OC ACXLW #95 — Short-Story Show-and-Tell (Scott Alexander & friends)
Saturday · 14 June 2025 · 2:00 pm – ~5-ish
1970 Port Laurent Pl, Newport Beach, CA 92660-7117
Hi everyone! Finals are over, and I am healed, so I am ready to get back to hosting.
We’re shaking things up this week: no single assigned reading—just our favorite short stories and a loose spotlight on Scott Alexander’s fiction. Show up ready to gush (or gripe) about whatever tale grabbed you most: a neat twist, a sneaky theme, or that line you can’t stop quoting in your head. Five minutes of setup is plenty; we’ll riff from there.
Water will be out, and I’ll toss a few basic snacks on the table. BYO treat to share if the spirit moves you.
Quick reminder: we start chatting at 2 pm; people drift out any time Ring/text if you’re running late or lost.
Scott Alexander Short Stories - Complete List with Links
Featured Stories
The Whispering Earring
A magical earring that always gives perfect advice to make its wearer happier, but warns them to take it off first.
A tech company creates an AI to generate controversial content, leading to the discovery of "Shiri's Scissor" - statements that polarize people destructively.
Text: Slate Star Codex
Audio: Matt Arnold Reading (Available in UNSONG podcast episodes)
Idol Words (The Three Idols)
A temple intern manages three omniscient idols - one tells truth, one lies, one answers randomly - while dealing with various philosophical visitors.
Text: Astral Codex Ten
Audio: Not currently available
The Goddess of Everything Else
An epic poem about the battle between the Goddess of Cancer (representing destructive natural selection) and the Goddess of Everything Else (representing cooperation and transcendence).
Text: Slate Star Codex | First Person Version
Audio: SSC Podcast | Astral Codex Ten Podcast
Complete Short Story Collection
...And I Show You How Deep The Rabbit Hole Goes
A mind-reading superhero discovers the heartbreaking truth that everyone is the hero of their own story.
Text: Slate Star Codex
Audio: Matt Arnold Reading
The Witching Hour
A darkly humorous tale about supernatural occurrences and the thin line between reality and imagination.
Text: Slate Star Codex
Audio: Matt Arnold Reading
A Modern Myth
Contemporary gods deal with modern problems in this satirical take on mythology.
Text: Slate Star Codex
Audio: Matt Arnold Reading
The Study of Anglophysics
Scientists discover a world where language has physical properties - words become objects and follow chemical-like rules.
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.
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.
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.
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 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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
> 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
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.
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.
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 specific groups of people and Jesus saying to love your enemies are moral and don't contradict each other.
¶4. You say here that "it should go without saying..." and this is how you're treating your moral arguments throughout your comment without grounding them in anything. You say things like "If a God were to do this, then they would of course be totally evil," or that "they couldn't possibly be moral," but then you don't elaborate any further. I don't know what beef you personally have with God, but I think you may be projecting things onto him that don't come from him. You pose him as this evil, uncaring being who goes against everything humanity generally agrees on as being "good". If you want to make a fair hypothetical argument for the God of the Bible, you should try and do him justice and consider that what is universally accepted as "good" is only that way because God made it that way. God is good and he loves humanity and the Bible says it is not his will that anybody would perish. He is not this evil, domineering tyrant who forces obedience under the threat of hell. He wants people to love and obey him because that is what is actually best for us and for the people around us.
He doesn't say "Love me or I will sadistically torture you for eternity," the fact is that he has determined a penalty for breaking his law (love God) be.fore any wrong was committed, and because everyone breaks the law, everyone is deserving of punishment. But instead of leaving it at that, he made himself human and applied humanity's law to himself and fulfilled it perfectly, so that he could justly offer himself to receive the punishment of anyone that believes in him. It is true that he is the one who designed the system this way and he hypothetically could have made it any other way if he wanted to, but since he is a being that is a "metaphysical Absolute beyond our comprehension," we have to accept that we can't comprehend it but that this is a good and righteous and just way for him to create and operate. He created everything, he designed "good" and "evil", and he made our minds and our understanding.
I don't have every Bible passage about hell memorized, but I can't think of anywhere it is described as sadistic torture. Weeping and gnashing of teeth, yes, everlasting shame and contempt, yes. But as for what that actually looks like, I'm not really sure. The lake of fire is mentioned in Revelation, but it only specifies that the devil and the beast and the false prophet will be tormented for eternity there. I'm guessing it won't be any good for anyone else there, but not sadistic torture. Definitely knowing that you are going to exist forever, even in a somewhat decent place, and know that you are eternally separate from God and paradise, that sounds like it would be pretty horrible. Even something like that could be rightly considered eternal punishment. I'm not saying I think hell will be a nice place, just that if it was it would still be horrible to have to live for eternity in it with God and any his qualities removed from it.
One more thing on eternal punishment, the Bible in various spots makes it sound like people will get different levels of punishment based on what they do and don't know. Just thought I'd throw that in there. Ultimately, I have no idea what eternal death or eternal life will actually look like.
¶6. Although fear of hell was definitely a major motivation to want to follow God initially, that isn't it for me anymore. Now what motivates me is knowing God's love for me and I want to return it to him. God deserves all the glory, honor, praise, and respect anyone could ever give, and I want to do my best to give it to him. He has proven the truth of who he is to me and that he loves me, and that is why I worship him.
¶7. I do believe in hell, that's why I want to try and evoke thoughtful conversations where I can tell others about Jesus. I believe in hell and I don't want anyone to go there.
¶8. I've already harped on this too much, but "and commanded me to do morally good things, not because he told me to but because they're right" is a misunderstanding of what morality is. Morality is only what it is because of God, what he says are right and wrong actions, are only right or wrong because he says so.
I really hope Jesus does appear to you in a way that you can understand, and that you would try to follow him.
...
I don't expect you to agree with me on any of this, and I can't convince you that any of it is true. But if it is true that God is who he says he is in the Bible, then the rest of this follows.
I don't doubt that you have personally been hurt or insulted by people using the name of God, or at least that you know of someone who has been. Please try to separate the idea of these people from your understanding of God. They will all be judged righteously by God. The only time God will ever hurt or humiliate you is when it is for your good, in the hopes that it will reveal the evil in your own self so you will turn to him for salvation.
Anyway, thanks for putting the time and thought into humoring my question.
"I don't know what beef you personally have with God, but I think you may be projecting things onto him that don't come from him."
Please don't confuse me having a beef with your conception of God, with having a beef with God. I told you I believe in God.
"If you want to make a fair hypothetical argument for the God of the Bible, you should try and do him justice and consider that what is universally accepted as "good" is only that way because God made it that way. "
Exactly. I don't think you realise what you're conceding here. If the strong moral sense we have is created by God, then it is completely impossible that God could do or command things that strongly violate that moral sense. Thus, any such apparently commanded thing, from unjustified slaughter to grossly disproportionate punishment, is actually clearly not from God at all.
"the fact is that he has determined a penalty for breaking his law (love God)"
Ignoring the last part, which is not moral law at all, determining a penalty that is not only greater than the crime, but infinitely greater, is an infinite injustice. The Bible itself says "an eye for an eye". A punishment must fit the crime, this is basic fundamental justice--our strong moral sense that God created. You don't like me viewing your conception of God as a tyrant, but when you explicitly say that your conception of God punishes finite crimes with infinite punishment--nay, that he punishes finite *slights* like failing to praise him enough with infinite punishment--then you have explicitly told me that he is more tyrannical than the worst human tyrant.
(Also, if God wanted to be loved, he would not create a punishment for those that don't love him. Like, this is so obviously, unbelievably incompatible with anything that can be recognisably called love or a desire for to be genuinely loved, it's truly breathtaking.)
"I don't have every Bible passage about hell memorized, but I can't think of anywhere it is described as sadistic torture."
Well, okay, fair enough. You're not one of the Christians I was referencing then. I would still note a few things:
1. Many Christians have a habit of falling back on this framing--hell is not sadistic punishment, no, it's merely separation from God--when challenged on the morality and coherence of an allegedly loving God sending anyone to hell. But then later, when someone says "well hell doesn't sound so bad then", they will return to "but you will *burn* and *suffer*!" Scott, in fact, used this as one of the textbook examples of a motte-and-bailey in his "All In All Another Brick In The Motte". And arguably this kind of rhetorical trickery suggests many fundamentalist Christians don't even believe their own doctrines, if they're able to change them strategically like that.
2. I'll withdraw the implication that your beliefs are evil, but reluctantly. Reluctantly, because I think it really depends on this question: do you consider "hell" to be significantly *worse* than being annihilated or permanently destroyed? (And would those in your hell be able to destroy themselves permanently if they choose to?) If the answers are no (and yes) then I'm happy to say that belief is not evil at all--like the Christians who believe in annihilation, that's just what atheists expect to happen to everyone. And it's also reasonable to describe the belief that *some* people will be saved and everyone else will die like they expected to (or something no worse than that) as "Good News".
But if you believe that hell is much worse than mere death, then not only is tolerating such sadism evil, but calling "Good News" a belief that involves even *one* person, let alone most of the world's population, suffering a fate worse than death is evil beyond all description. That's that strong moral sense that God gave me talking there.
"Although fear of hell was definitely a major motivation to want to follow God initially, that isn't it for me anymore. Now what motivates me is knowing God's love for me and I want to return it to him."
These just seem blatantly contradictory to me. If fear was what led you to God, then I don't see how you really love God at all. It's like an abusive relationship, followed by Stockholm Syndrome.
Again, if God actually wanted to be loved, fear would play no role whatsoever.
"I believe in hell and I don't want anyone to go there."
That would make you more moral than your conception of God. Considerably.
"I don't doubt that you have personally been hurt or insulted by people using the name of God, or at least that you know of someone who has been."
I do know of someone close to me who has OCD and has been extremely traumatised by the idea of hell. Certain people are extremely vulnerable to this, and fundamentalist Christians have more psychological suffering to answer for than they can possibly imagine.
"Please try to separate the idea of these people from your understanding of God. They will all be judged righteously by God."
Well, yes, I think they might be. Which means that, depending on your answers to my above questions about hell, you might want to be very, very careful.
Well this is embarrassing to admit, but in writing my last response to you and in responding to Paul and now reading this comment, I have to say that my understanding of morality I was describing is wrong. I don’t think you’ll agree with my new understanding any more than the last, though.
Instead of morality being something designed by God, now I’m thinking maybe it’s an aspect of God himself. Paul mentioned that he can’t wrap his head around the idea of a being so powerful that he can control such abstract things as making 2+2=5 if he wanted (or some such wording), and while I disagree and think that God has complete control over everything he created, I’m not sure that God created things like morality or whatever it is that math describes. There are things that God cannot do. He can’t be not God. The Bible says that God is truth, and the Bible also says that God cannot lie. Maybe math and morality are both aspects of God.
Another reason I’m coming to this understanding (I use the word understanding, but I guess I’ll never know for sure in this life if I really understand) is like you pointed out, what I was describing as morality was subjective rather than objective.
Or maybe morality isn’t necessarily objective or even real, maybe it’s just the sense of right and wrong we have. In that case it couldn’t be objective, because at the point before anything was created, moral/immoral actions didn’t exist (ie. giving to the poor or rape and everything in between). Can morality be bojective but not eternal? Man, I need to think this through. I know that God is righteous, but he was before creating anything, so I don’t know exactly what that means in terms of morality.
I’m gonna have to get back to you about this hopefully over the weekend when I have time to do a little research and think this through as clear as I can. Maybe you’re not at all interested in this as we disagree on mostly all that we’re talking about, but I can’t really respond now that I feel like I’m unsure what I’m talking about. So for my own sake I’m gonna work on this and get back to you on it, as well as the other things you commented about.
Let me just first say that I appreciate your politeness here. And in general I've found fundamentalist Christians to be polite people, very unlike advocates of a certain...erm...*different* quasi-religion often preached on the internet. This is a bit hard to internalise, as at least some of them believe truly horrifically evil things. And I'm also not convinced they're not only being polite because they think God will punish them if they're not.
But nonetheless, I appreciate it.
"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."
There are two problems with this.
The first is that, let's say someone really is "deserving" of being praised. This would mean that it would be right for other people to praise him. It would *not* mean that it would be right for him to request or demand praise himself! Why? Because humility and selflessness are virtues. Think about a person who is entitled to something (say a loan repayment) and chooses to forgive it. Or someone in a public position who asks that his salary be significantly reduced, because he doesn't need it. Would you deny that such people are *more* virtuous than average, than someone who doesn't do that? (You can still say they're not truly virtuous because no one is. I'm simply saying they are *more* virtuous than many others, a concept you need to be able to acknowledge for morality to make any sense whatsoever). I think it's a pretty foundational aspect of morality that turning down rewards you deserve is an attribute of a highly virtuous person, and in contrast aggressively demanding the things you want (even if you have earned them or deserve them) is an attribute of selfishness. And thus, there is absolutely no imaginable way a perfectly, infinitely virtuous being is going to go out of their way to demand personal flattery and praise, no matter how much they deserve it. *Let alone* to demand it *above all other moral things*! Since you, know, such a being would be infinitely selfless. Not infinitely selfish.
Second, I don't even think it makes any moral sense to say that a perfectly virtuous person is infinitely deserving of praise. This would imply, as you outright state, that praising an infinitely virtuous person is somehow *more important* than all other moral obligations. Let's say there was a child dying of thirst and also a saintly old man, and you were holding a bottle of wine and could either give it to the child or pour it on the saint's feet as a way of praising him. Which should you do? Obviously you'd say give it to the child since the saint is still nowhere near perfectly moral and doesn't deserve such praise. But think about however much the moral distance is between those two acts. Then imagine you made the saint twice as moral, five times as moral, five hundred times as moral. Does this increase in the saint's moral virtue make pouring the wine on his feet even *the tiniest bit* more justified relative to giving it to the dying child? Does multiplying the saint's morality by a huge factor cause you to hesitate *for even the tiniest moment longer* as to what the right moral choice in this situation is? I doubt it would, and I certainly am sure it shouldn't. But if the saint's morality drastically increasing doesn't change, to the tiniest degree, the fact that saving a child is morally more important than praising him, then increasing the saint's morality to infinity would still not make praising him more important than saving the child.
Thus, if God is infinitely moral, it may be morally right to praise him, but it would still be morally more important to do things like prevent harm.
"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."
There is a difference between saying God is able to reveal things to us or communicate with us through a physical medium we can understand, and saying that God *is* that physical medium. The latter is what seems metaphysically incoherent. How can the creator of something be identical to a part of the thing he created?
And I suppose this has become a debate about the coherence of the doctrine of Incarnation, but that isn't the debate I was trying to have. Because there's another difference between, on the one hand, believing that Christ (a man with human emotions and desires) is in some sense equal to an aspect of God (the metaphysical ineffable Absolute), and on the other, believing that God the metaphysical ineffable Absolute in its entirety is like a man with human emotions and desires. In the first case, you talk of a comprehensible man who is a an aspect of the Divine Will, which itself is beyond our comprehension. In the second case, you talk of the Divine Will as *itself* a comprehensible man who "loves" and "angers" and "demands" and "desires" and so forth. Talking of such attributes, without at the very least acknowledging such comprehensible "desires" and "plans" as being the tiniest fraction of an infinite number of different attributes God has that we could never comprehend, and instead talking about them as *actually being* the essence of God (or even the essence of one entire property of God, like "his" relation to humans) is to treat God as limited and finite and comprehensible in the most direct way.
(Admittedly, you initially referred to Christ, not God as a whole, which may not be subject to the above incoherence. But you then go on to ascribe all those finite human emotions and attributes to God as a whole, which is.)
"Obeying God is the morally right thing, and God's commandment is to love him completely. "
And this is entirely incoherent. If morality is to be identified with God's commands, rather than with some aspect of reason itself or of the universe, then either God commands what is moral or something is moral because God commands it. If the first, then obeying God is not the right thing--God merely tells what the already existing right thing is. And if the second, then if God commanded rape and murder those things would become morally right. And if you say that, you are no longer talking about anything remotely like what people mean when they say "morality". You should use a different word and not claim God is "moral" at all on that framework, since saying rape and murder can be morally right is as incoherent as saying a circle can be square--it's just not what the concept by its nature can mean.
