Has anyone tried to model bipolar disorder as a consequence of dopamine receptor upregulation? If depressive states lead to decreased dopamine production then I could imagine homeostatic factors causing the receptors to upregulate. Then if the depression lifts slightly and dopamine levels return to normal then you get this crazy surge of activity, i.e. mania. Is this plausible?
Scott's tweet says that America today is a weird place for a revolution, unlike historical revolutions. On the contrary, it looks to me like France 1789.
It wasn't the starving peasants who revolted in 1789.
Certainly the Flour War 15 years earlier was relevant. Certainly Scott is right to say that bread lines were relevant in 1991. But food wasn't definitive in those places, either. Soviets were rich enough to drink themselves to death, with life expectancy peaking in 1960 and declining until Gorbachev restricted alcohol in 1985. Wealth leads to revolution.
I remember some previous Open Threads from early in Russia's Ukraine debacle, where some doubted that drones would be able to blunt the massive deployments of Russian armor. Does anyone still doubt that drones have permanently changed the nature of warfare?
1. First off, an interesting thread compiled from the commentaries of Russian bloggers on how the insect screech of drones has become the defining sound of the Russia-Ukraine war. Drone noise has become a form of psychological warfare.
2. Ukraine is laying down a 15-20 km “kill zone” of autonomous drones along their defensive lines to deny Russian forces the ability to move undetected across the front. And it's trying to extend it to 40km. And it seems to be working. I'm having trouble getting Threadreaderapp to unroll this thread — apologies to those who are allergic to X.
And this made me snicker: "Drawing lessons from the Ukraine conflict, Driscoll emphasized the need for tanks to adapt to the increasing threat posed by inexpensive drones. This strategic pivot underscores the Army's commitment to *preserving its armored capabilities* while addressing emerging battlefield challenges" [emphasis mine]. US strategists still don't seem to have internalized the idea that tanks may be going the way of the Bronze Age chariot. But Driscoll still has confidence in his chariots.
4. Ukrainian sea drones have driven the Russian Navy off the Black Sea back into their ports. And now sea drones have used AIM-9 Sidewinder missiles to shoot down two Russian SU-30 fighters.
Tanks have already been written off in 2022 and 2023 when Javelin & Co got all the praise. It was too early to write off tanks then, and it's still too early today. The combination of mobility, firepower, and protection is a potent one and will always have a place on the battlefield; tracked and armored fighting vehicles will be replaced if and when some new technology makes them obsolete, but not before. Right now drones have the upper hand, but that's just the nature of warfare - it's an incentive to invest more into anti-drone capabilities (new tech & tactics), and that in turn is an incentive to invest in anti-anti-drone capabilities, and so on.
For much of the Middle Ages, the Catholic Church wasn't hunting down magic users. The official view was that magic didn't work, and anyone who claimed it did was a fraud.
As might be expected with any high-minded, abstract, and contrary to popular opinion command, compliance wasn't happening.
A lot of magical practice was something congregations insisted on priests walking a host around fields to improve harvests, and compliance with the hierarchy just wasn't worth it.
The later, witch-hunting period was real and horrifying, but it didn't happen in the middle ages. The Catholic Church isn't just one thing, and I wouldn't even say its behavior is especially predictable.
This is correct. Until the Renaissance, witch trials were rare and were almost exclusively conducted by civil authorities. In general, the medieval witch trials were otherwise-ordinary murder trial where the killing was alleged to have been done by means of magic.
Even in the Renaissance, it wasn't just Catholics doing witch hunting. Protestants did a lot of witch hunts, too. And at least one Orthodox country (Russia) did thematically-similar stuff in the same time period, but they were hanging sorcerers instead of burning witches and didn't generally consider their sorcerers to be devil-worshippers the way Catholic and Protestants thought of their witches. And in this time period, it was still usually civil authorities doing the burnings: the Dominicans in Catholic countries and various religious groups in Protestant countries did search for witches and do torture to force confessions and compel testimony against other witches, but they almost always turned unrepentant witches over to civil authorities for trial and execution, and a lot of civil authorities did witch hunts on their own.
Popular conceptions about witch hunts, especially in English-speaking countries, seem to be rooted in four sources:
- The Murray Thesis. This is a theory proposed in 1921 by Margaret Murray, an archeologist specializing in ancient Egypt. The theory was that only elites converted to Christianity in Roman times while commoners mainly remained pagan through the Renaissance and well into the Early Modern period and specifically practiced a common Europe-wide pagan tradition centered on a "horned god" which Christians identified with Satan. Under this thesis, the witch hunts were attempts by elites to destroy this pagan tradition. The Murray Thesis got taken seriously by mainstream scholars when it was first proposed, but it has since been thoroughly discredited. In the meantime, though, Gerald Gardner relied heavily on Murrays books when formulated Gardnerian Wicca in the 1950s, which he based on the assumption that modern English folk magic, early 20th century English mysticism, and classical Druidism were all parts of the "horned god" tradition which he aimed to reconstruct and codify. Thus, Wiccans and Wicca-adjacent neopagans (many of whom are terminally online) often take the Murray Thesis as an article of faith. The idea of the "Burning Times" and of witchcraft being "The Old Religion" are references to the Murray Thesis by way of Gardner
- The exploits of Matthew Hopkins, the self-styled Witch-Finder General of England. He was a Puritan con artist who operated during the English Civil War. His technique was to turn up in a village, announce that he'd been appointed by Parliament to root out witches throughout the country, conduct a highly dramatic investigation, and hang whatever "witches" he found that hadn't been killed by his trials-by-ordeal. Along the way, he'd also collect a "tax" to pay for his services. In the lawless chaos of the Civil War, he was able to keep this for several years before dying of natural causes. About half the tropes (at least in Anglo-American culture) of how witch trials were conducted, stuff like "swimming the witch" and searching an accused witch's skin for distinguishing marks, comes mostly from Hopkins. The Witchfinder Sergeant character from "Good Omens" is a pun on Hopkins's title.
- The Black Legend, a body of anti-Spanish and anti-Catholic propaganda originated by Queen Elizabeth I during the 1585-1604 Anglo-Spanish War, and which took on a life of its own afterwards. The Black Legend featured highly graphic exaggerations of the Spanish Inquisition techniques and practices, painting Spain as a totalitarian theocracy. A lot of elaborate torture techniques that have little or no historical basis (the iron maiden, the pear of anguish, etc) come from Black Legend propaganda. The truth of Early Modern Spain and the Inquisition is plenty awful, but the Black Legend exaggerated it enormously. The Inquisition primarily targeted Jews, Muslims, and Christian heretics (especially Protestants), but it also hunted witches and was conducted by the same religious order (the Dominicans) who also did witch hunts elsewhere in Europe in the 17th century, so the Black Legend spilled over into popular conceptions of witch hunts. Most of the other half of the Anglo-American pop culture image of witch trials come from the Black Legend.
- Late 20th century popular edutainment tropes about the history of science in the Renaissance, which tend to heavily emphasize the trial and imprisonment of Galileo for heresy by the Roman Inquisition (also conducted by the Dominicans).
I thought your response to Yarvin's response was very good.
Like you I was slightly cheered to learn that the Dems have started an Abundance Caucus and that as of last Friday it already had 30+ members. An equally positive sign is that the knee-jerks at places like The Nation absolutely haaaate it.
Meanwhile since Thursday afternoon,
-- another Trump-appointed federal judge ruled that the administration must immediately bring back another specific deportee from the El Salvador dungeon, and this judge added that she will start placing administration officials under oath for updates on their work to comply with her order;
-- Trump when asked live on-air whether he is obliged to defend the Constitution replied "I don't know";
-- the FBI Director denied under oath that the Constitution's guarantee of due process applies to noncitizens despite having Antonin Scalia's ruling to that effect read to him;
-- Trump appointed yet another Fox News personality to a high federal office;
-- Stephen Miller is convening White House meetings to explore a national suspension of habeas corpus;
-- Trump defended accepting a personal gift from the ruling family of Qatar of a half-billion dollar glammed-up 747, which he would graciously lend to the government for use as Air Force One until he leaves office at which time the plane goes with him. [Never mind that the Constitution's Emoluments clause _specifically_ bars the acceptance of gifts from any “King, Prince, or foreign State” without prior Congressional approval.]
Well, the way Yarvin is expressing himself might be overly poetic and flowery for my tastes, not to mention profane, but it's not that hard for me to mentally translate it into what I would consider plain english, at which point I could engage with it in the same way I would engage with anything else.
Assuming it's Yarvin you're accusing of being postmodernism, I'm not sure.
After seeing Scott recommend the Center for AI Safety free online course on AI Safety, Ethics, and Society, I took the course, and can report that it was great! Good weekly discussions, the textbook has good coverage of the relevant topics, and the project phase at the end was a great opportunity to dive deep into an area of interest. For my project I wrote a post clarifying the conclusion I have come to after reading much of Scott and Zvi's writing and taking the course - namely that we absolutely are not ready for AGI and it's kind of crazy that building it is still the stated goal of many of the top AI companies, and we should thus work to build consensus on (1) that this is stupid and dangerous and (2) what to do about that fact given the systemic forces pushing us forward. See the post here, I welcome any feedback or corrections! https://natezsharpe.substack.com/p/what-if-we-justdidnt-build-agi
It seems one of the most popular arguments for imminent AGI goes "skeptics said AI would never do x and then AI did x! They said it would never do y and y happend a few weeks later! Then they said those things didn't really count! When will you all wake up?????"
I think this is a bad argument. Bear with me.
ALICE: AI may solve equations, but it will never write a story.
BOB: Actually, AI has just written a story. "A man planted a tree. The tree grew. The end."
ALICE: I meant a real story. Like, with description and a multi-part plot.
BOB: Lol, moving the goalposts. But as it happens, AI has just produced such story.
ALICE (*reading it*): That's...just a copy of an existing story, with some paraphrasing and word-swaps. That's not what I meant.
BOB: Ha ha, you just keep shifting your claim. Be precise.
ALICE: AI will never produce a story that will win an award.
(A month later)
BOB: An AI story has won a prestigious award.
ALICE: Only because the judges wanted to "take a stand against ableism and human supremacy". That doesn't count.
BOB: I can't believe it. You'll never ever admit you were wrong.
The point is that Alice does, in fact, have something she means when she says "story", even if she can't describe it in advance. Even if she gives ten conditions, and gets presented with something that satisfies all of them, she can still say "that's not quite right, that's not what I meant" and be telling the truth. "I know it when I see it, and this is not it".
Yes, there is some Carol who really is satisfied by the stories AIs produce, and some David who, even when presented with exactly what he was thinking of, will lie and say that wasn't what he meant to avoid admitting he was wrong. But Alice is not Carol or David. There *is* some story that were an AI to produce it, she would be completely satisfied, and happily admit she was wrong. But that simply hasn't happened yet.
And I think there are a lot of Alices in the AI debate, even though there are a lot of Davids and Carols as well. And so there's a fundamental circularity in the pro-AI argument. The other side say that intelligence is really subtle and not something we understand or can model or describe. The AI side say that if they think that, they need to model and describe exactly what things AI will not be able to do, in advance. Which is just assuming that the nature of these things ("art", "emotion" etc) are things that can be modelled and described. Which is precisely what's at issue.
Alice: "AI will never produce a story that will win an award"
Bob: "An AI story has won a prestigious award"
Also Bob, but quietly, so Alice doesn't get the full story (sorry, intentional bad pun): "An AI story selected out of N attempts, after a painstakingly engineered series of prompts, by an actual human".
For reference, this is Scott actually taking the view of Bob against Gary Marcus's Alice. I think it's illustrative to see how close to Bob and Alice they end up being.
My view is that this isn't even close to what has happened. That Alice does not get to wriggle out of their claims just because there's a cosmic sense in which they're still right. In addition, in what sense does Alice have actually good predictive ability if they *can't* articulate what they're looking for? Do we also implicitly trust Alice to keep track of all the reasoning tasks that she can't come up with concrete examples for but AI has implicitly accomplished? I don't think so, because we also don't trust Bob when he says "I've been using AI and there's an ineffable sense in which it's qualitatively better"!
I was and still am a moderate AI skeptic. I confess to having moved my mental goalposts by a nontrivial amount. LLMs and image-generative AIs have gotten a lot more capable much faster than I expected early on, and I've had to update based on this.
I am a more radical AI skeptic, and yes, I do admit that AI had developed faster than I thought it would -- but in a different direction from the one doomers are constantly predicting. In terms of "intelligence" (whatever this means) AI is still comparable to a powerful search engine; but its usability had skyrocketed, to the point where you can reliably use it for repetitive low-impact tasks (as you would use a search engine).
Indeed, I see AI proponents moving their goalposts. The term "superintelligence" used to refer to some kind of a quasi-omniscient oracle who can answer any question with perfect accuracy even as it converts the Earth to computronium using the power of molecular nanotechnology. Now, it refers to e.g. an engine that can outperform most (though not all) human geoguessers (some of the time) at figuring out where a photo was taken.
My worry is not that AI will awaken and kill us all, but that we will downgrade our notion of "intelligence" to the point where even modern LLMs fit the bill. They would indeed become "superintelligent", but only compared to our new level of natural stupidity.
- a quasi-omniscient oracle who can answer any question with perfect accuracy: yes, sure, why not.
- even as it converts the Earth to computronium using the power of molecular nanotechnology - nope.
The fact that so many smart people think the first one inevitably and "almost instantly" leads to the second one tells us a lot about the ability of smart people to create fantastic tales.
Thanks for writing this, I hadn't really fully appreciated how Alices feel. That said, I think that one of the tenets of rationality is that shifting our claims *should* make us anxious, even if it's not "our" fault. We need to try our absolute best to precommit to criteria that make sense, and if for whatever reason we have to abandon those precommitments, we should "feel guilty" about doing so. In other words, because we can't tell Alices and Davids apart, Alices should be extra careful. Actually, we can't even trust our *own* internal feelings to be consistent over time. Maybe someone who feels like an Alice is actually being a David and their values are shifting over time. Sometimes you need to abandon the inside view of yourself and act according to the outside view.
One thing going on in the dialogue above is that Alice's metrics are corrupted after she issues them by motivated opponents. When Alice says "AI can't write a story that wins an award", and then a group forms to give an award to a story written by AI for the purpose of invalidating Alice's claim, it is obvious that this "doesn't count" - we may assume that what Alice has in mind is for her claim to be true whether or not other people have heard her make it.
Compare "Goodhart's Law".
Dismissing Alice as "moving the goalposts" in this scenario looks very bad.
Maybe a nitpick, but you're describing things that don't happen in the story: it doesn't say that the award committee knows anything about Alice, or that the award was founded after Alice made the prediction. It's not clear anyone is Goodharting.
A better way to describe the dynamic is that Alice had correct beliefs about AI (it wouldn't produce a story to her satisfaction) and incorrect beliefs about the judges of literary awards (they would have a similar judgment to hers). She placed the goalposts based on those two beliefs, but only meant to be making a strong claim about AI.
She's definitely moving the goalposts now: she chose a clear criterion that was unambiguously met, and only after that wants to revise it. The question is what we should make of her doing so. In this case, I think she has a very good argument that the details of the case didn't prove her wrong about AI, and if she'd thought about this from the start she would have placed the goalposts differently.
But if we didn't have the ability to read Alice's mind, or it were more ambiguous, it would be reasonable to see "Alice's prediction was falsified" as stronger evidence against her beliefs.
No, you've overlooked the part of the dialogue where the committee makes its award "to take a stand against human supremacy". That is a reason unrelated to the story; Alice was not mistaken about whether the judges would have judgment similar to hers - she was mistaken about whether the judges would consider the quality of the story when giving the award.
I didn't overlook that, I took it to be included in "different judgment than Alice" -- they judged based on very different criteria than what Alice was predicting, and which she doesn't see as legitimate. That's why we know she's justified in not changing her mind. I was pointing out that you framed this as an adversarial play against Alice's prediction, which is not how it's described above.
Quick edit: by "judgment" I meant "judgment about what should win an award." Alice's mistake was to think this meant "judgment about literary quality," but that's not the criterion she specified.
Generally, I think "skeptics said AI wouldn't be able to do X, and then it did X" is still a pretty good argument against someone saying "AI will never do X." At least, if Alice doesn't have a decent response to this, I feel justified in not giving her position much credence.
AI systems keep improving. If you claim to have some insight into the kinds of tasks AI systems fundamentally can and can't do, you should have been able to apply this insight at any point in the past and been correct. You can't personally do this. The best available proxy is the smart people from the past who confidently and incorrectly said "AI will never do X."
You need to be able to say why you have better insight into the fundamental limits of AI than they did. There are some good reasons you might: you have access to more evidence than they did! But if you're not somewhat humbled by the failures of people to make this exact same prediction in the past, and don't have an explanation for why you're not making the same mistake, then I'd think you're the appropriate target for this argument.
While I agree that hypothetical "AI systems" in general can do anything you can imagine, present-day LLMs seem to be quite limited. For example, they are incapable of learning on the fly and synthesizing their discoveries into a continuously changing worldview, the way humans can (even, or perhaps especially, in childhood). They are also significantly more prone to hallucinations than humans (even humans who have imbibed a lot of alcohol, weirdly enough). Also, all of the most spectacular feats of AI intelligence that I've ever seen require a huge amount of cherry-picking (by humans).
In addition, most of those smart people from the past who said "AI will never do X" turned out to be... correct ! You are significantly underestimating the sheer number of AI claims that have been made over the years, and focusing on the few that panned out; and even those have not yet been fully realized. For example, people claimed that AI had achieved intelligence since ELIZA, but while modern LLMs can hold a conversation much better than ELIZA could, talking to them is still kind of like... well... talking to a really sophisticated ELIZA. So, thus far, I remain unconvinced.
I agree that Alice is right not to change her mind here. She has held a consistent position that she's just been unable to precisely articulate. I also think Bob is right to be a bit annoyed with her: she espoused some positions that turned out to be false, and now she's claiming she was secretly right in some inarticulable way the whole time. Unless Alice is able to specify her position more clearly, she shouldn't expect to convince anyone except herself. (Which is unfortunate, since she's in possession of a true belief that others would benefit from!)
So Alice shouldn't be too comforted by being technically correct here. It's easy to shift your own goalposts without noticing, and it's basically impossible to check after the fact whether they were "really the same" all along. One of the best ways to prevent this drift is by making clear predictions -- and making predictions that are later falsified is *evidence* that you had a false belief. (In this case, Alice has a good argument that the false belief was about the award committee rather than about AI, but in many cases it won't be as clear.)
I think it can be very hard for people to differentiate the internal experience of "I hold a consistent position that I can't articulate" from a bundle of aesthetic(/moral/whatever) preferences that don't actually cohere to a falsifiable test. As non-mind-readers, we should be suspicious of Alice' claim, whether it's about AI or anything else.
I wrote about why we should not moralize procreation, and why there should be different measures of epistemic position depending on what criminal justice goals you have. https://hiphination.substack.com/archive
The only meaningful response to that idea was best expressed by Razib:
"Should Religion Play a Role in Politics? [link to a blog post featured on the New York TImes] This is like asking 'should men have sex with women?' It's always going to happen."
Following on from AI’s success at GeoGuessr, I decided to test the free platforms on radiology. Neither was a big success. ChatGPT undercalled an acute radial head fracture, saying it was a normal elbow X-ray, and Grok overcalled it saying that there was complete dislocation in addition to fracture. Neither was able to correct with prompting by query (Chat doubled down on normal when I asked it specifically if a radial head fracture was present, Grok insisted the elbow was dislocated when I asked if it was sure.) I only got correct diagnosis from Chat when I insisted “this image shows a radial head fracture.” Oh well. Radiologists to stay employed for now.
Chatbots were not (generally) trained on medical data or images, and it likely would have been low-reliability data. There are quite a few radiology companies that are using machine learning specifically with high quality data of MRI, CT, and PET scan images. So far, it has seemed quite promising. However, a chatbot would not be the relevant usage of ai in this case. Take a look at companies like Therapanacea, deepc, Aidoc, or Siemens (partnering with Britain's NHS). For example, if you can take a look at the white paper for Rad AI (Siemans), so far results seem to be very good, particularly for expediting radiologists' workflow. There are white papers available with relevant studies and sourcing.
Would you expect to see a NN-based specialized radiology software designed to do one thing only, read x-rays, with modules for, e.g., "Fractures", "Lung disease", "Brain Tumors", to be much better than a generic ChatGPT?
