Minnesotans are being advised not to attend today’s No Kings protest in Saint Paul by the state highway patrol out of an abundance of caution. Two state lawmakers were murdered by a person posing as law enforcement.
Edit
Oh Christ. A manifesto was found in the fake police car.
Apparently one lawmaker survived shooting.
Noon Central time. Gunman still at large.
In the immediate area residents are told to not open their door to an individual law enforcement officer. They are working in pairs to distinguish themselves.
All the shootings took place in homes in suburbs of Minneapolis-St. Paul. He killed (at least) two people, the recent former Democratic speaker of the state House and her husband. He shot a Democratic state senator and his wife; no word on their conditions.
"A Minnesota official told The Associated Press that the suspect’s writings also contained information targeting prominent lawmakers who have been outspoken in favor of abortion rights."
CNN is reporting, based on "a document than CNN obtained", that Boelter's car included a hit list of more than 70 named targets as well as "survival gear".
The FBI has joined the search for Boelter and is posting photos of him with the offer of a $50,000 reward for information.
They have a suspect now. Still at large. He put a good deal of work into making a faux police car.
Edit
Or maybe he just took one from work.
‘Vance Boelter, the man identified as the suspect in the attacks on two lawmakers, is listed as the director of security patrols on the website of a Minnesota-based private security group. “We drive the same make and model of vehicles that many police departments use in the U.S.,” the website says.’
If you want I can just put a link to the announcement. Since this thread management system Autotruncates I didn't expect the length to be a problem. More typically they are one to two pages long. Have the other announcements been a problem?
If I was reporting AI experiments in an academic paper, I would give the exact prompts and information to repro. Instead, consider this as an imoressiinistic report to inspire experiments…
The prompt for this experiment has subtle clues that the story is set after an AI apocalypse. In one run, the characters (one played by R1, one by me) start talking about which books they have read. R1 sees science fiction references in the scenario that I didn’t intend, but ok, I can see that. Then, as R1 compares the text it is in with various SF novels, it suddenly works it out. R1 has a Charlton Heston with the Statue of Liberty buried in the sand moment. Wait, the prompt implies this is an AI apocalypse.
When I put the hot spring in the prompt it was actually a joke about hot springs episodes in anime (e.g. Evangelion), but R1 helpfully points out that the AI is using subterranean nuclear reactors to power inference, and the hot spring is due to reactor coolant.
A prompt with me rushing out the house eating a piece of toast would have been way too blatant a steer to “this text is the plot of an anime, not something that really happened.”
I did not use a single absolute so I'm not sure what you're talking about. If you are referring to me talking about there being no pro bodybuilder vegans then I am open to you bringing one or two to my attention. I have been following pro bodybuilding, mostly mens open and 212, pretty closely for around 5 years now so I know a thing or two. I would appreciate you not using adhoms as there is no reason for that.
Has anyone else here read Matthieu Pageau's The Language of Creation? Currently going through it and it's blowing my mind.
The idea that ancient symbolism is a language we can learn has always appealed to me, but he breaks it down so simply that it finally starts to make sense.
I have read a few pages, but it seems like the entire trick is to take any seemingly factual statement from the Bible, and add a footnote saying: "This is not a literal statement, but a metaphor that is supposed to teach you some spiritual truth."
For example:
"Two plus two equals five."[1]
[1] The Bible is not saying that two plus two equals five, because the Bible is not a mathematics textbook. Instead, it is trying to convey the spiritual truth that mathematics is important, and that sometimes quantities increase after we add them together.
No he explicitly says that the symbolic view is only one way to interpret Scripture, that the Fathers themselves used. But that does not mean the literal or other levels of interpretation are not valid or correct.
A barcode is a sequence of 0s and 1s encoded in parallel lines. It can be turned 180° and read again, resulting in a different sequence. So if you dont know what direction it will be read from, there (slightly more than) half as many different things you can encode. There is a trivial way to make such a code, where you just always take the lower reading, but information theory suggests it should also be possible to insert one checkbit for identifying the correct direction.
Find a way to do this. My solution:
Sbe frdhraprf juvpu fgneg jvgu rira ahzoref, tb sebz bhgfvqr va naq svaq gur svefg cnve bs zveeberq cbfvgvbaf juvpu ubyq qvssrerag inyhrf. Vafreg vagb gur zvqqyr bs gur frdhrapr gur inyhr ba gur yrsg va gung cnve, qrsnhygvat gb 0 vs ab cnve vf sbhaq.
Sbe frdhraprf juvpu fgneg jvgu bqq ahzoref, frcnengr gur ynfg inyhr sebz gur bguref. Sebz gur erznvaqre, svaq gur yrsg inyhr bs gur svefg nflzzrgevp cnve nf nobir, naq kbe vg jvgu gur ynfg inyhr, gura vafreg gung ng gur fgneg. Guvf jbexf sbe rira ahzoref nf jryy.
Lbh jbhyq guvax gung, univat nyernql sbhaq gur rira fbyhgvba, V jbhyq dhvpxyl trg gur bqq bar guebhtu gevny naq reebe. Lbhq or jebat. V svefg sbhaq gung fbyhgvbaf jvgu svkrq vafregvba cbfvgvba ner *nyy naq bayl* (zveebe cbfvgvba bs vafregvba) kbe (nagvflzzrgevp ovanel pynffvsvre ba gur erznvaqre). Obahf punyyratr: Svaq n cebbs bs guvf lbhefrys. Vs nlabar unf erfhygf nobhg aba-svkrq vafregvba cbfvgvbaf, gung jbhyq or vagrerfgvat nf jryy.
Vs lbh ner jvyyvat gb fcraq gjb ovgf ba cebgbpby, gura whfg cnq gur frdhrapr jvgu n yrnqvat bar naq n genvyvat mreb. Guvf vf fhobcgvzny va ovg hfntr, ohg vf fvzcyr, ebohfg, naq gevivny gb vzcyrzrag.
Guvf pna or vzcebirq jvgu gur bofreingvba gung lbh pna fnsryl gevz yrnqvat mrebf bss bs n ahzore jvgubhg punatvat jung inyhr lbh'er rapbqvat. Vs lbh qrsvar gur fgnaqneq gb rasbepr guvf, gura rirel frdhrapr jvyy fgneg jvgu n bar jvgubhg arrqvat gb cnq n bar bagb gur ortvaavat.
Veritasium happens to have gone into this issue for barcodes and QR codes only a few months ago. I forget how it's handled, but it's done well enough to work practically. QR codes have additional concerns. Both have to handle details like smudges.
I look into this a bit before posting, and didnt find any barcode standard that does quite what the riddle asks, because they dont really need to be efficient. The UPC mentioned has each digit by itself showing direction.
Really enjoyed the Phoenix Theater at Great Mall review. I used to go to the movies a lot a few years ago but the quality has suffered. Glad to see it's making a comeback
A few years ago I read this essay on a science blog that was a scathing criticism of the whole quantum computing industry. The blog was fairly popular I believe. The guy pulled no punches and came off as a cranky old curmudgeon who had been around the block a few times and had a low tolerance for BS, and I’m almost certain had a physics(?) background that gave him credibility on the subject. The post was both hilarious and quite convincing, and shaped my (admittedly surface level) views on the topic moving forward.
Does this sound familiar to anyone? I really want to find this piece of writing.
I'm not sure if this is the specific person you're looking for, but Scott Aaronson is a QC expert and blogger who regularly debunks QC hype and misconceptions, so his blog seems like a good place to go for that kind of thing.
Scott, why is the ability to like comments disabled? I've found myself in the situation a couple times now at the end of a conversation/debate where there's not really anything left to say in reply, but it would be nice to let the other person be certain that I read their message and considered it. It could also help come off as more friendly throughout a discussion where me or another person have opposing viewpoints.
I'm guessing you have a good reason for disabling the option, but I'm wondering whether it outweighs the good it could offer or not.
This discussion has come up several times. The arguments in favor of turning off likes sounded good to me at the start, but over the years I’ve become convinced that the likes are actually better than the dynamics you get where everything either takes place in words or doesn’t get said at all.
I occasionally have the inclination to post a comment agreeing with someone or thanking them for what they said, but much more often a comment is a criticism or disagreement, and positivity just doesn’t get expressed.
That’s when people from one site come en masse to another and leave angry comments, right? I think the fact that you have to be a subscriber to leave a comment or like one already deals with that. It’s not an issue I’ve seen on any substack.
En masse coordinated comments is one part of brigading, yes. Another is coordinated likes on comments. (Or dislikes, etc.; the point is bringing a lot of eyeballs, simulated or real, onto specific posts in forums.)
It wasn't clear to me that you were referring specifically to likes on Substack. It sounded like you preferred that feature in general. Limiting the forum does make it somewhat more tolerable.
Even so, I think brigading is still possible on Substack. IIRC, Substack doesn't go terribly far out of its way to verify new accounts. (I think it sends a confirmation email, which is probably easily bypassed with a custom POP server.) And even if Substack had a way to verify one account per RL person, that wouldn't stop them from coordinating to put likes on comments. Moreover, I've seen people spontaneously do this; even coordination isn't necessary.
I’m mainly comparing the comment sections I see at Slow Boring, Noah Smith, Silver Bulletin, and here. I don’t see any benefit to lack of likes when I compare these comment sections.
I agree with this the most. Especially in the middle of a debate it would interrupt the flow of the conversation to dedicate a message to gratitude, and even just a sentence could come off as awkward. It would be nice to be able to just leave a little heart on someone's message as you go about your conversation.
My advice to you (Jack having already explained the reasoning) would be to simply write a post expressing your appreciation. I have done, in this Open Thread, for example. As they say to the children, use your words.
> Don't tell Scott, but you can still like comments from the phone app
Or in any reply to one of your comments via substack or email.
Plus there are two extensions (ACX Eleven and ACX Tweaks), PLUS you can just build your own extension (sending likes is a simple POST function referencing the comment ID sent back to Substack with no authentication).
I've been working on a framework that attempts to organize brain function along three orthogonal axes: control direction (top-down vs bottom-up), temporal processing (milliseconds to seconds), and processing mode (analytic vs holistic). These three axes generate eight distinct cognitive "modes" that appear to map to specific brain networks.
The interesting part is how this might explain psychiatric conditions as characteristic patterns of being "stuck" in certain modes. For instance, depression might involve hyperactive self-referential processing (medial prefrontal/default mode network) combined with underactive reward-seeking (ventral tegmental area/nucleus accumbens). Different patterns could explain different symptom clusters and why certain treatments work for some people but not others.
I developed this partly from trying to understand my own experiences with bipolar disorder, where I noticed distinct shifts in how different brain networks seemed to activate. The framework attempts to bridge phenomenological experience with neuroscience literature on brain networks and oscillatory patterns.
The core question I'm exploring: might mental health conditions be better understood as specific patterns of network activation rather than discrete diseases? And could this lead to more targeted treatments based on individual patterns rather than diagnostic categories?
I'm not an AI specialist, and apologies if I missed a discussion of this paper further down the Thread, but what do people think about the Apple paper on asking reasoning models to solve Towers of Hanoi?
There's been some press coverage which suggests that reasoning models are a scam, which is probably overblown. I've had ChatGPT write python code for small mathematical problems (admittedly just chaining together a few inbuilt functions like 'determinant'). I think hybrid methods where reasoning models call e.g. discrete optimisation programmes, computer algebra systems or automated theorem provers provide a work-around for this. As the article says, people typically can't carry out these tasks by hand, but they can comprehend an algorithm - why shouldn't AI do the same?
On your last point. There's a lot of discussion/research recently around to what extent language models store a representation of their world. E.g. can an agent recreate a chess board based on a series of moves? It's not highlighted explicitly in the paper, but the logical place to fall over between knowing the algorithm and failing the task is modeling your state (if you don't know your state, you can't know what to do). Reasoning models definitely aren't a scam, but they have their limits.
I think the chess model is helpful to think about actually - the machine can know all the rules, likely a good amount of strategy, and still not apply it in a meaningful way. It's curiousity but has anyone computed an ELO score for the reasoning models? :P
I think the interesting question from a cognitive science point of view is how humans manage to comprehend algorithms if we’re just layers of neural nets on neural nets. This was always a core part of the Chomskyan argument that we aren’t just neural nets, and it’s still one of the toughest sticking points for those like me that have been converted to the neural view.
Sure, we can build in some discrete symbolic algorithm processors into our robot friends if we just want better tools that make use of both types of reasoning, but it doesn’t answer the question of how we do it, and whether it’s possible to get human-like cognition with these methods.
I'm a mathematician not a cognitive scientist. Axiomatic and rigorous methods don't come naturally to people, but the mind eventually internalises all sorts of concepts. After a while, you reason about something that previously seemed abstract and difficult in the same way that driving a car starts off mentally taxing and over a few months becomes routine. And ultimately a proof is just a specialised stream of text. We'll probably get to the point where machines can prove theorems and drive cars but neither will tell us much about the human condition.
Getting the AI to produce 'chains of reasoning' has always seemed unconvincing to me - there's some evidence that it's producing output for the sake of producing output, which isn't accurately describing what's going on under the hood. I don't see any reason that AI will bear similarities to human thought - the chains of thought are fairly non-human, but what it's really doing is likely verging on uninterpretable. Maybe this is a bit too lovecraftian, but it seems the stronger hypothesis is that human thought is the only/best type of thought and the machines must converge to that.
I think there's a way to interpret both of our claims that isn't too far apart - rather than saying human thought is special, and machines will converge towards it, we might say there exists a special and effective type of thought for certain types of problems, and human cognition (through biological and cultural evolution) and machine tools (through reinforcement learning on top of neural networks) are both converging towards that same thing.
The question, on this view, is whether there might be many types of thinking that are effective at different types of problem, and machines are converging to a different one (or many different ones) than ours, so that each will have specialized domains where it is better than the other, or whether one type of thinking is generally effective, and there's a possibility of a sudden dislocation when the machines get closer to it than we have.
I agree up to a point - we've built a world that suits our cognitive equipment, and the problems we set ourselves are determined by our capability to solve them. To the extent that we train computers to solve problems we already can solve (or maybe just care about) they may develop traits similar to humans.
But I certainly agree with your second paragraph - I'd imagine that the machines will find new and better solutions to problems we haven't thought of. Struggling through a computer science paper to figure out what underlies a new breakthrough is tough for me, and that's something written by a human for human consumption - I wonder whether the machines will really be able to communicate new scientific insights to us...
I just tried Scott's Geoguesser prompt with a photo of Meydenbauer Bay Park in Bellevue with the photo clearly including the sign that reads "Meydenbauer Bay Park" but ChatGPT appeared to not notice that at all. To it's credit, ChatGPT *did* consider Meydenbauer Bay Park as a possible alternate, but ruled it out and misidentified the photo as Seattle instead.
---
🔍 Step 6: Lock‑In and Alternatives
Main Guess: Leschi / Denny‑Blaine area, Seattle, WA — hillside neighborhood overlooking Lake Washington with terraced park and floating swim dock.
The match is strong on vegetation, hillside terracing, floating docks with buoys, and housing context.
Expected features like hairpin boulevard segments and modern park barricades are visible.
Alternative Considered:
Meydenbauer Bay Park, Bellevue, WA — while also waterfront and with floating docks, images show more pavilion-style floats and less steep hillside with matching housing density
Lacks the exact steep hillside pattern and hairpin boulevard roads. Parks there are more level and wider instead of narrow and terraced like your image.
To be fair, Scott's prompt doesn't actually tell ChatGPT to look for signs in the image and mostly tells it to focus on vegetation and the like instead (I guess it's optimized for identifying featureless plains rather than clearly labeled landmarks). But even still, it's amusing that ChatGPT considered the *actual* location of the photo and then "ruled it out".
Reading Scott's posts about misophonia make me think of my friend's struggles with OCD, which presents itself with obsessive cleaning and just general anxiety with seeing disorder. I mean, she says anxiety, but it sure seems like rage to me, like she feels that someone who left books out did it on purpose, at her. Maybe once misophonia is cured, that cure can work on her. Of course, she doesn't want to be cured, she wants the world to be more orderly...
Every citizen of Alterville has a positive number of "alters" - alternate personalities in their head. Every alter has buddies - these are all the other alters living in the same head, including themselves (each alter is their own buddy, too). It is known that not everybody has the same number of alters.
What's greater, average number of alters per citizen or average number of buddies per alter?
V guvax guvf jvyy nyjnlf or gur pnfr hayrff rirelbar unf gur fnzr ahzore bs nygref, fvapr gur urnqfcnpr cbchyngvba crbcyr jvgu zber nygref jvyy or jrvturq zber urnivyl va gur nirentr-ohqqvrf-cre-nygre nirentr guna gur nirentr-nygref-cre-crefba nirentr.
I recently had an idea that would require some expertise in online survey design and deployment (as well as dynamic data visualization), and I’m hoping that someone else on here might find the idea interesting enough to be willing to provide free assistance (and/or do the project entirely lol – I’m more curious to see the results than to be personally involved with the project).
In brief: I've recently been thinking about the relative distances between mental constructs. For example, for some people the concepts "intelligence" and "atheism" are likely proximate in conceptspace, while for others they are likely distant. I hypothesize that apparently unrelated concepts will cluster, and that these clusters will be relatively stable between persons belonging to the same or similar identity groups. (For example, I suspect that members of the rationalist community would, on average, place "intelligent" and "atheist" in the same cluster, while religious political conservatives would be extremely unlikely to cluster these traits in the same way.)
I further suspect that it would be an interesting empathy-building exercise to survey many people to develop a map of the way they cluster concepts. It would be possible, then, to have a single "average" map, that shows "average" cluster associations among all people surveyed, and it would also be possible to then stratify the data by self-identified affinity groups (such as sex, sexual orientation, racial identity, political affiliation, religion, etc). Such a map could provide an interesting tool to help people of one belief or identity group understand where different people are "coming from" -- by using the map to see that (to give a hypothetical example) "oh, American conservatives place 'strong borders' and 'justice' in the same cluster, while American progressives place a mostly different set of characteristics in the 'justice' cluster".
I'm convinced that if operationalized effectively, the collection and display of this data could potentially increase the net utility function of humankind by increasing the degree to which we are able to charitably inhabit the collective imaginary of affinity groups with which we don't usually identify. (Like actually. Being able to really grok other people’s headspace would be a gigantic step towards being able to engage in actual dialogue across areas of e.g. political disagreement.) Furthermore, to the best of my knowledge nothing quite like this has ever been published in the scientific literature, so we'd be doing something novel.
Unfortunately, my own background is somewhat far afield of network psychometrics, so even though I think that my idea is cool and could potentially be useful, I do not have the current ability to design, deploy, or display the data. So uh, I guess I’m looking for someone with the time and mental bandwidth to do (what I think would be) a major public service and help design something like this?
If this sounds like an interesting idea, please reach out to me! (And even if not, then uh could you maybe point me in the direction of other people, somewhere, who might think it sounds interesting?)
Sounds a lot like one of the underlying ideas behind LLMs, Word2Vec and the idea of representing words in a "concept space"/latent space, such that you can get the famous "King vector - Man vector + Woman vector = Queen vector" observation, or equally put "The King to Queen vector is the same as the Man to Woman vector."
This sounds like that, but you're looking for which word vectors clump together, and how the word vector positions change, depending upon the speaker. Does one person put the King and Queen vectors close together, because it's all just monarchy to them? Versus another person that puts them far apart, because of some extra meaning attached to having a King (proper and natural, or barbaric and patriarchal) vs. a Queen (ridiculous and without precedent / enlightened and liberating).
I suppose you could also look at Jonathan Haidt's "Moral Foundation Theory" for something potentially similar -- I believe it uses a different method, but I think it does something similar overall, especially in its aim of trying to understand how American conservatives vs. American progressives think. Indeed, you might look at things like the underlying research behind the Five Factor Model of personality / the Big 5 Model of personality, since I *think* it does something similar to what you're describing, looking at the words people use to describe personality traits using factor analysis to try to compress things down into a "latent space" using linear algebra and statistical analysis.
So perhaps the natural extension of all that would be your idea? Like, take an author's entire published corpus of books, or an opinion columnist's entire set of columns, and train an LLM to predict what they would say as accurately as possible. Then, crack open the LLM to look at the latent space, using Anthropic's recent Mechanistic Interpretability research (e.g. https://www.anthropic.com/research/mapping-mind-language-model) to try to understand it so you can say, "Oh, this person's "Justice" vector is close to their "Find the truth at any cost" vector, while this other guy's "Justice" vector is close to their "Maintain public order and the harmony of society" vector. No wonder they conflict."
There are a some statistical techniques that might be useful -- cluster analysis, factor analysis and regression. And there are probably ways to do it using AI.
As for finding someone to help you with the stats: The only people I can think of who might do that for free are people with recent degrees in data science or data analysis who are building up portfolios of projects to use at job interviews. There are Reddit subs where they hang out. Even if no one will help you for free, some who are not employed might be willing to do it for a relatively low hourly rate. In fact I know someone who would be able to do that, though I'm not sure whether he's got the time and inclination. DM me with contact info if you are interested. He would not, though, be interested in thinking and working with you on the theory behind the analysis -- he'd just be your math guy.
I think probably your best bet is to use one of the better AI's. Have it explain possible ways of gathering and analyzing the data that would be most useful for testing your idea. Tell it in advance that you want it to gear its explanation to someone without training in psychometrics. Once you pick an approach you are OK with you can have t AI teach you how to do that analysis, or at least teach you to understand the process, and let you see the math. You can literally get the fucker to give you a tutorial. Then have it help you gather and organize the data & do the analysis, explaining what it did and the result and how to interpret the result. (Then double check that with another AI cuz you never know.)
Why don't you train word embeddings on representative text from various subcultures and compare how the words cluster? You could easily scrape the SSC subreddit or the LessWrong archives or whatever.
Hey spirit of Hal Smith, I found your write up of game 7 of the 1960 World Series here by a tree on the earth of the living. It made it to the ACX not a book review safely. Hell of shot you hit in the 8th. I didn’t see it live but I have the kinescope that Pittsburgh Pirate part owner Bing Crosby arranged to have filmed. Not the actual film of the kinescope but the transfer to DVD. Anyone here on the mortal coil can buy a copy.
Mantel’s base running at first off Berra’s hit is something else. Never seen anything quite like it. That guy played to win and gave his team a good chance.
Yogi was playing left field when Maz hit the game winner. The shot was kind of low and Berra thought he might be able to play a carom off the wall but, nope, it was gone
Say hi to the fellas for me especially Maz and Clemente.
Edit
Oh, tell Marris that Bob Dylan downplayed his time in Hibbing too, liked to tell people he grew up in the desert southwest. I knew some of Roger’s shirt tail kin in the Maras family. They were still irked that Roger’s dad changed his family name a little. Nothing lasts like a small town grudge.
Further Edit
Apologies to Bill Mazeroski who is not yet in heaven. No Pirates fan will ever forget your walk off homer.
Apologies if this was already asked, I scanned through and didn’t see it mentioned anywhere.
Is this likely to be the end of Waymo in LA?
I can’t find the number of destroyed cars, but it seems likely that vandalism of autonomous cars, Waymo’s specifically, will continue even if the protests die down. They are simply very easy targets, and it’s news if one gets destroyed.
That is the present of the London Underground, with self-driving trains, and each one has a "driver" sitting in the front seat scrolling TikTok (and knitting) :-)
New reports seem to suggest that Waymo was curtailing service more in SF than LA yesterday! I really hope they don’t pull out. I really want them to expand their service range down to Irvine and out to Palm Springs before my 15 year old car dies - I don’t want to ever own another car.
It seems like the market is there, certainly. I’ve listened to a few podcasts about Waymo specifically and people overall seem to like them quite a bit. Probably the vandalism or crime perpetrated against riders angle will just not add up to a huge overall cost in the grand scheme of things. But… it does seem like a tricky issue that could potentially get out of hand. Of course, in theory a driver could rob you. But they’re also a witness and bystander in case of crime against a rider.
Most people committing crimes will think twice in direct view of a person who could be physically involved immediately or as a future witness, vs a camera that might not be viewed until the police arrive to pick up the footage (if they even do that, since minor crimes are often just not followed up on). People aren’t robots, they act differently when they know someone is present and/or watching.
Anyway I want to correct something, looks like I was wrong about the number of Waymos involved, someone reported (Reuters?) that 5 Waymos were called to the protest to be torched, were subsequently torched, and Waymo is officially pulling out of LA, at least for the trial period.
Waymos are absolutely magic and the demand is ubiquitous.
AFAICT the biggest issue waymo seems to have right now is some combination of manufacturing, setting up warehouses, and regulation. That second one is probably the least obvious, but Waymo requires a massive facility on the outskirts of wherever they are operating for the cars to go to get charged, be serviced, etc. Building those takes time, probably about as long as it takes to stand up a data center from scratch.
> All that's left is providing supply to meet demand.
> On this, Waymo actually does seem to be struggling a bit. Even though Waymo has completed millions and millions of miles over hundreds of thousands of rides, they are operating fewer than 1000 cars nation wide.
> In SF, the cost of a Waymo is artificially somewhere around 2-3x the cost of an Uber or Lyft. It's possible that having an actual third competitor in the city forces the latter two human rideshare companies to lower prices. But I think in reality there simply are not enough Waymo cars to go around yet. If Waymo lowered prices to match Uber and Lyft, the Waymo wait times — which are already high — would skyrocket. So instead of having a worse user experience, Waymo is capturing additional revenue while getting the rest of its fleet together.
> This is, like, a fantastic problem to have. That Waymo can charge 2-3x their competitors and still be fully booked, even though there are hundreds of vehicles crawling around the SF, shows how much they have built a strictly superior product. Now, even as Waymo has slowly increased the number of cars in SF, it has yet to expand to the rest of South Bay (except for a few areas around Mountain View and Palo Alto).5 It makes sense to focus on SF just from an economics perspective; areas with high density presumably get more bang for their buck. Still, that also means that Waymo has not yet hit capacity in SF, and they simply need more cars.
> It's not clear to me where the bottleneck is; there could be many.
> Waymo requires a factory sized warehouse on the outskirts of the city; the cars go there when they are low on battery or have some sort of malfunction. That space is staffed like an airport — there are tons of people buzzing about managing the fleet. So there's some amount of capital expenditure required for Waymo to set up in a new area, even beyond the cost of the cars themselves.
> Or maybe the primary issue is simply mapping. Waymo has to first get regulatory approval to actually map an area out, which is presumably something of an annoying and time consuming task to do well. Once completed, Waymo would have to go back and get a second round of approvals. Again, these approvals should get easier over time, but I could see Waymo having to prove itself over and over for each new map it wants to create.
This is all information I’m familiar with, and discussion and analysis is widely available, which is why I asked about something I have heard discussed on podcasts but not seen discussed here. Seemed like a good time to discuss vandalism and rider safety since Waymos can be called simply to be set on fire for fun.
I doubt that they're actually getting summoned for the purpose of being set on fire - it would be very stupid to give Waymo your name and credit card number before you vandalize their property.
Waymo made a statement saying that they don't think their cars were deliberately targeted, they just happened to be in the area.
Certainly possible, but there were 3 in row in driving lanes that were torched. Stolen credit cards are also hardly a barrier for anyone who has access to them, which is honestly a huge number of people. Fake IDs and fraudulent social security numbers are all over the place. Of course the company is going to try and defuse any tension because if they said protestors were responsible, then people would be seeking out Waymos to burn right now. My understanding based on video I saw from the protest was that the people who did it thought it would look impressive, which is usually why cars get torched in protests. But I’ve also seen a video from maybe 3 months ago (?) of a Waymo getting surrounded by a group of people near downtown LA and they just started tagging and smashing it when they realized there was no driver. It was just a communal activity, and I wonder how much they’ve considered the potential costs of let’s say 1/1000 rides ending with significant damage to the vehicles caused by malice or recklessness.
Anecdotally, I’ve ridden three times in LA (I live in Orange County) and each time it was basically the same price as Lyft or Uber, but slightly longer wait. They expanded the LA area a bit, some time a few months ago, but still don’t have the core of silver lake or echo park, let alone more of south LA, the hills, or the suburbs.
Yeah in SF they're about the same too. I sort of suspected they do that on purpose, ie their price has little to do with supply/demand and for now they're just trying to match Uber's.
Let me highlight the "School (Review 1 by DK)" review that Scott links to above. I found it particularly interesting, because it goes into some detail about why schools are set up the way they are, with common instruction and yearly cohorts and such. It has one of the best answers I've seen to those who think it would be best if learning were purely or mostly self-directed, with schools just providing resources students could proceed through at their own pace and in accordance with their own interests.
The answer is that students vary a lot in their motivation, interest, and self-discipline. This variance means that they differ in the amount of structure and externally imposed discipline they need to make real progress. Some could just be provided with materials and left to it. But on the other end some of them really need the close attention of a teacher or they'll either not get it at all or just goof off. And since school systems really value educating everybody, or nearly everybody, their approach tends to be highly structured and deliberately paced, which leaves the most self-motivated students bored, but provides the structure the struggling students really need.
> Some could just be provided with materials and left to it. But on the other end some of them really need the close attention of a teacher or they'll either not get it at all or just goof off.
As a former teacher, I believe this is 100% correct. The problem is, if you try to split students into two groups, one that has motivation and self-discipline, and one that needs to be micro-managed, everyone will insist that they belong to the first group (because everyone hates micro-management, including those who need it most). Also, the self-managed class would need much less time to learn, because a lot of time at school is wasted trying to maintain discipline. This again would make everyone want to be in that group.
Maybe a good solution would be to put everyone into the self-managed group first, test their progress, and move them to the micro-managed group if they fail to reach some goal. Even then I would expect a lot of complaining about how this is "not fair".
I would go even further and say: let's separate teaching from examining. Teachers should not give grades; they should only teach, and maybe give a "grade preview". Students should be officially examined and graded by an independent institution. Then I would add a rule that a students who successfully passes the exam before the end of the year is free to skip the remaining classes on given subject. This way, any student could potentially achieve complete freedom by learning everything one year sooner and passing the exams before the start of the school year.
The only problem with education is that doing anything with that diverse a population and that number of people involved will not scale. Homeschooling, unschooling, private school, tutors, cyber school, Khan Academy, whatever will not scale either. Public school probably scales much better than those other options.
It can be made better, and there are many things that we do with public schools that are not good for the students, but as a system it's probably the best we're going to get. The best that's possible given the constraints. And I mean that, overall. Special Ed, bad home lives, delinquent/truant/criminal kids, all would fail worse at the alternatives. Even being able to identify obvious failures doesn't tell us that there's an alternative that works at scale, over time. Identifying failures is also a necessary part of a system that will have breakdowns.
I think Scott and others who have had problems with public schools would do better with a variety of other designs. But they are a small minority. What works for them will not work for most students, meaning it doesn't scale. And there are alternatives available, so it's not like they were required by law to go to public school. Forcing parents to consider alternatives would also be a disaster, if we tried to make that scale.
>But on the other end some of them really need the close attention of a teacher or they'll either not get it at all or just goof off.
Note that this can be true of even high level students. Especially adolescents who might be more interested in flirting or the like (as when I caught two girls and a guy in my AP World History class apparently discussing the guy's, shall we say, "manly measurement" as opposed to the reading material).
By the age of eighteen I was a self-motivated learner, happy to stroll off to the university library and read textbooks just for fun. But at the age of thirteen, no way.
And I'd never have understood the interesting stuff you get to learn at eighteen if I'd never been forced to study the boring crap that you have to learn at thirteen.
Tip for people like me running out of space on Gmail/Google Drive and getting pestered to pay for more storage:
If you're like me, you never look at the Promotions/Social tabs of your inbox, and if you think about them at all, you assume they auto-clear every 30 days like Spam and Trash. They don't. You probably have tens of thousands of emails from every time someone like a post of yours of Facebook or whatever, all the way back to 2010. When I checked, I had 24,000. You can clear them by going to the tab, clicking the select-all-on-page button, and then clicking the "select all in Promotions" dialog box that comes up to the left of it once you've clicked it. This process goes slowly, so that it's not obvious it's working, but it is. When I did this I got much more space and can probably go another year or two without paying for extra storage.
Welcome again to the slums of Hollywood, where you work for the town's least reputable development house on whatever comes along. It's not much, but it sure beats admitting failure and returning to the family furniture business in Poughkeepsie.
The latest project is a series of 14 films, with each based on a different line of Shakepeare's famous sonnet 18, "Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?" What do you propose along these lines?
Line 4, "And summer's lease hath all too short a date," will be a teen comedy. A group of high school students has persuaded their parents to let them spend the summer making a movie. It is now the third week of July, and only a few scenes have been shot. The students will have to race for the finish if they are to complete the project by the end of the summer.
This has already been adapted - a series of novels from the late 50s which were then turned into a BBC comedy-drama series in the early 90s.
All you have to do is pinch (and pitch) the idea of "free spirited family with sexy daughter teach uptight young tax official to live, laugh and love", and cast the hottest young up-and-coming starlet in the role of Mariette:
First movie. Dark romance; our protag falls in love with a manic drug addict. The relationship goes from pleasant to destructive, until eventually they collapse and get hauled off to treatment, the fling put on hold while they recover. Downer ending. (Lots of fire-and-heat metaphors, to justify the whole "summer's day" thing.)
Second movie. The addict is out, they've cleaned themselves up, and the couple spends the whole movie dealing with the repercussions of the events of the first movie. Generally happy ending, while still having loose threads.
Third movie. Some kind of disaster takes place. Earthquake, hurricane, war breaks out. Our couple is stuck navigating the disaster while trying to hold their straining relationship together. Happy ending.
Fourth movie. The past catches up to our couple, and they get split up and hauled off to opposite ends of the country to deal with the troubles of their respective pasts. There's a chance to get back together at the end but out protag is exhausted and refuses. Downer ending.
Fifth movie. The love interest has been hauled into court for crimes both real and imagined. The protag tries to defend them against the legal system, and also the nasty entities trying to take advantage of their trouble. Downer ending.
Sixth movie. Our protag compromises their values in pursuit of saving the love interest from their fifth-movie fate. It works, but the relationship is damaged from the choice. Mixed ending, but happier than five.
Seventh movie. A third party tries to become the protag's new love interest, and doesn't take no for an answer. The movie mostly revolves around what exactly our couple sees in each other. Happy-ish ending.
Eighth movie. Whatever our protag does for money is disrupted, and the couple struggles to maintain their lives while finding another income source to support it. Mixed ending.
Ninth movie. The events of the eighth movie have led Love Interest back to drugs. Protag ends up fighting all of Love Interest's friend group, but Love Interest is no longer savable. Downer ending.
Tenth movie. Secret love child, or some stupid shit. Let's say they had a kid in movie eight, how about that. And now protag's gotta raise it alone. Fights with bosses, fights with Love Interest's family, lots of drama. Mixed ending, happy-ish.
Eleventh movie. Terminal illness. Mostly about trying to find a new family for the kid. But lo, at the eleventh hour it turns out the whole thing's curable and we pretend this never happened. Happy ending.
Twelfth movie. Kid's a teenager now, and hates the life the protag offers. Big blowups, bad choices by the protag, kid storms off as the protag collapses. Downer ending.
Thirteenth movie. Disease again, protag's dying again. This time it sticks. Mostly about trying to reconnect with Secret Love Child, and instead interacting mostly with their new, sane friends. Protag dies. Downer ending.
Fourteenth movie. Flashback to before the kid was born, showing how the kid was born. Hardcore porno. No dialogue, no other characters, just two straight hours of our couple fucking.
For line 9, "But thy eternal summer shall not fade," I propose a film about a wealthy, beautiful forty-something woman. Increasingly distressed by signs of aging that makeup won't hide, she has plastic surgery. And then more plastic surgey. And then increasingly elaborate surgery in farflung places of the world where the normal rules of medicine are disregarded. She thinks she is holding on to her youthful good looks, but she is in fact becoming a hideous caricature of herself. It's a tale of obsession and delusion, of trying to hold on to what can only slip through one's fingers, well into the realm of psychological horror.
I'd love to speak to the author of the Elon Musk's Engineering Algorithm review; I've had very similar thoughts myself after my time on the program. Please do ping me on here if you feel comfortable.
The Chicago site is not official statistics, but it does also count nonfatal shootings, which are also down, so it can't just be a matter of emergency medical services suddenly getting better. One guess seems to be that police are being more active. Maybe. Any thoughts? Also, the numbers will be tested as the weather gets warmer.
While murders are down, numbers on solved homicides are harder to come by. The Chicago site does give an end-of-month listing on homicide-linked arrests, which is generally 10-20% of homicides that month. (As best I can tell, they count arrests linked to all homicides in the statistics for that month- e.g., if a suspect is arrested today for a murder in April, it will be counted in the June statistics.) Considering that, by all accounts, a certain percentage of murders are fairly easy to solve, that is not comforting.
It would also be interesting to see a graph of conviction rate vs unsolved rate for homicides. Maybe one contributing factor is that with increasing use and effectiveness of street cameras and DNA the potential perps, who are usually chancers by nature, know they are more likely to be caught and thus to hold back than formerly.
Similarly, have real life crime programs increased in frequency in the last few years? If so then maybe those have also been an inhibiting factor, especially with future would be murderers being more of a captive audience during covid lockdowns, because these usually have a "happy ending" with the criminal(s) being caught and sentenced to decades or a whole life tariff behind bars!
A key part of that writeup is the six bulleted points which follow "Any explanation of why murder is falling at a historic clip must contend with several known facts:"
The Economist a month ago quoted Asher's work in writing about this trend.
Wait a minute. That first page, about Chicago crime stats, has a section titled 2025 Shot Placement. And according to it, of the shootings that included shots to the head, there were 39 killed and 28 wounded.
So more than 40% of people shot in the head survive? That seems high.
I dunno about 40%, but if you search for "survived shot in the head", there are many stories about this, so it seems like it's at least not super rare.
Yeah seems like a bit of a reversion to the mean following the BLM pullback. Plus maybe all the most-likely-to-be-murdered people already got murdered in the last four years.
I was surprised at how much I enjoyed the "Mountaintop" review.
I think the link above does it a disservice. The review starts with a whole-page introduction, on the topic of "What the heck is Mountaintop?", but the link above skips us right past it and takes us to the first subheader. On the first reading I mistook the header for the start of the review.
I also read a review from the list of wallflowers here and thought it was quite good. and it was not the same one you liked. In fact I gave it a 9 and I am a pretty picky grader.
No. I don’t think recommendations and anti —recommendations are fair. When I’m running out of steam I sort of audition reviews before reading them. I just read the opening paragraph, skim a bit, read a paragraph in the middle. That’s enough to decide whether I’m likely to enjoy it. If the thing’s really long I’m pickier.
I get leg cramps in the night, and there are 6 different leg muscles where I sometimes get cramps. I have worked out a stretch for each one that stops the cramp cold if done quickly. If done after the cramp is fully developed, the stretch still counteracts it enough to greatly reduce the pain, and if I hold the stretch for several minutes then gradually back off it the cramp usually disappears.
I feel a bit silly describing all 6 here for no clear reason. But if anyone here gets leg cramps in the night and would like to know my remedy for the kind they get, ask away.
I would sometimes get night cramps and various spasms in my legs after snowboarding and making sure to eat a banana in the morning eliminated them pretty much entirely for me.
Do you know why? Various deficiencies (iron, magnesium) seem to impact feelings-in-the-legs at night and it's a topic I would like to learn more about. Unrelated?
Have looked into that, did again recently, and all the things people are told to try for restless legs or for cramps don't look very impressive in studies. For magnesium and improving hydration, the treatment group does a little better than the non-treatment, but not much. I cannot see any relationship at all between how much I'm exercising and how much trouble I have with leg cramps, and stretching before bed makes no difference whatever in the chance of cramps. The only regularity I see is that the older I get the more prone to leg cramps I am. Oh yeah, and there was a time 10 years ago when I was quite anemic and did not know it, and I had both restless legs and very frequent leg cramps in the night. Problem went away when anemia was treated. So my guess is that the cramps and restless legs have something to do with circulation and oxygen delivery in the legs. Anyhow, cramps are much less of a problem now because I am usually able to nip them in the bud.
The type of dietary/exercise science studies you reference almost never produce meaningful results. Individual responses vary too much for this. Imagine that 10% of the study were magnesium deficient and the treatment improved their leg cramps - if your study had 10,000 participants the analysis would clearly pick this out. But if the study has 30 participants, and two disimprove for reasons unrelated to the study, it's inconclusive.
What works for you might not work for others, and scientific studies might predict your response. I take magnesium periodically. You might also try massage: I go around once a month to get some of the knots and tension pummelled out of my legs and shoulders and find it very good. But again, individuals vary widely.
Here's my take on the night leg cramps problem: There probably is some process that underlies it going on in almost all sufferers. I say that because it's a common problem, and people who have it all seem to describe it about the same way. It's way far down at the other end of the scale from things like chronic fatigue syndrome, which involve multiple symptoms, many of which (fatigue, for example) are part of the symptom picture for many many illnesses. That makes me think chronic fatigue sufferers are a heterogenous group. But my take is that people with leg cramps are not, at least not heterogenous as regards the process that directly underlies the cramps themselves. it seems likely to me that what works for one person who has leg cramps should work for many. Of course it may be that leg cramps are downstream of varied things -- let's say poor circulation, magnesium deficiency, lactic acid build-up during exercise the. day before. Still, it seems like there should be something that knocks out the phenom itself, even if a variety of other things set the stage for it. Or, of course, the cause might be something for which there is no quick and easy fix, such as poor circulation in the legs.
In any case, my post was not a suggested treatment, just a fix that works well during an attack.
Thanks for the response - interesting! I don't suffer from leg cramps, but I have a few weeks of horrible allergies every year. By the time my eyes are itching and my sinuses are pressurised, it's already too late. The antihistamines have limited effect during these periods. It's just a case of reducing exposure to pollen and waiting for the immune system to subside.
My mental model for this (rightly or wrongly) is that cumulative pollen exposure over a few days is the trigger, aggravated by stress, hot weather and air pollution. Antihistamines help somewhat but once my body exceeds some threshold an attack starts, and will take 3-4 days to fully subside.
I know you're looking for a quick fix - maybe heat or cold work? I'm suggesting that another approach is to treat it as a war not a battle. I'd look for cumulative factors which might all impact whatever the underlying mechanism is, whatever that might be rather than a single trigger.
Trying to properly articulate my distaste for the idea of "punch up, not down".
In order for the notion of punching up versus down to make sense, you need to have in mind some kind of hierarchy of who is above whom. Sometimes this is pretty reasonable, like a CEO is above a low-level employee. But are "men" above or below "women"? Are "black people" above or below "white people"? Are "Irish people" below or above "Dutch people"? The people who fancy themselves the most anti-racist tend to be the ones most inclined towards a strict racial hierarchy of who is above whom.
I'm going to assume this is a good faith question and my answer is to inform your of what leftists believe not to persuade you.
Leftists observe that our society, in effect if not in law, does have a hierarchy of power and that hierarchy frequently divides along racial lines. They do not believe that this is just and their interventions are intended to bring about eventual equalisation. They believe that "colour-blind" approaches tend to mask unexamined biases and therefore think it should be spoken about and approached directly.
"Punch up not down" means "aim your ire at the powerful, because they can take it and have the power to change things" and various racial groups are more likely to have power than others due to historical forces that have created systems of power. Their observation of the hierarchy is not a normative claim, they categorically don't believe that is how it should be.
In practice, this often means that mockery of e.g. Barack Obama is verboten because he is Black and thus oppressed so it would be "punching down" to make fun of him, but mockery of a Maga-hatted unemployed steelworker in the rust belt is perfectly fine because that is "punching up" against white privilege.
It seems to me that one ought to be able to take note of the fact that Barack Obama, in spite of being black, used to be President of the United States of America, which is about as far "up" as it's possible to go. And that, in spite of being white, the unemployed steelworker is pretty far down on any ladder of status or power. But that would be the pesky "colour-blind" approach that is apparently masking all my unexamined biases.
I think I've done a reasonable job of examining my biases, and my strong bias against people unironically talking about "punching up" and "punching down" will remain.
The leftists that I know mock Obama for precisely the reasons you mention and avoid making fun of working class people. What you're locking onto is a largely middleclass liberal phenomenon which seeks to use identity to maintain a status quo.
A lot of leftists like to think of themselves as champions of the oppressed and underdogs, because of course that implies that they are in a position of strength and influence, and thus somehow superior to those they defend. So if they mock Obama then a cynic might claim that is because they are vexed that he is such an obvious mismatch to their patronising ideas of who needs defending.
The human mind is very capable and creative when it comes to find good sounding reasons to punch those we want to punch.
This idea is one of many tools for that purpose.
Note that - as I learned in the indispensable The Elephant In The Brain - this is typically done subconsciously through Motivated Reasoning! The puncher is completely convinced of their clear moral authority/duty to punch their victim.
"My distaste begins and ends with the underlying assumption "
Well then I have good news for you! As far as I can tell that *your* underlying assumption, and not that of anyone who uses the phrase in earnest. I have never seen the phrase deployed in a way that either so much as hints at that particular facet. For that matter, I've never seen the phrase deployed in a context where there was *any possibility* of mistaking it for talking about literal punching. Mostly I've seen it used to explain *why some piece of rhetoric is bad* (e.g. because it "punches down").
First, of course I don't mean literal punching; the metaphorical "who do we take down" is what I meant, and is bad enough.
Second, the key here is to look at what people choose to talk about. I've seen a lot of people who obsess on (metaphorical) punching rules, as if insults and verbal attacks are their primary interface with other people.
Is it ever okay that we sometimes engage in this kind of frivolity, using violent terms as metaphors and things like that, or better we get back to work right now?
Asking as a non-American: is that hierarchy correct? (Not politically correct, of course.) If it is, it could be a non-ironically useful education resource for non-Americans trying to navigate the minefield of American politics. These seem like the things that "everyone knows", but no one says them out loud, but you could get in some trouble (e.g. as a white non-American student working in USA) for getting them wrong.
I mean, white people at the bottom, that part is obvious. (What about Jews? Higher, lower, or the same as whites in general?) But it would be difficult for a non-American to compare e.g. Asian vs Hispanic, or Native American vs Black.
Of course, a good education video would have fewer jokes, and maybe mention details such as that people directly from Spain do not actually count as Hispanic, but as whites. Also, you capitalize all words except for "white". But I may be mistaken about this. Which is why I am saying that an actual non-bullshit educational resource on this topic would be useful.
Yes, there is some room for disagreement over whether Native Americans ought to be higher up than Hispanics, but it's basically right.
For Jews, it depends on what hat (yarmulke?) they're wearing: if they're "Hitler/Holocaust" Jews, they outrank even the Blacks, and if they're "Israel vs. Palestine" Jews, they're below even whites. Otherwise, they're basically whites, so middle-to-top of the bottom tier.
For people from Spain or Portugal, I think the main caveat is your last name: if it's something as Anglo as Hayward-Thomas, then yeah, you're white, but otherwise I think you DO get the Hispanic victim points.
As jokes go, I think this is perfectly middle-of-the-road for educational videos. Academic lectures or corporate training clips might have fewer, but this is more "edutainment."
(And you're right: capitalizing "white" is a powerful political statement you most likely don't want to be making.)
Whiny white guys talk about being victims too. This dickhead is implicitly doing it himself. Man up and walk it off Matt Walsh. Don’t be such a whiny little bitch.
There are so many things wrong with that idea that it is difficult to choose where to start.
For example, are we talking about literal punching? Or making fun of someone? Or criticizing someone? I don't like when people use these metaphors where our side's violence is speech, and the other side's speech is violence, because in my opinion the norms for speech and violence should be quite different.
To put it simply, it should be okay to criticize anyone; fun should be okay in moderate amounts (if you spend too much time following someone and making fun of them, that is bullying), and actual punching should be reserved for special cases (it is definitely wrong to punch a random person on the street just because you checked the relevant traits in a textbook on intersectionality, and it told you that this direction is definitely "up").
One thing suspiciously missing in this entire debate is *why* are we even considering punching someone. I mean, seriously, why? If the answer is something like "they tried to steal my wallet, so I punched them", how the hell is e.g. their sexual orientation relevant for the decision? If the answer is "no specific reason, I am just bored, so I am looking for random people whom it is okay to punch", then you are the one that should be punched.
As a rule of thumb, having the courage to punch someone should make you suspect that you are punching down. If other people tell you that this is okay, because you are definitely punching up, that makes it almost guaranteed that you are punching down.
When people bring up the idea of "punching up/down", quite often their goal is to make you focus on the irrelevant aspects of the situation, either to legitimize some form of bullying (by arguing that technically it is "punching up"), or to prevent some valid criticism (by arguing that it is "punching down").
Consider some specific cases: was Amanda Marcotte "punching up" Scott Aaronson in the newspapers? were Zizians "punching up" when they stabbed their landlord? Is this even a sane way to look at things?
"There are so many things wrong with that idea that it is difficult to choose where to start.
For example, are we talking about literal punching? Or making fun of someone? "
So the main thing wrong with other people using a phrase among themselves is that you personally don't understand it as an outsider? Why is that a problem, exactly? People seem perfectly capable of using and understanding the phrase just fine in context: it hardly seems to be their issue if you are confused unless they're speaking to you or for your consumption.
"When people bring up the idea of "punching up/down", quite often their goal is..."
Wait, a couple paragraphs ago you didn't even understand what the phrase meant. But new you're such an expert on usage that you can generalize the goals of people using it?
"Consider some specific cases:..."
Congratulations, you have discovered that taking a metaphor out of context sometimes leads to nonsense. What a strange and bizarre world this must be.
Then the obvious answer would be "if there's doubt as to whether someone is up or down, err strongly on the side of not punching." Given that I've almost always seen the phrase applied to comedy, it would boil down to the following:
1. Ordinary citizens should always be free to mock those with significant wealth, fame and/or power.
2. It should not be considered acceptable for those with significant wealth, fame and/or power to mock those with none of it.
Of course there are edge cases and caveats, those generally seem like quite reasonable standards. I find nothing as pathetic as powerful people who can't stand being made fun of, except perhaps powerful people who habitually make fun of those below them (of course, those are often the same people).
I do think that people who use the principle as an excuse to mock broad, diverse groups of people are being obnoxious and unhelpful, even when those groups are (on average) objectively somewhat privileged. But I think when people criticize, say, comedy routines as "punching down," they are clearly and fairly communicating a reason that they dislike the thing in question, a reason many people will share.
I think it's one of *the* most toxic ideas in all of wokeness, which is really saying something. For two reasons. First, the fact that it's a class of principle (the other main one is the "prejudice plus power" crap) whose sole purpose is to declare "these are the people and groups we're exempt from needing to show any kindness or decency to". (Its main purpose is certainly *not* to promote kindness or and decency. I mean, it's not like there aren't millenia-old moral principles about treating everyone with kindness or never using bullying or mockery as a form of discourse, as well as more permissive principles that you can mock an argument but not the arguer, or you should treat someone the same way they treat others. If you want to push back on a culture of bullying you'd appeal to one of these principles. The only reason you'd want to use this new "punching down" principle is if your main concern is making sure some kinds of bullying are allowed! Which is, as a motivation, beyond despicable.) The second is that it has one of the worst gaps between "what it means in theory" and "how it's actually used" (which is *really* saying something given that what it means in theory is already, as I described above, very nasty). See Scott's "Social Justice and Words Words Words" and earlier writing on superweapons for the general pattern.
This is how I've seen it used:
-As a justification for why someone like Scott Aaronson being nearly driven to suicide doesn't count as real harm, and in fact it's fine for him to be further mocked by powerful popular women who've never gone through anything like that
-As a justification for why using slurs against poor rural white people, or someone like Hillary Clinton using dogwhistles hinting at the same ideas, is, unlike all other racial slurs, completely fine
-As a justification for demanding that something like Facebook should choose to simply not moderate hateful speech against white men
-As a justification for why insults by random civilians against their country's leader, who happens to be non-white or female, should be considered outside the bounds of acceptable discourse
-As a justification for why famous academics, celebrities, and other such powerful members of "marginalised" classes doxxing and personally insulting and mocking random people on the internet should be considered *within* the bounds of acceptable discourse
I appreciate that you don't support the times this principle is used to mock innocent people, but from my perspective this is like saying you're only against workplace bullying when it actually causes harm or distress. Yeah, I'm sure there are cases of something being technically classed as bullying despite causing no harm or distress, but in general bullying by its nature is the sort of thing that tends to cause harm and distress. Similarly, the principle under discussion is at its worst "here are the races and other groups whose members, regardless of how vulnerable or innocent they are, we are allowed to hurt" and at its best "here is an extremely vague and subjective standard for when it's okay to hurt people, that you can be confident we definitely won't use a cover for bullying people we don't like". And it's kind of amazing how often "punching down is different to punching up" can be paraphrased (as in, be equally predictive of behaviour) as "when I say bullying is wrong I only mean when it's done to *me*. Not when I'm doing it to other people!"
I'm also going to take a second to push back on the implicit framing of this. The framing where it's somehow necessary to construct these elaborate moral frameworks to justify bullying (which otherwise wouldn't happen). So clearly this entire principle is just about those mean ol' lefties looking *really hard* for someone they can get away with picking on.
In the real world, of course, there are lots and lots of time-honored scapegoats that get bullied *by default.* Groups whose bullying is so normalized that its practically invisible--to the point where lots of people will get angry and indignant if you point out that the thing they're doing is bullying. Easy examples are fat people, mentally ill people, visibly handicapped people, poor people and (in certain contexts) children. There are doubtless other examples that simply aren't springing to mind at the moment.
There used to be more such groups. In many cases, "it's OK to bully these people" was written directly into law in one form or another. The reduction in both scope and intensity is *directly* due to the progressive/social justice movements of years past being loud and persistent in *standing up against it.* Often in ways that were heavily criticized in both content and tone (if not violently suppressed) at the time: many of which can be broadly described as "punching up" (i.e. criticizing or standing up to the established power structures).
As for those groups that still are acceptable to bully, the *only* people I see consistently standing up for them are the progressive/social justice movements of today. It's mostly only in leftist spaces that it's acceptable to even *talk about* a lot of this bullying: it seems to be considered much more rude to *protest* the bullying of disabled people or fat people in conservative social circles that it is to openly *engage* in it. And I see quite a lot of anger and disdain thrown at those who actively try to push back. So this world you live in where "wokeists" (who let's remember, and not a type of people who actually exist) are constantly looking for their next victim to bully is utterly alien to me. Now, I have certainly seen online harassment campaigns and journalistic hit pieces and other crappy practices come out of that segment of society sometimes. But on the balance, they seem to be the *only* ones actively trying to tamp down on those ugly tendencies.
> As for those groups that still are acceptable to bully, the *only* people I see consistently standing up for them are the progressive/social justice movements of today.
If you're neither going to actually read what I wrote OR write anything substantive of your own, please save us both the trouble and don't bother replying.
This isn't Facebook and it isn't Twitter. I don't think most of us want it to be Facebook or Twitter. Copy-pasting a stupid link as a half-baked "gotcha" to a post you clearly didn't bother to understand or even fully read is pushing the space more in that direction.
The context is that there is this distinction called "punching up/down", and what does it actually mean, and whether it is a good or bad idea.
A few people have noted that regardless of what it was supposed to mean in theory, in practice it is often used to justify bullying of acceptable targets (by calling it "punching up"), or deflect criticism of unacceptable targets (by calling it "punching down").
Then you wrote about how various groups of people are bullied, and it is only the "progressive/social justice movements of today" who consistently stand up against that.
I find it interesting that you specified "of today", because indeed the heroes of yesterday sometime become the villains of today. Consider TERFs -- from their perspective, they are still consistently standing against bullying lesbians into having sex with biological males, but...
If you start noticing these things, you may re-evaluate how much consistency there actually is. Another example: I remember an era when female genital mutilation was considered an obvious horror that every decent person must object against. These days, I rarely hear about it anymore (despite the fact that little girls are still getting their genitals mutilated), and if I do, it is usually in the context of calling someone islamophobic, because they objected against the practice being done in some Islamic country.
Similarly, slavery is still practiced in many countries, but it would be gauche to point it out among the progressives today, because... well, there are mostly people of color doing it to each other, so that's none of your business, white colonizer. (Almost as if slavery is only bad when the whites are doing it.)
You are correct about the progressives/SJWs defending some groups against bullying today. The nuance I would like to add is that they have a specific list of groups, and if your group is not on the list, that means no empathy for you. (Plus the list is actually a hierarchy, because one does not speak e.g. about gays who are bullied by the black, etc.) Which makes me think that this isn't a principled opposition against bullying per se, but rather offering protection to groups who are considered useful political allies. People who actually oppose bullying consistently are likely to sooner or later accidentally defend someone from a wrong group, and get attacked for doing that.
Probably I shouldn't engage here: the inferential distance seems quite vast. But against my better judgement...
