for it—although I've not followed anything about COVID very closely (viruses are interesting but the debate quickly reaches a point whereat I can only shrug & say "okay, sounds good", heh).
What I want to know is, not did this cause Covid, but why would you want to make bat viruses more easily transmissible?
There's got to be a reason, someone please tell me why, because this sounds like "we want a grant to study what happens when you pour accelerant all over the flammable materials in your house, then ignite it with a flamethrower".
One reason is to understand better which stuff is dangerous and which is not. Mind that the WIV was very active in screening which viruses exist in nature, and was also involved in monitoring spillover infections in humans.
If this research would have improved their understanding of dangerous vs non-dangerous corona viruses, that would have been a good outcome, and likely an implicit aim of the proposal. Imagine that a few years later (in a hypothetical world without SARS-CoV19) they detect some human being infected with a new corona virus, and that they can ideally look at the genome and discriminate between
- "Yeah, this sucks for you personally, but it's unlikely to spread in humans, no need to worry."
- "Oh, this cleavage site makes it really dangerous, it could be transmittable from human to human, we must act immediately, kill all animals in the district and shut down everything until it's under control."
That would be useful, no?
Not useful, because the ability to kill all animals and shut down everything to control the spread of the disease doesn't exist and has never existed.
Yes it has. Killing all animals is routinely used to fight animal diseases like BSE, foot-and-mouth disease, swine fever, and (in many countries, unfortunately currently excluding the US) bird flu. Most of the time it's very successful.
This is the proposal, as far as I can tell. The reasons why they wanted to do this kind of research are inside. It wasn't approved, for what it's worth.
https://drasticresearch.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/09/main-document-preempt-volume-1-no-ess-hr00118s0017-ecohealth-alliance.pdf
It's the same principle as making extremely cancer-prone mice to test potential cures: you COULD just have normal mice and wait for them to develop it naturally, but that makes it much harder.
Yeah but a mouse that more easily gets cancer isn't going to give humans cancer - or is it?
Well, both dogs and Tasmanian devils have developed contagious cancers. I suppose a humanized mouse could develop a cancer that was contagious to humans. (But it does seem improbable.)
How did phone books exist until recently?
What was different about the social architecture that meant that providing most people with publicly available phone numbers didn't degenerate into stalking and harassment?
I believe at one time addresses were in there too.
My mother for some reason was in the local paper a good deal as a child. Perhaps everyone's children in that small city were, but I've got what seems to me an unusual number of clippings. (She does love to be in pictures.)
A handful are in an envelope with a little note enclosed.
A couple of local businesses evidently marketed this way! They would scroll through the paper, cut out the clipping, attach it to their letterhead and send it you in the mail. So-and-so at ACME tire shop wishes you a good day and congratulates you on your ... lovely child being pictured in the paper.
And of course as has often been noted, people mentioned in news articles were often identified with their address.
"We spoke with juror Shelby Smith, an attractive young blonde, of 1210 Vine St., after the murder verdict was delivered ..."
Long distance calls were expensive.
Phone books still exist; they're just online now. E.g. here's one: https://www.hitta.se
But it seems to be encrypted somehow!
Yeah it's a super-secret cypher called Swedish. Don't tell anyone :)
If you were a celebrity you paid to not have your number listed.
Steve Martin did a documentary about phone books: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kOTDn2A7hcY&t=20s
I had to click to get the joke. Gotta work the optigrab in somehow.
My guess is the phone books weren't on the internet. Without that, the only people getting your number are the people who live in the same city or town as you, which includes neither Nigerian princes nor Indian scammers.
There wasn't an internet.
I remember having a phone book with my neighbor's numbers as late as 2005 or 2010. Back then there was hope the National Do Not Call Registry might actually work.
Got my first job when a magazine editor picked up a zine I’d left in a local shop. He looked up my name in the phone book and called me at home. Good thing I was there to pick up. It was a different time.
Well, recorded prank calls by people like the Jerky Boys and Adam Sandler were definitely a thing, so there was probably a smaller subculture of weirdo harassers, but not amplified like it is on the internet.