That's kind of where I see the path forward, huge open field for specialized AI applications as we already see in image processing, for example, while "AGI" remains mostly hot air and fearmongering.
This dialogue with Moldbug baffles me, mostly because there's a dialogue at all.
From the outside, it's like watching a twitching, seething mass of concentrated hatred and contempt, scream in a voice of a thousand howling voices "Coward! Tear down society! Build the God King a throne of skulls if he will tear down our rivals for us! REOPEN AUSCHWTIZ!"
Granted, 82 of the eyes if his twisted frame are winking in an exaggerated fashion when he says the last line, but other half-formed hands are sharpening knives and drafting legal memos justifying the active under unitary executive theory.
And then Scott nods sympathetically and says "hmm yes, you make some good points and nobody can doubt your lucidity, but on balance I think we should perhaps not drown the streets in blood so that our biological lessors are swallowed up before we are. I will of course update my priors if conditions change. Thank you for giving me much to consider."
One of the core tenets of rationalism is that you treat the argument itself, not the person making it, or what it would imply if true. Scott is the true Caliph of Rationalism.
A lot of people disagree that this is a good thing. You're also allowed to hold that position.
But you coming to his blog and complaining that he's taking Moldbug's arguments at face value is like telling the Pope that Jesus wasn't the son of god.
I really agree with this, and to be more direct, Scott:
I absolutely love all of your posts on medicine, psychology, pharmacology, art, and rhetoric. I don’t agree with everything you say but it’s all fantastic writing and has contributed a huge amount to my view of the world. I’ve shared many of the ideas in these posts with my family and friends.
But despite this, I’m extremely hesitant to recommend Astral Codex Ten to anyone who isn’t super close to me (when they ask where I saw an idea, I usually say “a blog”), because of this deliberate courting of and deference to open bigots. Yes, they are free to express whatever beliefs they choose and it’s fine to engage with them seriously rather than with ridicule, but the level of focus and steelmanning they get can seem to evince an actual preference for them.
Would you treat an “extreme woke” viewpoint with the same level of consideration? If not, why not?
Uh, I hope it was obvious I didn't mean 'the majority of people agree with moldbug, and crowds are wise' or 'smart people are smart, and smart people are more likely to agree with moldbug'. If unclear, I was saying 'a portion of the people who agree with moldbug are persuadable by honest, logical arguments'
Couldn't agree more. It's like his depictions in Unsong of Satan being at UN meetings! If i had to steelman it, he needs to appear reasonable *to the target audience* aka Moldbug sympathizers, rather than his audience. In politics you need converts, and he is confident any bridge will see net positive immigration... even if his current base don't want them around...
It really does all come down to mass immigration. If one believes in a strong version of HBD, and observes that the normal political process has completely failed to stop the problem, then building the God King a throne of skulls gets a lot more reasonable.
You’re right that these bravery debates are counterproductive, but no one has figured out how to have the real debate yet.
Except modern immigration is far from the problem it's portrayed to be. It has not increased Crime, it has not brought the US or most countries for that matter to poverty and it has not systematically changed the culture and law of a single country.
Anyone who wants a dictator forgets 2 of this 3 points, and depending if you count repression and crimes against humanity even the 1, would strongly increase in most democracies where this is applied.
Yes if it's a benevolent king/CEO whatever that won't happen, and yet the cases of an illuminated dictator in modern times can be counted on your hands.
> It has not increased Crime, it has not brought the US or most countries for that matter to poverty and it has not systematically changed the culture and law of a single country.
Crime has increased in Europe.
The claim about poverty is true but neither has immigration helped gdp per capita or wage growth. Poland is catching the U.K. in GDP per capita (at least in PPP) and it’s doing that with no immigration and falling population. (So much for that population decline doomsterism).
And the best we can say is that laws haven’t changed much yet, although sharia courts do exist in civil law.
I was thinking about the US but interesting information, is there any proof that this is related to immigration?
Poland is not a good example since it's an emerging economy whose GDP increase has nothing mysterious, you would need two mature economies of similar nature and significantly different immigration flows.
The Sharia courts do you mean in Europe or US? Because i found no mention of that, would you have an example?
Non-sex crime has been on a long-term trend of decline except for a very modest rise starting in 2021. Sex crime has been significantly rising, but that is probably higher reporting rates.
The one good thing about Trump is how idiotic he makes all his "smart" supporters look. The first go-round it got most of the IDW types. Now he's come for the neo-reactionaries.
Actually, Trump does that to everyone. His enemies make fools of themselves overreacting to some random outrageous tweet or comment, and then his friends make fools of themselves by jumping in to agree with the outrageous tweet or comment.
If AGI does everything better than humans can, then it will improve the charity sector. You'll be able to know exactly which charity creates the most benefit per dollar donated, and exactly how much you'll need to give and to whom to save a human life.
If you're still using Google for internet search, here's a One Weird Trick to get rid of all the AI junk and other various and sundry "innovations" of the last decade or so: add ?udm=14 after the url, like this:
After doing a very cursory search, it seems like literally all it does is remove the AI summarization. That is so far from the only problem with modern Google and not even close to "Ye Olde Goode Google". Google has been (relatively speaking), garbage for years before it implemented the AI summaries.
The closest I have actually gotten to Ye Olde Goode Google (and still not quite there) is the paid search service Kagi.
Not everyone will think that paying for search is worthwhile, but I'm personally definitely not going back.
I stopped using Google for search years ago, DuckDuckGo is my default go to. But this Tedium piece came across this morning, so I posted this after doing a quick test. Looks like the rot is more systemic and this hack only removes the top layer of decayed matter.
I tried DDG a while back, and what I found was that I kept having to add the !g because searches weren't finding what I needed, and even in it's fallen state, google was better. Kagi also has the !g bang option, but I don't find myself using it.
This is not to argue against your experience at all. I believe you when you say that you find DDG better.
In discussions about these searches, I have found a lot of people that have your experience, and (on hacker news where a lot more kagi users can be found), people who share mine. My best guess is that perception of search experience across the various options must depend a lot on the kinds of things one is searching for and the way in which different people search.
For whatever reason, my combination of search targets and search technique gets better results on Kagi than on either google or DDG.
This is exactly why it's nice to have other multiple options, and I would encourage people who are using google by default to try other things. It is no longer the head and shoulders obvious best option (and, to bring it back around to the original point: AI search is not the reason for it's lack of Pareto-fronteir superiority)
I'm kind of not even claiming DDG to be "better", it's just that it doesn't track me (at least not to the extent Google does), and it gives consistent results for a given query. It was more of "given that I don't want to use Google, what's an easy alternative that works well enough?" question. DDG fit the bill.
Re #3, in the comments to the response Scott says that housing prices are a stronger case for the claim that the median person is worse off than in the past, but housing does not actually seem to be all that strong a case
Consider the context. We know that in the past it was the norm for people to afford kids and their own home while in their early twenties, even on a lower middle class income. But now most people can't afford that. It's likely that something is missing in the data or the analysis. Otherwise we have to explain why everyone in society seems to have noticed a change that isn't real.
>We know that in the past it was the norm for people to afford kids and their own home while in their early twenties, even on a lower middle class income. But now most people can't afford that.
Well, it isn't my graph, but it is mortgage payments as pct of disposable personal income. Wasn't the whole subprime mortgage thing all about people with relatively low income getting mortgages they couldn't get previously?
I think the problem with the first one is that it is total quarterly required mortgage payments divided by total quarterly disposable personal income. So it isn't median, its mean, and as you say, lots of new people on the market, and lots of investment properties. From memory houses were actually really cheap at that time for the median person. Lots of zero deposit loans.
So you'd want to find something like mortgage payments for the median house, then divide by disposable personal income of the median person (or household?). Still need some way to factor in the deposit.
>From memory houses were actually really cheap at that time for the median person. Lots of zero deposit loans.
But they weren't cheap, because the mortgage payments were high. Take a look at an amortization calculator. Someone who buys a $200k house with 20 pct down and a 5% 30-yr mortgage pays $308k over the life of the loan. With zero down he pays $386k (actually more, bc he won't get the same interest rate).
Moreover, if homes were so affordable, why did so many borrowers default?
Finally, while it would be nice to have median, since we are comparing over time, what is important is that we are comparing like with like, unless we have reason to think that the gap between median and mean has changed over time (if anything I think the gap has grown over time, so the graph probably overstates current costs).
Curious Scott's or any psych researcher's thoughts on Cheng, Y. C., Huang, W. L., Chen, W. Y., Huang, Y. C., Kuo, P. H., & Tu, Y. K. (2025). Comparative efficacy and tolerability of nutraceuticals for depressive disorder: A systematic review and network meta-analysis. Psychological Medicine, 55, e134. I read it (and comments elsewhere about it) as saying a series of nutraceutical may match or beat SSRIs for depression.
I've been considering whether it would be possible and interesting to run prediction markets in a LARP setting. Does anyone know of a system I could use to run this which I could execute with nothing more advanced than a slide rule and ledger? (Ideally I could pre-calcuate some ratios and have a reference tome to look them up in.)
(The system in question is Empire in the UK, which has ~4000 players trading such that there is actual economic activity happening, like a recent liquidity crisis caused by spending too much coin with foreign merchants.)
Further specifications that might be relevant:
* I'd want to denominate things ideally in the smallest coin, a "ring" - players get an income worth somewhere around 120 of these, though not all of that in pure coinage. Expecting people to have ~10 rings in their pocket is reasonable; basically I'd like to keep the stake sizes a) integer and b) small enough they're accessible by as many people as possible.
The simplest method to implement would be a parimutual betting pool. The Wikipedia article is pretty good. There are reasons why prediction markets use other methods - the expected return on you bet depends on the bets placed *after* your bet - but it should be simple, transparent and straightforward to implement. Note that payouts might result in fractional rings.
To remove the risk of fractional rings entirely you could have some sort of open outcry system. If there is a contract that pays out ten rings when the blue team wins and zero when the red ream wins, then people could meet in the "pit" and call there buy/sell offers: "I am willing to buy 1 blue-team contract for 4 rings", " I am willing to sell 2 blue-team contracts for 10 rings", "2 blue-team contracts for 10 rings? I accept your offer; here are ten rings, thank you for the two contracts", etc. If you've ever played the cardgame Pit, you should get the vibe. This method solves the fractional rings problem but can be very very chaotic.
The constant product automated market maker is actually fairly simple to implement with pen and paper - whatever liquidity the market starts with, that will be the liquidity throughout; you only need one reference table with only two columns - but there will be a huge fractional rings problem.
My recommendation: Avoid constant product market makers. Pick from Parimutuel pools or open outcry or maybe an auction based model.
a collaborative Streetview roadtrip where users online at any time get to vote on which direction to go. You can also vote to honk the horn or to change the radio station.
I've been checking in every now and then. The trip started a few days ago in Boston, and right now it's covered 376 miles (it's much slower than a real road trip). The trip started heading southwest as if it was planning to head to California, but upon reaching Providence it twisted around towards the north and now there seems to be a consensus in favour of heading for Canada. At the time of writing (while everyone in the US is asleep anyway) we are heading up a coastal road in Maine.
What's interesting is the social dynamics of the voting. There's clearly people who want to stick with the plan -- we're heading north, let's just keep doing that as efficiently as possible. But then there's people who want to mess things up, taking every turn they possibly can because heading in a straight line is boring. These two teams fight it out every time an intersection or turnoff comes along. Often the chaos party will win, but then we all discover that the side road is frustrating and collaborate to get back on track, leading to a path which is overall progress marked with occasional fits of wandering. There's a comment section which will sometimes turn into name calling between these two parties as well. Oh, and occasionally there's a fit of interest in honking, which dissipates the moment we've honked. The only thing I haven't seen happen yet is a change in the radio station, which has been set to a jazz station in New Hampshire for a long while now.
Implications for real world politics are unclear but definitely present.
The divide between the "chaos party" and the "keep going party" sounds a lot like the dynamics of the original Twitch Plays Pokemon. The original mode was "anarchy mode" where the game just took the first input it saw in the chat, and then they added a "democracy mode" where people voted for the moves, which made it a lot easier to actually progress in the game, and the game shifted between the modes based on voting.
A lot of the dynamic there was people trying to actually win the game trying to get it into democracy mode (required a supermajority), while the other group tried to keep the game in anarchy (requiring just a majority) and would vote for "start9" (press the start button nine times - did nothing but waste time) while in democracy mode. The latter group was a mix of people who just wanted to make trouble for its own sake, and people who just felt like anarchy was the "truer" way to do TPP.
Maybe a similar dynamic here where some of the people voting for turns are just making chaos for its own sake, but others just generally prefer the original goal and don't want to go to Canada.
How can one find good editions of public-domain books? A popular public-domain book will usually have a lot of different versions available on Amazon, but no way to tell which ones have decent typesetting and printing. I am not looking for expensive collector’s versions, just good-quality trade paperbacks. For example, I recently ordered a copy of The Wind in the Willows that I figured would be nice because it had the first-edition cover design, but it was actually low-resolution facsimile and poor type. Is there a good brand in this market, or good heuristics?
I happen to have a Barnes & Noble Classics sitting on my desk right now. It's pretty nice. I've also been reading some Penguin and Dover books recently. I think the Penguins are probably a bit nicer than the Dovers.
If people had noticed, it seems clear that there wouldn't be a problem, because noticing the phenomenon by definition requires being aware of both people.
If people haven't noticed, there could potentially be a problem in that people might treat one person as if he were the other one, but I don't think that's what you have in mind.
There's great Russian literature but even the authors who were dissenters have been used by Moscow.
“Why Russian literature must lose its innocence. Germany's "Russia-complex" is linked to an uncritical adulation of Russian literature. The colonial mindset expressed in many Russian classics is too often overlooked.”
Imperial Russia was a state in the business of colonising Eurasia. Novorossiya was perhaps the flagship of this enterprise, with Kherson being the first major city founded as part of this colonisation effort. It is no different in kind to saying "The colonial mindset expressed in many American classics is too often overlooked."
I'm in favor of this, but not because I think any of these lunatics have a point. However, these books and writers really are painfully overrated and often uncritically lauded by what one suspects are pseuds who didn't read any of them. I read quite a few, enough to satisfy myself on the subject, and can honestly say that they were all meritless dogshit. If they could get canceled out of social existence and nobody would ever again have to listen to some imbecile braying on about "Dosto" that would be great.
Yeah, being dead white colonialist guys is bad enough, but Russian as well? Used by Moscow? An utter outrage! To the (long overdue) scrapheap of history with the lot!
Quotes like "Kherson is a Russian city" don't justify a genocidal war, which should be obvious to anybody not entirely mindkilled. So what's actually proposed here is suppressing any perspective contrary to what the western "polite society" deems acceptable. If this endeavor seems worthwhile to you, godspeed, I guess.
Could you summarize what's being proposed then? I read the first link and it includes this: "In Western debates, the calls from Ukraine to stop promoting Russian culture as long as this war is ongoing are often framed as a problematic call to ‘cancel’ certain authors who are still held in high regard. But, as Viktoria Amelina wrote before her death in 2023, should we in the West really be debating the supposed ‘canceling’ of dead Russian authors while Ukrainian authors are being killed right now? " which sounds a lot like proposing to chuck it all out.
> In Western debates, the calls from Ukraine to stop promoting Russian culture as long as this war is ongoing are often framed as a problematic call to ‘cancel’ certain authors who are still held in high regard.
> The latest utterly pointless sanction is the Cardiff Philharmonic Orchestra's announcement that it would remove music by Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky, the Russian composer, from its all-Tchaikovsky concert, calling it "inappropriate at this time."
> the objection hardly necessitates scrubbing Tchaikovsky in his entirety solely because of where he was born. That's especially true in light of what was supposed to be the program's main course: his Symphony No. 2, which, in a sort of cosmic irony, is built around…three Ukrainian folk songs.
> For those familiar with Tchaikovsky, that likely won't come as a shock. The composer spent several months a year in Ukraine and had close family ties to the region; his paternal grandfather was born there. "I found the peace of mind here that I had unsuccessfully sought in Moscow and Petersburg," he once wrote
But "Tchaikovsky was explicit that he preferred Ukraine to Russia, it's just that Ukraine was called 'Little Russia' at the time" is probably even more offensive to the movement to censor Russian culture than Russian culture is.
There's a big difference between actively suppressing a culture like what Russians are doing in occupied Ukraine, and in ceasing to actively promote a culture, which is what I've largely seen proposed for Russian culture while Russians pursue war.
What’s your feeling on Israeli literature (or perhaps Jewish literature) in the aftermath of Gaza. I suppose German literature is already out of the question. We are deep into the decolonisation of Shakespeare here in Blighty and I suppose that makes sense since though not a colonialist himself he probably brushed shoulders with a few people whose descendants might go on to colonise the falklands or somewhere.
The Spanish and Portuguese are already banned, one expects, and as to why any American literature survives at all is a mystery for the ages. Maybe because most of this cancellation malarkey is driven by the American Academy.
Abstract: This paper explores the phenomenon of musicians being moved to tears during performance, interpreting such moments as portals into emotional, physiological, and spiritual transformation. Drawing on personal narrative, cognitive neuroscience, and Tantric philosophy, it argues that these experiences reflect a confluence of subcortical emotional release and the disciplined control of artistic expression. Within a Tantric framework, they represent karmic purification and chakra activation—moments where the performer becomes a conduit for Shakti, the dynamic pulse of the cosmos. Music, in this view, functions not merely as art or communication, but as sacred ritual capable of dissolving ego, transmuting karma, and restoring the self through sound.
Contents: Contents
Introduction: How Do We Understand Tears in Music? 3
From a Lump in the Throat to Nothing 6
Tears for Johnny 8
Acting in the Inner and Outer Worlds 10
Where Music Breaks the Shell: Karma, Tantra, and the Tears of the Musician 15
Introduction: How Do We Understand Tears in Music?
As I have said in my preface to Beethoven’s Anvil: Music in Mind and Culture (Basic Books 2001), my oldest memory is of a piece music: Burl Ives singing about a fly marrying a bumble bee. I played a record of that song over and over, driving visiting uncle to distraction when I did it at five in the morning. That little ditty is thus my anchor to the world, my omphalos.
I started trumpet lessons when I was 10. I was a reluctant student for two or three years until my music teacher, David Dysert, read me the riot act and got me to take music seriously. Since then music has always been with me, sometimes more so than other, but always. It has given me great joy and pleasure, and it has soothed my wounded heart.
It has also given me experiences that we do not talk about. Perhaps we don’t talk about them because they are difficult to talk about. But then all sensory experience is difficult to talk about. No, I suspect we don’t talk about them because we are apprehensive about where such talk might lead us.
In the next section of this document, “From a Lump in the Throat to Nothing,” I talk about two such experiences. One of them – a lump in the throat – is about being moved nearly to tears while playing my instrument. It has happened to other musicians – I know, because I’ve read stories – but we don’t talk about them. Most of this document is about that kind of experience. The next section, “Tears for Johnny,” is about a performance Bette Midler gave to and for Johnny Carson in his last week of television. Both were moved nearly to tears and I rather suspect that many in the audience that night were weeping as well.
The last two sections are about understanding how such things happen, first from a Western scientific point of view, “Acting in Inner and Outer Worlds,” and then from an Eastern philosophical point of view, “Where Music Breaks the Shell: Karma, Tantra, and the Tears of the Musician.” How do we reconcile those two ways of looking at the world? I don’t know. But I’m working on it.
I’m working on it, in part, because the other experience I offer to you – nothing – shook me to the core. It was a mystical one, one where the world dissolved in a blaze of light and sound. What are we to make of such experiences?
For we must make something of them, must we not? The psychologist William James wrote a famous book about them, The Varieties of Religious Experience, countless philosophers and theologians, both East and West, have pondered them, sometimes to dismiss them (all too common in the West), but often to understand them, to understand what the world must be if such experiences are possible.
It is easy to psychologize such experiences, to explain them as something that the brain does. It’s highly unusual to be sure, but it’s just some kind of brain event that we can’t yet explain. And yet those experiences are so very compelling. How do we honor that? Or even: Should we honor that? Perhaps we explain it as entering higher realms of being. That is, in effect, what Hinduism and Buddhism do. Is there a way to assert that and acknowledge scientific psychology at the same time? How do we treat those experiences as an invitation, an invitation to a larger experience of the world? That’s what I’m interested in.