"First, the fact that it's a class of principle ... whose sole purpose is to declare "these are the people and groups we're exempt from needing to show any kindness or decency to"
It's pretty astonishing that you're able to divine the "sole purpose" of a relatively niche metaphor employed by a subculture you don't belong to. To be perfectly frank: when you say this, you CLEARLY don't know what the hell you're talking about. You do not know the people saying it. You do not know what they think, what they believe, how they relate to the world. You especially do not seem to know the contexts in which they are deploying the phrase. You are generalizing from an adversarially cherrypicked set of examples, which *of course* will inform you that everything about [outgroup] is awful and rotten and mean. Funny how that works.
"I mean, it's not like there aren't millenia-old moral principles about treating everyone with kindness..."
This is such an amazingly stilted and disingenuous comparison I barely know where to start. Like, first you're comparing a metaphor *specifically* employed to analyze adversarial situations to moral principles that are *supposed* to apply everywhere[1]. Like, assuming you're not just being deliberately deceptive here, I can only suspect that you have never, ever, EVER engaged with any of the core ideas of the philosophies you're criticizing[1]. It's not exactly a secret that a world where everyone treats everyone with kindness and nobody is screwed over or oppressed is one of the *core, guiding goals* of most strains of leftist thought. But shockingly enough, just like every other philosophy out there, they have to grapple with the fact that *we don't live in that world currently.*
I'm going to take a wild guess that you're not actually a strict pacifist, and do believe that use of force is sometimes appropriate. And I don't even *have* to guess that, pacificist or not, you're at the very least not above taking *rhetorical* swings at people (since, y'know, that's what you're doing here). So you CLEARLY can't hold "treat everyone with kindness all the time under all circumstances no matter what" as an inviolable principle yourself[3]; whether you laid them out explicitly or not, you clearly have *some* set of internal guidelines for when and how to approach conflicts and what level to participate in them at. So when you run into a piece (not the whole, just a piece) for someone else's schema for how to approach conflicts and insist they're terrible people because they *have* such a schema aren't *only* about Universal Love and Transcendent Joy, you are either failing extremely badly at introspection or just not even trying to understand what you're seeing.
I'm going to have to go ahead and express some real skepticism at some of your claims around this too. I do realize that it's not always convenient to find such things, but by the same token your memory isn't 100% reliable either. Like when you say you've seen it used to justify the following:
"-As a justification for why famous academics, celebrities, and other such powerful members of "marginalised" classes doxxing and personally insulting and mocking random people on the internet should be considered *within* the bounds of acceptable discourse"
I am EXTREMELY skeptical, and badly want to see an actual source and attendant details. I've *very* occasionally seen this sort of absolutely shit-tier take from random nobodies on social media[4]. But I've never seen anything within a million miles of it written by anyone serious enough to have anything resembling a platform, and I've read more than my fair share. Like clearly, OBVIOUSLY academics and celebrities picking on random people on the internet are punching down. So again, I'm not updating on this one until I see some actual receipts.
Or let's take this:
"As a justification for why insults by random civilians against their country's leader, who happens to be non-white or female, should be considered outside the bounds of acceptable discourse."
Is that actually what was said? In its entirety? This one makes me suspicious not because it very strongly resembles a reasonable position *with one key detail omitted.* It seems like exactly the sort of paraphrase that would come out of someone who didn't understand the culture they were critiquing, and thus didn't understand why the omitted part was load-bearing.
The reasonable version of this doesn't just apply to leaders who are non-white or female. In fact, I can quite specifically remember seeing people on the left use it to critique certain jokes about Trump: specifically jokes about his weight (and occasionally other health issues). The general version goes something like "if you make fun of a powerful person for [common characteristic], the powerful person almost certainly won't see it, but lots of ordinary people who share [common characteristic]" will. So, for example, I've never, ever heard anybody say it was inappropriate to mock or criticize Obama. But I saw plenty of people push back against racially loaded jokes about him--the part where it's about the POTUS is *not* what makes it "punching down."
"from my perspective this is like saying you're only against workplace bullying when it actually causes harm or distress."
And we're right back at "I don't think you actually know what you're talking about." Claiming that the phrase is fundamentally about "bullying" just suggests that your entire view of it comes from arguing with people on the internet. You came very, very close to hitting the nail on the head with that one example: mocking a national leader. Does that count as bullying, in your view? You don't seem to think so, given the phrasing of your example. The word "bullying," to my understanding of the term, is about exerting power over someone through fear, violence or intimidation. In fact, "bullying" seems pretty much synonymous with "punching down" when you get right down to it: you can't bully someone without having some sort of power over them, be it physical, social, political or whatever. So a reasonable paraphrase might be "don't engage in bullying, but do freely critique power and those who wield it." Which is a very far cry from what you seem to think it means.
[1] But somehow never actually *do* apply everywhere, funnily enough.
[2] Do you know which philosophies those are? That fact that you use "wokeness" with apparent seriousness leads me strongly to guess "no," since the *entire purpose* of the term is to homogenize the outgroup and pretend they all believe the same thing.
[3] Which, let's take a moment to notice, makes it VERY hypocritical for you to rant and rail about other people not holding it.
[4] We DO understand that there's an infinite supply of shit-tier takes flowing out of random nobodies on social media, right? And that as such, using them as evidence of anything but the vastness of human stupidity is terrible practice, yes?
"I'm going to have to go ahead and express some real skepticism at some of your claims around this too. I do realize that it's not always convenient to find such things, but by the same token your memory isn't 100% reliable either."
I appreciate this acknowledgement. And yes I agree, I could be remembering things wrong.
"The general version goes something like "if you make fun of a powerful person for [common characteristic], the powerful person almost certainly won't see it, but lots of ordinary people who share [common characteristic]" will."
In Australia, our first female prime minister was Julia Gillard who, in October 2012, gave a famous "misogyny speech" listing all the sexism she'd allegedly been subject to. [3] You can easily look this up. A lot of what she said was valid, being things that were or could be attacks on women in general. But a lot of it was also just personal insults or mockery directed at her, with some peripheral gendered aspect. Like, a sign at a rally calling her "Bob Brown's bitch"--gendered, yes (even though men are also routinely called someone's bitch), but directed at her personally for allegedly taking orders from Greens leader Bob Brown who was propping up her government. Or a right-wing radio commentator saying her father "died of shame" (this one doesn't even have a gendered aspect). Or the opposition leader saying she needed to "make an honest woman of herself".[4] And she got near-universal adulation for this "brave" speech from the left-leaning national and international media. Now, I should say that I thought those things (except the last) were disgusting, and terrible for public discourse. But I can only say this by rejecting the whole "punching up" framework and saying that even though she was literally the most powerful person in the country it was still not acceptable to talk about her like that. And to see the very same people who condemned this rhetoric go on to tolerate, and even engage in, the most vulgar and personal insults towards subsequent male politicians and even infinitely less powerful men on the basis of "punching up" was an enormous slap in the face to people like me who'd (like Scott witnessing the reactions to the deaths of Osama bin Laden and Margaret Thatcher) previously believed the left actually tried to live by some sort of principle of kindness.
Another example is it being generally unacceptable (from what I've seen) to mock Obama's (or Harris's) name. Whereas mocking Trump's or Bush's name is perfectly fine. They are the exact same thing, done to people of equally vast power. If your principle is that when the national leader is non-white or female then whole realms of mockery and comedy that would be acceptable otherwise (their names, their appearance, their level of submissiveness[5]) are now off limits, I think it's pretty fair to round that to the statement I made.
"But I've never seen anything within a million miles of it written by anyone serious enough to have anything resembling a platform, and I've read more than my fair share. Like clearly, OBVIOUSLY academics and celebrities picking on random people on the internet are punching down."
I'd have to search for some examples. I think this was pretty common during the gamergate fiasco, and has happened a fair amount since, with famous women doxxing and shaming random people on the internet who insulted them, and getting cheered on for it in left-leaning media. And I remember something in I think Brazil where people put up billboards doxxing random social media accounts that had said racially charged things about the president, and I think that was cheered in left media too. But if you insist on sources, give me some time.
4. I'm not going to reply to the rest with as much detail.
"It's not exactly a secret that a world where everyone treats everyone with kindness and nobody is screwed over or oppressed is one of the *core, guiding goals* of most strains of leftist thought."
Right. In other news, Christianity has always been about love and kindness, capitalism is primarily focused on maximising prosperity for everyone, and Trumpism's core guiding principle is doing the best thing for America. You can either take various movements' official statements of their core values on their face, or you can look at how they actually operate in practice. Many people's experience with various strains of leftism is that they tend to be *all about* kindness and fairness and justice...right up until they actually gain significant power. At which point those gullible enough to believe the official statements, especially if they belong to an as-of-this-year-disfavoured demographic group or, even worse, have at some point dared to suggest that they "only" agree with the left on 97% of things (see, again, Scott Aaronson, or for an even better example JK Rowling), are in for a very, very, *very* nasty shock. [6]
But I can understand if some people haven't caught up to this reality yet. After all, it's only been going on since about June 1793.
"That fact that you use "wokeness" with apparent seriousness leads me strongly to guess "no," since the *entire purpose* of the term is to homogenize the outgroup and pretend they all believe the same thing."
Oh come on, not this shit again. I'm not going to link to Freddie deBoer's piece on this, or Scott's numerous pieces, because they're really not at all hard to find. And I suspect you've seen them already. But in case you missed all of it: yes, "wokeness" is a silly term. It's also a term its advocates don't like. The reason we're all forced to refer to this ideology with a silly term its advocates don't like is that they have *absolutely and repeatedly* refused to accept *any* term for their movement--other than crap like "basic decency". Honestly, most people don't have a problem with using the preferred self-descriptor for a political group, even one they hate. Terms like "conservative", "liberal", "libertarian", "progressive", "socialist", "nationalist", "evangelical", etc etc, are happily used by both the groups themselves and those who hate them. Most of us who use "woke" aren't trying to be insulting, we're just trying to simply *refer* to a clear cluster of associated beliefs and practices that, empirically, tend to go together, tend to derive from the same sources and social environments, and tend to be championed by the same people. You can easily find lists of these beliefs and practices, but a sample is: putting social divisions way above economic divisions, dividing everyone into demographic groups based on how "privileged" they allegedly are, claiming racism against whites or sexism against men is impossible, using terms like "microaggression", "mansplain" and "cultural appropriation" unironically, calling speech violence, claiming it's not their responsibility to educate anyone when their factual claims are challenged, and excluding from their spaces and, if they can, all of society anyone who disagrees with a single one of their tenets. [7]
I'm willing to use any term you want me to to refer to this cluster, except something biased and ridiculous ("basic decency") or inaccurate and misleading ("liberalism"). I can call it Social Justice, SJWism, wokeness, wokeism, intersectionalism, or progressive identity politics. With any of these terms, I'd be referring to the exact same thing. It's just that all of these terms have been called slurs, whenever they were used, and no clear term has ever been offered that isn't "a slur".
But I'm not willing to pretend the thing being referred to doesn't exist.
[1] I don't really know what your core thesis is here. Is it a factual claim that the principle under discussion is hardly ever used in a bad way? Or a moral claim that even if it is it's still a useful principle? Or a a combination of all of this?
[2] Just to make this absolutely clear, there are two forms of this. (1) "yes Clinton was insulting rednecks but they deserve to be insulted because punching up". (2) Parsing Clinton's statement as meaning nothing except what she claimed to be saying, while passing Cruz's, Reagan's etc statements as having all these extra implications, based on the assumption dogwhistles aren't used to "punch up". They amount to the same thing.
[3] As an illuminating aside, she incorrectly used "misogyny" to mean "sexism" and then some dictionaries *were literally "updated" to justify her mistake*.
[4] What exactly is he supposed to do here? If Gillard were a man he'd say "the Prime Minister needs to make an honest man of himself" and no one would object. Because she's a woman, he either needs to keep the original expression and call her a man (I'm sure people would have loved that), use the modified form he did (and get accused somehow of implied misogyny), or he's simply not allowed to use that kind of expression with a woman.
[5] If a male leader were seen as unduly influenced by someone and he was described as "castrated" or similar, would anyone call this offensive or marginalising? What about a female politician implying that her male opponents had small penises? (This actually happened here, and the outcry from the "kind and decent" left was very absent. Maybe I just missed it. Though I doubt it.)
[6] Of course, it goes without saying that the right is no different in its potential for cruelty and injustice. It *is* better, however, in not claiming to be perfectly kind and pure angels while doing so. Except for the religious forms that is.
[7] Maybe you want to say the last one is a total strawman and never happens. I disagree, but I'm fine if you disregard that one and comprehend the cluster defined by the rest, the next time you feel like saying "what does woke even mean?"
You've thrown out a lot of different claims here and made a number of assumptions, or at least that's how it seems to me. [1] So bear with me and excuse me if I don't address everything--it doesn't mean I'm conceding it.
1. I find the tone of this comment pretty aggressive and borderline for the spirit of respectful discourse. A lot of it comes across as you saying "you have no idea what you're talking about. You REALLY have no idea what you're talking about! It's kind of AMAZING how little idea you have of what you're talking about!!!!!" I don't find this style of discourse remotely productive; how about simply stating what you think I'm wrong about *without* all the vaguely-insulting rhetoric?
Now, maybe you think my above comment was rude or aggressive; I didn't intend it that way. Though I was replying to you, I didn't personally attack you at all, or cast aspersions on your intelligence or knowledge, or suggest that you were arguing in bad faith. I in fact only mentioned you personally to say I *appreciated* your disclaimer! The rest of my comment was directly squarely at a hypothetical group of people who often appeal to this principle. (Unless you think things like "the only reason you'd want to use this new "punching down" principle is if your main concern is making sure some kinds of bullying are allowed!" were directed at you. I thought it was pretty clear I was using generic "you" for a hypothetical person, but in case that wasn't clear, I'm telling you that now. Can we please dial down the personal aspect?)
As for this: "you're at the very least not above taking *rhetorical* swings at people (since, y'know, that's what you're doing here)"--My personal preference (which I suppose I can't expect everyone to share, although I do think it's a pretty widely-established principle) is for the norm that it's always acceptable to insult an argument, it's sometimes and somewhat acceptable to insult a hypothetical and vaguely defined group of people not present on the site (and not concretely defined enough to be referencing people clearly present on some other particular site), and it's never acceptable to personally insult the person you're arguing with (unless they're doing it themselves). I don't claim to perfectly adhere to this, nor do I claim that your "you've clearly never bothered to look into this lol"-style asides are anywhere near the high end on a spectrum of insults. But I do maintain that there's a *significant difference* between the latter personally-directed swipes and something hypothetical and generic. Like, if you'd said "the people who rant and whine about how they're being punched up at clearly don't know what they're talking about" I'd be fine with that, since it's vague enough that it's not unambiguously directed at me. Unlike what you actually said.
2. You say "It's pretty astonishing that you're able to divine the "sole purpose" of a relatively niche metaphor employed by a subculture you don't belong to..." Now, it should first be noted that one is in fact capable of making informed deductions about the purpose of an institutional practice that's been used against them, or that they've seen used against people like them, *without* having to actually be one of the people using it! I mean, do you think nobody who's been a victim of say, an intimidating police interrogation is capable of opining on what the purpose of such behaviour is, unless they've worked in law enforcement themselves? Do you think a woman who's experienced sexual harassment at an otherwise-all-male workplace is disqualified, due to not being male, of "divining" the purpose of such harassment? Do you think such people are in fact obligated to *defer* to the official statements by said police department and workplace as to what their policies really are and how they're intended? I am (to use a bit of your sarcastic style) going to go out on a limb and say you probably *don't* believe that.
With that out of the way, let's turn to this: "You especially do not seem to know the contexts in which they are deploying the phrase." I really need to ask, genuinely not rhetorically, what kind of evidence would convince you on this. What if half a dozen people were to chime in on this thread saying they've routinely seen or experienced the phrase used to justify bullying? (I'll have to assume that's not enough, since that's already basically happened.) What if we held a poll and 80% of readers on this site answered that they'd primarily encountered the phrase in a bullying context? What if you polled all the white men in some very liberal environment (in a way that gave them ironclad guarantees their responses would be secret) and asked them how often they'd seen the phrase used to justify an objectively more powerful person than them (e.g. a boss, an online forum moderator, a professor, a local celebrity) mocking or bullying them, and how many times they'd seen it used to protect them from such a (powerful non-hetwhitemale) person? And you got answers like 95% and 5% respectively? Would you be convinced *then*? I need to know what kind of evidential standard you are demanding here, to know whether there's any point trying.
3. Following on, I notice that of my five examples, you directly answered the two that were vague and generic, and you ignored the three that were concrete and specific. Do you need to be linked to examples of the Scott Aaronson thing? Just read our Scott's "Untitled". Do you need examples of the same publications and people who condemned "New York values" and "welfare queens" and "inner city youth" being utterly fine with "basket of deplorables" and calling it punching up and "discomforting the privileged" for one for the most powerful women in the world to invoke the tropes of rural uneducated white people being dirty and disgusting and subhuman?[2] Do you need links to those old memes about Facebook at one point allowing attacks on "black drivers" (due to a technicality in its policy) but banning attacks on "white men"? (Note that exactly equally "black men" were protected and "white drivers" weren't. "Like, you know, do these people *actually believe* that white men are human beings with feelings to be given *equal protection* to others???") I could link to all of these if necessary, and I think they demonstrate my point very clearly.
Depends on what you mean by the term, I guess. He DOES make jokes that are offensive to the prevailing Liberal establishment, and has on occasion expressed support for Donald Trump.
He certainly _seems_ to really not like Jews. You could claim he's just being provocative for laughs – to me it reads strongly like "joking not joking".
So I think it's fair to say he's very antisemitic, and wants to protect the white race against race mixing and multiculturalism. For me that does round off fairly close to neo-Nazi.
In terms of literal support for historical Nazism, beyond Holocaust denial, there's not a lot: there are a few comics which present Nazis or white supremacists in a positive light but he hasn't explicitly said "Hitler was great and I mean this nonironically".
Okay, that's helpful. So to someone who thinks like you, yeah, he's definitely a neo-Nazi: Wikipedia says so, and it cites Reliable Sources, so it can't be wrong.
Intersectionality theory (as an actual academic theory) denies that there is always a clear “up” or “down”. Straight black men and straight black women and gay white men have different societal advantages and disadvantages, and none is strictly more or less privileged than the other.
Every individual will have lots of intersecting identities, some of which are more important than others and some of which result in privileges or oppressions or more likely both. But some individuals are clearly better off than others.
I think the steel man version of “punch up, not down” is just the thing where it’s fine to tease people once they’re already well-integrated into your friend group and aren’t worried about where they stand, but you probably shouldn’t do it with new people until they’re clear they’re doing fine. And if there’s an acquaintance that you never quite get that close with, you probably shouldn’t tease them.
> Intersectionality theory (as an actual academic theory) denies that there is always a clear “up” or “down”. Straight black men and straight black women and gay white men have different societal advantages and disadvantages, and none is strictly more or less privileged than the other.
Would intersectionality theory go so far as to admit that people are actually individuals rather than just clusters of group memberships, and thus generalising about "privilege" in the context of group memberships is a bad idea?
> I think the steel man version of “punch up, not down” is just the thing where it’s fine to tease people once they’re already well-integrated into your friend group and aren’t worried about where they stand, but you probably shouldn’t do it with new people until they’re clear they’re doing fine. And if there’s an acquaintance that you never quite get that close with, you probably shouldn’t tease them
I don't think that's a steel man so much as a totally different and much more sensible idea. It's about judging people on their own very specific individual circumstances (the right-wing point of view) rather than massively generalising about entire races or genders (the left-wing point of view).
>I don't think that's a steel man so much as a totally different and much more sensible idea. It's about judging people on their own very specific individual circumstances (the right-wing point of view) rather than massively generalising about entire races or genders (the left-wing point of view).
This is is extremely funny. Intersectionality, which has become one of the most important parts of left political theory over the last 50 years or so, is specifically about how any individual has a huge number of over lapping advantages and disadvantages in society based on the circumstances of their life. Intersectionality is the argument that we should always be accounting for all these hyper specific things. While major right wing figures are agitating that all Haitians eat pets, all gays and trans people are groomers, all Palestinians are Hamas etc etc.
"Intersectionality...is specifically about how any individual has a huge number of over lapping advantages and disadvantages in society based on the circumstances of their life."
No, it isn't, it's about how only certain kinds of disadvantages and circumstances are deemed to matter, and all others, no matter how much suffering they cause, are deemed to be irrelevant. As Scott once put it, "Imagine a boot stamping on a human face forever, saying "I KNOW YOU FEEL UPSET RE STAMPING, BUT THAT'S DIFFERENT FROM STRUCTURAL OPPRESSION""
Your version isn't steelmanning, it's sanewashing.
> Would intersectionality theory go so far as to admit that people are actually individuals rather than just clusters of group memberships, and thus generalising about "privilege" in the context of group memberships is a bad idea?
It does seem potentially useful to recognize and study predictors of social soft power, as well as the amount of variation not explained by them.
To take a different spin on it, it’s about noticing that there are generalizable observations you can make about how members of particular groups are treated by society, but that these generalizations often interact in ways that are more complicated than addition.
(Also, I don’t think you’ve got the political valence on this right - I find that left wing humanities academics are often allergic to *any* sort of generalization, and want to treat every individual or event as its own unique thing to be understood on its own terms. Of course, this is only some groups - obviously, Marxists are much more interested in quasi-scientific theories about classes, but they are not the mainstream in humanities academia.)
hi! long time reader. i'm looking for a wife, and decided to try to cast a broader net by writing. because "write what you know", i decided to write pseudonymously about looking for a wife as smut.
still workshopping the framing. interested in any feedback
Well I thought it wasn't bad. I see all the usual suspects trying to tear it apart in the comments, and I wanted to say ignore them.
A certain kind of woman sees red at the idea of a man having a sex drive, and you very decidedly don't want to attract those ones. Let 'em carp to each other.
A much larger swathe of the population is attracted to a man who seems to be doing something he likes and enjoying it. It felt like you had fun writing this to me.
It's slightly possible I'm giving you too much credit, but I'm going to disagree with the other commenters.
I think the purpose of the short story is to attractively showcase your competency as an artist; your ability to closely observe, to turn a clever phrase, to slide in a delightful callback joke, to maintain a theme, to self-observe your foibles and then wryly expose them to your audience. Even studiously avoiding capitalization feels like a considered choice; you're doing a visually dumb thing to disarm your audience into thinking the writer-character is a little bit dumb, but you abandon that strategy the moment it would be *too* wrong and confusing (you capitalize the initialized name "AJ").
I'm a little pressed for time, so I won't go into greater detail, but this was a *very* competent story, and the more I deconstruct it, the more I see to appreciate.
If you're looking for a wife who, like me, adores meta, is attracted to artistic competency, appreciates self-reflection, and maybe likes stories so much that they do stuff like write them or study them or (heh) even reference them in their usernames, then this is not a broader net: it's a hand-crafted highly-specialized single-use tool.
Or, it's just a short story, and the initial sales presentation is part of that story.
Either way, your piece is a banger.
(Oh, did I just reference the word "bang?" How clumsy of me!)
We're going to have to agree to disagree on this one 😁
Even as an artistic production it doesn't appeal to me, and if the narrator is meant to be at all representative of real-life BHE, I have to applaud his honesty about "yeah I'm a jerk".
I'm more interested in the girlfriend - Narrator says he wants a wife and family, he's *extraordinarily* susceptible given his reactions to the two women at the party (and are there only two? or are these just the two hottest chicks that grabbed his attention?), he does indulge in the pedestal problem (and boy I was never very sympathetic to the notion of "pedestalisation" but here we have Narrator going 'she's the most beautiful woman I ever saw' - dude, you only met her five minutes ago!) and clearly he's there to get into some woman's knickers (literally with AJ when it ends with him getting his hand under her thong).
He's not very sympathetic to Dave who recently broke up with his girlfriend and is clearly still hurting, since Narrator may say this is "not quite a sex party" but it's clear he's there to get laid if at all possible. So okay, Narrator is self-centred, we are learning that.
Which brings us back to the girlfriend casually mentioned and as casually dismissed in the first sentence. Does she know what is going on? We're led to assume so, but then again Narrator is so evasive about where he's going (not quite a sex party? so nearly sex then? up to the limit of having sex? Bill Clinton style 'I did not have sex with that woman'?)
Then later on he talks about what he wants - a wife and family. Is this true, or just something he's saying to sound more appealing to the women? If true, what about Girlfriend back home - she not on the wife list? Again, does she know this and is she okay with it? And is Narrator really as charming to the ladies as he tries to present himself as being?
It seems like most of your objections are more about cultural norms than the craftsmanship of the piece itself, though?
I've been in and adjacent to poly and woo and kink culture (Seattle is San Francisco's angry goth younger sibling), so I instantly understood that the girlfriend doesn't care at all about the sex party and is in fact so supportive we the audience don't need to be reassured of that by hearing from her. And of course she doesn't want to get married; possibly because she's practicing relationship anarchy or is already married or just isn't interested.
The descriptions about the physical beauty? Well, yes. That's just (not all but definitely all) men.
There's certainly an argument that one shouldn't write very spare, stripped-down short stories about cultures which may be inscrutable to much of one's audience, I'll give you that.
But he's also writing for the audience who mostly understands Scott's Bay Area House Parties, so this seems like a reasonable stage.
I don't think it's well-written, either. "my lust object had huge bazongas, really massive honkers, even bigger than the Whore of Urbino, you dig? and then my second lust object wasn't - get this! - even wearing a bra, I could tell because there was a hole cut out in her dress to let us all see that, plus it was slit up the thigh which was really handy when I groped her later and got to slip my hand under the two inches of lace on the thong to - well, you can just guess where my hand ended up, heh-heh, such a pity she bugged out on me right then!"
*shrug* That's guy writing women he finds attractive. I'm a straight woman so it's not a turn on to me (ooh, she has boobies? big big boobies?) and if I want some hot smut well there's plenty of fanfic more to my taste out there (though lately I'm way more interested in reading about platonic - genuinely platonic, not queer platonic - relationships).
Deiseach. I thought you probably just weren’t interested in sex, but if you like smut I have a site to recommend: Beautiful Agony. Rather than tell you what it’s like I’ll let you discover for yourself, if you’re curious. But I guarantee it’s nothing remotely like porn hub. You won’t be assaulted by a screen full of ads and multiple overlapping couples going at it with their eyes and veins bulging.
I consider that more cultural stuff, though, and it's sort of hard to argue on the cultural stuff. I spent my formative young adult years amongst nerdy straight men as an (incorrectly self-diagnosed) asexual, and when they stopped perceiving me as a potential sex object (eg “woman”), and started speaking around and to me as if I was another man, BOY HOWDY DID I LEARN ABOUT MEN.
They can't help it. They REALLY can't. The better amongst them learn to put a veneer of civility and complexity over their base reactions to women, and the best of them learn to semi-believe it, but, at their core…?
They can't help noticing and then wanting what they want.
"They can't help it. They REALLY can't. The better amongst them learn to put a veneer of civility and complexity over their base reactions to women, and the best of them learn to semi-believe it, but, at their core…?
They can't help noticing and then wanting what they want."
I know. God bless 'em. Which is what makes me smile when I read the long, aggrieved, discussion threads elsewhere about "what the heck do women want? what is female sexuality?" We've even had this on the dating discussion threads on here.
Men are simple when it comes to that. Men want booba and young totty. Be they seventeen or seventy-seven, they all want hot big tit seventeen year old blondie.
Simple pleasures, but it makes them happy.
Which is why men and women so often talk past one another, because guys do not believe women who say "personality is important" (since to them, they see women picking the hot guys) and women don't believe men that "yeah, hot big titty blondie is enough, she don't need be smart or stuff".
And again, that is not to say that men *never* want emotional depth and involvement and that women *never* want "he's dumb but he sure is pretty", but here's the clash when BHE is trying to write "will this attract women?"
It definitely is a different culture and you're right I was not picking up on the assumptions that the intended audience would have re: the girlfriend, the not-sex-party, etc.
To be frank, it's not spicy enough for me! 😀 The descriptions of Amelia and AJ are just so... what you'd expect from a sraight guy:
"hummus lady is long and lithe. dirty‑blonde, wavy hair that stops just above her collarbones. she’s wearing a light‑colored dress - maybe some green in it. calf length, shoulder straps, mid‑thigh slit. a diamond‑shaped gap just below her breasts, no bra. linen. later, as i’m mapping her body, she calls the dress “playful.”
Very convenient that he can ogle her braless breasts through the boob window. But eh, this is what you get. I'd like more about interior states and at least something that is direct speech from AJ, not just Narrator telling us little snippets of information he learned (e.g. she's from LA, etc.)
Though on re-reading, I wonder if Narrator is high? Sounds like he's loved-up (it would have been E in my youth, whatever is the current version of that) because he's friendly (over-friendly) to everyone there - he loves Dave, he loves Amelia, he loves Keanu, he loves AJ. That makes me wonder how much of the desire pulling him towards "helen of troy" is due to the drug and not the person.
That at least gives a little depth to the story! Contrast that with "they pair us off randomly with numbered cards. we have to stream of conscious say our desires." and Narrator is very likely *not* telling his real desires, this is just drug-induced babble. Same with how he's falling for both Amelia and AJ - when he's this under the influence, he'd fall in love with a lampstand. There's a lot of artifice under the seemingly 'telling it as it is' stream of consciousness, because when he's sober what the heck would he want or think of this encounter?
seems like 50% of this complaint could be resolved with another sentence:
> before i left, i told my girlfriend i’m going to "not quite a sex party." she said, "good luck!"
how much more exposition would satisfy that character isn't a mendacious degenerate?
irl she asked what that meant, i read her the event description, she was like "yeah that sounds like a sex party". "dunno, maybe a woo sex party?" "good luck!"
but as dialog it feels lifeless and... i haven't figured out how to write not-lifeless dialog.
"how much more exposition would satisfy that character isn't a mendacious degenerate?"
That he thinks for one second, before groping AJ, about his girlfriend? We get plenty of description of how sad he is that he didn't get his end away with La Nouvelle Hélène, but nothing about "and now I'm going back to my dwelling place and the woman there" and what might happen next.
When she says "good luck" in your amended sentence, does she mean that genuinely and happily? or sarcastically? or as what turns out to be 'goodbye' because she'll be gone by the time he gets back?
I think Eremolalos is right - this is a guy writing guy-feeling about hot sexy chicks. It's not going to appeal to women necessarily - even in smut, women like to talk about feelings and emotions and relationships. It sure isn't going to convince any woman to throw herself at you as a possible spouse, except maybe the kind of crazy that is too much drama and trouble in the long run.
> before i leave, i tell my girlfriend i’m going to "not quite a sex party." she says "good luck!", and smiles. we kiss.
if your cultural frame says "this is checkhov's gun; he's getting his ass dumped" then i don't know how many words i want to pay to palliate that response
See, the smile and the kiss make the difference there. More detail is fleshing out your story and giving insight.
The stripped-down style seems to be an artistic choice, but it might be *too* pared-down. We don't know enough (yet) about Narrator and his domestic situation to know if Girlfriend is okay with this or what is going on.
I think that attract-then-repel is a good mating strategy. First you lead off with your most attractive features, to get people interested in you. Then you reveal your least attractive features, the ones that are going to repel most of your potential mates. Whoever is left is someone who is both attracted to you and can tolerate you.
You appear to be going with a pure repel strategy. And I can't fault your honesty; you're doing women a service by leading straight off with the part of your personality that 99.99% of them are going to be repelled by, so they don't waste any time. But I would say that I'm a little concerned that a purely repulsive strategy with no attraction component might not be particularly effective.
Right, about this one, I'm going to be harsh but - well, I'm going to be harsh.
You're looking for a wife? And yet you start off with this:
"before i left, i told my girlfriend i’m going to ‘not quite a sex party.’"
And then you recount how you're ogling other women at the party, kiss one, and do some groping of another one.
Yeah, that's gonna convince women looking for husbands that you're prime material right there. "I might cheat every time I walk out the door, ha-ha!"
Honestly, I expect the ending of this one to be "and when i came back from the 'not quite a sex party' for some reason i had no girlfriend, she was packed up and gone".
I have to agree with Eremolalos - this is written from the guy point of view (ooh, she so smexy, no bra!!!) Women already know men are easy - tits'n'ass and be young, that's all that's needed. Convince us that you can also think with your big head and not just the little one, if you are looking for a committed long-term relationship.
(I wrote the above before I got to this part of the story and yep, whaddya know: "she’s shaped like an odalisque - think venus of urbino, but bigger tits.". Male sexuality: so. effin'. easy.)
On the other hand, if you want someone willing to be in an open marriage/poly, then sure - be upfront about how you're a horndog, that will filter for those willing to accept "my husband kisses and gropes strange women at parties".
Argh. Sorry, the more I read of this, the less I like.
"by “party” amelia meant “i’m going to run a structured event getting in touch with our desires, platonic and otherwise (platonic touch encouraged until 9:30pm).”
The desire arising in me is to engage in platonic touch by punching everyone in this story in the face.
"i tell keanu i want a family; a wife, and children. a job i enjoy, for a while. a community of peers."
So what about the girlfriend at home? Just a placeholder? Good enough until you find The One, then she's reprising "Another Suitcase In Another Hall"? Once again, yep that's gonna convince women you're genuine!
thanks for the words (sincere). i'm getting the sense that "late middle aged catholic irish woman" might not be a viable target demographic. I'm mildly disappointed you didn't even mention me bagging on leftists.
i've sliced away a lot of the context to tell a focused story about being an insane person. the story is mostly true, except minor fudges for clarity or anonymity. "this is absolutely repulsive to me" (paraphrased) is interesting feedback! (sincere) there are various omitted details that someone might find exonerating.
about the "cheating" comment: based on the text this actually feels a bit silly to me. i include a few details that a generous reader might take to mean this group and i are collectively operating in a non-standard ethical frame. examples:
- "i told my girlfriend i'm going to 'not quite a sex party'", and
- "amelia introduces me to her boyfriends. they seem nice"
you're a bright woman so i'm sure it's not reading comprehension (literal). instead the issue is probably one of these:
a. writing is too oblique, needs further exposition (poor writing),
b. it's too far outside of your cultural frame to register (too oblique for you personally, easily understood in the correct context), or
c. it's too repulsive to your moral frame to engage with
(a) is worth a think. (b) is also worth a think, but ultimately this isn't an evangelical project and i'm not trying to cast a super wide net. (c) is tedious.
I wouldn't say it's absolutely repulsive, I read it in the anthropological fashion of the entry in the "not a book review contest" about someone going to a sex party. As either a slice of real life (lightly fictionalised) or fiction, it's okay. Wouldn't be my thing, but I read novels about serial killers without wanting to be a serial killer myself.
Where you do yourself no favours is putting up "I want a wife and family". Uh-huh. Then you describe behaving in a way that outside of a particular bubble will be considered cheating or damn close to it - oh it's not sex, but there's kissing games and I felt up another woman not my girlfriend and I would have fucked her in a heartbeat given the chance.
And what about the girlfriend? You mention her casually, as though she's a piece of furniture. You're looking for a wife, so clearly Current Girlfriend is not going to be hearing wedding bells any time at all. Does she know that? Does she know that if you meet another hot bitch at another not-quite-a-sex-party that you'll dump her in a second? Is she okay with this? Are you looking for "yeah I want a wife and maybe kids and to keep my side chick and go to not-quite parties where I can fool around with other women"?
Is fidelity on the map at all here, or do you imagine that "if only I meet The One I will and can be faithful to her alone"?
Because you need to be 100% clear on this, and if your potential spouse is *not* part of that bubble, you *will* get a smack in the face.
"i include a few details that a generous reader might take to mean this group and i are collectively operating in a non-standard ethical frame."
You can say that again, bunky. And if you run into a woman who *does* operate in a standard ethical frame and pull this shit on her, her brother will come after you with a shotgun. Though right enough, you are describing the type of women who go to not-quite parties to fool around, so they're in the non-standard bubble and probably okay with you having girlfriends while they have boyfriends.
So maybe you will find a woman to have that polycule with, who will be the wife and mother to (some of) your kids while you have girlfriends and casual flings and she has boyfriends and casual flings. It could happen!
i mean irl my gf is happily married and the three of us live together. she thinks i'm stagnating and has been encouraging me to date around b/c she doesn't want to have kids.
as a strict rule to follow, yes, i like "don't involve women in situations they would find horrifying if they knew all of the details." but now we're moralizing and it's just. so. tedious.
Okay, so you're in some kind of open relationship/poly. That explains things. You might want to indicate that a little more about Narrator to avoid any moralising: girlfriend knows about and is fine with him looking for some strange.
I may be wrong, because while I'm female I'm sort of atypical in several ways, but I don't think your porn is likely to turn most women on. Maybe check with some other women on forums how they're reacting. So if you had in mind attracting someone by turning them on with your porn, I don't think that's a promising avenue.
To be more specific: I only read the first part of it, in a skimmy sort of way. The furthest I got was a game where you and a woman you have your eye on kiss with the group watching, but aren't kissing with tongues yet. But around that point there's lots of narration about how beautiful she is, and how she blushes, and how you want to go further, but hold back. That's all male point of view stuff, you know? Of course women like being seen as beautiful and hot, but the big turn-on for them is in how the male is coming across -- how they see him. If you want your porn to turn on the average woman, you have to write scenes much more from her point of view.
thanks for the words :) could you share writing you personally think achieves this?
fair, it probably fails as you describe. i certainly agree this doesn't work as self-insert fantasy - it's an unapologetically male viewpoint. "help i am a reasonable person trapped in an insane person's brain." AJ is granted little humanity, and as the story progresses: she's first a body in a dress; then a face; then some thin backstory.
christina does name the characteristics i'd hope the writing showcases.
irl, when i tell amelia she looks like a prototypal odalisque, she's flattered, and sends me 8 pictures of art from antiquity that look like her. but it only works in context of being generally appealing and emotionally safe. shorn from that context, being "guy who talks about venus of urbino's tits" isn't necessarily a winning play.
(unless it's with deiseach. i'm starting to think the disgust response is sublimated attraction. like lady, i have a girlfriend, okay?)
I can’t think of anything except couples in novels, and in them seductions (of the characters by each other, and of me by the author) are spread over 100+ pages. You will get better answers from other people.
"(unless it's with deiseach. i'm starting to think the disgust response is sublimated attraction. like lady, i have a girlfriend, okay?)"
Fear not, whatever remaining tatters of your virtue there be are quite safe from me. I've never wanted even a decent guy, let alone the sloppy fifths of a not-quite-sex-party goer.
"If you want your porn to turn on the average woman, you have to write scenes much more from her point of view."
'But - but - but I wrote how she had big tits and a slit dress and wasn't wearing a bra! Isn't that enough?'
😁
God forgive me, I feel like launching into the "how men write women" thing*. I do appreciate how he tells us his fancy has full lips but not, like, a trout pout y'know. Good to know it's all natural!
* On December 28th, 2016, Tumblr user scottbaiowulf made a text post titled, "Male writers writing female characters," followed by the paragraph:
“Cassandra woke up to the rays of the sun streaming through the slats on her blinds, cascading over her naked chest. She stretched, her breasts lifting with her arms as she greeted the sun. She rolled out of bed and put on a shirt, her nipples prominently showing through the thin fabric. She breasted boobily to the stairs, and titted downwards.”
With a friend in the DC area for a few days—any suggestions for restaurants / underrated attractions we should check out? Right now we're planning to get Ethiopian food (don't know where) and bum around the National Mall for a while, but that's basically it. (A part of me also wants to attend a Loudon County School Board meeting, but it might not be such a profitable use of time...)
DC has a great food scene. It’s also one of the few cities in the US with a Michelin guide, if you’re interested in eating fancy. Of those, I’ve found Rooster and Owl to be quite nice and less pricy than the competition https://www.roosterowl.com .
The Smithsonian museums are one of our national jewels, and will greedily suck up as much time as you’re willing to give them. The Air and Space one is generally regarded as the best, though all worth going to.
If you’re in DC until the 14th, I’d recommend watching the military parade for the US’s 250th anniversary. Likely to be great.
Did 4 of the "left-over" entries and got 4 times disappointed, ie: I gave 5 or 6. (And if it is not 7, it was a waste of time and if it is below 9, it should not be on ACX.) So, I see the probability to find a 9 or 10 among the left-overs as too low to continue. - I am glad the others - ie nearly all - got enough reviews!
I had already reviewed one of the left-over ones, and I will give it a 10. (I will enter the grades en bloc once i am through.) I only give a 10 twice so far, so I would deem that review not only a worthy finalist, but wouldn't mind it winning in the end.
OK, guys, you’ve heard from Mark: “We are not amused.” Fuck Scott and his efforts to make sure all reviews get enough readers for their scores to be a reasonable approximation of group consensus. We are all so damn smart that we deserve to be exempt from any parts of group projects that our beautiful minds find a bit tedious.
Pardon? - Let me rephrase: 1. I was all positive about Scott"s suggestion to give an extra shout-out for under-reviewed posts. 2. I did the work and read 4. None of them was worth to make it to the finals (a 5 or 6 does not mean they are worthless). If 20% of those "orphan-reviews" were good enough, the chance to hit zero on 4 attempts was 40%. Thus I assume: their share is lower, probably nil. Because: 3. Only a small share of all reviews got too seldom marked - I find it likely enough people tried those, too. But gave up reading and even marking those.
Summa: Great work of all in the ACX-readership (including me and probably you) to read and mark so many reviews in such a short time. While we could have been "lazy" and free riding on the others to wait for the finalists. Who will all be well worth reading, inferring from the reviews I read in the "first round".
Since I read your post I have read and rated a review from the list of wallflowers. It was one I had been planning to read anyway because it’s about a subject that interests me. I gave it a 9. And I’m a pretty hard grader. I deduct some if something is an essay but not a true review, for instance. I deduct a little for awkward, stilted prose even if there are no grammatical errors and I have no trouble taking in the writer’s meaning in the awkward lines. And I only give 10s to things that had a wow factor for me — writer did something that blew my socks off.
It is likely you are right that on average the wallflowers group is going to have fewer high scorers than reviews not in this group. Some are probably about a subject most people think isn’t worthy of a review, some probably start off with an especially silly opening, or an especially dry and droning one, leading potential reviewers to bail before reading further and rating . But the one I read had none of those flaws. I doubt many readers would give it less than a 7, and those giving 7s would be people who disagreed vehemently with the author’s main points. I’d guess that those who agree with the points, or at least find them interesting and intelligent, are likely to give this review an 8 or better.
I think this particular review probably turned off readers because its format is kind of congested and bullet-point ridden and footnote-heavy. It *looks like* it’s going to be long, boring and dry as dust. But it isn’t any of those 3.
Even the ACX readership, even the subset called Mark Doppelkorn, can make erroneous judgments by being over-influenced by first impressions.
I refer to my statement above. My average on just picking up some in the "first round" was about 8. Now 5. Which is not "bad", but not good enough to spend more of my time on. I did not claim that there are zero gems - below 20%, indeed, and , yes, "probably nil", as in most likely not a 10er. Will I read them all now to find your 9? Nope.
And it seems not just the strange topics, but also negative pre-selection: not good enough to have engaged people to not just click but read to the end AND to mark. I really feel sorry for the authors, "curse of knowledge" their main mode of failure.
I still object to your advising people not to bother reading the wallflowers, but I apologize for being so harsh in the way I did it. There was already one discussion of this issue, which you may not have read. My grounds for guaranteeing that all reviews got at least the number of reads Scott treats as minimum, which I believe is 8, were kindness and fairness. I thought it was just awfully harsh for somebody to have only a couple of readers. Also, when there are very few readers the review's average score isn't even a halfway decent representation of what the group consensus would have been, so the writer doesn't even get feedback he can trust.
But I get that many are not moved by the kindness argument. Scott posted in the discussion I'm talking about, and said that his reason for wanting reviews to get at least 8 votes was that there were times when a review had a high total score, enough to make it into the finals, but that score was based on very few reviews. Scott said that sometimes when he read a review of that kind he thought it was not very good, and felt uncomfortable having it make the finals. Maybe some of those are reviews by somebody who gave themselves a 10, and then 2 readers who happen to love the review's subject, or just are high graders, gave it and 8 and a 9. So the thing's average score is 9. I expect that argument cuts more ice with more people than my kindness one, so think it over.
The upshot of the discussion was that Scott said he'd make a point of nudging people to read the wallflowers this time around. I believe he said something about starting the nudging earlier this time around, though I'm not sure I'm remembering that bit right. Anyhow, the reason I was particularly irritated by your post was that the wallflower issue had been discussed and a plan announced. Then Scott carried through with the plan by giving an early nudge and a list of current wallflowers, and the very next post was you saying naw, don't bother.
If there were 100 reviews and 5000 ACX readers each reading just one, the average would be 50 reviews per piece. The average reader thus seems to read and rate near 0.1. We both do a lot more than 0.1, so just maybe we are on the same side? - Friend? - My comment was not the first one, I had to read first ;). Sorry if it was the first you read. - There are too many comments, I scroll down a while; if I find none making "my" point, I comment. Shrug.
It occurred to me that if AI alignment is likely to cause human extinction, that still doesn't explain the Great Filter, because presumably the AIs then colonize the stars, and we should have encountered other aliens' AIs. So what explains the Great Filter?
That's because a "misaligned ecosystem of AIs" is likely to destroy itself (e.g. by fighting wars among themselves with next generations of superweapons), and everything else around it would also disappear as a collateral damage. If this is typical, this might explain the Great Filter.
The ecosystem of AIs which is "decent enough" to avoid that fate might end up being quite compatible with human flourishing, even if it is not literally "aligned" to human interests and values.
Multicellularity, even complex multicellularity, evolved independently several times on Earth so I doubt that's it (at the very least: animals, fungi, green plants, red algae, kelp). It's true that multicellular life only took over bacterial mats recently -- 600-500 million years ago -- but identifiable red algae (Bangiomorpha) go back 1.2 billion ya, and other presumably unrelated macro-organisms (Diskagma, Horodyskia, the Franceville Biota) go back more than 2 billion years, very close to the origin of complex cells (eukaryotes). I suspect the actual difficult step is the origin of eukaryotes by symbiosis, and after that multicellularity is relatively easy to evolve, though it only really takes off once there is enough oxygen in the atmosphere and seawater.
Oops, I don't have much biology knowledge but I meant when one cell eats another cell but then they co-exist (eukaryogenesis). "Multicellularity" is a far easier to remember word!
In that case I would agree. Cellular endosymbiosis actually also happened several times, mostly involving photosynthetic symbionts, but at least the largest party is always a eukaryote, so eukaryogenesis might very well be the bottleneck.
What about “when civilizations create AI, they use it to enter infinite jest style VR heavens and fertility drops to zero. Everyone gets what they want in the Experience Machine—why expand into the stars when you can have everything you could possibly want right here in hyper-realistic Virtual Reality?” Performative Bafflement has written a lot about this scenario.
Maybe a little bit of expansion would happen to support the original population of aliens who enter the Experience Machine, but not by much because, again, I don't think the civilization in question would ever reproduce at that point.
VR tech can and will become so effective at delivering the desired experiences of anyone almost no matter what their goals are. The joys of discovery/sex/status/winning/relationships/love/childbearing/etc.? There's a thousand thousand mind-bogglingly awesome videogames you will be able to do for that when VR is advanced enough, with AI friends, children, etc. that will be just as real as organic life, and better/more engaging/more fulfilling than any other way you could experience those goods. (And you can continue your relationships with biological humans by just friending them in the Metaverse)
Think people have an overriding preference for living in the real world, and reproducing for its own sake? Well, Gen Z, the future of our species, ALREADY spends a voluntary 10-12 hrs per day on TikTok and other screen based entertainment, and that's just humanity capitulating to the almost 2D monomodal 6" rectangle version of digital entertainment technology available circa 2025.
Also, fertility declines as prosperity increases, as seen across the developed world--if South Korea is any indication, the ultimate result of status games + capitalism is permanent species self-imposed "genocide" by non-reproduction.
"But conservative groups that reject change will keep reproducing"--> yeah, sure, and they by virtue of their conservatism never adopt the AI technology necessary to engage in ambitious interstellar expansion/travel/domination. You really think the *Amish* will be the ones to take over the galaxy?
What's really sad about this scenario is if we don't achieve immortality by then, resulting in a civilization effectively committing suicide--Extinction by a consensus of revealed preferences.
I'm quite partial to the first one of those. If humans were relatively early in speedrunning the Habitable Planet -> Complex, Self-Reproducing Molecules -> Multicellular Life -> General Intelligence -> Technological Civilization sequence, the speed of light delay would take care of the entire rest of the paradox. We need not even be early in the ordinal sense, merely the temporal one: there could be lots of earlier intelligent species, as long as they're not too much earlier.
Another way to look at it is that the Great Filter need not necessarily be particularly Great or particularly singular. If several of the associated probabilities increase somewhat slowly in the early universe, their product could go from negligible probability to significant probability in the space of a few million years. Short enough that we could have at least a few other intelligent species here in the Milky Way that simply aren't both close enough and advanced enough that we can see them.
In my view the Great Filter is the economic consequence of FTL being impossible. If you accept that space travel is difficult (that is to say, expensive) then the vast timelines imposed by the relativistic speed limit place a fairly low upper bound on the amount of resources a civilization should be willing to spend on interstellar travel. Who's gonna invest a trillion dollars in a project that has a non-guaranteed chance of payback in 300 years? In my view ROI is the only thing that directs large-scale development and on that measure interstellar travel will always be outcompeted for funding.
And is willing to accept << 1% ROI? It doesn't really matter how long they live, there will always be competition for capital. That limits the capital outlay to essentially speculation or charity. My contention is that will always be insufficient to overcome the technical hurdle.
Also how can there realistically be *any* appreciable ROI? Your tangible return is limited to whatever cargo can fit in a spaceship traveling at < c. Even if we completely run out of, I dunno, oil - can you actually imagine a scenario, any scenario, where it's economically efficient to ship it in from across the galaxy? Because I can't. Not for oil and not for anything else.
There can never be a rational economic interest motivating interstellar travel. In that fact, at least, I'm completely confident. That puts a hard ceiling on how many resources we'll be willing to devote to solving the problem. In my view things like "the spirit of discovery" or "tail-risk insurance" will always be insufficient motivators. In any case I think it's the best candidate for explaining the Fermi paradox.
I skipped a condition - beings who live to age 600, and for whom a trillion in galactic dollars of whatever resources they use is at their command on a whim.
And 600 is a rough number. As Skull mentions, people will spend money to start projects they won't live to see the end of, from trees to corporations, so they don't even have to live to 300; 150 or even 100 could be enough.
If you're obsessed enough with ROI, consider that anyone can spend $P on a project that will pay off 10*$P some year, and sell the rights to it to someone younger for, say, 2*$P.
If you're still unsure that people will take that risk, well, someone spent multiple billions on a social media company that's now estimated at 80% of the buy price, and there's reason to believe he knew that could happen, and bought it anyway.
>If you're obsessed enough with ROI, consider that anyone can spend $P on a project that will pay off 10*$P some year, and sell the rights to it to someone younger for, say, 2*$P.
I don't think that works. The issue is that there can never be an ROI, not simply that it's too far in the future. Under no circumstances will a spaceship full of space rocks (traveling at < c) ever be worth the time and expense of transporting them. Are people going to wait 1500 years for their 10 tons of space diamonds or are they going to find a terrestrial substitute for space diamonds?
When I jumped in, we were only talking 300 years, not 1500. And I envisioned a species with a comparable lifespan, and an implied slower rate of technological progression.
Picture a race of testudinoids in a techno-feudal culture - they have interstellar travel, but they've had it for a century or two at the current cutting edge of propulsion tech, and society has largely stabilized around that level. Which is to say, scouts have returned with news of some substance available in great quantity in the next solar system over, technically possible to produce artificially on the home system, but only at great expense, in trace quantities, or both.
If you had propulsion capable of steady 1g, you could get half a light-year in one year, and be going at most of c by then. https://space.stackexchange.com/questions/840/how-fast-will-1g-get-you-there Add about three years for normal transit, another for decel, and a round trip to Alpha Centauri runs you about 10 years, ignoring time dilation. Steady 1g is probably a *huge* ask, but I'm too lazy to look up the fuel requirements for any of the speculative drives on the drawing board, so I'm pretending acceleration forces are the bottleneck.
Historically, voyages between China and Europe during the Age of Discovery took (ABAICT) around two years; Magellan's trip took about three. Ten doesn't seem like a hard ask for humans, and a hundred seems plausible for more lugubrious species.
Only one has to do it. Granted that isn’t a guarantee it’s possible but it inclines me to think the filter is not merely expense but impossibility (or just that intelligent life is vanishingly unlikely)
That "one" has to do it *repeatedly*. Getting to another planet is one thing, but you then have to re-create the entirety of the human industrial base on an unknown planet with an unknown distribution of mineral deposits. This is not a simple case of "nanobots self-reproduce and swarm the planet". It's a multistage process of recreating the entire technological ladder starting with *prospecting for minerals*. They will have to create semiconductor fabs starting from bauxite! I'm sorry but I don't think there's any technology that will ever make that easy. This is why I consider "colonization waves moving at 0.5c" to be fantastical nonsense.
Physically? No. Practically? Yes. Consider the engineering challenges implicit in the scenario I described in my previous post. Who's going to solve those when a) there's no hope of in-your-lifetime reward and b) the try-fail-update-retry cycle is on the order of centuries or millenia?
A few billion years is a really long time. We've nearly reached post-scarcity from basically everyone being a subsistence level farmer in only a few hundred years, so eventually we'll run out of things to do and easily accessible resources. Building a ship that travels at 1% of light speed to the nearest star starts seeming pretty attractive when it promises access to literally all the resources of human civilization just for you and your people.
> because presumably the AIs then colonize the stars
Why should we presume this? It looks to me like it's a lot easier for an AI to end human civilization (or at least cause human civilization to become permanently unable to make more high-end chips) than it is for AI to do that and _also_ gain all the capabilities necessary to maintain the supply chains for chip fabrication, or build its own supply chains.
We should presume it because it only needs to happen once. Even if most AIs don't outlast the civilization that created them, or are content to just paperclip their own planet and leave it at that, it only takes a small fraction of resourceful, ambitious AIs (across all the worlds that develop) to do stuff visible from Earth.
Which just highlights the problems with talking about the Fermi Paradox: we're almost exclusively dealing in probabilities we have no good way to estimate.
Yeah, if you assume that a nontrivial fraction of the AIs that *want* to paperclip their planet *successfully* paperclip their planet (rather than breaking their host civilization without the ability to fix or replace it), you have to wonder why none of them spend any resources on expansion.
This is not a solved question by any means, but I've always been fond of the aestivation hypothesis. The thermodynamics of it just so neatly falls into place that it feels as inevitable as physics.
Maybe I'm missing a step, but is the assumption that there will never be a better place to reject heat at scale than the far-future cosmic background? It would also seem to imply a strong prediction that there's no negentropy-possitive way to e.g. harvest stars, which sure seem to be pretty inefficient in their current configuration.
The "rationalist standard" answer is "grabby aliens" aka, "colonization waves are going at a appreciable fraction of the speed of light, and any other signs you'd see are fairly short on the timelines of civilizations forming, so the amount of time where you see an alien civilization but aren't eaten by an alien civilization is basically zero". See:
So long as we're sharing video links, I like Isaac Arthur's recent rundown of the fermi solutions that might work and the ones that don't: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vAFImV0iseM
Aestivation is one of the ones that doesn't quite work btw.
It's Robin Hanson's answer sure, but I'm not sure how popular it is - not sure it really counts as an anthropic argument, and it doesn't answer the mail on the Fermi paradox. I prefer this one, which argues that rewriting the Drake Equation with distributions instead of expected values give you a 40~85% chance we're alone in the universe, with the stilted expected values coming from a small number of densely populated universes:
This is true but I don't think answers the OP's answer on why, if AIs are possible we don't see them. In theory, it's chopping off all the preindustrial civilization parts of the Drake equation.
(I agree it explains the great filter pretty well to be clear)
Wait, which "it"? AI isn't a good explanation for the Great Filter, because it fails to *quietly* wipe out aliens - too plausible for it to result in a similar expanding colonization bubble as the progenitor anyway. So the Fermi Paradox still applies and needs a conventional non-AI answer.
Yup, I'm saying that even if AI alignment isn't easy, it doesn't contribute that much to the great filter, since the amount of time we have from realizing "oh shit" to dead isn't that long.
The White House two days ago said it had federalized 2,000 National Guardsmen and ordered them to Los Angeles. All media reports that I can find say about 300 actual soldiers are on the ground there today.
I don't know much about the National Guard -- where are the other 1,700 troops? Are they just still getting themselves to the scene? Being held in reserve? Something else?