I think lots of kids made prank calls, but it was often to a local business that would expect to be called out of the blue by strangers.
Various creeps/bored kids would make obscene phone calls sometimes, too.
And a whole generation of (now retiring/retired) tech-oriented kids got their start understanding engineering and technology by f--king around with the phone system.
I wonder if phone books made people more polite, in addition to anonymity being much more difficult back then. It seems like it'd harder to be a jerk if everyone could easily figure out your phone number and address.
People were much more polite before anonymity. In person rudeness could result in a punch in the mouth.
Phone calls cost money, people didn't have as wide access to phones as they do now, and the culture before the Internet enabled anonymous harassment meant few people thought of using the phone that way. Like poison pen letters - some people did that but the vast majority of people just wrote letters for business and family and friends.
I'm sure some people did call up random numbers to harass people, but it would have been much harder to figure out if Susan Smith was single or married to a guy who could break your kneecaps if he found out who you were.
There certainly were boiler-room operations to call people and offer them scams of various kinds--investments, retirement properties, etc. I think one thing that limited the damage was just that you had to pay someone to talk to each target of your scam individually. Spam and telemarketing and the like become a lot worse overall when the cost of making each attempt drops to a fraction of a cent. Why not send you Nigerian prince spam to every single person on Earth every day, if that increases your expected take by more than it costs?
Local phone calls were free. Long distance phone calls were expensive.
You're right that there was more social trust. I'm not sure anonymity was a major issue because I'm not sure it was that easy to trace a phone call back-- and remember, for a long time, there was no convenient way to record phone calls.
It was possible to get an unlisted phone number, but there was a fee and most people didn't do it.
The scams, the spam, and the harassment just weren't there. Thanks for the reminder of a specific way things were better.
Round here no, you were charged for everything and even had to go on a waiting list to have a phone installed 😀
We only got a phone when we moved into town into a house that already had one. This was Big Excitement for us back in 1978.
I had a party line (in the telephony sense) in the early 70s
Why would it?
What actually starts the harassment/stalking in modern cases?
Maybe Person A is browsing twitter/facebook/instagram/reddit/etc. and comes across Person B making a statement on a political issue that Person A disagrees with vehemently. Person A feels strongly enough that they track down Person B's name/phone number/address and stalk/harass them through internet sleuthing.
Other options are if Person A finds Person B very attractive and decides to stalk them or engage in a parasocial romantic relationship via twitch which escalates to stalking.
Sure phone books that have everyone's full name, address and phone number makes the stalking/harassing part easier but how does the initial encounter happen without the internet?
If Person A sees Person B walking down the street in 1970 and thinks "I'm gonna harass/stalk this person" the phone book is not immediately useful because there's no photos.
Person A has to follow Person B back to their house which is risky and carries the possibility of being noticed. Much riskier than internet sleuthing so a lot of Person A's maybe don't bother.
One part must have been that long distance calls were expensive until relatively recently which would limit things. Also since this was before widespread cell phones, most people used to have just one phone at home, sometimes without an answering machine. So spam calls ran a big risk of having no one pick up since people might not be home for much of the day. But I'm sure there's more to it than that. I wonder if the phone monopolies back then made it harder to make repeated calls from a blocked/untrackable number? It's an interesting question.
Also, there was one nationwide phone company and one local phone company, which probably made it easier for them to coordinate when they wanted to shut down some number with scam calls, and you didn't get a phone number to call from unless you had signed up and were getting a bill, so they could probably figure out who you were.
Not just phone numbers; typically, they included addresses as well!
Yes. If your city was big enough the books doubled as a child's booster seat at table.
We had a A-K and an L-Z. But really big cities like New York would have had triple the population, did they have six phone books?