I don’t pretend to provide an answer in this short document. My aim is simply to put the issue before you. What you make of it, that’s your responsibility.
Ancient Hindus believed that certain types of art jolted you out of your thinking. Like the discombulated patters I recently saw in the very very old Marundeeshwarar temple in Chennai in the Tripurasubdari section.
And they believed devotional music could be a trapdoor to experience oneness with the universe...i.e. a way to experience the dissolving of your own self and experiencing your being part of a larger universal self ("Brahman").
If Moldbug genuinely wants “rule by CEO” then why support Trump, who has been a disaster in every real management role he’s ever held? Good CEOs in the real world are probably too consensus driven and results oriented for Moldbug’s taste.
I'm not an expert on Trump's business by any means, but I understood he did get a number of buildings constructed and managed around the world. I suspect that's top 1% ability level at least - meaning 99/100 would fail to accomplish that, probably closer to 9,999/10,000 at least.
Of the people who manage multi-million dollar real estate companies, maybe he's a loser and bad at the job. But that's still a pretty exclusive club with a high bar to entry. I'm certain that if I was given control of his company at any stage from 1970 to present, I would have failed to run it. Even if the only thing he did was hire effective people, that's still a pretty significant skill. Maybe a rarer skill than being a good CEO alone.
He had a couple good projects in the eighties but most of his projects since then have been licensing deals. The Trump Tower project was run by a woman named Barbara Res. She worked for him for 18 years and doesn't have a lot of good things to say about him.
I did not deeply invest time into researching this, but I don't believe the trump organization was actually much involved in the building process for (any?) of the buildings. My brief internet research implies that they were mostly involved in securing financing and name licensing deals.
Also, most of them seem to be permanently closed or no longer be Trump affiliated. Not a great omen.
Hard to be sure because he's taken such care to suppress his tax returns. He inherited a total of around $400 million from his father. Guesstimates of his net worth have bounced around in the low-billions range, though those took at face value stated valuations of real estate holdings which have been exposed in a couple different courtrooms as hilariously fictitious.
Trump was always very aggressive with financial leverage (debt) which is why business bankruptcies have been such a central part of his operations. (Stiffing the lenders as a strategy rather than a last-ditch option.) Some unknown amount of personally-guaranteed debt still exists on paper, and the guy who ghost-wrote "Art of the Deal" has been quoted as predicting that Trump's probate will reveal his actual all-in net worth to be negative.
The new wrinkle which may wash away all that though is the crypto scam -- early indications are that it is proving _extremely_ rewarding for Trump and whichever family members are in with him on the back end of it.
> Guesstimates of his net worth have bounced around in the low-billions range, though those took at face value stated valuations of real estate holdings which have been exposed in a couple different courtrooms as hilariously fictitious.
While this is accurate, it should be noted that all other estimates of anyone's net worth have exactly the same problem.
Your cookie policy banner doesn't seem to work. At least whenever I click any of the options it says "saved" and then refreshes and the banner appears again. There doesn't seem to be any way to get rid of it.
Interestingly, the Washington Post did a piece on Curtis Yarvin last week making a rather different case on his Trump pivot, titled “Curtis Yarvin helped inspire DOGE. Now he scorns it.”
Curious what’s driving the seemingly different points of view here.
Their leader, imprisoned since 1999, had called for the group to disband this February. I assume this is great news, not just for people in Turkey, but for those in Syria and Iraq too (there are Kurdish militias affiliated with the PKK controlling territory in those countries), but I want to know what people from the area think.
These news may also have an effect on the US role in the Middle East, given that they're allied with the YPG (Kurdish militia in Syria), and possibly the Iraqi Kurds.
I don't expect this to affect Syria very much. YPG has quite different focus and goal than PKK. It's not clear that they can survive if the US should withdraw from that region, because Turkey would probably conquer the YPG territory pretty quickly if no one else intervenes. But that has little to do with their ties to PKK.
Curtis Yarvin. As a long time SSC/ACX reader, I kinda get it when Scott writes on X: I agree ... there's still a outside chance Trump manages to come through and do great stuff. Certainly I was happy to see him take steps against affirmative action, NEPA, etc. " - But why give the "others" (NYT and armies of trolls) such a fine quote to "proof" to non ACX-readers: "See: S.A. Siskind really is a racist who hates nature - we told you!" ... From a more obviously Straussian way-to-look at the whole thing: What is the aim of all that Curtis-critique - the one effect it can have is giving him more readers. (Oops the purpose is, what it does.) I did too much history to care zilch about Curtis and his fantasy-monarchies - or his opinion about Trump. At SSC Scott did some great writing steelmanning and refuting those wet dreams on monarchists/reactionaries. Chapter closed.
He probably feels like we're way past the age where the NYT and similarly aligned people had any real power over the collective consciousness, so he feels like he can speak freely. I would agree and I think it's a great thing.
Scott, calling yourself a libtard and a coward seems like poor rhetorical innovation. Just giving the other side ammo. “Scott Alexander admits that people who oppose Trump are cowards.”
It's not giving them ammo if they're going to call him that anyways; it's leaning into being Shylock. The self-awareness is refreshing, if he means it.
Signed,
Someone who has admitted to authorial cowardice in other comments elsewhere
it's also puerile and unclear, what does "libtard" even mean, never heard it in a single context where it made a minimum of sense. At the same time the association of not wanting to risk a monarchy and/or dictatorship = being a coward that's a strange association at best
Well, actual monarchies have occasionally been decent governments. (I think the rule is 1 time out of 5. Which is perhaps better than the record for presidents.) The problem is when they aren't. It has certainly been asserted "For forms of governments let fools contest, what ere is best administered is best.", though I thing is rather depends on the goals of the administration.
The thing is, democracies, and form adjacent governments like the US, are historically less reliable at keeping deals than other forms of government. Both internally and externally. They tend to feel that they don't want to be bound by the prior administration, and the populace forgets why the deal was made in the first place, if they ever agreed it should be made.
I think a modification of the old Anglo-Saxon idea is perhaps the best. The new king must be elected from a group of people, but not a small group. Say those who are either descendants, nephews, or nieces of the current king. (Perhaps expand the group if the list of candidates is less than 7. But expand by consanguinity. If there aren't enough cousins, pull in the second-cousins.) This gives a small enough group that they can be raised responsibly, and also have their characteristics known, and a large enough group that SOMEONE in it is likely to be decent. It also gives the current ruler a stake in the succession. As to who should do the electing...that's a tough one. Most people are clearly incompetent at that. I know that given a field of 12 candidates I wouldn't have paid enough attention to them to be a reasonable decision maker. Saying "just let everyone vote" is a recipe for disaster, but every filter I've thought of is subject to corruption. "Let the governors vote on the king", for example, is a guarantee that the current power structure will be supported.
In Charles Williams' _Descent into Hell_ (1937), a professor creates a succubus. No overt magical methods, just obsession about a young woman who isn't interested in him. He doesn't like that she's not interested. As I recall, once this is clear to him, he avoids her, and invents a false version with her distaste for him edited out.
He spends more and more time with the false Amelia until she can even be seen by someone else. His lack of interest in truth leads to his mind disintegrating.
I was surprised to find in this discussion of Paracelsus, a major Renaissance writer about magic who put much emphasis on the power of imagination (at about 25:00), a description of making a succubus by imagination, and I'm willing to bet that Williams, who had a considerable interest in magic, had picked the idea up from there.
I thought I had just found a really cool reference, but this does rather look like concerns about AI companions.
The rather hectic story of a manuscript copying Archimedes' letter about his "method", a socially unacceptable way of using infinitesimals to calculate areas.
The ancient Greeks didn't like them, the counter-Reformation Church didn't like them. (Let me know if that's true.) Fortunately, Newton didn't have to please the Jesuits. I feel like there's a whole conversation about gatekeeping and Damned Things* in the topic.
The text barely survived. There's one known copy, and it was bleached out for a prayer, but some of it was barely visible in the margins. A scholar copied what he could see-- recognizably lost Archimedes-- but a lot of it wasn't visible, and then the manuscript was lost and getting moldy, what with being hidden from the holocaust.
Fortunately, it was found, and modern scanning was able to recover the text. Watch the video for details of the method and animated diagrams.
The most interesting thing on the abstract level is the possibility that there is revulsion against actually good ideas, and probably not just ideas some current rebels are defending. Is there any way to get the actually good ideas to surface when there are so many bad ideas competing with them?
*Damned Things-- Robert Anton Wilson's term for things people seriously don't want to think about
It’s years and years since I had to study history of mathematics as part of math undergrad, but…
- you have the exhaustion lemma in Euclid’s elements
- techniques used by Archimedes, considered even at the time not to be respectable mathematics
- Newton and Lebnitz get a lot of flak from, e.g. Bishop Berkeley, for not being adequately rigourous.
- Eventually (nineteenth century or so) we hav an account of calculus that looks respectable
Now, when ‘m teaching ungraduate digital signal processing, we do point out that if the student is paying attention they ought to notice that what we’re doing is not mathematically respectable, and if you care you can go read a book on measure theory.
I maybe misremembering my undergrad history l course here, but possibly there is a step circa Newton and Leibnitz, where people know Archimedes had a method but don’t know what it was, try to rediscover it, and end up inventig something different.
Would appear analogous to the bit where the US circulated a fake story that lasers were used in isotype refinement for nuclear weapons, the soviets believed this nonsense story, and actually got it to work.
You say Archimedes' method was socially unacceptable - I don't think that's quite accurate. The mathematicians of his time had a geometric & Platonic view of mathematics. There wasn't a proper understanding of functions, or of limits in mathematics. The 'paradox' that an arrow could never strike a rabbit because in the time the arrow moves 4 feet the rabbit moves 1, and so they never meet was regarded seriously.
Aristotle's fairly sophisticated methods for working out areas (essentially by integration) didn't have the appropriate foundations, and mathematicians of his time thus couldn't either understand these ideas or work with them.
Newton & Leibnitz developed better descriptions of calculus (though Newton, as I understand it, spent several years developing 'geometric' justifications for the rules of calculus, which were probably not at all related to how he discovered the rules originally). These took mathematicians some substantial time to appreciate, and in fact analysis was placed on proper foundations only in the second half of the nineteenth century.
It's worth pointing out that the Church of England was hostile to Newton, for mathematical reasons as well as non-mathematical (his views were likely heretical). Traditionalists everywhere dislike new ideas, I guess.
Okay, interesting link but I had to stop because I was rolling my eyes so hard when we got to THE JESUIT WHO ROSE TO POWER and TOLD THE CHURCH IT COULD USE MATHEMATICS TO ACHIEVE ITS GOALS.
Said goals being of course "to re-establish its social, cultural and political dominance". Because the one thing every peasant in the middle of Europe was fighting about was which particular mathematical theory one supported, naturally.
If Clavius - who has a crater on the Moon named after him - 'rose to power' via mathematics, it was on the grounds of calendar reform. I guess the Protestants were right and the Gregorian Calendar should be junked because it's a sinister Papist plot to - what was it again? oh yeah - "re-establish social, cultural and political dominance".
Though I have to admit, the idea of a Renaissance figure pondering "how do I achieve power, status, wealth and success? I know, I'll become a mathematician!" does tickle my fancy.
I'd have to read this guy's book to figure out if what he is describing is so, and how the theory of infinitesimals was received outside of Italy in Protestant nations (was there any opposition from Protestant mathematicians? if so, that puts a hole in his proposition that it was purely Catholic power-grabbing) and to be frank, nothing will make me read a book about mathematics, so some braver soul must do this for me:
Infinitesimal: How a Dangerous Mathematical Theory Shaped the Modern World by Amir Alexander
So far, it's sounding like good old Whig history and the pernicious Papists, but since I'm only going by a video produced by some whippersnapper, that may be unfair.
Opposition to infinitesimals wasn't just a Catholic thing. From the book:
"Yet, useful as it was, and successful as it was, the concept of the infinitely small was challenged at every turn. The Jesuits opposed it; Hobbes and his admirers opposed it; Anglican churchmen opposed it, as did many others."
"The struggle over the infinitely small in the early modern world took different forms in different places, but nowhere was it waged with more determination, or with higher stakes, than in the two poles of Western Europe: Italy in the south and England in the north."
The Catholic Church has an interest in philosophy and theology, and I can imagine it wanting to spend a small fraction of its resources on what it thought was pinning down the corners, especially if one Jesuit thought it was important and no one else had a strong opinion.
The Church has been both fairly maligned and unfairly maligned, so what's needed is actual history.
I nearly made a fool of myself. I've only ever learned calculus through limits, so I just assumed Newton and Liebnitz used limits. Apparently that was a later formulation.
There are roughly two poles with regard to mathematical rigor. One camp I might call pure math, and it generally cares very much about solid foundations. (Not always enough, mind you, naive set theory was a thing, after all, and Goedel has put a hard limit on how good your foundations can be.)
The other pole I might roughly call "physicists". There, anything goes, if you can write it on a blackboard and don't get struck by lightening, that means you are allowed to do it. Using mechanical (a la Archimedes) or numerical methods is fine. Playing fast and loose with infinitesimals is fine, e.g. cancelling dx in (df/dx)*dx. If a student comes up with a counterexample where these tricks don't work, you just call it a pathological example and move on, irrespective of the fact that almost all functions might qualify as pathological. What do you mean, a plane wave in an unbounded space can not be normalized? In practice, you can take the integral of a lot of sets and never once encounter a Banach Tarski decomposition.
The difference between these poles is exemplified by Dirac's delta "function". It can be defined by a physicist in ten minutes. However, if you want a sound definition which tells you what you can actually do with it, you require distribution theory, which takes a semester or so.
Both approaches have their uses, however it is important to be aware if you are cutting corners or not.
Also, early mathematicians were a bit of a cult, see for example WP on irrational numbers:
> Hippasus, however, was not lauded for his efforts: according to one legend, he made his discovery while out at sea, and was subsequently thrown overboard by his fellow Pythagoreans 'for having produced an element in the universe which denied the... doctrine that all phenomena in the universe can be reduced to whole numbers and their ratios.'[7] Another legend states that Hippasus was merely exiled for this revelation. Whatever the consequence to Hippasus himself, his discovery posed a very serious problem to Pythagorean mathematics, since it shattered the assumption that numbers and geometry were inseparable; a foundation of their theory.
> [Dirac's delta function] can be defined by a physicist in ten minutes.
Only if you want the formality of setting it up as a limit of Gaussians. If you'll accept the piecewise function (δ(0) = +∞ and δ(x) = 0 if x ≠ 0), the integral, and a plot thrown for good measure, it shouldn't take more than one.
Differentiating this function is when you might need to watch out for lightning.
Is the Hippasus story true? In a lovely example of serendipity, I never heard of it or him till this comment, and when I went looking for something about Clavius and infinitesimals, there he pops up again:
"When there are good true stories to tell, everyone suffers when we tell the false ones. This is especially important when the stories directly impact the matters students are studying. If one tells the story of a man named Hippasus being tossed from a ship with regard to incommensurables, better to talk about what it says about worldviews that such a story seemed credible when first written down centuries later."
Anyway, the paper about infinitesimals and why they were so controversial was more educational for me. First off, unlike the framing in the video, it wasn't a tidy "religious bigots on this side, Enlightenment scientists on that side". Cavalieri, Galileo's pupil and defender of infinitesimals, was a member of a religious order himself. And the ban on teaching infinitesimals only held in *Jesuit* schools, since Clavius was creating the mathematics curriculum for these schools. If you weren't attending a Jesuit institution, you could (or could not, depending) learn about these.
"A typical analogy, most often associated with the Italian Jesuat brother [As always has to be explained regarding Cavalieri, he was a member of the Jesuat/Gesuat, not Jesuit, order. It flourished from 1361 until suppressed by papal decree in 1668] and mathematician Bonaventura Cavalieri, is of infinitely thin pages of a book.
1. The pages could be so thin that, no matter how (finitely) many you stacked, all of them together would not be as thick as any actual book; you would need infinitely many. Such pages are infinitesimal.
2. The pages could be so thin that, no matter how you tried, you could not slice them any thinner; they are indivisible. They are parts of the book, but if infinite in number, whether they comprise the whole book was open to question."
So, as ever, the story is slightly more complex than the easily-digestible Youtube video version with (bad old) Church on this side, (good new) mathematicians on the other side.
"Now, there is plenty of truth in this story. First, there is no doubt as to the remarkable success of the Jesuit order in (among other things) establishing rigorous, desirable, ‘safe’ schools for the minor nobility and nascent bourgeoisie – all in the name of the Catholic/Counter-Reformation. Their most prominent mathematician, Christopher Clavius, was a solid proponent of Euclidean geometry in these schools; under his aegis the church (and hence much of Europe) achieved the long-sought goal of calendrical
reform in 1582, where October 15th followed October 4th to make up for the solar year not being evenly divisible by standard days.
...But the overall story, alluring as it may be in our society of absolute freedom and intellectual inquiry, and as exciting as it might be to think of calculus (!) as having political importance so early on, is selling a bill of goods. The suppression of
indivisibles was surely part of a long fight over new ideas and to what extent the Church could direct or restrict many activities, but not the only one, and much of the hyperbolic verbiage used was par for the course at that time.
Despite Alexander’s often deft handling of the distance between (post) modern secular readers and the worldview landscape fifty years on either side of Galileo, much of the political discussion is speculation, or simply wrong. As just one example, while in such a political age it was possible that the Jesuits got the Pope to suppress the Jesuat order, and (barely) conceivable they would have been motivated because some of the most prominent advocates of indivisibles (notably Cavalieri) were from it, among his copious endnotes there is not one to be found about this topic.
We should teach about incommensurables, and that the Pythagoreans may have had strong feelings about this; but we should also make it clear that the death of Hippasus is probably just a story. Likewise, the example of the triangles is a good warning against setting up integrals without caution, and the very real fights waged over infinitesimals/indivisibles for some of these reasons (Galileo was an early advocate)
is a wonderful topic in a Calculus II course. But let’s not suggest it is really about preparing the West for a modern secularist worldview (as even his subtitle How a Dangerous Mathematical Theory Shaped the Modern World implies) that Alexander acknowledges no one in question was actually fighting for."
As for the second half of the book and the Hobbes-Wallis hairpulling:
"Now, Hobbes reasoned if he could achieve the long-desired (Euclidean) construction of a square with the same area as a circle using his techniques, then surely his entire philosophy would be accepted – including otherwise-distasteful-to-all outcomes such as the Leviathan totalitarian-yet-not-monarchist regime. (Here is where Alexander draws a direct comparison to the top-down regime promoted by the Jesuits, adherents of papal authority as their raison d’etre.)
...For the man primarily responsible for Hobbes’ downfall was another Oxford don, erstwhile Presbyterian-party preacher and Parliamentarian-party cryptoanalyst John Wallis.
Through all the regime change of the English Civil War era, Wallis retained favor by adroit maneuvering; unlike many similar men, he seems to have been addicted to producing (and publishing) correspondence aimed at defeating anyone he disagreed with about anything. Since Hobbes was just as stubborn, and since Wallis disliked Hobbes’ theology, views on the university, and (to him) inadequate mathematics,
their dispute lasted through over twenty years’ worth of letters, publication, and ‘transactions’. They argued primarily over mathematics, but interspersed accusations of plagiarism, bad Latin, and proper authority of a minister of the Gospel.
...Still, this was not somehow an English version of the Italian controversy. In fact, Wallis was even more cavalier about his use of infinitesimals than Hobbes was about his indivisibles (see the next section for an example). In Alexander’s telling, Wallis, not Hobbes, plays the role of Cavalieri’s school, with repeated direct references to the
Baconian ideals of experimental induction and free inquiry espoused by the Royal Society of London. All Wallis wanted, in the best experimentalist tradition, were “theorems that were sufficiently ‘true’ for the business at hand.”
Hence the Society’s (with Wallis) repudiation of Hobbes (and so his philosophy) was an example of the key to English (and, by extension, later American?) pre-eminence in science being tolerance of differing opinion, where “a land of many voices. . . discover[ed] its path to wealth and power”. This seems to be an awful lot to lay at the feet of the infinitesimals, or even the Royal Society, alone.