I had reluctantly blocked someone for repetitive bad faith arguments. I used another browser where I’m not logged in and this thread is so much shorter without that one commenter.
lmao i was curious because I also have a few folks blocked, checked incognito mode and yep, same guy. Also, wow, that's a solid 300+ comments, and almost all of them are people going "dude, come on."
My best guess is a mix of legal and command-and-control issues. On the legal front, Trump federalized elements of the CA National Guard, but did not formally invoke the Insurrection Act, so the Posse Comitatus Act's prohibition on using federal troops for law enforcement under most circumstances probably still applies. Using soldiers or federalized guardsmen to garrison a federal building doesn't require any special legal authority, but using them to arrest or disburse rioters in public streets is a violation of Posse Comitatus unless the right legal hoops have been jumped through.
On the command-and-control front, guardsmen are civilians who have volunteered for regular training and occasional call-ups into military service, and it takes time to mobilize them. You need to get in touch with them, give them time to set aside their civilian responsibilities and report to their muster points, and then the units need to form up, distribute equipment, and then handle the logistics of actually traveling to where they're being deployed. It took about 24 hours for the California National Guard to start to arrive after they were ordered to mobilize during the 1992 LA Riots. Procedures have been revised since then, largely in response to post-action assessments of the 1992 deployment, but I think the revised procedures are centered on having a small numbers of Guardsmen available for much faster mobilization at any given time. I wouldn't be surprised to learn that the 300 guardsmen already deployed were the only ones of those called into federal service who were available to be mobilized and deployed in a matter of hours, while the rest take more time to get ready.
I just saw a news article saying that the Guardsmen ended up having to sleep on the ground because nobody had figured out where they were going to stay. Seems like logistics is indeed an issue.
Trump calls up National Guard to help quell rioting illegal immigrants in Los Angeles. I do think this is another datapoint illegal immigration needs to be stopped.
For those that want to discuss immigration policy.
My position. I like to see alot more immigration of highly educated people. Alot more. Like 1M+ a year. Not sure if that's actually feasible as a policy (but happy to discuss how it could/could not work), but I wrote it to show you my ideal preferences.
I think current immigration law and the policies it enacts are awful. I blame both parties in Congress for it, though I place more blame on the Democrats. Why? Because Trump 45 was ready to make a deal. My memory is he was pretty willing to give amnesty to most the illegal immigrants. He just wanted the wall first. From memory, Democrats weren't willing to build the wall first (showing possible bad faith) and probably wanted some form of de facto open borders.
Then Biden administration did very little to enforce immigration policies and even had some programs that encouraged it. Biden did so little that the states sued him. SCOTUS essentially made a Separation of Powers decision and ruled that immigration enforcement was wholly in the realm of the Executive Branch. Estimates are that 1M+ additional illegal immigrants under Biden. That is additional. Much more came, but there are arguments that no amount of realistic enforcement would've prevented them from coming.
So we are here today. Many, many illegal immigrants living in fear of ICE. Which I blame the Democrats because they had an opportunity to legalise many, many of them. There is even more signs that Democrats have no problems with illegal immigration and potentially want open borders. Maybe not all Democrats, but certainly the progressive wing.
So as someone who wants more legal immigration, I see the only path is to strictly enforce immigration laws and remove many, many illegal immigrants. Off the top of my head, I would say 50%. Then potentially we can discuss building the wall in exchange for amnesty for the remainder 50%. And only then, IMO, the US is ready to discuss increasing legal immigration levels.
How does the fact that Biden authorized congressional democrats to work on a Bi-partisan bill that many Republicans championed as carrying every provision they had wanted, and then Trump urged Republicans to defect because collaboration with Democrats on immigration would hurt his chances for re-election factor into your apportionment of blame?
Perhaps I'm wrong, but I'm cynical enough to assume that the rioters are the same people who torch downtowns anytime they get an excuse (such as police accidentally killing yet another black criminal). This is not the behavior of somebody who just became concerned about a certain issue. They've probably been waiting for their day for some time, and just now someone gave them a signal.
"People are very angry about the government's violent immigration crackdown. This is evidence that the government needs to crack down even more violently on immigration." Flawless logic.
When I see photos of masked guys torching Waymo cars, I don't think "Aha, that is a concerned citizen peacefully protesting authoritarian crackdowns on legal immigrants", I think "that's a violent thug and hell yeah the cops should haul him in".
Don't let the exciting photos of burning cars distract you from the fact that a lot of people are protesting peacefully. Even the LAPD (not known for being a bastion of wokeness) put out a statement describing the protests as peaceful.
Anyway, "the police should crack down on protesters because the protesters are violent" is an entirely different argument from "the police should crack down on immigration because the protesters are violent." You are making the first statement, Paul made the second statement.
"Today, demonstrations across the city of Los Angeles remained peaceful."
The National Guard had just been mobilized at this time (Trump's order came down at 6 PM), and deployed the next day. People predicted that this would inflame the situation, and it appears that it has.
Rioters were attacking the Paramount ICE facility.[1] As it is a Federal facility, the Federal government is responsible for its protection and Trump called for more protection. The National Guard is only staged at Federal buildings. They are not involved with any protection work elsewhere, much less immigration enforcement.
Why would additional protection at Federal Buildings inflame the situation?
You are claiming that the Federal government is being violent in its immigration crackdown. I think provocative claims require evidence. Please provide the evidence?
I will phrase the current situation as.
Those who support breaking the law are rioting to allow them to break the law.
Or more specifically.
Illegal immigrants who have already broken US laws on immigration and their supporters are rioting (breaking another law) to continue to live in the US illegally.
Whether the protesters are violent or peaceful (and the vast majority are peaceful), they are evidence that people oppose the law. If you are using the protester's reactions as data, then this is a data point you should consider.
Now, you may believe that immigration enforcement should be a priority even if it's unpopular, but in that case, the protests (which are evidence that it's unpopular) are not a relevant data point. You would support immigration enforcement whether or not people protested it.
Like, my comment isn't litigating the exact nuances of how much police brutality is too much, the point is that your logic doesn't make sense.
Yes, it can be a datapoint. The Boston Tea Party is an example where the people were very upset over an issue and the government should have back downed (assuming the British wanted to try to remain the government).
Another example. The J6 protesters. The government decided that the protesters grievances were minor and the riot was not a proper way to protest. The government threw the book at the protesters to show its displeasure.
In this case, my argument is
illegal immigration enforcement is good ==> illegal immigrants rioting ==> more illegal enforcement is needed because the criminals are rioting
Of course, you don't have to accept my starting point. But I think my logic does make sense if you accept the first part ("illegal immigration enforcement is good")
Your claim that illegal immigration enforcement is unpopular is potentially misleading.
According to Pew, 83% of American want to deport illegal immigrants. It breaks down to 32% of Americans want all and 51% want some. Only 15%, a small minority want none.
Your claim about illegal immigration popularity could focus on just California or just Southern California. I googled and didn't find a poll. I am willing to concede that illegal immigration enforcement may be unpopular in California. But, California is a part of the US and immigration is a Federal matter, so the Federal government gets to decide on the enforcement level. As with all Federal laws, the whole nation gets to decide, not an individual state. The prosecution of the J6 protesters is an example of that (b/c I am guessing that more conservative states would've let many of the protesters off with a slap on the wrist).
>illegal immigration enforcement is good ==> illegal immigrants rioting ==> more illegal enforcement is needed because the criminals are rioting
See, I think the flaw in this logic is that I think it's mostly not illegal immigrants protesting or rioting. It's a lot easier to risk interfering with an ICE raid if you're only risking disorderly conduct charges instead of deportation.
As for your polls, I think most people are in favor of at least some amount of deportation, but very opposed to this sort of mass arrest and deportation. I've seen a lot of news articles along the lines of "I voted to deport criminals, not people like my neighbors."
illegal immigration enforcement is good ==> rioting for illegal immigration ==> more illegal immigration enforcement is needed because there is rioting on it
>very opposed to this sort of mass arrest and deportation. I've seen a lot of news articles along the lines of "I voted to deport criminals, not people like my neighbors."
I provided quantified data. Respectfully. your anecdote(s) are just that. Anecdotes. One person or 10 person still doesn't make the case that more deportations are unpopular. I am changing the word from "mass" because Trump is not doing mass deportations by my definition.
Checking the timestamps, you appear to have developed this view *quite* recently. Within the last few hours it seems. The thread is *quite full* of you making provocative claims with no evidence. No, I'm not going to point to which ones specifically: I'd be here all night. If you want to take this tack with others, please start by holding yourself to higher standards.
Are you actually interested in having an honest, rational debate? Or are you only interested in supporting your tribe?
I have tried to address responses to my post by addressing the substance of the post. If you want me to just score technical points.
My original phrase is "rioting illegal immigrants in Los Angeles".
So, if there were only 2 illegal immigrants rioting in Los Angeles, my point would be correct. I decided not to respond that way because there is no discussion with that response. I would argue my post is not provocative at all unless you believe there are no illegal immigrants currently rioting in Los Angeless. Is that the claim you are making?
Please point out the other "provocative posts".
Also, I don't see you policing the many left of center posters (assumed) posting much more provocative claims like the Federal government is "violent immigration crackdown" like beleester just did in this sub-thread (which you are a part of). Feels like you are making isolated demands for rigor. These points are what lead me to ask the question at the start of this post. I am not going to continue assuming rationality by a poster when the evidence supports a poster is being irrationally tribal.
If you're going to argue that "rioting illegal immigrants" isn't provocative so long as there are at least two violent illegal immigrants present in the protests, then my statement of "violent immigration crackdown" isn't provocative so long as there is at least two instances of police brutality during the ICE raids.
Are you prepared to argue that there have been no instances of police brutality across all the ICE raids that took place recently? Or should we set the bar a little higher than "my statement is not provably false"?
>Are you prepared to argue that there have been no instances of police brutality across all the ICE raids that took place recently?
I would not argue it because it would make no sense to argue such a statement because it could easily be false. Also, I know that law enforcement can overstep their bounds. Rodney King is prime example number 1.
My ask for evidence is to get the context for the "brutality". Many times when I have asked for support for claims, the support is very weak compared to the claim.
??? The limited protests probably reflect dissatisfaction with the way illegal immigration is perceived to be being stopped - via a non trivial amount of illegal detentions, citizen abuse, and racial profiling, making a large percent of the population uncomfortable. 19.5% of the US population is Hispanic. ICE is known to be targeting Hispanic communities and people that look Hispanic. The presence of a Mexican flag, charitably, could be a saying 'we, people of Mexican heritage live here, deal with it. We are a country of immigrants. Some of us have parents from Mexico. Some of us are from Mexico.'
Is this a data point that illegal immigrantion needs to be stopped? Not really? This equally could be more a data point that people think deportations should be done with legal and due process. It also may be a data point that immigrants still identify with their heritage and have some degree of immigrant identity and pride.
That being said, I dunno who is doing what, and I haven't seen any coherent messaging. Generally, the destruction of property is bad. I like movements with a coherent point and message. So far, this is not one of them, other than 'current administrative policies bad'
It's not just hispanics, they're going after *everyone* in a mad attempt to make numbers. For example, they arrested a white Danish immigrant who came legally, was never even accused of breaking any laws, was a father and longtime resident of the US, etc. - the model immigrant by anyone's standards, even nativists.
>Kasper’s understanding is that his failure to submit I-751 led to a removal order
If there is a removal order, then it really doesn't matter that he is or isn't a model citizen. There might be some grounds for him to be granted relief from removal, eg that his removal will cause severe hardship to an American citizen, but on its face there doesn't seem to be very much objectionable about enforcing an existing removal order.
One or two open threads ago you posted "I try to only post the topics that are most troubling to me or push back on claims that are wildly disportionate to the facts".
Consider the following, which I think is likely- the pushback and comments you are getting are because people think that your claims are wildly disproportionate to the facts.
See the other comments for what they think is disproportionate.
For my side, you argue or claim that 1) the people rioting are illegal immigrants; 2) that this could be a datapoint for stopping illegal immigration.
Disproportionate is your disregarding the most common other interpretation of newsworthiness of this call-up, that being Trump ordering the national guard against the wishes of the Governor, and more likely that Trump sees a way to inflame the situation for personal political reasons (escalating a fight with a blue state governor regarding immigration), rather than wishing to resolve the riots on their own.
I do not wish to sound like a broken record, but your writing reads like that of a culture warrior.
"Disproportionate is your disregarding the most common other interpretation of newsworthiness of this call-up, that being Trump ordering the national guard against the wishes of the Governor, and more likely that Trump sees a way to inflame the situation for personal political reasons (escalating a fight with a blue state governor regarding immigration), rather than wishing to resolve the riots on their own."
Trump is a sleazy politician. That does not "cancel out" all the people setting things on fire or mean we shouldn't talk about it.
"I do not wish to sound like a broken record, but your writing reads like that of a culture warrior."
"Culture warrior" just means "person disagreeing with me."
>That does not "cancel out" all the people setting things on fire or mean we shouldn't talk about it.
Indeed, neither did I claim anywhere it did. I appreciate ACX for its open-visor, rationalist debate, and was trying to push back against something that I perceive as overly political culture-warrior-like argument. My claim is not that the riots are justified, or that they cancel out Trump; I am sorry if perceived that way.
>"Culture warrior" just means "person disagreeing with me."
Disagree, the whole point of the rationalist community is to be better than unpredictive disagreement & tribal inflammation.
Ok. I made the claim that they were illegal immigrants because they were waving Mexican flags. Is your claim that citizens or visa holders would waive the Mexican flag?
>Trump ordering the national guard against the wishes of the Governor, and more likely that Trump sees a way to inflame the situation for personal political reasons (escalating a fight with a blue state governor regarding immigration)
Are you claiming Newsome would order more law enforcement to protect the Paramount ICE facility? During Georg Floyd Federal offices and local police stations were burned down. Even today, Newsome is pushing back on the National Guard call up.
From a border town, and I've seen many Mexican Americans who don't even speak Spanish flying the Mexican flag, let alone people actually from Mexico. You see the Mexican flag nearly as often as the American flag around here. And I mean like, a 55/45 split.
" I made the claim that they were illegal immigrants because they were waving Mexican flags. Is your claim that citizens or visa holders would waive the Mexican flag?"
OK, this here is exactly what I was talking about re: confirmation bias. This is a completely, utterly unhinged way of reasoning. It's the sort of thing that I would expect to see from an not-even-trying-to-be-subtle caricature of a hateful racist in a TV show or comic.
Now having said that, I have no interest in shaming or scolding or moralizing at you: yelling and insults aren't like to help. But this is a rationalist space, and I AM interested in helping you improve your reasoning process. This is the sort of thinking that will reliably, predictably produce extremely false beliefs about the world and regardless of your politics, you should be interested in avoiding that.
So to start, I ask you to take a minute to really try and consider the ways in which your fellow Americans think and what sorts of people are included among them. Is it *actually* reasonable to assume that none of them would wave a Mexican flag during a protest? Maybe it was different where you were, but in 2022 I saw a *lot* of Ukrainian flags show up on houses and cars. Were all the people flying them illegal immigrants from Ukraine? Or were many of them just citizens who wanted to show solidarity? Much smaller but more recently, some Americans have used Canadian flags and items displaying the Canadian flag symbol as a response to their president deciding to bully and threaten its longtime peaceful ally to the north. Do you think those people were illegal immigrants from Canada? Perhaps for you holding a flag is a symbol that can *only* denote immediate national heritage and origin; does everyone else view it the same way? Or do they use the symbol differently.
And even if it were exclusively a symbol of heritage, you do know that people can have multiple heritages, right? You may be unaware, but the land that Los Angeles sits on was part of Mexico until it was forcibly annexed by the U.S. The people living there when that happened didn't just disappear. They weren't especially numerous, but 175 years later they doubtless have lots of descendants who are U.S. citizens. And of course many, many others have come to the U.S. in the intervening years and also have descendants who are U.S. citizens. Nor is it unheard of for those born and raised in the U.S. to develop an affinity for another country, moving back and forth or living their part time, potentially obtaining dual citizenship. The point is there are *many* millions of U.S. citizens with some combination of hereditary and cultural ties to Mexico. Given its location and history, doubtless there are millions in California alone. And of course there are also plenty of Mexican nationals in the U.S. on work or student visas as well.
I'm belaboring this point hard because you really do have to have an incredibly, *staggeringly* poor model of both the composition of your country and the psychology of your fellow humans to believe that *nobody* who wasn't specifically an undocumented immigrant from Mexico would waive a Mexican flag during a protest.
Then there's priors to consider. Who do you *expect* to be at this sort of protest? If your answer is "illegal aliens" this is another failure of understanding. Anybody who has been living undocumented in the U.S. has most certainly been actively trying to avoid the notice of the authorities. Showing up at a protest like this--which very often draws LEO presence--would be very foolish for such people by any reasonable standard. I'm sure a few do it anyway, but there are many millions of American citizens--especially young people and *especially* in California--who are hopping mad at the administration and at ICE and much, much less worried about facing down some cops.
And then, having had this pointed out to you (multiple times), your response was...less than ideal:
"For the sake of argument, let's say that is true that no illegal immigrants are rioting. Doesn't that make the rioting worse?"
It was you, yes you who referred to them as "rioting illegal immigrants" and called in "another datapoint illegal immigration needs to be stopped." If one of the only things you thought worth mentioning about the situation--one of things that you presented as driving your conclusion--turned out to be false, offhandedly doubling down on your original answer would be *excessively* poor reasoning. When you discover a core premise of what your arguing is unsound, the primary thing you should do is *stop.* Stop, step back, and check to make sure everything *else* you assumed about the situation is true: if you made one bad assumption, might you have made others? Then you should *carefully* re-tread your reasoning process, examining the steps for soundness. If your response to discovering an error in your evidence is always to double down on your original conclusion, then whatever you're doing "reasoning" isn't it.
minor - it's Newsom, not Newsome. There is no e at the end.
>Is your claim that citizens or visa holders would waive the Mexican flag? - Sure, citizens and visa holders wave the Mexican flag all the time - say, on national holiday's associated with Mexico. I can also imagine that they would wave the flag here in solidarity with what they perceive to be a targeted or oppressed group. think it is disproportionate to assume that because someone is waving a flag, they are not a citizen or legal resident.
>Are you claiming Newsome would order more law enforcement to protect the Paramount ICE facility?
I make no such claims. Newsom stated that he thinks the local government would be able to quell the riots, and that he does not want national guard troops. He is the duly elected governor, are you claiming that he should not be listened to?
I find it likely Trump is exploiting the riots, and is looking not for a smooth resolution, but is looking for political gain by picking and inflaming a fight. Do you disagree with this claim, or find it unlikely?
Are you claiming that overstepping the governor's authority and sending in the national guard for the first time in decades is the best way to resolve these riots ("best" here could be filled by things like "least loss of life/proporty, respectful of laws and traditions, civil liberties")?
>Even today, Newsome is pushing back on the National Guard call up.
Are you claiming there are no reasons Newsom could have to push back on the call up, such as, but not limited to, that this will only inflame the situation?
>I can also imagine that they would wave the flag here in solidarity with what they perceive to be a targeted or oppressed group. think it is disproportionate to assume that because someone is waving a flag, they are not a citizen or legal resident.
Ok. I grant you there can be many citizens or visa holders. By waving the Mexican flag what message do you think the rest of America is receiving?
Why wouldn't waving a US flag be better? Speaking for myself, I would be more receptive to protests on illegal immigration where the emphasis is that we want to be American.
>I make no such claims. Newsom stated that he thinks the local government would be able to quell the riots,
WoolyAI has posted on this sub-thread that the order is only to protect Federal buildings. As these are Federal Buildings, my potentially flawed understanding is that it is unclear who is responsible to protect them. The responsibility to protect them may rest solely with the Federal government. Not the perfect analogy but it could be like National Park land. The state could help, but is under no obligation to help. If that is the case, I don't think Trump overstep is authority.
>Are you claiming there are no reasons Newsom could have to push back on the call up, such as, but not limited to, that this will only inflame the situation?
Yes, I am claiming that Newsom is doing his own politic'ing. He should know the Guard is there to protect the Federal Buildings. Over the weekend, Newsom was still saying the protests were peaceful. Arguably, if I am ICE, I am not going to wait for the protests to get out of hand.
If the calling of National Guards to protect Federal Buildings inflames the situation, then the blame should be on the protesters/rioters. Not on the Federal Government.
I live in LA, first itd questionable whether you could call what's happening a riot, but I don't want to get into it. It is obviously the case that the majority of people out in the streets right now are not illegals, they are US citizens who disagree with current immigration policy, plus some folks who show to smash and set stuff on fire whenever there is any kind of unrest.
>I live in LA, first itd questionable whether you could call what's happening a riot
It has gone on for 3 days and 101, a major freeway, was blocked. I don't know why it has to spread to all of LA (which is huge) for this to be called a riot.
Oh, FFS. Protestors block roadways all the time. That doesn't make it a riot. You are either intentionally using inflammatory language to justify an excessive response, or are totally blinded by your priors.
And note that I have not said that blocking the freeway, or anything else these people have done, is either OK or likely to be politically effective.
- Dropping stones from overpasses onto said vehicles
Is that a riot yet? Who can say, let us ponder this, after all it's "just blocking roadways" isn't it?
I've seen some mention online about "people just having fun watching cars burn" (downplaying what is going on, it's not rioting, it's not even violent, it's just some harmless fun), and if that is the definition of "fun" in Los Angeles, then there is something the hell very wrong with Los Angeles.
specifically : a tumultuous disturbance of the public peace by three or more persons assembled together and acting with a common intent
b
: public violence, tumult, or disorder
A group of people gathered at the Paramount ICE facility and the LA Times says they were throwing things at the agents. [1] The article doesn’t says how many exactly but the wording strongly implies 3 or more. I would consider throwing objects at law enforcement as being a riot.
For the freeway blocking, the rioters went beyond just blocking. They threw all sorts of things at the Police. In the article below, there is a picture of 3 or more rioters. [2]
I think this is another datapoint that shows how confirmation bias shapes peoples' worldviews. By all appearances your pre-existing political beliefs influenced both where you looked to get your news and how you interpreted what you found. Small wonder that the result ends up reinforcing what you already believed.
(Or maybe I just think that's true because it lines up with my pre-existing beliefs)
I do not disagree that confirmation bias affects all of us including me.
I argue that those left of center, particularly the ones that are actively reading the news more are the ones that more affected by it.
The mainstream media is mostly left of center and their reporting reflects it.
A local LA news source claiming people are just having fun watching burning cars during a "protest". [1] I guess we can all agree that anti-abortion protesters should be allowed to throw rocks at windows of abortion providers (something else the rioters are doing) and burn cars in front of Planned Parenthood.
"I argue that those left of center, particularly the ones that are actively reading the news more are the ones that more affected by it. "
Yes, that's how confirmation bias works. It always appears to affect other people strongly, and oneself little if at all. It would hardly be a bias if it didn't work that way.
In this thread you've been fact checked on a number of your claims at a number of points and have mostly brushed them aside. In particular, you seem to be stating a lot of assumptions, which--when pressed--you admit that you have no source at all for beyond how you think the world works.
"I argue that those left of center, particularly the ones that are actively reading the news more are the ones that more affected by it. "
While I'm not especially interested in getting into the weeds of bias in media reporting--it certainly exists and is everywhere--reading news at least *potentially* exposes you to information that contradicts what you already believe. Claiming that your reasoning is *more* reliable because you're reasoning from *less* information is just a hair shy of arguing that up is down and black is white. Yes, you'll read fewer lies and distortions by reading fewer things in total. But you'll also read fewer facts and be more prone to just making shit up: as you have so aptly demonstrated. The easiest person to fool is always yourself.
You're almost making the right point, which is that while people's individual acts of violence or resistance outside the law thye don't like can be counterproductive, but logically it doesn't discredit the underlying political disagreement. If it did, Donald Trump would not have been allowed to be president again after Jan. 6.
We can't read their minds but they seem to be protesting the ICE raids. They seem to think those raids and the deportation process has gone too far. That's what I would be protesting if I were out there. I'm not because I don't live in CA.
Cherrypicked? Or pointed out because mainstream media doesn't write about it?
I agree that both sides do bad things. It is just in the past year, the left has engaged in a lot of political violence. I am biased, but I would put it at 75% the left doing bad things and 25% the right doing bad things.
In a fair world, there would be completely unbiased news sources, entrusted representatives with no corruption, and political violence wouldn't exist at all or would be entirely 50/50 across all timespans like that makes it better. The unfortunate answers to your "concerns" is that, when a political side loses it's institutional power, radical members of that side tend to engage in political violence. Like... political violence is almost a universal, historical phenomena, or something. Every Red Army Faction has their counterpart in a McVeigh, though personally there is not enough investment to see if the bodycounts are bijective (and is wholly orthogonal to politics as practiced)
>The unfortunate answers to your "concerns" is that, when a political side loses it's institutional power, radical members of that side tend to engage in political violence. Like... political violence is almost a universal, historical phenomena, or something
I guess your argument is that we should be ok with levels of political violence from the side out of power? And not take the Democrats position which was to punish (overly) harshly those who engage in political violence to stop it?
Are you claiming that there are no illegal immigrants rioting?
There are rioters waving Mexican flags. I assumed that there were mostly illegals immigrants, but potentially they are not.
For the sake of argument, let's say that is true that no illegal immigrants are rioting. Doesn't that make the rioting worse? It is US citizens and permanent residents rioting because ICE is enforcing US laws on illegal immigration. And there is evidence that non-illegal immigrants are rioting.
There are alot of pre-printed signs linked to NGOs.
To me, feels like another case of the left using violence to get their poltical agenda enacted.
That's not the issue. The issue is whether they are wiser than the average illegal immigrant. Their claim was re the behavior of illegal immigrants, not the behavior of protesters.
That's a lot of words for "no I don't have any evidence to support my assertion."
Also your dishonest first sentence in replying to me demonstrates that your intentions are less than serious. I should know better by now than to feed the trolls, guess I'm still defaulting to an outdated sense of the caliber of discourse in ACX's comment sections....anyway, goodbye.
I don't think your assumption that the people waving Mexican flags are illegal immigrants is warranted. It's more likely just a symbol of racial solidarity.
There can be many reasons that someone would wave a Mexican flag in a protest over illegal immigration. I took the opinion it was foreign nationals.
>It's more likely just a symbol of racial solidarity.
Possible. But then is your argument that citizens of Mexican descent are waving Mexican flags to show solidarity? I think that is potentially a more inflammatory position because it is saying that Mexican Americans are just as (more) aligned with Mexico.
Note, I know that interpretation and just choose not to make it my position in for this event. I think it is more inflammatory so needs stronger proof before I assert it.
I have no ancestral connection to Mexico but I would think that waving a Mexican flag is the appropriate thing to do when supporting people of Mexican origin.
If I were in a country illegally and wanted to protest to continue to stay illegally, I would refrain from waving the flag of another country. Otherwise, maybe the officials of said country might interpret me as some type of agitator.
You literally assert it as such in your original post "quell rioting illegal immigrants" in the OP. without any indication that this is interpretation. A lot of people react to your statement.
>rioting because ICE is enforcing US laws on illegal immigration
[citation needed]. How do you tell the cause of the riots is that and not the enforcement being, in the opinion of the rioters, selective and not in line with procedure?
>How do you tell the cause of the riots is that and not the enforcement being, in the opinion of the rioters, selective and not in line with procedure?
I think that people with nuanced views probably don't riot. They sit around going "hmm yes well I certainly support taking increased action on illegal immigration but I have the following concerns". They aren't throwing flaming bags of garbage at ICE officers.
On one hand, this implies an “intellectual vs rioter” dichotomy, on the other hand, this draws the line where nuanced views begin pretty arbitrarily. The question of immigration legality is already a complex and nuanced one, “deport all illegals” or the opposite are very much not positions that are easy to define, it’s only simple if the true beliefs of the person making such statements are more like “I hate darkies”.
Finally, what’s so impossible in very different people coming to the same barricade for very different reasons?
I think we can all agree that the Biden administration’s rather idiosyncratic solution, particularly the aspect of it that is open-ended, always subject to “more” process - is probably not where we want to land going forward.
I misunderstood you to be saying that the rioters, whether antifa, or simply co-ethnics, or illegal immigrants, or college students - had a fine understanding of the immigration “process” and the law. Which would be difficult for them to have in any case, beyond being prima facie improbable, since it is changing all the time at the whim of judges.
I doubt at this point there’s a law professor in the country who could articulate it clearly and consistently, coherently.
OTOH plenty of people are good at law talk in a kind of inventive way, throwing in legal terms that they’ve read, here and there.
What do we think about the fact that this is the first time since 1992 that a president has summoned the national guard without consulting with the governor of that state?
It increasingly feels like California and Texas and New York are just...kinda disobeying the federal government and getting away with it. Like, remember when the Supreme Court told the feds they could cut the Texas razor wire in the Rio Grande after 3 migrants drowned and then Texas just...kept putting more razor wire in (1)? Or how gun rights are basically dead letter in Cali and NY like abortion rights were dead letter in the South before Roe v Wade was overturned.
And, like, that's bad but may I humbly suggest that the people of California and Texas want to live in very different worlds with very different laws and...they increasingly can just kinda do that. California can have sanctuary cities and abortions and Texas can have razor wire and guns. Maybe in an increasingly divided nation, we can just let different states do what they want?
The US Constitution sets out the responsibilities of each level of government.
There are certain grey areas, or areas where the Federal Government has managed to extend its authority beyond what was originally intended, but I can't see that this is one of them, immigration is clearly a Federal responsibility.
Mostly because the direct text of the Presidential Memoranda reads like the National Guard is there just to protect Federal property and personnel. (1)
Which seems fair. I'm not federalist enough to let states totally kick out the FBI and ICE. So if there's riots in LA and people want to block streets and burn stuff down and the governor doesn't want to do anything and they don't burn down any Federal buildings...that sounds pretty good. If they want to fight and throw rocks at LAPD but leave the ICE agents safe in their building...alright.
If Trump marches the National Guard through the streets to quell all the riots, I'll probably change my opinion but I haven't seen any evidence of that. It sounds like they're just deployed to the federal buildings.
The 1992 deployment of the National Guard (and of regular Army and Marine units as well) to Los Angeles was done at the request of then-Governor Pete Wilson. Wilson ordered the Guard in under state command and requested federal reinforcements. When the Army and Marines arrived, Bush the Elder federalized the guard in order to put all the troops under a unified command structure.
I think the last time Guard units were federalized for domestic deployment without the approval of state governors was during the early 60s when JFK did so in order to enforce a desegregation court order.
Maybe process wasn't followed. But you think Newsome would've called out the National Guard. Just today Newsome is suing Trump on the issue.[1] I don't think Newsome would've agreed to call the National Guard.
For those that may not be aware, the rioting started on Friday at a local ICE office. [2] Potentially the office would've been burned like many offices were in the George Floyd riots.
Newsom didn't call out the Guard because (at least according to him, the mayor of Los Angeles, and the LAPD) the riots were small and well within the capacity of the LAPD and CHP to handle. I have not vetted the accuracy of this claim one way or another, except that characterizations of the protests/riots from conservative and liberal sources seem to suffer from a "did you two visit the same country?" problem.
I think part of the issue is that California is just use to "protestors" doing rioty things and blocking highways. In this riot, the rioters have blocked a freeway.
The LAPD chief is now saying the violence is “escalating” and apparently referenced explosive devices although I haven’t the patience to watch videos to their end.
So it seems he’s no longer painting it as good fun.
I don’t live there of course so don’t know if the police chief is lying.
Or perhaps it came home to him to see all those patrol cars damaged or burned. Some people just don’t like waste.
I live in LA, can confirm its not currently a war zone. Not saying people don't have a right to go to work without seeing burning Waymos, but nothing that has happened sonfar seems like it would justify the kind of escalation that Trump is screaming about on social media.
That’s great. I’m glad it’s not Minneapolis. I hope they (the feds) will confine themselves to protecting their federal buildings then, and of course, keep doing their ICE work.
My current working hypothesis is that the protests through yesterday were small, fairly localized, and ran a spectrum of how peaceful they were. Some appear to have been relatively well-behaved while at least a few tipped over into riotous incidents and several more have done stuff like blocking streets which is highly uncivil but not, strictly speaking, violent.
I find it very plausible that the protests/riots have gotten quite a bit worse both in size and behavior since reports of Trump ordering in the National Guard, but I am not equipped to judge the veracity of claims to that effect by the LAPD.
>"…blocking streets which is highly uncivil but not, strictly speaking, violent."
Given that one could expect to be met with force if attempting to pass or clear the blockade(s), I would contend that such actions *are* violent (i.e., implicit threats).
ETA: there's a reason that naval blockades are considered an act of war; same logic would seem to apply here.
I definitely don’t envy the LEOs who have to figure out the right degree of cheerful acquiescence even up to coddling and accepting actions that would probably get a swift response If not couched as protest. Both so that the situation does not worsen out of their control, and so that they aren’t just setting themselves up to be blamed for the whole thing.
The slanted source complaint is true and also an isolated demand for rigor.
People post links from slanted sources such as CNN and the NYT here all the time. All these sources are slanted, many of them have a history of making mistakes, and in a fast-moving news environment they are often the only option we have. This is, or should be, understood.
There are very few, if any, trustworthy news sources. Pointing out that Fox News is untrustworthy when none of them are trustworthy is an isolated demand for rigor.
It is trivially true to point out that all news sources are biased. It is magnitude and expression of that bias that is under comment here.
The NYT is not perfect, nor should one derive their entire factual understanding from its pages. However, to claim that because because they have made any mistakes puts them on the same epistemic level of Fox News is to neglect your duty to critically evaluate your sources.
Fox News willfully distorts fact and opinion to such a level that it deserves Alban's incredulous rejoinder.
Dude, this is just a factual disagreement. Restating the position with more emphasis advances nothing.
I can read Fox News, it's mostly garbage. I can read the NYT, it's mostly garbage. I'm not going to subject myself to either enough to distinguish the slight variations in slime green garbage coloration that you're pointing to. If you've got a factual way to resolve this, delightful, let me hear it. Otherwise...
In the dim, dark past of 2023, Fox News settled 'Dominion Voting Systems v. Fox News Network' out of court for $787.5 million, the largest defamation settlement to date.
At contest in that case was whether Fox News acted with "reckless disregard" to the truth and "actual malice" towards Dominion. Pre-trial discovery and depositions largely revealed that Fox showrunners and commentators did not believe that the 2020 election was stolen or that Dominion systems altered the vote. They knowingly advanced false theories to try to win back conservatives frustrated with their calling of Arizona.
Of course this was not a singular event, but indicative of the culture and stance of Fox News more or less since its inception. In my view this is a level of malfeasance with no parallels at NYT.
My apologies if it is read that way, but I disagree it is a demand - for example, including 2 sources, say NYT and Foxnews (although I would disagree seeing them as equals quality wise) would decrease the slant in evidence presented; I make no claim that other sources are not also slanted.
I would also defend my "foxnews.com, really?" phrase; I have come to expect and appreciate better quality sources from this community.
Sure, providing two opposingly slanted views is probably better than one, fair enough.
The argument that the NYT is either in any way notably better in quality than Fox News or meets the standards of quality sources for this community is just a factual dispute between us. And I'm not sure how we'd resolve it. Like...I can just read it man. It's not good quality, even among news sources.
I did not say it is inaccurate , I said it was slanted. The weak factual claims were made by you: "to help quell rioting illegal immigrants", where upthread you stated as a follow-up when questioned - "I assumed that there were mostly illegals immigrants, but potentially they are not."
How does it make the situation better if it is non-illegal immigrants? Arguably, it is worse because it would be a strong datapoint that leftist groups are ok with violence.
I did not make a judgement about the situation being better either way. I just pointed out that I think your factual claims are weak, and that the source used is slanted.
Perhaps you could come up with a reason why it would be better if citizens were rioting, instead of illegal immigrants? I.e. illegal immigrants could be sufficiently scared that they wouldn't dare to show their face; that there are not enough illegal immigrants for the scale of the riots, because enough have been deported; or that the civic outrage of well-educated legal citizens causes them to violently protest a moral injustice of sufficient excess.
perhaps you can steelman some from across sides of the political spectrum?
Every other news outlet has reported this as just protests that heated up. I find it very dubious that the protestors are even majority "illegal immigrant"--how would they tell?
And how are you assessing those qualities in the protestors? You down there conducting interviews? Or just assuming they're unemployed and lazy because they're at a protest?
Prediction: The protests will continue all summer. I'd guess that the menacing presence of the guard as well as Hegseth's threats to bring in the Marines will only inflame the situation, as what is being protested is perceived federal-police overreach. This will get much worse before it gets better.
Mike Johnson prays every night that these protests will escalate and continue until the midterms, since that is by far the best chance his party has of holding onto its majority in the House.
Yes, heated for three days. Rodney King lasted for four days, though there was a significant buildup prior to that. Years long, in fact. BLM protests had a significant precedent and were a mix of peaceful and violent demonstrations in several cities.
This is a nothingburger on the scale of BLM. Sure, there will be protests, and riots, but nothing will particularly change. Political violence is a feature of living in society from both the left and the right.
(Doesn't help the "nonviolent" right wingers that political violence in the US in terms of terrorist incidents is more likely to be done by far-right extremists than by far left extremists--though we can go all day pointing out historical examples of both)
For what it’s worth, 90% or more of the people in the city of Los Angeles don’t live within a mile of any of the relevant events. Yesterday was LA Pride and you wouldn’t even know there were protests going on in other parts of the city if you were there.
The post feels like it is justifying political violence from the left.
>(Doesn't help the "nonviolent" right wingers that political violence in the US in terms of terrorist incidents is more likely to be done by far-right extremists than by far left extremists--though we can go all day pointing out historical examples of both)
This is particularly slanted to the point I would argue is misinformation. Most of the recent (past year) political violence is from the left. Examples
*Assassination attempt of Trump
*Murder of UnitedHealthCare CEO
*Murder of 2 Israeli embassy personnel in DC
*These riots
*Antifa violently blocking a protest in Seattle, which occurred weeks ago
Please list the recent violence from "right wingers"
In the wikipedia link you gave, Crooks also donated $15 to ActBlue, a Democratic pac. I would weigh that more heavily than registering as a Republican because it is unclear why he did it. In many elections, Democrats have encouraged their supporters to register as Republicans in the primary to get a more beneficial result for Democrats.
And due to the push back I got from the $15 donation the last time. Reposting.
I feel like I am getting unexplained push back about the $15 donation. I don't know why. My speculation is that many are thinking that $15 is a trivial amount. They may spend that much on a random lunch. I certainly do.
For Thomas Crook, that may not be alot of money but likely an amount he spent carefully. Thomas Crook was probably making (near) minimum wage in his job. In PA, that is $7.25/hour. $15 would be somewhere around 2 hours pre-tax earnings for Crook. I know if I spent 2 hours worth of pre-tax earnings, I would have given it some thought.
Christchurch, Anders Brevik, DNC headquaters in AZ shot up, Nancy Pelosi's husband, Mayor Craig Greensburg, the capital riots, the plot to kidnap Gretchen Witchner, Germany's BfV finding right wing extremists within the army. Of course, a standard left-wing argument would include institutional violence, but we're just gonna ignore that so you can... pretend your side is entirely justified.
I never said right wing violence should be overlooked. My point is that left wing violence in the US is now at an uncomfortable level.
I went through your list. Most are not recent. Many are not even in the US. I think your list an example of confirmation bias operating.
Christchurch: 2019 and in New Zealand
Anders Brevik: 2011 (more than a decade ago!) and in Norway
DNC Headquaters in AZ: 2024 and a good example of political violence
-There is also lots of violence against Republican offices. NM Republican office was burnt this year. [1] I view this level of violence as the background that will occur.
Nancy Pelosi's husand: 2022 so not so recent
Mayor Craig Greensburg: 2022 and not done by a right winger. AP calls the shooter a "social justice activist" [2]
Capital riots: 2021, so not recent. But good example of a right wing political violence.
Gretchen Whitmer plot: 2022 and there are questions about how much the plotters were entrapped because FBI informants were heavily embedded. [3]
There are protests about illegal federal actions against illegal immigrants, and Trump distrusts the police enough that he ordered the military in. This is more evidence that Trump should be stopped.
I apologize - I conflated several things. There were several illegal kidnappings claimed by ICE a few weeks ago where agents took people off the street while hiding their identity and making every effort to seem like criminals. Trump’s current use of the marines and national guard seems to violate several legal precedents (and may have broken laws). I think the original deportations that set off this event may have been legal.
>Trump’s current use of the marines and national guard seems to violate several legal precedents (and may have broken laws).
Respectfully, please read WoolyAIs posts on this because he has the details. The order is to only protect Federal buildings and there is no evidence the calls up are doing anything else. My interpretation is that would make the order legal. My analogy is that if there were riots in a National Park, the Federal government is the entity responsible to police the Park and restore calm. Not as clear cut in this case. My understanding is if the National Guard is only protecting Federal buildings by only being within a few hundred feet of said buildings, then I don't see anything illegal about the order.
Interesting paper from the Apple folks on LRMs, "The Illusion of Thinking: Understanding the Strengths and Limitations of Reasoning Models via the Lens of Problem Complexity." Their abstract is quite concise, so I'll quote it...
> Through extensive experimentation across diverse puzzles, we show that frontier LRMs face a complete accuracy collapse beyond certain complexities. Moreover, they exhibit a counterintuitive scaling limit: their reasoning effort increases with problem complexity up to a point, then declines despite having an adequate token budget. By comparing LRMs with their standard LLM counterparts under equivalent inference compute, we identify three performance regimes: (1) lowcomplexity tasks where standard models surprisingly outperform LRMs, (2) medium-complexity where additional thinking in LRMs demonstrates advantage, and (3) high-complexity tasks where both models experience complete collapse.
My layperson's question is: how do they know whether they're accessing the LRM part of the package or the LLM part? ChatGPT's 4 and 4o are supposed to incorporate LRMs, but if I'm querying it, how do I know if the result came from the RM or LM?
Rather than using benchmarks, this team used "controllable puzzle environments" that let them "vary complexity systematically—by adjusting puzzle elements while preserving
the core logic." And they mention "contamination" in established benchmarks.
Another laypeep's quetion: When they talk about contamination in the benchmarks, are they implying that the AI packages have been fed the answers to benchmark tests to cheat their way to better results?
I poked around X a bit to see the strongest case *against* the paper's findings -- Ryan Greenblatt says (in my understanding of his tweets) that the problem was that the problem + the sequential steps of the solution ("disc 1 to rod 3, disc 2 to rod 2, ...") gets long enough that it stops fitting into the context window of the model. And in some cases the model actually just says "you're asking for a solution with 32,000 steps, and I don't want to write all that out; here is the procedure that solves the general case: ..."
This is one of those situations where I'm not expert enough to know who's right: Gary Marcus and friends vs. AI researchers and friends. But Ryan is chief scientist at Redwood Research so he probably knows what he's talking about
This is what I said to a friend of mine who posted this paper in a discord and was arguing this shows LLMs aren't reasoning:
```
I'm not particularly surprised that these models are bad at solving puzzles that require learning algorithms. You don't have to reach for towers of hanoi, most models can't do simple addition of large numbers. The reason is straightforward: they haven't learned the algorithm for addition (add the two numbers on the far left, carry the one if necessary, repeat). But neural networks learn other kinds of circuits, and large neural networks are able to learn some kind of addition algorithm that looks more like modular addition.
And even if you give it the algorithm, that's not enough to guarantee that it will all suddenly go well.
Imagine I asked you to add two numbers with a billion digits each by hand. You know the algorithm for adding things. But do you think, somewhere in those billion additions, you might make a mistake? To solve a puzzle like towers of hanoi, you need to a) know the algorithm and b) successfully execute it. But even people are not good at consistently executing algorithms! This is why we built computers! And to that point, LLMs can easily write code to solve towers of hanoi. I can ask claude to do it and it will spit out the result in < 30 seconds
I like how you’ve framed the question in terms of ‘is this something we’d expect a general intelligence to do’, but I disagree with your conclusion that it isn’t. I agree most people would make a mistake if you asked them to add two book-length numbers by hand, on say Mechanical Turk or a study where you pay them for their time. But a lot comes down to motivation and effort. If you found a way to attach as much status as they’d get for building something crazy in Minecraft, I think there are lots of teenagers who could find ways to add billion-digit numbers without mistakes, much more reliably than these models. The same is true of a decent proportion of arts undergrads - if you told them they couldn’t get into their uni of choice unless they worked out a way to add two billion-digit numbers without mistakes, a lot of them would work out ways to be much more accurate than the LLMs in this paper.
The ‘unmotivated arts undergrad’ heuristic is fine as far as it goes, but I think we also need to compare it to motivated people. I think the original idea of a general intelligence was something that you can point at a new task and it does as well as a human who doesn’t know how to do it, but is really motivated so they’ll get the right answer if at all possible. There is a sense of ‘improve itself’ built into old ideas about AI, and I think the ability to produce and follow a good approach to a new problem is part of it.
- it's not obvious to me that an LLM, given enough time and a large enough context window, couldn't figure out the right answer. No one would ever run that study, though, because it would expensive for very little gain
- I don't know why we "need" to compare LLMs to motivated people, since the vast majority of people are not motivated but also are considered generally intelligent
> how do they know whether they're accessing the LRM part of the package or the LLM part?
From the paper: "Most of our experiments are conducted on reasoning models and their non-thinking counterparts, such as Claude 3.7 Sonnet (thinking/non-thinking) and DeepSeek-R1/V3."
> When they talk about contamination in the benchmarks, are they implying that the AI packages have been fed the answers to benchmark tests to cheat their way to better results?
Generally contamination happens from the training data. That is, if you scrape the entire web, and somewhere on the web is the answer to your question, then the question is 'contaminated' because somewhere in training the model has already seen the answer.
---
A few folks have sent me this paper. Personally, I don't think it's nearly as big a deal as people want it to be. "Intelligence" and "reasoning" have become semantics debates. The point of a word is to define reality. If "intelligence" means "a property only humans have" then ml models will never be intelligent. If "intelligence" means "being able to do productive work in the world" then many models are already intelligent.
Does anyone have advice for a younger adult experiencing political derangement? It's become pretty bad for me in the last few months and has to do with exposure to a specific friend of mine. Posting here as I think it's likely to find someone with similar values to me who's gone through something like this.
In short I have a 1%er FAANG friend who is also a self-identified radical communist and a proud #AbandonHarris supporter. She was ecstatic when dems lost in 2024 and spoke often of "punishing" Americans over Gaza. Her political beliefs can best be summed up by the phrase, "After Trump, our turn!"
Personally I am in the bottom 20% for US income and am strongly driven by rationalism and my experience with working-class folks growing up in rust belt Appalachia. I'm also gay and in a committed long-term relationship to a man I intend on marrying if I still have the right to do so next year.
My friend's views are making me feel insane and furious. I have no idea how to process this much anger and rage toward elite "progressives" whom I used to regard as being on my side. Trust fund babies at Ivy League schools wearing Amazon Basics keffiyehs proudly bragged about fighting to cause maximum harm to me and my family, and I'm supposed to just forget about that and move on?!
I feel politically homeless and am dealing with anger all the time as a result. I find myself increasingly cheering on harms to Ivy League schools/academics/activists just because I want to see them suffer for their elitism. I know this is stupid and cruel of me but I just can't get over the lack of self-reflection and criticality coming from my ultrawealthy friend and those like her.
I don't want to blow up a decade+ friendship (and associated friendgroup) over this but I'm at my limit. My friendships with conservative antigay evangelical Christians cause me much less stress than this friendship with someone who is ostensibly only slightly further to my left. What the hell does a young gay liberal do with himself in the modern USA??!!
My advice when asking for a potentially-challenging change in someone else's behaviour without alienating them is generally to frame it not as
"I think this thing you are doing is bad and you have a moral obligation to stop it"
but as
"I get that what you're doing is fine, but would you mind please changing even so, as a favour to me and a concession to my weaknesses"
I can suck having to say the latter when you believe the former, but it's a good way not to put backs up.
If you say "I'm really struggling with the mental stress of politics right now, would you mind not talking about it around me, please?", that's far from certain to work, but it may?
I empathize tremendously. What you're going through sucks. I had a very dear, close friend abruptly dump our relationship - one of 8 years, in which we were in contact pretty much daily - via text after I clumsily indicated with a meme that I had not voted for Trump but also had contempt for how the other team made Trump's win so possible.
Coincidentally to you using the phrase "politically homeless," the meme video I sent was actually from an episode of Dumpster Fire with Bridget Phetasy, a comedian who speaks frequently on the increasing political homelessness of standard liberals, and even had a segment on one of her podcasts reading letters by listeners who also feel politically homeless (https://www.phetasy.com/s/letters-from-the-politically-homeless).
In fact, there's a segment of the video commentary podcast called "Breaking Bridget" - as in, breaking her sanity - when something in the news is particularly infuriating and crazy-making. If you've never seen the show, you might hugely enjoy it: (https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLmvknGtOQpCJsbDrfnQOPF9Wor64Dh3VV)
Since you’re asking, I think you need to figure out a way to be emotionally OK regardless of the political situation.
If you can’t, you will be personally unhappy in a way that’s totally meaningless, unproductive and out of your control. You will be less effective in all your pursuits, be they selfish or altruistic. You will give pleasure to sadists.
In general I don’t think politics is important enough to blow up meaningful connections over. Can you bond with your friends over music, hobbies, shared interests? Can you agree to put politics and Trump aside?
If these conversations are making you feel so angry, and you don’t feel like your friend is listening to your point of view, the best solution is to stop having them.
Talk about state ranked choice voting reform/possibilities. A leftist has never won the presidency or most of congress before so it's a much less risky way for them to get a substantial voice in congress while also being great for your political views (which seem pretty centrist to me).
I think you completely disagreed with the person you thought you seconded. They forgot to put a quotation mark around their first paragraph, which they were quoting from the original person in order to disagree with it.
I hope no one gets burned to the ground, because hate and destruction are bad, actually.
Some people are more interested in cultish in-group signaling than winning elections or actual pragmatic results that help people. Either you can tolerate listening to someone LARPing as a revolutionary commie, or find other friends. You're not going to convince your friend of anything.
The best case is to get them to avoid the subject. If they respect the friendship as much as you do, they'll probably be willing to at least try to tone it down.
If they're not willing to avoid the subject around you, the next-best thing is to get away from them as much as you can. A lot of people feed on anger and will spread it as far as they can, and all you can do is shut the door and keep the flames away from you. It sucks, but is for the best.
If you're not able to do either of those, I've had some success imagining people as live-action cartoons. It helps to reduce the resentment, it's hard to stay angry at a cartoon. Try imagining them as the communists from Disco Elysium. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k6tgI79uT1g
...maybe you should just play Disco Elysium in general.
It seems like your friend is very angry, or very stressed. If I was you I would say something like "It seems like you're under a lot of stress, to the point that it's starting to make me stressed." And then you find some way to ask them how you can help them relax.
Or something like that, I can't actually know what I would do in your shoes, since I'm not in your shoes.
I don't think your friend is representative of elite progressives, FYI. Rage at your friend seems very understandable - extrapolating from that to being angry at millions of people who are very non-monolithic in their views seems like a stretch and is causing you unnecessary stress.
Speaking as an Ivy League grad, who worked at a FAANG, and consider myself progressive - I find your friends views pretty abhorrent, for many of the reasons you outline. I also consider myself squarely a Democrat, while also being disappointed with a lot of what the party does.
Some people are just stupid. Like, way more stupid than the average, which is already quite stupid. That includes your friend; sorry about that.
Everything you wrote seems correct. I have no specific advice to give you, other than to reduce the contact with the friend for a few years; maybe they will come to their senses later again. Maybe not.
Sometimes people have it so good that they get crazy and start kicking at things around them until everything falls apart, and then they can finally focus on solving actual problems, which restores their sanity. Some people just can't handle having it good. And it really sucks that these people often ruin things for other people around them, who then have to suffer the consequences, despite never having it "too good" themselves.
I wonder what causes this, and how could it be prevented. My current best guess is selfishness. Because there is so much suffering in the world, that even if you have no problem to address in your own life, you can still focus your energy on helping others. If you look around this planet, there is no fucking way you could conclude that it is too good. And you don't even need to consider the entire planet; just looking at your neighborhood is often enough. But if all you see is yourself...
> I know this is stupid and cruel of me
Yes, but it is also a natural reaction to the overwhelming stupidity you see.
People can call themselves "the left" without actually caring about their neighbor. It can all be performative. Ask them what they are doing to make the world a better place. If the answer is something like "keeping my thoughts pure, and tweeting a lot", that's the performative kind. Those are not your allies. They are just cosplaying.
Thank you! This is how I normally talk to my kids when I explain to them how the world works (or more often, fails to work in some aspect). Some people are horrified when they hear that. Luckily, my kids believe that I am pointing in the right direction, but exaggerating a lot. When they grow up, they will understand.
"Sometimes people have it so good that they get crazy and start kicking at things around them until everything falls apart, and then they can finally focus on solving actual problems, which restores their sanity. Some people just can't handle having it good. And it really sucks that these people often ruin things for other people around them, who then have to suffer the consequences, despite never having it "too good" themselves."
Very good observation, well phrased. Thanks for that.
How are you "politically homeless"? You seem to have the politics of a normal liberal. Your radical friends are the ones who are politically out to sea.
Thank you for reading! Growing up on the coast in left-wing spaces has definitely biased my view of how left "normal" is, so yours is a fair point. I do think there is an over-representation of those radical views in elite and highly-salient cultural/academic spaces and have now come to regard that as a problem
Are they actually doing something that harms you or do they just disagree with you in an annoying way? If you don't like arguing about politics all the time then tell them that you don't want to talk about it with them.
Feeling politically homeless is a sign of maturity. What are the odds that after serious inquiry and reflection your politics will perfectly align with one of only two available political coalitions?
Yes, I believe that being a public advocate for (and using one's privilege to platform) messaging around "not voting/protest voting" does represent an actual harm if it contributes to an avoidable loss and subsequent policy changes.
However, this is an abstract sort of harm and they've never punched me in the face or anything. We decided recently to have less political dialogue on this and it was positive; I've just been stewing! I loved your last sentence especially, I will remember that. Thanks for reading
> Yes, I believe that being a public advocate for (and using one's privilege to platform) messaging around "not voting/protest voting" does represent an actual harm if it contributes to an avoidable loss and subsequent policy changes
If this person has idiotic views then surely you don't want them voting?
I totally agree with the basic idea you express here, but to be fair, the notion that Palestine cost Kamala the election is something between Democrat cope and antisemite hope. Trump brought down the house this time. First Republican popular majority in how long? The idea that he'll be followed by a downright Communist seems... remote, all things considered.
Not a majority. A plurality. And the margin was one of the smallest ever. And Democratic turnout was in fact down, so it is plausible that, but for Gaza, Harris would have won. Though if course inflation was a much bigger factor.
>Turnout in Republican areas dropped less than in Democratic areas across both battleground and non-battleground states,
1. 49.8% Trump, 48.3% Harris. The only tiny margin there is the's hair's breadth short of a majority.
2. I mean, seriously, what?? A 1.5% victory margin is not in any meaningful sense "one of the smallest ever". I think 2000, 1968, 1960, 1888, 1884, 1880, 1844 all had smaller margins, and all but one of those was well below 1%. While plenty of elections (including 2016, 2004 and 1976 most recently) have just-over-2% margins. Plus, innumerable elections at other levels are regularly decided by margins much smaller than 1.5%. "On the smaller side" would be reasonable. "One of the smallest ever" is, though vague and undefined enough that you can call it technically true in some definition, entirely misleading to a reasonable person.
3. Where's the evidence that *Gaza* was the primary (or even a non-negligible) cause of lower D turnout? I find such a claim frankly laughable, and a total disconnect from real people's perspectives. At the very least it requires some pretty strong evidence, not zero.
4. The kind of straw-grasping in comments like this ("yes Trump won but it wasn't *technically* a majority, and it was *only* by 1.5%, and...") is very dangerous at a time when respect for democracy is badly falling, and extremely tone-deaf coming right after years of focus on Trump's election denial.
5. Most fundamentally, do you like attitudes like this from Republicans? Did you appreciate comments after 2020 saying that Trump *only* lost by half what the polls predicted and so *really* he did pretty well? And that this shows he really should have gone further right-wing, and that's the reason he lost? Do you find them helpful and constructive? Do they come across as respectful of democratic outcomes? Do they seem likely to improve polarisation, or to make it worse?
Because I find insistences that a candidate only lost because they weren't extreme enough one of the most toxic political ideas in existence, and one that has done unimaginable harm already.
>A 1.5% victory margin is not in any meaningful sense "one of the smallest ever".
It is the 11th smallest, out of 60. So, in the smallest 20%
>Where's the evidence that *Gaza* was the primary (or even a non-negligible) cause of lower D turnout
1. It was a major issue for substantial part of the base. And it clearly caused a shift in places like Dearborn.
2. I didn't say it was the primary cause. I said merely that it is plausible that Harris would have won, absent Gaza.
>The kind of straw-grasping in comments like this ("yes Trump won but it wasn't *technically* a majority, and it was *only* by 1.5%, and...") is very dangerous at a time when respect for democracy is badly falling, and extremely tone-deaf coming right after years of focus on Trump's election denial.