On the eve of another supply chain disaster, I've thought a lot about what the early days of covid were like. Then I realized, wait a minute - I *did* have advanced notice that it was going to be bad. I saw the news stories coming out of China and Italy. I *did* have a good info diet. My online network *was* encouraging me to prepare, and I *had* an opportunity to prepare. And... I didn't take that opportunity to stock up on essentials. Because I felt some shame about panicking. But it turned out that the random coworkers and family members being naysayers were wrong, and my online environment was right.
Well, not this time. I'm seeing smoke. The toilet paper/paper towels/tissues section at the store was already sparse when I went yesterday to stock up.
...Meanwhile I'm still in the middle of a renovation. I've bought what I could. I know for a fact that it won't be enough, but it's a start. I'll manage. Sigh.
Covid showed how strong are our supply chains actually.
The covid panic was totally unnecessary and it was the real cause for many disruptions later on. And yet, somehow all supply chains survived. I was right to buy stocks when they were low during covid because I didn't see any real danger from covid and my trust was that industries will survive and recover easily.
I recall going to Target and beginning to stock up on stuff when Covid was still in the "it's just a bunch of techbros panicking, LOL" stage. I got a few odd looks, but also there were other people doing the same thing, and I certainly was glad I'd done it later on.
I did my panic buying a week early, my wife thought I was crazy but later thought I was clever. In the end it didn't make much difference really, nothing except toilet paper was ever in genuinely short supply.
But one of my memories from that time is I remember seeing someone unloading their SUV, the back entirely filled with canned vegetables. Not appetising-looking ones, just hundreds of cans of mixed carrot-corn-pea blend. Sometimes I think about how they're doing. Did they ever get through it all?
I have a 25 pound sack of rice laying around my home somewhere.
I ended up with some masks and hand sanitizer ahead of time out of sheer blind luck.
I had surgery in Nov 2019, and my parents visited to take care of me. My mom insisted (*insisted*) on buying me two giant pump bottles of green aloe hand sanitizer at the time. I still have no idea why. She simply brought them back from the store when she went to get groceries one day.
Then in Feb 2020 I was paranoid I had bed bugs, so I got some diatomaceous earth bed bug powder and some masks to wear while applying it. I spent a day disassembling my bed frame and rubbing the stuff in with paste wax in all the joints. To this day, I think I was just being paranoid and was itchy from dry skin.
But those supplies sure came in handy!
In the early phase, all the expert and authorities were trying to avoid panic at all costs, hugging Chinese people, warning that limiting transportation would have been racist, etc. Except for reflex contrarians that always distrust the experts on principle, it wasn’t an easy call.
Personally, the one thing stronger than my reflex contrarianism is my belief that nothing ever happens, and in that case it actually served me better: I didn’t stock up on anything, and I didn’t see any adverse consequences.
Are you saying the Chinese even manufacture all the loo rolls these days?! I can well believe it. What a sad commentary on our times.
I'd also stock up on cans of tuna in sunflower oil, and potassium iodide pills, in case the balloon goes up. (That's a serious point by the way. I have! )
Most toilet paper in the US is made domestically. I mostly used it as a stand-in because of the association. I also genuinely needed to stock up, and I knew it might be the first thing to go once people start panic buying, due to people's memories from covid.
It's made domestically but using softwood lumber imported from Canada, which Trump put new tariffs on.
https://financialpost.com/commodities/lumber-tariffs-risk-toilet-paper-supply
Would be a great line for an anti-tariff campaign:
"Americans - without us, they can't even wipe their own backsides!"
Well that's just great...
And don't forget, the industrial machines at those US factories are probably made abroad. These machines need regular maintenance. Replacement parts come from all over the world, but probably majority China.
No, the main exporting nations for loo rolls are actually in Europe, together exceeding China by a factor of 4 or so (though likely most of that is exported into other European countries).
https://oec.world/en/profile/hs/toilet-paper
Regarding seeing the smoke, I saw in a few rat. online spaces the advice was "a covid-induced economic dip is coming - sell stocks now and buy when lower" which turned out to be very correct.
So with what Trump is claiming etc, what is everyone's thoughts on if stock market is going to go up or down significantly in the next couple of months?
> sell stocks now and buy when lower
The problem is knowing if this is "when lower" or not.