This is especially so since the technicalities of these questions looked so different in the dawning eighteenth century, where people abandoned Cavalieri or Wallis as dead ends to grapple with utilizing Leibniz’ tools (and Newton’s in England), with different controversies. Similarly, it is very hard to imagine the political development of Italy or England going very differently with or without infinitesimals. Even if the Royal Society’s openness to work with the sort of deficiencies Wallis’ had might perhaps be a token of a more general openness in English society to once-heretical ideas, it is not a main reason we should care about this dispute."
So I recently found out how extremely difficult it is to get reasonably priced ADHD meds in the US and then I got linked to this pretty moving video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eRPeU1DYOWA
Now im not an American, this could all just be entirely wrong for all I know but I remember hearing American private pharmacies were all on the the verge of bankruptcy a year ago - is this their response ? Is there something else going on with the actual manufacturers ?
This definitely feels like the sort of thing our resident Adderall Merchant and True Caliph should have done a deep dive on.
A useful workaround I know of for people having trouble getting the extended release version: I've known people who just get the regular version and take a fraction of a pill every couple hours. It's not much trouble, it's cheaper, and I wouldn't be surprised to learn that it actually is a better way to keep a steady lowish level of the stuff in your system. Whatever system an extended release version of a drug uses to keep up a slow release inside the person's body can't possibly work equally well for everyone.
Now I am wondering if someone could build empty diffusion-based extended release capsules for DIY pharmaceutical upgrading.
I don't think that is easy, though. The release rate depends on the solubility of the active ingredient and how well it diffuses through the membrane. And some drugs might rely on stomach acid, which will stop affecting the drug once the XR capsule moves to the intestines. (Also, one would require a two part capsule which seals on assembly, and any commercial manufacturer would likely get sued by the pharma industry.)
Re the contest: if you start organising things only tomorrow, does that mean that changes to the docs after submission but before today are automatically taken into account?
“ But you're the one who likes talking about curate's eggs”
That’s the egg that has good and bad in it which is I suppose how Moldbug uses it. I used to listen to some creaky intellectual Sunday morning review on BBC 4 where every movie or book considered as mediocre was compared to the curates egg.
Well they were wrong! The curates egg is a totally bad egg.
A lot of people think there was no humour in the 19C and when you realise that the “curates egg” has survived for more than a century (however misremembered) as their best joke, then we realise that’s probably true.
The joke is in comic book form, if I recall, the curate is visiting the bishop who has offered him an egg. The bishop asks if the egg is good, the curate replies it’s good in parts.
That means the poor curate is eating an egg that smells of sulphur and he has to eat around the bad parts, which would be greenish tinted if I recall. ( we don’t really have bad eggs any more as the hens are better educated).
Anyway that’s not a good egg, or even a mediocre eggs, it’s a rotten egg. That’s the joke!
You now have more reason to dislike Moldbug and fusty BBC 4 review shows, if you haven’t already. You’re welcome.
Part of the joke is that the curate (pretty much the most humble clerical rank in the Anglican church) is having breakfast with a bishop, and when the latter asks him how his egg is his ridiculous reply that it is good in places is a desperate attempt not to offend his exalted host.
The modern usage is, in my experience, to say with wry irony that something has good and bad parts (while implying that the bad parts entirely ruin the good part).
That's the same as the non-modern usage.
I'm prepared to believe that someone out there is misusing the phrase, I just haven't seen any examples provided.
Hmm. My experience is that the modern usage is always “good in parts” unironically, and never “rotten entirely” which ignores the original context. Otherwise why not say bad.
Anyway language usage moves on as chatGPT reminded me when I complained about this.
Edit:
It’s possible that i was misreading these BBC 4 types and they were totally condemning whatever they were reviewing as rotten while pretending to find some merit in it.
Apparently, I haven’t much noticed this phrase being used. But this modern usage is illogical and also pretty pointless (what’s the purpose of making a reference to something like this if one just wants to unironically say something is partly bad and partly good?).
Has anyone personally noticed end-user effects from the tariffs yet? I was hearing that by early to mid May the economy would in massive turmoil, and I've heard stories about ports being empty, but so far no complaints about products being unavailable or overpriced. Should I be surprised?
Hannafords has avocados at $1.50 now. It's possible I'm misremembering, but I think the price has been from $1 to $1.19 for as long as I've gone to the store - I don't think I've ever seen it that high.
I'm in some SF groupchats, and the people doing electronic engineering or computer hardware stuff have been fairly regularly posting about the overnight shortage of parts, some parts skyrocketing, orders being canceled by suppliers or changed in a 'pray I do not alter the deal further' way, for both the hobbyists and the hard-tech startups. People are definitely postponing projects or not starting them at all, in the usual Unseen way. (Just another example of how life is much easier in the software world than hardware world - you don't have to worry about your next `git pull` from Github suddenly costing you $10k extra because Trump 'truthed' something last night.)
And now the God King of Skulls has folded and slunked away into his corner with the tail between his legs as is his custom when met with a push back. Tariff pause with China for another 90 days! A "reset" (how on Earth did he use Obama's term for it?!) with China!
My Italian Wine Club offered to release me from my club obligations because they can't guarantee that I won't be hit with tariffs when my shipments arrive in the US. But they admit they don't know how they'll be enforced at our border. I decided to forego my club shipment for the immediate future because I couldn't find any clear guidance from the CBP on the current tariffs on alcohol from the EU, if any, and how they'd be collected. 10% I think, but those may only be for major importers, and not people who have alcohol shipped for personal use.
The job market in my field finally picked up, due as far as I can tell to foreign product equivalents being a bit more uncertain long-term, and I was finally able to get a good position. Can't say I've noticed anything on the consumer end.
The board game space is getting hit hard. I know of at least three companies that have already been shuttered or significantly reduced, and a few others on the larger side are dramatically changing the way they do things to not have non-American customers bear the costs of tariffs while charging Americans a surcharge.
I've heard (unofficially) on social media and message groups and such that many other smaller companies are going to just try to sell current stock and hope the situation changes. I'd be shocked if anyone's actually ordering new Chinese game manufacturing right now in the hobbyist space, and I'd guess 95%+ of hobbyist games are manufactured in China.
I'm not aware of what's happening with the actually big companies (Hasbro, Mattel, etc).
I suspect the story is the same for other industries that rely on heavily tariffed sources: they're big enough to start doing something of a pivot or they're selling out current stock and crossing their fingers. Or they were able to lobby for an exception, I suppose.
Another thing to consider is that while the de minimus exception has been removed (last I checked), I don't think anyone has any clue how it's supposed to be enforced, so many places might be getting away with direct to consumer shipments at the moment.
Yes, GMT games sent out a moving message to subscribers about how their operations are going through major changes and risk company finances going deep, deep red.
Obviously, anyone working in finance has had a hard month. Thus my spouse is more stressed.
Our resident substation engineer doesn't know yet how to get new transformers of the right size within budget. But we'll see...
Yep, I've got a kickstarter board game that's on indefinite hold from shipping to the US. Rest of the Anglosphere should have gotten theirs a week or two ago, I think?
More broadly, we're likely in a recession right now so that's pretty bad. I believe I also read a few weeks ago that there are indications that people are burning through their savings, the effects of which we'll see play out in the coming months.
More narrowly, I remembered that a few weeks ago we bought a trampoline. A couple of days after we purchased it the item nearly doubled in price.
The lab where I work is already seeing "tariff" line items on orders. I work with electronics (repairing old equipment and designing/building new tools) and I've seen prices go up. Mouser Electronics is one of the main distributors and they've got notices on their website to the effect that they're trying to minimize the impacts of tariffs on prices.
At least one board game company has closed. And another company for a game I preordered had to 1) raise prices and 2) collect payment in advance (which they normally don’t do)
As someone who was looking at the car market specifically during this:
25% Canada/Mexico tariffs went into effect March 4th, then March 5th there was a one month exemption for automakers, then March 6th further delays on general Canada/Mexico tariffs.
April 3rd the 25% auto tariffs actually started, and then April 5th the overall import 10% tariff started.
April 29th there is a change to give 3.75% of MSRP of an auto as a tariff rebate.
That's all to say: supply chains are long, we're not yet at the predicted price increase date of June, and the only increase I've seen confirmed so far is Ford in July. Whether others follow or not will depend on if tariffs stay in place or get more exemptions/changes. TBD, stay tuned.
I work in construction and yes, our costs are going up. We’re talking tens of millions.
I have friends whose companies either have hiring freezes or layoffs due in large part to the tariffs.
Prices don’t seem much different though. I wonder if this is a covid type situation where while it did cause a lot of big problems, we never got the worst of the overheated speculation and the issues didn’t arise quite so abruptly as the media predicted. (It’s easy to forget just how apocalyptic some of the March 2020 coverage was).
Seconded. I'm renovating my house, so I'm dealing with the consumer-facing side of building materials right now. I expect to be done just in the nick of time with the major work that I had to hire out (structural repairs and plumbing.)
The light fixture sections at Home Depot and Lowe's are getting sad. A lot of empty spots on the shelf. I got everything I needed, but several products were the last (or second to last) box on the shelf. No idea when (or if) things will get restocked.
There was empty shelves for key items. Especially frozen food I noticed. The brands or varieties that weren't as liked were stocked, but the #1 sellers were gone.
The only tartar sauce I could find was a different brand than usual in a huge jar. Overall not a big deal, but the store was definitely different from a few weeks ago.
For the Germans here or anyone interested in salaries in Berlin, I recently published the Salary Trends report 2025, a comprehensive overview of tech salaries in town:
I don't have the time to read it right now, just skimmed the intro. The two things that stood out to me is the that it's around 1.8k respondents and the gender pay cap numbers. At 20%+ and 15% they're a lot higher than the German average at around 16% and 6%[1]
I can think of a couple of explanations, but I worry it's selection bias in who answers your survey. If so then the data might just not be representative
Could also have different reasons and it's still interesting and I'll read it. But it'll probably not change my mind much, whatever the results, due to uncertainty about the issues above
Edit: Now that I've had the time to read a bit further into the article I see you've addressed those points in the report :)
Edit 2: I'm actually really impressed by how clear the report is at every level on what's measured exactly, what the sample sizes are for every group and so on. Great read :)
I mean, sure, but is it representative of the Berlin tech sector? That is, should we expect the gender pay gap to be much wider in Berlin tech than in society at large. Or should we expect that OP's getting a skewed sample from their respondents.
This leaves me a bit confused about how to update. In some sense he's selling out, but he's selling out from a position that he never should have had. So it's a bit tricky to tell how much it reflects a sensible retreat from untenable views, versus him becoming less principled.
One question that would help me thinking about this: lately he has been using FDR, Lincoln, and Washington as examples of the type of "CEO" that Trump should be. But these are non-central examples of dictators. Should I interpret this as him backing away from his position of supporting dictatorship?
"Yarvin's main intellectual contribution was diagnosing the problem of the cathedral"
You... seriously write this? As a serious thing?
These "diagnoses" are worthless, they are not even dime a dozen, every ranting boomer on facebook has "diagnosed" the cathedral/whatever with a great deal of detail and memes, who cares.
My interpretation is similar, Moldbug was an idealist writer about the best possible solution. Yarvin is a realist that recognizes his old solutions were never feasible, and has found a realistic way to accomplish the same objective. You could call him a sellout, but honestly I think most people do the same over their life. People in their 20s are idealistic and shoot for the moon, but now he’s in his 50s, and wants to accomplish something, even if it’s not perfect.
Au contraire, Yarvin Cathedral premises were always based on his mistaken (bordering on delusional) belief that elite institutions, such as universities and the mainstream press, were *colluding* to pull the strings of public opinion. This has been a mainstay of rightwing nuttery long before Yarvin came along. The Cathedral used to be the Trilateral Commission, and before that, it was Freemasons, and before that, it was the Illuminati. In their ignorance, people like Yarvin revive the bogeymen of the past and repackage them in an attractive garment of contemporary memes and discontent. The Paranoid Style in American Politics by Richard Hofstadter is still relevant sixty years after he wrote it, and nothing has changed except that rightwing nuttery has finally gained power in the US. There's something to Marx's quip that "History repeats itself, first as tragedy, second as farce."
What puzzles me is that the Substack ecosystem treats Yarvin as a Very Serious Person when his ideas are and always have been manifestly screwball.
I think he's said he wants Trump to reduce Congress and the Supreme Court to "advisory" roles only, which I interpet as a polite way of saying completely ignore them if they disagree. I think this is beyond FDR/Lincoln, although of course FDR's appointed court packing was a step in this direction. I really do think he means "rule by decree".
I think all of Moldbug's critique of the Cathedral survives this pivot, but I think the objection to him was always "doesn't dictatorship have some very obvious failure modes?", and that most of his answer to that question involved the weird stuff which is now obsoleted. I don't know what his new answer to that question would be.
Hopefully little. Last time I disqualified one entry for obviously being like this (unusually high score with most voters from the same unusual country as the author). I do spot checks to make sure most voters are ACX subscribers (obviously not all, and it's not cheating if a nonsubscriber votes, but if one entry has way more nonsubscribers than others, I'll be suspicious).
I had something of an idea for the everything-but... contest, but was not able to implement it in time with sufficient quality due to other projects.
Perhaps there's room for two contests per year? One for books and one for everything-but... or is the intention to just return to the normal contest schedule next year and hope there's more everything-but reviews than previously?
You can do double the contests with the same fatigue if you only allow people with even birthdates to participate and vote in one and odd birthdates to participate and vote in the other
(replace birthdates with some other random oracle you can afford to assign to people)
‘Skill issue’ is a useful meme - on agency, learned helplessness, useful beliefs and systems
wrote a short essay on the usefulness of the meme “skill issue” that some of you might enjoy. I wrote it as a way to reconcile my own belief in personal agency with the reality of supra-individual forces that constrain it. The point isn’t that everything is a skill issue, but that more things might be than we assume and that believing something is learnable can expand what’s possible.
It’s part cultural critique, part personal essay, weaving through tattoos, Peter Pan, and The Prestige to ask: what happens when belief does shape reality? And how do we keep choosing, even when the choice feels like it’s left us?
Are you supposed to have gotten an email notification after submitting to the contest?
Has anyone tried to model bipolar disorder as a consequence of dopamine receptor upregulation? If depressive states lead to decreased dopamine production then I could imagine homeostatic factors causing the receptors to upregulate. Then if the depression lifts slightly and dopamine levels return to normal then you get this crazy surge of activity, i.e. mania. Is this plausible?
Scott's tweet says that America today is a weird place for a revolution, unlike historical revolutions. On the contrary, it looks to me like France 1789.
How so? No one starves to death here. Do you think the peasants in 1789 would've revolted if they'd had iPhones and YouTube?
We're not gonna revolt, we're gonna collapse. America is in the second half of Atlas Shrugged, not the French Enlightenment.
It wasn't the starving peasants who revolted in 1789.
Certainly the Flour War 15 years earlier was relevant. Certainly Scott is right to say that bread lines were relevant in 1991. But food wasn't definitive in those places, either. Soviets were rich enough to drink themselves to death, with life expectancy peaking in 1960 and declining until Gorbachev restricted alcohol in 1985. Wealth leads to revolution.
I remember some previous Open Threads from early in Russia's Ukraine debacle, where some doubted that drones would be able to blunt the massive deployments of Russian armor. Does anyone still doubt that drones have permanently changed the nature of warfare?
1. First off, an interesting thread compiled from the commentaries of Russian bloggers on how the insect screech of drones has become the defining sound of the Russia-Ukraine war. Drone noise has become a form of psychological warfare.
https://t.co/uFgw74atan
2. Ukraine is laying down a 15-20 km “kill zone” of autonomous drones along their defensive lines to deny Russian forces the ability to move undetected across the front. And it's trying to extend it to 40km. And it seems to be working. I'm having trouble getting Threadreaderapp to unroll this thread — apologies to those who are allergic to X.
https://x.com/DVKirichenko/status/1915439099588329809
3. Because of drones, tanks have been relegated to the role of mobile artillery.
https://cepa.org/article/the-era-of-the-cautious-tank/
And this made me snicker: "Drawing lessons from the Ukraine conflict, Driscoll emphasized the need for tanks to adapt to the increasing threat posed by inexpensive drones. This strategic pivot underscores the Army's commitment to *preserving its armored capabilities* while addressing emerging battlefield challenges" [emphasis mine]. US strategists still don't seem to have internalized the idea that tanks may be going the way of the Bronze Age chariot. But Driscoll still has confidence in his chariots.
https://armyrecognition.com/news/army-news/2025/exclusive-us-army-reevaluates-tank-warfare-strategy-amid-drone-threats
4. Ukrainian sea drones have driven the Russian Navy off the Black Sea back into their ports. And now sea drones have used AIM-9 Sidewinder missiles to shoot down two Russian SU-30 fighters.
https://cepa.org/article/ukraines-marauding-sea-drones-bewilder-russia/
https://www.twz.com/news-features/two-russian-su-30-flankers-downed-by-aim-9s-fired-from-drone-boats-ukrainian-intel-boss
Tanks have already been written off in 2022 and 2023 when Javelin & Co got all the praise. It was too early to write off tanks then, and it's still too early today. The combination of mobility, firepower, and protection is a potent one and will always have a place on the battlefield; tracked and armored fighting vehicles will be replaced if and when some new technology makes them obsolete, but not before. Right now drones have the upper hand, but that's just the nature of warfare - it's an incentive to invest more into anti-drone capabilities (new tech & tactics), and that in turn is an incentive to invest in anti-anti-drone capabilities, and so on.
https://www.tumblr.com/andrewducker/783048372986707968?source=share
For much of the Middle Ages, the Catholic Church wasn't hunting down magic users. The official view was that magic didn't work, and anyone who claimed it did was a fraud.
As might be expected with any high-minded, abstract, and contrary to popular opinion command, compliance wasn't happening.
A lot of magical practice was something congregations insisted on priests walking a host around fields to improve harvests, and compliance with the hierarchy just wasn't worth it.
The later, witch-hunting period was real and horrifying, but it didn't happen in the middle ages. The Catholic Church isn't just one thing, and I wouldn't even say its behavior is especially predictable.
This is correct. Until the Renaissance, witch trials were rare and were almost exclusively conducted by civil authorities. In general, the medieval witch trials were otherwise-ordinary murder trial where the killing was alleged to have been done by means of magic.
Even in the Renaissance, it wasn't just Catholics doing witch hunting. Protestants did a lot of witch hunts, too. And at least one Orthodox country (Russia) did thematically-similar stuff in the same time period, but they were hanging sorcerers instead of burning witches and didn't generally consider their sorcerers to be devil-worshippers the way Catholic and Protestants thought of their witches. And in this time period, it was still usually civil authorities doing the burnings: the Dominicans in Catholic countries and various religious groups in Protestant countries did search for witches and do torture to force confessions and compel testimony against other witches, but they almost always turned unrepentant witches over to civil authorities for trial and execution, and a lot of civil authorities did witch hunts on their own.
Popular conceptions about witch hunts, especially in English-speaking countries, seem to be rooted in four sources:
- The Murray Thesis. This is a theory proposed in 1921 by Margaret Murray, an archeologist specializing in ancient Egypt. The theory was that only elites converted to Christianity in Roman times while commoners mainly remained pagan through the Renaissance and well into the Early Modern period and specifically practiced a common Europe-wide pagan tradition centered on a "horned god" which Christians identified with Satan. Under this thesis, the witch hunts were attempts by elites to destroy this pagan tradition. The Murray Thesis got taken seriously by mainstream scholars when it was first proposed, but it has since been thoroughly discredited. In the meantime, though, Gerald Gardner relied heavily on Murrays books when formulated Gardnerian Wicca in the 1950s, which he based on the assumption that modern English folk magic, early 20th century English mysticism, and classical Druidism were all parts of the "horned god" tradition which he aimed to reconstruct and codify. Thus, Wiccans and Wicca-adjacent neopagans (many of whom are terminally online) often take the Murray Thesis as an article of faith. The idea of the "Burning Times" and of witchcraft being "The Old Religion" are references to the Murray Thesis by way of Gardner
- The exploits of Matthew Hopkins, the self-styled Witch-Finder General of England. He was a Puritan con artist who operated during the English Civil War. His technique was to turn up in a village, announce that he'd been appointed by Parliament to root out witches throughout the country, conduct a highly dramatic investigation, and hang whatever "witches" he found that hadn't been killed by his trials-by-ordeal. Along the way, he'd also collect a "tax" to pay for his services. In the lawless chaos of the Civil War, he was able to keep this for several years before dying of natural causes. About half the tropes (at least in Anglo-American culture) of how witch trials were conducted, stuff like "swimming the witch" and searching an accused witch's skin for distinguishing marks, comes mostly from Hopkins. The Witchfinder Sergeant character from "Good Omens" is a pun on Hopkins's title.