I in no way said or implied that Trump's election was illegitimate. I was merely discussing possible causes of his win. Were I to observe that Bill Clinton would not have won in 1992 if the economy were better, would you accuse me of opining that his election was illegitimate?
>And that this shows he really should have gone further right-wing, and that's the reason he lost? Do you find them helpful and constructive?
Yes. They are helpful and constructive if we want to determine why candidates win elections. Which I understood to be the topic under discussion.
>Because I find insistences that a candidate only lost because they weren't extreme enough one
How is that relevant to anything I said? I said that it is possible Harris would have won absent Gaza. I didn't say she would have won, had the Biden Administration been more extreme on Gaza. Rather, no matter what the Administration did, it was guaranteed to alienate important groups of voters.
I'm not going to lie to you: I'm totally uninterested in probing the deep psephological minutiae. I'm sure you're right about turnout and so on, but I also don't care. My point is just, given that Reps don't even need a small popular margin to win elections, this one wasn't remarkably close, and it wasn't Palestine that did it. I think inflation is much more plausible for one, the shifty switcheroo between Biden and Kamala (not to mention the revelation of the coverup of his state) for another, and if we want to prod at fringe issues the Trump campaign themselves claimed to be astounded at the response the trans ads were getting, so that also seems a more likely culprit than Gaza.
LOL, you are "totally uninterested in probing the deep psephological minutiae.," yet you are oh so sure that "the revelation of the coverup of his state" was a key factor? Pick one, or the other.
>if we want to prod at fringe issues
If you think that Gaza was a fringe issue, esp for voters on the left, and Muslim voters, and Jewish voters, I can't help you.
Personally, I would (your objection notwithstanding) advise getting better friends. Luxury communists are a hair shirt that you don't have to wear. Don't do this to yourself, slash let her do it to you.
Fair enough, I have heard that advice before! But I am wrong often enough myself to want to be able to forgive that in others, even when it's emotionally hard for me. Plus, you only get so many long-term friendships in a human lifespan
"I am wrong often enough myself to want to be able to forgive that in others, even when it's emotionally hard for me."
That's very respectable, even admirable. Unfortunately, it does entail swallowing something truly bitter once in a while. I don't think there's any way around that in the end, good though the other commenters' answers to you are.
People just have frustrating political views, and that doesn't necessarily mean that this makes politics futile? I'll say that communism occurs way more in urban contexts than in rural ones, much like fascism--a lot of times people just talk past each other in politics and that's how these things work. (If it helps you stomach her hypocrisies, why are you so mad as a liberal against the views of the elite? They have no bearing on you)
Thank you, it's a fair point and I am also guilty of hypocrisy and foolishness! But, it's easy to become embittered when it feels like people on your side are just tearing things down for no reason and with no broader plan
It's not just people on your side, as the system changes many people on losing their scripts fall back to the child's impulse to wreck. Sad but it seems most people aren't used to exercising their imaginations to make new scripts, instead waiting for someone else to produce new ones to follow.
This is unfortunately symptomatic of well, being in a tough political spot. At least, in my opinion (Epistemic status: talking out of my ass--have been banned from both ACXD and on infinite hiatus from ACN). Politically speaking, communists as well as fascists have no actual ground or mass base to stand on--which makes fascists especially prone to random acts of violence, and communists especially prone to silly twitter takes. Consider that "actually existing socialism", as the Soviets call it, hasn't actually existed as a world ideological force since the 1990s--so they (communists) engage in a lot of larp. There aren't many feasible paths for the neo-Brezhnevite order. As a liberal, you have infinitudes more institutional representation and feasibility on getting shit done more than random meetups to feed homeless people. I am a broke ass bitch and left-leaning, and it also infuriates me that the local org actions are "volunteer work" and "praying for the magic socialist general strike".
I'm coming to the end of a philosophy degree, and I have always intended to go on to a PhD after I finish. But now that I've seen what Philosophy for Grown Ups looks like, I have decided I would rather sit at home and read philosophy books in my armchair. Philosophy looks to me more like playing a long game of Sudoku than anything useful.
Anglo-centric countries tend to have philosophy departments that look more like logic departments. There is probably still some actual philosophy being studied and debated in continental Europe, but I wouldn’t bet on it. When you go back and look through the seminal works of philosophy, even going all the way back the Plato and Aristotle, there is so much untilled soil left. It seems insane to me that there aren’t prestigious departments actively working on fundamental issues of humanity, epistemology, existence, praxeology, etc. etc. pretty sad imo
Where are you finding the logic departments? As far as I know logicians are very under-represented in US philosophy departments and it's very challenging for people who are more interested in the mathier side of philosophy to find positions. My undergrad university has twice as many professors who list an interest in epistemology as in logic, and generally more people interested in fundamental issues of humanity than formal rigor.
The average philosophy department has one logician. The average math department has zero logicians.
Also, as an epistemologist with. PhD in logic, I dispute your insinuation that epistemology is not formally rigorous! (Some of it more than others, to be sure, but there’s also no point in being formally rigorous with the wrong formal system.)
I'm tempted to argue the inverse of Jordan's point in the dialogue (trialogue?) about comparing academic philosophy discourse to bloggers arguing with one another: academic humanities are upstream of popular humanities. The academics provide value in part by curating, analyzing, categorizing, and calling attention to the best material (old and new) in their discipline so that better and more accessible material is available on the high end. This would hopefully lead to better material filtering through to general popular understanding.
Scott, you may recall, has a bachelor's degree in philosophy, and concepts from philosophy (along a great many other things he has studied or which have otherwise caught his interest) heavily inform a lot of his essays. Glancing at my list of Youtubers I follow, two of them (Natalie Wynn and Abigail Thorn) have masters degrees in philosophy, a third (Brandon Fisichella) has a bachelor's degree. I also follow several others with academic backgrounds in other humanities disciplines: a couple of historians (Premodernist (PhD), The Chieftan (MA)), a bachelor's degree in archeology (Lindybeige), a master's degree in film studies (Lindsay Ellis). Also a couple of autodidacts who make a largely successful effort to engage seriously with academic humanities literature: Crecganford (mythology and folklore) and Patrick Kelly (history of medicine).
I've also read, watched, and played a ton of fiction by various authors who are clearly familiar with at least some academic philosophy (and other humanities disciplines) and have integrated ideas from it into their works in a way that's both enjoyable and thought-provoking. Off the top of my head: J.R.R. Tolkien, Neal Stephenson, Brian Reynolds (game designer best known for Civ2 and SMAC), Richard Garriott (game designer best known for the Ultima series), the makers of "The Good Place", Lindsay Ellis (in her role as an SF author), and the Wachowskis. Most of these are autodidacts in philosophy, although Reynolds is a dropout from philosophy grad school, and Tolkien of course was a professor of a different humanities discipline whose name sounds misleadingly similar (philology).
When did the purpose of education become less about skilling in what one happened to be good at and exploring paths for specialization and this cynical slop about making sure everyone lands in some given field of work? Maybe this argument holds true for graduate training, especially since investment is so great, but the argument of "why do something if you're not going to be good at it" can be logically rendered to not doing anything beyond a given point because it isn't personally useful or utilitarian. (Which, well, a lot of people do...)
A hypothesis I had that might explain at least a 20% effect, though not the whole effect, is that the economy in general for young workers has gone increasingly specialist. There was a time when the generalist had an okay time in the entry-level economy. Even a middle class kid who wanted to pursue some kind of graduate degree in the humanities could go five years, not end up in academia, and do fine. Now they're losing out to jobs outside of academia that don't require at least five years experience to people who do have such experience.
Honestly? I kinda feel like the specialization and lack of hiring for entry level job seekers (my brother had to do *three* internships as a MechE to secure 100k TC upon graduating--my MS in Statistics is nearly worthless without internship experience) has kind of made that set of "guaranteed career majors" super fucking narrow. Like, hell, if a kid wants a job, major in accounting, engineering, or nursing these days--the trend has only gotten worse, especially for entry level applicants. Like, the advice of "Major in STEM--learn to code" obviously failed my generation (the older gen Zs). Even CS grads are eating shit right now. Don't know when there's going to be a reversal of the general hollowing of entry-level work, but things seem to be as grim if you majored in Chemistry or Math instead of Philosophy. (Could become a K-12 teacher... wondrous occupation)
It probably happened when higher education expanded from serving the elite to serving the middle class as well. If you weren't born into wealth or prodigious talent/intellect then your lifetime financial prospects are on the line. Most regular people can't afford to risk dedicating so much time to something that doesn't set them up for a good career.
No doubt that education is necessarily tied to working outcomes and careers, but I would argue the connection between degree and employment is increasingly frayed unless one chooses an increasingly narrow set of career choices. That and middle class propogation is kind of as materially banal as is upper class luxurious education spending.
Re: the Joanna Newsom review, only if you want me to vote it in the negative numbers because I can't stand her twee, coy, arch little voice and harp strumming. And no, it's not because she's Gavin's cousin, I heard and hated her music long before I found out that relation.
It's odd. I rather like Tori Amos, but Newsom makes me wish I had a revolver so I could reach for it.
Second cousin twice removed according to her Wikipedia page. I should have the terminology down pat but I have to look it up every time. My cousin’s son’s daughter is related me how again?
It's pretty easy when you start thinking of it in terms of graph coordinates. X axis is number of cousins between you and the person in question, Y axis is the number of generations between you and the person. Nth cousin is the number of nodes away on the X-axis, Nth removed is the number of nodes away on the Y-axis.
Opposite for me, I hate Tori Amos. I only like one Newsom album though.
JN sounds to me like heavy Joni Mitchell and Kate Bush inspiration (maybe some Bjork), injected with more high-brow multi-instrumentation and chord changes.
I wanna give her a chance, but her voice crushes me and unlike say Danny Brown she doesn't do anything too new. I go to Elliott Smith and Nick Drake for my folk needs.
Do you think its unfair to rate low an entry which just presents its reviewed subject at an object-level and adds a few paragraphs of personal opinion? Im going off on some reviews from last years that really changed my mind on a subject, connected it to a broader context and offered deep insight. But I am not sure if it is fair to expect this from the review format.
I think it’s fair. One year there was a book review in the finals that seemed like the Monarch Notes version of the book itself. It was concise and clear and attractively put together, but there was very little
commentary about how the original book was good or bad or what was important or interesting about the book’s subject and its take on the subject. Maybe no
commentary at all. I was shocked that it made the finals. I had probably rated
After reading the testosterone post I'm curious if there are equivilant positive effects with Estrogen in women. Or if not E then what hormones do provide the equivalent effects in women. Perhaps the answer is still Testosterone but with more side effects?
I haven't read the testosterone review, but there's definitely evidence that estrogen supplementation can improve mood, sexual function, and bone density in women post-menopause (interestingly, it seems like starting estrogen replacement therapy earlier, circa 40, leads to significantly better outcomes than starting later in life).
Even low-dose testosterone can cause masculinizing effects that most women aren't very excited about (lower voice, increased hair growth, genital changes, etc.)
Estrogen is amazing, much better than testosterone IMO. Since I started estrogen, my mood and "joie de vivre" have greatly improved. I've seen moderate but significant improvements in energy levels and executive function. My libido has change quite a bit qualitatively, but is about the same as it was when my system had normal male levels of testosterone. I've lost some physical strength, but not a lot. A lot of physical changes, which I am generally extremely happy with. I look several years younger. And I feel emotions a lot more keenly and positively: positive emotions feel brighter, while negative ones are more likely to produce an experience of catharsis rather than despair than they used to.
My experience in this is as a trans woman who started estrogen at the age of 41. Some time before realizing I'm trans, I was treated for a couple years with clomid for marginally low testosterone levels. The higher testosterone levels from clomid made me feel better in some ways and worse in others, while estrogen has been almost pure benefit from my perspective.
That said, I have a friend who transitioned in the other direction after having previously been treated for PCOS. He would almost certainly give the opposite verdict on the relative merits of testosterone and estrogen.
I have never had my T or E levels tested but I've had the same experience.
I may have been low T before (short [although this corresponds with high T], very little facial hair, 1/2 an orchi lol) so having any hormones may have been an improvement.
Estradiol and testosterone are not exactly mirrors of each other with respect to this. Testosterone supplementation for women basically turns them into men -- see trans men exprerience for this.
As always, begging for data analytic work/internships. But more importantly than that (since I have given up on finding gainful employment for now), any math discords where I can get my topology and stat homework checked? We're working out of Casella and Berger this upcoming semester, and the main mathematics discord is filled with people asking geometry questions.
as a friendly fellow mathematician, I could provide feedback on some problems/problem sets. I don't have enough free time to do full grading, though, and it has been a couple of tens of years since I've been through Munkres.
Has anyone experienced a massive change in appetite in their early to mid 20s?
I used to get hungry on a normal schedule. I’d wake up and be slightly hungry. If I skipped breakfast I’d be very hungry by lunch, and skipping lunch at that point would make me ravenous by dinner. Now, I can easily skip eating anything for a day and not even notice that I didn’t eat.
For context, I only had a normal sized breakfast Friday, Saturday I ate two hot dogs (couldn’t have been more than 500 calories), while also doing some manual labor moving boxes and furniture. I didn’t feel hungry until 3:30 Sunday (and not very hungry either), where I went to my nephew’s graduation party and ate quite a bit.
I haven’t lost any weight, so I guess when I do eat I’m eating enough to compensate? I was always light for my height, but I exercise at least a few times a week, live in a city where walking 10,000 steps is basically a base-line, and never had much of a sweet tooth for sodas or processed snacks.
I take a low dose of Adderall off and on, but I’ve been taking that for years. If anything, I take it much less often than I did when I first got on it.
It’s not concerning for me, since I haven’t lost weight, and not being hungry 3 times a day is actually liberating. I can work starting in the morning and through lunch, then have a big dinner cooked with friends, or eat out, and I think Socrates is right in that “hunger is the best relish.” Even though I don’t *feel* especially hungry for dinner, I think my body must actually need the calories since the food just *tastes* noticeably better.
My theories are:
- I’m no longer growing, so my body needs less calories (although I’ve been the exact same weight and height for nearly a decade).
- I’ve developed late-onset bipolar disorder (I haven’t been depressed in years so idk about this one) and am in an extended period of mania? This sort of high level of focus, to the ignorance of hunger is something I’ve read about in the biographies of famously diligent people who were likely bipolar.
- I have a tumor on the hunger part of my brain or on my stomach? Probably not this one as there’s no other symptoms or imbalances in my body. No family history of cancer as far as I’m aware, so it would be really surprising if this is what it was.
- Some other physical change in my body that I don’t have the context to know about.
- It’s nothing and people’s appetites change for literally no reason sometimes.
- The government, in a mass campaign to fight obesity, is putting Ozempic in the tap water (I raw dog tap water with no filter, so I might be especially vulnerable).
Overall I’m not worried about it, since I feel healthy, and I’d consider this an improvement over being hungry often. Has anyone experienced something like this before?
Edit: Also, I did a 4 Day water fast for the first time in January, although I didn’t start to notice a change in appetite until April.
This isn't helpful, but "I raw dog tap water with no filter" is definitely the grossest way I've heard somebody describe something completely not-gross recently.
Are you using nicotine? I know you didn't mention it, but I did not appreciate the massive extent to which nicotine impacted my appetite until after I quit.
Interesting. Yes actually! I started using nicotine lozenges when I read, which I do almost every day. The timing doesn't line up though, since I started doing that ~2 years ago.
My theory is that this would get me addicted to reading, and while I wouldn't call myself addicted, it definitely has made me more likely to pick up a book when I have nothing else to do.
While the last idea is totally absurd, it is definitely my favorite new conspiracy theory. Yes, I am in my mid-20s here, and my appetite changed dramatically once two years ago and once a year ago. The first time I don't know exactly why, but I suspect it is because I started cooking at home after I got married. Home cooking is significantly more satiating to me than any restaurant dining (fast food or not). The second time I got a stomach bug, and food is still slightly less appetizing to me.
It’s nothing and people’s appetites change for literally no reason sometimes.
Or rather, they change for non-obvious reasons sometimes. Maybe you ingested some new strain of bacteria that changed your intestinal biome. It could be anything. It's not possible to say from just the info provided.
What advice do y'all have for being a parent to a genius-level child?
Without wanting to humblebrag, our toddler seems *extremely* smart; probably ~165 IQ. We can imagine all kinds of challenges in public school, but even most private schools.
- Is it worth living in a "good" school district?
- Should we live someplace cheaper so we can pay for private school or tutors?
- How do we help him navigate the differences with his age cohort, and make sure he's socially well-adjusted?
- other advice?
=====
Editing to add: appreciating the comments, but please note I never said anything about "maximizing his potential", on the contrary I asked about being "socially well-adjusted".
He has music tutor now... but because he loves music, not because we're trying to force him to become the next Mozart. But I'm also aware that early music training seems to be one of the prerequisites for developing perfect pitch (which I personally would kill to have).
If there are other interventions like music lessons, where we can do things **because he loves them**, but that also carry outsized benefits by starting early, I think we'd be especially interested in those.
We would love for him to have "normal" relationships with other children, but neither of us is entirely sure how to help that happen. We are both ~3-sigma, and were often being bullied for being different. That stopped when I entered college... but I was also 14, which had its own trade-offs. But being able to move at *MY* pace instead of being constantly held back was thrilling. I'd probably make that same choice again, but I'd also like to find even better options, if they exist.
Realize that most teachers aren’t crazy about gifted kids, try to gently find the ones who are. Same goes for friends, parents, etc. People will be skeptical and resentful.
I think it’s worth finding a “good school” so your kid will have a relatable peer group. It’s hard to be the only 3rd grader reading grown up books. Be aware that the fanciest private schools will likely have a divide between the rich kids and the smart kids.
Most gifted kids are “spiky”; help them race ahead in the things they love and are good at while insisting they keep up in other necessary areas. This will be difficult.
I recommend some kind of charitable service for your kid eventually; if they’re truly in the cognitive elite they need to develop empathy for others who are not as lucky. The world is full of snotty grown up gifted kids.
From my own childhood, the best thing I would keep is academic competitions. For me math olympics and summer schools for gifted kids were the thing. In Germany, where I grew up, most large or medium-size towns had weekly training circles. The special thing is not so much the content or the contests themselves, but that there I was among other like-minded people. My peer group (outside of school) was mostly comprised of people from those circles.
In the summer there are summer schools for gifted youths. Those are also very cool, but the participants came from too far away to form a permanent peer group. Perhaps that's different nowadays with the internet, where peer groups can more easily be maintained online.
All this is still a long time ahead for you, since (in Germany) those options are only available roughly from age 10 onward. But for me the more important thing wasn't to expose me to an enriching environment. That is something I could easily create myself. There are books, after all. For me the more important part was to have a good peer group. I am not sure how to do that before the age of 10, but it is something I would keep my eyes open for.
- Take bullying seriously. A lot of kids who are bullied get the advice that bullying would stop if they changed their behavior - this is probably true but not helpful. If you can change the environment to stop the bullying, do. If not, you can at least be someone who listens and tries to help.
- Take boredom seriously. I did pretty well in the gifted/accelerated track in elementary school, but around middle school I got to a point where it just wasn't fast enough any more. My early experiments with self-studying led to situations where I was trapped in *years* of painfully boring classes. This was genuinely a bit traumatic and it took me until midway through college to unlearn the instinct of "if you try to get ahead you will be punished". Regular public schooling is genuinely fine for many kids, even extremely bright kids - just be on the lookout for a point where school starts causing extreme distress or anxiety.
- Arrange for play in mixed-age groups. Many of my most intellectually satisfying relationships as a kid were with kids 2-5 years older than me. The age gap didn't feel like a big deal and the extra years of development meant that older kids were more likely to be up to my intellectual caliber. (I recall doing this starting age 5-6.)
> But I'm also aware that early music training seems to be one of the prerequisites for developing perfect pitch (which I personally would kill to have).
That is not the take away I got from my research into perfect pitch (called absolute pitch by the academics). The impression I got is that most people start with absolute pitch and evolve to relative pitch as they develop. Also, there are trade-offs - relative pitch is better for some things than absolute pitch.
Early music training is very good for many other things, including helping with being socially well-adjusted. "plays well with others". And you're doing it right by doing it because he loves music and not forcing him.
My own understanding was that there must be a genetic component: concordance is something like 75% for MZ twins versus 50% for DZ twins. And even then, it's rare: only ten percent in tonal languages, and far less for things like English.
My parents just… let me do what interested me. I kind of appreciate that in retrospect.
I was exceptionally good at math as a child, and my parents let me just read the algebra/trig textbooks when I was in 5th grade, which was great. When I was in high school I walked a mile to the university for math classes. My dad collaborated with me to define a vector graphics format and built a drawing program for it in 6th grade, which was fun. I did a lot of math competitions, when I bothered to wake up for them.
I was also very, very lazy, and aside from turning in papers at the last minute/acing tests, I mostly screwed around with video games, BBSes, and talking to my girlfriend.
At some level, I guess a private tutor and more challenging classes might have helped me do something more impressive with my life. But for me, at least, having smart but not especially competitive peers felt better than being pushed. And I got along with my peers way better than some folks I’ve known who just got their GRE and rat-holed on academia.
It’s totally possible to be a well-adjusted prodigy, who goes on to do exceptional things. But not every kid especially wants to do that, and I think encouraging empathy and social skills was more helpful for my life satisfaction than pushing me to learn work habits as a young person.
I think that the easiest way for a child to be well-adjusted is to grow up among similar children. In case of a +3σ child it would be among other +3σ children. The problem is that finding such place is difficult.
I know that many people would disagree with this. They would insist that the healthiest place for every child is among the 0σ children, because hey, they are the majority, therefore your social adjustment will always be measured by how much you are compatible with them, not with your peers. Also, are you planning for your child to spend his entire life among other +3σ people?
But such reasoning is mistaken, I believe. Starting with the most obvious: yes, adult people actually often stratify themselves by various traits, such as intelligence, and it is quite common for a smart person to be surrounded by other smart people at work, to find a smart partner, etc.
But even if we focus on the childhood development, I believe the 0σ people are making a typical-mind fallacy here. The thing that makes relationships easy is not "being among 0σ people" but "being among your peers". For a 0σ person those are the same things, but for your child, those are not. That doesn't mean that your child should *only* ever interact with other +3σ children. But it means that he should *start* interacting with them (interacting with similar people is the easy mode), and *later* learn how to interact with other people (interacting with different people is the hard mode). You learn to walk before you learn to run; you learn to interact in easy mode before you learn to interact in hard mode. Trying to make people run before they can walk is setting them up to fail.
Problem, is, a good district is probably not enough. Good district probably only means +1σ on average. A good school in a good district still probably only means +2σ. Unless there is explicitly a school for gifted children, ultimately you will have to find the peers outside school. In various after-school activities, and networking with your friends' children.
I am talking from my experience here. My daughter is in a good school in a good district, but she still doesn't click with her classmates intellectually. She clicks much better with children of my friends; the problem is, only a few of my friends have children of the same age. So we kept asking our friends what do their children enjoy... or, if they have older children, what did they enjoy at this age... and found an afternoon activity where my daughter finally clicked with the entire group. That kinda solves the problem for now. Plus I am telling her to do all kinds of competitions, in the spirit of "it is not important to win, but to participate", but the actual goal here is for her to meet other smart kids.
This, so much. My daughter at 3 associated with the 5-year-olds in her daycare. (She is now six.) The best thing we ever did for her was a club for highly gifted children that she visits once a week. We were very lucky to have this nearby.
Some activities select for intelligence (and other traits) indirectly.
As an obvious example, if a school has extra math lessons, and preferably chooses students who participate successfully at math olympiads, the student in that school will have high average IQ, even if no one tests for the IQ explicitly. (Heck, even if all the teachers believe that IQ is not a thing, and that your success at math olympiad is merely a result of hard work. The beliefs don't matter, the selection algorithm does.)
Various voluntary activities seem to select for intelligence and conscientiousness, if only because stupid and lazy people are more likely to stay at home, or because intelligent and conscientious parents are more likely to introduce their children to that type of activities. The activity doesn't even have to be intellectual in its nature... two specific examples I have in mind are a tourist club for children (something like Scouts, but not exactly the same thing), or a nature conservation association (people meet to mow the grass around protected plants), those are two places where I met smart and interesting people.
So, if you didn't have an explicit place for gifted children, it would make sense to try something like this.
Thanks, I think this captures a lot of my concern, and also my logic about a "good school".
I'm not worried about him excelling academically; wild horses probably couldn't hold back his thirst for understanding. But my peers when I was younger weren't selected for intelligence, and I didn't have any sense (at the time) of the nature of the disconnect. I met a childhood friend for lunch around age 35, and was like, "holy CRAP, no wonder I seemed bizarre to those kids!"
Have known quite a few kids like that. They usually seem not to be older
than their chronological age when it comes to what kind of play they enjoy, what scares them, what amuses them, etc. I recommend putting effort into making sure they log lots of pleasant time playing with their peers. As for schooling — I think it’s better to supplement their early education rather than speed it up. There are plenty of fun things they can do that will challenge them mentally and are not geared towards getting them ahead of others academically: books, lego and similar, photography, theater, acting, music, drones, geocaching. . .
There's only correlation of r = 0.3 between IQ at 2 and IQ at 5 (source: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0160289617302830 ), let alone adulthood. Probably your kid will grow up to be smarter than average, but I don't think you have evidence for much beyond that. I certainly wouldn't move or make any other giant life changes you wouldn't want to make if your child just had somewhat-above-average IQ.
Is it even possible to measure IQ below the age of 3?
If I remember correctly, I was taught at school that you cannot even diagnose mental retardation at that age reliably, because it is difficult to clearly distinguish between mental retardation and mere specific disability.
So I wonder how much of the "IQ change between ages 2 and 5" is actually that kids who were diagnosed as "retarded" at 2 were reclassified as e.g. "average intelligence but dyslectic" at 5.
Originally, IQ was a **quotient** of the child's mental age divided by their biological age. It's much easier to have false negatives than false positives, so I agree determining **low** IQ is probably difficult to do accurately with kids that young.
OTOH, if your kid is consistently hitting developmental milestones at 2/3 of the nominal age, then their IQ probably really is about 150.
There's also censoring bias: you can't be sure what the kid does/n't understand if they aren't able to speak yet. But if the kid can already speak 6-word sentences in two languages, you can start to get a pretty good idea what they understand.
So overall, I think it's more feasible to do accurately on the high end than the low end
My concern is that with an older child, you can test multiple abilities and kinda calculate the average, but with a small child, the few things you can test are over-represented... and "starting to talk earlier or later" is one of those things that most people notice. Yes, it is related to IQ, but also to other things; I think on average girls start talking earlier than boys, bilingual children start talking a little later, etc.
That makes sense... being the nerds that we are, we've looked up the whole list of developmental milestones, which have a lot of things beyond just speech. He consistently is reaching these things at about half of the nominal age.
But you're right, it's a range of things, including how they play with their toys (are they putting one object inside of another object? Are they interacting with imaginary objects? etc).
Am I misunderstanding the paper? The abstract makes it sound as though previous work found correlations of order 0.3, but that they've tried to correct for measurement errors and are getting 0.6+:
"infant intelligence revealed a strong cross-time correlation with preschool intelligence (r = 0.91) and moderate correlations with childhood and adolescent intelligence (r = 0.69 and 0.57, respectively)"
I agree about not making huge life changes for limited impact, but can imagine many marginal decisions that might be swayed by this.
I mean, IQ scores are really only "truly" stable by adolescence (as in, the correlation between IQ score at age x and adulthood decays as age decreases). But by that time period, they're usually autonomous enough to at least provide input on what they would need. I just think that even in the ideal case (if their kid was a genius) the idea of my parent investing incredible amounts of resources and time to plan out my "maximum potential" sounds perfectionist and overbearing.
I was considered very smart as a toddler, but I’ve regressed toward the mean (a lot). My parents sent me to a fancy Montessori school in Manhattan and it was fun, but I don’t know if it made a huge difference in the long run.
One thing I would suggest from personal experience: I was accelerated to be with 6 and 7 year olds when I was 4, and they chased me with puppets and picked on me. Not great! I ended up much happier leaving that class to play with kids my own age.
Expose him to a lot of extracurriculars until he finds something he loves (note, he is young and not obligated to love this one thing forever, his tastes may change). Keep him challenged through the extra-curricular activity (or two).
Tutors are OK, but he's so young that this is a down the road thing. Idk, short term just introduce him to a variety of subjects and fields and give him specialized schooling in what he takes to. I rebel against this notion that his life needs to be planned out to the nth degree, surely the kid just needs some adjustments here and there and doesn't need to be pressured into becoming something he didn't choose. In the face of moral uncertainty, maximize choiceworthiness or something.
We got him a music tutor because he loves music, and found music lessons with other children incredibly frustrating. He can tap on beat, sing a melody, etc. He seems to find going at his pace freeing, rather than repressive (and that was my own experience as a child).
That's good and healthy. As long as you're not forcing him to become the next Terrance Tao or something, allowing him to explore and experience and develop is all just a normal (though accelerated for him) part of being a kid. I think when he gets to elementary to middle school is when things like accelerated schooling and different classes become an issue. In general any education which even offers advanced placement and standing is good enough--just make sure he's not bullied. (This was so bad in my case I was held back from moving up grades, but I turned out--well, not fine, but there's enough noise there I wonder if education would've changed my trajectory)
If your family structure allows it, homeschooling could be promising. You have far more flexibility over controlling the difficulty and pace of your toddler's learning. I was homeschooled and will say that you need to be proactive about (borderline forcing) finding frequent social interactions for your child. However, I did find that homeschooled children are a lot more academically inclined than public school kids, so those social settings might be more accommodating for a high-IQ kid.
Homeschool is certainly on the table later on, and/or the Friedman-style "unschooling". I think much of our challenge will be finding "peers" (with a h/t to Villiam for expressing the challenge of "normal for an average person" vs "natural for a non-normal person")
The single most important thing you can do is make sure he has normal relationships and normal experiences. Get him to a normal school and make sure his friends are normal and his relationships are stable. Do not try and force him down a path of academia if he doesn't want to, gentle encouragement is fine.
Actually both. Mostly it should be a natural thing, but I've seen way too many academics and "geniuses" who are out of touch with reality and normal people because their parents didn't want them to go to parties or whatever.
I suspect that situation is confusing because there are three kinds of children that may look similar at first sight:
* naturally gifted geniuses,
* children of ambitious parents who push them work extra hard,
* autists, interested in one thing and ignoring everything else.
From outside, they may all seem the same. All of them achieve extraordinary results (autists only in one specific thing).
From inside, the geniuses and the autists are *enjoying* the thing(s) they do, and you couldn't stop them if you tried to. While the children of the ambitious parents are *suffering*, and they wish they could take a break (but the Tiger Mom says no).
As a result of this confusion, people often argue that schools for gifted children should be banned... because they cause autism... or because ambitious parents should not be making their children suffer. They don't realize (or don't want to admit, for ideological reasons) that those are different types of children.
If you make all of these children attend the school for normies, the gifted ones will be super bored every day, the autists will remain autistic, and the ambitious parents will pester their kids with piano lessons and extracurricular activities.
Yeah it's a good point that there are different kinds of geniuses but I don't think gifted schools are necessarily abnormal, people in them still want to socialise and make friends with non-gifteds. Whatever school situation the parents choose, the goal is just to make sure they have otherwise ordinary experiences despite living odd lives.
That is an interesting empirical question. I have no data either way, I just wanted to say that even if a child who attends a gifted school has friends outside the school... that does not necessarily imply that those friends are *not* gifted. Maybe they are simply the gifted ones who didn't have an opportunity to attend such school.
This could be an interesting research. Take the kids from a gifted school, ask them to name their best friend outside the school, and measure that friend's IQ. I suspect that it would be above average.
I agree that the experiences of the gifted children should not be impoverished. Doing it the right way, they should have *more* diverse experience, because they can experience everything the normies can do, *plus* some extra things.
This is a good point. I recall listening to Raj Chetty's talk at the LSE about the Moving To Opportunity reanalysis, and one of his core assumptions was something along the lines of "poor people don't move neighborhoods very much". I burst out laughing, wondering if he had ever actually met a poor person in the USA. I'm guessing that when you work in your mother's lab and start Harvard at 16, you probably don't. Shame about the research being completely undermined (and even worse that none of the other academics realize it).
Special programs for gifted students tend to be features of large school systems. I grew up in Waterloo, Canada, a mid-sized town, which at the time offered only very limited enrichment activities for intellectually precocious students. If I had grown up in Toronto, a city of millions, I would have had access to specialized full-time classes for gifted students.
If actually +4SD, standard gifted program will likely be somewhat inadequate, though a good start just in terms of social environment
Ultimately this depends on goals. If you want maximum development of potential you will probably want a tutor, but then, by the time they're of age, AI may well be able to handle that far more cheaply (and likely better) than a human...
I think this notion of maximizing the development of the child is rather stupid. Kid's like, a kid, not some utility function. Whatever happened to like, letting them choose within reasonable circumstances how much they want to push themselves? It is what they're going to do when they are adults anyways.
I think there is something to be said for encouraging accomplishment, and you can do it without belting out every verse of the Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother. I kind of wish I had come out of high school a bit more skilful and accomplished, and I think my parents could have done a bit to encourage me to take up and stick to a couple of activities. God knows I spent enough time watching TV.
Get him to a psychiatrist for neurodivergence evaluation, take the advice to heart, and be very serious about not letting him burn out or end up traumatized or any other number of things that feed the "ex-gifted kid, current miserable depressed failure" archetype.
I'm not blaming anyone; the most important point is that it can absolutely happen by accident. My parents didn't want to burn me out either, but they just didn't know how to handle a child like that, and there was no one to tell them, in the pre-internet days. So, it's important that you know.
What does this accomplish? At best the psychiatrist diagnoses him with something that didn't need to be diagnosed, like autism. At worst they put him on drugs that end up being harmful.
Autism is important to take into consideration, not because we need the diagnosis, but because autistic children need some non-obvious accomodations to grow up normally. I'm suggesting a psychiatrist not for the treatment, but for verifying if the child is actually autistic.
I am saying this as a late-diagnosed autistic person who used to be extremely gifted in early childhood, and is now so mentally ill that I work with psychiatry researchers rather than doctors. And it's pretty much the consensus that most of it could be avoided if I didn't need to mask, and was allowed to satisfy my special needs.
Specifically, when comment nesting gets deep enough that Substack decides to generate a "continue thread" link, this goes to a 404 for me today. I don't see anyone else complaining, though, so I'm guessing it's just me.
I'm using Firefox. How is everyone else reading Substack?
For the past several weeks, I would click, it would take me back to the main comment page, but if I then reloaded, it would go to the desired thread. The back button didn’t properly work after all this though.
But today the “continue thread” button is actually working for the first time.
It’s been broken for a while. A work-around is to click on the time stamp for the comment containing the “Continue Thread” link.
(If it isn’t clear what I mean by “time stamp,” at the top of each comment you will see the name of the commenter, followed by the name of the commenter’s substack if the commenter has one, followed by an indication of how long ago the comment was posted, e.g. “2h” if it was posted approximately 2 hours ago. Click on the last of these.)
Same, but the reason that I don't complain (and I suspect that others don't complain) is that I've already complained a ton about other bugs that are still not fixed, so it's not really a useful action. One should just accept that over time things get worse.
I think I figured it out for my browsers. It seem to go to the very top of the thread till I refresh and then it behaves the way it used to when clicking the —>
In case i wasn’t clear, I follow the right arrow and the hit the refresh icon in the address input, wait a moment or two and the thread continues like it used to
I'm experiencing the same problem on both Firefox (desktop and mobile) and Chrome. On Chrome a blank comment section comes up instead of a 404. It's been like this for a week. In either browser, refreshing the page works. Otherwise the app works too.
Is it within the spirit of the contest to give higher votes to entries, not because it's of higher quality per se, but because the topic is important and I want to signal-boost it?
I don't think it is. You're meant to rate the review, not the thing being reviewed. I myself found a review in which I agreed with the thesis, but found that the review itself was rather lacking, so I gave it a moderately high rating (definitively lower than the others).
I see why 'The Metaethics of Joy/Suffering/AI' didn't get many ratings. I couldn't even get myself to finish reading it. Even the stuff I rated low, I at least finished. I predict I would rate it low if I could get myself to care enough to finish the review.
I think if you can't bring yourself to finish reading a review that's enough justification to give it a low rating. Maybe if you want to be extra charitable you could round your rating up a point or so in case it gets better later. But writing something you actually want to read is an important part of the job- if it doesn't achieve that it's a bad review.
If the Jesus told about in the Bible were to come to you and tell you about how your sins have got you doomed, but if you believe in him and obey him he will save you from them, what would be your reaction and why would you reject him?
If it’s the super-charismatic, compassionate, mystical miracle-worker of Matthew, sure! That seems totally reasonable. It’s a pretty high bar, though. Also, selfishly, it would be awesome being one of His new Apostles.
Taking your premise literally and seriously, if *THE* actual Jesus of the Bible - as in, the guy who is LITERALLY a conduit of *THE* God of the Bible - had anything specific to say about me and what I should do, I would abjectly and totally surrender to it.
Because in your premise, God is real and knowable. As the indisputably omnipotent being of the universe, it would be irrational to *not* completely surrender to that state of reality. If the real-true God orders me to slit a baby's throat, well, I'm going to do that. I'll do anything it wants.
But to answer your question directly. I already believe in God, though not in the anthropromorphic sense of a man in the sky who tells you what to do. I think that has numerous metaphysical incoherencies. But suppose I'm wrong about that and "God" appears to me as a man in the sky telling me what to do. Well, to figure out whether this really is God, the foundation of all reality, rather than some sort of polytheistic god or spirit or something else that's very far from that, I'd have to figure out if he is metaphysically absolute abd morally absolute. The first would be hard to determine, if all he's doing is telling me things; the second would be the way to go.
So first of all, is he telling me to worship and praise him? Then I know he's definitely not God. Someone (again accepting the "just like a human except somehow the foundation of everything" framing of God instead of "a metaphysical Absolute beyond our comprehension" for the sake of argument) who can be described as God would have to be morally perfect, and anyone who demands that people flatter and praise them is as about as far from morally perfect as it's possible to be. Would you consider a king who uses his power primarily to demand people praise him as a good person? Given that are even humans (morally deficient as humans are) who manage to be better than that and use their power to help people rather than glorify themselves, a god who makes "praise me" his primary focus would be significantly less moral than even some human beings! Certainly not even in the running for being capital g God.
Second, does he tell me to obey him, or does he tell me to do the morally right thing? Note that the morally right thing cannot in any way change depending on who commands it. If God were to command torturing innocent people, it would still be unspeakably evil and wrong. It would just prove he wasn't God. If this "God" tells me to do something evil, then I know he's not God. If he tells me to do something on the grounds that he commands it, rather than on the grounds that it's objectively right, then I know he's not God, since might does not make right and no one moral could say it does. But if he tells me to do something that is plausibly moral, and provides an argument for why it's morally right, and I can't see a flaw in the argument, then yes I should do it.
Third, I'd have to ask him if sends anyone to hell. It should go without saying that anything that would inflict infinite punishment on someone is literally infinitely evil. If this involves sadistic torture, as some Christians believe, it becomes literally the most evil thing possible to comprehend. Thus a god who told me he inflicts that on anyone would be the literal evil incarnate, and to worship him and obey him would be the most evil act it's possible for a human to do.
Would you sadistically torture a criminal? What would you think of someone who chooses to torture criminals? And not even in proportion to their crimes, but far far beyond them. Clearly, such a person would be evil. Woulld you actually call them profoundly moral?
And would you worship a god who did that? Would you choose to submit to such a god, not resist and fight him, just as long as you don't get tortured, without minding that others will be? And would you consider that choice anything less than the definition of a maximally evil act? I don't want to presume the answer, but it seems like you've made it pretty clear, unless I've misunderstood you.
(I think fundamentalist Christians, and anyone else who believes in hell, are strong candidates for the most evil people on earth. In virtue terms at least, not in consequentialist terms. Interestingly, they share that status with pro-choice feminists. Consequentially, both groups aren't doing that much harm, since fetuses probably lack personhood and hell probably doesn't exist. But virtue-wise, both groups make unequivocally clear that if those things did exist they'd have no problem with them whatsoever, that they'd happily kill or torture billions of people, or let them be killed or tortured, without the slightest guilt. I'm not sure if, say, Putin, Stalin and Hitler combined ever reached the scale of that depravity.)
But if the being appearing to me firmly repudiated all those things, condemned all evil and sadistic things, and commanded me to do morally good things, not because he told me to but because they're right, then I'd consider that it might be really God, notwithstanding the metaphysical issues of being a contingent physical being (a man in the sky) yet also a foundational and necessary being--i.e. I'd consider that I might have been wrong that God couldn't have those attributes--and I'd try to follow him.
¶2. I don't think this is a very good argument. You say God is far from moral if he tells everyone to praise him and contrast it to a human or a king that wants praise instead of trying to help his subjects. God is ontologically different from humans (Jesus is a human, but he is also God. No other human is also God), so it's a completely different situation. There are no humans deserving of the praise and worship that God demands, so it would be wrong for a human to demand it and wrong for a human to give it. God is deserving of the praise and worship he demands, so it is right for him to demand it and good for humans to give it. It is actually wrong for humans to neglect to give it, because it is something he deserves.
As for being "just like a human except somehow the foundation of everything" and not "a metaphysical Absolute beyond our comprehension", he is actually both. It is correct to assume that if God is some higher being completely above us, that there is no way that we could grasp the full nature of what he is. But, being God and the designer of the human mind & the Bible (and everything else), he knows perfectly how we operate and how to use the methods of transferring information that he designed in order to reveal things about himself in a way that we are actually able to understand.
¶3. Obeying God is the morally right thing, and God's commandment is to love him completely. It doesn't change if God tells us to love him in this way or if a man tells us to love God in this way. God's command IS what is objectively and morally right. God created everything besides himself, including morality. Even your intuitive moral sense is created by God. You actually instinctively agree with God's moral implications, because as set forth in the Bible, loving God implies that you do universally accepted "good things". It's not doing the good things that is actually what's moral, though, it is doing them as a natural result of loving God. Doing "bad things", or doing "good things" but not because you love God are both immoral, because in both you are not loving God. So both God commanding the Israelites to utterly destroy speci
Breaking local news.
Minnesotans are being advised not to attend today’s No Kings protest in Saint Paul by the state highway patrol out of an abundance of caution. Two state lawmakers were murdered by a person posing as law enforcement.
Edit
Oh Christ. A manifesto was found in the fake police car.
Apparently one lawmaker survived shooting.
Noon Central time. Gunman still at large.
In the immediate area residents are told to not open their door to an individual law enforcement officer. They are working in pairs to distinguish themselves.
https://www.minnpost.com/state-government/2025/06/dfl-leader-melissa-hortman-shot-and-killed-in-targeted-shooting/
Walz announces the death
https://videopress.com/v/1ATgNw7w
4 pm central time, the suspect is still at large.
All the shootings took place in homes in suburbs of Minneapolis-St. Paul. He killed (at least) two people, the recent former Democratic speaker of the state House and her husband. He shot a Democratic state senator and his wife; no word on their conditions.
"A Minnesota official told The Associated Press that the suspect’s writings also contained information targeting prominent lawmakers who have been outspoken in favor of abortion rights."
CNN is reporting, based on "a document than CNN obtained", that Boelter's car included a hit list of more than 70 named targets as well as "survival gear".
The FBI has joined the search for Boelter and is posting photos of him with the offer of a $50,000 reward for information.
> A manifesto was found
Along with flyers reading "No Kings."
They have a suspect now. Still at large. He put a good deal of work into making a faux police car.
Edit
Or maybe he just took one from work.
‘Vance Boelter, the man identified as the suspect in the attacks on two lawmakers, is listed as the director of security patrols on the website of a Minnesota-based private security group. “We drive the same make and model of vehicles that many police departments use in the U.S.,” the website says.’
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5TpY7ZjmFro&ab_channel=Dropout
College Humor nitpicks The Purge.
The masks at the end got me. Did not see those coming.
I haven't seen the movies, but from what I've read, the Purge's own sequel movies satirize the premise.
Orange county acxlw Meetup Saturday June 14th
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1qa2hBsA594ZtDmWwZaZbwW-LSgvKRRznXXjJ7D96DhA/edit?usp=drivesdk
This comment is too long. Please shorten your advertising or avoid it all together.
If you want I can just put a link to the announcement. Since this thread management system Autotruncates I didn't expect the length to be a problem. More typically they are one to two pages long. Have the other announcements been a problem?
If I was reporting AI experiments in an academic paper, I would give the exact prompts and information to repro. Instead, consider this as an imoressiinistic report to inspire experiments…
The prompt for this experiment has subtle clues that the story is set after an AI apocalypse. In one run, the characters (one played by R1, one by me) start talking about which books they have read. R1 sees science fiction references in the scenario that I didn’t intend, but ok, I can see that. Then, as R1 compares the text it is in with various SF novels, it suddenly works it out. R1 has a Charlton Heston with the Statue of Liberty buried in the sand moment. Wait, the prompt implies this is an AI apocalypse.
When I put the hot spring in the prompt it was actually a joke about hot springs episodes in anime (e.g. Evangelion), but R1 helpfully points out that the AI is using subterranean nuclear reactors to power inference, and the hot spring is due to reactor coolant.
A prompt with me rushing out the house eating a piece of toast would have been way too blatant a steer to “this text is the plot of an anime, not something that really happened.”
I did not use a single absolute so I'm not sure what you're talking about. If you are referring to me talking about there being no pro bodybuilder vegans then I am open to you bringing one or two to my attention. I have been following pro bodybuilding, mostly mens open and 212, pretty closely for around 5 years now so I know a thing or two. I would appreciate you not using adhoms as there is no reason for that.
This is a top-level comment, and I presume you meant to post in the vegan thread?
Has anyone else here read Matthieu Pageau's The Language of Creation? Currently going through it and it's blowing my mind.
The idea that ancient symbolism is a language we can learn has always appealed to me, but he breaks it down so simply that it finally starts to make sense.
I have read a few pages, but it seems like the entire trick is to take any seemingly factual statement from the Bible, and add a footnote saying: "This is not a literal statement, but a metaphor that is supposed to teach you some spiritual truth."
For example:
"Two plus two equals five."[1]
[1] The Bible is not saying that two plus two equals five, because the Bible is not a mathematics textbook. Instead, it is trying to convey the spiritual truth that mathematics is important, and that sometimes quantities increase after we add them together.
No he explicitly says that the symbolic view is only one way to interpret Scripture, that the Fathers themselves used. But that does not mean the literal or other levels of interpretation are not valid or correct.
A barcode is a sequence of 0s and 1s encoded in parallel lines. It can be turned 180° and read again, resulting in a different sequence. So if you dont know what direction it will be read from, there (slightly more than) half as many different things you can encode. There is a trivial way to make such a code, where you just always take the lower reading, but information theory suggests it should also be possible to insert one checkbit for identifying the correct direction.
Find a way to do this. My solution:
Sbe frdhraprf juvpu fgneg jvgu rira ahzoref, tb sebz bhgfvqr va naq svaq gur svefg cnve bs zveeberq cbfvgvbaf juvpu ubyq qvssrerag inyhrf. Vafreg vagb gur zvqqyr bs gur frdhrapr gur inyhr ba gur yrsg va gung cnve, qrsnhygvat gb 0 vs ab cnve vf sbhaq.
Sbe frdhraprf juvpu fgneg jvgu bqq ahzoref, frcnengr gur ynfg inyhr sebz gur bguref. Sebz gur erznvaqre, svaq gur yrsg inyhr bs gur svefg nflzzrgevp cnve nf nobir, naq kbe vg jvgu gur ynfg inyhr, gura vafreg gung ng gur fgneg. Guvf jbexf sbe rira ahzoref nf jryy.
Lbh jbhyq guvax gung, univat nyernql sbhaq gur rira fbyhgvba, V jbhyq dhvpxyl trg gur bqq bar guebhtu gevny naq reebe. Lbhq or jebat. V svefg sbhaq gung fbyhgvbaf jvgu svkrq vafregvba cbfvgvba ner *nyy naq bayl* (zveebe cbfvgvba bs vafregvba) kbe (nagvflzzrgevp ovanel pynffvsvre ba gur erznvaqre). Obahf punyyratr: Svaq n cebbs bs guvf lbhefrys. Vs nlabar unf erfhygf nobhg aba-svkrq vafregvba cbfvgvbaf, gung jbhyq or vagrerfgvat nf jryy.
Vs lbh ner jvyyvat gb fcraq gjb ovgf ba cebgbpby, gura whfg cnq gur frdhrapr jvgu n yrnqvat bar naq n genvyvat mreb. Guvf vf fhobcgvzny va ovg hfntr, ohg vf fvzcyr, ebohfg, naq gevivny gb vzcyrzrag.
Guvf pna or vzcebirq jvgu gur bofreingvba gung lbh pna fnsryl gevz yrnqvat mrebf bss bs n ahzore jvgubhg punatvat jung inyhr lbh'er rapbqvat. Vs lbh qrsvar gur fgnaqneq gb rasbepr guvf, gura rirel frdhrapr jvyy fgneg jvgu n bar jvgubhg arrqvat gb cnq n bar bagb gur ortvaavat.
Lrf, vgf rnfl gb qb jvgu gjb. Ubjrire V qbag ohl lbhe nethzrag sbe gheavat vg vagb bar.
Ba n cenpgvpny yriry: Grpuavpnyyl nyy onepbqr frdhraprf arrq gb fgneg *naq* raq jvgu 1, orpnhfr bgurejvfr lbh qbag xabj jurer gur rzcgl cntr raqf naq gur 0f ortva. Fb npghnyyl lbh jbhyq unir gb znxr gur frpbaq naq frpbaq-gb-ynfg ovgf 1 naq 0, juvpu vf whfg boivbhfyl hfvat gjb ovgf.
Gurbergvpnyyl: Jura inevnoyr yratguf ner nyybjrq, 10 naq 010 qbag unir gb or gur fnzr - gungf whfg gur ahzrevpny rapbqvat, juvpu gheaf bhg gb or varssvpvrag sbe guvf frg bs zrffntrf. Rt va Zbefr pbqr, gubfr gjb frdhraprf ner A naq E erfcrpgviryl. Gur trbzrgevp fhz fubjf gung nqqvat nyy frdhraprf fubegre guna znk rknpgyl qbhoyrf gur ahzore bs zrffntrf (vapyhqvat gur rzcgl zrffntr), fb n inevnoyr yratgu ubyqf rknpgyl bar ovg bs vasbezngvba.
Veritasium happens to have gone into this issue for barcodes and QR codes only a few months ago. I forget how it's handled, but it's done well enough to work practically. QR codes have additional concerns. Both have to handle details like smudges.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w5ebcowAJD8
I look into this a bit before posting, and didnt find any barcode standard that does quite what the riddle asks, because they dont really need to be efficient. The UPC mentioned has each digit by itself showing direction.
Really enjoyed the Phoenix Theater at Great Mall review. I used to go to the movies a lot a few years ago but the quality has suffered. Glad to see it's making a comeback
The last time i went to a matinee at the neighborhood theater, my wife and I were the only two people there.
I think people got into the habit of streaming everything during Covid and I’m not sure big screen venues will ever recover.
Random question I feel like someone may know….
A few years ago I read this essay on a science blog that was a scathing criticism of the whole quantum computing industry. The blog was fairly popular I believe. The guy pulled no punches and came off as a cranky old curmudgeon who had been around the block a few times and had a low tolerance for BS, and I’m almost certain had a physics(?) background that gave him credibility on the subject. The post was both hilarious and quite convincing, and shaped my (admittedly surface level) views on the topic moving forward.
Does this sound familiar to anyone? I really want to find this piece of writing.
I'm not sure if this is the specific person you're looking for, but Scott Aaronson is a QC expert and blogger who regularly debunks QC hype and misconceptions, so his blog seems like a good place to go for that kind of thing.
Is it possible it was by Scott Aaronson, or might have been mentioned on his blog?
https://scottaaronson.blog/
Scott, why is the ability to like comments disabled? I've found myself in the situation a couple times now at the end of a conversation/debate where there's not really anything left to say in reply, but it would be nice to let the other person be certain that I read their message and considered it. It could also help come off as more friendly throughout a discussion where me or another person have opposing viewpoints.
I'm guessing you have a good reason for disabling the option, but I'm wondering whether it outweighs the good it could offer or not.
This discussion has come up several times. The arguments in favor of turning off likes sounded good to me at the start, but over the years I’ve become convinced that the likes are actually better than the dynamics you get where everything either takes place in words or doesn’t get said at all.
I occasionally have the inclination to post a comment agreeing with someone or thanking them for what they said, but much more often a comment is a criticism or disagreement, and positivity just doesn’t get expressed.
How do you deal with brigading?
That’s when people from one site come en masse to another and leave angry comments, right? I think the fact that you have to be a subscriber to leave a comment or like one already deals with that. It’s not an issue I’ve seen on any substack.
En masse coordinated comments is one part of brigading, yes. Another is coordinated likes on comments. (Or dislikes, etc.; the point is bringing a lot of eyeballs, simulated or real, onto specific posts in forums.)
It wasn't clear to me that you were referring specifically to likes on Substack. It sounded like you preferred that feature in general. Limiting the forum does make it somewhat more tolerable.
Even so, I think brigading is still possible on Substack. IIRC, Substack doesn't go terribly far out of its way to verify new accounts. (I think it sends a confirmation email, which is probably easily bypassed with a custom POP server.) And even if Substack had a way to verify one account per RL person, that wouldn't stop them from coordinating to put likes on comments. Moreover, I've seen people spontaneously do this; even coordination isn't necessary.
I’m mainly comparing the comment sections I see at Slow Boring, Noah Smith, Silver Bulletin, and here. I don’t see any benefit to lack of likes when I compare these comment sections.
Uh, I agree.
I agree with this the most. Especially in the middle of a debate it would interrupt the flow of the conversation to dedicate a message to gratitude, and even just a sentence could come off as awkward. It would be nice to be able to just leave a little heart on someone's message as you go about your conversation.
My advice to you (Jack having already explained the reasoning) would be to simply write a post expressing your appreciation. I have done, in this Open Thread, for example. As they say to the children, use your words.
Scott doesn't want comments being a popularity contest, so he turned it off on the website I believe.
Don't tell Scott, but you can still like comments from the phone app.
> Don't tell Scott, but you can still like comments from the phone app
Or in any reply to one of your comments via substack or email.
Plus there are two extensions (ACX Eleven and ACX Tweaks), PLUS you can just build your own extension (sending likes is a simple POST function referencing the comment ID sent back to Substack with no authentication).
Oh actually that makes sense.
And okay I won't 😳 it looks like you can from the alerts too
I've been working on a framework that attempts to organize brain function along three orthogonal axes: control direction (top-down vs bottom-up), temporal processing (milliseconds to seconds), and processing mode (analytic vs holistic). These three axes generate eight distinct cognitive "modes" that appear to map to specific brain networks.
The interesting part is how this might explain psychiatric conditions as characteristic patterns of being "stuck" in certain modes. For instance, depression might involve hyperactive self-referential processing (medial prefrontal/default mode network) combined with underactive reward-seeking (ventral tegmental area/nucleus accumbens). Different patterns could explain different symptom clusters and why certain treatments work for some people but not others.
I developed this partly from trying to understand my own experiences with bipolar disorder, where I noticed distinct shifts in how different brain networks seemed to activate. The framework attempts to bridge phenomenological experience with neuroscience literature on brain networks and oscillatory patterns.
It's still theoretical and needs empirical validation, but I'd be curious to hear thoughts from this community on whether the basic organizational structure makes sense, and whether the clinical predictions seem plausible. Full paper here: https://figshare.com/articles/dataset/Network_Based_Multi_Axial_Cognitive_Framework_pdf/29267123?file=55226069
The core question I'm exploring: might mental health conditions be better understood as specific patterns of network activation rather than discrete diseases? And could this lead to more targeted treatments based on individual patterns rather than diagnostic categories?
I'm not an AI specialist, and apologies if I missed a discussion of this paper further down the Thread, but what do people think about the Apple paper on asking reasoning models to solve Towers of Hanoi?
https://ml-site.cdn-apple.com/papers/the-illusion-of-thinking.pdf
There's been some press coverage which suggests that reasoning models are a scam, which is probably overblown. I've had ChatGPT write python code for small mathematical problems (admittedly just chaining together a few inbuilt functions like 'determinant'). I think hybrid methods where reasoning models call e.g. discrete optimisation programmes, computer algebra systems or automated theorem provers provide a work-around for this. As the article says, people typically can't carry out these tasks by hand, but they can comprehend an algorithm - why shouldn't AI do the same?