I've been pushing money into international stocks. I want to push some of my Vanguard money into their utilities index, since that's typically a stable thing in time of distress, but there's a minimum $100,000 buy-in for VUIAX in my retirement account, and I didn't want to do that much at once.
Yeah, I agree that "buy low, sell high" is very good investment advice, but it does seem kinda hard to use without some further guidance.
Get a washet. You'll use less TP, it feels good, and your parts will be cleaner.
But yea, prep sounds good.
I haven't been hearing of an impending supply chain disaster in my circles (other than some mildly alarming tariff talk) but maybe I'm out of touch.
Your comment got me curious, what items (other than TP), should people stock up on prior to an incoming supply chain disaster of this sort?
See this 4/28 post from Noah Smith (unfortunately paywalled, but you can read the intro section): https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/if-you-think-americans-are-mad-now
> Americans are starting to get very angry about the tariffs, as they ought to. But so far the actual economic pain from Trump’s policies hasn’t hit — there’s been no big rise in unemployment, no cratering of GDP growth, no empty shelves and only a modest increase in inflation. So far it’s all just market movements, gloomy forecasts, and anger in the media.
> So we’re in this strange holding pattern, a little like the period in World War 2 before the conquest of France. Humanity’s great superpower is that our intelligence allows us to see disasters coming before they strike. [...]
> A lot of Americans realize that tariffs mean that pain is heading their way
It's now been a week since Noah's post, and there *are* empty shelves here and there at the store now. I don't know yet if that's from people panic buying and the store hasn't restocked yet (but the company still has plenty at the warehouse) vs. a genuine decrease in available stock.
Supply chains cannot simply be turned off and then back on again. The shipping "pause" from this month is already baked in. Even if the tariffs end tomorrow, there will still be a huge ripple effect. And every day that the tariffs stay in place, the longer the damage will compound.
It's probably panic buying. I don't expect supply chain to break so easily that the US experiences serious shortages so quickly. Rather, it will be that prices will creep up slowly and selection of products will decrease slightly. In 4 years the results might be considerable but sometimes people don't notice changes if they happen slowly.
In 1992 Argentina was richer than post-Soviet Latvia. Today Argentina is at about the same level as in 1992 while Latvia is much richer than Argentina. Wrong economic policies take time to have deep effect. There is a hope that damage of 4 years can be reversed more quickly.
It's the tariffs. Cargo ships leaving China and bound for the US are way down. Any boat that left China after April 9th is subject to the ~145% tariff (unless your company got some kind of exception. Too complicated for me to list them all out.) The last few boats from before 4/9 have been arriving in California this week. We're still a couple weeks out from other ships arriving in Houston/Florida/New York.
"Impending" is relative here. More of a slow moving train wreck. The predictions I've been seeing from Noah Smith are mid-late May when the issues start percolating. They'll get worse from there. Items that people buy for Christmas gifts will need to ship soon, in order to get through all the corporate logistics networks and onto shelves by October/November. So Christmas season is probably going to be bad unless the tariffs go away immediately.
It's weird, because a lot of our essentials (like toilet paper) are produced domestically. I'm not worried about running out of food. But durable goods like electronics? Especially my renovation supplies, like flooring and light fixtures? That's almost all from China.
For some of us, this news is like Christmas coming early.
Meetup this week in Tallinn too!
https://www.lesswrong.com/events/fQiXf8ymNBu2fvhu7/tallinn-acx-meetups-everywhere-spring-2025
I'm a bit confused about the therapeutic (folk?) wisdom that one should be "vulnerable".
I feel like I'd have no issue asking for help from close friends if I really needed it, but mostly it just doesn't... help, to discuss my issues with laymen? Most of my personal issues stem from a not very common mental disorder with pretty counter-intuitive therapeutic treatment (OCD. OCD therapists will often stop you from venting and confessing too many of your thoughts, because that becomes a compulsion in itself). Normal people give shit advice on that. I could discuss my mom's early onset Alzheimer's and how that's upsetting and frightening, but I just don't... want to? Or feel like it would help?