- The Black Legend, a body of anti-Spanish and anti-Catholic propaganda originated by Queen Elizabeth I during the 1585-1604 Anglo-Spanish War, and which took on a life of its own afterwards. The Black Legend featured highly graphic exaggerations of the Spanish Inquisition techniques and practices, painting Spain as a totalitarian theocracy. A lot of elaborate torture techniques that have little or no historical basis (the iron maiden, the pear of anguish, etc) come from Black Legend propaganda. The truth of Early Modern Spain and the Inquisition is plenty awful, but the Black Legend exaggerated it enormously. The Inquisition primarily targeted Jews, Muslims, and Christian heretics (especially Protestants), but it also hunted witches and was conducted by the same religious order (the Dominicans) who also did witch hunts elsewhere in Europe in the 17th century, so the Black Legend spilled over into popular conceptions of witch hunts. Most of the other half of the Anglo-American pop culture image of witch trials come from the Black Legend.
- Late 20th century popular edutainment tropes about the history of science in the Renaissance, which tend to heavily emphasize the trial and imprisonment of Galileo for heresy by the Roman Inquisition (also conducted by the Dominicans).
I thought your response to Yarvin's response was very good.
Like you I was slightly cheered to learn that the Dems have started an Abundance Caucus and that as of last Friday it already had 30+ members. An equally positive sign is that the knee-jerks at places like The Nation absolutely haaaate it.
Meanwhile since Thursday afternoon,
-- another Trump-appointed federal judge ruled that the administration must immediately bring back another specific deportee from the El Salvador dungeon, and this judge added that she will start placing administration officials under oath for updates on their work to comply with her order;
-- Trump when asked live on-air whether he is obliged to defend the Constitution replied "I don't know";
-- the FBI Director denied under oath that the Constitution's guarantee of due process applies to noncitizens despite having Antonin Scalia's ruling to that effect read to him;
-- Trump appointed yet another Fox News personality to a high federal office;
-- Stephen Miller is convening White House meetings to explore a national suspension of habeas corpus;
-- Trump defended accepting a personal gift from the ruling family of Qatar of a half-billion dollar glammed-up 747, which he would graciously lend to the government for use as Air Force One until he leaves office at which time the plane goes with him. [Never mind that the Constitution's Emoluments clause _specifically_ bars the acceptance of gifts from any “King, Prince, or foreign State” without prior Congressional approval.]
"I was a libtard and a coward. I still am. I’ve just recovered a bit more"
Up is down, war is peace. You can't seriously engage with postmodernism.
Well, the way Yarvin is expressing himself might be overly poetic and flowery for my tastes, not to mention profane, but it's not that hard for me to mentally translate it into what I would consider plain english, at which point I could engage with it in the same way I would engage with anything else.
Assuming it's Yarvin you're accusing of being postmodernism, I'm not sure.
After seeing Scott recommend the Center for AI Safety free online course on AI Safety, Ethics, and Society, I took the course, and can report that it was great! Good weekly discussions, the textbook has good coverage of the relevant topics, and the project phase at the end was a great opportunity to dive deep into an area of interest. For my project I wrote a post clarifying the conclusion I have come to after reading much of Scott and Zvi's writing and taking the course - namely that we absolutely are not ready for AGI and it's kind of crazy that building it is still the stated goal of many of the top AI companies, and we should thus work to build consensus on (1) that this is stupid and dangerous and (2) what to do about that fact given the systemic forces pushing us forward. See the post here, I welcome any feedback or corrections! https://natezsharpe.substack.com/p/what-if-we-justdidnt-build-agi
It seems one of the most popular arguments for imminent AGI goes "skeptics said AI would never do x and then AI did x! They said it would never do y and y happend a few weeks later! Then they said those things didn't really count! When will you all wake up?????"
I think this is a bad argument. Bear with me.
ALICE: AI may solve equations, but it will never write a story.
BOB: Actually, AI has just written a story. "A man planted a tree. The tree grew. The end."
ALICE: I meant a real story. Like, with description and a multi-part plot.
BOB: Lol, moving the goalposts. But as it happens, AI has just produced such story.
ALICE (*reading it*): That's...just a copy of an existing story, with some paraphrasing and word-swaps. That's not what I meant.
BOB: Ha ha, you just keep shifting your claim. Be precise.
ALICE: AI will never produce a story that will win an award.
(A month later)
BOB: An AI story has won a prestigious award.
ALICE: Only because the judges wanted to "take a stand against ableism and human supremacy". That doesn't count.
BOB: I can't believe it. You'll never ever admit you were wrong.
The point is that Alice does, in fact, have something she means when she says "story", even if she can't describe it in advance. Even if she gives ten conditions, and gets presented with something that satisfies all of them, she can still say "that's not quite right, that's not what I meant" and be telling the truth. "I know it when I see it, and this is not it".
Yes, there is some Carol who really is satisfied by the stories AIs produce, and some David who, even when presented with exactly what he was thinking of, will lie and say that wasn't what he meant to avoid admitting he was wrong. But Alice is not Carol or David. There *is* some story that were an AI to produce it, she would be completely satisfied, and happily admit she was wrong. But that simply hasn't happened yet.
And I think there are a lot of Alices in the AI debate, even though there are a lot of Davids and Carols as well. And so there's a fundamental circularity in the pro-AI argument. The other side say that intelligence is really subtle and not something we understand or can model or describe. The AI side say that if they think that, they need to model and describe exactly what things AI will not be able to do, in advance. Which is just assuming that the nature of these things ("art", "emotion" etc) are things that can be modelled and described. Which is precisely what's at issue.
Alice: "AI will never produce a story that will win an award"
Bob: "An AI story has won a prestigious award"
Also Bob, but quietly, so Alice doesn't get the full story (sorry, intentional bad pun): "An AI story selected out of N attempts, after a painstakingly engineered series of prompts, by an actual human".
https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/my-bet-ai-size-solves-flubs
For reference, this is Scott actually taking the view of Bob against Gary Marcus's Alice. I think it's illustrative to see how close to Bob and Alice they end up being.
My view is that this isn't even close to what has happened. That Alice does not get to wriggle out of their claims just because there's a cosmic sense in which they're still right. In addition, in what sense does Alice have actually good predictive ability if they *can't* articulate what they're looking for? Do we also implicitly trust Alice to keep track of all the reasoning tasks that she can't come up with concrete examples for but AI has implicitly accomplished? I don't think so, because we also don't trust Bob when he says "I've been using AI and there's an ineffable sense in which it's qualitatively better"!
I was and still am a moderate AI skeptic. I confess to having moved my mental goalposts by a nontrivial amount. LLMs and image-generative AIs have gotten a lot more capable much faster than I expected early on, and I've had to update based on this.
I am a more radical AI skeptic, and yes, I do admit that AI had developed faster than I thought it would -- but in a different direction from the one doomers are constantly predicting. In terms of "intelligence" (whatever this means) AI is still comparable to a powerful search engine; but its usability had skyrocketed, to the point where you can reliably use it for repetitive low-impact tasks (as you would use a search engine).
Indeed, I see AI proponents moving their goalposts. The term "superintelligence" used to refer to some kind of a quasi-omniscient oracle who can answer any question with perfect accuracy even as it converts the Earth to computronium using the power of molecular nanotechnology. Now, it refers to e.g. an engine that can outperform most (though not all) human geoguessers (some of the time) at figuring out where a photo was taken.
My worry is not that AI will awaken and kill us all, but that we will downgrade our notion of "intelligence" to the point where even modern LLMs fit the bill. They would indeed become "superintelligent", but only compared to our new level of natural stupidity.
Thank you, this is an excellent AGI summary:
- a quasi-omniscient oracle who can answer any question with perfect accuracy: yes, sure, why not.
- even as it converts the Earth to computronium using the power of molecular nanotechnology - nope.
The fact that so many smart people think the first one inevitably and "almost instantly" leads to the second one tells us a lot about the ability of smart people to create fantastic tales.
Thanks for writing this, I hadn't really fully appreciated how Alices feel. That said, I think that one of the tenets of rationality is that shifting our claims *should* make us anxious, even if it's not "our" fault. We need to try our absolute best to precommit to criteria that make sense, and if for whatever reason we have to abandon those precommitments, we should "feel guilty" about doing so. In other words, because we can't tell Alices and Davids apart, Alices should be extra careful. Actually, we can't even trust our *own* internal feelings to be consistent over time. Maybe someone who feels like an Alice is actually being a David and their values are shifting over time. Sometimes you need to abandon the inside view of yourself and act according to the outside view.
One thing going on in the dialogue above is that Alice's metrics are corrupted after she issues them by motivated opponents. When Alice says "AI can't write a story that wins an award", and then a group forms to give an award to a story written by AI for the purpose of invalidating Alice's claim, it is obvious that this "doesn't count" - we may assume that what Alice has in mind is for her claim to be true whether or not other people have heard her make it.
Compare "Goodhart's Law".
Dismissing Alice as "moving the goalposts" in this scenario looks very bad.
Maybe a nitpick, but you're describing things that don't happen in the story: it doesn't say that the award committee knows anything about Alice, or that the award was founded after Alice made the prediction. It's not clear anyone is Goodharting.
A better way to describe the dynamic is that Alice had correct beliefs about AI (it wouldn't produce a story to her satisfaction) and incorrect beliefs about the judges of literary awards (they would have a similar judgment to hers). She placed the goalposts based on those two beliefs, but only meant to be making a strong claim about AI.
She's definitely moving the goalposts now: she chose a clear criterion that was unambiguously met, and only after that wants to revise it. The question is what we should make of her doing so. In this case, I think she has a very good argument that the details of the case didn't prove her wrong about AI, and if she'd thought about this from the start she would have placed the goalposts differently.
But if we didn't have the ability to read Alice's mind, or it were more ambiguous, it would be reasonable to see "Alice's prediction was falsified" as stronger evidence against her beliefs.
No, you've overlooked the part of the dialogue where the committee makes its award "to take a stand against human supremacy". That is a reason unrelated to the story; Alice was not mistaken about whether the judges would have judgment similar to hers - she was mistaken about whether the judges would consider the quality of the story when giving the award.
I didn't overlook that, I took it to be included in "different judgment than Alice" -- they judged based on very different criteria than what Alice was predicting, and which she doesn't see as legitimate. That's why we know she's justified in not changing her mind. I was pointing out that you framed this as an adversarial play against Alice's prediction, which is not how it's described above.
Quick edit: by "judgment" I meant "judgment about what should win an award." Alice's mistake was to think this meant "judgment about literary quality," but that's not the criterion she specified.
Generally, I think "skeptics said AI wouldn't be able to do X, and then it did X" is still a pretty good argument against someone saying "AI will never do X." At least, if Alice doesn't have a decent response to this, I feel justified in not giving her position much credence.
AI systems keep improving. If you claim to have some insight into the kinds of tasks AI systems fundamentally can and can't do, you should have been able to apply this insight at any point in the past and been correct. You can't personally do this. The best available proxy is the smart people from the past who confidently and incorrectly said "AI will never do X."
You need to be able to say why you have better insight into the fundamental limits of AI than they did. There are some good reasons you might: you have access to more evidence than they did! But if you're not somewhat humbled by the failures of people to make this exact same prediction in the past, and don't have an explanation for why you're not making the same mistake, then I'd think you're the appropriate target for this argument.
While I agree that hypothetical "AI systems" in general can do anything you can imagine, present-day LLMs seem to be quite limited. For example, they are incapable of learning on the fly and synthesizing their discoveries into a continuously changing worldview, the way humans can (even, or perhaps especially, in childhood). They are also significantly more prone to hallucinations than humans (even humans who have imbibed a lot of alcohol, weirdly enough). Also, all of the most spectacular feats of AI intelligence that I've ever seen require a huge amount of cherry-picking (by humans).
In addition, most of those smart people from the past who said "AI will never do X" turned out to be... correct ! You are significantly underestimating the sheer number of AI claims that have been made over the years, and focusing on the few that panned out; and even those have not yet been fully realized. For example, people claimed that AI had achieved intelligence since ELIZA, but while modern LLMs can hold a conversation much better than ELIZA could, talking to them is still kind of like... well... talking to a really sophisticated ELIZA. So, thus far, I remain unconvinced.
"They are also significantly more prone to hallucinations than humans (even humans who have imbibed a lot of alcohol"
This sounds like a specific claim. Is it based on an experiment?
True in principle, but I think the overwhelming majority of purported Alices are actually Davidim.
I agree that Alice is right not to change her mind here. She has held a consistent position that she's just been unable to precisely articulate. I also think Bob is right to be a bit annoyed with her: she espoused some positions that turned out to be false, and now she's claiming she was secretly right in some inarticulable way the whole time. Unless Alice is able to specify her position more clearly, she shouldn't expect to convince anyone except herself. (Which is unfortunate, since she's in possession of a true belief that others would benefit from!)
So Alice shouldn't be too comforted by being technically correct here. It's easy to shift your own goalposts without noticing, and it's basically impossible to check after the fact whether they were "really the same" all along. One of the best ways to prevent this drift is by making clear predictions -- and making predictions that are later falsified is *evidence* that you had a false belief. (In this case, Alice has a good argument that the false belief was about the award committee rather than about AI, but in many cases it won't be as clear.)
I think it can be very hard for people to differentiate the internal experience of "I hold a consistent position that I can't articulate" from a bundle of aesthetic(/moral/whatever) preferences that don't actually cohere to a falsifiable test. As non-mind-readers, we should be suspicious of Alice' claim, whether it's about AI or anything else.
I wrote about why we should not moralize procreation, and why there should be different measures of epistemic position depending on what criminal justice goals you have. https://hiphination.substack.com/archive
The only meaningful response to that idea was best expressed by Razib:
"Should Religion Play a Role in Politics? [link to a blog post featured on the New York TImes] This is like asking 'should men have sex with women?' It's always going to happen."
Following on from AI’s success at GeoGuessr, I decided to test the free platforms on radiology. Neither was a big success. ChatGPT undercalled an acute radial head fracture, saying it was a normal elbow X-ray, and Grok overcalled it saying that there was complete dislocation in addition to fracture. Neither was able to correct with prompting by query (Chat doubled down on normal when I asked it specifically if a radial head fracture was present, Grok insisted the elbow was dislocated when I asked if it was sure.) I only got correct diagnosis from Chat when I insisted “this image shows a radial head fracture.” Oh well. Radiologists to stay employed for now.
Chatbots were not (generally) trained on medical data or images, and it likely would have been low-reliability data. There are quite a few radiology companies that are using machine learning specifically with high quality data of MRI, CT, and PET scan images. So far, it has seemed quite promising. However, a chatbot would not be the relevant usage of ai in this case. Take a look at companies like Therapanacea, deepc, Aidoc, or Siemens (partnering with Britain's NHS). For example, if you can take a look at the white paper for Rad AI (Siemans), so far results seem to be very good, particularly for expediting radiologists' workflow. There are white papers available with relevant studies and sourcing.
Would you expect to see a NN-based specialized radiology software designed to do one thing only, read x-rays, with modules for, e.g., "Fractures", "Lung disease", "Brain Tumors", to be much better than a generic ChatGPT?
That's kind of where I see the path forward, huge open field for specialized AI applications as we already see in image processing, for example, while "AGI" remains mostly hot air and fearmongering.
This dialogue with Moldbug baffles me, mostly because there's a dialogue at all.
From the outside, it's like watching a twitching, seething mass of concentrated hatred and contempt, scream in a voice of a thousand howling voices "Coward! Tear down society! Build the God King a throne of skulls if he will tear down our rivals for us! REOPEN AUSCHWTIZ!"
Granted, 82 of the eyes if his twisted frame are winking in an exaggerated fashion when he says the last line, but other half-formed hands are sharpening knives and drafting legal memos justifying the active under unitary executive theory.
And then Scott nods sympathetically and says "hmm yes, you make some good points and nobody can doubt your lucidity, but on balance I think we should perhaps not drown the streets in blood so that our biological lessors are swallowed up before we are. I will of course update my priors if conditions change. Thank you for giving me much to consider."
One of the core tenets of rationalism is that you treat the argument itself, not the person making it, or what it would imply if true. Scott is the true Caliph of Rationalism.
A lot of people disagree that this is a good thing. You're also allowed to hold that position.
But you coming to his blog and complaining that he's taking Moldbug's arguments at face value is like telling the Pope that Jesus wasn't the son of god.
I really agree with this, and to be more direct, Scott:
I absolutely love all of your posts on medicine, psychology, pharmacology, art, and rhetoric. I don’t agree with everything you say but it’s all fantastic writing and has contributed a huge amount to my view of the world. I’ve shared many of the ideas in these posts with my family and friends.
But despite this, I’m extremely hesitant to recommend Astral Codex Ten to anyone who isn’t super close to me (when they ask where I saw an idea, I usually say “a blog”), because of this deliberate courting of and deference to open bigots. Yes, they are free to express whatever beliefs they choose and it’s fine to engage with them seriously rather than with ridicule, but the level of focus and steelmanning they get can seem to evince an actual preference for them.
Would you treat an “extreme woke” viewpoint with the same level of consideration? If not, why not?
If "I know you're not racist but I'm concerned *what people would think* if they read your stuff" worked, it would have worked 10 years ago.
He treats extreme woke viewpoints with this level of care and consideration all the time ?!
People, who are smart, agree with Moldbug. Smart counterarguments are one of the useful vectors to persuade them.
> People, who are smart, agree with Moldbug.
Some people who are smart.
I think the comma conveys the "some" part. That's how I read it.
Uh, I hope it was obvious I didn't mean 'the majority of people agree with moldbug, and crowds are wise' or 'smart people are smart, and smart people are more likely to agree with moldbug'. If unclear, I was saying 'a portion of the people who agree with moldbug are persuadable by honest, logical arguments'
Fair enough. Thanks.
Couldn't agree more. It's like his depictions in Unsong of Satan being at UN meetings! If i had to steelman it, he needs to appear reasonable *to the target audience* aka Moldbug sympathizers, rather than his audience. In politics you need converts, and he is confident any bridge will see net positive immigration... even if his current base don't want them around...
Fractals!
It really does all come down to mass immigration. If one believes in a strong version of HBD, and observes that the normal political process has completely failed to stop the problem, then building the God King a throne of skulls gets a lot more reasonable.
You’re right that these bravery debates are counterproductive, but no one has figured out how to have the real debate yet.
Except modern immigration is far from the problem it's portrayed to be. It has not increased Crime, it has not brought the US or most countries for that matter to poverty and it has not systematically changed the culture and law of a single country.
Anyone who wants a dictator forgets 2 of this 3 points, and depending if you count repression and crimes against humanity even the 1, would strongly increase in most democracies where this is applied.
Yes if it's a benevolent king/CEO whatever that won't happen, and yet the cases of an illuminated dictator in modern times can be counted on your hands.
> It has not increased Crime, it has not brought the US or most countries for that matter to poverty and it has not systematically changed the culture and law of a single country.
Crime has increased in Europe.
The claim about poverty is true but neither has immigration helped gdp per capita or wage growth. Poland is catching the U.K. in GDP per capita (at least in PPP) and it’s doing that with no immigration and falling population. (So much for that population decline doomsterism).
And the best we can say is that laws haven’t changed much yet, although sharia courts do exist in civil law.
I was thinking about the US but interesting information, is there any proof that this is related to immigration?
Poland is not a good example since it's an emerging economy whose GDP increase has nothing mysterious, you would need two mature economies of similar nature and significantly different immigration flows.
The Sharia courts do you mean in Europe or US? Because i found no mention of that, would you have an example?
To begin with, "Crime has increased in Europe" may or may not be true depending on what you look at.
https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php?title=Crime_statistics
Non-sex crime has been on a long-term trend of decline except for a very modest rise starting in 2021. Sex crime has been significantly rising, but that is probably higher reporting rates.
The God King is bringing in African refugees now!
But there's a nuance: https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/crljn5046epo
Yes, of course there is. Another troll. This one is up there with nominating Matt Gaetz to be AG.
The one good thing about Trump is how idiotic he makes all his "smart" supporters look. The first go-round it got most of the IDW types. Now he's come for the neo-reactionaries.