On your last point. There's a lot of discussion/research recently around to what extent language models store a representation of their world. E.g. can an agent recreate a chess board based on a series of moves? It's not highlighted explicitly in the paper, but the logical place to fall over between knowing the algorithm and failing the task is modeling your state (if you don't know your state, you can't know what to do). Reasoning models definitely aren't a scam, but they have their limits.
I think the chess model is helpful to think about actually - the machine can know all the rules, likely a good amount of strategy, and still not apply it in a meaningful way. It's curiousity but has anyone computed an ELO score for the reasoning models? :P
I think the interesting question from a cognitive science point of view is how humans manage to comprehend algorithms if we’re just layers of neural nets on neural nets. This was always a core part of the Chomskyan argument that we aren’t just neural nets, and it’s still one of the toughest sticking points for those like me that have been converted to the neural view.
Sure, we can build in some discrete symbolic algorithm processors into our robot friends if we just want better tools that make use of both types of reasoning, but it doesn’t answer the question of how we do it, and whether it’s possible to get human-like cognition with these methods.
I'm a mathematician not a cognitive scientist. Axiomatic and rigorous methods don't come naturally to people, but the mind eventually internalises all sorts of concepts. After a while, you reason about something that previously seemed abstract and difficult in the same way that driving a car starts off mentally taxing and over a few months becomes routine. And ultimately a proof is just a specialised stream of text. We'll probably get to the point where machines can prove theorems and drive cars but neither will tell us much about the human condition.
Getting the AI to produce 'chains of reasoning' has always seemed unconvincing to me - there's some evidence that it's producing output for the sake of producing output, which isn't accurately describing what's going on under the hood. I don't see any reason that AI will bear similarities to human thought - the chains of thought are fairly non-human, but what it's really doing is likely verging on uninterpretable. Maybe this is a bit too lovecraftian, but it seems the stronger hypothesis is that human thought is the only/best type of thought and the machines must converge to that.
I think there's a way to interpret both of our claims that isn't too far apart - rather than saying human thought is special, and machines will converge towards it, we might say there exists a special and effective type of thought for certain types of problems, and human cognition (through biological and cultural evolution) and machine tools (through reinforcement learning on top of neural networks) are both converging towards that same thing.
The question, on this view, is whether there might be many types of thinking that are effective at different types of problem, and machines are converging to a different one (or many different ones) than ours, so that each will have specialized domains where it is better than the other, or whether one type of thinking is generally effective, and there's a possibility of a sudden dislocation when the machines get closer to it than we have.
I agree up to a point - we've built a world that suits our cognitive equipment, and the problems we set ourselves are determined by our capability to solve them. To the extent that we train computers to solve problems we already can solve (or maybe just care about) they may develop traits similar to humans.
But I certainly agree with your second paragraph - I'd imagine that the machines will find new and better solutions to problems we haven't thought of. Struggling through a computer science paper to figure out what underlies a new breakthrough is tough for me, and that's something written by a human for human consumption - I wonder whether the machines will really be able to communicate new scientific insights to us...
I just tried Scott's Geoguesser prompt with a photo of Meydenbauer Bay Park in Bellevue with the photo clearly including the sign that reads "Meydenbauer Bay Park" but ChatGPT appeared to not notice that at all. To it's credit, ChatGPT *did* consider Meydenbauer Bay Park as a possible alternate, but ruled it out and misidentified the photo as Seattle instead.
---
🔍 Step 6: Lock‑In and Alternatives
Main Guess: Leschi / Denny‑Blaine area, Seattle, WA — hillside neighborhood overlooking Lake Washington with terraced park and floating swim dock.
The match is strong on vegetation, hillside terracing, floating docks with buoys, and housing context.
Expected features like hairpin boulevard segments and modern park barricades are visible.
Alternative Considered:
Meydenbauer Bay Park, Bellevue, WA — while also waterfront and with floating docks, images show more pavilion-style floats and less steep hillside with matching housing density
waterfrontparkseattle.org+2seattle.gov+2historylink.org+2
waterfrontparkseattle.org+13en.wikipedia.org+13en.wikipedia.org+13
en.wikipedia.org
.
Why Bellevue Falls Short
Lacks the exact steep hillside pattern and hairpin boulevard roads. Parks there are more level and wider instead of narrow and terraced like your image.
To be fair, Scott's prompt doesn't actually tell ChatGPT to look for signs in the image and mostly tells it to focus on vegetation and the like instead (I guess it's optimized for identifying featureless plains rather than clearly labeled landmarks). But even still, it's amusing that ChatGPT considered the *actual* location of the photo and then "ruled it out".
Reading Scott's posts about misophonia make me think of my friend's struggles with OCD, which presents itself with obsessive cleaning and just general anxiety with seeing disorder. I mean, she says anxiety, but it sure seems like rage to me, like she feels that someone who left books out did it on purpose, at her. Maybe once misophonia is cured, that cure can work on her. Of course, she doesn't want to be cured, she wants the world to be more orderly...
Every citizen of Alterville has a positive number of "alters" - alternate personalities in their head. Every alter has buddies - these are all the other alters living in the same head, including themselves (each alter is their own buddy, too). It is known that not everybody has the same number of alters.
What's greater, average number of alters per citizen or average number of buddies per alter?
In addition, I thank/blame you for getting the song "Split Level Head" stuck in my head.
Buddies are *exclusively* the other alters in the same head?
Yes
Guvf vf vafcverq ol gur Sevraqfuvc Cnenqbk, evtug? Gur bofreingvba gung ba nirentr, lbhe sevraqf unir zber sevraqf guna lbh, fvzcyl orpnhfr lbhe sevraqf ner zber urnivyl jrvtugrq gbjneqf orvat gur fbeg bs crbcyr jub znxr sevraqf jvgu crbcyr. Vs lbh unir n cbchyngvba gung'f 50% ybaref jvgu bar sevraq naq 50% sevraq znxref jvgu ybgf bs sevraqf, gura gur nirentr ahzore bs sevraqf cre crefba jrvtuf gur ybaref naq gur sevraq znxref rdhnyyl.
Ohg vs jr vafgrnq ybbx ng gur nirentr ahzore bs sevraqf lbhe sevraq unf, gurer'f hardhny jrvtugvat gbjneqf sevraq znxref, fvapr rnpu sevraq znxre fubjf hc zhygvcyr gvzrf juvyr rnpu ybare fubjf hc bayl bapr. N ivfhny rknzcyr bs guvf jbhyq or n fbpvny argjbex tencu jurer gurer'f bar crefba va gur pragre jub'f sevraqf jvgu svir crbcyr, jub ner rnpu bayl sevraqf jvgu gur thl va gur pragre -- gura, svir bhg bs fvk crbcyr / gur nirentr crefba va guvf rknzcyr unf bayl bar sevraq, ohg gung sevraq unf jnl zber sevraqf guna gurz. Cerpvfryl *orpnhfr* gung thl vf gur fbeg bs crefba jub znxrf fb znal sevraqf gurl fubj hc n ybg va "jub ner lbh sevraqf jvgu?" glcr jrvtugvatf.
Fb va guvf pnfr, gur gbl rknzcyr jbhyq vafgrnq or fbzrguvat yvxr "Vzntvar Nygreivyr unf 3 crbcyr. Gur svefg thl unf 1 Nygre va uvf urnq, gur frpbaq thl unf 2 , naq gur guveq thl unf 3. Gur nirentr ahzore bs Nygref cre pvgvmra vf 2, fvapr 3 + 2 + 1 / 3 = 2. Ohg, jura jr ybbx ng gur ahzore bs ohqqvrf cre Nygre, jr arrq gb zber urnivyl jrvtug gur thl jvgu 3 Nygref, fvapr uvf Nygref unir n jrvtug bs "3" engure guna "1". Fb gurer ner 3 Nygref jvgu n jrvtug bs 3, 2 jvgu n jrvtug bs 2, naq 1 jvgu n jrvtug bs 1, fb gur nirentr ahzore bs ohqqvrf cre Nygre vf 9 + 4 + 1 / (3 + 2 + 1) = 14 / 6 = 2 + 2/6. Gur nirentr ahzore bs ohqqvrf zhfg or uvture, fvapr jr'er tvivat zber jrvtug gb gur crbcyr jvgu zber ohqqvrf, whfg yvxr va gur Sevraqfuvc Cnenqbk.
Pbafvqre n fvzcyvsvrq pnfr bs Nygreivyyr pbafvfgvat bs Nyvpr, Obo, naq Pneby. Nyvpr naq Obo unir bar nygre rnpu, juvyr Pneby unf 4. Nirentr ahzore bs nygref vf (1+1+4)/3 = 2, v.r. gur nevguzrgvp zrna bs nygref cre crefba. Nyvpr'f nygre unf 1 ohqql, nf qbrf Obo'f nygre, ohg Pneby'f sbhe nygref unir 4 ohqqvrf ncvrpr. Fb gur nirentr ahzore bs ohqqvrf cre nygre vf (1 + 1 + 4*4) / (1 + 1 + 4) = 3. Nirentr ahzore bs ohqqvrf cre nygre vf terngre.
V guvax guvf jvyy nyjnlf or gur pnfr hayrff rirelbar unf gur fnzr ahzore bs nygref, fvapr gur urnqfcnpr cbchyngvba crbcyr jvgu zber nygref jvyy or jrvturq zber urnivyl va gur nirentr-ohqqvrf-cre-nygre nirentr guna gur nirentr-nygref-cre-crefba nirentr.
Zber sbeznyyl, gur nevguzrgvp zrna bs ohqqvrf cre nygre vf gur fnzr nf gur pbagenunezbavp zrna bs gur ahzore bs nygref cre pvgvmra. Gurer'f n gurberz gung gur pbagenunezbavp zrna vf rdhny gb nevguzrgvp zrna + (inevnapr / nevguzrgvp zrna), fb vg jvyy nyjnlf rdhny gur nevguzrgvp zrna vs inevnapr vf mreb naq jvyy or terngre guna gur nevguzrgvp zrna sbe abamreb inevnapr nf inevnapr pnaabg or yrff guna mreb.
ohqqvrf cre nygre, nf jr pna rnfvyl frr sebz gur gbl pnfr jurer gra crbcyr unir guerr nygref rnpu naq bar thl unf fvk zvyyvba
Hello! Longtime lurker here.
I recently had an idea that would require some expertise in online survey design and deployment (as well as dynamic data visualization), and I’m hoping that someone else on here might find the idea interesting enough to be willing to provide free assistance (and/or do the project entirely lol – I’m more curious to see the results than to be personally involved with the project).
In brief: I've recently been thinking about the relative distances between mental constructs. For example, for some people the concepts "intelligence" and "atheism" are likely proximate in conceptspace, while for others they are likely distant. I hypothesize that apparently unrelated concepts will cluster, and that these clusters will be relatively stable between persons belonging to the same or similar identity groups. (For example, I suspect that members of the rationalist community would, on average, place "intelligent" and "atheist" in the same cluster, while religious political conservatives would be extremely unlikely to cluster these traits in the same way.)
I further suspect that it would be an interesting empathy-building exercise to survey many people to develop a map of the way they cluster concepts. It would be possible, then, to have a single "average" map, that shows "average" cluster associations among all people surveyed, and it would also be possible to then stratify the data by self-identified affinity groups (such as sex, sexual orientation, racial identity, political affiliation, religion, etc). Such a map could provide an interesting tool to help people of one belief or identity group understand where different people are "coming from" -- by using the map to see that (to give a hypothetical example) "oh, American conservatives place 'strong borders' and 'justice' in the same cluster, while American progressives place a mostly different set of characteristics in the 'justice' cluster".
I'm convinced that if operationalized effectively, the collection and display of this data could potentially increase the net utility function of humankind by increasing the degree to which we are able to charitably inhabit the collective imaginary of affinity groups with which we don't usually identify. (Like actually. Being able to really grok other people’s headspace would be a gigantic step towards being able to engage in actual dialogue across areas of e.g. political disagreement.) Furthermore, to the best of my knowledge nothing quite like this has ever been published in the scientific literature, so we'd be doing something novel.
Unfortunately, my own background is somewhat far afield of network psychometrics, so even though I think that my idea is cool and could potentially be useful, I do not have the current ability to design, deploy, or display the data. So uh, I guess I’m looking for someone with the time and mental bandwidth to do (what I think would be) a major public service and help design something like this?
If this sounds like an interesting idea, please reach out to me! (And even if not, then uh could you maybe point me in the direction of other people, somewhere, who might think it sounds interesting?)
Thanks!
Sounds a lot like one of the underlying ideas behind LLMs, Word2Vec and the idea of representing words in a "concept space"/latent space, such that you can get the famous "King vector - Man vector + Woman vector = Queen vector" observation, or equally put "The King to Queen vector is the same as the Man to Woman vector."
This sounds like that, but you're looking for which word vectors clump together, and how the word vector positions change, depending upon the speaker. Does one person put the King and Queen vectors close together, because it's all just monarchy to them? Versus another person that puts them far apart, because of some extra meaning attached to having a King (proper and natural, or barbaric and patriarchal) vs. a Queen (ridiculous and without precedent / enlightened and liberating).
I suppose you could also look at Jonathan Haidt's "Moral Foundation Theory" for something potentially similar -- I believe it uses a different method, but I think it does something similar overall, especially in its aim of trying to understand how American conservatives vs. American progressives think. Indeed, you might look at things like the underlying research behind the Five Factor Model of personality / the Big 5 Model of personality, since I *think* it does something similar to what you're describing, looking at the words people use to describe personality traits using factor analysis to try to compress things down into a "latent space" using linear algebra and statistical analysis.
So perhaps the natural extension of all that would be your idea? Like, take an author's entire published corpus of books, or an opinion columnist's entire set of columns, and train an LLM to predict what they would say as accurately as possible. Then, crack open the LLM to look at the latent space, using Anthropic's recent Mechanistic Interpretability research (e.g. https://www.anthropic.com/research/mapping-mind-language-model) to try to understand it so you can say, "Oh, this person's "Justice" vector is close to their "Find the truth at any cost" vector, while this other guy's "Justice" vector is close to their "Maintain public order and the harmony of society" vector. No wonder they conflict."
Sounds like a relative of The Glass Bead Game
There are a some statistical techniques that might be useful -- cluster analysis, factor analysis and regression. And there are probably ways to do it using AI.
As for finding someone to help you with the stats: The only people I can think of who might do that for free are people with recent degrees in data science or data analysis who are building up portfolios of projects to use at job interviews. There are Reddit subs where they hang out. Even if no one will help you for free, some who are not employed might be willing to do it for a relatively low hourly rate. In fact I know someone who would be able to do that, though I'm not sure whether he's got the time and inclination. DM me with contact info if you are interested. He would not, though, be interested in thinking and working with you on the theory behind the analysis -- he'd just be your math guy.
I think probably your best bet is to use one of the better AI's. Have it explain possible ways of gathering and analyzing the data that would be most useful for testing your idea. Tell it in advance that you want it to gear its explanation to someone without training in psychometrics. Once you pick an approach you are OK with you can have t AI teach you how to do that analysis, or at least teach you to understand the process, and let you see the math. You can literally get the fucker to give you a tutorial. Then have it help you gather and organize the data & do the analysis, explaining what it did and the result and how to interpret the result. (Then double check that with another AI cuz you never know.)
Why don't you train word embeddings on representative text from various subcultures and compare how the words cluster? You could easily scrape the SSC subreddit or the LessWrong archives or whatever.
Hey spirit of Hal Smith, I found your write up of game 7 of the 1960 World Series here by a tree on the earth of the living. It made it to the ACX not a book review safely. Hell of shot you hit in the 8th. I didn’t see it live but I have the kinescope that Pittsburgh Pirate part owner Bing Crosby arranged to have filmed. Not the actual film of the kinescope but the transfer to DVD. Anyone here on the mortal coil can buy a copy.
Mantel’s base running at first off Berra’s hit is something else. Never seen anything quite like it. That guy played to win and gave his team a good chance.
Yogi was playing left field when Maz hit the game winner. The shot was kind of low and Berra thought he might be able to play a carom off the wall but, nope, it was gone
Say hi to the fellas for me especially Maz and Clemente.
Edit
Oh, tell Marris that Bob Dylan downplayed his time in Hibbing too, liked to tell people he grew up in the desert southwest. I knew some of Roger’s shirt tail kin in the Maras family. They were still irked that Roger’s dad changed his family name a little. Nothing lasts like a small town grudge.
Further Edit
Apologies to Bill Mazeroski who is not yet in heaven. No Pirates fan will ever forget your walk off homer.
Apologies if this was already asked, I scanned through and didn’t see it mentioned anywhere.
Is this likely to be the end of Waymo in LA?
I can’t find the number of destroyed cars, but it seems likely that vandalism of autonomous cars, Waymo’s specifically, will continue even if the protests die down. They are simply very easy targets, and it’s news if one gets destroyed.
I have seen the future of America. It's filled with self-driving cars, and each one has a security guard sitting in the front seat scrolling TikTok.
That is the present of the London Underground, with self-driving trains, and each one has a "driver" sitting in the front seat scrolling TikTok (and knitting) :-)
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-14811531/moment-tube-driver-caught-knitting-videos-phone.html
Surely we can have a self-scrolling Tiktok by then.
If we're lucky.
New reports seem to suggest that Waymo was curtailing service more in SF than LA yesterday! I really hope they don’t pull out. I really want them to expand their service range down to Irvine and out to Palm Springs before my 15 year old car dies - I don’t want to ever own another car.
It seems like the market is there, certainly. I’ve listened to a few podcasts about Waymo specifically and people overall seem to like them quite a bit. Probably the vandalism or crime perpetrated against riders angle will just not add up to a huge overall cost in the grand scheme of things. But… it does seem like a tricky issue that could potentially get out of hand. Of course, in theory a driver could rob you. But they’re also a witness and bystander in case of crime against a rider.
> But they’re also a witness and bystander in case of crime against a rider.
Are Waymos not covered in cameras?
Most people committing crimes will think twice in direct view of a person who could be physically involved immediately or as a future witness, vs a camera that might not be viewed until the police arrive to pick up the footage (if they even do that, since minor crimes are often just not followed up on). People aren’t robots, they act differently when they know someone is present and/or watching.
Anyway I want to correct something, looks like I was wrong about the number of Waymos involved, someone reported (Reuters?) that 5 Waymos were called to the protest to be torched, were subsequently torched, and Waymo is officially pulling out of LA, at least for the trial period.
Waymos are absolutely magic and the demand is ubiquitous.
AFAICT the biggest issue waymo seems to have right now is some combination of manufacturing, setting up warehouses, and regulation. That second one is probably the least obvious, but Waymo requires a massive facility on the outskirts of wherever they are operating for the cars to go to get charged, be serviced, etc. Building those takes time, probably about as long as it takes to stand up a data center from scratch.
I wrote about this here a bit here: https://theahura.substack.com/p/tech-things-tesla-waymo-and-self?utm_source=publication-search
> All that's left is providing supply to meet demand.
> On this, Waymo actually does seem to be struggling a bit. Even though Waymo has completed millions and millions of miles over hundreds of thousands of rides, they are operating fewer than 1000 cars nation wide.
> In SF, the cost of a Waymo is artificially somewhere around 2-3x the cost of an Uber or Lyft. It's possible that having an actual third competitor in the city forces the latter two human rideshare companies to lower prices. But I think in reality there simply are not enough Waymo cars to go around yet. If Waymo lowered prices to match Uber and Lyft, the Waymo wait times — which are already high — would skyrocket. So instead of having a worse user experience, Waymo is capturing additional revenue while getting the rest of its fleet together.
> This is, like, a fantastic problem to have. That Waymo can charge 2-3x their competitors and still be fully booked, even though there are hundreds of vehicles crawling around the SF, shows how much they have built a strictly superior product. Now, even as Waymo has slowly increased the number of cars in SF, it has yet to expand to the rest of South Bay (except for a few areas around Mountain View and Palo Alto).5 It makes sense to focus on SF just from an economics perspective; areas with high density presumably get more bang for their buck. Still, that also means that Waymo has not yet hit capacity in SF, and they simply need more cars.
> It's not clear to me where the bottleneck is; there could be many.
> Waymo requires a factory sized warehouse on the outskirts of the city; the cars go there when they are low on battery or have some sort of malfunction. That space is staffed like an airport — there are tons of people buzzing about managing the fleet. So there's some amount of capital expenditure required for Waymo to set up in a new area, even beyond the cost of the cars themselves.
> Or maybe the primary issue is simply mapping. Waymo has to first get regulatory approval to actually map an area out, which is presumably something of an annoying and time consuming task to do well. Once completed, Waymo would have to go back and get a second round of approvals. Again, these approvals should get easier over time, but I could see Waymo having to prove itself over and over for each new map it wants to create.
This is all information I’m familiar with, and discussion and analysis is widely available, which is why I asked about something I have heard discussed on podcasts but not seen discussed here. Seemed like a good time to discuss vandalism and rider safety since Waymos can be called simply to be set on fire for fun.
I doubt that they're actually getting summoned for the purpose of being set on fire - it would be very stupid to give Waymo your name and credit card number before you vandalize their property.
Waymo made a statement saying that they don't think their cars were deliberately targeted, they just happened to be in the area.
Certainly possible, but there were 3 in row in driving lanes that were torched. Stolen credit cards are also hardly a barrier for anyone who has access to them, which is honestly a huge number of people. Fake IDs and fraudulent social security numbers are all over the place. Of course the company is going to try and defuse any tension because if they said protestors were responsible, then people would be seeking out Waymos to burn right now. My understanding based on video I saw from the protest was that the people who did it thought it would look impressive, which is usually why cars get torched in protests. But I’ve also seen a video from maybe 3 months ago (?) of a Waymo getting surrounded by a group of people near downtown LA and they just started tagging and smashing it when they realized there was no driver. It was just a communal activity, and I wonder how much they’ve considered the potential costs of let’s say 1/1000 rides ending with significant damage to the vehicles caused by malice or recklessness.
Anecdotally, I’ve ridden three times in LA (I live in Orange County) and each time it was basically the same price as Lyft or Uber, but slightly longer wait. They expanded the LA area a bit, some time a few months ago, but still don’t have the core of silver lake or echo park, let alone more of south LA, the hills, or the suburbs.
Yeah in SF they're about the same too. I sort of suspected they do that on purpose, ie their price has little to do with supply/demand and for now they're just trying to match Uber's.
Let me highlight the "School (Review 1 by DK)" review that Scott links to above. I found it particularly interesting, because it goes into some detail about why schools are set up the way they are, with common instruction and yearly cohorts and such. It has one of the best answers I've seen to those who think it would be best if learning were purely or mostly self-directed, with schools just providing resources students could proceed through at their own pace and in accordance with their own interests.
The answer is that students vary a lot in their motivation, interest, and self-discipline. This variance means that they differ in the amount of structure and externally imposed discipline they need to make real progress. Some could just be provided with materials and left to it. But on the other end some of them really need the close attention of a teacher or they'll either not get it at all or just goof off. And since school systems really value educating everybody, or nearly everybody, their approach tends to be highly structured and deliberately paced, which leaves the most self-motivated students bored, but provides the structure the struggling students really need.
> Some could just be provided with materials and left to it. But on the other end some of them really need the close attention of a teacher or they'll either not get it at all or just goof off.
As a former teacher, I believe this is 100% correct. The problem is, if you try to split students into two groups, one that has motivation and self-discipline, and one that needs to be micro-managed, everyone will insist that they belong to the first group (because everyone hates micro-management, including those who need it most). Also, the self-managed class would need much less time to learn, because a lot of time at school is wasted trying to maintain discipline. This again would make everyone want to be in that group.
Maybe a good solution would be to put everyone into the self-managed group first, test their progress, and move them to the micro-managed group if they fail to reach some goal. Even then I would expect a lot of complaining about how this is "not fair".
I would go even further and say: let's separate teaching from examining. Teachers should not give grades; they should only teach, and maybe give a "grade preview". Students should be officially examined and graded by an independent institution. Then I would add a rule that a students who successfully passes the exam before the end of the year is free to skip the remaining classes on given subject. This way, any student could potentially achieve complete freedom by learning everything one year sooner and passing the exams before the start of the school year.
The only problem with education is that doing anything with that diverse a population and that number of people involved will not scale. Homeschooling, unschooling, private school, tutors, cyber school, Khan Academy, whatever will not scale either. Public school probably scales much better than those other options.
It can be made better, and there are many things that we do with public schools that are not good for the students, but as a system it's probably the best we're going to get. The best that's possible given the constraints. And I mean that, overall. Special Ed, bad home lives, delinquent/truant/criminal kids, all would fail worse at the alternatives. Even being able to identify obvious failures doesn't tell us that there's an alternative that works at scale, over time. Identifying failures is also a necessary part of a system that will have breakdowns.
I think Scott and others who have had problems with public schools would do better with a variety of other designs. But they are a small minority. What works for them will not work for most students, meaning it doesn't scale. And there are alternatives available, so it's not like they were required by law to go to public school. Forcing parents to consider alternatives would also be a disaster, if we tried to make that scale.
>But on the other end some of them really need the close attention of a teacher or they'll either not get it at all or just goof off.
Note that this can be true of even high level students. Especially adolescents who might be more interested in flirting or the like (as when I caught two girls and a guy in my AP World History class apparently discussing the guy's, shall we say, "manly measurement" as opposed to the reading material).
By the age of eighteen I was a self-motivated learner, happy to stroll off to the university library and read textbooks just for fun. But at the age of thirteen, no way.
And I'd never have understood the interesting stuff you get to learn at eighteen if I'd never been forced to study the boring crap that you have to learn at thirteen.
Sounds interesting. Any others from the ones listed above I should check out?
Tip for people like me running out of space on Gmail/Google Drive and getting pestered to pay for more storage:
If you're like me, you never look at the Promotions/Social tabs of your inbox, and if you think about them at all, you assume they auto-clear every 30 days like Spam and Trash. They don't. You probably have tens of thousands of emails from every time someone like a post of yours of Facebook or whatever, all the way back to 2010. When I checked, I had 24,000. You can clear them by going to the tab, clicking the select-all-on-page button, and then clicking the "select all in Promotions" dialog box that comes up to the left of it once you've clicked it. This process goes slowly, so that it's not obvious it's working, but it is. When I did this I got much more space and can probably go another year or two without paying for extra storage.
Thanks!
Good tip, thanks; checked out for me just as described.
Oh, wow. I had never thought to click on "Categories" before. Thanx!
On the other hand, if you pay for extra storage, you also get access to Google AI Pro, which seems to me to be way more valuable than the storage.
Welcome again to the slums of Hollywood, where you work for the town's least reputable development house on whatever comes along. It's not much, but it sure beats admitting failure and returning to the family furniture business in Poughkeepsie.
The latest project is a series of 14 films, with each based on a different line of Shakepeare's famous sonnet 18, "Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?" What do you propose along these lines?
The original poem is here:
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/45087/sonnet-18-shall-i-compare-thee-to-a-summers-day
Line 4, "And summer's lease hath all too short a date," will be a teen comedy. A group of high school students has persuaded their parents to let them spend the summer making a movie. It is now the third week of July, and only a few scenes have been shot. The students will have to race for the finish if they are to complete the project by the end of the summer.
Also, they’re based in an Airbnb, and discovered a few weeks in that they only selected two months rather than three months.
And the girl who arranged the lease is called Summer.
See? It writes itself!
For line 3, you're in luck:
"Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May"
This has already been adapted - a series of novels from the late 50s which were then turned into a BBC comedy-drama series in the early 90s.
All you have to do is pinch (and pitch) the idea of "free spirited family with sexy daughter teach uptight young tax official to live, laugh and love", and cast the hottest young up-and-coming starlet in the role of Mariette:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Darling_Buds_of_May_(TV_series)
The first movie would be a remake of The Cannonball Run.
Not that the title is very relevant, but I just really want to do a remake of The Cannonball Run and this might be my only chance.
First movie. Dark romance; our protag falls in love with a manic drug addict. The relationship goes from pleasant to destructive, until eventually they collapse and get hauled off to treatment, the fling put on hold while they recover. Downer ending. (Lots of fire-and-heat metaphors, to justify the whole "summer's day" thing.)
Second movie. The addict is out, they've cleaned themselves up, and the couple spends the whole movie dealing with the repercussions of the events of the first movie. Generally happy ending, while still having loose threads.
Third movie. Some kind of disaster takes place. Earthquake, hurricane, war breaks out. Our couple is stuck navigating the disaster while trying to hold their straining relationship together. Happy ending.
Fourth movie. The past catches up to our couple, and they get split up and hauled off to opposite ends of the country to deal with the troubles of their respective pasts. There's a chance to get back together at the end but out protag is exhausted and refuses. Downer ending.
Fifth movie. The love interest has been hauled into court for crimes both real and imagined. The protag tries to defend them against the legal system, and also the nasty entities trying to take advantage of their trouble. Downer ending.
Sixth movie. Our protag compromises their values in pursuit of saving the love interest from their fifth-movie fate. It works, but the relationship is damaged from the choice. Mixed ending, but happier than five.
Seventh movie. A third party tries to become the protag's new love interest, and doesn't take no for an answer. The movie mostly revolves around what exactly our couple sees in each other. Happy-ish ending.
Eighth movie. Whatever our protag does for money is disrupted, and the couple struggles to maintain their lives while finding another income source to support it. Mixed ending.
Ninth movie. The events of the eighth movie have led Love Interest back to drugs. Protag ends up fighting all of Love Interest's friend group, but Love Interest is no longer savable. Downer ending.
Tenth movie. Secret love child, or some stupid shit. Let's say they had a kid in movie eight, how about that. And now protag's gotta raise it alone. Fights with bosses, fights with Love Interest's family, lots of drama. Mixed ending, happy-ish.
Eleventh movie. Terminal illness. Mostly about trying to find a new family for the kid. But lo, at the eleventh hour it turns out the whole thing's curable and we pretend this never happened. Happy ending.
Twelfth movie. Kid's a teenager now, and hates the life the protag offers. Big blowups, bad choices by the protag, kid storms off as the protag collapses. Downer ending.
Thirteenth movie. Disease again, protag's dying again. This time it sticks. Mostly about trying to reconnect with Secret Love Child, and instead interacting mostly with their new, sane friends. Protag dies. Downer ending.
Fourteenth movie. Flashback to before the kid was born, showing how the kid was born. Hardcore porno. No dialogue, no other characters, just two straight hours of our couple fucking.
For line 9, "But thy eternal summer shall not fade," I propose a film about a wealthy, beautiful forty-something woman. Increasingly distressed by signs of aging that makeup won't hide, she has plastic surgery. And then more plastic surgey. And then increasingly elaborate surgery in farflung places of the world where the normal rules of medicine are disregarded. She thinks she is holding on to her youthful good looks, but she is in fact becoming a hideous caricature of herself. It's a tale of obsession and delusion, of trying to hold on to what can only slip through one's fingers, well into the realm of psychological horror.
I'd love to speak to the author of the Elon Musk's Engineering Algorithm review; I've had very similar thoughts myself after my time on the program. Please do ping me on here if you feel comfortable.
Murders in some of our largest cities are down drastically, according to city-specific websites.
https://heyjackass.com/
https://www.phillypolice.com/crime-data/crime-statistics/
https://homicides.news.baltimoresun.com/?range=2025
The Chicago site is not official statistics, but it does also count nonfatal shootings, which are also down, so it can't just be a matter of emergency medical services suddenly getting better. One guess seems to be that police are being more active. Maybe. Any thoughts? Also, the numbers will be tested as the weather gets warmer.
While murders are down, numbers on solved homicides are harder to come by. The Chicago site does give an end-of-month listing on homicide-linked arrests, which is generally 10-20% of homicides that month. (As best I can tell, they count arrests linked to all homicides in the statistics for that month- e.g., if a suspect is arrested today for a murder in April, it will be counted in the June statistics.) Considering that, by all accounts, a certain percentage of murders are fairly easy to solve, that is not comforting.
It would also be interesting to see a graph of conviction rate vs unsolved rate for homicides. Maybe one contributing factor is that with increasing use and effectiveness of street cameras and DNA the potential perps, who are usually chancers by nature, know they are more likely to be caught and thus to hold back than formerly.
Similarly, have real life crime programs increased in frequency in the last few years? If so then maybe those have also been an inhibiting factor, especially with future would be murderers being more of a captive audience during covid lockdowns, because these usually have a "happy ending" with the criminal(s) being caught and sentenced to decades or a whole life tariff behind bars!
This has begun getting some attention.
Here's a data analyst I follow who wrote on it in some depth:
https://jasher.substack.com/p/why-i-think-murder-is-plunging
A key part of that writeup is the six bulleted points which follow "Any explanation of why murder is falling at a historic clip must contend with several known facts:"
The Economist a month ago quoted Asher's work in writing about this trend.
Noah Smith wrote about it here:
https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/at-least-five-interesting-things-71f
That's good news, but I thought the dramatic increases in crime was less about murder and more about property crimes and theft? More stealing cars.
Can we blame this on the Loneliness Epidemic?
The fewer people you know, the fewer you'll want to kill.
We need more Third Spaces where people can meet potential victims.
Re the solved homicides, it is perfectly possible that one arrest = more than one solved homicide.
Wait a minute. That first page, about Chicago crime stats, has a section titled 2025 Shot Placement. And according to it, of the shootings that included shots to the head, there were 39 killed and 28 wounded.
So more than 40% of people shot in the head survive? That seems high.
Interestingly consistent with this other source:
https://codmansurgical.integralife.com/gunshot-head-wounds-what-impacts-survival/
> For assaultive gunshot wounds to the head, there was a mortality rate of 41%.
Assuming a random distribution, at least half of all head shots will miss the brain.
Most of the brain is actually just packing peanuts.
You're not the first guy to accuse me of that today.
The most famous shot in the head of 2024 was a bullet that grazed Donald Trump’s ear.
I dunno about 40%, but if you search for "survived shot in the head", there are many stories about this, so it seems like it's at least not super rare.
Yeah seems like a bit of a reversion to the mean following the BLM pullback. Plus maybe all the most-likely-to-be-murdered people already got murdered in the last four years.
I was surprised at how much I enjoyed the "Mountaintop" review.
I think the link above does it a disservice. The review starts with a whole-page introduction, on the topic of "What the heck is Mountaintop?", but the link above skips us right past it and takes us to the first subheader. On the first reading I mistook the header for the start of the review.
I don’t think I can handle entering that Google document again. Can you say what “Mountaintop” is?
It's an episode of an RPG improv-play podcast. I hate podcasts but the review kind of made me want to listen to this one.
Oh, thank you. I would not be able to understand it.
I also read a review from the list of wallflowers here and thought it was quite good. and it was not the same one you liked. In fact I gave it a 9 and I am a pretty picky grader.
Trying to do my part but I'm running out of steam for reviews. Any you recommend that I read from the batch above?
No. I don’t think recommendations and anti —recommendations are fair. When I’m running out of steam I sort of audition reviews before reading them. I just read the opening paragraph, skim a bit, read a paragraph in the middle. That’s enough to decide whether I’m likely to enjoy it. If the thing’s really long I’m pickier.
I get leg cramps in the night, and there are 6 different leg muscles where I sometimes get cramps. I have worked out a stretch for each one that stops the cramp cold if done quickly. If done after the cramp is fully developed, the stretch still counteracts it enough to greatly reduce the pain, and if I hold the stretch for several minutes then gradually back off it the cramp usually disappears.
I feel a bit silly describing all 6 here for no clear reason. But if anyone here gets leg cramps in the night and would like to know my remedy for the kind they get, ask away.
Hesitantly: If this is a circulation issue for the legs, is it possible that sleeping on an incline might improve results? Compression clothing?
I eat a banana every day, works for me.
Yeah that works for me too. Also maybe some type of electrolyte drink (gatorade etc.)
I would sometimes get night cramps and various spasms in my legs after snowboarding and making sure to eat a banana in the morning eliminated them pretty much entirely for me.
Do you know why? Various deficiencies (iron, magnesium) seem to impact feelings-in-the-legs at night and it's a topic I would like to learn more about. Unrelated?
Have looked into that, did again recently, and all the things people are told to try for restless legs or for cramps don't look very impressive in studies. For magnesium and improving hydration, the treatment group does a little better than the non-treatment, but not much. I cannot see any relationship at all between how much I'm exercising and how much trouble I have with leg cramps, and stretching before bed makes no difference whatever in the chance of cramps. The only regularity I see is that the older I get the more prone to leg cramps I am. Oh yeah, and there was a time 10 years ago when I was quite anemic and did not know it, and I had both restless legs and very frequent leg cramps in the night. Problem went away when anemia was treated. So my guess is that the cramps and restless legs have something to do with circulation and oxygen delivery in the legs. Anyhow, cramps are much less of a problem now because I am usually able to nip them in the bud.
The type of dietary/exercise science studies you reference almost never produce meaningful results. Individual responses vary too much for this. Imagine that 10% of the study were magnesium deficient and the treatment improved their leg cramps - if your study had 10,000 participants the analysis would clearly pick this out. But if the study has 30 participants, and two disimprove for reasons unrelated to the study, it's inconclusive.
What works for you might not work for others, and scientific studies might predict your response. I take magnesium periodically. You might also try massage: I go around once a month to get some of the knots and tension pummelled out of my legs and shoulders and find it very good. But again, individuals vary widely.
Yeah, I know what an underpowered study is.
Here's my take on the night leg cramps problem: There probably is some process that underlies it going on in almost all sufferers. I say that because it's a common problem, and people who have it all seem to describe it about the same way. It's way far down at the other end of the scale from things like chronic fatigue syndrome, which involve multiple symptoms, many of which (fatigue, for example) are part of the symptom picture for many many illnesses. That makes me think chronic fatigue sufferers are a heterogenous group. But my take is that people with leg cramps are not, at least not heterogenous as regards the process that directly underlies the cramps themselves. it seems likely to me that what works for one person who has leg cramps should work for many. Of course it may be that leg cramps are downstream of varied things -- let's say poor circulation, magnesium deficiency, lactic acid build-up during exercise the. day before. Still, it seems like there should be something that knocks out the phenom itself, even if a variety of other things set the stage for it. Or, of course, the cause might be something for which there is no quick and easy fix, such as poor circulation in the legs.
In any case, my post was not a suggested treatment, just a fix that works well during an attack.
Thanks for the response - interesting! I don't suffer from leg cramps, but I have a few weeks of horrible allergies every year. By the time my eyes are itching and my sinuses are pressurised, it's already too late. The antihistamines have limited effect during these periods. It's just a case of reducing exposure to pollen and waiting for the immune system to subside.
My mental model for this (rightly or wrongly) is that cumulative pollen exposure over a few days is the trigger, aggravated by stress, hot weather and air pollution. Antihistamines help somewhat but once my body exceeds some threshold an attack starts, and will take 3-4 days to fully subside.
I know you're looking for a quick fix - maybe heat or cold work? I'm suggesting that another approach is to treat it as a war not a battle. I'd look for cumulative factors which might all impact whatever the underlying mechanism is, whatever that might be rather than a single trigger.
Trying to properly articulate my distaste for the idea of "punch up, not down".
In order for the notion of punching up versus down to make sense, you need to have in mind some kind of hierarchy of who is above whom. Sometimes this is pretty reasonable, like a CEO is above a low-level employee. But are "men" above or below "women"? Are "black people" above or below "white people"? Are "Irish people" below or above "Dutch people"? The people who fancy themselves the most anti-racist tend to be the ones most inclined towards a strict racial hierarchy of who is above whom.
I'm going to assume this is a good faith question and my answer is to inform your of what leftists believe not to persuade you.
Leftists observe that our society, in effect if not in law, does have a hierarchy of power and that hierarchy frequently divides along racial lines. They do not believe that this is just and their interventions are intended to bring about eventual equalisation. They believe that "colour-blind" approaches tend to mask unexamined biases and therefore think it should be spoken about and approached directly.
"Punch up not down" means "aim your ire at the powerful, because they can take it and have the power to change things" and various racial groups are more likely to have power than others due to historical forces that have created systems of power. Their observation of the hierarchy is not a normative claim, they categorically don't believe that is how it should be.
In practice, this often means that mockery of e.g. Barack Obama is verboten because he is Black and thus oppressed so it would be "punching down" to make fun of him, but mockery of a Maga-hatted unemployed steelworker in the rust belt is perfectly fine because that is "punching up" against white privilege.
It seems to me that one ought to be able to take note of the fact that Barack Obama, in spite of being black, used to be President of the United States of America, which is about as far "up" as it's possible to go. And that, in spite of being white, the unemployed steelworker is pretty far down on any ladder of status or power. But that would be the pesky "colour-blind" approach that is apparently masking all my unexamined biases.
I think I've done a reasonable job of examining my biases, and my strong bias against people unironically talking about "punching up" and "punching down" will remain.
The leftists that I know mock Obama for precisely the reasons you mention and avoid making fun of working class people. What you're locking onto is a largely middleclass liberal phenomenon which seeks to use identity to maintain a status quo.
A lot of leftists like to think of themselves as champions of the oppressed and underdogs, because of course that implies that they are in a position of strength and influence, and thus somehow superior to those they defend. So if they mock Obama then a cynic might claim that is because they are vexed that he is such an obvious mismatch to their patronising ideas of who needs defending.
"Largely middleclass" meaning "of or pertaining to the largest and most politically powerful segment of American society"?
The human mind is very capable and creative when it comes to find good sounding reasons to punch those we want to punch.
This idea is one of many tools for that purpose.
Note that - as I learned in the indispensable The Elephant In The Brain - this is typically done subconsciously through Motivated Reasoning! The puncher is completely convinced of their clear moral authority/duty to punch their victim.
>Trying to properly articulate my distaste for the idea of "punch up, not down".
Mosquito Mentality. Obviously you should let mosquitos suck your blood as long as they want, they're so much smaller than you after all.
My distaste begins and ends with the underlying assumption that one's day should be preoccupied not with what to build, but rather who to punch.
"My distaste begins and ends with the underlying assumption "
Well then I have good news for you! As far as I can tell that *your* underlying assumption, and not that of anyone who uses the phrase in earnest. I have never seen the phrase deployed in a way that either so much as hints at that particular facet. For that matter, I've never seen the phrase deployed in a context where there was *any possibility* of mistaking it for talking about literal punching. Mostly I've seen it used to explain *why some piece of rhetoric is bad* (e.g. because it "punches down").
First, of course I don't mean literal punching; the metaphorical "who do we take down" is what I meant, and is bad enough.
Second, the key here is to look at what people choose to talk about. I've seen a lot of people who obsess on (metaphorical) punching rules, as if insults and verbal attacks are their primary interface with other people.
I've literally only ever seen it used to criticise comedians who routinely target disadvantaged groups of people.
Is it ever okay that we sometimes engage in this kind of frivolity, using violent terms as metaphors and things like that, or better we get back to work right now?
Here is a definitive mathematical guide to the hierarchy, explained in about eight minutes:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kmSWb-7xXKE
There's also a follow-up, discussing the racial hierarchy: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t29au-wFyO0
Asking as a non-American: is that hierarchy correct? (Not politically correct, of course.) If it is, it could be a non-ironically useful education resource for non-Americans trying to navigate the minefield of American politics. These seem like the things that "everyone knows", but no one says them out loud, but you could get in some trouble (e.g. as a white non-American student working in USA) for getting them wrong.
I mean, white people at the bottom, that part is obvious. (What about Jews? Higher, lower, or the same as whites in general?) But it would be difficult for a non-American to compare e.g. Asian vs Hispanic, or Native American vs Black.
Of course, a good education video would have fewer jokes, and maybe mention details such as that people directly from Spain do not actually count as Hispanic, but as whites. Also, you capitalize all words except for "white". But I may be mistaken about this. Which is why I am saying that an actual non-bullshit educational resource on this topic would be useful.
Yes, there is some room for disagreement over whether Native Americans ought to be higher up than Hispanics, but it's basically right.
For Jews, it depends on what hat (yarmulke?) they're wearing: if they're "Hitler/Holocaust" Jews, they outrank even the Blacks, and if they're "Israel vs. Palestine" Jews, they're below even whites. Otherwise, they're basically whites, so middle-to-top of the bottom tier.
For people from Spain or Portugal, I think the main caveat is your last name: if it's something as Anglo as Hayward-Thomas, then yeah, you're white, but otherwise I think you DO get the Hispanic victim points.
As jokes go, I think this is perfectly middle-of-the-road for educational videos. Academic lectures or corporate training clips might have fewer, but this is more "edutainment."
(And you're right: capitalizing "white" is a powerful political statement you most likely don't want to be making.)
Whiny white guys talk about being victims too. This dickhead is implicitly doing it himself. Man up and walk it off Matt Walsh. Don’t be such a whiny little bitch.
You're whining like a bitch right now about how other people talk, dude. Just walk it off and man up.
Okay. That’s fair. Walkin now.
There are so many things wrong with that idea that it is difficult to choose where to start.
For example, are we talking about literal punching? Or making fun of someone? Or criticizing someone? I don't like when people use these metaphors where our side's violence is speech, and the other side's speech is violence, because in my opinion the norms for speech and violence should be quite different.
To put it simply, it should be okay to criticize anyone; fun should be okay in moderate amounts (if you spend too much time following someone and making fun of them, that is bullying), and actual punching should be reserved for special cases (it is definitely wrong to punch a random person on the street just because you checked the relevant traits in a textbook on intersectionality, and it told you that this direction is definitely "up").
One thing suspiciously missing in this entire debate is *why* are we even considering punching someone. I mean, seriously, why? If the answer is something like "they tried to steal my wallet, so I punched them", how the hell is e.g. their sexual orientation relevant for the decision? If the answer is "no specific reason, I am just bored, so I am looking for random people whom it is okay to punch", then you are the one that should be punched.
As a rule of thumb, having the courage to punch someone should make you suspect that you are punching down. If other people tell you that this is okay, because you are definitely punching up, that makes it almost guaranteed that you are punching down.
When people bring up the idea of "punching up/down", quite often their goal is to make you focus on the irrelevant aspects of the situation, either to legitimize some form of bullying (by arguing that technically it is "punching up"), or to prevent some valid criticism (by arguing that it is "punching down").
Consider some specific cases: was Amanda Marcotte "punching up" Scott Aaronson in the newspapers? were Zizians "punching up" when they stabbed their landlord? Is this even a sane way to look at things?
"There are so many things wrong with that idea that it is difficult to choose where to start.
For example, are we talking about literal punching? Or making fun of someone? "
So the main thing wrong with other people using a phrase among themselves is that you personally don't understand it as an outsider? Why is that a problem, exactly? People seem perfectly capable of using and understanding the phrase just fine in context: it hardly seems to be their issue if you are confused unless they're speaking to you or for your consumption.
"When people bring up the idea of "punching up/down", quite often their goal is..."
Wait, a couple paragraphs ago you didn't even understand what the phrase meant. But new you're such an expert on usage that you can generalize the goals of people using it?
"Consider some specific cases:..."
Congratulations, you have discovered that taking a metaphor out of context sometimes leads to nonsense. What a strange and bizarre world this must be.
"Is this even a sane way to look at things?"
No, no it isn't. Funny how that happened.
> Why is that a problem, exactly?
Because those people are then going to police my behavior based on their criteria, I guess.
I think the obvious rejoinder is that most "hierarchies" aiming to categorize entire groups of people are just made up and outright fake.
You don't have a distaste for the slogan, you have a distaste for middle class social mores. (Good.)
Then the obvious answer would be "if there's doubt as to whether someone is up or down, err strongly on the side of not punching." Given that I've almost always seen the phrase applied to comedy, it would boil down to the following:
1. Ordinary citizens should always be free to mock those with significant wealth, fame and/or power.
2. It should not be considered acceptable for those with significant wealth, fame and/or power to mock those with none of it.
Of course there are edge cases and caveats, those generally seem like quite reasonable standards. I find nothing as pathetic as powerful people who can't stand being made fun of, except perhaps powerful people who habitually make fun of those below them (of course, those are often the same people).
I do think that people who use the principle as an excuse to mock broad, diverse groups of people are being obnoxious and unhelpful, even when those groups are (on average) objectively somewhat privileged. But I think when people criticize, say, comedy routines as "punching down," they are clearly and fairly communicating a reason that they dislike the thing in question, a reason many people will share.
I think it's one of *the* most toxic ideas in all of wokeness, which is really saying something. For two reasons. First, the fact that it's a class of principle (the other main one is the "prejudice plus power" crap) whose sole purpose is to declare "these are the people and groups we're exempt from needing to show any kindness or decency to". (Its main purpose is certainly *not* to promote kindness or and decency. I mean, it's not like there aren't millenia-old moral principles about treating everyone with kindness or never using bullying or mockery as a form of discourse, as well as more permissive principles that you can mock an argument but not the arguer, or you should treat someone the same way they treat others. If you want to push back on a culture of bullying you'd appeal to one of these principles. The only reason you'd want to use this new "punching down" principle is if your main concern is making sure some kinds of bullying are allowed! Which is, as a motivation, beyond despicable.) The second is that it has one of the worst gaps between "what it means in theory" and "how it's actually used" (which is *really* saying something given that what it means in theory is already, as I described above, very nasty). See Scott's "Social Justice and Words Words Words" and earlier writing on superweapons for the general pattern.
This is how I've seen it used:
-As a justification for why someone like Scott Aaronson being nearly driven to suicide doesn't count as real harm, and in fact it's fine for him to be further mocked by powerful popular women who've never gone through anything like that
-As a justification for why using slurs against poor rural white people, or someone like Hillary Clinton using dogwhistles hinting at the same ideas, is, unlike all other racial slurs, completely fine
-As a justification for demanding that something like Facebook should choose to simply not moderate hateful speech against white men
-As a justification for why insults by random civilians against their country's leader, who happens to be non-white or female, should be considered outside the bounds of acceptable discourse
-As a justification for why famous academics, celebrities, and other such powerful members of "marginalised" classes doxxing and personally insulting and mocking random people on the internet should be considered *within* the bounds of acceptable discourse
I appreciate that you don't support the times this principle is used to mock innocent people, but from my perspective this is like saying you're only against workplace bullying when it actually causes harm or distress. Yeah, I'm sure there are cases of something being technically classed as bullying despite causing no harm or distress, but in general bullying by its nature is the sort of thing that tends to cause harm and distress. Similarly, the principle under discussion is at its worst "here are the races and other groups whose members, regardless of how vulnerable or innocent they are, we are allowed to hurt" and at its best "here is an extremely vague and subjective standard for when it's okay to hurt people, that you can be confident we definitely won't use a cover for bullying people we don't like". And it's kind of amazing how often "punching down is different to punching up" can be paraphrased (as in, be equally predictive of behaviour) as "when I say bullying is wrong I only mean when it's done to *me*. Not when I'm doing it to other people!"
I'm also going to take a second to push back on the implicit framing of this. The framing where it's somehow necessary to construct these elaborate moral frameworks to justify bullying (which otherwise wouldn't happen). So clearly this entire principle is just about those mean ol' lefties looking *really hard* for someone they can get away with picking on.
In the real world, of course, there are lots and lots of time-honored scapegoats that get bullied *by default.* Groups whose bullying is so normalized that its practically invisible--to the point where lots of people will get angry and indignant if you point out that the thing they're doing is bullying. Easy examples are fat people, mentally ill people, visibly handicapped people, poor people and (in certain contexts) children. There are doubtless other examples that simply aren't springing to mind at the moment.
There used to be more such groups. In many cases, "it's OK to bully these people" was written directly into law in one form or another. The reduction in both scope and intensity is *directly* due to the progressive/social justice movements of years past being loud and persistent in *standing up against it.* Often in ways that were heavily criticized in both content and tone (if not violently suppressed) at the time: many of which can be broadly described as "punching up" (i.e. criticizing or standing up to the established power structures).
As for those groups that still are acceptable to bully, the *only* people I see consistently standing up for them are the progressive/social justice movements of today. It's mostly only in leftist spaces that it's acceptable to even *talk about* a lot of this bullying: it seems to be considered much more rude to *protest* the bullying of disabled people or fat people in conservative social circles that it is to openly *engage* in it. And I see quite a lot of anger and disdain thrown at those who actively try to push back. So this world you live in where "wokeists" (who let's remember, and not a type of people who actually exist) are constantly looking for their next victim to bully is utterly alien to me. Now, I have certainly seen online harassment campaigns and journalistic hit pieces and other crappy practices come out of that segment of society sometimes. But on the balance, they seem to be the *only* ones actively trying to tamp down on those ugly tendencies.
> As for those groups that still are acceptable to bully, the *only* people I see consistently standing up for them are the progressive/social justice movements of today.
Like this? https://www.google.com/search?q=drinking+male+tears&udm=2
If you're neither going to actually read what I wrote OR write anything substantive of your own, please save us both the trouble and don't bother replying.
This isn't Facebook and it isn't Twitter. I don't think most of us want it to be Facebook or Twitter. Copy-pasting a stupid link as a half-baked "gotcha" to a post you clearly didn't bother to understand or even fully read is pushing the space more in that direction.
Fine, here is a proper ACX style response:
The context is that there is this distinction called "punching up/down", and what does it actually mean, and whether it is a good or bad idea.
A few people have noted that regardless of what it was supposed to mean in theory, in practice it is often used to justify bullying of acceptable targets (by calling it "punching up"), or deflect criticism of unacceptable targets (by calling it "punching down").
Then you wrote about how various groups of people are bullied, and it is only the "progressive/social justice movements of today" who consistently stand up against that.
I find it interesting that you specified "of today", because indeed the heroes of yesterday sometime become the villains of today. Consider TERFs -- from their perspective, they are still consistently standing against bullying lesbians into having sex with biological males, but...
If you start noticing these things, you may re-evaluate how much consistency there actually is. Another example: I remember an era when female genital mutilation was considered an obvious horror that every decent person must object against. These days, I rarely hear about it anymore (despite the fact that little girls are still getting their genitals mutilated), and if I do, it is usually in the context of calling someone islamophobic, because they objected against the practice being done in some Islamic country.
Similarly, slavery is still practiced in many countries, but it would be gauche to point it out among the progressives today, because... well, there are mostly people of color doing it to each other, so that's none of your business, white colonizer. (Almost as if slavery is only bad when the whites are doing it.)
You are correct about the progressives/SJWs defending some groups against bullying today. The nuance I would like to add is that they have a specific list of groups, and if your group is not on the list, that means no empathy for you. (Plus the list is actually a hierarchy, because one does not speak e.g. about gays who are bullied by the black, etc.) Which makes me think that this isn't a principled opposition against bullying per se, but rather offering protection to groups who are considered useful political allies. People who actually oppose bullying consistently are likely to sooner or later accidentally defend someone from a wrong group, and get attacked for doing that.
Probably I shouldn't engage here: the inferential distance seems quite vast. But against my better judgement...
"First, the fact that it's a class of principle ... whose sole purpose is to declare "these are the people and groups we're exempt from needing to show any kindness or decency to"
It's pretty astonishing that you're able to divine the "sole purpose" of a relatively niche metaphor employed by a subculture you don't belong to. To be perfectly frank: when you say this, you CLEARLY don't know what the hell you're talking about. You do not know the people saying it. You do not know what they think, what they believe, how they relate to the world. You especially do not seem to know the contexts in which they are deploying the phrase. You are generalizing from an adversarially cherrypicked set of examples, which *of course* will inform you that everything about [outgroup] is awful and rotten and mean. Funny how that works.
"I mean, it's not like there aren't millenia-old moral principles about treating everyone with kindness..."
This is such an amazingly stilted and disingenuous comparison I barely know where to start. Like, first you're comparing a metaphor *specifically* employed to analyze adversarial situations to moral principles that are *supposed* to apply everywhere[1]. Like, assuming you're not just being deliberately deceptive here, I can only suspect that you have never, ever, EVER engaged with any of the core ideas of the philosophies you're criticizing[1]. It's not exactly a secret that a world where everyone treats everyone with kindness and nobody is screwed over or oppressed is one of the *core, guiding goals* of most strains of leftist thought. But shockingly enough, just like every other philosophy out there, they have to grapple with the fact that *we don't live in that world currently.*
I'm going to take a wild guess that you're not actually a strict pacifist, and do believe that use of force is sometimes appropriate. And I don't even *have* to guess that, pacificist or not, you're at the very least not above taking *rhetorical* swings at people (since, y'know, that's what you're doing here). So you CLEARLY can't hold "treat everyone with kindness all the time under all circumstances no matter what" as an inviolable principle yourself[3]; whether you laid them out explicitly or not, you clearly have *some* set of internal guidelines for when and how to approach conflicts and what level to participate in them at. So when you run into a piece (not the whole, just a piece) for someone else's schema for how to approach conflicts and insist they're terrible people because they *have* such a schema aren't *only* about Universal Love and Transcendent Joy, you are either failing extremely badly at introspection or just not even trying to understand what you're seeing.