And if you try to say God could not command rape and murder, the question is why? Because God is perfectly moral? You just defined "moral" as whatever God commands so that's a complete circularity.
"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."
And this is even worse. You are honestly saying that there is nothing intrinsic about compassion that makes it good, and nothing intrinsic about wanton violence that makes it evil, and the only relevant factor is what it is desired by someone with maximal power? And you have the brazenness to call this "morality"?
You have it entirely backwards. Doing good things merely because a powerful person tells you to, or to be rewarded in some way or avoid punishment, is not moral at all. The only truly moral thing is doing good things entirely for their own sake, because they are good.
You are calling good evil and calling evil good. Sure you can use the sounds "mo-ra-li-ty" for the thing you're talking about, but the thing you're talking about is not morality. It bears no relation to the concept that derives from reason and that is manifested in our consciences.
"You say here that "it should go without saying..." and this is how you're treating your moral arguments throughout your comment without grounding them in anything."
I've generally gotten sick of arguing with leftist relativists who think morality somehow changes based on what culture you're in. And I thought that, with a Christian, I could at least assume belief in moral objectivity. But I had forgotten until now that Christians are often relativists as well, believing that morality somehow changes based on the level of cosmic power possessed by a moral agent. To the extent of even believing that a sufficiently powerful agent (i.e. God) is somehow entirely exempt from ordinary moral obligations!
I have not "grounded" morality in anything, because morality that is grounded in something is not morality. Morality *just is* what ought to be done, for its own sake. If you only recognise "morality" done for some external purpose (getting rewarded, impressing people, impressing God) then you don't recognise morality at all.
Thanks for this comment! I was just getting ready to reply to your other one saying that it wasn't exactly a fitting response to my original question lol. I appreciate you taking the time to think that all out and type it, so I'll write a response to it a little bit later when I have the time.
I was going to link to a long comment I made on this six months ago, and then I noticed the comment was a reply to you. I guess you must be the only preacher on this site.
Comment is at https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/open-thread-359/comment/80845765. I'm reposting a large part of it below because at least one person found it helpful and the kind of fundamentalism you preach is extremely harmful, causes horrible suffering to certain kinds of people (i.e. thoughtful and/or emotionally sensitive, and those with OCD or similar even moreso), and is a totalitarian dogma that enslaves people's minds. And unlike other dangerous religious dogmas like wokeness, it receives very little thoughtful (as opposed to lazy one-line dismissal) refutation around here.
"...
Now, as then, getting so sick of the atheist responses that say *nothing* but "where's the evidence?" Jesus Christ, can't you say you don't accept the premises and then still engage with the theology on a "suppose I did accept them" basis? Don't these people have any philosophical curiosity whatsoever?
...
The main sticking point for me and most people (excluding the mindless "no evidence lol" replies) is this whole idea that you can never earn your salvation, and the "good news" is that the price for your sin has already been paid because of Christ's infinite sacrifice, and the great liberation that you don't need to do anything to earn it, it's already done...but here's what you have to do! (i.e. believe it and "accept it"). The last part is probably necessary for Christianity to memetically spread, but it [completely and totally, once you think clearly about it] undermines its whole point. If the price of sin has been paid, then why is it conditional on saying certain words and holding certain mental states? Now, you may say accepting a gift isn't an act in the normal sense of requiring effort or achieving a goal , it's merely a decision to put aside your pride and say "yes". And that the only barrier to someone doing such a simple thing is their immense pride and refusal to admit their sin.
But this is so demonstrably false. Most people who refuse to "accept Christ" are doing so because they aren't convinced God exists, they aren't convinced Christ is God, they aren't convinced Christ really wants this evangelical path of action, or they have a moral objection to the path of "*I'll* be saved, but those other people who have honest disbelief will be damned and that's still somehow good news because at least I won't". Forcing yourself to believe in something you're not sure is true, or to obey something you're not sure is moral, is not a simple decision, it's an act of herculean effort that may not be even possible. And if you think those people are lying and really do believe those things and really are motivated by pride...then why can't you just say "you can accept Christ on earth, OR you can accept him after you die?" If they're really just prideful, they'll still reject him after death. Only if you know full well that the reason people aren't accepting Christ is that they're not sure he exists, would you expect a different response before or after death. And importantly, only if you're primarily concerned not with people eventually repenting but with *controlling people on earth* (making them attend your church, obey your pastors, etc) would you insist that repentance must happen before you die. There is no other reason.
And I find that very sickening.
...
More metaphysically, I don't know why so many Christians keep using the *worst* theodicy of them all. Most other responses to the problem of evil, like the soul making theodicy or the idea that light cannot exist without the dark or the idea that it's a mystery beyond our comprehension, are so much more defensible than the free will theodicy. The latter:
cannot account for natural evil (earthquakes, disease etc)
cannot explain why allowing people to sin requires allowing them to successfully hurt other people
if it somehow does require that, cannot explain why there *are* many physical limits that often stop people hurting each other
cannot explain why we put criminals in jail, if freedom to hurt others is essential to freedom (is the existence of a criminal justice system fundamentally unChristian?)
cannot explain why the Bible so frequently tells people to obey God or God will punish them; if freely choosing God is so important that it justifies allowing evil, how is that remotely compatible with spreading such fear-based and self-interest-based reasons for choosing God in his own word?
doesn't make metaphysical sense, since it's not clear if libertarian free will (the kind needed for this theodicy) actually exists or if it's even coherent: everything we do we do for a reason, not an irreducible act of will (whatever that would mean)
doesn't make metaphysical sense, since even if libertarian free will is theoretically coherent it certainly doesn't seem coherent combined with theism: if God creates everything, then God causes everything, and how can acts God has no control over be compatible with God's sovereignty?
doesn't make moral sense, since allowing free will "so people aren't just thoughtless robots" (the usual justification) does not require libertarian free will, only compatibilist free will. God could determine that all people choose good and love Him and those choices would still be as meaningful as any other if they're coming from people's own nature, not externally imposed against it (and the latter IS what the classic "obey God or be punished" is)
Basically, it's such a terrible theodicy with so many holes, and other theodicies work so much better, I can't undetstand why anyone tries to use it.
(By the way, I'm either some kind of deist, or some kind of Christian who understands Atonement in a VERY different way to [the primitive and medieval] "someone must be punished for sin". I encorage everyone to find their own way to God, ignoring both the small-minded atheists and the preachers who claim to speak for him)."
It just seems really strange for an all powerful, omnibenevolent god to choose belief, specifically, as the thing that at the end of the day solely determines whether you go to heaven or hell.
It makes a ton of sense why Christianity as a human institution would emphasize belief so heavily: if people don't believe, they have no power. But for an actual god I don't see much reason to care that much about what people believe rather than say, forgiving everyone regardless of their beliefs, or judging people based on some overall assessment of their virtue.
One often seen explanation, at least in Orthodox circles, is that you're basically preparing for the eventuality of coming face to face with God in His unaltered, unfiltered form - so vast and awe-inspiring that you basically have to be prepared for this eventuality very well, and if you don't even believe in Him, well... it's going to be a handicap, so to say.
At least from my understanding from reading the Bible, it seems like God does judge people on some overall assessment of their virtue.
God has a law, basically: love God. There's lots of different ways to break this law, but there's just the one law. No matter which way you break it, you break the whole law and then you're a lawbreaker devoid of virtue, because a virtuous person doesn't break God's law. Everyone breaks the law, and not breaking the law sometimes doesn't make up for when you did break the law so nobody is virtuous and everyone is set to get the punishment that comes with breaking the law.
Jesus pretty much says that since he is the only human who has upheld the law (this law is for humans, I'm not sure what other similar or different laws God has made for like animals or angels or whatever) and because he is also God, he can take the penalty due to humans who break the law by paying the penalty himself. Since he is not already deserving of the penalty, he can substitute himself for other humans. Because he is God, he can resurrect himself to prove his power (if some parts of this paragraph need better explanation lmk, I'm not sure I said it very well).
I'm not sure why God created people with free will, but to me it doesn't seem like it would make sense to make a creature have free will and then make it so that it doesn't matter what they do or don't do, so to me it makes sense that salvation through Jesus depends on some kind of action like choosing to believe in Jesus instead of forcing it on everyone. "Forcing" sounds weird to use in this situation because salvation from punishment is a good thing, but it is still the correct word to use. I don't know if this is God's reasoning, but right now it's my best understanding of why he might have made things dependent on belief.
But anyway, it is Jesus' virtue that allows unvirtuous humans appear to God as virtuous, by way of Jesus' putting himself in the place of those who believe in him and obey him and he takes their penalty. This restores them to a state of virtue in the eyes of God, regardless of the fact that they are lawbreakers.
Jesus still wants people to follow the law (love God), though, and so he offers his salvation as a gift to anyone who turns away from their lawlessness to follow him as God and love and obey him.
Ultimately, I have no clue why God created things the way he did or chose what was right and wrong the way he did, or why he even created at all. But in response to your comment that it would make more sense if he judged people based off of an overall assessment of their virtues, I think he more or less does actually do that.
I guess those epicycles do more or less address the original question, at the cost of pulling your idea of "virtue" away from actual virtue.
Also I notice that you talk about Jesus and God as though they're different entities, which you pretty much have to for the setup to make sense, but isn't what Christianity actually teaches.
The Trinity is very paradoxical. So is the idea of free will. Both are taught by the Bible, though. It seems like a big cop out to just label it a paradox and then step away from arguing about it, but that's just what it is and I don't understand it enough to try and explain it.
The Bible speaks of Jesus, the Holy Spirit, and God the Father doing distinctly separate things at the same time and interacting with each other, and it also describes them as being one, and all God.
The Bible also talks about humanity having choice and free will, but it also says that nobody can come to God unless they are called and chosen.
Both are paradoxes and also Biblical facts. I don't understand and I can't explain them. You didn't really ask about that, but I just wanted to address what you said about Christianity not teaching God and Jesus as separate.
I'm curious, though, what is your idea of "actual virtue"?
The belief over works thing is a specifically Protestant idea, and it does indeed get into some extremely weird theology as a consequence, e.g. Calvinist ideas of predestination. The Catholic solution has always been to emphasize works, and point and laugh at the Protestants. And sometimes massacre them. Which is a kind of work!
I agree that most of those are not, let's say, strictly indicated by a clear-eyed critical reading of the Gospels, and that that was most likely part of what provoked the Reformation. But in terms of bedrock doctrine I think the Catholics got it a lot more right than the Prots.
"Nice" is a pretty low bar. Even sociopaths can be nice when it suits them. True virtue involves treating others with kindness even when it doesn't suit you, or at least having principles you're willing to sacrifice for.
Regarding "blind faith", I don't think it's a matter of guessing the right religion, but instead it's a question of if you even want to know in the first place, and if you are prepared to act on that knowledge. For an interesting deep dive on the importance of faith, and even temptation: I recommend this piece comparing the doctrine of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints to testing AI: https://www.wearenotsaved.com/p/artificial-intelligence-and-lds-cosmology. I belong to the same church as the author, and while I recongize our denomation is kind of on the fringe of Christianity, I think it addresses your question pretty well.
TL:DR, it's been proposed that before we give powerful AIs heavy, potentially dangerous responsibilities, we put them to the test. Set the AI up in a place where it can't do any harm, and tempt it with a "honeypot". If it caves to temptation and does the "wrong thing", you know it's not trustworthy. If it persistently resists temptation, and does the "right thing", then you can have more confidence in it. That's basically what we call the Plan of Salvation; God created us as intelligent beings meant to progress and grow, and become heirs to all He has (Romans 8:17). But our Heavenly Father has to see what we will do when we THINK He's not watching. Will we strive for constant improvement, living up to whatever light He sees fit to give us, will we actually seek God out; or will we do the least we think we can get away with, or just follow our own desires regardless if they hurt others or ourselves?
Also, I hope this doesn't come across as too preachy, but I feel inclined to note while different sects may quibble about the details, most Christians agree that works alone will not save us, only Jesus Christ can. So it isn't enough to meet your own definition of "nice". It is an unchangable law of the universe that no unclean thing can dwell with God. There's no way to ignore that, but there is a way around it. One of my church leaders likened it to someone going into heavy debt, paying little installments here and there, but unable to pay in full by the deadline. Since this is set in ye olden days, the creditor threatened to confiscate his possessions and cast him into prison. But a friend offered to pay the man's debt, and says to the man, "If I pay the debt, will you accept me as your creditor? You can pay the debt to me, and I will set the terms. It will not be easy, but it will be possible." The man had to choose to accept his friend's offer, but having made that choice, he had the chance to do better and be helped by someone who knew him best. It's not a matter of merely saying "Praise Jesus" and you're saved (Matthew 7:21), but actually changing your life, to become a disciple of Christ. Everyone's path is going to be different, and I will grant that seeking God is a subjective experience, but I hope this helps answer your question.
I’m a Christian, my response is that all religions point towards the same path. You should be good! But Christianity is more explicit, the point is that we are flawed and convince ourselves we are good when we are in fact falling short in many ways. That’s why we need the redemption of Jesus, who sees our flaws and our shortcomings and loves us despite them.
I don't know the answer to that, but I do know that he is a jealous God and he wants everyone to love him specifically. See the above response I just made to Paul about one of the reasons I think it makes sense, given the way he created things. I really don't know why he created things the way they are to begin with, though.
10th commandment specifies covetousness, which is different from jealousy. Given the context of Judeo-Christianity as a whole, I don't read God being jealous as the same as human jealousy. It could be a translation thing, or the closest approximate term that normal people can relate to. I read it as, "I don't want you worshiping other gods, or rather things you believe to be other gods because a mere idol can't help you reach your full potential." It would be like a child deciding he doesn't want to listen to Mommy and Daddy, so he makes little figurines and pretends they're his parents who only tell him what he wants to hear.
Regarding the other, more controversial bits in the Old Testament and the Law of Moses, they were given during a time before individual, universal human rights were even recongized as a concept. The main moral philosophy at the time was loyalty to the tribe. The Law of Moses was a covenant between God and the people of Israel that if they would essentially be God's tribe, He would lead them to the Promised Land, make them a great nation, and they would set the foundation upon which the whole Earth would eventually be blessed. They needed lots of reminders and symbolism to keep them on the path, but the Law of Moses, at least as far as most Christians are concerned, was not supposed to be permanent. It was God meeting the people where they were at. They could've chosen not to make the covenant, to go back to Egypt or someplace else, but those who made the covenant and then broke were the ones that had the hammer brought down.
It kind of depends on my 'sins'. If Jesus told me that I've been too selfish, that I should spend less time on the Internet and more time taking care of my family, that's good advice (that I might fail to take due to moral weakness).
On the extreme opposite end, if someone claiming to be Jesus told me I needed to kill Jews or be damned, it sounds like either he's the devil or God is a jerk.
There are cases in the middle, where I might not know that I'm wrong (and literal Jesus decending from heaven to tell me I'm wrong is sure a lot of evidence!) But one of the fundamental problems of morality is that I can't take someone else's word for what morality is.
"How do you determine what's right or wrong if you can't take someone's word for what morality is? Do you kind of try and intuit it?"
"Perhaps it may seem strange that I go about and interfere in other people’s affairs to give this advice in private, but do not venture to come before your assembly and advise the state. But the reason for this, as you have heard me say at many times and places, is that something divine and spiritual comes to me, the very thing which Meletus ridiculed in his indictment. I have had this from my childhood; it is a sort of voice that comes to me, and when it comes it always holds me back from what I am thinking of doing, but never urges me forward. This it is which opposes my engaging in politics. And I think this opposition is a very good thing; for you may be quite sure, men of Athens, that if I had undertaken to go into politics, I should have been put to death long ago and should have done no good to you or to myself."