Actually, Trump does that to everyone. His enemies make fools of themselves overreacting to some random outrageous tweet or comment, and then his friends make fools of themselves by jumping in to agree with the outrageous tweet or comment.
The "Trump is all bluster" crowd looks even worse right now.
c.f. Politifact labeling Kamala Harris's claim "half true" for assuming Trump would actually implement tariffs as high as he propmised on the campaign trail. https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2024/aug/30/kamala-harris/would-donald-trumps-proposed-tariffs-hit-typical-f/
Looking sane is part of the argument.
See also: https://kennaway.org.uk/writings/Insanity-Wolf-Sanity-Check.html
If AGI does everything better than humans can, then it will improve the charity sector. You'll be able to know exactly which charity creates the most benefit per dollar donated, and exactly how much you'll need to give and to whom to save a human life.
If you're still using Google for internet search, here's a One Weird Trick to get rid of all the AI junk and other various and sundry "innovations" of the last decade or so: add ?udm=14 after the url, like this:
https://www.google.com/?udm=14
and get Yer Olde Goode Google back, like it was in the ancient times a score years ago.
UPDATE: looks like it's still pretty far from Yer Olde Goode Google, just a bit cleaner....
After doing a very cursory search, it seems like literally all it does is remove the AI summarization. That is so far from the only problem with modern Google and not even close to "Ye Olde Goode Google". Google has been (relatively speaking), garbage for years before it implemented the AI summaries.
The closest I have actually gotten to Ye Olde Goode Google (and still not quite there) is the paid search service Kagi.
Not everyone will think that paying for search is worthwhile, but I'm personally definitely not going back.
I stopped using Google for search years ago, DuckDuckGo is my default go to. But this Tedium piece came across this morning, so I posted this after doing a quick test. Looks like the rot is more systemic and this hack only removes the top layer of decayed matter.
I tried DDG a while back, and what I found was that I kept having to add the !g because searches weren't finding what I needed, and even in it's fallen state, google was better. Kagi also has the !g bang option, but I don't find myself using it.
This is not to argue against your experience at all. I believe you when you say that you find DDG better.
In discussions about these searches, I have found a lot of people that have your experience, and (on hacker news where a lot more kagi users can be found), people who share mine. My best guess is that perception of search experience across the various options must depend a lot on the kinds of things one is searching for and the way in which different people search.
For whatever reason, my combination of search targets and search technique gets better results on Kagi than on either google or DDG.
This is exactly why it's nice to have other multiple options, and I would encourage people who are using google by default to try other things. It is no longer the head and shoulders obvious best option (and, to bring it back around to the original point: AI search is not the reason for it's lack of Pareto-fronteir superiority)
I'm kind of not even claiming DDG to be "better", it's just that it doesn't track me (at least not to the extent Google does), and it gives consistent results for a given query. It was more of "given that I don't want to use Google, what's an easy alternative that works well enough?" question. DDG fit the bill.
I used that link, searched for something, and immediately got an "AI Summary"
Interesting... I'm not seeing AI summaries when I do this. I don't normally use Google for search nor plan to use it even with this hack.
Here's the original source: https://tedium.co/2024/05/17/google-web-search-make-default/
Re #3, in the comments to the response Scott says that housing prices are a stronger case for the claim that the median person is worse off than in the past, but housing does not actually seem to be all that strong a case
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=fXwf
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=18JRa
Consider the context. We know that in the past it was the norm for people to afford kids and their own home while in their early twenties, even on a lower middle class income. But now most people can't afford that. It's likely that something is missing in the data or the analysis. Otherwise we have to explain why everyone in society seems to have noticed a change that isn't real.
>We know that in the past it was the norm for people to afford kids and their own home while in their early twenties, even on a lower middle class income. But now most people can't afford that.
Except that isn't true. Were that true, home ownership rates would have declined over the last sixty years, but they haven't. https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/RHORUSQ156N
>we have to explain why everyone in society seems to have noticed a change that isn't real.
Because, as always, people look at the past through rose-tinted lenses.
Can you explain that first graph? I thought mortgage payments were cheap in 2006?
Well, it isn't my graph, but it is mortgage payments as pct of disposable personal income. Wasn't the whole subprime mortgage thing all about people with relatively low income getting mortgages they couldn't get previously?
Plus, IIRC, a lot of those were adjustable mortgages, and it looks like adjustable rates rose at that time. https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MORTGAGE5US
I think the problem with the first one is that it is total quarterly required mortgage payments divided by total quarterly disposable personal income. So it isn't median, its mean, and as you say, lots of new people on the market, and lots of investment properties. From memory houses were actually really cheap at that time for the median person. Lots of zero deposit loans.
So you'd want to find something like mortgage payments for the median house, then divide by disposable personal income of the median person (or household?). Still need some way to factor in the deposit.
>From memory houses were actually really cheap at that time for the median person. Lots of zero deposit loans.
But they weren't cheap, because the mortgage payments were high. Take a look at an amortization calculator. Someone who buys a $200k house with 20 pct down and a 5% 30-yr mortgage pays $308k over the life of the loan. With zero down he pays $386k (actually more, bc he won't get the same interest rate).
Moreover, if homes were so affordable, why did so many borrowers default?
Finally, while it would be nice to have median, since we are comparing over time, what is important is that we are comparing like with like, unless we have reason to think that the gap between median and mean has changed over time (if anything I think the gap has grown over time, so the graph probably overstates current costs).
Just like to point out that the illustrated tails are trifid not bifid.
Curious Scott's or any psych researcher's thoughts on Cheng, Y. C., Huang, W. L., Chen, W. Y., Huang, Y. C., Kuo, P. H., & Tu, Y. K. (2025). Comparative efficacy and tolerability of nutraceuticals for depressive disorder: A systematic review and network meta-analysis. Psychological Medicine, 55, e134. I read it (and comments elsewhere about it) as saying a series of nutraceutical may match or beat SSRIs for depression.
I've been considering whether it would be possible and interesting to run prediction markets in a LARP setting. Does anyone know of a system I could use to run this which I could execute with nothing more advanced than a slide rule and ledger? (Ideally I could pre-calcuate some ratios and have a reference tome to look them up in.)
(The system in question is Empire in the UK, which has ~4000 players trading such that there is actual economic activity happening, like a recent liquidity crisis caused by spending too much coin with foreign merchants.)
Further specifications that might be relevant:
* I'd want to denominate things ideally in the smallest coin, a "ring" - players get an income worth somewhere around 120 of these, though not all of that in pure coinage. Expecting people to have ~10 rings in their pocket is reasonable; basically I'd like to keep the stake sizes a) integer and b) small enough they're accessible by as many people as possible.
Robin Hanson has a prediction market board game for guessing movie outcomes. Maybe you can adapt that. I’ll see if I can drum up a link
had the same thought after seeing Eve online, you might find that setting even more interesting.
The simplest method to implement would be a parimutual betting pool. The Wikipedia article is pretty good. There are reasons why prediction markets use other methods - the expected return on you bet depends on the bets placed *after* your bet - but it should be simple, transparent and straightforward to implement. Note that payouts might result in fractional rings.
To remove the risk of fractional rings entirely you could have some sort of open outcry system. If there is a contract that pays out ten rings when the blue team wins and zero when the red ream wins, then people could meet in the "pit" and call there buy/sell offers: "I am willing to buy 1 blue-team contract for 4 rings", " I am willing to sell 2 blue-team contracts for 10 rings", "2 blue-team contracts for 10 rings? I accept your offer; here are ten rings, thank you for the two contracts", etc. If you've ever played the cardgame Pit, you should get the vibe. This method solves the fractional rings problem but can be very very chaotic.
The constant product automated market maker is actually fairly simple to implement with pen and paper - whatever liquidity the market starts with, that will be the liquidity throughout; you only need one reference table with only two columns - but there will be a huge fractional rings problem.
My recommendation: Avoid constant product market makers. Pick from Parimutuel pools or open outcry or maybe an auction based model.
Naomi Kanakia was profiled in the New Yorker https://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/is-the-next-great-american-novel-being-published-on-substack
A new project from neal.fun (known from things like The Password Game and Stimulation Clicker) is Internet Road Trip:
https://neal.fun/internet-roadtrip/
a collaborative Streetview roadtrip where users online at any time get to vote on which direction to go. You can also vote to honk the horn or to change the radio station.
I've been checking in every now and then. The trip started a few days ago in Boston, and right now it's covered 376 miles (it's much slower than a real road trip). The trip started heading southwest as if it was planning to head to California, but upon reaching Providence it twisted around towards the north and now there seems to be a consensus in favour of heading for Canada. At the time of writing (while everyone in the US is asleep anyway) we are heading up a coastal road in Maine.
What's interesting is the social dynamics of the voting. There's clearly people who want to stick with the plan -- we're heading north, let's just keep doing that as efficiently as possible. But then there's people who want to mess things up, taking every turn they possibly can because heading in a straight line is boring. These two teams fight it out every time an intersection or turnoff comes along. Often the chaos party will win, but then we all discover that the side road is frustrating and collaborate to get back on track, leading to a path which is overall progress marked with occasional fits of wandering. There's a comment section which will sometimes turn into name calling between these two parties as well. Oh, and occasionally there's a fit of interest in honking, which dissipates the moment we've honked. The only thing I haven't seen happen yet is a change in the radio station, which has been set to a jazz station in New Hampshire for a long while now.
Implications for real world politics are unclear but definitely present.
The divide between the "chaos party" and the "keep going party" sounds a lot like the dynamics of the original Twitch Plays Pokemon. The original mode was "anarchy mode" where the game just took the first input it saw in the chat, and then they added a "democracy mode" where people voted for the moves, which made it a lot easier to actually progress in the game, and the game shifted between the modes based on voting.
A lot of the dynamic there was people trying to actually win the game trying to get it into democracy mode (required a supermajority), while the other group tried to keep the game in anarchy (requiring just a majority) and would vote for "start9" (press the start button nine times - did nothing but waste time) while in democracy mode. The latter group was a mix of people who just wanted to make trouble for its own sake, and people who just felt like anarchy was the "truer" way to do TPP.
Maybe a similar dynamic here where some of the people voting for turns are just making chaos for its own sake, but others just generally prefer the original goal and don't want to go to Canada.
I mostly appreciate his website for the increasingly absurd Trolley Problems.
It seems obvious that the core implication is that jazz is the Great American Uniter.
How can one find good editions of public-domain books? A popular public-domain book will usually have a lot of different versions available on Amazon, but no way to tell which ones have decent typesetting and printing. I am not looking for expensive collector’s versions, just good-quality trade paperbacks. For example, I recently ordered a copy of The Wind in the Willows that I figured would be nice because it had the first-edition cover design, but it was actually low-resolution facsimile and poor type. Is there a good brand in this market, or good heuristics?
I happen to have a Barnes & Noble Classics sitting on my desk right now. It's pretty nice. I've also been reading some Penguin and Dover books recently. I think the Penguins are probably a bit nicer than the Dovers.
Just go to the bookshop and have a look?
Don't even have to go to a bookshop, you can preview a limited number of pages for most books on Amazon.
What kind of books? Penguin is known for paperbacks of the classics. Everyman’s Library books are nice but not so cheap, usually hardcovers I think.
Dover publishes pretty cheap out of print books (in my experience mostly nonfiction).
Has anyone else noticed that "Daniel Kokotajlo", AI Safety advocate, shares the exact same name as "Daniel Kokotajlo", Some Random British Director?
Not to disparage the director, but this feels like a Problem. And when you google the name, it's still the director who comes up first.
No, no one else has noticed that.
If people had noticed, it seems clear that there wouldn't be a problem, because noticing the phenomenon by definition requires being aware of both people.
If people haven't noticed, there could potentially be a problem in that people might treat one person as if he were the other one, but I don't think that's what you have in mind.
Do you have something in mind?
I guess the British director has better SEO.
To clarify, it's a problem if 1) you take AI Risk seriously and 2) you think Daniel is an important figure/spokesperson for AI Risk.
(though to be fair, it's probably embarrassing for both Daniel Kokotaijlotlakdltkalso's)
I once worked for a company with a name that would produce a first hit link to a sex offender registry.
At least he doesn't have the same name as a child rapist: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ian_%22H%22_Watkins#Misidentification
I don't understand what the problem is here. Two people have the same name. One of them comes up first on Google. Yes?
It’s a problem with a capital P.
And that rhymes with T and that stands for Trouble!
And also with D for making it Double!
There's great Russian literature but even the authors who were dissenters have been used by Moscow.
“Why Russian literature must lose its innocence. Germany's "Russia-complex" is linked to an uncritical adulation of Russian literature. The colonial mindset expressed in many Russian classics is too often overlooked.”
https://efdavies.substack.com/p/why-russian-literature-must-lose
https://zygaro.substack.com/p/putin-and-dostoevsky
https://www.persuasion.community/p/the-slavic-battle-of-the-books
https://daryazorka.substack.com/p/i-see-russia-everywhere-i-go
https://lesiadubenko.substack.com/p/tolstoevsky-must-be-reconceptualized
https://smalldeedsbigwar.substack.com/p/pushkin-at-the-mass-grave
Imperial Russia was a state in the business of colonising Eurasia. Novorossiya was perhaps the flagship of this enterprise, with Kherson being the first major city founded as part of this colonisation effort. It is no different in kind to saying "The colonial mindset expressed in many American classics is too often overlooked."
I'm in favor of this, but not because I think any of these lunatics have a point. However, these books and writers really are painfully overrated and often uncritically lauded by what one suspects are pseuds who didn't read any of them. I read quite a few, enough to satisfy myself on the subject, and can honestly say that they were all meritless dogshit. If they could get canceled out of social existence and nobody would ever again have to listen to some imbecile braying on about "Dosto" that would be great.
Yeah, being dead white colonialist guys is bad enough, but Russian as well? Used by Moscow? An utter outrage! To the (long overdue) scrapheap of history with the lot!
Justifying genocidal war is bad.
If you'd read those pieces, chucking the lot out isn't what's proposed there.
Quotes like "Kherson is a Russian city" don't justify a genocidal war, which should be obvious to anybody not entirely mindkilled. So what's actually proposed here is suppressing any perspective contrary to what the western "polite society" deems acceptable. If this endeavor seems worthwhile to you, godspeed, I guess.
If that's what you take away, fair enough.
Could you summarize what's being proposed then? I read the first link and it includes this: "In Western debates, the calls from Ukraine to stop promoting Russian culture as long as this war is ongoing are often framed as a problematic call to ‘cancel’ certain authors who are still held in high regard. But, as Viktoria Amelina wrote before her death in 2023, should we in the West really be debating the supposed ‘canceling’ of dead Russian authors while Ukrainian authors are being killed right now? " which sounds a lot like proposing to chuck it all out.
> In Western debates, the calls from Ukraine to stop promoting Russian culture as long as this war is ongoing are often framed as a problematic call to ‘cancel’ certain authors who are still held in high regard.
There are bigger problems. If you try to litigate what's Russian culture and what's Ukrainian culture, you often find that there isn't a distinction. Reason had a good piece on the cancellation of a performance of Tchaikovsky ( https://reason.com/2022/03/09/cardiff-philharmonic-orchestra-tchaikovsky-is-canceled/ ):
> The latest utterly pointless sanction is the Cardiff Philharmonic Orchestra's announcement that it would remove music by Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky, the Russian composer, from its all-Tchaikovsky concert, calling it "inappropriate at this time."
> the objection hardly necessitates scrubbing Tchaikovsky in his entirety solely because of where he was born. That's especially true in light of what was supposed to be the program's main course: his Symphony No. 2, which, in a sort of cosmic irony, is built around…three Ukrainian folk songs.
> For those familiar with Tchaikovsky, that likely won't come as a shock. The composer spent several months a year in Ukraine and had close family ties to the region; his paternal grandfather was born there. "I found the peace of mind here that I had unsuccessfully sought in Moscow and Petersburg," he once wrote
But "Tchaikovsky was explicit that he preferred Ukraine to Russia, it's just that Ukraine was called 'Little Russia' at the time" is probably even more offensive to the movement to censor Russian culture than Russian culture is.
There's a big difference between actively suppressing a culture like what Russians are doing in occupied Ukraine, and in ceasing to actively promote a culture, which is what I've largely seen proposed for Russian culture while Russians pursue war.
What’s your feeling on Israeli literature (or perhaps Jewish literature) in the aftermath of Gaza. I suppose German literature is already out of the question. We are deep into the decolonisation of Shakespeare here in Blighty and I suppose that makes sense since though not a colonialist himself he probably brushed shoulders with a few people whose descendants might go on to colonise the falklands or somewhere.
The Spanish and Portuguese are already banned, one expects, and as to why any American literature survives at all is a mystery for the ages. Maybe because most of this cancellation malarkey is driven by the American Academy.
Is themotte.org still up? I've been getting "this site can't be reached. DNS_PROBE_FINISHED_NXDOMAIN" for a while now
Works for me and in https://downforeveryoneorjustme.com/themotte.org
8.8.8.8 still resolves themotte.org
Working fine for me. Must be on your end.
I have a new working paper: Music and Tears: Phenomenology, Science, Philosophy
Download here: Academia.edu: https://www.academia.edu/129310650/Music_and_Tears4_WP
SSRN: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=5250527
ResearchGate: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/391653542_Music_and_Tears_Phenomenology_Science_Philosophy
Abstract: This paper explores the phenomenon of musicians being moved to tears during performance, interpreting such moments as portals into emotional, physiological, and spiritual transformation. Drawing on personal narrative, cognitive neuroscience, and Tantric philosophy, it argues that these experiences reflect a confluence of subcortical emotional release and the disciplined control of artistic expression. Within a Tantric framework, they represent karmic purification and chakra activation—moments where the performer becomes a conduit for Shakti, the dynamic pulse of the cosmos. Music, in this view, functions not merely as art or communication, but as sacred ritual capable of dissolving ego, transmuting karma, and restoring the self through sound.
Contents: Contents
Introduction: How Do We Understand Tears in Music? 3
From a Lump in the Throat to Nothing 6
Tears for Johnny 8
Acting in the Inner and Outer Worlds 10
Where Music Breaks the Shell: Karma, Tantra, and the Tears of the Musician 15
Introduction: How Do We Understand Tears in Music?
As I have said in my preface to Beethoven’s Anvil: Music in Mind and Culture (Basic Books 2001), my oldest memory is of a piece music: Burl Ives singing about a fly marrying a bumble bee. I played a record of that song over and over, driving visiting uncle to distraction when I did it at five in the morning. That little ditty is thus my anchor to the world, my omphalos.
I started trumpet lessons when I was 10. I was a reluctant student for two or three years until my music teacher, David Dysert, read me the riot act and got me to take music seriously. Since then music has always been with me, sometimes more so than other, but always. It has given me great joy and pleasure, and it has soothed my wounded heart.
It has also given me experiences that we do not talk about. Perhaps we don’t talk about them because they are difficult to talk about. But then all sensory experience is difficult to talk about. No, I suspect we don’t talk about them because we are apprehensive about where such talk might lead us.
In the next section of this document, “From a Lump in the Throat to Nothing,” I talk about two such experiences. One of them – a lump in the throat – is about being moved nearly to tears while playing my instrument. It has happened to other musicians – I know, because I’ve read stories – but we don’t talk about them. Most of this document is about that kind of experience. The next section, “Tears for Johnny,” is about a performance Bette Midler gave to and for Johnny Carson in his last week of television. Both were moved nearly to tears and I rather suspect that many in the audience that night were weeping as well.
The last two sections are about understanding how such things happen, first from a Western scientific point of view, “Acting in Inner and Outer Worlds,” and then from an Eastern philosophical point of view, “Where Music Breaks the Shell: Karma, Tantra, and the Tears of the Musician.” How do we reconcile those two ways of looking at the world? I don’t know. But I’m working on it.
I’m working on it, in part, because the other experience I offer to you – nothing – shook me to the core. It was a mystical one, one where the world dissolved in a blaze of light and sound. What are we to make of such experiences?
For we must make something of them, must we not? The psychologist William James wrote a famous book about them, The Varieties of Religious Experience, countless philosophers and theologians, both East and West, have pondered them, sometimes to dismiss them (all too common in the West), but often to understand them, to understand what the world must be if such experiences are possible.