I'm going to have to go ahead and express some real skepticism at some of your claims around this too. I do realize that it's not always convenient to find such things, but by the same token your memory isn't 100% reliable either. Like when you say you've seen it used to justify the following:
"-As a justification for why famous academics, celebrities, and other such powerful members of "marginalised" classes doxxing and personally insulting and mocking random people on the internet should be considered *within* the bounds of acceptable discourse"
I am EXTREMELY skeptical, and badly want to see an actual source and attendant details. I've *very* occasionally seen this sort of absolutely shit-tier take from random nobodies on social media[4]. But I've never seen anything within a million miles of it written by anyone serious enough to have anything resembling a platform, and I've read more than my fair share. Like clearly, OBVIOUSLY academics and celebrities picking on random people on the internet are punching down. So again, I'm not updating on this one until I see some actual receipts.
Or let's take this:
"As a justification for why insults by random civilians against their country's leader, who happens to be non-white or female, should be considered outside the bounds of acceptable discourse."
Is that actually what was said? In its entirety? This one makes me suspicious not because it very strongly resembles a reasonable position *with one key detail omitted.* It seems like exactly the sort of paraphrase that would come out of someone who didn't understand the culture they were critiquing, and thus didn't understand why the omitted part was load-bearing.
The reasonable version of this doesn't just apply to leaders who are non-white or female. In fact, I can quite specifically remember seeing people on the left use it to critique certain jokes about Trump: specifically jokes about his weight (and occasionally other health issues). The general version goes something like "if you make fun of a powerful person for [common characteristic], the powerful person almost certainly won't see it, but lots of ordinary people who share [common characteristic]" will. So, for example, I've never, ever heard anybody say it was inappropriate to mock or criticize Obama. But I saw plenty of people push back against racially loaded jokes about him--the part where it's about the POTUS is *not* what makes it "punching down."
"from my perspective this is like saying you're only against workplace bullying when it actually causes harm or distress."
And we're right back at "I don't think you actually know what you're talking about." Claiming that the phrase is fundamentally about "bullying" just suggests that your entire view of it comes from arguing with people on the internet. You came very, very close to hitting the nail on the head with that one example: mocking a national leader. Does that count as bullying, in your view? You don't seem to think so, given the phrasing of your example. The word "bullying," to my understanding of the term, is about exerting power over someone through fear, violence or intimidation. In fact, "bullying" seems pretty much synonymous with "punching down" when you get right down to it: you can't bully someone without having some sort of power over them, be it physical, social, political or whatever. So a reasonable paraphrase might be "don't engage in bullying, but do freely critique power and those who wield it." Which is a very far cry from what you seem to think it means.
[1] But somehow never actually *do* apply everywhere, funnily enough.
[2] Do you know which philosophies those are? That fact that you use "wokeness" with apparent seriousness leads me strongly to guess "no," since the *entire purpose* of the term is to homogenize the outgroup and pretend they all believe the same thing.
[3] Which, let's take a moment to notice, makes it VERY hypocritical for you to rant and rail about other people not holding it.
[4] We DO understand that there's an infinite supply of shit-tier takes flowing out of random nobodies on social media, right? And that as such, using them as evidence of anything but the vastness of human stupidity is terrible practice, yes?
[continued]
"I'm going to have to go ahead and express some real skepticism at some of your claims around this too. I do realize that it's not always convenient to find such things, but by the same token your memory isn't 100% reliable either."
I appreciate this acknowledgement. And yes I agree, I could be remembering things wrong.
"The general version goes something like "if you make fun of a powerful person for [common characteristic], the powerful person almost certainly won't see it, but lots of ordinary people who share [common characteristic]" will."
In Australia, our first female prime minister was Julia Gillard who, in October 2012, gave a famous "misogyny speech" listing all the sexism she'd allegedly been subject to. [3] You can easily look this up. A lot of what she said was valid, being things that were or could be attacks on women in general. But a lot of it was also just personal insults or mockery directed at her, with some peripheral gendered aspect. Like, a sign at a rally calling her "Bob Brown's bitch"--gendered, yes (even though men are also routinely called someone's bitch), but directed at her personally for allegedly taking orders from Greens leader Bob Brown who was propping up her government. Or a right-wing radio commentator saying her father "died of shame" (this one doesn't even have a gendered aspect). Or the opposition leader saying she needed to "make an honest woman of herself".[4] And she got near-universal adulation for this "brave" speech from the left-leaning national and international media. Now, I should say that I thought those things (except the last) were disgusting, and terrible for public discourse. But I can only say this by rejecting the whole "punching up" framework and saying that even though she was literally the most powerful person in the country it was still not acceptable to talk about her like that. And to see the very same people who condemned this rhetoric go on to tolerate, and even engage in, the most vulgar and personal insults towards subsequent male politicians and even infinitely less powerful men on the basis of "punching up" was an enormous slap in the face to people like me who'd (like Scott witnessing the reactions to the deaths of Osama bin Laden and Margaret Thatcher) previously believed the left actually tried to live by some sort of principle of kindness.
Another example is it being generally unacceptable (from what I've seen) to mock Obama's (or Harris's) name. Whereas mocking Trump's or Bush's name is perfectly fine. They are the exact same thing, done to people of equally vast power. If your principle is that when the national leader is non-white or female then whole realms of mockery and comedy that would be acceptable otherwise (their names, their appearance, their level of submissiveness[5]) are now off limits, I think it's pretty fair to round that to the statement I made.
"But I've never seen anything within a million miles of it written by anyone serious enough to have anything resembling a platform, and I've read more than my fair share. Like clearly, OBVIOUSLY academics and celebrities picking on random people on the internet are punching down."
I'd have to search for some examples. I think this was pretty common during the gamergate fiasco, and has happened a fair amount since, with famous women doxxing and shaming random people on the internet who insulted them, and getting cheered on for it in left-leaning media. And I remember something in I think Brazil where people put up billboards doxxing random social media accounts that had said racially charged things about the president, and I think that was cheered in left media too. But if you insist on sources, give me some time.
4. I'm not going to reply to the rest with as much detail.
"It's not exactly a secret that a world where everyone treats everyone with kindness and nobody is screwed over or oppressed is one of the *core, guiding goals* of most strains of leftist thought."
Right. In other news, Christianity has always been about love and kindness, capitalism is primarily focused on maximising prosperity for everyone, and Trumpism's core guiding principle is doing the best thing for America. You can either take various movements' official statements of their core values on their face, or you can look at how they actually operate in practice. Many people's experience with various strains of leftism is that they tend to be *all about* kindness and fairness and justice...right up until they actually gain significant power. At which point those gullible enough to believe the official statements, especially if they belong to an as-of-this-year-disfavoured demographic group or, even worse, have at some point dared to suggest that they "only" agree with the left on 97% of things (see, again, Scott Aaronson, or for an even better example JK Rowling), are in for a very, very, *very* nasty shock. [6]
But I can understand if some people haven't caught up to this reality yet. After all, it's only been going on since about June 1793.
"That fact that you use "wokeness" with apparent seriousness leads me strongly to guess "no," since the *entire purpose* of the term is to homogenize the outgroup and pretend they all believe the same thing."
Oh come on, not this shit again. I'm not going to link to Freddie deBoer's piece on this, or Scott's numerous pieces, because they're really not at all hard to find. And I suspect you've seen them already. But in case you missed all of it: yes, "wokeness" is a silly term. It's also a term its advocates don't like. The reason we're all forced to refer to this ideology with a silly term its advocates don't like is that they have *absolutely and repeatedly* refused to accept *any* term for their movement--other than crap like "basic decency". Honestly, most people don't have a problem with using the preferred self-descriptor for a political group, even one they hate. Terms like "conservative", "liberal", "libertarian", "progressive", "socialist", "nationalist", "evangelical", etc etc, are happily used by both the groups themselves and those who hate them. Most of us who use "woke" aren't trying to be insulting, we're just trying to simply *refer* to a clear cluster of associated beliefs and practices that, empirically, tend to go together, tend to derive from the same sources and social environments, and tend to be championed by the same people. You can easily find lists of these beliefs and practices, but a sample is: putting social divisions way above economic divisions, dividing everyone into demographic groups based on how "privileged" they allegedly are, claiming racism against whites or sexism against men is impossible, using terms like "microaggression", "mansplain" and "cultural appropriation" unironically, calling speech violence, claiming it's not their responsibility to educate anyone when their factual claims are challenged, and excluding from their spaces and, if they can, all of society anyone who disagrees with a single one of their tenets. [7]
I'm willing to use any term you want me to to refer to this cluster, except something biased and ridiculous ("basic decency") or inaccurate and misleading ("liberalism"). I can call it Social Justice, SJWism, wokeness, wokeism, intersectionalism, or progressive identity politics. With any of these terms, I'd be referring to the exact same thing. It's just that all of these terms have been called slurs, whenever they were used, and no clear term has ever been offered that isn't "a slur".
But I'm not willing to pretend the thing being referred to doesn't exist.
[1] I don't really know what your core thesis is here. Is it a factual claim that the principle under discussion is hardly ever used in a bad way? Or a moral claim that even if it is it's still a useful principle? Or a a combination of all of this?
[2] Just to make this absolutely clear, there are two forms of this. (1) "yes Clinton was insulting rednecks but they deserve to be insulted because punching up". (2) Parsing Clinton's statement as meaning nothing except what she claimed to be saying, while passing Cruz's, Reagan's etc statements as having all these extra implications, based on the assumption dogwhistles aren't used to "punch up". They amount to the same thing.
[3] As an illuminating aside, she incorrectly used "misogyny" to mean "sexism" and then some dictionaries *were literally "updated" to justify her mistake*.
[4] What exactly is he supposed to do here? If Gillard were a man he'd say "the Prime Minister needs to make an honest man of himself" and no one would object. Because she's a woman, he either needs to keep the original expression and call her a man (I'm sure people would have loved that), use the modified form he did (and get accused somehow of implied misogyny), or he's simply not allowed to use that kind of expression with a woman.
[5] If a male leader were seen as unduly influenced by someone and he was described as "castrated" or similar, would anyone call this offensive or marginalising? What about a female politician implying that her male opponents had small penises? (This actually happened here, and the outcry from the "kind and decent" left was very absent. Maybe I just missed it. Though I doubt it.)
[6] Of course, it goes without saying that the right is no different in its potential for cruelty and injustice. It *is* better, however, in not claiming to be perfectly kind and pure angels while doing so. Except for the religious forms that is.
[7] Maybe you want to say the last one is a total strawman and never happens. I disagree, but I'm fine if you disregard that one and comprehend the cluster defined by the rest, the next time you feel like saying "what does woke even mean?"
You've thrown out a lot of different claims here and made a number of assumptions, or at least that's how it seems to me. [1] So bear with me and excuse me if I don't address everything--it doesn't mean I'm conceding it.
1. I find the tone of this comment pretty aggressive and borderline for the spirit of respectful discourse. A lot of it comes across as you saying "you have no idea what you're talking about. You REALLY have no idea what you're talking about! It's kind of AMAZING how little idea you have of what you're talking about!!!!!" I don't find this style of discourse remotely productive; how about simply stating what you think I'm wrong about *without* all the vaguely-insulting rhetoric?
Now, maybe you think my above comment was rude or aggressive; I didn't intend it that way. Though I was replying to you, I didn't personally attack you at all, or cast aspersions on your intelligence or knowledge, or suggest that you were arguing in bad faith. I in fact only mentioned you personally to say I *appreciated* your disclaimer! The rest of my comment was directly squarely at a hypothetical group of people who often appeal to this principle. (Unless you think things like "the only reason you'd want to use this new "punching down" principle is if your main concern is making sure some kinds of bullying are allowed!" were directed at you. I thought it was pretty clear I was using generic "you" for a hypothetical person, but in case that wasn't clear, I'm telling you that now. Can we please dial down the personal aspect?)
As for this: "you're at the very least not above taking *rhetorical* swings at people (since, y'know, that's what you're doing here)"--My personal preference (which I suppose I can't expect everyone to share, although I do think it's a pretty widely-established principle) is for the norm that it's always acceptable to insult an argument, it's sometimes and somewhat acceptable to insult a hypothetical and vaguely defined group of people not present on the site (and not concretely defined enough to be referencing people clearly present on some other particular site), and it's never acceptable to personally insult the person you're arguing with (unless they're doing it themselves). I don't claim to perfectly adhere to this, nor do I claim that your "you've clearly never bothered to look into this lol"-style asides are anywhere near the high end on a spectrum of insults. But I do maintain that there's a *significant difference* between the latter personally-directed swipes and something hypothetical and generic. Like, if you'd said "the people who rant and whine about how they're being punched up at clearly don't know what they're talking about" I'd be fine with that, since it's vague enough that it's not unambiguously directed at me. Unlike what you actually said.
2. You say "It's pretty astonishing that you're able to divine the "sole purpose" of a relatively niche metaphor employed by a subculture you don't belong to..." Now, it should first be noted that one is in fact capable of making informed deductions about the purpose of an institutional practice that's been used against them, or that they've seen used against people like them, *without* having to actually be one of the people using it! I mean, do you think nobody who's been a victim of say, an intimidating police interrogation is capable of opining on what the purpose of such behaviour is, unless they've worked in law enforcement themselves? Do you think a woman who's experienced sexual harassment at an otherwise-all-male workplace is disqualified, due to not being male, of "divining" the purpose of such harassment? Do you think such people are in fact obligated to *defer* to the official statements by said police department and workplace as to what their policies really are and how they're intended? I am (to use a bit of your sarcastic style) going to go out on a limb and say you probably *don't* believe that.
With that out of the way, let's turn to this: "You especially do not seem to know the contexts in which they are deploying the phrase." I really need to ask, genuinely not rhetorically, what kind of evidence would convince you on this. What if half a dozen people were to chime in on this thread saying they've routinely seen or experienced the phrase used to justify bullying? (I'll have to assume that's not enough, since that's already basically happened.) What if we held a poll and 80% of readers on this site answered that they'd primarily encountered the phrase in a bullying context? What if you polled all the white men in some very liberal environment (in a way that gave them ironclad guarantees their responses would be secret) and asked them how often they'd seen the phrase used to justify an objectively more powerful person than them (e.g. a boss, an online forum moderator, a professor, a local celebrity) mocking or bullying them, and how many times they'd seen it used to protect them from such a (powerful non-hetwhitemale) person? And you got answers like 95% and 5% respectively? Would you be convinced *then*? I need to know what kind of evidential standard you are demanding here, to know whether there's any point trying.
3. Following on, I notice that of my five examples, you directly answered the two that were vague and generic, and you ignored the three that were concrete and specific. Do you need to be linked to examples of the Scott Aaronson thing? Just read our Scott's "Untitled". Do you need examples of the same publications and people who condemned "New York values" and "welfare queens" and "inner city youth" being utterly fine with "basket of deplorables" and calling it punching up and "discomforting the privileged" for one for the most powerful women in the world to invoke the tropes of rural uneducated white people being dirty and disgusting and subhuman?[2] Do you need links to those old memes about Facebook at one point allowing attacks on "black drivers" (due to a technicality in its policy) but banning attacks on "white men"? (Note that exactly equally "black men" were protected and "white drivers" weren't. "Like, you know, do these people *actually believe* that white men are human beings with feelings to be given *equal protection* to others???") I could link to all of these if necessary, and I think they demonstrate my point very clearly.
But as for the ones you challenged...
Another criticism of the idea, but from a different direction: https://stonetoss.com/comic/goliath/
Isn't Stonetoss a neonazi?
Depends on what you mean by the term, I guess. He DOES make jokes that are offensive to the prevailing Liberal establishment, and has on occasion expressed support for Donald Trump.
He certainly _seems_ to really not like Jews. You could claim he's just being provocative for laughs – to me it reads strongly like "joking not joking".
- Holocaust denial comic: https://web.archive.org/web/20200120053636/https://i.imgur.com/woflC2c.png
- Rabbi sucking bloody child penis comic (sorry): https://web.archive.org/web/20230610162231/https://i.redd.it/bkg3u41vwbw01.jpg
- Global financial elite are Jews comic: https://web.archive.org/web/20211008092427/https://rationalwiki.org/w/images/0/08/StoneToss-billionaires-comic-1.png
In general he also seems strongly against race or culture mixing:
- Refugees leading to the extinction of all whites: https://web.archive.org/web/20250423234819/https://i.imgur.com/2VaxJAk.png
- Multiculturalism is bad: https://web.archive.org/web/20250423234817/https://i.imgur.com/GHrNZoE.jpg
So I think it's fair to say he's very antisemitic, and wants to protect the white race against race mixing and multiculturalism. For me that does round off fairly close to neo-Nazi.
In terms of literal support for historical Nazism, beyond Holocaust denial, there's not a lot: there are a few comics which present Nazis or white supremacists in a positive light but he hasn't explicitly said "Hitler was great and I mean this nonironically".
- https://web.archive.org/web/20200120053659/https://i.imgur.com/CMCKEX7.png
-
https://web.archive.org/web/20250212205921/https://i.imgur.com/og7d5B1.png
I'm avoiding guilt-by-association arguments here as hanging out with neo-Nazis doesn't inherently make you one.
I hope nobody ever asks if I'm a neonazi and someone else responds "depends what you mean by the term"
Okay, that's helpful. So to someone who thinks like you, yeah, he's definitely a neo-Nazi: Wikipedia says so, and it cites Reliable Sources, so it can't be wrong.
Okay, and what do *you* say? As simply as possible, please.
Intersectionality theory (as an actual academic theory) denies that there is always a clear “up” or “down”. Straight black men and straight black women and gay white men have different societal advantages and disadvantages, and none is strictly more or less privileged than the other.
Every individual will have lots of intersecting identities, some of which are more important than others and some of which result in privileges or oppressions or more likely both. But some individuals are clearly better off than others.
I think the steel man version of “punch up, not down” is just the thing where it’s fine to tease people once they’re already well-integrated into your friend group and aren’t worried about where they stand, but you probably shouldn’t do it with new people until they’re clear they’re doing fine. And if there’s an acquaintance that you never quite get that close with, you probably shouldn’t tease them.
> Intersectionality theory (as an actual academic theory) denies that there is always a clear “up” or “down”. Straight black men and straight black women and gay white men have different societal advantages and disadvantages, and none is strictly more or less privileged than the other.
Would intersectionality theory go so far as to admit that people are actually individuals rather than just clusters of group memberships, and thus generalising about "privilege" in the context of group memberships is a bad idea?
> I think the steel man version of “punch up, not down” is just the thing where it’s fine to tease people once they’re already well-integrated into your friend group and aren’t worried about where they stand, but you probably shouldn’t do it with new people until they’re clear they’re doing fine. And if there’s an acquaintance that you never quite get that close with, you probably shouldn’t tease them
I don't think that's a steel man so much as a totally different and much more sensible idea. It's about judging people on their own very specific individual circumstances (the right-wing point of view) rather than massively generalising about entire races or genders (the left-wing point of view).
>I don't think that's a steel man so much as a totally different and much more sensible idea. It's about judging people on their own very specific individual circumstances (the right-wing point of view) rather than massively generalising about entire races or genders (the left-wing point of view).
This is is extremely funny. Intersectionality, which has become one of the most important parts of left political theory over the last 50 years or so, is specifically about how any individual has a huge number of over lapping advantages and disadvantages in society based on the circumstances of their life. Intersectionality is the argument that we should always be accounting for all these hyper specific things. While major right wing figures are agitating that all Haitians eat pets, all gays and trans people are groomers, all Palestinians are Hamas etc etc.
"Intersectionality...is specifically about how any individual has a huge number of over lapping advantages and disadvantages in society based on the circumstances of their life."
No, it isn't, it's about how only certain kinds of disadvantages and circumstances are deemed to matter, and all others, no matter how much suffering they cause, are deemed to be irrelevant. As Scott once put it, "Imagine a boot stamping on a human face forever, saying "I KNOW YOU FEEL UPSET RE STAMPING, BUT THAT'S DIFFERENT FROM STRUCTURAL OPPRESSION""
Your version isn't steelmanning, it's sanewashing.
> Would intersectionality theory go so far as to admit that people are actually individuals rather than just clusters of group memberships, and thus generalising about "privilege" in the context of group memberships is a bad idea?
It does seem potentially useful to recognize and study predictors of social soft power, as well as the amount of variation not explained by them.
To take a different spin on it, it’s about noticing that there are generalizable observations you can make about how members of particular groups are treated by society, but that these generalizations often interact in ways that are more complicated than addition.
(Also, I don’t think you’ve got the political valence on this right - I find that left wing humanities academics are often allergic to *any* sort of generalization, and want to treat every individual or event as its own unique thing to be understood on its own terms. Of course, this is only some groups - obviously, Marxists are much more interested in quasi-scientific theories about classes, but they are not the mainstream in humanities academia.)
Podcast on Plato's Symposium
https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/38-plato-on-platonic-love/id1567970646?i=1000712072177
hi! long time reader. i'm looking for a wife, and decided to try to cast a broader net by writing. because "write what you know", i decided to write pseudonymously about looking for a wife as smut.
still workshopping the framing. interested in any feedback
https://besthusbandever.substack.com/p/68185808-50ee-4417-b45a-fb36f72ced51?postPreview=paid&updated=2025-06-09T23%3A33%3A27.327Z&audience=everyone&free_preview=false&freemail=true
Well I thought it wasn't bad. I see all the usual suspects trying to tear it apart in the comments, and I wanted to say ignore them.
A certain kind of woman sees red at the idea of a man having a sex drive, and you very decidedly don't want to attract those ones. Let 'em carp to each other.
A much larger swathe of the population is attracted to a man who seems to be doing something he likes and enjoying it. It felt like you had fun writing this to me.
It's slightly possible I'm giving you too much credit, but I'm going to disagree with the other commenters.
I think the purpose of the short story is to attractively showcase your competency as an artist; your ability to closely observe, to turn a clever phrase, to slide in a delightful callback joke, to maintain a theme, to self-observe your foibles and then wryly expose them to your audience. Even studiously avoiding capitalization feels like a considered choice; you're doing a visually dumb thing to disarm your audience into thinking the writer-character is a little bit dumb, but you abandon that strategy the moment it would be *too* wrong and confusing (you capitalize the initialized name "AJ").
I'm a little pressed for time, so I won't go into greater detail, but this was a *very* competent story, and the more I deconstruct it, the more I see to appreciate.
If you're looking for a wife who, like me, adores meta, is attracted to artistic competency, appreciates self-reflection, and maybe likes stories so much that they do stuff like write them or study them or (heh) even reference them in their usernames, then this is not a broader net: it's a hand-crafted highly-specialized single-use tool.
Or, it's just a short story, and the initial sales presentation is part of that story.
Either way, your piece is a banger.
(Oh, did I just reference the word "bang?" How clumsy of me!)
a/s/l???
We're going to have to agree to disagree on this one 😁
Even as an artistic production it doesn't appeal to me, and if the narrator is meant to be at all representative of real-life BHE, I have to applaud his honesty about "yeah I'm a jerk".
I'm more interested in the girlfriend - Narrator says he wants a wife and family, he's *extraordinarily* susceptible given his reactions to the two women at the party (and are there only two? or are these just the two hottest chicks that grabbed his attention?), he does indulge in the pedestal problem (and boy I was never very sympathetic to the notion of "pedestalisation" but here we have Narrator going 'she's the most beautiful woman I ever saw' - dude, you only met her five minutes ago!) and clearly he's there to get into some woman's knickers (literally with AJ when it ends with him getting his hand under her thong).
He's not very sympathetic to Dave who recently broke up with his girlfriend and is clearly still hurting, since Narrator may say this is "not quite a sex party" but it's clear he's there to get laid if at all possible. So okay, Narrator is self-centred, we are learning that.
Which brings us back to the girlfriend casually mentioned and as casually dismissed in the first sentence. Does she know what is going on? We're led to assume so, but then again Narrator is so evasive about where he's going (not quite a sex party? so nearly sex then? up to the limit of having sex? Bill Clinton style 'I did not have sex with that woman'?)
Then later on he talks about what he wants - a wife and family. Is this true, or just something he's saying to sound more appealing to the women? If true, what about Girlfriend back home - she not on the wife list? Again, does she know this and is she okay with it? And is Narrator really as charming to the ladies as he tries to present himself as being?
It seems like most of your objections are more about cultural norms than the craftsmanship of the piece itself, though?
I've been in and adjacent to poly and woo and kink culture (Seattle is San Francisco's angry goth younger sibling), so I instantly understood that the girlfriend doesn't care at all about the sex party and is in fact so supportive we the audience don't need to be reassured of that by hearing from her. And of course she doesn't want to get married; possibly because she's practicing relationship anarchy or is already married or just isn't interested.
The descriptions about the physical beauty? Well, yes. That's just (not all but definitely all) men.
There's certainly an argument that one shouldn't write very spare, stripped-down short stories about cultures which may be inscrutable to much of one's audience, I'll give you that.
But he's also writing for the audience who mostly understands Scott's Bay Area House Parties, so this seems like a reasonable stage.
I don't think it's well-written, either. "my lust object had huge bazongas, really massive honkers, even bigger than the Whore of Urbino, you dig? and then my second lust object wasn't - get this! - even wearing a bra, I could tell because there was a hole cut out in her dress to let us all see that, plus it was slit up the thigh which was really handy when I groped her later and got to slip my hand under the two inches of lace on the thong to - well, you can just guess where my hand ended up, heh-heh, such a pity she bugged out on me right then!"
*shrug* That's guy writing women he finds attractive. I'm a straight woman so it's not a turn on to me (ooh, she has boobies? big big boobies?) and if I want some hot smut well there's plenty of fanfic more to my taste out there (though lately I'm way more interested in reading about platonic - genuinely platonic, not queer platonic - relationships).
Deiseach. I thought you probably just weren’t interested in sex, but if you like smut I have a site to recommend: Beautiful Agony. Rather than tell you what it’s like I’ll let you discover for yourself, if you’re curious. But I guarantee it’s nothing remotely like porn hub. You won’t be assaulted by a screen full of ads and multiple overlapping couples going at it with their eyes and veins bulging.
I consider that more cultural stuff, though, and it's sort of hard to argue on the cultural stuff. I spent my formative young adult years amongst nerdy straight men as an (incorrectly self-diagnosed) asexual, and when they stopped perceiving me as a potential sex object (eg “woman”), and started speaking around and to me as if I was another man, BOY HOWDY DID I LEARN ABOUT MEN.
They can't help it. They REALLY can't. The better amongst them learn to put a veneer of civility and complexity over their base reactions to women, and the best of them learn to semi-believe it, but, at their core…?
They can't help noticing and then wanting what they want.
"They can't help it. They REALLY can't. The better amongst them learn to put a veneer of civility and complexity over their base reactions to women, and the best of them learn to semi-believe it, but, at their core…?
They can't help noticing and then wanting what they want."
I know. God bless 'em. Which is what makes me smile when I read the long, aggrieved, discussion threads elsewhere about "what the heck do women want? what is female sexuality?" We've even had this on the dating discussion threads on here.
Men are simple when it comes to that. Men want booba and young totty. Be they seventeen or seventy-seven, they all want hot big tit seventeen year old blondie.
Simple pleasures, but it makes them happy.
Which is why men and women so often talk past one another, because guys do not believe women who say "personality is important" (since to them, they see women picking the hot guys) and women don't believe men that "yeah, hot big titty blondie is enough, she don't need be smart or stuff".
And again, that is not to say that men *never* want emotional depth and involvement and that women *never* want "he's dumb but he sure is pretty", but here's the clash when BHE is trying to write "will this attract women?"
It definitely is a different culture and you're right I was not picking up on the assumptions that the intended audience would have re: the girlfriend, the not-sex-party, etc.
To be frank, it's not spicy enough for me! 😀 The descriptions of Amelia and AJ are just so... what you'd expect from a sraight guy:
"hummus lady is long and lithe. dirty‑blonde, wavy hair that stops just above her collarbones. she’s wearing a light‑colored dress - maybe some green in it. calf length, shoulder straps, mid‑thigh slit. a diamond‑shaped gap just below her breasts, no bra. linen. later, as i’m mapping her body, she calls the dress “playful.”
Very convenient that he can ogle her braless breasts through the boob window. But eh, this is what you get. I'd like more about interior states and at least something that is direct speech from AJ, not just Narrator telling us little snippets of information he learned (e.g. she's from LA, etc.)
Though on re-reading, I wonder if Narrator is high? Sounds like he's loved-up (it would have been E in my youth, whatever is the current version of that) because he's friendly (over-friendly) to everyone there - he loves Dave, he loves Amelia, he loves Keanu, he loves AJ. That makes me wonder how much of the desire pulling him towards "helen of troy" is due to the drug and not the person.
That at least gives a little depth to the story! Contrast that with "they pair us off randomly with numbered cards. we have to stream of conscious say our desires." and Narrator is very likely *not* telling his real desires, this is just drug-induced babble. Same with how he's falling for both Amelia and AJ - when he's this under the influence, he'd fall in love with a lampstand. There's a lot of artifice under the seemingly 'telling it as it is' stream of consciousness, because when he's sober what the heck would he want or think of this encounter?
seems like 50% of this complaint could be resolved with another sentence:
> before i left, i told my girlfriend i’m going to "not quite a sex party." she said, "good luck!"
how much more exposition would satisfy that character isn't a mendacious degenerate?
irl she asked what that meant, i read her the event description, she was like "yeah that sounds like a sex party". "dunno, maybe a woo sex party?" "good luck!"
but as dialog it feels lifeless and... i haven't figured out how to write not-lifeless dialog.
> before i left, i told my girlfriend i’m going to ‘not quite a sex party.’
Oh man, I just now noticed you made the mistake of using the word "workshop," so, rudely, suggestions!
Okay -
i'm going out the door to a 'not quite a sex party.'
'good luck!' my girlfriend [shouts/calls/says].
Better -
i'm going out our door to a 'not quite a sex party.'
'good luck!' my girlfriend and her husband chorus.
Probably not right for the style, but I like it -
'yeah, that sounds like a sex party,' my girlfriend says.
i look over the description again. 'i dunno, maybe a woo sex party?'
'good luck!' my girlfriend's husband says.
(would likely require reworking the "...a party?" section)
"how much more exposition would satisfy that character isn't a mendacious degenerate?"
That he thinks for one second, before groping AJ, about his girlfriend? We get plenty of description of how sad he is that he didn't get his end away with La Nouvelle Hélène, but nothing about "and now I'm going back to my dwelling place and the woman there" and what might happen next.
When she says "good luck" in your amended sentence, does she mean that genuinely and happily? or sarcastically? or as what turns out to be 'goodbye' because she'll be gone by the time he gets back?
I think Eremolalos is right - this is a guy writing guy-feeling about hot sexy chicks. It's not going to appeal to women necessarily - even in smut, women like to talk about feelings and emotions and relationships. It sure isn't going to convince any woman to throw herself at you as a possible spouse, except maybe the kind of crazy that is too much drama and trouble in the long run.
> before i leave, i tell my girlfriend i’m going to "not quite a sex party." she says "good luck!", and smiles. we kiss.
if your cultural frame says "this is checkhov's gun; he's getting his ass dumped" then i don't know how many words i want to pay to palliate that response
See, the smile and the kiss make the difference there. More detail is fleshing out your story and giving insight.
The stripped-down style seems to be an artistic choice, but it might be *too* pared-down. We don't know enough (yet) about Narrator and his domestic situation to know if Girlfriend is okay with this or what is going on.
I think that attract-then-repel is a good mating strategy. First you lead off with your most attractive features, to get people interested in you. Then you reveal your least attractive features, the ones that are going to repel most of your potential mates. Whoever is left is someone who is both attracted to you and can tolerate you.
You appear to be going with a pure repel strategy. And I can't fault your honesty; you're doing women a service by leading straight off with the part of your personality that 99.99% of them are going to be repelled by, so they don't waste any time. But I would say that I'm a little concerned that a purely repulsive strategy with no attraction component might not be particularly effective.
savage. thanks for the words (sincere).
Right, about this one, I'm going to be harsh but - well, I'm going to be harsh.
You're looking for a wife? And yet you start off with this:
"before i left, i told my girlfriend i’m going to ‘not quite a sex party.’"
And then you recount how you're ogling other women at the party, kiss one, and do some groping of another one.
Yeah, that's gonna convince women looking for husbands that you're prime material right there. "I might cheat every time I walk out the door, ha-ha!"
Honestly, I expect the ending of this one to be "and when i came back from the 'not quite a sex party' for some reason i had no girlfriend, she was packed up and gone".
I have to agree with Eremolalos - this is written from the guy point of view (ooh, she so smexy, no bra!!!) Women already know men are easy - tits'n'ass and be young, that's all that's needed. Convince us that you can also think with your big head and not just the little one, if you are looking for a committed long-term relationship.
(I wrote the above before I got to this part of the story and yep, whaddya know: "she’s shaped like an odalisque - think venus of urbino, but bigger tits.". Male sexuality: so. effin'. easy.)
On the other hand, if you want someone willing to be in an open marriage/poly, then sure - be upfront about how you're a horndog, that will filter for those willing to accept "my husband kisses and gropes strange women at parties".
Argh. Sorry, the more I read of this, the less I like.
"by “party” amelia meant “i’m going to run a structured event getting in touch with our desires, platonic and otherwise (platonic touch encouraged until 9:30pm).”
The desire arising in me is to engage in platonic touch by punching everyone in this story in the face.
"i tell keanu i want a family; a wife, and children. a job i enjoy, for a while. a community of peers."
So what about the girlfriend at home? Just a placeholder? Good enough until you find The One, then she's reprising "Another Suitcase In Another Hall"? Once again, yep that's gonna convince women you're genuine!
thanks for the words (sincere). i'm getting the sense that "late middle aged catholic irish woman" might not be a viable target demographic. I'm mildly disappointed you didn't even mention me bagging on leftists.
i've sliced away a lot of the context to tell a focused story about being an insane person. the story is mostly true, except minor fudges for clarity or anonymity. "this is absolutely repulsive to me" (paraphrased) is interesting feedback! (sincere) there are various omitted details that someone might find exonerating.
about the "cheating" comment: based on the text this actually feels a bit silly to me. i include a few details that a generous reader might take to mean this group and i are collectively operating in a non-standard ethical frame. examples:
- "i told my girlfriend i'm going to 'not quite a sex party'", and
- "amelia introduces me to her boyfriends. they seem nice"
you're a bright woman so i'm sure it's not reading comprehension (literal). instead the issue is probably one of these:
a. writing is too oblique, needs further exposition (poor writing),
b. it's too far outside of your cultural frame to register (too oblique for you personally, easily understood in the correct context), or
c. it's too repulsive to your moral frame to engage with
(a) is worth a think. (b) is also worth a think, but ultimately this isn't an evangelical project and i'm not trying to cast a super wide net. (c) is tedious.
I wouldn't say it's absolutely repulsive, I read it in the anthropological fashion of the entry in the "not a book review contest" about someone going to a sex party. As either a slice of real life (lightly fictionalised) or fiction, it's okay. Wouldn't be my thing, but I read novels about serial killers without wanting to be a serial killer myself.
Where you do yourself no favours is putting up "I want a wife and family". Uh-huh. Then you describe behaving in a way that outside of a particular bubble will be considered cheating or damn close to it - oh it's not sex, but there's kissing games and I felt up another woman not my girlfriend and I would have fucked her in a heartbeat given the chance.
And what about the girlfriend? You mention her casually, as though she's a piece of furniture. You're looking for a wife, so clearly Current Girlfriend is not going to be hearing wedding bells any time at all. Does she know that? Does she know that if you meet another hot bitch at another not-quite-a-sex-party that you'll dump her in a second? Is she okay with this? Are you looking for "yeah I want a wife and maybe kids and to keep my side chick and go to not-quite parties where I can fool around with other women"?
Is fidelity on the map at all here, or do you imagine that "if only I meet The One I will and can be faithful to her alone"?
Because you need to be 100% clear on this, and if your potential spouse is *not* part of that bubble, you *will* get a smack in the face.
"i include a few details that a generous reader might take to mean this group and i are collectively operating in a non-standard ethical frame."
You can say that again, bunky. And if you run into a woman who *does* operate in a standard ethical frame and pull this shit on her, her brother will come after you with a shotgun. Though right enough, you are describing the type of women who go to not-quite parties to fool around, so they're in the non-standard bubble and probably okay with you having girlfriends while they have boyfriends.
So maybe you will find a woman to have that polycule with, who will be the wife and mother to (some of) your kids while you have girlfriends and casual flings and she has boyfriends and casual flings. It could happen!
i mean irl my gf is happily married and the three of us live together. she thinks i'm stagnating and has been encouraging me to date around b/c she doesn't want to have kids.
as a strict rule to follow, yes, i like "don't involve women in situations they would find horrifying if they knew all of the details." but now we're moralizing and it's just. so. tedious.
Oh wow I'm replying on my phone and didn't see this reveal until after I wrote my comment speculating that.
I'm smugly satisfied with myself.
Okay, so you're in some kind of open relationship/poly. That explains things. You might want to indicate that a little more about Narrator to avoid any moralising: girlfriend knows about and is fine with him looking for some strange.
Use proper capitalization. I find reading more than two sentences in that style to be very taxing and distracting from the actual content.
thank you for your feedback
What, you don't like the bell hooks affect? 😁
I may be wrong, because while I'm female I'm sort of atypical in several ways, but I don't think your porn is likely to turn most women on. Maybe check with some other women on forums how they're reacting. So if you had in mind attracting someone by turning them on with your porn, I don't think that's a promising avenue.
To be more specific: I only read the first part of it, in a skimmy sort of way. The furthest I got was a game where you and a woman you have your eye on kiss with the group watching, but aren't kissing with tongues yet. But around that point there's lots of narration about how beautiful she is, and how she blushes, and how you want to go further, but hold back. That's all male point of view stuff, you know? Of course women like being seen as beautiful and hot, but the big turn-on for them is in how the male is coming across -- how they see him. If you want your porn to turn on the average woman, you have to write scenes much more from her point of view.
thanks for the words :) could you share writing you personally think achieves this?
fair, it probably fails as you describe. i certainly agree this doesn't work as self-insert fantasy - it's an unapologetically male viewpoint. "help i am a reasonable person trapped in an insane person's brain." AJ is granted little humanity, and as the story progresses: she's first a body in a dress; then a face; then some thin backstory.
christina does name the characteristics i'd hope the writing showcases.
irl, when i tell amelia she looks like a prototypal odalisque, she's flattered, and sends me 8 pictures of art from antiquity that look like her. but it only works in context of being generally appealing and emotionally safe. shorn from that context, being "guy who talks about venus of urbino's tits" isn't necessarily a winning play.
(unless it's with deiseach. i'm starting to think the disgust response is sublimated attraction. like lady, i have a girlfriend, okay?)
I can’t think of anything except couples in novels, and in them seductions (of the characters by each other, and of me by the author) are spread over 100+ pages. You will get better answers from other people.
fair, thanks!
"(unless it's with deiseach. i'm starting to think the disgust response is sublimated attraction. like lady, i have a girlfriend, okay?)"
Fear not, whatever remaining tatters of your virtue there be are quite safe from me. I've never wanted even a decent guy, let alone the sloppy fifths of a not-quite-sex-party goer.
On men writing women.
Jack Nicholson’s OCD plagued jerk character in As Good as it Gets (1997) novel writing character…
Fan of jerk’s writing: “How do you write women so well?”
Jerk: “I think of a man and take away reason and accountability.”
"If you want your porn to turn on the average woman, you have to write scenes much more from her point of view."
'But - but - but I wrote how she had big tits and a slit dress and wasn't wearing a bra! Isn't that enough?'
😁
God forgive me, I feel like launching into the "how men write women" thing*. I do appreciate how he tells us his fancy has full lips but not, like, a trout pout y'know. Good to know it's all natural!
* On December 28th, 2016, Tumblr user scottbaiowulf made a text post titled, "Male writers writing female characters," followed by the paragraph:
“Cassandra woke up to the rays of the sun streaming through the slats on her blinds, cascading over her naked chest. She stretched, her breasts lifting with her arms as she greeted the sun. She rolled out of bed and put on a shirt, her nipples prominently showing through the thin fabric. She breasted boobily to the stairs, and titted downwards.”
This is a very strange way to look for a wife. Someone should write a book about you.
will there be updates on the ACX grants?
With a friend in the DC area for a few days—any suggestions for restaurants / underrated attractions we should check out? Right now we're planning to get Ethiopian food (don't know where) and bum around the National Mall for a while, but that's basically it. (A part of me also wants to attend a Loudon County School Board meeting, but it might not be such a profitable use of time...)
https://tylercowensethnicdiningguide.com/
If you only take one recommendation: visit congress while it’s in session. It feels crazy to watch all the politicians buzzing around in their hive, pointing out the ones you know. Virtually nobody knows that you can just do this. You have to visit your member of congress’s office to get permission, but it’s pro forma and very quick. https://www.visitthecapitol.gov/visit/know-before-you-go/watching-congress-in-session#:~:text=House%20of%20Representatives%20Gallery%20Passes,your%20delegate%20or%20resident%20commissioner.
DC has a great food scene. It’s also one of the few cities in the US with a Michelin guide, if you’re interested in eating fancy. Of those, I’ve found Rooster and Owl to be quite nice and less pricy than the competition https://www.roosterowl.com .
The Smithsonian museums are one of our national jewels, and will greedily suck up as much time as you’re willing to give them. The Air and Space one is generally regarded as the best, though all worth going to.
If you’re in DC until the 14th, I’d recommend watching the military parade for the US’s 250th anniversary. Likely to be great.
Check out Fogo de Chão, Brazilian steakhouse.
Oh Jesus, don't look down:
https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/open-thread-385/comment/124137637
Isn't that a chain? Their website tells me they have 60 locations across at least seven countries.
That is a chain; I'm sure they have locations at least in the SF bay area and Texas.
(It might be that the one in DC is really awesome though. Or there's nothing else to do there.)
A friend wrote meditation instructions that I quite like: https://feelingtones.substack.com/p/full-of-feeling-in-any-situation
Did 4 of the "left-over" entries and got 4 times disappointed, ie: I gave 5 or 6. (And if it is not 7, it was a waste of time and if it is below 9, it should not be on ACX.) So, I see the probability to find a 9 or 10 among the left-overs as too low to continue. - I am glad the others - ie nearly all - got enough reviews!
I had already reviewed one of the left-over ones, and I will give it a 10. (I will enter the grades en bloc once i am through.) I only give a 10 twice so far, so I would deem that review not only a worthy finalist, but wouldn't mind it winning in the end.
OK, guys, you’ve heard from Mark: “We are not amused.” Fuck Scott and his efforts to make sure all reviews get enough readers for their scores to be a reasonable approximation of group consensus. We are all so damn smart that we deserve to be exempt from any parts of group projects that our beautiful minds find a bit tedious.
Pardon? - Let me rephrase: 1. I was all positive about Scott"s suggestion to give an extra shout-out for under-reviewed posts. 2. I did the work and read 4. None of them was worth to make it to the finals (a 5 or 6 does not mean they are worthless). If 20% of those "orphan-reviews" were good enough, the chance to hit zero on 4 attempts was 40%. Thus I assume: their share is lower, probably nil. Because: 3. Only a small share of all reviews got too seldom marked - I find it likely enough people tried those, too. But gave up reading and even marking those.
Summa: Great work of all in the ACX-readership (including me and probably you) to read and mark so many reviews in such a short time. While we could have been "lazy" and free riding on the others to wait for the finalists. Who will all be well worth reading, inferring from the reviews I read in the "first round".
Since I read your post I have read and rated a review from the list of wallflowers. It was one I had been planning to read anyway because it’s about a subject that interests me. I gave it a 9. And I’m a pretty hard grader. I deduct some if something is an essay but not a true review, for instance. I deduct a little for awkward, stilted prose even if there are no grammatical errors and I have no trouble taking in the writer’s meaning in the awkward lines. And I only give 10s to things that had a wow factor for me — writer did something that blew my socks off.
It is likely you are right that on average the wallflowers group is going to have fewer high scorers than reviews not in this group. Some are probably about a subject most people think isn’t worthy of a review, some probably start off with an especially silly opening, or an especially dry and droning one, leading potential reviewers to bail before reading further and rating . But the one I read had none of those flaws. I doubt many readers would give it less than a 7, and those giving 7s would be people who disagreed vehemently with the author’s main points. I’d guess that those who agree with the points, or at least find them interesting and intelligent, are likely to give this review an 8 or better.
I think this particular review probably turned off readers because its format is kind of congested and bullet-point ridden and footnote-heavy. It *looks like* it’s going to be long, boring and dry as dust. But it isn’t any of those 3.
Even the ACX readership, even the subset called Mark Doppelkorn, can make erroneous judgments by being over-influenced by first impressions.
I refer to my statement above. My average on just picking up some in the "first round" was about 8. Now 5. Which is not "bad", but not good enough to spend more of my time on. I did not claim that there are zero gems - below 20%, indeed, and , yes, "probably nil", as in most likely not a 10er. Will I read them all now to find your 9? Nope.
And it seems not just the strange topics, but also negative pre-selection: not good enough to have engaged people to not just click but read to the end AND to mark. I really feel sorry for the authors, "curse of knowledge" their main mode of failure.
I still object to your advising people not to bother reading the wallflowers, but I apologize for being so harsh in the way I did it. There was already one discussion of this issue, which you may not have read. My grounds for guaranteeing that all reviews got at least the number of reads Scott treats as minimum, which I believe is 8, were kindness and fairness. I thought it was just awfully harsh for somebody to have only a couple of readers. Also, when there are very few readers the review's average score isn't even a halfway decent representation of what the group consensus would have been, so the writer doesn't even get feedback he can trust.
But I get that many are not moved by the kindness argument. Scott posted in the discussion I'm talking about, and said that his reason for wanting reviews to get at least 8 votes was that there were times when a review had a high total score, enough to make it into the finals, but that score was based on very few reviews. Scott said that sometimes when he read a review of that kind he thought it was not very good, and felt uncomfortable having it make the finals. Maybe some of those are reviews by somebody who gave themselves a 10, and then 2 readers who happen to love the review's subject, or just are high graders, gave it and 8 and a 9. So the thing's average score is 9. I expect that argument cuts more ice with more people than my kindness one, so think it over.
The upshot of the discussion was that Scott said he'd make a point of nudging people to read the wallflowers this time around. I believe he said something about starting the nudging earlier this time around, though I'm not sure I'm remembering that bit right. Anyhow, the reason I was particularly irritated by your post was that the wallflower issue had been discussed and a plan announced. Then Scott carried through with the plan by giving an early nudge and a list of current wallflowers, and the very next post was you saying naw, don't bother.
If there were 100 reviews and 5000 ACX readers each reading just one, the average would be 50 reviews per piece. The average reader thus seems to read and rate near 0.1. We both do a lot more than 0.1, so just maybe we are on the same side? - Friend? - My comment was not the first one, I had to read first ;). Sorry if it was the first you read. - There are too many comments, I scroll down a while; if I find none making "my" point, I comment. Shrug.
It occurred to me that if AI alignment is likely to cause human extinction, that still doesn't explain the Great Filter, because presumably the AIs then colonize the stars, and we should have encountered other aliens' AIs. So what explains the Great Filter?
There is no shortage credible explanations to the Fermi Paradox.
There just isn't a way to decide which one is right.
Is has always been and will obviously always be nukes
That's because a "misaligned ecosystem of AIs" is likely to destroy itself (e.g. by fighting wars among themselves with next generations of superweapons), and everything else around it would also disappear as a collateral damage. If this is typical, this might explain the Great Filter.
The ecosystem of AIs which is "decent enough" to avoid that fate might end up being quite compatible with human flourishing, even if it is not literally "aligned" to human interests and values.
Well you have stumbled upon why it is such a great question to ponder; there is no easy answer.
Explanations I favour:
• Multicellular life is very slow to get going, Earth only took 2 billion years (so fast)!
• Earth's climate has been unusually stable over the past 3 billion years (compare Mars and Venus). Maybe our unusual moon plays a role.
• Intelligent life consistently realises leaving it's home system isn't actually worthwhile.
Multicellularity, even complex multicellularity, evolved independently several times on Earth so I doubt that's it (at the very least: animals, fungi, green plants, red algae, kelp). It's true that multicellular life only took over bacterial mats recently -- 600-500 million years ago -- but identifiable red algae (Bangiomorpha) go back 1.2 billion ya, and other presumably unrelated macro-organisms (Diskagma, Horodyskia, the Franceville Biota) go back more than 2 billion years, very close to the origin of complex cells (eukaryotes). I suspect the actual difficult step is the origin of eukaryotes by symbiosis, and after that multicellularity is relatively easy to evolve, though it only really takes off once there is enough oxygen in the atmosphere and seawater.
Oops, I don't have much biology knowledge but I meant when one cell eats another cell but then they co-exist (eukaryogenesis). "Multicellularity" is a far easier to remember word!
In that case I would agree. Cellular endosymbiosis actually also happened several times, mostly involving photosynthetic symbionts, but at least the largest party is always a eukaryote, so eukaryogenesis might very well be the bottleneck.
What about “when civilizations create AI, they use it to enter infinite jest style VR heavens and fertility drops to zero. Everyone gets what they want in the Experience Machine—why expand into the stars when you can have everything you could possibly want right here in hyper-realistic Virtual Reality?” Performative Bafflement has written a lot about this scenario.
If you have a competent caretaker AI, wouldn't it still want to expand at least a little for redundancy?
Maybe a little bit of expansion would happen to support the original population of aliens who enter the Experience Machine, but not by much because, again, I don't think the civilization in question would ever reproduce at that point.
VR tech can and will become so effective at delivering the desired experiences of anyone almost no matter what their goals are. The joys of discovery/sex/status/winning/relationships/love/childbearing/etc.? There's a thousand thousand mind-bogglingly awesome videogames you will be able to do for that when VR is advanced enough, with AI friends, children, etc. that will be just as real as organic life, and better/more engaging/more fulfilling than any other way you could experience those goods. (And you can continue your relationships with biological humans by just friending them in the Metaverse)
Think people have an overriding preference for living in the real world, and reproducing for its own sake? Well, Gen Z, the future of our species, ALREADY spends a voluntary 10-12 hrs per day on TikTok and other screen based entertainment, and that's just humanity capitulating to the almost 2D monomodal 6" rectangle version of digital entertainment technology available circa 2025.
Also, fertility declines as prosperity increases, as seen across the developed world--if South Korea is any indication, the ultimate result of status games + capitalism is permanent species self-imposed "genocide" by non-reproduction.
"But conservative groups that reject change will keep reproducing"--> yeah, sure, and they by virtue of their conservatism never adopt the AI technology necessary to engage in ambitious interstellar expansion/travel/domination. You really think the *Amish* will be the ones to take over the galaxy?
What's really sad about this scenario is if we don't achieve immortality by then, resulting in a civilization effectively committing suicide--Extinction by a consensus of revealed preferences.
I'm quite partial to the first one of those. If humans were relatively early in speedrunning the Habitable Planet -> Complex, Self-Reproducing Molecules -> Multicellular Life -> General Intelligence -> Technological Civilization sequence, the speed of light delay would take care of the entire rest of the paradox. We need not even be early in the ordinal sense, merely the temporal one: there could be lots of earlier intelligent species, as long as they're not too much earlier.
Another way to look at it is that the Great Filter need not necessarily be particularly Great or particularly singular. If several of the associated probabilities increase somewhat slowly in the early universe, their product could go from negligible probability to significant probability in the space of a few million years. Short enough that we could have at least a few other intelligent species here in the Milky Way that simply aren't both close enough and advanced enough that we can see them.
In my view the Great Filter is the economic consequence of FTL being impossible. If you accept that space travel is difficult (that is to say, expensive) then the vast timelines imposed by the relativistic speed limit place a fairly low upper bound on the amount of resources a civilization should be willing to spend on interstellar travel. Who's gonna invest a trillion dollars in a project that has a non-guaranteed chance of payback in 300 years? In my view ROI is the only thing that directs large-scale development and on that measure interstellar travel will always be outcompeted for funding.
"Who's gonna invest a trillion dollars in a project that has a non-guaranteed chance of payback in 300 years?"
Any species whose average lifespan is 600 years.
You have plenty of humans on earth willing to plant trees. That's not the difficult hump in this equation.
And is willing to accept << 1% ROI? It doesn't really matter how long they live, there will always be competition for capital. That limits the capital outlay to essentially speculation or charity. My contention is that will always be insufficient to overcome the technical hurdle.
Also how can there realistically be *any* appreciable ROI? Your tangible return is limited to whatever cargo can fit in a spaceship traveling at < c. Even if we completely run out of, I dunno, oil - can you actually imagine a scenario, any scenario, where it's economically efficient to ship it in from across the galaxy? Because I can't. Not for oil and not for anything else.
There can never be a rational economic interest motivating interstellar travel. In that fact, at least, I'm completely confident. That puts a hard ceiling on how many resources we'll be willing to devote to solving the problem. In my view things like "the spirit of discovery" or "tail-risk insurance" will always be insufficient motivators. In any case I think it's the best candidate for explaining the Fermi paradox.
I skipped a condition - beings who live to age 600, and for whom a trillion in galactic dollars of whatever resources they use is at their command on a whim.
And 600 is a rough number. As Skull mentions, people will spend money to start projects they won't live to see the end of, from trees to corporations, so they don't even have to live to 300; 150 or even 100 could be enough.
If you're obsessed enough with ROI, consider that anyone can spend $P on a project that will pay off 10*$P some year, and sell the rights to it to someone younger for, say, 2*$P.
If you're still unsure that people will take that risk, well, someone spent multiple billions on a social media company that's now estimated at 80% of the buy price, and there's reason to believe he knew that could happen, and bought it anyway.
>If you're obsessed enough with ROI, consider that anyone can spend $P on a project that will pay off 10*$P some year, and sell the rights to it to someone younger for, say, 2*$P.
I don't think that works. The issue is that there can never be an ROI, not simply that it's too far in the future. Under no circumstances will a spaceship full of space rocks (traveling at < c) ever be worth the time and expense of transporting them. Are people going to wait 1500 years for their 10 tons of space diamonds or are they going to find a terrestrial substitute for space diamonds?
When I jumped in, we were only talking 300 years, not 1500. And I envisioned a species with a comparable lifespan, and an implied slower rate of technological progression.
Picture a race of testudinoids in a techno-feudal culture - they have interstellar travel, but they've had it for a century or two at the current cutting edge of propulsion tech, and society has largely stabilized around that level. Which is to say, scouts have returned with news of some substance available in great quantity in the next solar system over, technically possible to produce artificially on the home system, but only at great expense, in trace quantities, or both.
If you had propulsion capable of steady 1g, you could get half a light-year in one year, and be going at most of c by then. https://space.stackexchange.com/questions/840/how-fast-will-1g-get-you-there Add about three years for normal transit, another for decel, and a round trip to Alpha Centauri runs you about 10 years, ignoring time dilation. Steady 1g is probably a *huge* ask, but I'm too lazy to look up the fuel requirements for any of the speculative drives on the drawing board, so I'm pretending acceleration forces are the bottleneck.
Historically, voyages between China and Europe during the Age of Discovery took (ABAICT) around two years; Magellan's trip took about three. Ten doesn't seem like a hard ask for humans, and a hundred seems plausible for more lugubrious species.
Only one has to do it. Granted that isn’t a guarantee it’s possible but it inclines me to think the filter is not merely expense but impossibility (or just that intelligent life is vanishingly unlikely)
That "one" has to do it *repeatedly*. Getting to another planet is one thing, but you then have to re-create the entirety of the human industrial base on an unknown planet with an unknown distribution of mineral deposits. This is not a simple case of "nanobots self-reproduce and swarm the planet". It's a multistage process of recreating the entire technological ladder starting with *prospecting for minerals*. They will have to create semiconductor fabs starting from bauxite! I'm sorry but I don't think there's any technology that will ever make that easy. This is why I consider "colonization waves moving at 0.5c" to be fantastical nonsense.
Do you think von Neumann probes are impossible?
Physically? No. Practically? Yes. Consider the engineering challenges implicit in the scenario I described in my previous post. Who's going to solve those when a) there's no hope of in-your-lifetime reward and b) the try-fail-update-retry cycle is on the order of centuries or millenia?
A few billion years is a really long time. We've nearly reached post-scarcity from basically everyone being a subsistence level farmer in only a few hundred years, so eventually we'll run out of things to do and easily accessible resources. Building a ship that travels at 1% of light speed to the nearest star starts seeming pretty attractive when it promises access to literally all the resources of human civilization just for you and your people.
> because presumably the AIs then colonize the stars
Why should we presume this? It looks to me like it's a lot easier for an AI to end human civilization (or at least cause human civilization to become permanently unable to make more high-end chips) than it is for AI to do that and _also_ gain all the capabilities necessary to maintain the supply chains for chip fabrication, or build its own supply chains.