However it's one of those things people often emphasize, that you need to learn to be vulnerable. Apparently many also see it as rude and as if you don't like them if they talk about vulnerable personal stuff with you, and you don't confess something yourself.
I'm female which makes this a bit harder, seems like it's totally socially fine if men are never emotionally vulnerable lol.
I think the distinction is, that one “should” be vulnerable in personal intimate relationships is true, but that doesn’t mean one has to walk around the world being vulnerable to any Tom, Dick and Harry.
Vulnerable is kind of a difficult word in this context. It’s sort of implies weakness, but that’s not the point.
Mutually sharing vulnerability is a bit of a bonding ritual. If you wanted to be cynical, you could: both sides make it easier for the other side to destroy them, thus providing evidence that they trust the other side to not do that, and because if they both have a hold on each other, betrayal becomes more costly for both. If you don't want to be cynical, you can just say that knowing the inner lives of others, and being known in turn, creates a stronger and more intimate relationship.
So yeah, not confessing is rude: you're flouting the ritual! Non-cynical version: they've offered a chance to grow closer, and you declined. Cynical version: they gave you power over them as a sign of trust, and then you didn't equalize things, showing that you don't trust them and are trying to create a power imbalance.
(Yes, this is very easy to abuse, since by being vulnerable you can force others to do the same or be rude. I think this is why "oversharing" is considered a faux pas, and why some communities have explicit norms against "trauma-dumping".)
Does it help for mental health? I don't know. Probably it's different for different people. Probably it helps you less than it helps most others. For me personally, sharing personal weaknesses or emotions *feels* good, but I don't think it actually helps me.
Besides what Rockychug said, vulnerability is also an essential part of intimate relationships (sexual or otherwise). It's hard to get close to someone if they aren't sharing who they are, or what they're feeling and going through. And close relationships is one of the main keys to a happy life.
Is there really such idea that one should be 'vulnerable'? Personally I rather see it as, when there are some issues affecting you, to not pretend to others or to yourself that these issues do not exist and instead to seek for help/advice.
Extraverts will always recommend More Talking. Always and forever.
I dunno, as a man I see this having some pretty terrible failure modes where some men never admit anything is wrong and then suffer terribly over it.
I'm pretty up-front with my coworkers about how my ADHD affects me and how sometimes specific things can help me with it, and they're generally understanding. (I've had jobs where I judged this was not a good plan, though.)
Hans-Georg Maaßenwas the president of the German Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution, an intelligence agency that monitors allegedly anti-constitutional activities, from 2012 to 2018. After that, his life took an interesting turn:
"After departing from the BfV, Maaßen radicalised, increasingly using far right terminology about "globalism", a "New World Order", and the "Great Reset". In 2019, he told Swiss newspaper Neue Zuercher Zeitung that the term conspiracy theory had been "invented by certain foreign intelligence services" in order to "discredit political opponents." He described public health measures in Germany against the COVID19 pandemic the "most serious human rights crimes we have experienced". In 2021, Stephan Kramer, head of the state intelligence service in Thuringia and former general secretary of the Central Council of Jews in Germany, accused him of using “classic antisemitic stereotypes”."
"In an investigation of a December 2022 far right plot to storm the Bundestag and install a new Reich, security forces found text messages between Maaßen and members of the leadership of the Reichsbuerger movement, including one that said: "We have to keep fighting." He collaborated with the Austrian conspiracy theory website AUF1 and the YouTube channel Hallo Meinung as well as appearing on RT Deutsch."
{snip}
"In January 2023, he tweeted that the direction of “the driving forces in the political media sphere” is “eliminatory racism against whites and the burning desire for Germany to kick the bucket.” As a result, the CDU unanimously approved a resolution calling for him to quit the party and in an interview discussed "a green-leftist race theory" that casts "whites as inferior" and promotes "immigration by Arabic and African men". CDU leader Friedrich Merz said: “His language and the body of thought that he expresses with it have no place in the CDU. The limit has been reached.” Maaßen responded: "What I said wasn't racist, but what many people think. I reject ideological positions that demand the extinction of 'whitebreads' - those with white skin colour - through mass immigration.""
https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Hans-Georg_Maa%C3%9Fen&oldid=1279500169
Remember when "radicalization" was something that happened to high schoolers, college students, 23yo video game streamers? Now it happens to middle-aged men like Musk, Vance, and this guy.