It is easy to psychologize such experiences, to explain them as something that the brain does. It’s highly unusual to be sure, but it’s just some kind of brain event that we can’t yet explain. And yet those experiences are so very compelling. How do we honor that? Or even: Should we honor that? Perhaps we explain it as entering higher realms of being. That is, in effect, what Hinduism and Buddhism do. Is there a way to assert that and acknowledge scientific psychology at the same time? How do we treat those experiences as an invitation, an invitation to a larger experience of the world? That’s what I’m interested in.
I don’t pretend to provide an answer in this short document. My aim is simply to put the issue before you. What you make of it, that’s your responsibility.
Ancient Hindus believed that certain types of art jolted you out of your thinking. Like the discombulated patters I recently saw in the very very old Marundeeshwarar temple in Chennai in the Tripurasubdari section.
And they believed devotional music could be a trapdoor to experience oneness with the universe...i.e. a way to experience the dissolving of your own self and experiencing your being part of a larger universal self ("Brahman").
*Tripurasundari
You can edit posts. Click on the ellipsis on the upper right of one of your posts and one of the options will be Edit.
Can't. Not on mobile Substack app anyway.
If Moldbug genuinely wants “rule by CEO” then why support Trump, who has been a disaster in every real management role he’s ever held? Good CEOs in the real world are probably too consensus driven and results oriented for Moldbug’s taste.
I'm not an expert on Trump's business by any means, but I understood he did get a number of buildings constructed and managed around the world. I suspect that's top 1% ability level at least - meaning 99/100 would fail to accomplish that, probably closer to 9,999/10,000 at least.
Of the people who manage multi-million dollar real estate companies, maybe he's a loser and bad at the job. But that's still a pretty exclusive club with a high bar to entry. I'm certain that if I was given control of his company at any stage from 1970 to present, I would have failed to run it. Even if the only thing he did was hire effective people, that's still a pretty significant skill. Maybe a rarer skill than being a good CEO alone.
Forbes says if he had put all of his inheritance in an S&P 500 index fund and done nothing else he'd be better off today than he is.
He had a couple good projects in the eighties but most of his projects since then have been licensing deals. The Trump Tower project was run by a woman named Barbara Res. She worked for him for 18 years and doesn't have a lot of good things to say about him.
https://www.businessinsider.com/barbara-res-donald-trump-real-estate-trump-tower-2020-11
I did not deeply invest time into researching this, but I don't believe the trump organization was actually much involved in the building process for (any?) of the buildings. My brief internet research implies that they were mostly involved in securing financing and name licensing deals.
Also, most of them seem to be permanently closed or no longer be Trump affiliated. Not a great omen.
If you define "good CEO" by how much money the person makes, it's pretty clear Trump qualifies. He's a billionaire.
Didn’t he make most of his fortune (post-bankruptcy) by being an entertainer as opposed to a businessman?
Citation needed. I'm not claiming one way or the other, but the only people I've seen claiming this are not to be taking seriously.
A good CEO is defined by how much money he makes shareholders.
The shareholders of the Trump Organization have made money.
By how many orders of magnitude did he increase his family fortune after inheriting it?
Hard to be sure because he's taken such care to suppress his tax returns. He inherited a total of around $400 million from his father. Guesstimates of his net worth have bounced around in the low-billions range, though those took at face value stated valuations of real estate holdings which have been exposed in a couple different courtrooms as hilariously fictitious.
Trump was always very aggressive with financial leverage (debt) which is why business bankruptcies have been such a central part of his operations. (Stiffing the lenders as a strategy rather than a last-ditch option.) Some unknown amount of personally-guaranteed debt still exists on paper, and the guy who ghost-wrote "Art of the Deal" has been quoted as predicting that Trump's probate will reveal his actual all-in net worth to be negative.
The new wrinkle which may wash away all that though is the crypto scam -- early indications are that it is proving _extremely_ rewarding for Trump and whichever family members are in with him on the back end of it.
> Guesstimates of his net worth have bounced around in the low-billions range, though those took at face value stated valuations of real estate holdings which have been exposed in a couple different courtrooms as hilariously fictitious.
While this is accurate, it should be noted that all other estimates of anyone's net worth have exactly the same problem.
Not sure if you can answer this, but I saw a report that whoever runs $TRUMP has made multiple millions off of transaction fees.
Those fees aren't in dollars, just in $TRUMP, so they would still need a party to change the cryptos into dollars, right? And that would be trackable?
Your cookie policy banner doesn't seem to work. At least whenever I click any of the options it says "saved" and then refreshes and the banner appears again. There doesn't seem to be any way to get rid of it.
Happened to me but whitelisting the site in uBlock fixed it
All of substack seems to be doing that, at least in my experience. Substack seems to have trouble maintaining a decent web experience...
Interestingly, the Washington Post did a piece on Curtis Yarvin last week making a rather different case on his Trump pivot, titled “Curtis Yarvin helped inspire DOGE. Now he scorns it.”
Curious what’s driving the seemingly different points of view here.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2025/05/08/curtis-yarvin-doge-musk-thiel/
Key observation of the column:
‘Yarvin’s DOGE disillusionment is somewhat surreal, almost as if Marx had lived long enough to troll the Bolsheviks for misreading “Das Kapital.”’
Which Marx would have done.
Looks like Musk didn't make proper obeisances, so he's on the shit list.
The PKK, the Kurdish terrorist organization from Turkey, has announced its dissolution: https://www.reuters.com/world/middle-east/kurdish-pkk-dissolves-after-decades-struggle-with-turkey-news-agency-close-2025-05-12/
Their leader, imprisoned since 1999, had called for the group to disband this February. I assume this is great news, not just for people in Turkey, but for those in Syria and Iraq too (there are Kurdish militias affiliated with the PKK controlling territory in those countries), but I want to know what people from the area think.
These news may also have an effect on the US role in the Middle East, given that they're allied with the YPG (Kurdish militia in Syria), and possibly the Iraqi Kurds.
Great news indeed!
I don't expect this to affect Syria very much. YPG has quite different focus and goal than PKK. It's not clear that they can survive if the US should withdraw from that region, because Turkey would probably conquer the YPG territory pretty quickly if no one else intervenes. But that has little to do with their ties to PKK.
Curtis Yarvin. As a long time SSC/ACX reader, I kinda get it when Scott writes on X: I agree ... there's still a outside chance Trump manages to come through and do great stuff. Certainly I was happy to see him take steps against affirmative action, NEPA, etc. " - But why give the "others" (NYT and armies of trolls) such a fine quote to "proof" to non ACX-readers: "See: S.A. Siskind really is a racist who hates nature - we told you!" ... From a more obviously Straussian way-to-look at the whole thing: What is the aim of all that Curtis-critique - the one effect it can have is giving him more readers. (Oops the purpose is, what it does.) I did too much history to care zilch about Curtis and his fantasy-monarchies - or his opinion about Trump. At SSC Scott did some great writing steelmanning and refuting those wet dreams on monarchists/reactionaries. Chapter closed.
He probably feels like we're way past the age where the NYT and similarly aligned people had any real power over the collective consciousness, so he feels like he can speak freely. I would agree and I think it's a great thing.
Scott, calling yourself a libtard and a coward seems like poor rhetorical innovation. Just giving the other side ammo. “Scott Alexander admits that people who oppose Trump are cowards.”
It's not giving them ammo if they're going to call him that anyways; it's leaning into being Shylock. The self-awareness is refreshing, if he means it.
Signed,
Someone who has admitted to authorial cowardice in other comments elsewhere
it's also puerile and unclear, what does "libtard" even mean, never heard it in a single context where it made a minimum of sense. At the same time the association of not wanting to risk a monarchy and/or dictatorship = being a coward that's a strange association at best
Well, actual monarchies have occasionally been decent governments. (I think the rule is 1 time out of 5. Which is perhaps better than the record for presidents.) The problem is when they aren't. It has certainly been asserted "For forms of governments let fools contest, what ere is best administered is best.", though I thing is rather depends on the goals of the administration.
The thing is, democracies, and form adjacent governments like the US, are historically less reliable at keeping deals than other forms of government. Both internally and externally. They tend to feel that they don't want to be bound by the prior administration, and the populace forgets why the deal was made in the first place, if they ever agreed it should be made.
I think a modification of the old Anglo-Saxon idea is perhaps the best. The new king must be elected from a group of people, but not a small group. Say those who are either descendants, nephews, or nieces of the current king. (Perhaps expand the group if the list of candidates is less than 7. But expand by consanguinity. If there aren't enough cousins, pull in the second-cousins.) This gives a small enough group that they can be raised responsibly, and also have their characteristics known, and a large enough group that SOMEONE in it is likely to be decent. It also gives the current ruler a stake in the succession. As to who should do the electing...that's a tough one. Most people are clearly incompetent at that. I know that given a field of 12 candidates I wouldn't have paid enough attention to them to be a reasonable decision maker. Saying "just let everyone vote" is a recipe for disaster, but every filter I've thought of is subject to corruption. "Let the governors vote on the king", for example, is a guarantee that the current power structure will be supported.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aNOu6tfmOOA&ab_channel=ESOTERICA
In Charles Williams' _Descent into Hell_ (1937), a professor creates a succubus. No overt magical methods, just obsession about a young woman who isn't interested in him. He doesn't like that she's not interested. As I recall, once this is clear to him, he avoids her, and invents a false version with her distaste for him edited out.
He spends more and more time with the false Amelia until she can even be seen by someone else. His lack of interest in truth leads to his mind disintegrating.
I was surprised to find in this discussion of Paracelsus, a major Renaissance writer about magic who put much emphasis on the power of imagination (at about 25:00), a description of making a succubus by imagination, and I'm willing to bet that Williams, who had a considerable interest in magic, had picked the idea up from there.
I thought I had just found a really cool reference, but this does rather look like concerns about AI companions.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZXNIgHov0Nk&ab_channel=BenSyversen
The rather hectic story of a manuscript copying Archimedes' letter about his "method", a socially unacceptable way of using infinitesimals to calculate areas.
The ancient Greeks didn't like them, the counter-Reformation Church didn't like them. (Let me know if that's true.) Fortunately, Newton didn't have to please the Jesuits. I feel like there's a whole conversation about gatekeeping and Damned Things* in the topic.
The text barely survived. There's one known copy, and it was bleached out for a prayer, but some of it was barely visible in the margins. A scholar copied what he could see-- recognizably lost Archimedes-- but a lot of it wasn't visible, and then the manuscript was lost and getting moldy, what with being hidden from the holocaust.
Fortunately, it was found, and modern scanning was able to recover the text. Watch the video for details of the method and animated diagrams.
The most interesting thing on the abstract level is the possibility that there is revulsion against actually good ideas, and probably not just ideas some current rebels are defending. Is there any way to get the actually good ideas to surface when there are so many bad ideas competing with them?
*Damned Things-- Robert Anton Wilson's term for things people seriously don't want to think about
It’s years and years since I had to study history of mathematics as part of math undergrad, but…
- you have the exhaustion lemma in Euclid’s elements
- techniques used by Archimedes, considered even at the time not to be respectable mathematics
- Newton and Lebnitz get a lot of flak from, e.g. Bishop Berkeley, for not being adequately rigourous.
- Eventually (nineteenth century or so) we hav an account of calculus that looks respectable
Now, when ‘m teaching ungraduate digital signal processing, we do point out that if the student is paying attention they ought to notice that what we’re doing is not mathematically respectable, and if you care you can go read a book on measure theory.
And then, you go pick up a quantum field theory book, turn to the section on zeta summation, and wince.
I maybe misremembering my undergrad history l course here, but possibly there is a step circa Newton and Leibnitz, where people know Archimedes had a method but don’t know what it was, try to rediscover it, and end up inventig something different.
Would appear analogous to the bit where the US circulated a fake story that lasers were used in isotype refinement for nuclear weapons, the soviets believed this nonsense story, and actually got it to work.
You say Archimedes' method was socially unacceptable - I don't think that's quite accurate. The mathematicians of his time had a geometric & Platonic view of mathematics. There wasn't a proper understanding of functions, or of limits in mathematics. The 'paradox' that an arrow could never strike a rabbit because in the time the arrow moves 4 feet the rabbit moves 1, and so they never meet was regarded seriously.
Aristotle's fairly sophisticated methods for working out areas (essentially by integration) didn't have the appropriate foundations, and mathematicians of his time thus couldn't either understand these ideas or work with them.
Newton & Leibnitz developed better descriptions of calculus (though Newton, as I understand it, spent several years developing 'geometric' justifications for the rules of calculus, which were probably not at all related to how he discovered the rules originally). These took mathematicians some substantial time to appreciate, and in fact analysis was placed on proper foundations only in the second half of the nineteenth century.
It's worth pointing out that the Church of England was hostile to Newton, for mathematical reasons as well as non-mathematical (his views were likely heretical). Traditionalists everywhere dislike new ideas, I guess.
Okay, interesting link but I had to stop because I was rolling my eyes so hard when we got to THE JESUIT WHO ROSE TO POWER and TOLD THE CHURCH IT COULD USE MATHEMATICS TO ACHIEVE ITS GOALS.
Said goals being of course "to re-establish its social, cultural and political dominance". Because the one thing every peasant in the middle of Europe was fighting about was which particular mathematical theory one supported, naturally.
If Clavius - who has a crater on the Moon named after him - 'rose to power' via mathematics, it was on the grounds of calendar reform. I guess the Protestants were right and the Gregorian Calendar should be junked because it's a sinister Papist plot to - what was it again? oh yeah - "re-establish social, cultural and political dominance".
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christopher_Clavius
Though I have to admit, the idea of a Renaissance figure pondering "how do I achieve power, status, wealth and success? I know, I'll become a mathematician!" does tickle my fancy.
I'd have to read this guy's book to figure out if what he is describing is so, and how the theory of infinitesimals was received outside of Italy in Protestant nations (was there any opposition from Protestant mathematicians? if so, that puts a hole in his proposition that it was purely Catholic power-grabbing) and to be frank, nothing will make me read a book about mathematics, so some braver soul must do this for me:
Infinitesimal: How a Dangerous Mathematical Theory Shaped the Modern World by Amir Alexander
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/18593597-infinitesimal
So far, it's sounding like good old Whig history and the pernicious Papists, but since I'm only going by a video produced by some whippersnapper, that may be unfair.
Opposition to infinitesimals wasn't just a Catholic thing. From the book:
"Yet, useful as it was, and successful as it was, the concept of the infinitely small was challenged at every turn. The Jesuits opposed it; Hobbes and his admirers opposed it; Anglican churchmen opposed it, as did many others."
"The struggle over the infinitely small in the early modern world took different forms in different places, but nowhere was it waged with more determination, or with higher stakes, than in the two poles of Western Europe: Italy in the south and England in the north."
The Catholic Church has an interest in philosophy and theology, and I can imagine it wanting to spend a small fraction of its resources on what it thought was pinning down the corners, especially if one Jesuit thought it was important and no one else had a strong opinion.
The Church has been both fairly maligned and unfairly maligned, so what's needed is actual history.
I nearly made a fool of myself. I've only ever learned calculus through limits, so I just assumed Newton and Liebnitz used limits. Apparently that was a later formulation.
"the counter-Reformation Church didn't like them. (Let me know if that's true.)" Yep, it's true. A few years ago I was going to review this book for the contest, but life and laziness got in the way. I've forgotten the details by now but yeah, there was plenty of religious debate over infinitesimals. https://www.amazon.com/Infinitesimal-Dangerous-Mathematical-Theory-Shaped/dp/0374176817/ref=tmm_hrd_swatch_0
There are roughly two poles with regard to mathematical rigor. One camp I might call pure math, and it generally cares very much about solid foundations. (Not always enough, mind you, naive set theory was a thing, after all, and Goedel has put a hard limit on how good your foundations can be.)
The other pole I might roughly call "physicists". There, anything goes, if you can write it on a blackboard and don't get struck by lightening, that means you are allowed to do it. Using mechanical (a la Archimedes) or numerical methods is fine. Playing fast and loose with infinitesimals is fine, e.g. cancelling dx in (df/dx)*dx. If a student comes up with a counterexample where these tricks don't work, you just call it a pathological example and move on, irrespective of the fact that almost all functions might qualify as pathological. What do you mean, a plane wave in an unbounded space can not be normalized? In practice, you can take the integral of a lot of sets and never once encounter a Banach Tarski decomposition.
The difference between these poles is exemplified by Dirac's delta "function". It can be defined by a physicist in ten minutes. However, if you want a sound definition which tells you what you can actually do with it, you require distribution theory, which takes a semester or so.
Both approaches have their uses, however it is important to be aware if you are cutting corners or not.
Also, early mathematicians were a bit of a cult, see for example WP on irrational numbers:
> Hippasus, however, was not lauded for his efforts: according to one legend, he made his discovery while out at sea, and was subsequently thrown overboard by his fellow Pythagoreans 'for having produced an element in the universe which denied the... doctrine that all phenomena in the universe can be reduced to whole numbers and their ratios.'[7] Another legend states that Hippasus was merely exiled for this revelation. Whatever the consequence to Hippasus himself, his discovery posed a very serious problem to Pythagorean mathematics, since it shattered the assumption that numbers and geometry were inseparable; a foundation of their theory.
> [Dirac's delta function] can be defined by a physicist in ten minutes.
Only if you want the formality of setting it up as a limit of Gaussians. If you'll accept the piecewise function (δ(0) = +∞ and δ(x) = 0 if x ≠ 0), the integral, and a plot thrown for good measure, it shouldn't take more than one.
Differentiating this function is when you might need to watch out for lightning.
Is the Hippasus story true? In a lovely example of serendipity, I never heard of it or him till this comment, and when I went looking for something about Clavius and infinitesimals, there he pops up again:
https://pillars.taylor.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1008&context=acms-2017
"When there are good true stories to tell, everyone suffers when we tell the false ones. This is especially important when the stories directly impact the matters students are studying. If one tells the story of a man named Hippasus being tossed from a ship with regard to incommensurables, better to talk about what it says about worldviews that such a story seemed credible when first written down centuries later."
Anyway, the paper about infinitesimals and why they were so controversial was more educational for me. First off, unlike the framing in the video, it wasn't a tidy "religious bigots on this side, Enlightenment scientists on that side". Cavalieri, Galileo's pupil and defender of infinitesimals, was a member of a religious order himself. And the ban on teaching infinitesimals only held in *Jesuit* schools, since Clavius was creating the mathematics curriculum for these schools. If you weren't attending a Jesuit institution, you could (or could not, depending) learn about these.
"A typical analogy, most often associated with the Italian Jesuat brother [As always has to be explained regarding Cavalieri, he was a member of the Jesuat/Gesuat, not Jesuit, order. It flourished from 1361 until suppressed by papal decree in 1668] and mathematician Bonaventura Cavalieri, is of infinitely thin pages of a book.
1. The pages could be so thin that, no matter how (finitely) many you stacked, all of them together would not be as thick as any actual book; you would need infinitely many. Such pages are infinitesimal.
2. The pages could be so thin that, no matter how you tried, you could not slice them any thinner; they are indivisible. They are parts of the book, but if infinite in number, whether they comprise the whole book was open to question."
So, as ever, the story is slightly more complex than the easily-digestible Youtube video version with (bad old) Church on this side, (good new) mathematicians on the other side.
"Now, there is plenty of truth in this story. First, there is no doubt as to the remarkable success of the Jesuit order in (among other things) establishing rigorous, desirable, ‘safe’ schools for the minor nobility and nascent bourgeoisie – all in the name of the Catholic/Counter-Reformation. Their most prominent mathematician, Christopher Clavius, was a solid proponent of Euclidean geometry in these schools; under his aegis the church (and hence much of Europe) achieved the long-sought goal of calendrical
reform in 1582, where October 15th followed October 4th to make up for the solar year not being evenly divisible by standard days.
...But the overall story, alluring as it may be in our society of absolute freedom and intellectual inquiry, and as exciting as it might be to think of calculus (!) as having political importance so early on, is selling a bill of goods. The suppression of
indivisibles was surely part of a long fight over new ideas and to what extent the Church could direct or restrict many activities, but not the only one, and much of the hyperbolic verbiage used was par for the course at that time.
Despite Alexander’s often deft handling of the distance between (post) modern secular readers and the worldview landscape fifty years on either side of Galileo, much of the political discussion is speculation, or simply wrong. As just one example, while in such a political age it was possible that the Jesuits got the Pope to suppress the Jesuat order, and (barely) conceivable they would have been motivated because some of the most prominent advocates of indivisibles (notably Cavalieri) were from it, among his copious endnotes there is not one to be found about this topic.