We should presume it because it only needs to happen once. Even if most AIs don't outlast the civilization that created them, or are content to just paperclip their own planet and leave it at that, it only takes a small fraction of resourceful, ambitious AIs (across all the worlds that develop) to do stuff visible from Earth.
Which just highlights the problems with talking about the Fermi Paradox: we're almost exclusively dealing in probabilities we have no good way to estimate.
Yeah, if you assume that a nontrivial fraction of the AIs that *want* to paperclip their planet *successfully* paperclip their planet (rather than breaking their host civilization without the ability to fix or replace it), you have to wonder why none of them spend any resources on expansion.
This is not a solved question by any means, but I've always been fond of the aestivation hypothesis. The thermodynamics of it just so neatly falls into place that it feels as inevitable as physics.
Maybe I'm missing a step, but is the assumption that there will never be a better place to reject heat at scale than the far-future cosmic background? It would also seem to imply a strong prediction that there's no negentropy-possitive way to e.g. harvest stars, which sure seem to be pretty inefficient in their current configuration.
Everything is much too far apart for meaningful communication.
The "rationalist standard" answer is "grabby aliens" aka, "colonization waves are going at a appreciable fraction of the speed of light, and any other signs you'd see are fairly short on the timelines of civilizations forming, so the amount of time where you see an alien civilization but aren't eaten by an alien civilization is basically zero". See:
https://grabbyaliens.com/ For the paper and
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l3whaviTqqg For a simplified video explanation
So long as we're sharing video links, I like Isaac Arthur's recent rundown of the fermi solutions that might work and the ones that don't: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vAFImV0iseM
Aestivation is one of the ones that doesn't quite work btw.
It's Robin Hanson's answer sure, but I'm not sure how popular it is - not sure it really counts as an anthropic argument, and it doesn't answer the mail on the Fermi paradox. I prefer this one, which argues that rewriting the Drake Equation with distributions instead of expected values give you a 40~85% chance we're alone in the universe, with the stilted expected values coming from a small number of densely populated universes:
https://arxiv.org/pdf/1806.02404
This is true but I don't think answers the OP's answer on why, if AIs are possible we don't see them. In theory, it's chopping off all the preindustrial civilization parts of the Drake equation.
(I agree it explains the great filter pretty well to be clear)
Wait, which "it"? AI isn't a good explanation for the Great Filter, because it fails to *quietly* wipe out aliens - too plausible for it to result in a similar expanding colonization bubble as the progenitor anyway. So the Fermi Paradox still applies and needs a conventional non-AI answer.
Yup, I'm saying that even if AI alignment isn't easy, it doesn't contribute that much to the great filter, since the amount of time we have from realizing "oh shit" to dead isn't that long.
This can’t be emphasized enough. There is no need to speculate about a great filter, the whole thing is a math error.
The White House two days ago said it had federalized 2,000 National Guardsmen and ordered them to Los Angeles. All media reports that I can find say about 300 actual soldiers are on the ground there today.
I don't know much about the National Guard -- where are the other 1,700 troops? Are they just still getting themselves to the scene? Being held in reserve? Something else?
I had reluctantly blocked someone for repetitive bad faith arguments. I used another browser where I’m not logged in and this thread is so much shorter without that one commenter.
lmao i was curious because I also have a few folks blocked, checked incognito mode and yep, same guy. Also, wow, that's a solid 300+ comments, and almost all of them are people going "dude, come on."
My best guess is a mix of legal and command-and-control issues. On the legal front, Trump federalized elements of the CA National Guard, but did not formally invoke the Insurrection Act, so the Posse Comitatus Act's prohibition on using federal troops for law enforcement under most circumstances probably still applies. Using soldiers or federalized guardsmen to garrison a federal building doesn't require any special legal authority, but using them to arrest or disburse rioters in public streets is a violation of Posse Comitatus unless the right legal hoops have been jumped through.
On the command-and-control front, guardsmen are civilians who have volunteered for regular training and occasional call-ups into military service, and it takes time to mobilize them. You need to get in touch with them, give them time to set aside their civilian responsibilities and report to their muster points, and then the units need to form up, distribute equipment, and then handle the logistics of actually traveling to where they're being deployed. It took about 24 hours for the California National Guard to start to arrive after they were ordered to mobilize during the 1992 LA Riots. Procedures have been revised since then, largely in response to post-action assessments of the 1992 deployment, but I think the revised procedures are centered on having a small numbers of Guardsmen available for much faster mobilization at any given time. I wouldn't be surprised to learn that the 300 guardsmen already deployed were the only ones of those called into federal service who were available to be mobilized and deployed in a matter of hours, while the rest take more time to get ready.
I just saw a news article saying that the Guardsmen ended up having to sleep on the ground because nobody had figured out where they were going to stay. Seems like logistics is indeed an issue.
In the old days, they could have built their own camp in a few hours.
No ready source, but from what I read. Looks like the National Guard is only protecting Federal offices, likely focusing on ICE facilities.
Trump calls up National Guard to help quell rioting illegal immigrants in Los Angeles. I do think this is another datapoint illegal immigration needs to be stopped.
https://www.foxnews.com/live-news/president-trump-sends-national-guard-as-violent-anti-ice-riots-erupt-in-los-angeles
For those that want to discuss immigration policy.
My position. I like to see alot more immigration of highly educated people. Alot more. Like 1M+ a year. Not sure if that's actually feasible as a policy (but happy to discuss how it could/could not work), but I wrote it to show you my ideal preferences.
I think current immigration law and the policies it enacts are awful. I blame both parties in Congress for it, though I place more blame on the Democrats. Why? Because Trump 45 was ready to make a deal. My memory is he was pretty willing to give amnesty to most the illegal immigrants. He just wanted the wall first. From memory, Democrats weren't willing to build the wall first (showing possible bad faith) and probably wanted some form of de facto open borders.
Then Biden administration did very little to enforce immigration policies and even had some programs that encouraged it. Biden did so little that the states sued him. SCOTUS essentially made a Separation of Powers decision and ruled that immigration enforcement was wholly in the realm of the Executive Branch. Estimates are that 1M+ additional illegal immigrants under Biden. That is additional. Much more came, but there are arguments that no amount of realistic enforcement would've prevented them from coming.
So we are here today. Many, many illegal immigrants living in fear of ICE. Which I blame the Democrats because they had an opportunity to legalise many, many of them. There is even more signs that Democrats have no problems with illegal immigration and potentially want open borders. Maybe not all Democrats, but certainly the progressive wing.
So as someone who wants more legal immigration, I see the only path is to strictly enforce immigration laws and remove many, many illegal immigrants. Off the top of my head, I would say 50%. Then potentially we can discuss building the wall in exchange for amnesty for the remainder 50%. And only then, IMO, the US is ready to discuss increasing legal immigration levels.
How does the fact that Biden authorized congressional democrats to work on a Bi-partisan bill that many Republicans championed as carrying every provision they had wanted, and then Trump urged Republicans to defect because collaboration with Democrats on immigration would hurt his chances for re-election factor into your apportionment of blame?
Perhaps I'm wrong, but I'm cynical enough to assume that the rioters are the same people who torch downtowns anytime they get an excuse (such as police accidentally killing yet another black criminal). This is not the behavior of somebody who just became concerned about a certain issue. They've probably been waiting for their day for some time, and just now someone gave them a signal.
"People are very angry about the government's violent immigration crackdown. This is evidence that the government needs to crack down even more violently on immigration." Flawless logic.
When I see photos of masked guys torching Waymo cars, I don't think "Aha, that is a concerned citizen peacefully protesting authoritarian crackdowns on legal immigrants", I think "that's a violent thug and hell yeah the cops should haul him in".
https://www.wsj.com/video/watch-los-angeles-protestors-target-waymo-driverless-cars/8F985EC9-D428-4A42-8825-A92D37B89B89
And if said thug turns out to be in the country illegally and he's handed over to ICE for deportation? Oh dear, how sad, never mind.
Don't let the exciting photos of burning cars distract you from the fact that a lot of people are protesting peacefully. Even the LAPD (not known for being a bastion of wokeness) put out a statement describing the protests as peaceful.
Anyway, "the police should crack down on protesters because the protesters are violent" is an entirely different argument from "the police should crack down on immigration because the protesters are violent." You are making the first statement, Paul made the second statement.
I don't know when the reports you referenced occur.
I see reports about yesterday that says the protests are getting much more violent.
https://abc7.com/live-updates/tensions-flare-downtown-la-anti-ice-protesters-clash-agents-live-updates/16692645/entry/16702287/
June 7th, the evening of the second day of protests: https://bsky.app/profile/acatwithnews.bsky.social/post/3lr2swjkkac2e
"Today, demonstrations across the city of Los Angeles remained peaceful."
The National Guard had just been mobilized at this time (Trump's order came down at 6 PM), and deployed the next day. People predicted that this would inflame the situation, and it appears that it has.
Now, I would respectfully push back.
A claim of mostly peaceful != all peaceful.
Rioters were attacking the Paramount ICE facility.[1] As it is a Federal facility, the Federal government is responsible for its protection and Trump called for more protection. The National Guard is only staged at Federal buildings. They are not involved with any protection work elsewhere, much less immigration enforcement.
Why would additional protection at Federal Buildings inflame the situation?
[1] https://abc7.com/post/protesters-federal-agents-clash-ice-raid-paramount-watch-live/16688818/
You are claiming that the Federal government is being violent in its immigration crackdown. I think provocative claims require evidence. Please provide the evidence?
I will phrase the current situation as.
Those who support breaking the law are rioting to allow them to break the law.
Or more specifically.
Illegal immigrants who have already broken US laws on immigration and their supporters are rioting (breaking another law) to continue to live in the US illegally.
Whether the protesters are violent or peaceful (and the vast majority are peaceful), they are evidence that people oppose the law. If you are using the protester's reactions as data, then this is a data point you should consider.
Now, you may believe that immigration enforcement should be a priority even if it's unpopular, but in that case, the protests (which are evidence that it's unpopular) are not a relevant data point. You would support immigration enforcement whether or not people protested it.
Like, my comment isn't litigating the exact nuances of how much police brutality is too much, the point is that your logic doesn't make sense.
Yes, it can be a datapoint. The Boston Tea Party is an example where the people were very upset over an issue and the government should have back downed (assuming the British wanted to try to remain the government).
Another example. The J6 protesters. The government decided that the protesters grievances were minor and the riot was not a proper way to protest. The government threw the book at the protesters to show its displeasure.
In this case, my argument is
illegal immigration enforcement is good ==> illegal immigrants rioting ==> more illegal enforcement is needed because the criminals are rioting
Of course, you don't have to accept my starting point. But I think my logic does make sense if you accept the first part ("illegal immigration enforcement is good")
Your claim that illegal immigration enforcement is unpopular is potentially misleading.
According to Pew, 83% of American want to deport illegal immigrants. It breaks down to 32% of Americans want all and 51% want some. Only 15%, a small minority want none.
https://www.pewresearch.org/race-and-ethnicity/2025/03/26/americans-views-of-deportations/
Your claim about illegal immigration popularity could focus on just California or just Southern California. I googled and didn't find a poll. I am willing to concede that illegal immigration enforcement may be unpopular in California. But, California is a part of the US and immigration is a Federal matter, so the Federal government gets to decide on the enforcement level. As with all Federal laws, the whole nation gets to decide, not an individual state. The prosecution of the J6 protesters is an example of that (b/c I am guessing that more conservative states would've let many of the protesters off with a slap on the wrist).
>illegal immigration enforcement is good ==> illegal immigrants rioting ==> more illegal enforcement is needed because the criminals are rioting
See, I think the flaw in this logic is that I think it's mostly not illegal immigrants protesting or rioting. It's a lot easier to risk interfering with an ICE raid if you're only risking disorderly conduct charges instead of deportation.
As for your polls, I think most people are in favor of at least some amount of deportation, but very opposed to this sort of mass arrest and deportation. I've seen a lot of news articles along the lines of "I voted to deport criminals, not people like my neighbors."
For example, here's a co-founder of Latinas for Trump criticizing ICE's tactics and arguing that people who are following the rules for seeking asylum shouldn't be deported: https://thehill.com/immigration/5339542-latinas-for-trump-co-founder-blasts-mass-deportations/
Does it matter much if its change to
illegal immigration enforcement is good ==> rioting for illegal immigration ==> more illegal immigration enforcement is needed because there is rioting on it
>very opposed to this sort of mass arrest and deportation. I've seen a lot of news articles along the lines of "I voted to deport criminals, not people like my neighbors."
I provided quantified data. Respectfully. your anecdote(s) are just that. Anecdotes. One person or 10 person still doesn't make the case that more deportations are unpopular. I am changing the word from "mass" because Trump is not doing mass deportations by my definition.
"I think provocative claims require evidence. "
Checking the timestamps, you appear to have developed this view *quite* recently. Within the last few hours it seems. The thread is *quite full* of you making provocative claims with no evidence. No, I'm not going to point to which ones specifically: I'd be here all night. If you want to take this tack with others, please start by holding yourself to higher standards.
Are you actually interested in having an honest, rational debate? Or are you only interested in supporting your tribe?
I have tried to address responses to my post by addressing the substance of the post. If you want me to just score technical points.
My original phrase is "rioting illegal immigrants in Los Angeles".
So, if there were only 2 illegal immigrants rioting in Los Angeles, my point would be correct. I decided not to respond that way because there is no discussion with that response. I would argue my post is not provocative at all unless you believe there are no illegal immigrants currently rioting in Los Angeless. Is that the claim you are making?
Please point out the other "provocative posts".
Also, I don't see you policing the many left of center posters (assumed) posting much more provocative claims like the Federal government is "violent immigration crackdown" like beleester just did in this sub-thread (which you are a part of). Feels like you are making isolated demands for rigor. These points are what lead me to ask the question at the start of this post. I am not going to continue assuming rationality by a poster when the evidence supports a poster is being irrationally tribal.
If you're going to argue that "rioting illegal immigrants" isn't provocative so long as there are at least two violent illegal immigrants present in the protests, then my statement of "violent immigration crackdown" isn't provocative so long as there is at least two instances of police brutality during the ICE raids.
Are you prepared to argue that there have been no instances of police brutality across all the ICE raids that took place recently? Or should we set the bar a little higher than "my statement is not provably false"?
>Are you prepared to argue that there have been no instances of police brutality across all the ICE raids that took place recently?
I would not argue it because it would make no sense to argue such a statement because it could easily be false. Also, I know that law enforcement can overstep their bounds. Rodney King is prime example number 1.
My ask for evidence is to get the context for the "brutality". Many times when I have asked for support for claims, the support is very weak compared to the claim.
??? The limited protests probably reflect dissatisfaction with the way illegal immigration is perceived to be being stopped - via a non trivial amount of illegal detentions, citizen abuse, and racial profiling, making a large percent of the population uncomfortable. 19.5% of the US population is Hispanic. ICE is known to be targeting Hispanic communities and people that look Hispanic. The presence of a Mexican flag, charitably, could be a saying 'we, people of Mexican heritage live here, deal with it. We are a country of immigrants. Some of us have parents from Mexico. Some of us are from Mexico.'
Is this a data point that illegal immigrantion needs to be stopped? Not really? This equally could be more a data point that people think deportations should be done with legal and due process. It also may be a data point that immigrants still identify with their heritage and have some degree of immigrant identity and pride.
That being said, I dunno who is doing what, and I haven't seen any coherent messaging. Generally, the destruction of property is bad. I like movements with a coherent point and message. So far, this is not one of them, other than 'current administrative policies bad'
It's not just hispanics, they're going after *everyone* in a mad attempt to make numbers. For example, they arrested a white Danish immigrant who came legally, was never even accused of breaking any laws, was a father and longtime resident of the US, etc. - the model immigrant by anyone's standards, even nativists.
The article linked below says:
>Kasper’s understanding is that his failure to submit I-751 led to a removal order
If there is a removal order, then it really doesn't matter that he is or isn't a model citizen. There might be some grounds for him to be granted relief from removal, eg that his removal will cause severe hardship to an American citizen, but on its face there doesn't seem to be very much objectionable about enforcing an existing removal order.
There's obviously more to this story than has been reported, come on.
I found one article with details. https://www.mississippifreepress.org/ice-arrests-mississippi-father-at-his-citizenship-hearing-threatening-deportation/#:~:text=ICE%20arrested%20Kasper%20Eriksen%2C%20a,swift%20intervention%20of%20a%20judge.
One or two open threads ago you posted "I try to only post the topics that are most troubling to me or push back on claims that are wildly disportionate to the facts".
Consider the following, which I think is likely- the pushback and comments you are getting are because people think that your claims are wildly disproportionate to the facts.
What in my post is disproportionate?
See the other comments for what they think is disproportionate.
For my side, you argue or claim that 1) the people rioting are illegal immigrants; 2) that this could be a datapoint for stopping illegal immigration.
Disproportionate is your disregarding the most common other interpretation of newsworthiness of this call-up, that being Trump ordering the national guard against the wishes of the Governor, and more likely that Trump sees a way to inflame the situation for personal political reasons (escalating a fight with a blue state governor regarding immigration), rather than wishing to resolve the riots on their own.
I do not wish to sound like a broken record, but your writing reads like that of a culture warrior.
"Disproportionate is your disregarding the most common other interpretation of newsworthiness of this call-up, that being Trump ordering the national guard against the wishes of the Governor, and more likely that Trump sees a way to inflame the situation for personal political reasons (escalating a fight with a blue state governor regarding immigration), rather than wishing to resolve the riots on their own."
Trump is a sleazy politician. That does not "cancel out" all the people setting things on fire or mean we shouldn't talk about it.
"I do not wish to sound like a broken record, but your writing reads like that of a culture warrior."
"Culture warrior" just means "person disagreeing with me."
>That does not "cancel out" all the people setting things on fire or mean we shouldn't talk about it.
Indeed, neither did I claim anywhere it did. I appreciate ACX for its open-visor, rationalist debate, and was trying to push back against something that I perceive as overly political culture-warrior-like argument. My claim is not that the riots are justified, or that they cancel out Trump; I am sorry if perceived that way.
>"Culture warrior" just means "person disagreeing with me."
Disagree, the whole point of the rationalist community is to be better than unpredictive disagreement & tribal inflammation.
Ok. I made the claim that they were illegal immigrants because they were waving Mexican flags. Is your claim that citizens or visa holders would waive the Mexican flag?
>Trump ordering the national guard against the wishes of the Governor, and more likely that Trump sees a way to inflame the situation for personal political reasons (escalating a fight with a blue state governor regarding immigration)
Are you claiming Newsome would order more law enforcement to protect the Paramount ICE facility? During Georg Floyd Federal offices and local police stations were burned down. Even today, Newsome is pushing back on the National Guard call up.
From a border town, and I've seen many Mexican Americans who don't even speak Spanish flying the Mexican flag, let alone people actually from Mexico. You see the Mexican flag nearly as often as the American flag around here. And I mean like, a 55/45 split.
" I made the claim that they were illegal immigrants because they were waving Mexican flags. Is your claim that citizens or visa holders would waive the Mexican flag?"
OK, this here is exactly what I was talking about re: confirmation bias. This is a completely, utterly unhinged way of reasoning. It's the sort of thing that I would expect to see from an not-even-trying-to-be-subtle caricature of a hateful racist in a TV show or comic.
Now having said that, I have no interest in shaming or scolding or moralizing at you: yelling and insults aren't like to help. But this is a rationalist space, and I AM interested in helping you improve your reasoning process. This is the sort of thinking that will reliably, predictably produce extremely false beliefs about the world and regardless of your politics, you should be interested in avoiding that.
So to start, I ask you to take a minute to really try and consider the ways in which your fellow Americans think and what sorts of people are included among them. Is it *actually* reasonable to assume that none of them would wave a Mexican flag during a protest? Maybe it was different where you were, but in 2022 I saw a *lot* of Ukrainian flags show up on houses and cars. Were all the people flying them illegal immigrants from Ukraine? Or were many of them just citizens who wanted to show solidarity? Much smaller but more recently, some Americans have used Canadian flags and items displaying the Canadian flag symbol as a response to their president deciding to bully and threaten its longtime peaceful ally to the north. Do you think those people were illegal immigrants from Canada? Perhaps for you holding a flag is a symbol that can *only* denote immediate national heritage and origin; does everyone else view it the same way? Or do they use the symbol differently.
And even if it were exclusively a symbol of heritage, you do know that people can have multiple heritages, right? You may be unaware, but the land that Los Angeles sits on was part of Mexico until it was forcibly annexed by the U.S. The people living there when that happened didn't just disappear. They weren't especially numerous, but 175 years later they doubtless have lots of descendants who are U.S. citizens. And of course many, many others have come to the U.S. in the intervening years and also have descendants who are U.S. citizens. Nor is it unheard of for those born and raised in the U.S. to develop an affinity for another country, moving back and forth or living their part time, potentially obtaining dual citizenship. The point is there are *many* millions of U.S. citizens with some combination of hereditary and cultural ties to Mexico. Given its location and history, doubtless there are millions in California alone. And of course there are also plenty of Mexican nationals in the U.S. on work or student visas as well.
I'm belaboring this point hard because you really do have to have an incredibly, *staggeringly* poor model of both the composition of your country and the psychology of your fellow humans to believe that *nobody* who wasn't specifically an undocumented immigrant from Mexico would waive a Mexican flag during a protest.
Then there's priors to consider. Who do you *expect* to be at this sort of protest? If your answer is "illegal aliens" this is another failure of understanding. Anybody who has been living undocumented in the U.S. has most certainly been actively trying to avoid the notice of the authorities. Showing up at a protest like this--which very often draws LEO presence--would be very foolish for such people by any reasonable standard. I'm sure a few do it anyway, but there are many millions of American citizens--especially young people and *especially* in California--who are hopping mad at the administration and at ICE and much, much less worried about facing down some cops.
And then, having had this pointed out to you (multiple times), your response was...less than ideal:
"For the sake of argument, let's say that is true that no illegal immigrants are rioting. Doesn't that make the rioting worse?"
It was you, yes you who referred to them as "rioting illegal immigrants" and called in "another datapoint illegal immigration needs to be stopped." If one of the only things you thought worth mentioning about the situation--one of things that you presented as driving your conclusion--turned out to be false, offhandedly doubling down on your original answer would be *excessively* poor reasoning. When you discover a core premise of what your arguing is unsound, the primary thing you should do is *stop.* Stop, step back, and check to make sure everything *else* you assumed about the situation is true: if you made one bad assumption, might you have made others? Then you should *carefully* re-tread your reasoning process, examining the steps for soundness. If your response to discovering an error in your evidence is always to double down on your original conclusion, then whatever you're doing "reasoning" isn't it.
minor - it's Newsom, not Newsome. There is no e at the end.
>Is your claim that citizens or visa holders would waive the Mexican flag? - Sure, citizens and visa holders wave the Mexican flag all the time - say, on national holiday's associated with Mexico. I can also imagine that they would wave the flag here in solidarity with what they perceive to be a targeted or oppressed group. think it is disproportionate to assume that because someone is waving a flag, they are not a citizen or legal resident.
>Are you claiming Newsome would order more law enforcement to protect the Paramount ICE facility?
I make no such claims. Newsom stated that he thinks the local government would be able to quell the riots, and that he does not want national guard troops. He is the duly elected governor, are you claiming that he should not be listened to?
I find it likely Trump is exploiting the riots, and is looking not for a smooth resolution, but is looking for political gain by picking and inflaming a fight. Do you disagree with this claim, or find it unlikely?
Are you claiming that overstepping the governor's authority and sending in the national guard for the first time in decades is the best way to resolve these riots ("best" here could be filled by things like "least loss of life/proporty, respectful of laws and traditions, civil liberties")?
>Even today, Newsome is pushing back on the National Guard call up.
Are you claiming there are no reasons Newsom could have to push back on the call up, such as, but not limited to, that this will only inflame the situation?
>I can also imagine that they would wave the flag here in solidarity with what they perceive to be a targeted or oppressed group. think it is disproportionate to assume that because someone is waving a flag, they are not a citizen or legal resident.
Ok. I grant you there can be many citizens or visa holders. By waving the Mexican flag what message do you think the rest of America is receiving?
Why wouldn't waving a US flag be better? Speaking for myself, I would be more receptive to protests on illegal immigration where the emphasis is that we want to be American.
>I make no such claims. Newsom stated that he thinks the local government would be able to quell the riots,
WoolyAI has posted on this sub-thread that the order is only to protect Federal buildings. As these are Federal Buildings, my potentially flawed understanding is that it is unclear who is responsible to protect them. The responsibility to protect them may rest solely with the Federal government. Not the perfect analogy but it could be like National Park land. The state could help, but is under no obligation to help. If that is the case, I don't think Trump overstep is authority.
>Are you claiming there are no reasons Newsom could have to push back on the call up, such as, but not limited to, that this will only inflame the situation?
Yes, I am claiming that Newsom is doing his own politic'ing. He should know the Guard is there to protect the Federal Buildings. Over the weekend, Newsom was still saying the protests were peaceful. Arguably, if I am ICE, I am not going to wait for the protests to get out of hand.
If the calling of National Guards to protect Federal Buildings inflames the situation, then the blame should be on the protesters/rioters. Not on the Federal Government.
I live in LA, first itd questionable whether you could call what's happening a riot, but I don't want to get into it. It is obviously the case that the majority of people out in the streets right now are not illegals, they are US citizens who disagree with current immigration policy, plus some folks who show to smash and set stuff on fire whenever there is any kind of unrest.
> I live in LA, first itd questionable whether you could call what's happening a riot
Out of curiosity do you think it's questionable whether you could call what happened at the Capitol on January 6 2021 a riot?
What part of "I don't want to get into it" can people not read? But if you want my opinion on January 6th, its elsewhere in this thread.
>I live in LA, first itd questionable whether you could call what's happening a riot
It has gone on for 3 days and 101, a major freeway, was blocked. I don't know why it has to spread to all of LA (which is huge) for this to be called a riot.
Oh, FFS. Protestors block roadways all the time. That doesn't make it a riot. You are either intentionally using inflammatory language to justify an excessive response, or are totally blinded by your priors.
And note that I have not said that blocking the freeway, or anything else these people have done, is either OK or likely to be politically effective.
Well gosh, let's see:
- Setting cars on fire
- Stoning police and ICE vehicles
- Dropping stones from overpasses onto said vehicles
Is that a riot yet? Who can say, let us ponder this, after all it's "just blocking roadways" isn't it?
I've seen some mention online about "people just having fun watching cars burn" (downplaying what is going on, it's not rioting, it's not even violent, it's just some harmless fun), and if that is the definition of "fun" in Los Angeles, then there is something the hell very wrong with Los Angeles.
Webster definition of riot
a
: a violent public disorder
specifically : a tumultuous disturbance of the public peace by three or more persons assembled together and acting with a common intent
b
: public violence, tumult, or disorder
A group of people gathered at the Paramount ICE facility and the LA Times says they were throwing things at the agents. [1] The article doesn’t says how many exactly but the wording strongly implies 3 or more. I would consider throwing objects at law enforcement as being a riot.
For the freeway blocking, the rioters went beyond just blocking. They threw all sorts of things at the Police. In the article below, there is a picture of 3 or more rioters. [2]
How are the examples not riots?
[1] https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2025-06-08/what-actually-happened-at-the-paramount-home-depot
[2] https://ktla.com/news/local-news/video-protesters-throw-rocks-at-chp-officers-from-l-a-freeway-bridge/amp/
I think this is another datapoint that shows how confirmation bias shapes peoples' worldviews. By all appearances your pre-existing political beliefs influenced both where you looked to get your news and how you interpreted what you found. Small wonder that the result ends up reinforcing what you already believed.
(Or maybe I just think that's true because it lines up with my pre-existing beliefs)
I do not disagree that confirmation bias affects all of us including me.
I argue that those left of center, particularly the ones that are actively reading the news more are the ones that more affected by it.
The mainstream media is mostly left of center and their reporting reflects it.
A local LA news source claiming people are just having fun watching burning cars during a "protest". [1] I guess we can all agree that anti-abortion protesters should be allowed to throw rocks at windows of abortion providers (something else the rioters are doing) and burn cars in front of Planned Parenthood.
[1] https://x.com/SteveGuest/status/1932043760860328336?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E1932043760860328336%7Ctwgr%5E0c09ba821c9877d84c7531a120b6ac2470fca0ae%7Ctwcon%5Es1_&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Finstapundit.com%2F724803%2F
"I argue that those left of center, particularly the ones that are actively reading the news more are the ones that more affected by it. "
Yes, that's how confirmation bias works. It always appears to affect other people strongly, and oneself little if at all. It would hardly be a bias if it didn't work that way.
In this thread you've been fact checked on a number of your claims at a number of points and have mostly brushed them aside. In particular, you seem to be stating a lot of assumptions, which--when pressed--you admit that you have no source at all for beyond how you think the world works.
"I argue that those left of center, particularly the ones that are actively reading the news more are the ones that more affected by it. "
While I'm not especially interested in getting into the weeds of bias in media reporting--it certainly exists and is everywhere--reading news at least *potentially* exposes you to information that contradicts what you already believe. Claiming that your reasoning is *more* reliable because you're reasoning from *less* information is just a hair shy of arguing that up is down and black is white. Yes, you'll read fewer lies and distortions by reading fewer things in total. But you'll also read fewer facts and be more prone to just making shit up: as you have so aptly demonstrated. The easiest person to fool is always yourself.
You're almost making the right point, which is that while people's individual acts of violence or resistance outside the law thye don't like can be counterproductive, but logically it doesn't discredit the underlying political disagreement. If it did, Donald Trump would not have been allowed to be president again after Jan. 6.
What are the underlying political positions of the protesters?
We can't read their minds but they seem to be protesting the ICE raids. They seem to think those raids and the deportation process has gone too far. That's what I would be protesting if I were out there. I'm not because I don't live in CA.
I am still unclear. What has gone too far?
From my vantage point, it looks like the protestors are just protesting more enforcement.
This is going to be another thread where examples of violent left wing activists are cherrypicked, isn't it?
Wonder if left-wingers and tankies do the exact same thing. Wait. They do.
Cherrypicked? Or pointed out because mainstream media doesn't write about it?
I agree that both sides do bad things. It is just in the past year, the left has engaged in a lot of political violence. I am biased, but I would put it at 75% the left doing bad things and 25% the right doing bad things.
In a fair world, there would be completely unbiased news sources, entrusted representatives with no corruption, and political violence wouldn't exist at all or would be entirely 50/50 across all timespans like that makes it better. The unfortunate answers to your "concerns" is that, when a political side loses it's institutional power, radical members of that side tend to engage in political violence. Like... political violence is almost a universal, historical phenomena, or something. Every Red Army Faction has their counterpart in a McVeigh, though personally there is not enough investment to see if the bodycounts are bijective (and is wholly orthogonal to politics as practiced)
>The unfortunate answers to your "concerns" is that, when a political side loses it's institutional power, radical members of that side tend to engage in political violence. Like... political violence is almost a universal, historical phenomena, or something
I guess your argument is that we should be ok with levels of political violence from the side out of power? And not take the Democrats position which was to punish (overly) harshly those who engage in political violence to stop it?
Errr....what rioting illegal immigrants?
Any actual evidence to support that claim?
Vibes
Are you claiming that there are no illegal immigrants rioting?
There are rioters waving Mexican flags. I assumed that there were mostly illegals immigrants, but potentially they are not.
For the sake of argument, let's say that is true that no illegal immigrants are rioting. Doesn't that make the rioting worse? It is US citizens and permanent residents rioting because ICE is enforcing US laws on illegal immigration. And there is evidence that non-illegal immigrants are rioting.
There are alot of pre-printed signs linked to NGOs.
To me, feels like another case of the left using violence to get their poltical agenda enacted.
https://x.com/DataRepublican/status/1931508673328922698?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E1931508673328922698%7Ctwgr%5E0c09ba821c9877d84c7531a120b6ac2470fca0ae%7Ctwcon%5Es1_&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Finstapundit.com%2F724803%2F
I have to tell you, if I were an illegal immigrant, I would not go within ten miles of a riot, especially not this riot.
That would be wise. But you're probably less wise than the average rioter.
That's not the issue. The issue is whether they are wiser than the average illegal immigrant. Their claim was re the behavior of illegal immigrants, not the behavior of protesters.
That's a lot of words for "no I don't have any evidence to support my assertion."
Also your dishonest first sentence in replying to me demonstrates that your intentions are less than serious. I should know better by now than to feed the trolls, guess I'm still defaulting to an outdated sense of the caliber of discourse in ACX's comment sections....anyway, goodbye.
I think we have responded to each other enough to know that your question wasn't an innocent question.
We have different polticial beliefs and I am happy to debate those beliefs with you.
I don't think your assumption that the people waving Mexican flags are illegal immigrants is warranted. It's more likely just a symbol of racial solidarity.
There can be many reasons that someone would wave a Mexican flag in a protest over illegal immigration. I took the opinion it was foreign nationals.
>It's more likely just a symbol of racial solidarity.
Possible. But then is your argument that citizens of Mexican descent are waving Mexican flags to show solidarity? I think that is potentially a more inflammatory position because it is saying that Mexican Americans are just as (more) aligned with Mexico.
Note, I know that interpretation and just choose not to make it my position in for this event. I think it is more inflammatory so needs stronger proof before I assert it.
I have no ancestral connection to Mexico but I would think that waving a Mexican flag is the appropriate thing to do when supporting people of Mexican origin.
That is an opinion.
If I were in a country illegally and wanted to protest to continue to stay illegally, I would refrain from waving the flag of another country. Otherwise, maybe the officials of said country might interpret me as some type of agitator.
You literally assert it as such in your original post "quell rioting illegal immigrants" in the OP. without any indication that this is interpretation. A lot of people react to your statement.
What would have been a more neutral title then?
>rioting because ICE is enforcing US laws on illegal immigration
[citation needed]. How do you tell the cause of the riots is that and not the enforcement being, in the opinion of the rioters, selective and not in line with procedure?
>How do you tell the cause of the riots is that and not the enforcement being, in the opinion of the rioters, selective and not in line with procedure?
I think that people with nuanced views probably don't riot. They sit around going "hmm yes well I certainly support taking increased action on illegal immigration but I have the following concerns". They aren't throwing flaming bags of garbage at ICE officers.
On one hand, this implies an “intellectual vs rioter” dichotomy, on the other hand, this draws the line where nuanced views begin pretty arbitrarily. The question of immigration legality is already a complex and nuanced one, “deport all illegals” or the opposite are very much not positions that are easy to define, it’s only simple if the true beliefs of the person making such statements are more like “I hate darkies”.
Finally, what’s so impossible in very different people coming to the same barricade for very different reasons?
I think we can all agree that the Biden administration’s rather idiosyncratic solution, particularly the aspect of it that is open-ended, always subject to “more” process - is probably not where we want to land going forward.
That’s not particularly relevant to the topic of the rioters and their motivations
I misunderstood you to be saying that the rioters, whether antifa, or simply co-ethnics, or illegal immigrants, or college students - had a fine understanding of the immigration “process” and the law. Which would be difficult for them to have in any case, beyond being prima facie improbable, since it is changing all the time at the whim of judges.
I doubt at this point there’s a law professor in the country who could articulate it clearly and consistently, coherently.
OTOH plenty of people are good at law talk in a kind of inventive way, throwing in legal terms that they’ve read, here and there.
What do we think about the fact that this is the first time since 1992 that a president has summoned the national guard without consulting with the governor of that state?
I don't know, what do you think about it?
If you opposed it in general terms, then feel free to say so and condemn Johnson for doing so in 1965.
1965, actually.
Kinda...good?
It increasingly feels like California and Texas and New York are just...kinda disobeying the federal government and getting away with it. Like, remember when the Supreme Court told the feds they could cut the Texas razor wire in the Rio Grande after 3 migrants drowned and then Texas just...kept putting more razor wire in (1)? Or how gun rights are basically dead letter in Cali and NY like abortion rights were dead letter in the South before Roe v Wade was overturned.
And, like, that's bad but may I humbly suggest that the people of California and Texas want to live in very different worlds with very different laws and...they increasingly can just kinda do that. California can have sanctuary cities and abortions and Texas can have razor wire and guns. Maybe in an increasingly divided nation, we can just let different states do what they want?
(1) https://gov.texas.gov/news/post/texas-deploys-more-than-100-miles-of-razor-wire-to-secure-border
Then why do you feel good about the fact the federal government is overriding the will of the state in this instance?
The US Constitution sets out the responsibilities of each level of government.
There are certain grey areas, or areas where the Federal Government has managed to extend its authority beyond what was originally intended, but I can't see that this is one of them, immigration is clearly a Federal responsibility.
Mostly because the direct text of the Presidential Memoranda reads like the National Guard is there just to protect Federal property and personnel. (1)
Which seems fair. I'm not federalist enough to let states totally kick out the FBI and ICE. So if there's riots in LA and people want to block streets and burn stuff down and the governor doesn't want to do anything and they don't burn down any Federal buildings...that sounds pretty good. If they want to fight and throw rocks at LAPD but leave the ICE agents safe in their building...alright.
If Trump marches the National Guard through the streets to quell all the riots, I'll probably change my opinion but I haven't seen any evidence of that. It sounds like they're just deployed to the federal buildings.
(1) https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2025/06/department-of-defense-security-for-the-protection-of-department-of-homeland-security-functions/
The 1992 deployment of the National Guard (and of regular Army and Marine units as well) to Los Angeles was done at the request of then-Governor Pete Wilson. Wilson ordered the Guard in under state command and requested federal reinforcements. When the Army and Marines arrived, Bush the Elder federalized the guard in order to put all the troops under a unified command structure.
I think the last time Guard units were federalized for domestic deployment without the approval of state governors was during the early 60s when JFK did so in order to enforce a desegregation court order.
LBJ in 1965: https://www.politico.com/story/2016/03/lbj-protects-civil-right-march-march-20-1965-220862
Maybe process wasn't followed. But you think Newsome would've called out the National Guard. Just today Newsome is suing Trump on the issue.[1] I don't think Newsome would've agreed to call the National Guard.
For those that may not be aware, the rioting started on Friday at a local ICE office. [2] Potentially the office would've been burned like many offices were in the George Floyd riots.
[1] https://apnews.com/live/immigration-protests-los-angeles
[2] https://abc7.com/post/protesters-federal-agents-clash-ice-raid-paramount-watch-live/16688818/
Just fyi, his name doesn't have the "e" at the end.
Newsom didn't call out the Guard because (at least according to him, the mayor of Los Angeles, and the LAPD) the riots were small and well within the capacity of the LAPD and CHP to handle. I have not vetted the accuracy of this claim one way or another, except that characterizations of the protests/riots from conservative and liberal sources seem to suffer from a "did you two visit the same country?" problem.
Yeah, agree that news sources are differing.
I think part of the issue is that California is just use to "protestors" doing rioty things and blocking highways. In this riot, the rioters have blocked a freeway.
https://www.pbs.org/newshour/nation/thousands-fill-the-streets-block-freeway-in-los-angeles-after-trump-deploys-national-guard
The LAPD chief is now saying the violence is “escalating” and apparently referenced explosive devices although I haven’t the patience to watch videos to their end.
So it seems he’s no longer painting it as good fun.
I don’t live there of course so don’t know if the police chief is lying.
Or perhaps it came home to him to see all those patrol cars damaged or burned. Some people just don’t like waste.
I live in LA, can confirm its not currently a war zone. Not saying people don't have a right to go to work without seeing burning Waymos, but nothing that has happened sonfar seems like it would justify the kind of escalation that Trump is screaming about on social media.
That’s great. I’m glad it’s not Minneapolis. I hope they (the feds) will confine themselves to protecting their federal buildings then, and of course, keep doing their ICE work.
My current working hypothesis is that the protests through yesterday were small, fairly localized, and ran a spectrum of how peaceful they were. Some appear to have been relatively well-behaved while at least a few tipped over into riotous incidents and several more have done stuff like blocking streets which is highly uncivil but not, strictly speaking, violent.
I find it very plausible that the protests/riots have gotten quite a bit worse both in size and behavior since reports of Trump ordering in the National Guard, but I am not equipped to judge the veracity of claims to that effect by the LAPD.
>"…blocking streets which is highly uncivil but not, strictly speaking, violent."
Given that one could expect to be met with force if attempting to pass or clear the blockade(s), I would contend that such actions *are* violent (i.e., implicit threats).
ETA: there's a reason that naval blockades are considered an act of war; same logic would seem to apply here.
I definitely don’t envy the LEOs who have to figure out the right degree of cheerful acquiescence even up to coddling and accepting actions that would probably get a swift response If not couched as protest. Both so that the situation does not worsen out of their control, and so that they aren’t just setting themselves up to be blamed for the whole thing.
How do you view the attack on the Paramount ICE office on Friday that started this?
prediction: that argument is an enemy soldier and will thus be disregarded; the call is justified in his opinion. https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/9weLK2AJ9JEt2Tt8f/politics-is-the-mind-killer
Never mind the weak factual claims, or the slanted source - foxnews.com, really?
The slanted source complaint is true and also an isolated demand for rigor.
People post links from slanted sources such as CNN and the NYT here all the time. All these sources are slanted, many of them have a history of making mistakes, and in a fast-moving news environment they are often the only option we have. This is, or should be, understood.
There are very few, if any, trustworthy news sources. Pointing out that Fox News is untrustworthy when none of them are trustworthy is an isolated demand for rigor.
https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/08/14/beware-isolated-demands-for-rigor/
It is trivially true to point out that all news sources are biased. It is magnitude and expression of that bias that is under comment here.
The NYT is not perfect, nor should one derive their entire factual understanding from its pages. However, to claim that because because they have made any mistakes puts them on the same epistemic level of Fox News is to neglect your duty to critically evaluate your sources.
Fox News willfully distorts fact and opinion to such a level that it deserves Alban's incredulous rejoinder.
Dude, this is just a factual disagreement. Restating the position with more emphasis advances nothing.
I can read Fox News, it's mostly garbage. I can read the NYT, it's mostly garbage. I'm not going to subject myself to either enough to distinguish the slight variations in slime green garbage coloration that you're pointing to. If you've got a factual way to resolve this, delightful, let me hear it. Otherwise...
In the dim, dark past of 2023, Fox News settled 'Dominion Voting Systems v. Fox News Network' out of court for $787.5 million, the largest defamation settlement to date.
At contest in that case was whether Fox News acted with "reckless disregard" to the truth and "actual malice" towards Dominion. Pre-trial discovery and depositions largely revealed that Fox showrunners and commentators did not believe that the 2020 election was stolen or that Dominion systems altered the vote. They knowingly advanced false theories to try to win back conservatives frustrated with their calling of Arizona.
Of course this was not a singular event, but indicative of the culture and stance of Fox News more or less since its inception. In my view this is a level of malfeasance with no parallels at NYT.
My apologies if it is read that way, but I disagree it is a demand - for example, including 2 sources, say NYT and Foxnews (although I would disagree seeing them as equals quality wise) would decrease the slant in evidence presented; I make no claim that other sources are not also slanted.
I would also defend my "foxnews.com, really?" phrase; I have come to expect and appreciate better quality sources from this community.
Sure, providing two opposingly slanted views is probably better than one, fair enough.
The argument that the NYT is either in any way notably better in quality than Fox News or meets the standards of quality sources for this community is just a factual dispute between us. And I'm not sure how we'd resolve it. Like...I can just read it man. It's not good quality, even among news sources.
What in the foxnews report is inaccurate?
Happy for you to provide your sources if you think anything in the foxnews source is inaccurate.
I did not say it is inaccurate , I said it was slanted. The weak factual claims were made by you: "to help quell rioting illegal immigrants", where upthread you stated as a follow-up when questioned - "I assumed that there were mostly illegals immigrants, but potentially they are not."
How does it make the situation better if it is non-illegal immigrants? Arguably, it is worse because it would be a strong datapoint that leftist groups are ok with violence.
I did not make a judgement about the situation being better either way. I just pointed out that I think your factual claims are weak, and that the source used is slanted.
Perhaps you could come up with a reason why it would be better if citizens were rioting, instead of illegal immigrants? I.e. illegal immigrants could be sufficiently scared that they wouldn't dare to show their face; that there are not enough illegal immigrants for the scale of the riots, because enough have been deported; or that the civic outrage of well-educated legal citizens causes them to violently protest a moral injustice of sufficient excess.
perhaps you can steelman some from across sides of the political spectrum?
Every other news outlet has reported this as just protests that heated up. I find it very dubious that the protestors are even majority "illegal immigrant"--how would they tell?
I would think 2nd generation much more likely.
Based on what?
My impression of the relative employment status, and work ethic of the two groups.
And how are you assessing those qualities in the protestors? You down there conducting interviews? Or just assuming they're unemployed and lazy because they're at a protest?
Oh heavens no! I just live in a majority minority state where whole trades are dominated by largely illegal immigrants.
Heated for 3 days?
And potentially the riots are spreading. 2 officers were hurt and 60 rioters arrested in SF last night.
https://www.sfgate.com/news/bayarea/article/2-officers-injured-60-arrested-as-ice-protest-20367743.php
Prediction: The protests will continue all summer. I'd guess that the menacing presence of the guard as well as Hegseth's threats to bring in the Marines will only inflame the situation, as what is being protested is perceived federal-police overreach. This will get much worse before it gets better.
Mike Johnson prays every night that these protests will escalate and continue until the midterms, since that is by far the best chance his party has of holding onto its majority in the House.
Yes, heated for three days. Rodney King lasted for four days, though there was a significant buildup prior to that. Years long, in fact. BLM protests had a significant precedent and were a mix of peaceful and violent demonstrations in several cities.
This is a nothingburger on the scale of BLM. Sure, there will be protests, and riots, but nothing will particularly change. Political violence is a feature of living in society from both the left and the right.
https://www.start.umd.edu/publication/comparison-political-violence-left-wing-right-wing-and-islamist-extremists-united
(Doesn't help the "nonviolent" right wingers that political violence in the US in terms of terrorist incidents is more likely to be done by far-right extremists than by far left extremists--though we can go all day pointing out historical examples of both)
For what it’s worth, 90% or more of the people in the city of Los Angeles don’t live within a mile of any of the relevant events. Yesterday was LA Pride and you wouldn’t even know there were protests going on in other parts of the city if you were there.
The post feels like it is justifying political violence from the left.
>(Doesn't help the "nonviolent" right wingers that political violence in the US in terms of terrorist incidents is more likely to be done by far-right extremists than by far left extremists--though we can go all day pointing out historical examples of both)
This is particularly slanted to the point I would argue is misinformation. Most of the recent (past year) political violence is from the left. Examples
*Assassination attempt of Trump
*Murder of UnitedHealthCare CEO
*Murder of 2 Israeli embassy personnel in DC
*These riots
*Antifa violently blocking a protest in Seattle, which occurred weeks ago
Please list the recent violence from "right wingers"
What is it about the guy who shot at Trump, a registered Republican, that sounds leftist to you?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Matthew_Crooks#Political_activities
The fact that he tried to kill Trump.
Crooks is more likely to be a leftist.
In the wikipedia link you gave, Crooks also donated $15 to ActBlue, a Democratic pac. I would weigh that more heavily than registering as a Republican because it is unclear why he did it. In many elections, Democrats have encouraged their supporters to register as Republicans in the primary to get a more beneficial result for Democrats.
And due to the push back I got from the $15 donation the last time. Reposting.
I feel like I am getting unexplained push back about the $15 donation. I don't know why. My speculation is that many are thinking that $15 is a trivial amount. They may spend that much on a random lunch. I certainly do.
For Thomas Crook, that may not be alot of money but likely an amount he spent carefully. Thomas Crook was probably making (near) minimum wage in his job. In PA, that is $7.25/hour. $15 would be somewhere around 2 hours pre-tax earnings for Crook. I know if I spent 2 hours worth of pre-tax earnings, I would have given it some thought.
Christchurch, Anders Brevik, DNC headquaters in AZ shot up, Nancy Pelosi's husband, Mayor Craig Greensburg, the capital riots, the plot to kidnap Gretchen Witchner, Germany's BfV finding right wing extremists within the army. Of course, a standard left-wing argument would include institutional violence, but we're just gonna ignore that so you can... pretend your side is entirely justified.
I never said right wing violence should be overlooked. My point is that left wing violence in the US is now at an uncomfortable level.
I went through your list. Most are not recent. Many are not even in the US. I think your list an example of confirmation bias operating.
Christchurch: 2019 and in New Zealand
Anders Brevik: 2011 (more than a decade ago!) and in Norway
DNC Headquaters in AZ: 2024 and a good example of political violence
-There is also lots of violence against Republican offices. NM Republican office was burnt this year. [1] I view this level of violence as the background that will occur.
Nancy Pelosi's husand: 2022 so not so recent
Mayor Craig Greensburg: 2022 and not done by a right winger. AP calls the shooter a "social justice activist" [2]
Capital riots: 2021, so not recent. But good example of a right wing political violence.
Gretchen Whitmer plot: 2022 and there are questions about how much the plotters were entrapped because FBI informants were heavily embedded. [3]
Germany's BfV: Not sure when. Not in the US.
[1] https://apnews.com/article/new-mexico-republican-headquarters-fire-investigation-8b97dd1b9441d38690d3980ae576d337
[2] https://apnews.com/article/louisville-mayoral-elections-shootings-87d7235a74818cc106b8b52e75cd68ce
[3] https://apnews.com/article/michigan-whitmer-kidnap-plot-appeal-539a9dd44027a5f8aff729d778dc8f5b
I thought Gretchen Whitmer got her ownself kidnapped.
Not the other way around?
Can you clarify your point?
There are protests about illegal federal actions against illegal immigrants, and Trump distrusts the police enough that he ordered the military in. This is more evidence that Trump should be stopped.
>There are protests about illegal federal actions against illegal immigrants
Can you provide evidence of the claim about illegal federal actions that are the reasons for the protests?
I apologize - I conflated several things. There were several illegal kidnappings claimed by ICE a few weeks ago where agents took people off the street while hiding their identity and making every effort to seem like criminals. Trump’s current use of the marines and national guard seems to violate several legal precedents (and may have broken laws). I think the original deportations that set off this event may have been legal.
>Trump’s current use of the marines and national guard seems to violate several legal precedents (and may have broken laws).
Respectfully, please read WoolyAIs posts on this because he has the details. The order is to only protect Federal buildings and there is no evidence the calls up are doing anything else. My interpretation is that would make the order legal. My analogy is that if there were riots in a National Park, the Federal government is the entity responsible to police the Park and restore calm. Not as clear cut in this case. My understanding is if the National Guard is only protecting Federal buildings by only being within a few hundred feet of said buildings, then I don't see anything illegal about the order.
Interesting paper from the Apple folks on LRMs, "The Illusion of Thinking: Understanding the Strengths and Limitations of Reasoning Models via the Lens of Problem Complexity." Their abstract is quite concise, so I'll quote it...
> Through extensive experimentation across diverse puzzles, we show that frontier LRMs face a complete accuracy collapse beyond certain complexities. Moreover, they exhibit a counterintuitive scaling limit: their reasoning effort increases with problem complexity up to a point, then declines despite having an adequate token budget. By comparing LRMs with their standard LLM counterparts under equivalent inference compute, we identify three performance regimes: (1) lowcomplexity tasks where standard models surprisingly outperform LRMs, (2) medium-complexity where additional thinking in LRMs demonstrates advantage, and (3) high-complexity tasks where both models experience complete collapse.
My layperson's question is: how do they know whether they're accessing the LRM part of the package or the LLM part? ChatGPT's 4 and 4o are supposed to incorporate LRMs, but if I'm querying it, how do I know if the result came from the RM or LM?
Rather than using benchmarks, this team used "controllable puzzle environments" that let them "vary complexity systematically—by adjusting puzzle elements while preserving
the core logic." And they mention "contamination" in established benchmarks.
Another laypeep's quetion: When they talk about contamination in the benchmarks, are they implying that the AI packages have been fed the answers to benchmark tests to cheat their way to better results?
https://ml-site.cdn-apple.com/papers/the-illusion-of-thinking.pdf
I poked around X a bit to see the strongest case *against* the paper's findings -- Ryan Greenblatt says (in my understanding of his tweets) that the problem was that the problem + the sequential steps of the solution ("disc 1 to rod 3, disc 2 to rod 2, ...") gets long enough that it stops fitting into the context window of the model. And in some cases the model actually just says "you're asking for a solution with 32,000 steps, and I don't want to write all that out; here is the procedure that solves the general case: ..."
This is one of those situations where I'm not expert enough to know who's right: Gary Marcus and friends vs. AI researchers and friends. But Ryan is chief scientist at Redwood Research so he probably knows what he's talking about
https://x.com/RyanPGreenblatt/status/1931823002649542658
+1
(EDIT: I ended up taking this response and making it a post on my blog here: https://theahura.substack.com/p/a-few-quick-thoughts-on-apples-illusion)
This is what I said to a friend of mine who posted this paper in a discord and was arguing this shows LLMs aren't reasoning:
```
I'm not particularly surprised that these models are bad at solving puzzles that require learning algorithms. You don't have to reach for towers of hanoi, most models can't do simple addition of large numbers. The reason is straightforward: they haven't learned the algorithm for addition (add the two numbers on the far left, carry the one if necessary, repeat). But neural networks learn other kinds of circuits, and large neural networks are able to learn some kind of addition algorithm that looks more like modular addition.
And even if you give it the algorithm, that's not enough to guarantee that it will all suddenly go well.
Imagine I asked you to add two numbers with a billion digits each by hand. You know the algorithm for adding things. But do you think, somewhere in those billion additions, you might make a mistake? To solve a puzzle like towers of hanoi, you need to a) know the algorithm and b) successfully execute it. But even people are not good at consistently executing algorithms! This is why we built computers! And to that point, LLMs can easily write code to solve towers of hanoi. I can ask claude to do it and it will spit out the result in < 30 seconds
```
I like how you’ve framed the question in terms of ‘is this something we’d expect a general intelligence to do’, but I disagree with your conclusion that it isn’t. I agree most people would make a mistake if you asked them to add two book-length numbers by hand, on say Mechanical Turk or a study where you pay them for their time. But a lot comes down to motivation and effort. If you found a way to attach as much status as they’d get for building something crazy in Minecraft, I think there are lots of teenagers who could find ways to add billion-digit numbers without mistakes, much more reliably than these models. The same is true of a decent proportion of arts undergrads - if you told them they couldn’t get into their uni of choice unless they worked out a way to add two billion-digit numbers without mistakes, a lot of them would work out ways to be much more accurate than the LLMs in this paper.
The ‘unmotivated arts undergrad’ heuristic is fine as far as it goes, but I think we also need to compare it to motivated people. I think the original idea of a general intelligence was something that you can point at a new task and it does as well as a human who doesn’t know how to do it, but is really motivated so they’ll get the right answer if at all possible. There is a sense of ‘improve itself’ built into old ideas about AI, and I think the ability to produce and follow a good approach to a new problem is part of it.
Two thoughts
- it's not obvious to me that an LLM, given enough time and a large enough context window, couldn't figure out the right answer. No one would ever run that study, though, because it would expensive for very little gain
- I don't know why we "need" to compare LLMs to motivated people, since the vast majority of people are not motivated but also are considered generally intelligent
Interesting. Thanks for putting it into perspective. And thanks for link!
I can answer some of these
> how do they know whether they're accessing the LRM part of the package or the LLM part?
From the paper: "Most of our experiments are conducted on reasoning models and their non-thinking counterparts, such as Claude 3.7 Sonnet (thinking/non-thinking) and DeepSeek-R1/V3."
Deepseek is an opensource model that allows them to force which mode they want to be in. Claude's API allows you to specify which mode you want (https://docs.anthropic.com/en/docs/build-with-claude/extended-thinking)
> When they talk about contamination in the benchmarks, are they implying that the AI packages have been fed the answers to benchmark tests to cheat their way to better results?
Generally contamination happens from the training data. That is, if you scrape the entire web, and somewhere on the web is the answer to your question, then the question is 'contaminated' because somewhere in training the model has already seen the answer.
---
A few folks have sent me this paper. Personally, I don't think it's nearly as big a deal as people want it to be. "Intelligence" and "reasoning" have become semantics debates. The point of a word is to define reality. If "intelligence" means "a property only humans have" then ml models will never be intelligent. If "intelligence" means "being able to do productive work in the world" then many models are already intelligent.
Does anyone have advice for a younger adult experiencing political derangement? It's become pretty bad for me in the last few months and has to do with exposure to a specific friend of mine. Posting here as I think it's likely to find someone with similar values to me who's gone through something like this.
In short I have a 1%er FAANG friend who is also a self-identified radical communist and a proud #AbandonHarris supporter. She was ecstatic when dems lost in 2024 and spoke often of "punishing" Americans over Gaza. Her political beliefs can best be summed up by the phrase, "After Trump, our turn!"