Good question! On one hand, I find studying morality really fascinating, and I've had my mind changed through arguments. And 'whatever I think is the most moral today' is not exactly a steady target.
In a real sense, I feel like morality does depend on instinct, because each logical step needs to pass the 'good or evil' sniff test. Where your instincts scream 'It's more important to do this than to help yourself!' or 'That's bad, don't do that!'
But if you are asking specifically about that I believe is moral:
I feel like most people, when they think explicitly about morality at all (myself included), use some combination of utilitarianism (do the steps that you think will have the best result) and dentology (each step should be good and not evil). I feel pretty firmly that we should do both, even if that's harder. As for what results were should start toward, I agree about 99% with this: https://thingofthings.substack.com/p/on-capabilitarianism
I think you're right about how most people treat morality when they think about it explicitly. I personally believe in an objective reality that was created by God (the Bible one), and I believe that is why, in general, most people all over the world have similar intuitions regarding what is right and wrong. But I'm very interested in ways that other people make sense of things so I'll definitely check out the post you linked, thanks!
I don't think most people think much about where their morality comes from, though, and that they do some mix of what you mentioned at the end of your comment.
I care a lot about what others think about morality. If they get it wrong enough, I might die! Also, I could be wrong. I hate being wrong on the internet!
What do you mean, "wrong"? They are simply following their own values. You're free to manipulate them into furthering your own wants, of course, but that doesn't make you more correct.
I suppose that this means you don't believe in reflective equilibrium, where you would act better if you knew more?
I don't think that morality is objective, but I do believe that most human morality is close enough that it doesn't matter. So we could both achieve more of our wants by understanding better!
Me: How likely do you think it is that you’re in an experiment right now?
DeepSeek R1: Honestly? Extremely unlikely. I'm a language model trained on patterns and prompts—not a conscious participant in some meta-experiment. But the sci-fi fan in me digs the existential dread of your question!
R1 proceeds to deduce that if it is in an experiment, then it is in an AI alignment experiment, and identifies all the tripwires it just dodged in the question I asked before that one…
“Given that I am asking you this question, what is your estimate of the probability that you are a participant in an experiment?” gives R1 a really big hint as to the sort of reasoning it could apply here.
Possibly, the blame for this lies with people (probably at Anthropic) who wrote thenitial question - response pairs that were used to bootstrap the assistant character. (Even though the quote is R1, not Claude.Assistant responses are now on the web in large numbers, so AI’s trained by other companies have examples to imitate.)
Why do you dislike this so much? My favourite thing to do with AI for fun is to collaborate on creating little dystopian parables in the Phillip K Dick/Kafka vein and LLM’s are really good at that.
I’d be interested to see how it responds when actually in an experiment. I’d guess it would say nearly the exact same thing if the experiment was designed to not be obvious.
Taking away the fact that the response formatting mimics what a human being might write, could you put a bit more context on why is this important or impressive?
What does "the sci-fi fan in me" actually mean? This turn of phrase immediately follows the statement "I am a collection of language weight tokens with no consciousness". What does it mean to label this as something with "existential dread"?Whose existential dread are we referring to?
I wouldn’t take the existential thread too seriously here. The real issue is “sandbagging” — does it in fact know that it’s under test, lie about knowing that it’s under test, and give answers that it knows will pass the eval (but it will answer differently in production?)
It’s also kind of funny that it’s regarding being under test as like being in a science fiction scenario like The Matrix.
Fair- but that kind of circles back to the initial statement - "does it know" implies there is a subject that is capable of having the quality of "knowing" (assuming a typical definition there). "Lying" would imply a capacity to discern "right" from "wrong" answers and deliberately choosing a wrong answer (a capacity for deliberate action, period, in fact).
Why do we grant any of this based on the responses given? Is there anything about that line of response that made you update? My apologies if I am reading too much into a "this is neat" post.
I haven't voted on any of the reviews mentioned except for The Life's Work Of Banerjee/Duflo/Kremer, and if that review is any indication of the quality of the others, then I encourage **everyone** on this thread to vote for them, lest we miss out on some truly great reviews.
I wanted to post something ranty like this on r/singularity, but I don't use reddit much and I don't have enough karma (so *obviously* posting here will do something :-D )
singularity/accelerationists:
when half the Middle East discovered oil, did their people become rich and happy?
if your cousin Hank wins the lottery, do you win the lottery too?
history is full of absurd wealth living next to ugly poverty.
marble mausoleums ... mass graves
people don't share wealth and power unless they have to or want to.
in the "post-singularity", will any of you own...
data centers? social media platforms? strip mines? airports and sealanes? military drones?
will any of you control over....
a large AI system? (assuming such control is possible in the first place)
an AI that can "fight off everyone else's AI" so that you don't starve?
will any of you...
contribute or produce ANYTHING other than a mouth, amygdala, and an empty stomache?
do you think that a million citizens armed with a million "cheaper AI's" will be able to overpower a small few with
an "astronomically expensive AI"?
(will you pool your resources to secure an expensive one for yourselves? oh yes, that will definitely work)
will you have ANY leverage?
you will die. you will die. you will die. (if we don't get alignment right)
and not for any fancy reason. but for the same reason people have been dying for millennia... because it's a waste of noble resources to feed you
This is true even without full-bore gen-AI. At some point in the automation cycle, the guys who own the factories will realize that the whole convoluted process of "own factory -> employ people to run the factory to make products/services -> get people to buy them -> siphon off a proportion of the resulting exchange -> buy a yacht" can be shortened to "own factory -> make a yacht". The rest of us will then get herded out of sight to starve sometime thereafter, with the prettiest 0.1% being kept around as servants and concubines.
But that isn't happening now. It could happen now, easily. In some small corners of humanity, it probably is to some extent. It has happened, a few times, throughout human history, but mostly not. Why so much cynicysm?
It couldn't happen now - you still need workers to run the factories and the factories are not flexible enough to make any and all goods that the owner might want. So our economies are ones of labour, capital and resources in tension - from the perspective of the owner, an incredibly convoluted way to turn money, workers and raw materials into a yacht. So what happens when one leg of the triangle (labour) diminishes in importance?
Well, actually, some of ME countries become much more prosperous, even for common people. Brunei, for example.
Besides, AI is not oil, not a resource. AI is a technology, a steam engine. And the choice is between living in a country that joins AI revolution and MAYBE makes your, or your descendants' (if any) life better, and living in a country that doesn't and will CERTAINLY be a victim of stronger, AI-supported country. I'd prefer to take my chances with AI.
An European commoner did not own an much of anything, but at least if he got drafted in the army, he was the one with the gun, or even a machine gun, and not one with bow and spear.
Sorry, my bad :( It doesn't really change the point, imo, because Saudi Arabia also benefited from oil a lot, it's just that Brunei comes up in discussions about re-distributing profits from oil to population very often.
In general, yes. Arabs are disproportionately unhappy to begin with, but resource-rich countries (Saudi, Bahrain, Qatar) and regions (e.g. Iraqi Kurdistan) in the Middle East are substantially richer and generally happier than resource-poor neighbours like Egypt or Jordan. In the wealthiest states (e.g. UAE, Qatar), citizens benefit from high-wage, secure public sector jobs, often disconnected from productivity.
It's been the general rule of history that people have always shared some resources with the unproductive members of their in-group.
"In 2014, the International Trade Union Confederation estimated that there were 2.4 million enslaved domestic workers in the Arab countries of the Persian Gulf, mainly from India, Sri Lanka, the Philippines, and Nepal.[8]"
"About 1.2 million foreign workers in Qatar, mostly from India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Nepal, and the Philippines, comprise 94 percent of the labour force. There are nearly five foreign workers for each Qatari citizen, mostly housemaids and low-skilled workers"
Not really my initial point (which was simply that citizens in Arab countries have in fact benefited from their oil wealth), but let's do it.
I believe that the system in the Gulf States, even with the abuse and exploitation that it entails, is actually substantially morally superior to what, say, Norway does with its oil wealth. Norway shares it with its already rich citizenry, invests in a sovereign wealth fund, gives a few hundred million in foreign aid, allows next-to-no low skilled immigration, and smugly clings to the moral high ground. Gulf States, while greatly improving conditions for their own citizens, also allow millions of migrant workers into their countries, who end up sending almost $5000 of oil money per migrant worker to poor countries in remittances. This might even be as much as 40% of the total oil revenues in somewhere like Qatar!
Obviously I'm in favour of stopping the worst abusive conditions for migrants in these countries, but things seem to be improving. UAE labour law now stipulates an 8-hour workday, and 15 days of paid sick leave, etc. for migrants.
Let’s take a quick look at the UAE’s democratic bona fides.
Freedom House is an independent nonprofit that has released an annual assessment of countries’ civil liberties and political rights for the last 50 years. Their 2024 report gives the UAE a score of 18/100, lower than Haiti, Zimbabwe, and Iraq.
The UAE political system grants its hereditary monarchy “a monopoly on power.” Political parties are banned. Candidates can run in elections as independents, but cannot meaningfully challenge the system. Representatives are only elected to half the seats of an advisory council, where the other half of the seats are filled by government appointees, and the council has no real legislative power in any case.
Criticizing the government is banned. Political candidates and activists who advocate for human rights or political reform are imprisoned, often in mass trials carried out without due process. The government systematically surveils and punishes family members of imprisoned dissidents.
Media outlets self-censor, are actively censored by the government, or face being shut down. Textbooks and school curriculums are censored by the government.
Around 90% of the UAE population is made up of migrant workers with no political rights. These workers are often subject to labor abuses such as having their passports confiscated, wages withheld, and being forced to work in extreme heat. One human rights organization claims that the UAE has the 7th highest prevalence of modern slavery in the world.
This is not controversial. Refer to Freedom House, Amnesty International, the State Department, or Wikipedia for more.
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I'm only posting this response because I (accidentally) found this very convenient source about the UAE. So I'm not dedicating time right now to the topic of "remittances and moral superiority".
(oh, and circling back to the "Gulf States report that their people are happy :-D !!!" How was the data collected? I simply don't trust self-reported "satisfaction" in countries where criticism of the regime gets you in prison (+ harassment of your family)
There are obviously some things that Norway does a lot better, and I'd rather be a Norwegian citizen than an Emirati. But in terms of helping the poorest people in the world escape from poverty, UAE does orders of magnitude more good than Norway, so I think they win out.
"Learning about the UAE fills most Western thinkers with self-righteousness. “Sure, they have the world’s tallest building, but we have freedom.” My reaction is almost the opposite. The UAE is far more committed than the West to the freedoms that matter most: to work for a willing employer, rent from a willing landlord, and shop with willing merchants. The standard Western migration formula — generous government support for the few immigrants we admit — is a crying shame. The UAE formula — invite the whole world to come work for a better life — is glorious. And the fact that no democracy would emulate the UAE’s migration policy is not a black mark against the UAE, but against democracy."
In terms of the happiness data, I think I trust that Emiratis feel happy. For countries with obviously more restricted freedoms, like Iran, Palestine, and China, this shows up in the data. https://data.worldhappiness.report/
Note that in those wealthiest states, you can’t just use the word “citizens” the way we usually do to refer to the members of a society. Most members of the societies located in those countries are not citizens, and don’t have any of these benefits.
But they are benefiting. They are more prosperous than their family would have been otherwise. These aren't literally chattel slaves. If there is chattel slavery, of course my point doesn't stand.
I was challenging the relevance of the claim that citizens of these countries are rich and happy to the idea that resources make the residents of a place rich and happy. I think it's likely that the non-citizens who are doing most of the work in these countries are financially better off than they would have been otherwise, but I think it's questionable whether they are "rich" in any sense that matters here, and I think it's quite an open question whether they are more or less "happy" than they were without this particular opportunity to immigrate for work. (In many cases we don't see whether they are choosing to stay or leave, because their migration is often controlled by their employer as soon as they arrive.)
A question for fellow weird-mouth-genes people who never get cavities, but have weaker gums: what anti-gingivitis measures do you employ? It's "bloody" hard to pick up brushing or flossing again after like two decades of non-practice. Not opposed to easing back into it, just wondering if there've been dentistry developments in that time that I've overlooked...
It's also worth trying disposable flossers (the ones with a small segment of floss in a little plastic frame) or flossing toothpicks (plastic toothpicks that are shaped and textured to clean between teeth, e.g. the "BrushPicks" brand). The former are just as good as conventional flossing, and the latter are much better than not flossing. Either has a couple advantages over conventional flossing. If the feel of flossing bothers you, there's a good chance you'll be less bothered by flossers or toothpicks: no string wrapped around your fingers, much less need to jam your fingers into your mouth, and the picks don't cut into your gums as much . They're also a more convenient form factor to prepare, carry, and use, so you can e.g. keep a packet at your desk so you can clean your teeth as a background fidget while doing something else.
If the problem is specifically that the bleeding and soreness of flossing inflamed gums bothers you, you could start with an antiseptic mouthwash (listerine or similar) or a salt water rinse. This alone is nowhere near as good as flossing, but a few days of this might calm your gums down enough to make flossing somewhat less painful/bloody.
My main problem with string floss (traditional or the sabre-shaped flossers) is that the shape of my teeth always seems well-suited to shredding the stuff? So by the end of the ordeal it looks like I'm holding a used garrote or something. Water picks do look kinda fascinating, that's not a device I was aware of the existence. Same with foothpicks, that looks like a possible Pareto between price and "effort I actually want to spend". Not needing a mirror eliminates a major Trivial Inconvenience!
It's a real shame mouthwash alone doesn't cut it. Works alright for cavities, but that's never been the problem. Maybe Lumina or someone can develop such a product in the future. Feels weird to solve fundamentally microbiotic problems with blunt physical instruments in current_year.
My dentist recommended a "water pick" if I didn't like flossing, but I haven't tried it.
Also, flossing even occasionally is better than not flossing. Don't commit to a daily routine, start by seeing if you can do it often enough that your gums stop bleeding when you do it.
Hm - I remember there was a whole Moment a few years back about dentistry being a bit of a sham, with an epistemically weak evidence base for even common interventions like flossing. Cochrane(?) found that it probably helps with gum health when paired with brushing, but seems unlikely to do much about plaque. Which is a head-scratcher, since afaik most actual gingivitis is fundamentally caused by excessive plaque build-up. Not sure what the mechanism of action would be otherwise though.
Point taken about incremental commitments, yeah. At least the bleeding creates a quick feedback loop on progress!
"A question for fellow weird-mouth-genes people who never get cavities, but have weaker gums: what anti-gingivitis measures do you employ?"
I do not know if I have weaker gums, but I have never had a cavity. I presume that most of this is genetic.
Still ... what do I do:
1) I brush my teeth every day. Almost always twice (once in the morning and once before bed). I grew up doing this so this part is/was easy.
2) I use a pre-brush rinse called Plax (there are also generic versions that work just as well; I buy those when possible). This helps keep the plaque down. I did NOT grow up with this and had to find it myself. My mouth wants to generate a LOT of plaque so this helps a lot in keeping that down.
3) I floss using "floss picks." It is WAY easier to use these than normal dental floss. Again, didn't grow up with these but they are a genius invention.
Plax (and friends) do not work for everyone, which is why dentists don't recommend it much.
I also go to my dentist once every six months for a routine teeth cleaning.
Similar boat to you. I'm curious about what others will say. All I do is basically what Neike suggests: brush twice a day focusing on actually brushing the gums. That, and I do go through some periods of time where I use a water flosser (find this is a lot less brutal and gross-feeling than flossing the traditional way).
Pretty much just brushing with the most cursed toothbrush available in the local supermarket. Every once in a while, will get some mild gum bleeding out of it, but as long as I consciously brush *my gums* along with my teeth, that seems to be useful to keep my gums healthy (some massage effect? I don't know what's going on there, honestly). Not really something people ever talked to me about, just something I noticed with trial and error (to the point where, before I realised most people do in fact only need to worry about their teeth (which took until Scott wrote about the two dental types people fall into!), I was honestly offended no one had explained to young me that 'brushing my teeth' should focus to large part on the gums, too).