The thing is, if the former head of an intelligence agency starts talking about globalist conspiracies or the deep state or something, that might mean he's gone nuts, but it might also mean he actually saw some stuff that was best explained by globalist conspiracies or the deep state or something.
Maybe - doesn't make the Reichsbuerger stuff any less ridiculous.
In your presentation of his life you missed the most insightful event, which was his handling of far-right gangs chasing immigrants in Chemnitz during the demonstrations in 2018. He was contesting the veracity of videos showing that such events indeed happened. It's directly because of his resignation following these events that he started talking about conspiracies.
Except everything you wrote is wrong and he didnt radicalise.
This reminds me of reading about YouTube moderators and such, where they have to watch too many conspiracy theories and they end up adopting them.
Well recently some conspiracy theories turned out to be true (Hunter laptop, Covid lab leak, Biden dementia.) so probably some of the things we currently think are conspiracy theories will also turn out to be true (which ones?? No idea, hoping that lizard people don’t run world governments)
I would say that a lot of things in medicine may turn out different than we thought.
It will not be that vaccines cause autism. That is pure RFK Jr lunacy. But some things majority believed, will turn out false.
The simplest is that masks were not effective against respiratory viruses. I think that many people including healthcare professions still believe they are.
Another interesting thing is that Bhattacharya has already started to reduce animal testing. Many will consider this anti-science but actually 10 years ago at the university many professors considered that a lot of animal testing is pointless. Especially with dogs because the knowledge we get from those experiments are quite irrelevant and are done only due to regulatory requirements.
Maybe Scott is right and the FDA needs to be reorganized and completely new approach would serve us better?
COVID as a lab leak wasn't "proven true" and is still speculative.
Arguably "Hunter Biden's laptop is a Russian disinformation campaign" is actually the conspiracy theory, which I think we have basically discarded, and was really just a brief media hysteria.
Biden dementia, though, classic conspiracy theory that was right.
Biden's dementia was apparent to everyone. While not really proven and probably not on the level it gets normally diagnosed, the standards for the president of the country should be higher and as a theory it was definitely something worthwhile to assume. In my view, it was something that everybody could see but ignored because it was inconvenient.
Now the question is that Trump appears to have initial stages of dementia too. Again, I predict that by the end of his 4 year presidency (if he still remains as a president), it will be revealed as factual and something that many tried to hide from the public.
I doubt they'll reveal it at all. The media stopped talking about the gerontocracy as soon as (the ironically younger) Biden dropped out of the race, because that point only mattered when it hurt Democrats. We won't learn anything about trump's dementia for some time, same as with reagan.
On a somewhat related note, does anyone know what happened with the JFK files? They were supposedly released, but I’m still waiting for someone to go on Joe Rogan and explain what it all means
Marc Andreessen gave Thomas Crooks the Oliver Stone treatment on Joe Rogan. “Why did he use open sights? Will we find out who was behind this after Trump is inaugurated?
Is there some amount of wealth that just makes people go kind of nutty?
No, but there's some level of wealth or fame that causes people to listen and publish/repeat it when you say nutty things. And even sometimes when you say sensible things that can be excerpted to sound nutty.
It’s hard to argue with a fully MAGAfied conspiracy theorist. They just start shouting “EPSTEIN” repeatedly.
Epstein is becoming an almost mythological, Satan-like figure, the personification of all of America's neuroses about sex.
Mannheim Meetup is also happening on Saturday!
Warren Buffet, famous for his "value investing" philosophy, is retiring.
What is the rationalist position on investing strategies?
Crypto to the moon!