We should teach about incommensurables, and that the Pythagoreans may have had strong feelings about this; but we should also make it clear that the death of Hippasus is probably just a story. Likewise, the example of the triangles is a good warning against setting up integrals without caution, and the very real fights waged over infinitesimals/indivisibles for some of these reasons (Galileo was an early advocate)
is a wonderful topic in a Calculus II course. But let’s not suggest it is really about preparing the West for a modern secularist worldview (as even his subtitle How a Dangerous Mathematical Theory Shaped the Modern World implies) that Alexander acknowledges no one in question was actually fighting for."
As for the second half of the book and the Hobbes-Wallis hairpulling:
"Now, Hobbes reasoned if he could achieve the long-desired (Euclidean) construction of a square with the same area as a circle using his techniques, then surely his entire philosophy would be accepted – including otherwise-distasteful-to-all outcomes such as the Leviathan totalitarian-yet-not-monarchist regime. (Here is where Alexander draws a direct comparison to the top-down regime promoted by the Jesuits, adherents of papal authority as their raison d’etre.)
...For the man primarily responsible for Hobbes’ downfall was another Oxford don, erstwhile Presbyterian-party preacher and Parliamentarian-party cryptoanalyst John Wallis.
Through all the regime change of the English Civil War era, Wallis retained favor by adroit maneuvering; unlike many similar men, he seems to have been addicted to producing (and publishing) correspondence aimed at defeating anyone he disagreed with about anything. Since Hobbes was just as stubborn, and since Wallis disliked Hobbes’ theology, views on the university, and (to him) inadequate mathematics,
their dispute lasted through over twenty years’ worth of letters, publication, and ‘transactions’. They argued primarily over mathematics, but interspersed accusations of plagiarism, bad Latin, and proper authority of a minister of the Gospel.
...Still, this was not somehow an English version of the Italian controversy. In fact, Wallis was even more cavalier about his use of infinitesimals than Hobbes was about his indivisibles (see the next section for an example). In Alexander’s telling, Wallis, not Hobbes, plays the role of Cavalieri’s school, with repeated direct references to the
Baconian ideals of experimental induction and free inquiry espoused by the Royal Society of London. All Wallis wanted, in the best experimentalist tradition, were “theorems that were sufficiently ‘true’ for the business at hand.”
Hence the Society’s (with Wallis) repudiation of Hobbes (and so his philosophy) was an example of the key to English (and, by extension, later American?) pre-eminence in science being tolerance of differing opinion, where “a land of many voices. . . discover[ed] its path to wealth and power”. This seems to be an awful lot to lay at the feet of the infinitesimals, or even the Royal Society, alone.
This is especially so since the technicalities of these questions looked so different in the dawning eighteenth century, where people abandoned Cavalieri or Wallis as dead ends to grapple with utilizing Leibniz’ tools (and Newton’s in England), with different controversies. Similarly, it is very hard to imagine the political development of Italy or England going very differently with or without infinitesimals. Even if the Royal Society’s openness to work with the sort of deficiencies Wallis’ had might perhaps be a token of a more general openness in English society to once-heretical ideas, it is not a main reason we should care about this dispute."
So I recently found out how extremely difficult it is to get reasonably priced ADHD meds in the US and then I got linked to this pretty moving video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eRPeU1DYOWA
Now im not an American, this could all just be entirely wrong for all I know but I remember hearing American private pharmacies were all on the the verge of bankruptcy a year ago - is this their response ? Is there something else going on with the actual manufacturers ?
This definitely feels like the sort of thing our resident Adderall Merchant and True Caliph should have done a deep dive on.
A useful workaround I know of for people having trouble getting the extended release version: I've known people who just get the regular version and take a fraction of a pill every couple hours. It's not much trouble, it's cheaper, and I wouldn't be surprised to learn that it actually is a better way to keep a steady lowish level of the stuff in your system. Whatever system an extended release version of a drug uses to keep up a slow release inside the person's body can't possibly work equally well for everyone.
Now I am wondering if someone could build empty diffusion-based extended release capsules for DIY pharmaceutical upgrading.
I don't think that is easy, though. The release rate depends on the solubility of the active ingredient and how well it diffuses through the membrane. And some drugs might rely on stomach acid, which will stop affecting the drug once the XR capsule moves to the intestines. (Also, one would require a two part capsule which seals on assembly, and any commercial manufacturer would likely get sued by the pharma industry.)
Re the contest: if you start organising things only tomorrow, does that mean that changes to the docs after submission but before today are automatically taken into account?
In his response to Moldbug, Scott says
“ But you're the one who likes talking about curate's eggs”
That’s the egg that has good and bad in it which is I suppose how Moldbug uses it. I used to listen to some creaky intellectual Sunday morning review on BBC 4 where every movie or book considered as mediocre was compared to the curates egg.
Well they were wrong! The curates egg is a totally bad egg.
A lot of people think there was no humour in the 19C and when you realise that the “curates egg” has survived for more than a century (however misremembered) as their best joke, then we realise that’s probably true.
The joke is in comic book form, if I recall, the curate is visiting the bishop who has offered him an egg. The bishop asks if the egg is good, the curate replies it’s good in parts.
That means the poor curate is eating an egg that smells of sulphur and he has to eat around the bad parts, which would be greenish tinted if I recall. ( we don’t really have bad eggs any more as the hens are better educated).
Anyway that’s not a good egg, or even a mediocre eggs, it’s a rotten egg. That’s the joke!
You now have more reason to dislike Moldbug and fusty BBC 4 review shows, if you haven’t already. You’re welcome.
Moldbug also likes to say if your drink has any sewage in it, it's all sewage.
Part of the joke is that the curate (pretty much the most humble clerical rank in the Anglican church) is having breakfast with a bishop, and when the latter asks him how his egg is his ridiculous reply that it is good in places is a desperate attempt not to offend his exalted host.
Moldbug uses the term in the original sense, not in the radio 4 sense. See for example (and why Scott referenced it): https://graymirror.substack.com/p/scott-alexander-the-disappointed
A quote from that link:
> As a boomer, I am not and nor will I be on any “Twitter,”
And now their argument is taking place on Twitter.
The point of the joke is that an egg can’t be good in parts.
The curate is using a common formula to mitigate criticism that doesn’t make sense applied to an egg.
The modern usage isn’t that.
The modern usage is, in my experience, to say with wry irony that something has good and bad parts (while implying that the bad parts entirely ruin the good part).
That's the same as the non-modern usage.
I'm prepared to believe that someone out there is misusing the phrase, I just haven't seen any examples provided.
Hmm. My experience is that the modern usage is always “good in parts” unironically, and never “rotten entirely” which ignores the original context. Otherwise why not say bad.
Anyway language usage moves on as chatGPT reminded me when I complained about this.
Edit:
It’s possible that i was misreading these BBC 4 types and they were totally condemning whatever they were reviewing as rotten while pretending to find some merit in it.
This has shattered my worldview.
Apparently, I haven’t much noticed this phrase being used. But this modern usage is illogical and also pretty pointless (what’s the purpose of making a reference to something like this if one just wants to unironically say something is partly bad and partly good?).
Vibe coding is so addictive, it should be called vicoding.
(Cue lots of folks piling in saying emacscoding is better ;) )
A much cleaner high. ;)
Has anyone personally noticed end-user effects from the tariffs yet? I was hearing that by early to mid May the economy would in massive turmoil, and I've heard stories about ports being empty, but so far no complaints about products being unavailable or overpriced. Should I be surprised?
Hannafords has avocados at $1.50 now. It's possible I'm misremembering, but I think the price has been from $1 to $1.19 for as long as I've gone to the store - I don't think I've ever seen it that high.
I'm in some SF groupchats, and the people doing electronic engineering or computer hardware stuff have been fairly regularly posting about the overnight shortage of parts, some parts skyrocketing, orders being canceled by suppliers or changed in a 'pray I do not alter the deal further' way, for both the hobbyists and the hard-tech startups. People are definitely postponing projects or not starting them at all, in the usual Unseen way. (Just another example of how life is much easier in the software world than hardware world - you don't have to worry about your next `git pull` from Github suddenly costing you $10k extra because Trump 'truthed' something last night.)
And now the God King of Skulls has folded and slunked away into his corner with the tail between his legs as is his custom when met with a push back. Tariff pause with China for another 90 days! A "reset" (how on Earth did he use Obama's term for it?!) with China!
The stock market is lapping it up.
> how on Earth did he use Obama's term for it?!
It doesn't beat the time he introduced the Space Force as a "separate but equal" branch of the US armed forces.
Scientific equipment has had lots of tariff-related price increases. This is really annoying for my company.
My Italian Wine Club offered to release me from my club obligations because they can't guarantee that I won't be hit with tariffs when my shipments arrive in the US. But they admit they don't know how they'll be enforced at our border. I decided to forego my club shipment for the immediate future because I couldn't find any clear guidance from the CBP on the current tariffs on alcohol from the EU, if any, and how they'd be collected. 10% I think, but those may only be for major importers, and not people who have alcohol shipped for personal use.
The job market in my field finally picked up, due as far as I can tell to foreign product equivalents being a bit more uncertain long-term, and I was finally able to get a good position. Can't say I've noticed anything on the consumer end.
My favorite YouTuber's merch has gone up in price.
I’m still waiting for my $1 Temu blender to arrive.
The board game space is getting hit hard. I know of at least three companies that have already been shuttered or significantly reduced, and a few others on the larger side are dramatically changing the way they do things to not have non-American customers bear the costs of tariffs while charging Americans a surcharge.
I've heard (unofficially) on social media and message groups and such that many other smaller companies are going to just try to sell current stock and hope the situation changes. I'd be shocked if anyone's actually ordering new Chinese game manufacturing right now in the hobbyist space, and I'd guess 95%+ of hobbyist games are manufactured in China.
I'm not aware of what's happening with the actually big companies (Hasbro, Mattel, etc).
I suspect the story is the same for other industries that rely on heavily tariffed sources: they're big enough to start doing something of a pivot or they're selling out current stock and crossing their fingers. Or they were able to lobby for an exception, I suppose.
Another thing to consider is that while the de minimus exception has been removed (last I checked), I don't think anyone has any clue how it's supposed to be enforced, so many places might be getting away with direct to consumer shipments at the moment.
Yes, GMT games sent out a moving message to subscribers about how their operations are going through major changes and risk company finances going deep, deep red.
Obviously, anyone working in finance has had a hard month. Thus my spouse is more stressed.
Our resident substation engineer doesn't know yet how to get new transformers of the right size within budget. But we'll see...
Yep, I've got a kickstarter board game that's on indefinite hold from shipping to the US. Rest of the Anglosphere should have gotten theirs a week or two ago, I think?
More broadly, we're likely in a recession right now so that's pretty bad. I believe I also read a few weeks ago that there are indications that people are burning through their savings, the effects of which we'll see play out in the coming months.
More narrowly, I remembered that a few weeks ago we bought a trampoline. A couple of days after we purchased it the item nearly doubled in price.
The lab where I work is already seeing "tariff" line items on orders. I work with electronics (repairing old equipment and designing/building new tools) and I've seen prices go up. Mouser Electronics is one of the main distributors and they've got notices on their website to the effect that they're trying to minimize the impacts of tariffs on prices.
A part I ordered in March for $X got "lost in shipment" from China. I had to reorder the part. The price was $2X.
At least one board game company has closed. And another company for a game I preordered had to 1) raise prices and 2) collect payment in advance (which they normally don’t do)
Of all the things I had no idea were now all "made in China", board games never occurred to me.
We really have put all our eggs in one basket, haven't we?
Which company is the latter? I try to keep up with board game news.
As someone who was looking at the car market specifically during this:
25% Canada/Mexico tariffs went into effect March 4th, then March 5th there was a one month exemption for automakers, then March 6th further delays on general Canada/Mexico tariffs.
April 3rd the 25% auto tariffs actually started, and then April 5th the overall import 10% tariff started.
April 29th there is a change to give 3.75% of MSRP of an auto as a tariff rebate.
Companies have made plans and taken action to reduce imports, and many companies said new prices will stay the same through May or June (see https://www.caranddriver.com/news/a64375899/automakers-trump-tariff-response/).
In early April many people said that used car prices would rise, which happened (see https://www.carscoops.com/2025/05/used-car-prices-jumped-2-7-in-april-as-demand-surges/), while they predicted new car prices would be flat through June, and then we'd see where tariffs are at (eg https://www.usatoday.com/story/money/cars/2025/04/02/trump-car-prices-tariffs/82744006007/). Some auto dealers tried to capitalize on tariff panic to drive sales (https://www.koreaherald.com/article/10479836), but people making predictions targeted June as the earliest you'd see new car price increases (March 7th prediction for a summer rise in prices https://www.cbsnews.com/news/auto-tariffs-should-you-buy-a-car-now-2025-prices/).
Well, we're in May and there are some announced price increases for July: https://www.caranddriver.com/news/a64704402/ford-bronco-sport-maverick-mustang-mach-e-price-hike-tariffs/ This is despite what looks like weakening demand for new cars (https://www.cnn.com/2025/05/12/business/car-prices-tariffs-recession-economy).
That's all to say: supply chains are long, we're not yet at the predicted price increase date of June, and the only increase I've seen confirmed so far is Ford in July. Whether others follow or not will depend on if tariffs stay in place or get more exemptions/changes. TBD, stay tuned.
We had a shipment of drones from Sweden delayed for a couple of weeks.
I work in construction and yes, our costs are going up. We’re talking tens of millions.
I have friends whose companies either have hiring freezes or layoffs due in large part to the tariffs.
Prices don’t seem much different though. I wonder if this is a covid type situation where while it did cause a lot of big problems, we never got the worst of the overheated speculation and the issues didn’t arise quite so abruptly as the media predicted. (It’s easy to forget just how apocalyptic some of the March 2020 coverage was).
Seconded. I'm renovating my house, so I'm dealing with the consumer-facing side of building materials right now. I expect to be done just in the nick of time with the major work that I had to hire out (structural repairs and plumbing.)
The light fixture sections at Home Depot and Lowe's are getting sad. A lot of empty spots on the shelf. I got everything I needed, but several products were the last (or second to last) box on the shelf. No idea when (or if) things will get restocked.
There was empty shelves for key items. Especially frozen food I noticed. The brands or varieties that weren't as liked were stocked, but the #1 sellers were gone.
The only tartar sauce I could find was a different brand than usual in a huge jar. Overall not a big deal, but the store was definitely different from a few weeks ago.
For the Germans here or anyone interested in salaries in Berlin, I recently published the Salary Trends report 2025, a comprehensive overview of tech salaries in town:
https://handpickedberlin.com/salaries/2025-03/report/
I would appreciate feedback, and if you shared it with anyone who'd be interested in this type of data.
Thanks!
I don't have the time to read it right now, just skimmed the intro. The two things that stood out to me is the that it's around 1.8k respondents and the gender pay cap numbers. At 20%+ and 15% they're a lot higher than the German average at around 16% and 6%[1]
I can think of a couple of explanations, but I worry it's selection bias in who answers your survey. If so then the data might just not be representative
Could also have different reasons and it's still interesting and I'll read it. But it'll probably not change my mind much, whatever the results, due to uncertainty about the issues above
[1] https://www.tagesschau.de/wirtschaft/gender-pay-gap-lohnluecke-100.html [in German]
Edit: Now that I've had the time to read a bit further into the article I see you've addressed those points in the report :)
Edit 2: I'm actually really impressed by how clear the report is at every level on what's measured exactly, what the sample sizes are for every group and so on. Great read :)
There is a selection bias, it’s a tech survey.
I mean, sure, but is it representative of the Berlin tech sector? That is, should we expect the gender pay gap to be much wider in Berlin tech than in society at large. Or should we expect that OP's getting a skewed sample from their respondents.
I think you would expect the tech sector to have greater gender discrepancies than average. Higher paid roles for engineers
My sense is that:
1. Scott is right that Yarvin is now supporting governance solutions which he used to oppose.
2. Yarvin's main intellectual contribution was diagnosing the problem of the cathedral, and his proposed solutions were always kinda silly (more here: https://x.com/RichardMCNgo/status/1880988102371754156).
This leaves me a bit confused about how to update. In some sense he's selling out, but he's selling out from a position that he never should have had. So it's a bit tricky to tell how much it reflects a sensible retreat from untenable views, versus him becoming less principled.
One question that would help me thinking about this: lately he has been using FDR, Lincoln, and Washington as examples of the type of "CEO" that Trump should be. But these are non-central examples of dictators. Should I interpret this as him backing away from his position of supporting dictatorship?
"Yarvin's main intellectual contribution was diagnosing the problem of the cathedral"
You... seriously write this? As a serious thing?
These "diagnoses" are worthless, they are not even dime a dozen, every ranting boomer on facebook has "diagnosed" the cathedral/whatever with a great deal of detail and memes, who cares.
My interpretation is similar, Moldbug was an idealist writer about the best possible solution. Yarvin is a realist that recognizes his old solutions were never feasible, and has found a realistic way to accomplish the same objective. You could call him a sellout, but honestly I think most people do the same over their life. People in their 20s are idealistic and shoot for the moon, but now he’s in his 50s, and wants to accomplish something, even if it’s not perfect.
Au contraire, Yarvin Cathedral premises were always based on his mistaken (bordering on delusional) belief that elite institutions, such as universities and the mainstream press, were *colluding* to pull the strings of public opinion. This has been a mainstay of rightwing nuttery long before Yarvin came along. The Cathedral used to be the Trilateral Commission, and before that, it was Freemasons, and before that, it was the Illuminati. In their ignorance, people like Yarvin revive the bogeymen of the past and repackage them in an attractive garment of contemporary memes and discontent. The Paranoid Style in American Politics by Richard Hofstadter is still relevant sixty years after he wrote it, and nothing has changed except that rightwing nuttery has finally gained power in the US. There's something to Marx's quip that "History repeats itself, first as tragedy, second as farce."
What puzzles me is that the Substack ecosystem treats Yarvin as a Very Serious Person when his ideas are and always have been manifestly screwball.
I think he's said he wants Trump to reduce Congress and the Supreme Court to "advisory" roles only, which I interpet as a polite way of saying completely ignore them if they disagree. I think this is beyond FDR/Lincoln, although of course FDR's appointed court packing was a step in this direction. I really do think he means "rule by decree".
I think all of Moldbug's critique of the Cathedral survives this pivot, but I think the objection to him was always "doesn't dictatorship have some very obvious failure modes?", and that most of his answer to that question involved the weird stuff which is now obsoleted. I don't know what his new answer to that question would be.
How much of the contest results are driven by people asking their friends to vote?
Hopefully little. Last time I disqualified one entry for obviously being like this (unusually high score with most voters from the same unusual country as the author). I do spot checks to make sure most voters are ACX subscribers (obviously not all, and it's not cheating if a nonsubscriber votes, but if one entry has way more nonsubscribers than others, I'll be suspicious).
It might also be worthwhile to check the vote of people who are long-term and/or paid subscribers.
But I presume that the implementation details of cheater detection are probably best kept secret.
I had something of an idea for the everything-but... contest, but was not able to implement it in time with sufficient quality due to other projects.
Perhaps there's room for two contests per year? One for books and one for everything-but... or is the intention to just return to the normal contest schedule next year and hope there's more everything-but reviews than previously?
Readers tend to get contest fatigue pretty quickly.
You can do double the contests with the same fatigue if you only allow people with even birthdates to participate and vote in one and odd birthdates to participate and vote in the other
(replace birthdates with some other random oracle you can afford to assign to people)
‘Skill issue’ is a useful meme - on agency, learned helplessness, useful beliefs and systems
wrote a short essay on the usefulness of the meme “skill issue” that some of you might enjoy. I wrote it as a way to reconcile my own belief in personal agency with the reality of supra-individual forces that constrain it. The point isn’t that everything is a skill issue, but that more things might be than we assume and that believing something is learnable can expand what’s possible.
It’s part cultural critique, part personal essay, weaving through tattoos, Peter Pan, and The Prestige to ask: what happens when belief does shape reality? And how do we keep choosing, even when the choice feels like it’s left us?
I’d love to hear what you think :)
https://velvetnoise.substack.com/p/skill-issue-is-a-useful-meme