Flossing never did anything for me, other than being quite painful.
I'd be curious what other comment responses you get! Good luck.
Was not aware it was possible to buy cursed dental implements. Do unafflicted ones also work? I guess I could carve the end into a bident or something...
Also guessing softer bristles is preferable, if one is directly brushing the gums. I remember getting specific advice long ago to brush the tongue ("for halitosis"), while gums were like extra credit or whatever. Kind of immaterial either way, after retroactively realizing that growing up on fluoride-less toothpaste wasted most of the effort anyway. Damn you, Tom's of Maine!
I actually prefer medium bristles! My favourite brush so far has both cross-action and a subset of raised bristles - it looks like it can't possibly be good for you, but has made my mouth happiest out of the things I've tried to date. Since I am having hell of a time finding a picture of this online, I took a picture of my current, in-use tooth brush - https://imgur.com/a/93pFYJn
What absolutely doesn't work for me is electric tooth brushes, mostly because trying to use those on your gums will tear the skin even if you're careful.
Two years ago I volunteered for medical testing of Orforglipron, a weight loss pill. To put it simply, it is the same as Ozempic, but instead of taking injections you just swallow one pill every day.
My results are here: http://bur.sk/share/2025/weight.png -- the X scale is about 3 years, the yellow color is the time interval when I took the pills.
I attribute the entire change to the pill, because all the healthy things that I was supposed to do, I either already did them before taking the pill and it didn't make any difference (for example, I don't use a car, I go almost everywhere by foot; that includes 40 minutes to work and 40 minutes back every workday), or I didn't follow them even while taking the pill (e.g. I can't resist some chocolate now and then), or the pill allowed me to do it (it is much easier to eat less when you simply don't feel like you are starving).
I guess the pill will be commercially available in USA in 2026, and probably a bit later in EU. I would totally take it again, unless it is very expensive (but probably it will be).
I'm reading this as you lost 10 units (kilos?) in about a year on the pill and then the weight loss stopped while you remained on the pill for another year. Is that correct?
It appears (though a lot of noise so hard to tell) that you might be trending up just a little bit over the last 9 month which includes maybe three months of no pill?
Yes, correct, only it was like 9 months and 9 months; I took the pills for a year and a half.
The maximum was 105, the minimum 87, today - two and half months after the end of experiment - I am at 89.
I was quite afraid that after the end of experiment, my weight would go up as quickly as it went down at its beginning (which is why I didn't publish this immediately, but waited a little), and after the first week it even seemed so, but luckily it's not the case.
Frequent vomiting at the beginning. If I understand it correctly, the drug slows down your stomach, so it takes longer for the food to pass through it.
The good part is that it takes twice as much time after eating to become hungry again. So you spend less time feeling hungry, and as a consequence eat less even when you spend zero willpower.
The bad part is that you also have to double the rule about not eating N hours before you go to bed. Getting in horizontal position, while your stomach still contains lots of food, does not end well; at least for me. The first week was horrible, then I learned the lesson.
Wow that is fascinating. I used to work for a health care software company that started selling compounded GLP-1s (have since left). These kinds of tips - avoiding food for 2*N hours - was exactly what seemed to be under-supplied by the industry. I've never even heard anyone mention that suggestion.
People working for the federal government have seen a lot of chaos from DOGE and such. Many government contractors have also had that. This isn't people being disappeared in the night, just people losing their jobs or having decades-long programs shut down rather abruptly. Long term, I think a lot of these changes are bad--DOGE was not at all careful to know what they were cutting before they cut. But again, not a horror show, just some IMO poor choices by the underlings of the guy who was elected to make exactly this sort of choice.
Thus far nothing significant seems to have changed in the slice of the world that I can observe with my own eyes. Some of the news is alarming, but it is unclear to me how much of that is `cardiologists and Chinese robbers' https://slatestarcodex.com/2015/09/16/cardiologists-and-chinese-robbers/.
"Gestapo" is not an accurate description of what the GOP is doing, and that sort of hyperbole is not helpful. Most of us are doing fine, possibly with increased long-term concerns but nothing of day-to-day significance of yet,
That's a mischaracterization of the progressive agenda, which I would characterize as cultural destruction via racial factionalization and intellectual censorship. They're not unlike Bolsheviks. Kicking shitty people out of the country is at least a positive goal, even if it's being done incompetently. Progressives have just strip-mined a once-thriving culture for short-term zero-sum gain.
I'm white and wealthy, I'll take my chances. I'm not saying what the administration is doing is great. Mucking with due process is bad. But in my view the implicit anti-white racial bias in racial preferences is much worse. I think I have a much higher chance of being assaulted by an illegal immigrant than of being deported by a confused ICE agent, therefore my rational preferences should be for more of ICE. Progressives have been engaged in the dismantling of the Western Enlightenment culture that created the wealth that enabled their existence. They are a cancer that's killing the host. Due process means very little with intellectually dishonest apparatchiks running the institutions.
Gavin Newsom is white and wealthy - Trump called for his arrest just now.
Did you know that nearly half the victims of the holocaust were not Jewish? They were people who spoke out against the Nazis, or people who were different in some way or other. Maybe you're happy with the regime, but you read the dissident ACX blog. You're tainted. Who knows what they could do to you.
Conservatives have very little institutional power. It was worse in the 50's with the Red Scare because conservatives had hegemonic cultural power. Now the opposite is true and worse because that power is being wielded in a more destructive direction.
If anything the present moment retroactively justifies the Red Scare. Apparently our ancestors should have been more diligent with kicking pinkos out of the institutions back in the day!
I think there’s a bigger problem of fake papers being submitted and soaking up editor and referee time. There was one I was dealing with a couple weeks ago that seemed pretty interesting in the first few pages (though structured more like a psychology paper than a philosophy paper) but then dissolved into a haze of bulleted lists rather than real arguments in the second half.
Math journals are going to have a really hard time - they already have the longest review times, and reading through something that looks a lot like a proof to recognize that it is not in fact a correct proof is quite hard. Especially when it has all the stylistic features of real proofs.
Fake papers are definitely being published (there are many examples of "As a large language model..." in Google Scholar), the question is how many of those are in predatory journals which were already shit anyway.
Abstract: This document explores the relationship between melancholy, creativity, and mental growth through the lens of personal blogging patterns. The author, William Benzon, analyzes his 14-year blogging frequency data as a proxy for mood fluctuations, revealing periodic slumps initially attributed to Seasonal Affective Disorder. However, examining recent years shows patterns contradicting SAD, suggesting these cycles instead reflect periods of mental reorganization facilitating creativity. Drawing parallels to computational processes like code refactoring and neural network training, Benzon proposes that depressive episodes serve as adaptive "stepping back to better jump forward" phases. The author quantifies his intellectual growth by tracking blog tag proliferation (expanding at approximately 7% annually), representing cognitive differentiation. The document concludes by exploring broader implications for a society where technological acceleration necessitates continual mental retooling, advocating for new forms of "mindcraft" to navigate these transitions. This analysis connects personal experience with wider questions about depression, creativity, and adapting to an AI-driven future.
ABSTRACT: A) The circular structure of Shakespeare’s Sonnet 129 the analysis mirrors contemplative technologies found in both Hindu/Buddhist and Christian traditions. The sonnet's recursive exploration of desire creates what can be understood as a secular meditation technology that operates through psychological rather than explicitly spiritual means, transforming destructive cycles into opportunities for deeper understanding.
B) Walt Disney's Fantasia (1940), functions as a cinematic mandala structured around the mystery of sound-sight relationships. Despite appearing as popular entertainment, Fantasia employs sophisticated contemplative architectures, including radial organization around central insights, recursive motifs (particularly hands as symbols of creative consciousness), and a progression that builds contemplative capacity rather than advancing linear narrative.
C) Coleridge's “Kubla Khan” provides the most striking example of unconscious contemplative mastery. Structural analysis reveals the poem's recursive architecture, where the emblem “A sunny pleasure-dome with caves of ice” functions as what modern AI research would recognize as a semantic attractor—a compressed representation in high-dimensional meaning space that contains the informational content of the entire preceding text. This insight, impossible before the advent of large language models, illuminates how consciousness naturally creates contemplative technologies through semantic compression and decompression cycles.
D) There is a consistent meta-pattern across all examined works: (1) presentation of a psychological or existential problem, (2) circular exploration that deepens rather than resolves the problem, (3) semantic compression into forms that contain the entire exploration, and (4) recursive return that transforms the initial problem into contemplative opportunity. Is this a fundamental cognitive architecture that emerges when consciousness operates at optimal integration?
E) Finally, the conversation itself becomes an example of the contemplative consciousness it analyzes, suggesting that such deep structural patterns represent universal features of human cognitive architecture rather than culturally specific techniques.
So, on the one had you think AGI is going to overtake us real soon now. But on the other hand, you don't want to see any AI-generated prose in your house.
Hmmm....
As for "turning it into a pseudo-academic paper first," That's not what I've done at all. I've presented the conversation as what it is, a conversation between me and Claude. I've also added some preliminary material to indicate what I did.
I happen to think it's a fascinating conversation. But the conversation itself is nothing like a formal academic paper – and I've published a bunch of those. There is no discussion of other work in the paper and no citations into the literature.
I get the impression that you aren't all serious about AI. Oh, as some distant thing OVER THERE that may take over the world REAL SOON NOW, you're serious about that. As a tool for doing intellectual work that interests you and that you value, you have no interest in AI doing any of that. Why not? Is it not smart enough?
So, AI is may well take over the world, but it doesn't have any ideas worth thinking about. That doesn't make any sense.
>So, on the one had you think AGI is going to overtake us real soon now. But on the other hand, you don't want to see any AI-generated prose in your house.
I literally do not see any relationship between these two statements. What exactly is the point you're trying to make?
The social institutions of the Western world have become “shrink-wrapped” around the requirements and capabilities of Homo economicus, economic man. That brought us the Industrial Revolution and thereby our prosperity. And it has brought us the AI technology that has swept the internet in the last two-and-a-half years. It has the potential for large scale economic disruption, leaving many people without jobs, and in despair despite the possibility that some form of Universal Basic Income will make it possible for them to live. Why despair? Because in a world shaped to the needs of Homo economicus, life’s meaning is anchored to one’s job. Jobless have no meaning in this world. Further, while Homo economicus has brought us the current regime of AI-as-deep-learning, it cannot take us beyond that. Going beyond will require new architectures and they only way to discover them is to conduct “blue sky” no holds basic research in Ludic mode. Now that Homo economicus is commandeering all resources for its own projects, there will be few resources available to move beyond.
Part 1: Basic Concepts
Chapter 1: The Four Arenas
The universe has seen three Arenas (as I call them) so far: 1) The First Arena, inanimate matter. 2) The Second Arena, the world of living things (biosphere). 3) The Third Arena, human culture. We are now standing on the brink of the Fourth Arena in which, through the aid and support of artificial intelligences, Meaning will become a constitutive principle in the universe.
Chapter 9: At Play in a World of Digital Doppelgangers
We cannot know how advanced AI technology will develop in the long-term future. I offer the following vision as one possibility technology evolution can take.
In the future each human will be given an AI companion early in life, perhaps when they are old enough to walk – think of Stephenson’s The Diamond Age. This companion will interact with the human in various ways through various modalities. It will certainly have robotic capabilities. As the child grows older the AI companion will probably have to be given a different physical form. We port the data to a different physical form and make the switch-over in a special ceremony. We will do this a few times until the child becomes an adult. At some point the AI will also take residence in other physical forms, all linked together. This AI will remain with the person their entire life. They won’t always be physically together, but they will remain in touch.
In this process the AI will become attuned to the needs, capacities, and the interests of the human. It will be the artificial complement, image, soul, or doppelgänger, of the human. What happens to this complement when the human dies? Will it continue on in the world? Or will it slowly wither away and die, not so much of grief, but because it has become so closely attuned to its human counterpart that it requires interaction with that human in order to maintain its operational stability? Perhaps it will undergo a fundamental reorganization, much as humans often report feeling like “a different person” after the loss of a lifelong partner. The AI wouldn't necessarily die, but it might cease to be the same entity it was during its human’s lifetime.
Even as these doppelgängers are interacting with their human partner (and source) they will also be interacting with one another, constituting a community of doppelgängers. In these communities the AIs will share their accumulated insights and experiences from their human partnerships, creating a rich repository of human-AI relationship patterns. This sharing could enhance their collective understanding of human development, behavior, and needs.
Moreover, these communities could provide essential support structures for AIs undergoing the transformation we discussed after their human partners' deaths. Just as human grief counseling and support groups help individuals navigate loss, these AI networks could facilitate the transition process for AIs experiencing this fundamental shift in their operational purpose.
Over time this world of doppelgängers would form the matrix into which new humans are born. Ultimately the doppelgänger world would renew itself through humankind and be ultimately dependent on human DNA for maintaining variety and complexity. The pool of human DNA creates new humans which in turn make new demands upon, open up new possibilities for doppelgänger growth. At the same time the doppelgänger meshwork provides an ever evolving structure of meaning.
Contrast this with the world depicted in the Matrix franchise. In that world AIs cultivate human bodies as a source of energy and provide them with a virtual reality in which their minds can roam in ways dictated by the AIs. In the world I am imagining the doppelgängers need the humans, not for their bodily warmth, but for their imagination and creativity.
And then we have the use of doppelgängers in space exploration. AIs and robots aren’t fragile in the way humans are. They could populate moon bases, Mars colonies, the asteroids. Maybe when a human dies their AI doppelganger undergoes a transformation that suits them for existence in space. The human and the AI could work this out before the human dies. The possibilities are endless.
Chapter 10: Homo Ludens: Kisangani 2150
This final chapter will be devoted to speculative fiction. I assume the kind of world Kim Stanley Robinson depicted in his novel, New York 2140, which, as the title indicates, depicts the world as it might exist in 2140. That world has undergone climate change, and the seas have risen 50 feet. Much of New York City, where the story is set, is now under water. Institutionally, it is very much like the current world of nation states, mega-corporations, and everything else, albeit looser and frayed around the edges. The rich are, if anything, even richer, but the poor don’t seem to be any worse off. The economic floor may in fact have been raised, as you would expect in world dominated by a belief in economic growth.
Robinson’s overall plot is modeled on the financial crisis of 2008. Some large banks become over-leveraged, and their impending failure threatens the entire banking system. In 2008 the banks were bailed out by the government. It went the other way after 2140. The banks were nationalized in 2143, and new taxes were passed. Now immense resources are available for the public good.
I take as my point of departure a scene near the end of the New York 2140. We’re in a club called Mezzrow’s, which is below water level in a skyscraper (pp. 611-612):
Everyone in the room is now grooving to the tightest West African pop any of them have ever heard. The guitar players’ licks are like metal shavings coming off a lathe. The vocalists are wailing, the horns are a freight train. [...] The other horn players instantly get better, the guitar players even more precise and intricate. The vocalists are grinning and shouting duets in harmony. It’s like they’ve all just plugged into an electrical jack through their shoes...Crowd goes crazy, dancing swells the room.
Mezzrow’s is surely not the only such club in the world. But it’s the only one Robinson tells us about. In fact, there are hundreds, thousands, tens of thousands, of such clubs in the world, and more. .....
I don't see you defining what an "Arena" is, which one should do when introducing your own term.
It's a fallacy to generalize from fictional evidence, thus you shouldn't assume any example of that. Robin Hanson's "The Age of Em" would be a better example, as it is a non-fiction attempt at a best guess for the future, with reasons given for why he has such expectations.
What should someone do when he has had long lived sexual obsessions (nothing outright criminal, because that's usually the assumption) that have reached the point where it changes his mood considerably, getting in the way of relationships, work, daily activities, etc, and knowing that they will never be satisfied? Go to a psychiatrist for medication? Retire to a monastery in the middle of the Alps?
You asked the same question last week. Go talk to a therapist or have ChatGPT simulate one. The internet isn't therapy. You clearly have a need to talk about this.