Do whatever Warren Buffet does, starting in the 1970s.
I think it's generally "buy broad Index funds, don't spend much time thinking about it".
Are you familiar with Greg Egan? After reading several of The Culture novels I was craving for that level of sci-fi and he seems to have met it. I'm halfway through Axiomatic which is an anthology of short stories, and I'd love you to- hmmm. I just realized that this could be *my* book review entry for the next iteration...
I really like the short story "Wang's Carpet" as a thorough imagining of a transhumanist culture.
I've read most of his work now and it's all incredibly good. Axiomatic, Diaspora, and Permutation City are my favorites, which I believe is a popular opinion.
Personally, I'd say Axiomatic is his best work; lots of very tasty short stories in there! That said, the early novels are IMO great (Schild's Ladder is my personal favourite, although Permutation City is more popular generally speaking), and if you like high-concept stuff, the later novels are also very fun. I like to say that Dichronauts gave me an intuition for why information can't move faster than light (any more than you can go more north than the north pole).
Learning To Be Me is my favourite story from Axiomatic. What's yours so far?
I just finished the one about the out of body experience (Sight, iirc). I think my favorite has been Eugene, but I also loved the very first one, the Infinite Assassin. I was very lucky to have come around a Tiktok about the Cantor Set a few days before, otherwise it wouldn't have blown my mind. To smithereens.
I've read some Egan. He's very good on the hard science elements, his prose styling less so. Reading some of his work feels like chewing through cardboard for me. It's hard to get elegant, stylish writing anymore!
I like Egan, but I feel I often lack a degree or two to really understand science in his books. I felt especially lost reading "The Clockwork Rocket", where he doesn't just uses real physics, but invent new one, based on a slightly different axioms.
That was a tough read but I absolutely loved it. People are always writing science fiction that's just "what if this one invention happens" and Egan's out here like "what if amorphous insect people lived in a world where relativity was totally different and creating light generates energy instead of using it".
How is the voting kept fair for the review contests? I would assume that contestants are going to share the contests with their friends to get them to vote, and even if it's only a small minority who do that, they will be overrepresented among the winners.
Someone did that last year and got caught. The problem with the strategy is that Scott is smart enough to be suspicious when a review with a very high average score also has a very high number of votes and isn't particularly good.
Voting is done via Google form. You have to put in your email address when you vote; it's not anonymous. I guess someone *could* rig up a bunch of fake email addresses to spam the form, but nobody really bothers.
But then those friends would have to log on here to ACX and maybe even join up if they wanted to vote, and then we would all get new friends! How is that bad? 😀
Generally people on here don't cheat or fiddle contests like that. I mean, yeah there's the incentive of a cash prize if you win the review contest, but there is also strong implicit pressure that you donate the prize to charity. If you want fame, then being a big fish in a small pond may satisfy that, but you won't get much bragging rights out of telling people at work or in your social circle "I won an amateur book review contest on an obscure site".
>I would assume that contestants are going to share the contests with their friends to get them to vote
But to do that, they'll have to let their friends know what they wrote. And if it's bad, that'll probably cost them friends.
Anyone saw the Hasan - Ethan Klein debate? It's probably a bit more lowbrow than what people here are used to, but imo it was pretty fun.
I did, but I'm also terminally online and seeing someone get to call out Hasan one of the rare times he steps outside his hugbox is immensely cathartic.
This debate is truly the epitome of how normies debate things. Some of Ethan's arguments would ring hollow under more scrutiny, but Hasan is so committed to idiotic positions that he ends up losing anyways.
Much like Trump, Hasan is too stupid to notice how his enemies could be defeated, and the only way he could know these things would correlate with not taking the actions or positions that he does.
Reminded me waaaaay too much of an argument I would have with my narcissistic dad... not very fun lol.
The narcissistic one was Hasan right? I got struck by how many people in TikTok/Twitter were saying he was better. absolutely crazy. He didn't concede even when he was clearly wrong, and was being very hypocritical with his standards for himself/his side vs the ones he had for Ethan