Personally I am in the bottom 20% for US income and am strongly driven by rationalism and my experience with working-class folks growing up in rust belt Appalachia. I'm also gay and in a committed long-term relationship to a man I intend on marrying if I still have the right to do so next year.
My friend's views are making me feel insane and furious. I have no idea how to process this much anger and rage toward elite "progressives" whom I used to regard as being on my side. Trust fund babies at Ivy League schools wearing Amazon Basics keffiyehs proudly bragged about fighting to cause maximum harm to me and my family, and I'm supposed to just forget about that and move on?!
I feel politically homeless and am dealing with anger all the time as a result. I find myself increasingly cheering on harms to Ivy League schools/academics/activists just because I want to see them suffer for their elitism. I know this is stupid and cruel of me but I just can't get over the lack of self-reflection and criticality coming from my ultrawealthy friend and those like her.
I don't want to blow up a decade+ friendship (and associated friendgroup) over this but I'm at my limit. My friendships with conservative antigay evangelical Christians cause me much less stress than this friendship with someone who is ostensibly only slightly further to my left. What the hell does a young gay liberal do with himself in the modern USA??!!
My advice when asking for a potentially-challenging change in someone else's behaviour without alienating them is generally to frame it not as
"I think this thing you are doing is bad and you have a moral obligation to stop it"
but as
"I get that what you're doing is fine, but would you mind please changing even so, as a favour to me and a concession to my weaknesses"
I can suck having to say the latter when you believe the former, but it's a good way not to put backs up.
If you say "I'm really struggling with the mental stress of politics right now, would you mind not talking about it around me, please?", that's far from certain to work, but it may?
I empathize tremendously. What you're going through sucks. I had a very dear, close friend abruptly dump our relationship - one of 8 years, in which we were in contact pretty much daily - via text after I clumsily indicated with a meme that I had not voted for Trump but also had contempt for how the other team made Trump's win so possible.
Not sure if you're a subscriber with access to subscriber-only comment threads, but I wrote about it here, and there was a lot of wisdom in the comments (https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/hidden-open-thread-3555/comment/77124074). Though there's a lot of wisdom in the comments here, too!
Coincidentally to you using the phrase "politically homeless," the meme video I sent was actually from an episode of Dumpster Fire with Bridget Phetasy, a comedian who speaks frequently on the increasing political homelessness of standard liberals, and even had a segment on one of her podcasts reading letters by listeners who also feel politically homeless (https://www.phetasy.com/s/letters-from-the-politically-homeless).
In fact, there's a segment of the video commentary podcast called "Breaking Bridget" - as in, breaking her sanity - when something in the news is particularly infuriating and crazy-making. If you've never seen the show, you might hugely enjoy it: (https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLmvknGtOQpCJsbDrfnQOPF9Wor64Dh3VV)
Since you’re asking, I think you need to figure out a way to be emotionally OK regardless of the political situation.
If you can’t, you will be personally unhappy in a way that’s totally meaningless, unproductive and out of your control. You will be less effective in all your pursuits, be they selfish or altruistic. You will give pleasure to sadists.
In general I don’t think politics is important enough to blow up meaningful connections over. Can you bond with your friends over music, hobbies, shared interests? Can you agree to put politics and Trump aside?
If these conversations are making you feel so angry, and you don’t feel like your friend is listening to your point of view, the best solution is to stop having them.
Talk about state ranked choice voting reform/possibilities. A leftist has never won the presidency or most of congress before so it's a much less risky way for them to get a substantial voice in congress while also being great for your political views (which seem pretty centrist to me).
I find myself increasingly cheering on harms to Ivy League schools/academics/activists just because I want to see them suffer for their elitism
I can assure you that the institutional views of Ivy League schools, as well as most faculty, are far from the naive communism of your friends.
I think you completely disagreed with the person you thought you seconded. They forgot to put a quotation mark around their first paragraph, which they were quoting from the original person in order to disagree with it.
I hope no one gets burned to the ground, because hate and destruction are bad, actually.
Oops. Well isn't my face red.
Some people are more interested in cultish in-group signaling than winning elections or actual pragmatic results that help people. Either you can tolerate listening to someone LARPing as a revolutionary commie, or find other friends. You're not going to convince your friend of anything.
The best case is to get them to avoid the subject. If they respect the friendship as much as you do, they'll probably be willing to at least try to tone it down.
If they're not willing to avoid the subject around you, the next-best thing is to get away from them as much as you can. A lot of people feed on anger and will spread it as far as they can, and all you can do is shut the door and keep the flames away from you. It sucks, but is for the best.
If you're not able to do either of those, I've had some success imagining people as live-action cartoons. It helps to reduce the resentment, it's hard to stay angry at a cartoon. Try imagining them as the communists from Disco Elysium. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k6tgI79uT1g
...maybe you should just play Disco Elysium in general.
It seems like your friend is very angry, or very stressed. If I was you I would say something like "It seems like you're under a lot of stress, to the point that it's starting to make me stressed." And then you find some way to ask them how you can help them relax.
Or something like that, I can't actually know what I would do in your shoes, since I'm not in your shoes.
I don't think your friend is representative of elite progressives, FYI. Rage at your friend seems very understandable - extrapolating from that to being angry at millions of people who are very non-monolithic in their views seems like a stretch and is causing you unnecessary stress.
Speaking as an Ivy League grad, who worked at a FAANG, and consider myself progressive - I find your friends views pretty abhorrent, for many of the reasons you outline. I also consider myself squarely a Democrat, while also being disappointed with a lot of what the party does.
Thanks for listening Roger. I appreciate your perspective and it helps me put my life and experiences into a broader context!
Some people are just stupid. Like, way more stupid than the average, which is already quite stupid. That includes your friend; sorry about that.
Everything you wrote seems correct. I have no specific advice to give you, other than to reduce the contact with the friend for a few years; maybe they will come to their senses later again. Maybe not.
Sometimes people have it so good that they get crazy and start kicking at things around them until everything falls apart, and then they can finally focus on solving actual problems, which restores their sanity. Some people just can't handle having it good. And it really sucks that these people often ruin things for other people around them, who then have to suffer the consequences, despite never having it "too good" themselves.
I wonder what causes this, and how could it be prevented. My current best guess is selfishness. Because there is so much suffering in the world, that even if you have no problem to address in your own life, you can still focus your energy on helping others. If you look around this planet, there is no fucking way you could conclude that it is too good. And you don't even need to consider the entire planet; just looking at your neighborhood is often enough. But if all you see is yourself...
> I know this is stupid and cruel of me
Yes, but it is also a natural reaction to the overwhelming stupidity you see.
People can call themselves "the left" without actually caring about their neighbor. It can all be performative. Ask them what they are doing to make the world a better place. If the answer is something like "keeping my thoughts pure, and tweeting a lot", that's the performative kind. Those are not your allies. They are just cosplaying.
> "Some people are just stupid. Like, way more stupid than the average, which is already quite stupid. That includes your friend; sorry about that."
I LOL'ed.
This entire comment was enormously satisfying.
Thank you! This is how I normally talk to my kids when I explain to them how the world works (or more often, fails to work in some aspect). Some people are horrified when they hear that. Luckily, my kids believe that I am pointing in the right direction, but exaggerating a lot. When they grow up, they will understand.
"Sometimes people have it so good that they get crazy and start kicking at things around them until everything falls apart, and then they can finally focus on solving actual problems, which restores their sanity. Some people just can't handle having it good. And it really sucks that these people often ruin things for other people around them, who then have to suffer the consequences, despite never having it "too good" themselves."
Very good observation, well phrased. Thanks for that.
How are you "politically homeless"? You seem to have the politics of a normal liberal. Your radical friends are the ones who are politically out to sea.
Thank you for reading! Growing up on the coast in left-wing spaces has definitely biased my view of how left "normal" is, so yours is a fair point. I do think there is an over-representation of those radical views in elite and highly-salient cultural/academic spaces and have now come to regard that as a problem
There's lots of centrist Democratic bloggers who agree with you about that - Matt Yglesias, Nate Silver, etc.
Are they actually doing something that harms you or do they just disagree with you in an annoying way? If you don't like arguing about politics all the time then tell them that you don't want to talk about it with them.
Feeling politically homeless is a sign of maturity. What are the odds that after serious inquiry and reflection your politics will perfectly align with one of only two available political coalitions?
Yes, I believe that being a public advocate for (and using one's privilege to platform) messaging around "not voting/protest voting" does represent an actual harm if it contributes to an avoidable loss and subsequent policy changes.
However, this is an abstract sort of harm and they've never punched me in the face or anything. We decided recently to have less political dialogue on this and it was positive; I've just been stewing! I loved your last sentence especially, I will remember that. Thanks for reading
> Yes, I believe that being a public advocate for (and using one's privilege to platform) messaging around "not voting/protest voting" does represent an actual harm if it contributes to an avoidable loss and subsequent policy changes
If this person has idiotic views then surely you don't want them voting?
I totally agree with the basic idea you express here, but to be fair, the notion that Palestine cost Kamala the election is something between Democrat cope and antisemite hope. Trump brought down the house this time. First Republican popular majority in how long? The idea that he'll be followed by a downright Communist seems... remote, all things considered.
>First Republican popular majority in how long
Not a majority. A plurality. And the margin was one of the smallest ever. And Democratic turnout was in fact down, so it is plausible that, but for Gaza, Harris would have won. Though if course inflation was a much bigger factor.
>Turnout in Republican areas dropped less than in Democratic areas across both battleground and non-battleground states,
https://catalist.us/whathappened2024/
Uh, okay...
1. 49.8% Trump, 48.3% Harris. The only tiny margin there is the's hair's breadth short of a majority.
2. I mean, seriously, what?? A 1.5% victory margin is not in any meaningful sense "one of the smallest ever". I think 2000, 1968, 1960, 1888, 1884, 1880, 1844 all had smaller margins, and all but one of those was well below 1%. While plenty of elections (including 2016, 2004 and 1976 most recently) have just-over-2% margins. Plus, innumerable elections at other levels are regularly decided by margins much smaller than 1.5%. "On the smaller side" would be reasonable. "One of the smallest ever" is, though vague and undefined enough that you can call it technically true in some definition, entirely misleading to a reasonable person.
3. Where's the evidence that *Gaza* was the primary (or even a non-negligible) cause of lower D turnout? I find such a claim frankly laughable, and a total disconnect from real people's perspectives. At the very least it requires some pretty strong evidence, not zero.
4. The kind of straw-grasping in comments like this ("yes Trump won but it wasn't *technically* a majority, and it was *only* by 1.5%, and...") is very dangerous at a time when respect for democracy is badly falling, and extremely tone-deaf coming right after years of focus on Trump's election denial.
5. Most fundamentally, do you like attitudes like this from Republicans? Did you appreciate comments after 2020 saying that Trump *only* lost by half what the polls predicted and so *really* he did pretty well? And that this shows he really should have gone further right-wing, and that's the reason he lost? Do you find them helpful and constructive? Do they come across as respectful of democratic outcomes? Do they seem likely to improve polarisation, or to make it worse?
Because I find insistences that a candidate only lost because they weren't extreme enough one of the most toxic political ideas in existence, and one that has done unimaginable harm already.
>A 1.5% victory margin is not in any meaningful sense "one of the smallest ever".
It is the 11th smallest, out of 60. So, in the smallest 20%
>Where's the evidence that *Gaza* was the primary (or even a non-negligible) cause of lower D turnout
1. It was a major issue for substantial part of the base. And it clearly caused a shift in places like Dearborn.
2. I didn't say it was the primary cause. I said merely that it is plausible that Harris would have won, absent Gaza.
>The kind of straw-grasping in comments like this ("yes Trump won but it wasn't *technically* a majority, and it was *only* by 1.5%, and...") is very dangerous at a time when respect for democracy is badly falling, and extremely tone-deaf coming right after years of focus on Trump's election denial.
I in no way said or implied that Trump's election was illegitimate. I was merely discussing possible causes of his win. Were I to observe that Bill Clinton would not have won in 1992 if the economy were better, would you accuse me of opining that his election was illegitimate?
>And that this shows he really should have gone further right-wing, and that's the reason he lost? Do you find them helpful and constructive?
Yes. They are helpful and constructive if we want to determine why candidates win elections. Which I understood to be the topic under discussion.
>Because I find insistences that a candidate only lost because they weren't extreme enough one
How is that relevant to anything I said? I said that it is possible Harris would have won absent Gaza. I didn't say she would have won, had the Biden Administration been more extreme on Gaza. Rather, no matter what the Administration did, it was guaranteed to alienate important groups of voters.
I'm not going to lie to you: I'm totally uninterested in probing the deep psephological minutiae. I'm sure you're right about turnout and so on, but I also don't care. My point is just, given that Reps don't even need a small popular margin to win elections, this one wasn't remarkably close, and it wasn't Palestine that did it. I think inflation is much more plausible for one, the shifty switcheroo between Biden and Kamala (not to mention the revelation of the coverup of his state) for another, and if we want to prod at fringe issues the Trump campaign themselves claimed to be astounded at the response the trans ads were getting, so that also seems a more likely culprit than Gaza.
LOL, you are "totally uninterested in probing the deep psephological minutiae.," yet you are oh so sure that "the revelation of the coverup of his state" was a key factor? Pick one, or the other.
>if we want to prod at fringe issues
If you think that Gaza was a fringe issue, esp for voters on the left, and Muslim voters, and Jewish voters, I can't help you.
Personally, I would (your objection notwithstanding) advise getting better friends. Luxury communists are a hair shirt that you don't have to wear. Don't do this to yourself, slash let her do it to you.
Fair enough, I have heard that advice before! But I am wrong often enough myself to want to be able to forgive that in others, even when it's emotionally hard for me. Plus, you only get so many long-term friendships in a human lifespan
"I am wrong often enough myself to want to be able to forgive that in others, even when it's emotionally hard for me."
That's very respectable, even admirable. Unfortunately, it does entail swallowing something truly bitter once in a while. I don't think there's any way around that in the end, good though the other commenters' answers to you are.
People just have frustrating political views, and that doesn't necessarily mean that this makes politics futile? I'll say that communism occurs way more in urban contexts than in rural ones, much like fascism--a lot of times people just talk past each other in politics and that's how these things work. (If it helps you stomach her hypocrisies, why are you so mad as a liberal against the views of the elite? They have no bearing on you)
Thank you, it's a fair point and I am also guilty of hypocrisy and foolishness! But, it's easy to become embittered when it feels like people on your side are just tearing things down for no reason and with no broader plan
It's not just people on your side, as the system changes many people on losing their scripts fall back to the child's impulse to wreck. Sad but it seems most people aren't used to exercising their imaginations to make new scripts, instead waiting for someone else to produce new ones to follow.
This is unfortunately symptomatic of well, being in a tough political spot. At least, in my opinion (Epistemic status: talking out of my ass--have been banned from both ACXD and on infinite hiatus from ACN). Politically speaking, communists as well as fascists have no actual ground or mass base to stand on--which makes fascists especially prone to random acts of violence, and communists especially prone to silly twitter takes. Consider that "actually existing socialism", as the Soviets call it, hasn't actually existed as a world ideological force since the 1990s--so they (communists) engage in a lot of larp. There aren't many feasible paths for the neo-Brezhnevite order. As a liberal, you have infinitudes more institutional representation and feasibility on getting shit done more than random meetups to feed homeless people. I am a broke ass bitch and left-leaning, and it also infuriates me that the local org actions are "volunteer work" and "praying for the magic socialist general strike".
What is the point of a PhD program in Philosophy? A dialogue between three drunk philosophers where the unspoken is spoken about why graduate education exists. https://open.substack.com/pub/hiphination/p/what-is-the-purpose-of-a-graduate?r=i44h&utm_medium=ios
I'm coming to the end of a philosophy degree, and I have always intended to go on to a PhD after I finish. But now that I've seen what Philosophy for Grown Ups looks like, I have decided I would rather sit at home and read philosophy books in my armchair. Philosophy looks to me more like playing a long game of Sudoku than anything useful.
Anglo-centric countries tend to have philosophy departments that look more like logic departments. There is probably still some actual philosophy being studied and debated in continental Europe, but I wouldn’t bet on it. When you go back and look through the seminal works of philosophy, even going all the way back the Plato and Aristotle, there is so much untilled soil left. It seems insane to me that there aren’t prestigious departments actively working on fundamental issues of humanity, epistemology, existence, praxeology, etc. etc. pretty sad imo
Where are you finding the logic departments? As far as I know logicians are very under-represented in US philosophy departments and it's very challenging for people who are more interested in the mathier side of philosophy to find positions. My undergrad university has twice as many professors who list an interest in epistemology as in logic, and generally more people interested in fundamental issues of humanity than formal rigor.
The average philosophy department has one logician. The average math department has zero logicians.
Also, as an epistemologist with. PhD in logic, I dispute your insinuation that epistemology is not formally rigorous! (Some of it more than others, to be sure, but there’s also no point in being formally rigorous with the wrong formal system.)
I'm tempted to argue the inverse of Jordan's point in the dialogue (trialogue?) about comparing academic philosophy discourse to bloggers arguing with one another: academic humanities are upstream of popular humanities. The academics provide value in part by curating, analyzing, categorizing, and calling attention to the best material (old and new) in their discipline so that better and more accessible material is available on the high end. This would hopefully lead to better material filtering through to general popular understanding.
Scott, you may recall, has a bachelor's degree in philosophy, and concepts from philosophy (along a great many other things he has studied or which have otherwise caught his interest) heavily inform a lot of his essays. Glancing at my list of Youtubers I follow, two of them (Natalie Wynn and Abigail Thorn) have masters degrees in philosophy, a third (Brandon Fisichella) has a bachelor's degree. I also follow several others with academic backgrounds in other humanities disciplines: a couple of historians (Premodernist (PhD), The Chieftan (MA)), a bachelor's degree in archeology (Lindybeige), a master's degree in film studies (Lindsay Ellis). Also a couple of autodidacts who make a largely successful effort to engage seriously with academic humanities literature: Crecganford (mythology and folklore) and Patrick Kelly (history of medicine).
I've also read, watched, and played a ton of fiction by various authors who are clearly familiar with at least some academic philosophy (and other humanities disciplines) and have integrated ideas from it into their works in a way that's both enjoyable and thought-provoking. Off the top of my head: J.R.R. Tolkien, Neal Stephenson, Brian Reynolds (game designer best known for Civ2 and SMAC), Richard Garriott (game designer best known for the Ultima series), the makers of "The Good Place", Lindsay Ellis (in her role as an SF author), and the Wachowskis. Most of these are autodidacts in philosophy, although Reynolds is a dropout from philosophy grad school, and Tolkien of course was a professor of a different humanities discipline whose name sounds misleadingly similar (philology).
When did the purpose of education become less about skilling in what one happened to be good at and exploring paths for specialization and this cynical slop about making sure everyone lands in some given field of work? Maybe this argument holds true for graduate training, especially since investment is so great, but the argument of "why do something if you're not going to be good at it" can be logically rendered to not doing anything beyond a given point because it isn't personally useful or utilitarian. (Which, well, a lot of people do...)
A hypothesis I had that might explain at least a 20% effect, though not the whole effect, is that the economy in general for young workers has gone increasingly specialist. There was a time when the generalist had an okay time in the entry-level economy. Even a middle class kid who wanted to pursue some kind of graduate degree in the humanities could go five years, not end up in academia, and do fine. Now they're losing out to jobs outside of academia that don't require at least five years experience to people who do have such experience.
Honestly? I kinda feel like the specialization and lack of hiring for entry level job seekers (my brother had to do *three* internships as a MechE to secure 100k TC upon graduating--my MS in Statistics is nearly worthless without internship experience) has kind of made that set of "guaranteed career majors" super fucking narrow. Like, hell, if a kid wants a job, major in accounting, engineering, or nursing these days--the trend has only gotten worse, especially for entry level applicants. Like, the advice of "Major in STEM--learn to code" obviously failed my generation (the older gen Zs). Even CS grads are eating shit right now. Don't know when there's going to be a reversal of the general hollowing of entry-level work, but things seem to be as grim if you majored in Chemistry or Math instead of Philosophy. (Could become a K-12 teacher... wondrous occupation)
It probably happened when higher education expanded from serving the elite to serving the middle class as well. If you weren't born into wealth or prodigious talent/intellect then your lifetime financial prospects are on the line. Most regular people can't afford to risk dedicating so much time to something that doesn't set them up for a good career.
No doubt that education is necessarily tied to working outcomes and careers, but I would argue the connection between degree and employment is increasingly frayed unless one chooses an increasingly narrow set of career choices. That and middle class propogation is kind of as materially banal as is upper class luxurious education spending.
Re: the Joanna Newsom review, only if you want me to vote it in the negative numbers because I can't stand her twee, coy, arch little voice and harp strumming. And no, it's not because she's Gavin's cousin, I heard and hated her music long before I found out that relation.
It's odd. I rather like Tori Amos, but Newsom makes me wish I had a revolver so I could reach for it.
Second cousin twice removed according to her Wikipedia page. I should have the terminology down pat but I have to look it up every time. My cousin’s son’s daughter is related me how again?
It's pretty easy when you start thinking of it in terms of graph coordinates. X axis is number of cousins between you and the person in question, Y axis is the number of generations between you and the person. Nth cousin is the number of nodes away on the X-axis, Nth removed is the number of nodes away on the Y-axis.
Opposite for me, I hate Tori Amos. I only like one Newsom album though.
JN sounds to me like heavy Joni Mitchell and Kate Bush inspiration (maybe some Bjork), injected with more high-brow multi-instrumentation and chord changes.
When I hear Joanna Newsom, I disengage the tonearm of my Panasonic!
When I hear Joanna Newsom I crack up over the idea that she's married to Andy Samberg. One of these things is not like the other.
Unexpected!
delightfully retro terminology here
There's just nothing equivalent to the safety to disengage on your Spotify account.
I wanna give her a chance, but her voice crushes me and unlike say Danny Brown she doesn't do anything too new. I go to Elliott Smith and Nick Drake for my folk needs.
If I wanted to be depressed I'd go to them too ;)
I engage in political discussions in rationalist spaces instead of getting math help in rationalist spaces. Of course I want to be depressed.
Do you think its unfair to rate low an entry which just presents its reviewed subject at an object-level and adds a few paragraphs of personal opinion? Im going off on some reviews from last years that really changed my mind on a subject, connected it to a broader context and offered deep insight. But I am not sure if it is fair to expect this from the review format.
My general rating scale
10 - Extremely insightful, I would recommend that many people read this
5 - Some insights, probably useful for some readers
1 - Reading this would be a waste of time for almost all readers
IMO a review with minimal content/insight is actively worse than a flawed one with something interesting to say.
What's the difference between rating shallow reviews low, and rating deep reviews high?
I think it’s fair. One year there was a book review in the finals that seemed like the Monarch Notes version of the book itself. It was concise and clear and attractively put together, but there was very little
commentary about how the original book was good or bad or what was important or interesting about the book’s subject and its take on the subject. Maybe no
commentary at all. I was shocked that it made the finals. I had probably rated
it about 4.
I think it's fair. If it's just summarized or factual then what's the point? Might as well read the original
This is something that gets a low mark from me, certainly. There's plenty of actually insightful and helpful reviews out there.
After reading the testosterone post I'm curious if there are equivilant positive effects with Estrogen in women. Or if not E then what hormones do provide the equivalent effects in women. Perhaps the answer is still Testosterone but with more side effects?
I haven't read the testosterone review, but there's definitely evidence that estrogen supplementation can improve mood, sexual function, and bone density in women post-menopause (interestingly, it seems like starting estrogen replacement therapy earlier, circa 40, leads to significantly better outcomes than starting later in life).
Even low-dose testosterone can cause masculinizing effects that most women aren't very excited about (lower voice, increased hair growth, genital changes, etc.)
Estrogen is amazing, much better than testosterone IMO. Since I started estrogen, my mood and "joie de vivre" have greatly improved. I've seen moderate but significant improvements in energy levels and executive function. My libido has change quite a bit qualitatively, but is about the same as it was when my system had normal male levels of testosterone. I've lost some physical strength, but not a lot. A lot of physical changes, which I am generally extremely happy with. I look several years younger. And I feel emotions a lot more keenly and positively: positive emotions feel brighter, while negative ones are more likely to produce an experience of catharsis rather than despair than they used to.
My experience in this is as a trans woman who started estrogen at the age of 41. Some time before realizing I'm trans, I was treated for a couple years with clomid for marginally low testosterone levels. The higher testosterone levels from clomid made me feel better in some ways and worse in others, while estrogen has been almost pure benefit from my perspective.
That said, I have a friend who transitioned in the other direction after having previously been treated for PCOS. He would almost certainly give the opposite verdict on the relative merits of testosterone and estrogen.
I have never had my T or E levels tested but I've had the same experience.
I may have been low T before (short [although this corresponds with high T], very little facial hair, 1/2 an orchi lol) so having any hormones may have been an improvement.
Estradiol and testosterone are not exactly mirrors of each other with respect to this. Testosterone supplementation for women basically turns them into men -- see trans men exprerience for this.
I don't think there is an equivalent.
As always, begging for data analytic work/internships. But more importantly than that (since I have given up on finding gainful employment for now), any math discords where I can get my topology and stat homework checked? We're working out of Casella and Berger this upcoming semester, and the main mathematics discord is filled with people asking geometry questions.
what are you using for topology?
Munkres. We're starting on a review of set theory. Yaaay.
as a friendly fellow mathematician, I could provide feedback on some problems/problem sets. I don't have enough free time to do full grading, though, and it has been a couple of tens of years since I've been through Munkres.
Has anyone experienced a massive change in appetite in their early to mid 20s?
I used to get hungry on a normal schedule. I’d wake up and be slightly hungry. If I skipped breakfast I’d be very hungry by lunch, and skipping lunch at that point would make me ravenous by dinner. Now, I can easily skip eating anything for a day and not even notice that I didn’t eat.
For context, I only had a normal sized breakfast Friday, Saturday I ate two hot dogs (couldn’t have been more than 500 calories), while also doing some manual labor moving boxes and furniture. I didn’t feel hungry until 3:30 Sunday (and not very hungry either), where I went to my nephew’s graduation party and ate quite a bit.
I haven’t lost any weight, so I guess when I do eat I’m eating enough to compensate? I was always light for my height, but I exercise at least a few times a week, live in a city where walking 10,000 steps is basically a base-line, and never had much of a sweet tooth for sodas or processed snacks.
I take a low dose of Adderall off and on, but I’ve been taking that for years. If anything, I take it much less often than I did when I first got on it.
It’s not concerning for me, since I haven’t lost weight, and not being hungry 3 times a day is actually liberating. I can work starting in the morning and through lunch, then have a big dinner cooked with friends, or eat out, and I think Socrates is right in that “hunger is the best relish.” Even though I don’t *feel* especially hungry for dinner, I think my body must actually need the calories since the food just *tastes* noticeably better.
My theories are:
- I’m no longer growing, so my body needs less calories (although I’ve been the exact same weight and height for nearly a decade).
- I’ve developed late-onset bipolar disorder (I haven’t been depressed in years so idk about this one) and am in an extended period of mania? This sort of high level of focus, to the ignorance of hunger is something I’ve read about in the biographies of famously diligent people who were likely bipolar.
- I have a tumor on the hunger part of my brain or on my stomach? Probably not this one as there’s no other symptoms or imbalances in my body. No family history of cancer as far as I’m aware, so it would be really surprising if this is what it was.
- Some other physical change in my body that I don’t have the context to know about.
- It’s nothing and people’s appetites change for literally no reason sometimes.
- The government, in a mass campaign to fight obesity, is putting Ozempic in the tap water (I raw dog tap water with no filter, so I might be especially vulnerable).
Overall I’m not worried about it, since I feel healthy, and I’d consider this an improvement over being hungry often. Has anyone experienced something like this before?
Edit: Also, I did a 4 Day water fast for the first time in January, although I didn’t start to notice a change in appetite until April.
This isn't helpful, but "I raw dog tap water with no filter" is definitely the grossest way I've heard somebody describe something completely not-gross recently.
🙃
Are you using nicotine? I know you didn't mention it, but I did not appreciate the massive extent to which nicotine impacted my appetite until after I quit.
Interesting. Yes actually! I started using nicotine lozenges when I read, which I do almost every day. The timing doesn't line up though, since I started doing that ~2 years ago.
My theory is that this would get me addicted to reading, and while I wouldn't call myself addicted, it definitely has made me more likely to pick up a book when I have nothing else to do.
While the last idea is totally absurd, it is definitely my favorite new conspiracy theory. Yes, I am in my mid-20s here, and my appetite changed dramatically once two years ago and once a year ago. The first time I don't know exactly why, but I suspect it is because I started cooking at home after I got married. Home cooking is significantly more satiating to me than any restaurant dining (fast food or not). The second time I got a stomach bug, and food is still slightly less appetizing to me.
It’s nothing and people’s appetites change for literally no reason sometimes.
Or rather, they change for non-obvious reasons sometimes. Maybe you ingested some new strain of bacteria that changed your intestinal biome. It could be anything. It's not possible to say from just the info provided.
Another example of a real life name that would sound stupid and lame if used in fiction: Marquis de La Badie, as in "Are we the baddies?"
Reality Winner.
What advice do y'all have for being a parent to a genius-level child?
Without wanting to humblebrag, our toddler seems *extremely* smart; probably ~165 IQ. We can imagine all kinds of challenges in public school, but even most private schools.
- Is it worth living in a "good" school district?
- Should we live someplace cheaper so we can pay for private school or tutors?
- How do we help him navigate the differences with his age cohort, and make sure he's socially well-adjusted?
- other advice?
=====
Editing to add: appreciating the comments, but please note I never said anything about "maximizing his potential", on the contrary I asked about being "socially well-adjusted".
He has music tutor now... but because he loves music, not because we're trying to force him to become the next Mozart. But I'm also aware that early music training seems to be one of the prerequisites for developing perfect pitch (which I personally would kill to have).
If there are other interventions like music lessons, where we can do things **because he loves them**, but that also carry outsized benefits by starting early, I think we'd be especially interested in those.
We would love for him to have "normal" relationships with other children, but neither of us is entirely sure how to help that happen. We are both ~3-sigma, and were often being bullied for being different. That stopped when I entered college... but I was also 14, which had its own trade-offs. But being able to move at *MY* pace instead of being constantly held back was thrilling. I'd probably make that same choice again, but I'd also like to find even better options, if they exist.
In no particular order:
Realize that most teachers aren’t crazy about gifted kids, try to gently find the ones who are. Same goes for friends, parents, etc. People will be skeptical and resentful.
I think it’s worth finding a “good school” so your kid will have a relatable peer group. It’s hard to be the only 3rd grader reading grown up books. Be aware that the fanciest private schools will likely have a divide between the rich kids and the smart kids.
Most gifted kids are “spiky”; help them race ahead in the things they love and are good at while insisting they keep up in other necessary areas. This will be difficult.
I recommend some kind of charitable service for your kid eventually; if they’re truly in the cognitive elite they need to develop empathy for others who are not as lucky. The world is full of snotty grown up gifted kids.
From my own childhood, the best thing I would keep is academic competitions. For me math olympics and summer schools for gifted kids were the thing. In Germany, where I grew up, most large or medium-size towns had weekly training circles. The special thing is not so much the content or the contests themselves, but that there I was among other like-minded people. My peer group (outside of school) was mostly comprised of people from those circles.
In the summer there are summer schools for gifted youths. Those are also very cool, but the participants came from too far away to form a permanent peer group. Perhaps that's different nowadays with the internet, where peer groups can more easily be maintained online.
All this is still a long time ahead for you, since (in Germany) those options are only available roughly from age 10 onward. But for me the more important thing wasn't to expose me to an enriching environment. That is something I could easily create myself. There are books, after all. For me the more important part was to have a good peer group. I am not sure how to do that before the age of 10, but it is something I would keep my eyes open for.
Observations from my own childhood:
- Take bullying seriously. A lot of kids who are bullied get the advice that bullying would stop if they changed their behavior - this is probably true but not helpful. If you can change the environment to stop the bullying, do. If not, you can at least be someone who listens and tries to help.
- Take boredom seriously. I did pretty well in the gifted/accelerated track in elementary school, but around middle school I got to a point where it just wasn't fast enough any more. My early experiments with self-studying led to situations where I was trapped in *years* of painfully boring classes. This was genuinely a bit traumatic and it took me until midway through college to unlearn the instinct of "if you try to get ahead you will be punished". Regular public schooling is genuinely fine for many kids, even extremely bright kids - just be on the lookout for a point where school starts causing extreme distress or anxiety.
- Arrange for play in mixed-age groups. Many of my most intellectually satisfying relationships as a kid were with kids 2-5 years older than me. The age gap didn't feel like a big deal and the extra years of development meant that older kids were more likely to be up to my intellectual caliber. (I recall doing this starting age 5-6.)
> But I'm also aware that early music training seems to be one of the prerequisites for developing perfect pitch (which I personally would kill to have).
That is not the take away I got from my research into perfect pitch (called absolute pitch by the academics). The impression I got is that most people start with absolute pitch and evolve to relative pitch as they develop. Also, there are trade-offs - relative pitch is better for some things than absolute pitch.
Early music training is very good for many other things, including helping with being socially well-adjusted. "plays well with others". And you're doing it right by doing it because he loves music and not forcing him.
My own understanding was that there must be a genetic component: concordance is something like 75% for MZ twins versus 50% for DZ twins. And even then, it's rare: only ten percent in tonal languages, and far less for things like English.
My parents just… let me do what interested me. I kind of appreciate that in retrospect.
I was exceptionally good at math as a child, and my parents let me just read the algebra/trig textbooks when I was in 5th grade, which was great. When I was in high school I walked a mile to the university for math classes. My dad collaborated with me to define a vector graphics format and built a drawing program for it in 6th grade, which was fun. I did a lot of math competitions, when I bothered to wake up for them.
I was also very, very lazy, and aside from turning in papers at the last minute/acing tests, I mostly screwed around with video games, BBSes, and talking to my girlfriend.
At some level, I guess a private tutor and more challenging classes might have helped me do something more impressive with my life. But for me, at least, having smart but not especially competitive peers felt better than being pushed. And I got along with my peers way better than some folks I’ve known who just got their GRE and rat-holed on academia.
It’s totally possible to be a well-adjusted prodigy, who goes on to do exceptional things. But not every kid especially wants to do that, and I think encouraging empathy and social skills was more helpful for my life satisfaction than pushing me to learn work habits as a young person.
I recommend Josh Waitzkin's The Art of Learning. Might give you a good perspective.
looks interesting, thanks!
I think that the easiest way for a child to be well-adjusted is to grow up among similar children. In case of a +3σ child it would be among other +3σ children. The problem is that finding such place is difficult.
I know that many people would disagree with this. They would insist that the healthiest place for every child is among the 0σ children, because hey, they are the majority, therefore your social adjustment will always be measured by how much you are compatible with them, not with your peers. Also, are you planning for your child to spend his entire life among other +3σ people?
But such reasoning is mistaken, I believe. Starting with the most obvious: yes, adult people actually often stratify themselves by various traits, such as intelligence, and it is quite common for a smart person to be surrounded by other smart people at work, to find a smart partner, etc.
But even if we focus on the childhood development, I believe the 0σ people are making a typical-mind fallacy here. The thing that makes relationships easy is not "being among 0σ people" but "being among your peers". For a 0σ person those are the same things, but for your child, those are not. That doesn't mean that your child should *only* ever interact with other +3σ children. But it means that he should *start* interacting with them (interacting with similar people is the easy mode), and *later* learn how to interact with other people (interacting with different people is the hard mode). You learn to walk before you learn to run; you learn to interact in easy mode before you learn to interact in hard mode. Trying to make people run before they can walk is setting them up to fail.
Problem, is, a good district is probably not enough. Good district probably only means +1σ on average. A good school in a good district still probably only means +2σ. Unless there is explicitly a school for gifted children, ultimately you will have to find the peers outside school. In various after-school activities, and networking with your friends' children.
I am talking from my experience here. My daughter is in a good school in a good district, but she still doesn't click with her classmates intellectually. She clicks much better with children of my friends; the problem is, only a few of my friends have children of the same age. So we kept asking our friends what do their children enjoy... or, if they have older children, what did they enjoy at this age... and found an afternoon activity where my daughter finally clicked with the entire group. That kinda solves the problem for now. Plus I am telling her to do all kinds of competitions, in the spirit of "it is not important to win, but to participate", but the actual goal here is for her to meet other smart kids.
This, so much. My daughter at 3 associated with the 5-year-olds in her daycare. (She is now six.) The best thing we ever did for her was a club for highly gifted children that she visits once a week. We were very lucky to have this nearby.
Some activities select for intelligence (and other traits) indirectly.
As an obvious example, if a school has extra math lessons, and preferably chooses students who participate successfully at math olympiads, the student in that school will have high average IQ, even if no one tests for the IQ explicitly. (Heck, even if all the teachers believe that IQ is not a thing, and that your success at math olympiad is merely a result of hard work. The beliefs don't matter, the selection algorithm does.)
Various voluntary activities seem to select for intelligence and conscientiousness, if only because stupid and lazy people are more likely to stay at home, or because intelligent and conscientious parents are more likely to introduce their children to that type of activities. The activity doesn't even have to be intellectual in its nature... two specific examples I have in mind are a tourist club for children (something like Scouts, but not exactly the same thing), or a nature conservation association (people meet to mow the grass around protected plants), those are two places where I met smart and interesting people.
So, if you didn't have an explicit place for gifted children, it would make sense to try something like this.
Thanks, I think this captures a lot of my concern, and also my logic about a "good school".
I'm not worried about him excelling academically; wild horses probably couldn't hold back his thirst for understanding. But my peers when I was younger weren't selected for intelligence, and I didn't have any sense (at the time) of the nature of the disconnect. I met a childhood friend for lunch around age 35, and was like, "holy CRAP, no wonder I seemed bizarre to those kids!"
Have known quite a few kids like that. They usually seem not to be older
than their chronological age when it comes to what kind of play they enjoy, what scares them, what amuses them, etc. I recommend putting effort into making sure they log lots of pleasant time playing with their peers. As for schooling — I think it’s better to supplement their early education rather than speed it up. There are plenty of fun things they can do that will challenge them mentally and are not geared towards getting them ahead of others academically: books, lego and similar, photography, theater, acting, music, drones, geocaching. . .
There's only correlation of r = 0.3 between IQ at 2 and IQ at 5 (source: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0160289617302830 ), let alone adulthood. Probably your kid will grow up to be smarter than average, but I don't think you have evidence for much beyond that. I certainly wouldn't move or make any other giant life changes you wouldn't want to make if your child just had somewhat-above-average IQ.
Is it even possible to measure IQ below the age of 3?
If I remember correctly, I was taught at school that you cannot even diagnose mental retardation at that age reliably, because it is difficult to clearly distinguish between mental retardation and mere specific disability.
So I wonder how much of the "IQ change between ages 2 and 5" is actually that kids who were diagnosed as "retarded" at 2 were reclassified as e.g. "average intelligence but dyslectic" at 5.
Originally, IQ was a **quotient** of the child's mental age divided by their biological age. It's much easier to have false negatives than false positives, so I agree determining **low** IQ is probably difficult to do accurately with kids that young.
OTOH, if your kid is consistently hitting developmental milestones at 2/3 of the nominal age, then their IQ probably really is about 150.
There's also censoring bias: you can't be sure what the kid does/n't understand if they aren't able to speak yet. But if the kid can already speak 6-word sentences in two languages, you can start to get a pretty good idea what they understand.
So overall, I think it's more feasible to do accurately on the high end than the low end
My concern is that with an older child, you can test multiple abilities and kinda calculate the average, but with a small child, the few things you can test are over-represented... and "starting to talk earlier or later" is one of those things that most people notice. Yes, it is related to IQ, but also to other things; I think on average girls start talking earlier than boys, bilingual children start talking a little later, etc.
That makes sense... being the nerds that we are, we've looked up the whole list of developmental milestones, which have a lot of things beyond just speech. He consistently is reaching these things at about half of the nominal age.
But you're right, it's a range of things, including how they play with their toys (are they putting one object inside of another object? Are they interacting with imaginary objects? etc).
Am I misunderstanding the paper? The abstract makes it sound as though previous work found correlations of order 0.3, but that they've tried to correct for measurement errors and are getting 0.6+:
"infant intelligence revealed a strong cross-time correlation with preschool intelligence (r = 0.91) and moderate correlations with childhood and adolescent intelligence (r = 0.69 and 0.57, respectively)"
I agree about not making huge life changes for limited impact, but can imagine many marginal decisions that might be swayed by this.
I mean, IQ scores are really only "truly" stable by adolescence (as in, the correlation between IQ score at age x and adulthood decays as age decreases). But by that time period, they're usually autonomous enough to at least provide input on what they would need. I just think that even in the ideal case (if their kid was a genius) the idea of my parent investing incredible amounts of resources and time to plan out my "maximum potential" sounds perfectionist and overbearing.
I think it might be a bit early to worry much.
I was considered very smart as a toddler, but I’ve regressed toward the mean (a lot). My parents sent me to a fancy Montessori school in Manhattan and it was fun, but I don’t know if it made a huge difference in the long run.
One thing I would suggest from personal experience: I was accelerated to be with 6 and 7 year olds when I was 4, and they chased me with puppets and picked on me. Not great! I ended up much happier leaving that class to play with kids my own age.
School will be for building social skills.
Expose him to a lot of extracurriculars until he finds something he loves (note, he is young and not obligated to love this one thing forever, his tastes may change). Keep him challenged through the extra-curricular activity (or two).
Tutors are OK, but he's so young that this is a down the road thing. Idk, short term just introduce him to a variety of subjects and fields and give him specialized schooling in what he takes to. I rebel against this notion that his life needs to be planned out to the nth degree, surely the kid just needs some adjustments here and there and doesn't need to be pressured into becoming something he didn't choose. In the face of moral uncertainty, maximize choiceworthiness or something.
We got him a music tutor because he loves music, and found music lessons with other children incredibly frustrating. He can tap on beat, sing a melody, etc. He seems to find going at his pace freeing, rather than repressive (and that was my own experience as a child).
That's good and healthy. As long as you're not forcing him to become the next Terrance Tao or something, allowing him to explore and experience and develop is all just a normal (though accelerated for him) part of being a kid. I think when he gets to elementary to middle school is when things like accelerated schooling and different classes become an issue. In general any education which even offers advanced placement and standing is good enough--just make sure he's not bullied. (This was so bad in my case I was held back from moving up grades, but I turned out--well, not fine, but there's enough noise there I wonder if education would've changed my trajectory)
If your family structure allows it, homeschooling could be promising. You have far more flexibility over controlling the difficulty and pace of your toddler's learning. I was homeschooled and will say that you need to be proactive about (borderline forcing) finding frequent social interactions for your child. However, I did find that homeschooled children are a lot more academically inclined than public school kids, so those social settings might be more accommodating for a high-IQ kid.
Homeschool is certainly on the table later on, and/or the Friedman-style "unschooling". I think much of our challenge will be finding "peers" (with a h/t to Villiam for expressing the challenge of "normal for an average person" vs "natural for a non-normal person")
The single most important thing you can do is make sure he has normal relationships and normal experiences. Get him to a normal school and make sure his friends are normal and his relationships are stable. Do not try and force him down a path of academia if he doesn't want to, gentle encouragement is fine.
By "normal", do you mean "what comes *naturally* to the person" or "what the *average* of the population does"?
For a non-average person those can be quite different things.
Actually both. Mostly it should be a natural thing, but I've seen way too many academics and "geniuses" who are out of touch with reality and normal people because their parents didn't want them to go to parties or whatever.
I suspect that situation is confusing because there are three kinds of children that may look similar at first sight:
* naturally gifted geniuses,
* children of ambitious parents who push them work extra hard,
* autists, interested in one thing and ignoring everything else.
From outside, they may all seem the same. All of them achieve extraordinary results (autists only in one specific thing).
From inside, the geniuses and the autists are *enjoying* the thing(s) they do, and you couldn't stop them if you tried to. While the children of the ambitious parents are *suffering*, and they wish they could take a break (but the Tiger Mom says no).
As a result of this confusion, people often argue that schools for gifted children should be banned... because they cause autism... or because ambitious parents should not be making their children suffer. They don't realize (or don't want to admit, for ideological reasons) that those are different types of children.
If you make all of these children attend the school for normies, the gifted ones will be super bored every day, the autists will remain autistic, and the ambitious parents will pester their kids with piano lessons and extracurricular activities.
Yeah it's a good point that there are different kinds of geniuses but I don't think gifted schools are necessarily abnormal, people in them still want to socialise and make friends with non-gifteds. Whatever school situation the parents choose, the goal is just to make sure they have otherwise ordinary experiences despite living odd lives.
That is an interesting empirical question. I have no data either way, I just wanted to say that even if a child who attends a gifted school has friends outside the school... that does not necessarily imply that those friends are *not* gifted. Maybe they are simply the gifted ones who didn't have an opportunity to attend such school.
This could be an interesting research. Take the kids from a gifted school, ask them to name their best friend outside the school, and measure that friend's IQ. I suspect that it would be above average.
I agree that the experiences of the gifted children should not be impoverished. Doing it the right way, they should have *more* diverse experience, because they can experience everything the normies can do, *plus* some extra things.
This is a good point. I recall listening to Raj Chetty's talk at the LSE about the Moving To Opportunity reanalysis, and one of his core assumptions was something along the lines of "poor people don't move neighborhoods very much". I burst out laughing, wondering if he had ever actually met a poor person in the USA. I'm guessing that when you work in your mother's lab and start Harvard at 16, you probably don't. Shame about the research being completely undermined (and even worse that none of the other academics realize it).
Thanks for writing that succinctly, that captures much of my concern.
Special programs for gifted students tend to be features of large school systems. I grew up in Waterloo, Canada, a mid-sized town, which at the time offered only very limited enrichment activities for intellectually precocious students. If I had grown up in Toronto, a city of millions, I would have had access to specialized full-time classes for gifted students.
If actually +4SD, standard gifted program will likely be somewhat inadequate, though a good start just in terms of social environment
Ultimately this depends on goals. If you want maximum development of potential you will probably want a tutor, but then, by the time they're of age, AI may well be able to handle that far more cheaply (and likely better) than a human...
I think this notion of maximizing the development of the child is rather stupid. Kid's like, a kid, not some utility function. Whatever happened to like, letting them choose within reasonable circumstances how much they want to push themselves? It is what they're going to do when they are adults anyways.
I think there is something to be said for encouraging accomplishment, and you can do it without belting out every verse of the Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother. I kind of wish I had come out of high school a bit more skilful and accomplished, and I think my parents could have done a bit to encourage me to take up and stick to a couple of activities. God knows I spent enough time watching TV.
It's a balance. And besides, it's not like HS achievements map to irl ones. (Ask me how I know)
Get him to a psychiatrist for neurodivergence evaluation, take the advice to heart, and be very serious about not letting him burn out or end up traumatized or any other number of things that feed the "ex-gifted kid, current miserable depressed failure" archetype.
I'm sorry that was your experience, that sucks. We don't have any interest in trying to burn him out, mostly in helping him find joy.
I'm not blaming anyone; the most important point is that it can absolutely happen by accident. My parents didn't want to burn me out either, but they just didn't know how to handle a child like that, and there was no one to tell them, in the pre-internet days. So, it's important that you know.
What does this accomplish? At best the psychiatrist diagnoses him with something that didn't need to be diagnosed, like autism. At worst they put him on drugs that end up being harmful.
Autism is important to take into consideration, not because we need the diagnosis, but because autistic children need some non-obvious accomodations to grow up normally. I'm suggesting a psychiatrist not for the treatment, but for verifying if the child is actually autistic.
I am saying this as a late-diagnosed autistic person who used to be extremely gifted in early childhood, and is now so mentally ill that I work with psychiatry researchers rather than doctors. And it's pretty much the consensus that most of it could be avoided if I didn't need to mask, and was allowed to satisfy my special needs.
That is fair
Is threading broken for anyone else, or just me?
Specifically, when comment nesting gets deep enough that Substack decides to generate a "continue thread" link, this goes to a 404 for me today. I don't see anyone else complaining, though, so I'm guessing it's just me.
I'm using Firefox. How is everyone else reading Substack?
For the past several weeks, I would click, it would take me back to the main comment page, but if I then reloaded, it would go to the desired thread. The back button didn’t properly work after all this though.
But today the “continue thread” button is actually working for the first time.
(I’m on chrome on iOS.)
It’s been broken for a while. A work-around is to click on the time stamp for the comment containing the “Continue Thread” link.
(If it isn’t clear what I mean by “time stamp,” at the top of each comment you will see the name of the commenter, followed by the name of the commenter’s substack if the commenter has one, followed by an indication of how long ago the comment was posted, e.g. “2h” if it was posted approximately 2 hours ago. Click on the last of these.)
Came here to post exactly the same workaround.
Same, but the reason that I don't complain (and I suspect that others don't complain) is that I've already complained a ton about other bugs that are still not fixed, so it's not really a useful action. One should just accept that over time things get worse.
Same here, click on "continue thread" and it goes nowhere. Standard Google Chrome on a Dell PC.
I think I figured it out for my browsers. It seem to go to the very top of the thread till I refresh and then it behaves the way it used to when clicking the —>
Ahh. I too go to the top of the thread when I click continue thread. I will try this work around.
In case i wasn’t clear, I follow the right arrow and the hit the refresh icon in the address input, wait a moment or two and the thread continues like it used to
I don’t know if I did exactly what you said, but I did something close to it and it worked. Thank you.
I'm experiencing the same problem on both Firefox (desktop and mobile) and Chrome. On Chrome a blank comment section comes up instead of a 404. It's been like this for a week. In either browser, refreshing the page works. Otherwise the app works too.
Is it within the spirit of the contest to give higher votes to entries, not because it's of higher quality per se, but because the topic is important and I want to signal-boost it?
I don’t think it is. The way I handle that is to give those reviews more attention. I make a point of reading them, and I read them more carefully.
Yes. Picking an interesting topic is part of the contest.
Just go for it. If the topic is important then in my view it automatically becomes a better review.
I don't think it is. You're meant to rate the review, not the thing being reviewed. I myself found a review in which I agreed with the thesis, but found that the review itself was rather lacking, so I gave it a moderately high rating (definitively lower than the others).
I see why 'The Metaethics of Joy/Suffering/AI' didn't get many ratings. I couldn't even get myself to finish reading it. Even the stuff I rated low, I at least finished. I predict I would rate it low if I could get myself to care enough to finish the review.
I think if you can't bring yourself to finish reading a review that's enough justification to give it a low rating. Maybe if you want to be extra charitable you could round your rating up a point or so in case it gets better later. But writing something you actually want to read is an important part of the job- if it doesn't achieve that it's a bad review.
If the Jesus told about in the Bible were to come to you and tell you about how your sins have got you doomed, but if you believe in him and obey him he will save you from them, what would be your reaction and why would you reject him?
Presumably in your thought experiment, we have some incontrovertible evidence that this weird guru creature isn't just some guy on kratom?
Who would say no to that? Eternal paradise is on offer, no?
What if you didn't have incontrovertible evidence, and that it wasn't a guy at all. Just words in the New Testament of the Bible?
If it’s the super-charismatic, compassionate, mystical miracle-worker of Matthew, sure! That seems totally reasonable. It’s a pretty high bar, though. Also, selfishly, it would be awesome being one of His new Apostles.
Taking your premise literally and seriously, if *THE* actual Jesus of the Bible - as in, the guy who is LITERALLY a conduit of *THE* God of the Bible - had anything specific to say about me and what I should do, I would abjectly and totally surrender to it.
Because in your premise, God is real and knowable. As the indisputably omnipotent being of the universe, it would be irrational to *not* completely surrender to that state of reality. If the real-true God orders me to slit a baby's throat, well, I'm going to do that. I'll do anything it wants.
Because...
...you know...
...it's *GOD* and all.
But to answer your question directly. I already believe in God, though not in the anthropromorphic sense of a man in the sky who tells you what to do. I think that has numerous metaphysical incoherencies. But suppose I'm wrong about that and "God" appears to me as a man in the sky telling me what to do. Well, to figure out whether this really is God, the foundation of all reality, rather than some sort of polytheistic god or spirit or something else that's very far from that, I'd have to figure out if he is metaphysically absolute abd morally absolute. The first would be hard to determine, if all he's doing is telling me things; the second would be the way to go.
So first of all, is he telling me to worship and praise him? Then I know he's definitely not God. Someone (again accepting the "just like a human except somehow the foundation of everything" framing of God instead of "a metaphysical Absolute beyond our comprehension" for the sake of argument) who can be described as God would have to be morally perfect, and anyone who demands that people flatter and praise them is as about as far from morally perfect as it's possible to be. Would you consider a king who uses his power primarily to demand people praise him as a good person? Given that are even humans (morally deficient as humans are) who manage to be better than that and use their power to help people rather than glorify themselves, a god who makes "praise me" his primary focus would be significantly less moral than even some human beings! Certainly not even in the running for being capital g God.
Second, does he tell me to obey him, or does he tell me to do the morally right thing? Note that the morally right thing cannot in any way change depending on who commands it. If God were to command torturing innocent people, it would still be unspeakably evil and wrong. It would just prove he wasn't God. If this "God" tells me to do something evil, then I know he's not God. If he tells me to do something on the grounds that he commands it, rather than on the grounds that it's objectively right, then I know he's not God, since might does not make right and no one moral could say it does. But if he tells me to do something that is plausibly moral, and provides an argument for why it's morally right, and I can't see a flaw in the argument, then yes I should do it.
Third, I'd have to ask him if sends anyone to hell. It should go without saying that anything that would inflict infinite punishment on someone is literally infinitely evil. If this involves sadistic torture, as some Christians believe, it becomes literally the most evil thing possible to comprehend. Thus a god who told me he inflicts that on anyone would be the literal evil incarnate, and to worship him and obey him would be the most evil act it's possible for a human to do.
Would you sadistically torture a criminal? What would you think of someone who chooses to torture criminals? And not even in proportion to their crimes, but far far beyond them. Clearly, such a person would be evil. Woulld you actually call them profoundly moral?
And would you worship a god who did that? Would you choose to submit to such a god, not resist and fight him, just as long as you don't get tortured, without minding that others will be? And would you consider that choice anything less than the definition of a maximally evil act? I don't want to presume the answer, but it seems like you've made it pretty clear, unless I've misunderstood you.
(I think fundamentalist Christians, and anyone else who believes in hell, are strong candidates for the most evil people on earth. In virtue terms at least, not in consequentialist terms. Interestingly, they share that status with pro-choice feminists. Consequentially, both groups aren't doing that much harm, since fetuses probably lack personhood and hell probably doesn't exist. But virtue-wise, both groups make unequivocally clear that if those things did exist they'd have no problem with them whatsoever, that they'd happily kill or torture billions of people, or let them be killed or tortured, without the slightest guilt. I'm not sure if, say, Putin, Stalin and Hitler combined ever reached the scale of that depravity.)
But if the being appearing to me firmly repudiated all those things, condemned all evil and sadistic things, and commanded me to do morally good things, not because he told me to but because they're right, then I'd consider that it might be really God, notwithstanding the metaphysical issues of being a contingent physical being (a man in the sky) yet also a foundational and necessary being--i.e. I'd consider that I might have been wrong that God couldn't have those attributes--and I'd try to follow him.
I'll respond to your comment by paragraph:
¶2. I don't think this is a very good argument. You say God is far from moral if he tells everyone to praise him and contrast it to a human or a king that wants praise instead of trying to help his subjects. God is ontologically different from humans (Jesus is a human, but he is also God. No other human is also God), so it's a completely different situation. There are no humans deserving of the praise and worship that God demands, so it would be wrong for a human to demand it and wrong for a human to give it. God is deserving of the praise and worship he demands, so it is right for him to demand it and good for humans to give it. It is actually wrong for humans to neglect to give it, because it is something he deserves.
As for being "just like a human except somehow the foundation of everything" and not "a metaphysical Absolute beyond our comprehension", he is actually both. It is correct to assume that if God is some higher being completely above us, that there is no way that we could grasp the full nature of what he is. But, being God and the designer of the human mind & the Bible (and everything else), he knows perfectly how we operate and how to use the methods of transferring information that he designed in order to reveal things about himself in a way that we are actually able to understand.
¶3. Obeying God is the morally right thing, and God's commandment is to love him completely. It doesn't change if God tells us to love him in this way or if a man tells us to love God in this way. God's command IS what is objectively and morally right. God created everything besides himself, including morality. Even your intuitive moral sense is created by God. You actually instinctively agree with God's moral implications, because as set forth in the Bible, loving God implies that you do universally accepted "good things". It's not doing the good things that is actually what's moral, though, it is doing them as a natural result of loving God. Doing "bad things", or doing "good things" but not because you love God are both immoral, because in both you are not loving God. So both God commanding the Israelites to utterly destroy speci