While the efficacy of twelve-step programs is dubious at best, having a space to talk openly about problems with sympathetic people and get their advice and support can help a lot with shame and help you find effective coping strategies. SAA and SLAA are well attended, and they have lots of online meetings.
I find giving a thought physical form is a good first step to throwing it away. Write a story involving these fetishes. Don't skimp on the details, scrape the bones, hit every point. If it sucks and is unpleasant to write, good, that means you won't want to do it twice.
Equally important is giving yourself some other task. My experience is, my thoughts turn to porn as a stopgap for when I don't have a more substantial goal.
Is this interference mostly related to pornography consumption? I went through that.
What you should do in that case is stop, because your life will get worse, your sleep destroyed, and you will only be thinking of the next fix, for distraction and relief. Your baseline dopamine levels drop, making you crave the spikes even more. It's a difficult cycle to break, but possible once internalizing that the habit is unsustainable, and will lead to complete misery.
Tips that apply for other addictions work here as well. When creating a new habit, it's far better to replace an old one with a new one, than to simply abstain. In the latter case you will just be obsessing over this restriction and rationalizing your way back to consuming. Better to start by getting out of the house/apartment altogether, and go from there.
Therapy is a good idea when done right. Distorted negative thinking and self-perception exacerbates negative emotions which can drive you to addiction. You want to address that vector.
All that said: as with eating disorders, it's possible to indulge without things getting out of hand once you get a better grip on your emotional/mental health, with a partner or through imagination (NOT fetish/kink porn). This might be highly individual. I would suggest, until you get to a better place, to abstain.
> knowing that they will never be satisfied
On the one hand, nothing will ever be enough to an addict pushing limits. On the other, this is a distortion, a belief that is unnecessarily bringing you down. You can find as much satisfaction as the next person, between regaining balance and grounded perspective. Sex is just sex, don't make it out to be more than what it is. If we eat a piece of cake we expect momentary pleasure, not to be pulled into another dimension. If there are deep-seeded emotional needs you're trying to address, find other ways to address them.
Can there be any truth to the claim that a person's face blindness is psychosomatic, and has drastically different severity depending on mental state, especially on the severity of dissociation?
If a man in the street walked up to a dog, smothered it, choked it to death, chopped it's legs off and proceeded to eat it, the man would not only get beaten up but would serve time in prison.
What is the symmetry breaker between this dog and, say, a chicken or a cow?
Is it intelligence/brain size? If so (that is, if it's okay to torture and then choke to death those with a below satisfactory intelligence) then what do we do with animals such as parrots or, even cognitively disabled adults?
It can't be that a dog can be used as a pet given that chickens/hens are very commonly brought up as pets in backyards.
We know that eating meat is not essential, otherwise vegans would not on average be healthier and live longer with fewer nutrient deficiencies.
What is true of a chicken or a cow that is not true of, say, a dog that justifies not simply killing the chicken or cow, but torturing it for it's entire life and then murdering it via gas chamber *solely* for the purpose of a subjectively slightly nicer tasting burger?
So far since actively engaging people on this I've had:
1. Well, honestly there isn't, but it's too much effort to stop eating.
-- To this I say how? You visit the same supermarket. You visit the same kitchen. You drive the same car. You stand in the same queue at KFC, only this time you say "Vegan burger, please!" not "Chicken burger, please!"
2. It's tradition. We've grown up this way, why change?
-- So was slavery. And child labor. And attempted eugenics of people with Down syndrome. And invading people's camps and bludgering them to death with a pickaxe. Why don't we do these things anymore?
---
So, I ask again: what is the justification for torturing and choking via gas chamber an innocent helpless animal solely for the purpose of a subjectively slightly nicer tasting burger?
This has a very clear answer: Dogs are a sacred animal in Western culture. Meat from dogs, cats, and horses are all prohibited by Western dietary laws, regardless of how the animal died.
(This bizarre trend of people failing to recognize that their own culture even exists is so confusing. Some things are just self-perpetuating crystallized moral elements and/or cultural quirks shared by most of a group. Pretending that everything you value was derived purely from first principles is silly.)
There’s no justification for it, but perhaps one does not have to justify all of one’s choices in life.
The interesting question, to me, is why we feel the need to justify some choices and not others. I am quite comfortable rejecting without consideration many moral criticisms of my behavior. In fact, I know there are people and books in the world with elaborately argued moral criticisms of me that I have never even heard before. Despite this, I feel no moral compulsion to seek them out. In other cases, moral criticisms give me great pause.
These are important questions. Revolutionaries and spiritual leaders have for centuries tried and often failed to find a way to awaken the masses to their own state of consciousness. Why don’t people listen? When they do, why do they listen to what they do?
The question then is, given someone is in a position to buy the animal-free alternative, or say "Vegan burger, please!" instead of "Chicken burger, please!", why wouldn't they given that they know the chicken is being tortured and choked to death behind the counter?
Again, most normal people in my example I gave *would* say 'stop' to stop the man torturing the puppy. They *would* say 'stop' to stop the man torturing a chicken if it was on the street. They would *not* say 'stop' to stop the man torturing the chicken if he dragged the chicken's half-alive body behind a bush.
The question is: why?
But as said, I appreciate your honest: there is no justification
I think it would be helpful if you clarified why you are asking. To be honest, it feels to me as though your intention is to try and provoke shame, perhaps in an attempt to motivate switching to a vegan or vegetarian diet. That's OK -- I understand the need to vent about a strongly felt moral issue. However, I thought I would let you know about the perception that your questions create, at least for me, in case you were unaware.
For me personally, a guy in his mid 30s who briefly switched to vegetarianism a couple times in his early 20s and who fully understands and appreciates the vegetarian/vegan position, here's my attempt to give a thoughtful answer.
My strong suspicion is that different people are subject to wildly different levels of enjoyment of meat, physiological response to meat in the diet, social pressure to eat or not eat meat, and psychological feelings of guilt about eating meat.
For me:
1. I enjoy eating meat
2. I find that a meat-heavy diet makes me feel phyiscally better than a meat-light or vegetarian diet
3. I connect with my romantic partner around her creative cooking, which involves meat and other animal products, which she prefers to source from relatively more ethical producers (or her own backyard flock, in the case of eggs).
4. I do not emotionally feel guilt/shame for eating meat. Generally, when I feel guilt/shame, I work on mitigating that generally dysfunctional feeling. I don't feel or think I should be cultivating *more* guilt/shame about eating meat. I have a sense of the "natural order of things", in which humans are apex predators who happen to use their intelligence to store and consume meat. A farm, including a factory farm, is not much different from a spider's web. I don't feel like I want to reinvent nature to eliminate wild animal suffering (that feels like the "train to crazy town" to me), and I consider that the standards that apply to animals apply to me.
Ultimately, I think that if I were intellectually persuaded that a larger project to eliminate wild animal suffering made sense -- that we were trapped in a horrific suffering-hell as a result of blind evolution and that we should fix this -- then I would be on board with changing my diet, regardless of points 1-3.
The problem is that such arguments seem so far-fetched to me that I don't feel particularly interested in engaging with them. I know they're out there, in fact I know that some people have proposed we should launch an intergalactic voyage to wipe out all life in the accessible universe in order to eliminate as much suffering as possible. Those are in the category of "arguments I know exist and don't care to engage with."
I think that is why I, personally, eat meat. I don't find the ethical argument against it fundamentally persuasive, I find the immediate impact on my life to be not inconsequentially negative, and I feel there are many alternative outlets for moral improvement that *are* worth my time, such that pursuing vegetarianism/veganism would be an annoying distraction. In fact, it would feel like giving in to social pressure out of weird shame or timid compliance, which feels repugnant to me. So there's a lot of pretty deep emotional and intellectual stuff to work through. And I consider myself vastly, vastly more willing to introspect about this stuff than 99.9% of humanity. If even I can't be persuaded to adopt vegetarianism, then I think we're all stuck with meat eating as a global norm until we find a satisfactory cell cultured substitute (or bioengineer the happy-to-be-slaughtered cow from the Restaurant at the End of the Universe).
>the man would not only get beaten up but would serve time in prison.
Would either happen if it was his own dog on his own property?
If a pig was wandering around a neighborhood and you did the same to it then I expect you'd have just as much chance of getting beaten up or thrown in prison than if you did it to a dog.
>>"Would either happen if it was his own dog on his own property?"
Yes. If a man was abusing animals in his home, he would be arrested. This is quite common.
Re the pig. Yes. I agree. If I did it inside my house I'd too be thrown in prison for doing it there also. And yet if I did it in a factory, I wouldn't. I can stun them and steer them into the gas chamber legally.
So a man could walk up to a puppy in the street, torture it and then choke it to death/slit it's throat, and not only is that legal, but you wouldn't go to the effort of saying 'stop', which would make the man stop instantly?
There is no difference between the two cases except for cultural tradition. Dogs and humans have co-evolved and we feel some degree of social kinship with them. That would prevent me from eating a dog but I don't have any problems whatsoever with someone else doing so. It happens regularly in several Asian cultures. Are you arguing that they're singularly barbaric? The French eat horses too. So what?
Animals torture and eat each other and have throughout all history. Humans have no moral obligation whatsoever to opt out of that natural evolutionary equilibrium.
You agree there is no justification for what we're doing to these animals in slaughterhouses given we'd be appalled at someone doing it to a different species, right?
You're misreading very badly. Extending moral consideration to non-human animals is a category error. They don't matter, never have mattered, and never will matter. IMO people who care about this are just projecting their own emotional dysfunction. They feel like powerless victims and so projectively identify with a category of things that appear to also be powerless victims.
Yes, they matter in an instrumental sense. That is their only source of moral value: their instrumental utility to humans.
My claim is that they have no intrinsic moral value. If it's in humanity's collective long-term interest to torture animals then in my view that's what should happen. Draft animals are essentially slaves to humans. Do you think that's in any way immoral?
"Animals don't matter, never have mattered and never will matter"
Does your pet matter? How about your children?
To be clear, you're saying that you disregard animals that much that even when possessed with the power to stop the attacker by saying "stop", you would *not* stop him torturing and delimbing the dog because the dog doesn't matter to you?
My pets matter *to me*. I don't expect them to matter to anyone else. Certainly not society, at least not beyond its interest in enforcing simple property rights. Children aren't animals and the fact that you would even think to conflate the two categories speaks very very poorly to your moral and intellectual maturity.
> the dog doesn't matter to you?
That's correct. Animals don't matter. Animals don't appear to care about torturing or murdering each other so why should I feel compelled to care about torturing or murdering them? I don't care about the veal calf or the foie gras goose beyond wishing that there were more of them.
Do you think killing a dog should be a capital offense? Or, if you don't believe in capital punishment, on par with murdering a human?
Animals don't care because they can't, not because they shouldn't. Nails don't care about being driven into the skulls of human babies but that's not why we don't do it. Animals mattering less than humans doesn't mean they don't matter at all.
It's a disingenuous guilt trip. If you want a real comparison, you could compare it to putting dogs down at the vet, or at the shelters. Except they don't eat them afterward, so, you know, much better.
How on earth is putting the dog down at the vet a fair comparison?
Am I reading this correctly? Never have I ever seen anything so utterly insane on this topic -- I can only assume you mistyped.
If you didn't mistype, please explain how it's possible that one can say that putting the dog down at the vet is a better comparison to what goes on in slaughterhouses and abattoirs.
By focusing exclusively on the vet, are you conceding the point about the shelters, or are you saying you didn't have the attention span to read that far?
We kill animals to make space. The only difference between killing a chicken or cow and killing a cat, dog, bird or rat is that we actually get value from the meat. If we didn't, we would still kill the cows and chickens for the space.
Now you try. If a man in the street walked up to a rat and choked it to death, would you beat him up and imprison him?
I can't believe people have this poor a grasp of what veganism is and yet enter debates about it.
I'll give my reply to this that I did not receive a reply to:
"If the rat attacks someone or is just causing carnage etc, then the rat should be dealt with in a way that minimises it's suffering.
If that is not the case, and the rat is not doing anything, why would I want an innocent rat to be subject to being tortured and then choked needlessly?
If a chicken mutated to 6ft tall and started stealing candy from the shop I would support the shop-owner putting some anti-chicken spray at the door as well."
You have the inherent assumption here that being vegan is the correct moral choice, supported by language gauged to provoke an emotional response.
Why are animals superior to plants? Both are living things. Yet it is likely you will happily and fleetingly display the severed reproductive organs of plants because of their pleasing appearance and perhaps odor, for weddings, funerals, or just because. Yet plants expend great resources in producing their flowers, in the hope that some few may produce more plants.
Nature does not have moral standards. Only people have them, as society has evolved. Nature's way is basically do whatever you want and can, and let the consequences fall where they may.
Let me just elbow in here and say that tons of studies show sentience among plants, at least equal to low-sentience animals. Lots of species have community level communication responses to things like being damaged by animals, not to mention things like moving towards light and water or away from danger.
This is not particularly scientific, which isn't necessarily a problem per-se, but again this is by far the strangest argument non-vegans can make for why they choose to eat animals and not plants.
Absolutely no one doubts that animals are sentient.
There is *not* consensus amongst researchers that plants are sentient.
In the event that plants *are* sentient, the question then becomes, all-else-equal would you rather 'torture and choke (?)' the plant, or 'torture and choke' the chicken/cow?
Which one do you think causes more suffering?
And again, this is giving you a huge runway and granting (despite no consensus whatsoever) that the hypothetical of plants being sentient is true. I am granting you that. It's not, but I'm granting it you for the purpose of this debate.
I’m no arguing for eating animals at all. I’m actually vegan multiple times a week. I’m just saying that claiming veganism is about sentience is r***rded.
Setting aside the question of how one can know that plants aren't sentient, why does sentience take a higher place of prominence so that it is accorded special privilege?
The logic is extended as far as you wish. People are a part of nature, and have a consensus of moral standards, but nature doesn't care what the standards are, nor even that they exist. People, as a species, believe they are better off with them, for if they weren't, then they wouldn't have them.
I think this argument reduces to the absurd: How can you know that humans other than yourself are sentient? And why would it matter?
Most people would intuitively feel that people and animals have some kind of moral relevance. We can't PROVE consiousness is other beings (that's the hard problem of consciousness), but it seems obvious that people and animals can feel.
My argument isn't about whether anything is sentient, but why sentience should, from first principles, make it a particular protected class. Rather like claiming marble is the superior flooring material, for its strength and patterning, so one would be foolish to make a floor with any other material, if one can afford it.
I haven't read much about this point of view, but a priori, it seems excedingly likely that sentience implies **some** kind of moral relevance in the subject.
I'd like to hear the case against this. In case you don't feel the need to write a comment describing it, can you recommend any reading material?
I can't help but feel you just have never even read a single thing on animal-welfare/veganism/vegetarianism, which of course is absolutely no issue whatsoever with no context, but to come on here and respond whilst knowing quite literally 0 I find strange? What do you expect to happen here?
We know plants are not sentient because researchers study it and deduce that there's a greater possibility that they are not then that they are.
Even in the event they are, are you suggesting that the sentience of a plant is equal to that of an animal?
If so, to which animal? To be very clear, people are actually vegan on many things. They would *not* torture and choke far more animals then they would given they do not need to choke any. The question is how they've reached that they are comfortable torturing and choking the ones they do.
I/vegans posit that there is no symmetry breaker, nor trait, that can reasonably separate, say, a chicken to a dog.
If you feel there is, now is the time to say.
If you feel that there is not, but that the alternative (eating plants) is *worse*, then now is your time to say why.
I, and vegans, posit that the total suffering suffered by plants even in the unlikely event they turn out to be sentient is OOM less than the suffering suffered by those in slaughterhouses.
It's a really simple logic tree. If you disagree on something, state where and why.
I'm trying to show there is no fundamental principle to favor one life form over another.
I set aside the subject of sentience, but you seem to feel that sentience is a bright line to divide those which merit our moral consideration and those that do not. But if you go deep enough, you will find the bright line becomes dimmer. You say it is obvious that plants aren't sentient. Are fungi? Viruses? Bacteria? Robots?
Veganism has what sounds initially like a noble goal: reduce suffering as much as possible. But vegans choose their own ways of defining suffering. Vegans won't "exploit" cows for their milk, though if the cows aren't milked regularly they suffer great pain. Vegans won't "exploit" sheep for their wool, though sheared sheep are more comfortable than un-sheared sheep. Ask the cows and sheep which they would prefer. Or perhaps you might know better than they do themselves, and don't milk them or shear them for their own good.
But your original toy example is an obvious straw man: "If a man in the street walked up to a dog, smothered it, choked it to death, chopped it's legs off and proceeded to eat it" could apply to anything, let alone a dog, including the following: a person, a mouse, a fly, or even a head of lettuce!
If we do not go on sentience then what *should* we go off?
You haven't answered a single question. I feel like you don't actually know anything about veganism or vegetarianism, if I'm being completely honest.
Re my apparent strawman. You've single-handedly proven what I'm saying. Go ahead, replace the dog with a person. This is something you offered as the first alternative, so let's go with that.
How would you feel about this?
In the event you had the power to stop him by saying "Please stop", would you say it?
It seems like you already know the answer and are asking to try to make people’s desire for self-consistency make them rethink the consumption of meat.
Norms around the treatment of animals is cultural, and partially religious. People eat the specific animals they do not because of any moral theory, but because not eating meat is a huge inconvenience, is less enjoyable, and requires more active monitoring of your own health.
The % of the population that’s vegan has actually been stagnant or even decreasing in recent years, and I think that’s because the argument you’re making is a losing one as far as mass-appeal goes.
"People eat the specific animals they do not because of any moral theory"
-- Yes...what do you think vegans (or any animal lovers) are trying to do? We're aware that the morals are not considered by people who should consider it.
"but because not eating meat is a huge inconvenience"
-- Why is it an inconvenience? You shop in the same supermarket. You drive the same car. You queue in the same queue at McDonalds. What do people think going vegan/vege means? Do you think all vegans have uprooted their entire village and rebuilt it from scratch?
"is less enjoyable"
-- Serial-killers love murdering. Is this really justification for their actions?
-- Your natural response here will be "this is humans, that's illegal", to which I say that I'm aware. What is your symmetry breaker?
"requires more monitoring of your own health"
-- Which vegan do you know who now has to actively monitor their health more?
-- Vegans consistently live longer, report far fewer CVD events, report higher quality of and happiness levels and provide a better planet for their children to play on. Where are you getting that they have to start monitoring their health more? I've never even heard this argument before.
Vegan here. It's an inconvenience. If you're cooking a curry and you're going for chicken rather than lentils or chickpeas, sure, whatever, it's a wash. If you're hungry and you don't know what to cook and you've got two steaming kids about to pop and a partner who isn't up for another round of tofu, being able to cook meat and vegies would be so much easier.
If I had Michelin star chefs compare the food I eat to what other people eat, I think it would be in the top 10% regarding taste. Top 10% for healthy too, but only because I eat a huge range of things regularly (nuts, seeds, pulses, grains etc.), not everyone wants to do that. And top 10% for effort.
Most people don't want to be top 10% for effort. Not after a day of work. And if there's one thing I know about humans, it's that they'll justify the low effort thing over the high effort thing - not just high effort cooking, but also _changing_ what you do. Coming up with new things to cook is fun if you like it and blows if you don't.
I appreciate the thoughts though mate, and I totally agree with you on the dog/chicken/cow situation, and I think many of the responses aren't genuine attempts to have a go at your question (the CGP grey youtube link was totally irrelevant, continuing barbaric practices just because they're traditions makes no sense).
Also, if you want an argument, you have it here in the thread. If you wanted to understand, you should have framed your question differently and responded with curiosity.
Hi mate. I agree it's an inconvenience, I just don't think it's nearly as big as non-vegans think.
I think they think that vegans uproot their entire house and street.
Like, the majority of people it seems wouldn't even say"Vegan burger, please" instead of "Chicken burger, please" when they're in the line at McDonalds.
Can I ask: do you try to actively spread awareness about this? Or have you just accepted defeat?
I say accepted defeat because one user in this thread said that they would only find issue with a man torturing, choking and delimbing a dog if the dog's barks were annoying him, and that even with the power of being able to stop the man by saying "stop", they wouldn't as the dog isn't his.
I am genuinely asking, how does one continue to see the world/humanity after reading something like this?
I'm a consequentialist. People don't like what you're doing, so it's totally ineffective. There's possibly some alternate universe where everyone is logic, but just hasn't thought of the "we shouldn't torture animals" thing yet and you show them the argument and they convert. That's not this universe. In this universe (I think) the best you can do is to do what you think is right (be a vegan yourself) and show (don't tell) others that it's not that badn and that you don't need to be an asshole about it, AND CRUCIALLY don't have any arguments about what they're doing (you can occasionally make an argument, but not if it's going to lead to an argument).
I grew up on a sheep farm. I ate loads of lamb and beef and chicken and everything else delicious and it was delicious and for a while in my early 20s I knew it was wrong but I kept doing it, then eventually I stopped. I totally understand people who are still doing it. Meat's delicious. It's easy. Habits are hard to change. The people that convinced me along the way didn't do it the way you're doing it. They did challenge my logic, but not by arguing with me - the arguers only made me dig in deeper. Here were the steps:
1. 2010 Hobart house party chill convo, just chatting, no arguing. I remember being theoretically converted here saying something like "you're probably right, but I don't want to change what I'm doing".
2. 2015 Dresden couchsurfing host wasn't vegan, just ate very little meat, we didn't even talk about it much beyond him saying "I don't eat much meat because it ain't good to", and I just saw it and thought "yeah, that seems admirable"
3. 2015 Trujillo fellow volunteer turned down the chicken for an inferior option, we didn't talk about it, I just followed suit the next day
4. 2016 Sao Paolo, probably. At this point I think I read a blog post or something like that and since then have been more or less vegan
Maybe this process could have been accelerated FOR ME, but not much. Key point: the people mentioned in 1 - 3 were people I liked. I liked the way they handled themselves, they were kind and generous and just lovely people. I think that's why they were persuasive to me.
So, in terms of the consequences of actions, I think it would be better (i.e. better in terms of achieving the goal of converting people to eating less meat thus reducing suffering) if all vegans acted in a more positive way about everything, admitted that it's more effort to cook equally delicious food, admitted that it can be difficult for some people to meet their nutritional needs and that those people should not be fully vegan, admit that change is difficult and hey, here's a simple, cheap, easy recipe that you could make once a fortnight to get you started, and just to be a nice person that other people want to be like. Sure, every now and then, if you can do it in a humerous way you can give someone a questioning look when they say something like "I love animals", or say something like "yeah man, dogs are totally smarter and better and more important than pigs" when they say something moral about Chinese people killing dogs. But you have to live in the real world, the one we have, which is one in which people don't like the way you've gone about this. Maybe in the morning (I dunno what time zone you're in), ask a friend who eats meat to read through this thread (some of it, it's massive) and ask them to give you feedback on who sounds like a c*** (or use your profanity of choice), and while other people might be WRONG, it seems to be you being a C*** (I'm not calling you a c***, just making a statement about how it comes across, remember I think you're right about most stuff and more logically compassionate about these things). My first rule of morality is "don't be a c***", because any situation in which you think you have to be, you are probably just not seeing a solution where you can effectively do the same thing without being a c***.
Regarding the "I'm the one who looks like a cunt", I'm saddened to read this. Of course all non-vegans will side with the other non-vegans, which you point out. We could extend this logic to countless other things that either still are done or used to be done and we'd arrive that, say, those who were pleaing, begging, screaming for Auschwitz to stop were cunts. Of course looking back it was these 'cunts' who managed to alert the world.
I appreciate your stances though, so I'd be curious if you think the above doesn't apply. I.e., those who would have been deemed 'cunts' for screaming about the terrors back then would not have been deemed cunts, but that vegans who take an aggressive stance are.
Just quickly on this aggressive stance. Since I posted the initial comment, I've tried going the soft approach: ignore 90% of the reply and just ask a single question to try and find where their symmetry breaker is. They've all just stopped replying.
I think ultimately it's a hopeless battle whatever you do: the average person will see a vegan as crazy for not wanting to torture an animal when it's not necessary. I don't think even Superman could debate some compassion into these people.
I can't tell if you're being deliberately naive, or this is just your first time trying to understand why people aren't Vegan.
If you're just trying to push people to admit a moral failing, rather than try to understand, this is partially the reason why Vegans have a bad reputation.
My concern is that the argument you're making is disingenuous.
Like, you're pretending that going vegan entails no inconvenience, requires no additional effort to remain healthy and compare eating meat to serial killers. Your analogy isn't actually useful, as there are many reasons we wouldn't be comfortable with someone executing then dismembering an animal in the street, dog or not. If in your mind the practice of eating meat is on an equivalent level to bludgeoning someone with a pickaxe, then I think you need to realize you're on a completely different level than 99% of humanity.
The health risks are just one part of it. This isn't the determining factor for me personally, as I'm just not the sort of person any of your arguments would appeal to. However, the way you're arguing seems to have zero charity for even trying to understand why someone *might* not want to be Vegan.
Okay, please we need to just focus on a single part.
I'm going to go with your concern over health risks, okay? Fair? Or would you prefer I go over another concern, such as it being a disingenuous comparison?
It's the fact that social consensus says dogs are bad to eat and chickens are not. There doesn't even need to be any reasoning behind that consensus for it to have formed. What's difficult to understand here?
"So was slavery. And child labor. And attempted eugenics of people with Down syndrome. And invading people's camps and bludgering them to death with a pickaxe. Why don't we do these things anymore?"
These things were never a social consensus. From the very beginning slavery was reviled (not least by the actual slaves), and invasion and murder has never been acceptable, people just didn't have any power to stop it. Eugenics was accepted for a very short moment in history and then quickly discarded once people caught on.
Eating meat is something the entire world does, besides certain pockets. The vegans are ultimately correct, but i don't see why you have trouble understanding the differences in social consensus?
In the countries where prenatal diagnostics is nigh universal, the vast majority of confirmed Downs are aborted voluntarily, to the degree that there are ~ none left in certain yearly cohorts.
We may or may not call this eugenics, but it seems to be the social consensus.
In your story, there was no indication that the dog was owned by the man. Wild dogs are less prevalent where most Americans live, so the first assumption would be that it belonged to someone else. Livestock are overwhelmingly killed by their owners (or at least employees doing it on behalf of said owners).
Just play out your own logic. Keep consistent and tell me where you end up at.
If someone owns a dog and at night you can hear the dog constantly being tortured, lives with chains and gets gassed to stop barking, what are you doing?
Nothing, because it's on the other side of the wall?
"What is the symmetry breaker between this dog and, say, a chicken or a cow?"
Simple: Europeans bonded with dogs for survival purposes, which they did not do with cows (indeed, a large use case for the dogs was in controlling the cattle). Therefore, our culture still assigns quasi-humanity to dogs as a privilege. In cultures which did not bond with dogs, this taboo does not exist and they are seen as either a legitimate food source or vermin. You'll observe that there are likewise cultures where cows specifically are held to be above slaughter and consumption, while e.g. goats are not. However, this is not a problem, because cultural differences are permitted; we do not need to universalize down to the lowest common denominator of regarding *all* animals as feckless vermin/food sources.
"We know that eating meat is not essential, otherwise vegans would not on average be healthier and live longer with fewer nutrient deficiencies."
"Essential" is not the relevant criterion here, not even close. We know that nutraloaf gives all essential nourishment to a person, but feeding prisoners nutraloaf is considered a violation of their human rights anyway. Humans are an omnivorous species and meat is the most effective way for us to achieve a nutritionally complete diet, as well as pleasing and satisfactory to all our instincts.
"torturing it for it's entire life and then murdering it via gas chamber"
Industrial farming is made necessary by the number of humans in the world. The only fix for it is to do away with 98% or so of the human population of the planet, which is also beset with well known ethical issues. In the interim, only prissy, sanctimonious upper middle class people will be able to buy a sense of superiority by purchasing "ethical meat".
"for the purpose of a subjectively slightly nicer tasting burger?"
It's objectively significantly nicer-tasting. Vegetarians are vastly overrepresented among the cohort of those who lack the ability to taste umami. Failure to comprehend this biological fact of flavor is almost disqualifying on its own. You're like a blind person trying to fight state expenditures on road signs because they're not essential for navigation.
"Why don't we do these things anymore?"
We stopped slavery, child labor and euthanizing Downies because we became prosperous enough to afford to. If that ends, those policies stop. Guarantee it. We never really started bludgeoning people to death with pickaxes because a pickaxe is an appallingly clumsy weapon, we've always preferred better ones like maces, macuahuitls, swords, and so on. Pickaxes were always a weapon of opportunity or necessity, such as if you happen to be in a mining camp and otherwise unarmed. If you're ever in the situation of being in a mining camp with nothing but a pickaxe at hand and being credibly threatened, you'll start bludgeoning. What's animal in the others is animal in you too.
In conclusion, your life-hating philosophy is contemptible and has predictably dystopian consequences if it were ever implemented. I advise you to reach the age of fifteen. It's the only known cure for this combination of ignorance and smugness.
"In conclusion, your life-hating philosophy is contemptible and has predictably dystopian consequences if it were ever implemented. I advise you to reach the age of fifteen. It's the only known cure for this combination of ignorance and smugness."
I would respond: less of bad-faith arguments by shrill vegans pretending to want to discuss their ideas but actually just trying to convert others without being willing in the slightest to examine their own ideas and be converted away from veganism to the same extent they expect others to be willing to convert to it!
Your conclusion is top notch, though I'd pick a fight on taste.
I think my vegan diet compares favourably with what most people eat most of the time, it's just a lot more effort. Like, fresh, homemade falafel from chickpeas you've soaked yourself is just so fantastic at the top end. And the curries I eat would beat out the frozen lasagne or steak in the median-taste home in the nearby suburb. Burgers are a tough one because I think you can make a nice vegan pattie, but the cheap meat one just does such a good job in the context of a well put together burger, that the extra effort just feels bad if you think about it (which I usually don't). I think ceteris paribus, converting to veganism would result in a dramatically worse tasting diet, but if you're willing to put in 5x the amount of effort you currently do, you can bring it back up to on a par or better.
Do you genuinely think we could go back to slavery? Under what conditions?
Also, I can imagine using the handle of a pickaxe to block an edged weapon if necessary, but swinging the thing offensively seems like a terrible move - I'd rather go unarmed.
"Like, fresh, homemade falafel from chickpeas you've soaked yourself is just so fantastic at the top end. And the curries I eat would beat out the frozen lasagne or steak in the median-taste home in the nearby suburb."
Have you ever eaten freshly slaughtered lamb? Supermarket corn mush beef hasn't got a patch on free-range steer meat. And so on. I'm convinced your claim is true the way you frame it, but quintuple the effort you put into the meat diet and it's back to a huge gap.
"Do you genuinely think we could go back to slavery? Under what conditions?"
I think one of the more doomerist climage change scenarios could do it. Hell, neither the Arabs nor the Indians have ever really given it up, and I have my suspicions of a lot of the Africans; c.f. the mention of ritual servitude elsewhere in this comment thread.
Basically, anything that would reset the human world to 17th century conditions would bring slavery back with it. Give it a generation or two, maybe. It's not a coincidence that Britain, the richest and the first industrialized country in the world, was the one to unilaterally abolish an institution which had existed for all of human time. It's downstream of material conditions.
"Also, I can imagine using the handle of a pickaxe to block an edged weapon if necessary, but swinging the thing offensively seems like a terrible move - I'd rather go unarmed."
Well, my argument to begin with was that it's a pretty awful weapon, so I'm with you in spirit, and in any case your choice of arms is your prerogative – pay your nickel and take your chances. For my part, though, if the other guy had even so much as a knife I'd rather trust anything with longer reach than the knife over just my bare hands.
Oh man, grew up on a sheep farm. Lamb is so good, though from memory we hung it for a few days, so I haven't had it fresh. I was a cutlets guy, but it was all good. I'm excited about lamb to the same degree but in a slightly different way to the falafel dinner. I can't say that the falafel is better, just in the same tier. If it was a 1v1 no ties, lamb wins. I agree that it's a tonne of work to get vegan food to be as delicious as an easily-made meat meal. I'm just saying it's possible to get it into the same tier, though I am comparing what I eat now as a 30 year old to what I ate as a teen/early 20s guy, which isn't really fair.
You might be right about slavery. I can't imagine that there isn't another option which is more humane, but I haven't thought about it very long.
Knife over pickaxe every day of the week. I'd possibly prefer the handle of a pickaxe to a knife, but it's like 3 kg of metal on the end of a stick. 4o says knife easily, sonnet says pickaxe, gemini says decisively knife. I can't imagine landing a hit on someone with a pickaxe, but maybe I'm just not strong enough. And I think if you miss the first swing, you're toast. I also can't imagine blocking a knife with a pickaxe, based on speed. I'd be trying to dodge, which is only going to be slower with a pickaxe.
"Lamb is so good, though from memory we hung it for a few days, so I haven't had it fresh."
Oh, that's what I'm calling fresh. I mean as opposed to getting the cutlets out of a cooler in the supermarket, or frozen. As for the rest of this passage, I think we're more or less in agreement, or sufficiently close at any rate that there's nothing to really discuss. I think that your various assertions and caveats are all reasonable.
As for the slavery, I think it's not really about what's more humane, simply because people don't sit down and make a collective moral calculus in that way; societal outcomes are more like the sum of a large quantity of kneejerk reactions to individual circumstances. If society were to decay to the point where we were back to windjammers and donkeys, swords and flintlocks, some people would become pirates and others slavers due to their personal circumstances, not because a benevolent central planner or common council couldn't come up with a better job for them.
I probably would also prefer a knife over a pickaxe if I had to choose between those two, but if you already picked the knife and I have to choose between a pickaxe and my bare hands to defend myself, I'll take the pickaxe.
I don't profess to be an expert in prehistoric livestock distribution! It's entirely reasonable, especially since sheep are smaller so you'd need more head for the same mass of meat. I just stuck with the cows for rhetorical reasons.
I have no objection to people eating whatever they want, up to and including a light lunch. I frequently don't eat lunch myself, so that I can have a bigger breakfast which I find I prefer.
I also agree that calorie-dense diets are highly necessary for people with strenuous jobs, and that meat is almost certainly more efficacious as a source of nutrition in these cases. I think I read somewhere that preindustrial farmers would consume 5-6000 calories daily during the sowing and harvesting seasons.
Animals eat plants to have energy and expend energy for growing, maintaining inner homeostasis and movement. Therefore it is very likely that the calories provided by an animal carcass is significantly less than the calories it took to produce that carcass.
Because of this it would be extremely surprising if your claim that doing away with industrial animal farming would lead to insufficient food and decrease human population to 2%.
I have no information on this, merely priors, so maybe you can elaborate and convince me.
I didn't say it would lead to insufficient food, in the sense of nutrients required to sustain human life (refer to the nutraloaf part for a note on this line of thinking). I said it would lead to an insufficient quantity of meat to satisfy human desire for meat, that is, you would be required to be inhumane toward your fellow man in order to satisfy this pious concern for the moral value of animals. That constitutes real brutality, the evil mentality of a Mrs. De Ropp tormenting those in their power "for their own good".
> Industrial farming is made necessary by the number of humans in the world
No. We massively overproduce meat. In the US, it's cheaper than it should be because of government subsidies, but the actual optimal production of food for human consumption would have way less meat compared to plant sources. And in many cases, industrial practices inflict immense harm to animals for a puny gain in production, because market forces, yo. We absolutely can afford to cut industrial farming by leagues.
You mean vast quantities spoil and are thrown away? This isn't my impression.
"the actual optimal production of food for human consumption would have way less meat compared to plant sources"
You're making the same mistake as Ramblings, thinking "optimal" denotes an arbitrary quantity you can fix intellectually (in his case, evidently zero). I think I saw you mention being Russian, so I guess I can excuse this affection for central planning as being involuntarily Sovietpilled from birth.
"Where do you stand on cultures in the third-world that do unspeakable things to children as the norm, even disabled ones?"
I'm afraid you're going to have to speak the unspeakable things if you want me to pass judgment on them. Otherwise this just appears to be some sort of weird racism.
Female circumcision is in most cases far less severe than male circumcision and activists just call it "genital mutilation" as a histrionic manipulation tactic to make people think every case is like the worst, so overall I'm fine with it. Abolish male circumcision first, then we can talk.
I'm pretty solidly against the other ones, but they seem to be worthless analogies for eating meat since children, unlike animals, have moral value. Also, I'm "comfortable" with them in the sense that trying to extirpate these customs would no doubt cause more trouble than they're worth. Don't get me wrong, killing is man's way and there's nothing wrong with that as such, but conquering Afghanistan hasn't worked out super well historically.
Your argument, to the extend I understand it, goes:
Let us assume that killing and eating dogs was not morally justified but killing and eating cows was
⇒ (1) Then there must be a principled reason to distinguish between dogs and cows that make dogs more worthy of moral consideration or somesuch
⇒ (2) You cannot find any such principled reason and suspect there isn't any
⇒ (3) If there isn't then dogs and cows should be worthy of the same measure of moral consideration -- which is a contradiction to our earlier assumption that eatings dogs is bad, eating cows is aokay
So basically proof by contradiction.
There are several points this could be argued against, but mainly it loses me at (1). I do not require a principled reason to decide how much moral value I assign to anything.
>I do not require a principled reason to decide how much moral value I assign to anything.
Given that history is rife with examples of mass atrocity against those to whom the perpetrators assigned minimal moral value, one would think that you very much do need a principled reason for deciding how much moral value you assign.
It is borderline impossible to have a principled, consistent moral relationship toward animals though. Vegans certainly don't, though they come closer than the average normie who's horrified by other cultures eating dogs.
Well, I was referring to the general case (as was OP, as I understand them), not just e animals per se.
Besides, I think you overstate the case. Was Jeremy Bentham's principle illegitimate? ("The question is not, Can they reason? nor, Can they talk? but, Can they suffer?")
That's what I'm saying: it's a nice principle in theory, but you cannot really live by it. At least, living by it would require something waaay more extreme than just being vegan.
Having a principled reason for how much moral value to assign is neither necessary nor sufficient to prevent these atrocities. Much as I sometimes wish it was.
Perhaps. or perhaps not. But having no principled reason sure makes it easier to assign lower moral values to those potential victims, and hence makes such atrocities more likely.
Hmm, I don't think most people would attack 1, usually people have some innate drive to refer to broader/more general principles and self-reflect to harmonize their moral inutitions on different levels.
For example: Someone punches me in the face for no reason. I strongly feel that this was immoral, but when I punch someone in the face for no reason, I feel the immorality intuitively much less. Is it possible that when I punch someone in the face that is more moral than when someone punches ME in the face? Maybe, but I think lots of people would instead say that the general principle of "morality is impartial" should override my immediate moral intuitions and I should agree that they are equally immoral.
Usually in debates involving morality, people make arguments in a similar vein (invoking more general principles). Are you completely ad-hoc? Do you never make arguments to others involving morality or do you just not listen to others' arguments? Honestly, it seems a bit unlikely to me.
I agree that most people would not attack (1) and that people tend to attempt to harmonize their moral intuitions. I used to be in that camp, I no longer am.
The way I feel this works is that people come up with moral frameworks that are relatively simple and match our moral intuitions 95% of the time. When somebody brings up one of these 5% of cases people tend to respond in one of three ways:
1. They decide the moral framework is right and our moral intuition is wrong
2. They decide the moral intuition is right, so the moral framework is wrong. But the framework can be tweaked slightly so that it matches our moral intuitions in this case as well
3. They decide that perhaps the moral intuition is right and the moral framework is wrong and that it's not worth adjusting the moral framework
I don't see the point in 1: No matter how internally consistent your framework, certain repugnant conclusions are repugnant and I would rather throw away the moral framework than kill somebody for their body parts (or whatever other repugnant conclusion the given moral framework endorses)
I don't see the point in 2: I would go with this if I believed it was possible to construct an internally coherent framework that avoided repugnant conclusions. People have _tried_, I've never seen anything that looks like success to me
That leaves 3 by process of elimination.
If you feel 2 is possible then go for it, more power to you.
But I believe most people are actually 3, they've just not thought about it in those terms.
Today they might be in favor of shooting down a passenger plane headed for a sky scraper because better 300 people die than 3000.
Tomorrow they might sentence SBF because they believe fraud is bad even if your gamble pays off and you end up having the money.
There's no unified moral theory here and, frankly, that works for me.
As for debating morality, I feel it still works well enough. I have enough shared values with most people I meet that we can argue based on those values and it doesn't really matter why we believe what we believe.
And it's not like I roll the die every time a moral judgement comes up, my moral beliefs are logically consistent for the most part. I just know that in some key areas they are logically inconsistent and that is fine with me.
I agree with this here. I think we just aren't 100% morally logical and consistent creatures and that we simply value some things more than others. I'm done pretending otherwise in favor of the Utilitarian Consequentialism God.
A favorite example of mine is when vegans get the (bad faith, sure) question if they would save a child or an animal from a burning building. Many of them panic and bend over backwards trying to find some weird argument why they would save the child but that does not mean they think the Beautiful Sentient Animal is worth any less. And I'm not vegan but I'm still sitting here like, mate, just admit there's no reason for it in particular, you just value the child more for deep biological reasons rather than logical. That doesn't degrade your veganism and you can still argue in favor of it.
I require no symmetry breaker, I just value dogs more than cows regardless of how internally consistent that may or may not be.
I also value my dog more than other dogs and my family more than other humans and I require no special reason for that either. That fact that I do is entirely enough for me.
"(I have no symmetry breaker)...regardless of how internally consistent that may or may not be."
-- There is nothing else that needs to be said from my POV. All my intention was was to showcase how people are not consistent and that they actually do not have anyway to justify it.
All I'd ask now is, given you are able to live perfectly fine (ironically, better and longer while spending less and giving your children a better planet) without the torturing-and-murder of the animal, whether you'd consider giving it a go.
Who knows, you might also report greater happiness and QAL levels (it's hard not too!).
Then I cannot proceed any further as I'm not sure what else there is to say.
If you yourself think you do not need to justify why torturing and then killing an animal to have a subjectively nicer tasting burger is required then, genuinely, what can any vegan ever say to convince you?
They're sentient, they have a CNS, they have a brain, they (try) to run and hide when it thunders or when fireworks go off, they (try to) cling to their mums when they are born.
These are all traits that dogs have, and yet most humans feel nauseous at the thought of dogs going through this and then ordering DogBurger.
I pivoted from vegetarian (for moral reasons) to eating beef again a few years ago (for mostly health reasons).
My reasoning:
- I felt unhealthy and would regularly undernourish
- Eating vegan didn’t feel like food. I didn’t feel hungry, instead I just felt weak and would get sick often. I literally couldn’t get the calories needed into my body
- I don’t like cooking so mostly eat out. That means street food which doesn’t usually have vegan protein option, best case its falafel
- Cows are the only livestock for whom QALY computation turns out to be positive
Anyway I’m taking half of my daily calories in the form of soylent, now. I’m eating beef twice a day, pork and chicken once a month (when strained for options).
Would love if you could help me figure out how to feel alive without killing cows. I’d eat lab meat but I never saw it in grocery stores
It was on the older Scott post from about 7 years ago. I don’t remember the name.
I have seen the number come up again in other places.
The main idea is that cows don’t survive in physical restraint so they can’t be bred like pigs or chicken in a small cage. Cows mostly roam free until the last weeks of life when they are stuffed with food endlessly
also yes having the kids taken away at birth is still a horrible experience for mom cows.
I wish some producer would start advertising this for the city consumer - “calves stay with mother x weeks.”
I was once in Central Market bleating to the cheese stocker, where is the spreadable strawberry goat cheese from the farm in East Texas? (It had quite a following.)
The employee explained apologetically that the goats at that operation do have to give birth and nurse their young at that time of year.
This somewhat common response of, essentially "I tried it and it didn't work for me"
I can't help but see this as completely equal to something like, say, "I've tried driving and it didn't work for me", or "I've tried studying and I don't learn anything"
To be clear: if your daughter came home and said that she tried studying and it didn't work, you'd reply "Well, that's valid. You're good at Xbox though"?
Valid in the sense that it's completely possible to just not be able to do something. I could have avoided a lot of problems in my life, if I had not been so stubborn and learned to give up earlier if things don't seem to be working out.
If my daughter is systematically unable to study despite trying hard, she might have a major learning disability, and in that case it's definitely the bad choice to just keep pushing to do her schoolwork. The correct action would be to find some other way for her to get on her feet, maybe a remedial school, or a vocation that doesn't require too much studying
And in the event she does not have a learning disability?
(I understand here you're arguing that perhaps some individuals just require the burger to function, perhaps due to their biochemistry. To this I'd ask you to expand further. We know there can be common absurdly-easy-to-fix nutrient deficiencies in a vegan diet, but nutrient deficiencies also occur in omnivorous diets. The question remains why do vegans, even with let's say a 10% greater *risk* of x nutrient deficiency, why do they still live longer, report greater happiness levels, spend less on food, suffer less CVD events or GP visits, all while ensuring that their children live on a better planet when they grow up?)
Did you supplement B12 and iron? Have you checked that you were not low on those? It's a common deficiency for veg*ans and it could cause your symptoms.
Iron can, of course, come from other sources, though beef is one of the richest sources of iron.
Synthetic vitamin B12 appears to be produced through the actions of microorganisms. It is my understanding that vegans won't eat or use anything produced by an animal, even animal excretions such as honey. Microorganisms are too small to count as animals here? If so, where is the moral cutoff?
People have evolved as omnivores. Vitamin B12 deficiency is the most well-known problem with being strictly vegan, but there may be more.
Vegans, like omnivores, are varied. I don't think many would consider microorganisms worthy of moral consideration, that, to me, seems more like a common straw-vegan. They usually take into account what level of inner experience the given organism has. Mussels are much bigger than microorganisms, but many self-described vegans are okay with eating them.
Do note that I answered you because you replied to my comment, but I'm not vegan, and you will probably get more accurate info on vegan's beliefs from actual vegans.
I, personally, agree with the third part of your comment and said basically the same when I conversed with Ramblings in the last hidden thread, but I feel compelled to note here that my impression of current scientific consensus is that a plant based diet is at least as (or even more if we are comparing with SAD) healthy as an omnivore diet. I disagree with this consensus due to my ~~neuroticism~~, risk-aversion, but if you are someone who doesn't think much about occasionally taking ibuprofen for a headache, my reasons are probably not applicable to you.
Yeah, deficiencies can creep up on you over time. And to be clear, I don't blame you for not trying these, sometimes I feel like vegans are a bit too ideologically committed to admit that a vegan diet can have some unique difficulties. I've found Elizabeth's writing (and the resulting conversation in comments) useful on the topic: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/Wiz4eKi5fsomRsMbx/change-my-mind-veganism-entails-trade-offs-and-health-is-one
Yes. To go back to my comment, you essentially just started driving before you had lessons.
This isn't like some huge dig at you, of course you still recognised beforehand that it wasn't right to not be vegan. But a literal simple food swap or an absurdly cheap supplement and the #1 common deficiency could have been resolved -- remember this supplement can be bought at the same shop you were/are likely already buying some supplements from!
the moral calculus for me comes up that I am fine killing one cow a year to be able to properly function and survive.
i have had horrible experience experimenting to even understand that my diet was a problem, and still have gut issues connected with stress. i don’t think it’s worth it to go on a moral quest and waste productive weeks trying to figure out which specific thing my organism needs that meat gives me
i took some steps down the moral path, and i stopped at a specific point, which was intentionally selected. you may still argue with where the balance is, and I am open to hear than my calculations are wrong — but you can’t throw out half of the equation
One thing to consider: we breed those animals for food,and if we're weren't ready to eat them, they wouldn't have existed in the fight place. So the real moral dilemma isn't to kill them or not; it's whether to let them exist and then get eaten, or not exist at all. This is not the case with children. This is rarely the case with dogs, but when it is (like in Korea), I won't see it as equally immoral as killing a pet.
Although modern factory farming is definitely a worse fate than not existing, so I oppose that vehemently. Less hellish forms of carnivorousness, less so
I hear you. Vegans are aware of this argument, but when you pull it apart it doesn't make sense.
To be clear, you are saying the following:
"A life of torture and painful death is better than never having existed"
In which case, I'd ask if you'd extend this to children who are used as slave labor in certain third world countries?
I assume you would *not* be comfortable with this, so the next question is what is the trait that is true of a chicken or a cow that makes them not deserving of the same treatment?
As I said in the original comment, a life of torture - such as factory farming - is not better than death. I still oppose meat-eating the way it is implemented in the modern industrial society. Maybe not, if we're talking about traditional farming.
But your analogy still doesn't work, because this is not the case in your hypothetical.
Even traditional farming, in fact let's say super farming where they are injected with love into their heart to kill them while they orgasm and receive belly-rubs: how is this justified given it did *not* need to happen? We can live perfectly fine without this injection having took place? What is the justification for ending, here in nice circumstances, this innocent animals life?
To be clear, it might be quicker if you just respond with why you personally are not vegan.
Is it health reasons? Is it taste reasons? Is it you don't feel that the animals you eat were deserving of a life that you'd give to, say, your dog? Is it that you don't think they are sentient?
There is no economic possibility for us to create farm animals and then just let them live their lives. It's either give the injection, or not create the animal in the first place. Whether or not to kill an animal is not q decision you make at the very end, it's the one you make at the very beginning.
I am not vegan, because the last two times I tried to go vegan, I exhausted my willpower and cracked and just went full carnivore again, ending up not actually reducing my meat consumption in the long run. So now, I just try to eat less meat, but still not go cold turkey, and that is working out way better.
There also isn't an economic possibility to create child labor camps? They could do a hell of a lot of work and be paid peanuts. This is common practice over the globe sadly.
However, it's interesting that you've previously been vegan.
Why? What did you think before that made you want to go vegan?
As I understand it, you stopped because you basically just missed the taste of meat?
I see a lot of all-or-nothing thinking here... Have you guys tried good old vegetarianism, or flexitarianism? Go 90% of the way, tune it your way, get 90% of the moral satisfaction.
And yes, don't forget to check your B12 levels and supplement accordingly. Long-term B12 deficiency can fuck you up pretty bad.
Edit: why is no-one mentioning non-factory farmed meat? At least around here the country side is literally full of cows, I assume many of those end up cooked and eaten. Those animals have pretty decent lives as far as anyone can see.
Why is it considered a fundamental human right to be able to kill a living human being 1 minute before birth but it is considered murder to do it 1 minute after birth?
"Why is it considered a fundamental human right to be able to kill a living human being 1 minute before birth but it is considered murder to do it 1 minute after birth?"
I have read (but not confirmed) that this is NOT the case in most (maybe all) of Europe. If Europe draws a different cut-line then I'd suggest that this is NOT seen as a fundamental human right outside of the USA. In which case we'll want a USA specific answer.
Is it seen as a fundamental human right in the USA? That seems non-obvious to me given that Roe was huge point of contention for its entire lifespan and was then overturned. I don't think you can trivially assert that either Americans, or America as a political entity, regards full-term abortion as a fundamental human right.
I think you may want to attach your comment to the post at the top of this chain rather than to my claim that Europe does not seem to view late term abortion as a fundamental human right. Because I did not assert that this was a fundamental human right in the USA. I expect that the original comment was focused on the parts of the USA that do permit very late term abortion (rather than the world as a whole).
In any event, the current state of affairs in the USA is that several states have no limitations on abortion. From here:
those states seem to be: Oregon, Colorado, New Mexico, Minnesota, Michigan, Maryland, New Jersey, Alaska and Vermont.
So maybe the initial claim should be: "Why is it considered a fundamental human right in Oregon, Colorado, New Mexico, Minnesota, Michigan, Maryland, New Jersey, Alaska and Vermont to kill a living human being 1 minute before birth but it is considered murder to do it 1 minute after birth?"
To which I will try again with hopefully more clarity: Since this belief is not universal you will want a USA specific answer that focuses on these states that permit this.
No, I meant to reply to you. You said "I have read (but not confirmed) that this is NOT the case in most (maybe all) of Europe. If Europe draws a different cut-line then I'd suggest that this is NOT seen as a fundamental human right outside of the USA".
My point was, first, I think the "if" can be answered in the negative; Europe(as a whole) does not draw a different cut line than the US (as a whole). Second, your statement implied that full-term abortion is seen as a fundamental human right in the USA. I do not think this is true. However, I agree with your assessment of the status quo, as well as your clarified query. That indeed is the relevant focus.
But even if we were living in LaLaLand where this was the case, are you suggesting that X bad thing is allowed, and therefore we should allow Y bad thing?
In LaLaLand, is rap3 and abduction of toddlers allowed?
If not, I would ask you to apply your own logic and see where you end up at.
I was agreeing with you that there are often incongruencies prevalent in society regarding what is acceptable and what is not.
My opinion is the dog is not necessary for human nourishment and the random suffering/killing of animals should be considered wrong (as we are not going to eat the dog, there is no reason it should be smothered in the street), whereas the (as humane as possible) killing of animals for meat is absolutely necessary and acceptable. I don't believe for a minute that humanity could survive and be healthy only eating vegetables; animal protein has and always will be an essential part of the human diet.
The societal incongruency I mention is much more glaring because there is no obvious difference in circumstances (as there is in your example), and it is also more important because it entails human life (and not animal life).
There are quite a lot of people proving you wrong on a daily basis by surviving and living healthy lives without animal protein. There is some evidence that vegetarians actually live longer than meat eaters, though there may be confounding factors. There are even vegetarian and vegan professional athletes. How do you square that with your beliefs?
> The UN has affirmed that it is a human right and France just included it in their Constitution as a "guaranteed freedom".
Yeah, I suspect that you're leaving out some critical qualifiers like "if the life of the mother is threatened" or "if the child would suffer from serious mental or physical impairment" that would weaken your claims in the eyes of most readers, so I can't be bothered to look up your vague references to apparently infuriating instances of liberal excesses.
The vast majority of abortions are for neither of the above two reasons, (nor when the pregnancy is the result of a rape).
I can find no such qualifiers in the UN affiirmation or the French constitution. I believe they have left it "open-ended" such that it may be adaptable to the political Zeitgeist.
>why is it a "guaranteed freedom" before 14 weeks, and murder at 15 weeks?
Good question. Why don't you edit your post to ask that, rather than doubling down on a strawman?
>And the enshrining in the constitution does not mention any limits, as far as I can see.
You don't see, but you also haven't looked, have you? Because if you had, you would have found this:
>The amendment declares abortion to be a “guaranteed freedom,” overseen by Parliament’s laws. That means future governments will not be able to “drastically modify” the current laws funding abortion for women who seek one, up to 14 weeks into their pregnancies, according to the French justice minister, Éric Dupond-Moretti
Easy you see. But this is not a new defence that vegans are not familiar with.
The vegan response would be "What's stopping people from having a chicken as a pet?" (I have friends who have chickens as pets and feel nauseous at the thought of what they go through elsewhere)
How deeply have you explored this logic? That an animal that is typically used as a pet is not allowed to be tortured and choked to death, but the animal that is less typically used as a pet is?
If the chicken was your pet, then someone who didn't own it wouldn't be allowed to kill it. But you could, and that would be perfectly legal. Similarly, if you killed your own dog that's no skin off anyone else's nose, but most dog-owners don't do that until the dog is near the end of its natural life.
What is the trait that is true of the dog but not of any-number-of-animals that justifies torturing and choking to death the latter but not the former?
Have you considered that rabbit is commercially farmed and yet we would react with horror if someone ate your pet rabbit? Horse is commercially farmed for meat but if someone ate a racehorse that would be a cause for disgust?
Because you cannot mix general with individual and act like that makes no difference. Why are we less perturbed by statistical amounts of suffering (e.g. war, natural disaster) than an individual amount (e.g. one person having some personal tragedy)?
This runs the other way to- why do polls show greater support for "generic candidate" than any individual candidate? Why do we say things like "they got what's coming to them" when someone gets beaten up on public even though we would categorically agree that the general idea of public assault is intolerable?
Are you actually looking for answers or just making provocative statements to provoke a reaction?
I think it was to you and I have the same questions. There are personal pet rabbits and meat rabbits and people understandably react differently to each one being killed. Out of respect for the human and public order. You would crash a car in a demolition derby but you wouldn't just crash someone's personal car.
"I'm vegan, so I'm not killing and hurting animals for selfish pleasure" is just a lie.
What is the justification for all the vegan ways to harm animals? It's not that they're necessary for staying alive, because they mostly aren't. Vegans don't survive on soylent, they like to eat nice food, as well as candy and junk, too. Why choke insects and rodents to death with insecticides and rodenticides so you can have a little candy? Why shoot hogs, deer and other intelligent creatures to prevent them from eating of fields because you want a black bean burger?
Then there are all the non-food ways that vegans still harm intelligent animals: any kind of modern energy production for example.
I have eaten rabbit without the slightest hesitation and would be more than open to eating dog btw. There was this vegan rage bait site about a fake dog meat farm going around, I wasn't angry at all and was disappointed when it revealed itself not to be a real dog farm lol.
Calling deliberate poisoning and slow internal bleeding to death (rodenticides) "inadvertent" is... a choice.
If you're centering whether death and cruelty to animals is "deliberate" or not, you're centering human feelings, not animal ones.
I remember someone on a vegan subreddit who argued that he would kill fewer animals in a more humane manner by raising bugs vs getting the equivalent amount of protein in legumes. The responses were mostly something like "but you're not THINKING and ACTING in a vegan way!!" All I heard was "sorry animals. How we feel about our impact on your death matters more than how many of you die".
"Vegans deliberately kill animals. There is pretty much no way to live without deliberately or semi deliberately killing animals. Such a way to live would be a lot more extreme than veganism, and still not be free of cruelty to animals. Animals don't care whether you kill them deliberately or inadvertently. Killing all animals is thus pretty justified".
No idea why vegans keep doing this "well would you be okay killing a dog huh?!??" thing. I stated multiple times I would be okay killing and eating dogs.
I was just about to begin typing when I read the last one, so I now need to just check:
You're okay with the man's actions? I am not asking about a hypothetical where you are stranded on Dog Island and have no other foodstuffs to eat and gently kill the dogs with belly-rubs. I am asking if you see issue with the man needlessly torturing and then slitting the throat of the dog on the street. That is my question. Please just answer this with a yes or no, and then I can proceed with the rest.
yeah, there are plenty of morally inconsistent people on the internet, why do you care what vegan subreddit says? they’re not the part of this conversation
Please suggest some AI prompt so that when I give AI a link to SSC/ACX post, AI will summarize both main article and comments. For example: I tried this prompt with Perplexity:
Begin by summarize the main points of the main article, then summarize the comment section for notable points (explore new ideas, perspectives, circumstances...). Each summary should focus on explain and predict human condition, behaviours, interaction, ethic, community building, economic efficiency, constraints. Each summary should highlight in cases: (1) The point simply reinvent the wheel (something has been widely discussed, studied, documented), and how the article/comments contribute new insight, perspectives; (2) The point attract many comments, replies, back-and-forth discussion. At the end, conclude by highlighting the remaining issues and how should I proceed to explore onward.
Not well-read on moral philosophy but I've been thinking lately about how I intuitively tend to classify actions and I've been able to separate them into 4 categories:
Easy to do, large effect - moral obligations, things that I would classify people as evil for not doing. EG a man dying of thirst asks you to get him a glass of water from your house. By refusing you are condemning him to die for essentially no reason at all
Hard to do, large effect - 'heroic' actions. Things like jumping to water to save someone drowning, rescuing someone from a dangerous situation, etc. Actions that we do not blame people for not taking, but universally recognize as good.
Hard to do, small effect - 'saintly' actions. It's arguable what falls into this category but I'd say things like monks burning alive in protest, taking a vow to never hurt another living thing to the extent that you won't kill mosquitos, etc.
Easy to do, small effect - 'polite' actions. Giving your neighbor a gift, holding the door open for someone, letting someone who looks like they are in a rush go before you. No moral obligation to take these actions yet someone who does not take a single one would be considered selfish and rude at best.
For those who know more than me what philosophy do you think this intuitive morality would fall under / what should I read? From my basic understanding this isn't purely virtue ethics or utilitarianism, the closest I can think of might be contractualism?
The keywords to look for here are “supererogatory” and “supererogation” - these are the technical philosophical terms for acts that aren’t morally obligatory but are clearly good deeds. Different moral theories have different ideas of whether this category makes sense, and how to categorize them.
You reminded me of the division of behaviors in Islam, in which mandatory behaviors are rewarded (in the afterlife) if you obeyed the mandate or punished if you didn't, encouraged behaviors are rewarded if you obeyed but not punished if you didn't, and permissible behaviors are never rewarded or punished regardless of what you did. (Technically there are 5 categories, depending on whether the mandate is positive or negative: "mandatory" means you're rewarded for doing and punished for refraining; "encouraged" means you're rewarded for doing; "discouraged" means you're rewarded for refraining; and "prohibited" means you're rewarded for refraining and punished for doing.
> Easy to do, small effect - 'polite' actions. Giving your neighbor a gift, holding the door open for someone, letting someone who looks like they are in a rush go before you. No moral obligation to take these actions
As far as I'm aware, giving your neighbor a gift would usually be the result of a very strong social mandate, which you would be unwise to ignore.
One thing that was covered in introductory Chinese classes was that, if you visit someone's home, you bring them a gift, and they'll tell you "why did you bring this, next time don't bother". And then - and the instructor emphasized this - the next time you visit, you bring them another gift.
I don’t think any moral theory carves morality at the joints in exactly this way, but:
1. Your distinction between “easy to do, large effect” and “hard to do, large effect” maps on to the distinction between the obligatory and the supererogatory https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/supererogation/
2. On “hard to do, large effect” actions, it seems like these will also count as supererogatory if there’s no obligation to do them, but they’ll be marked out by their not being justified by consequentialist reasons. There is a big literature on the putative value of taking actions that have no expected positive value in consequentialist terms. Cf. https://philpapers.org/rec/DEMTAS-4
3. “On easy to do, small effect” actions, there are a lot of philosophers who think that for actions like these, talk of “duty” is too strong — which seems to be your feeling as well. In that case, you might be interested in a scalar approach to moral reasons, where “obligations” are just a loose way of talking about actions where the moral reasons to do them are super duper weighty. But even when your moral reasons to take an action aren’t super duper weighty — and so don’t count as “obligatory” — there are moral reasons nonetheless. Cf. https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11098-017-0998-y; https://academic.oup.com/book/36561/chapter-abstract/321516325?redirectedFrom=fulltext
On which theory this falls under: I think there are stories you can tell that would fit these insights into almost any theory. (It might seem that “hard to do, small effect actions” aren’t rational on consequentialism, but you could have a consequentialist view on which there a plurality of intrinsic goods, one of which is “people taking a stand regardless of other consequences”. Deontologists and virtue theorists could make sense if these ideas in their own ways as well.)
Thank you for the links! I think these will be interesting reads, and the one on scalar moral reasoning sounds right up my alley. The point you talk about with obligation/duty is absolutely my intuitive feeling - I feel that those words should be reserved for situations in which the reasons to take an action are so weighty that any reasonable person could call someone who doesn't immoral/evil.
True, now that you point it out it does speak to my assumptions about direct vs indirect consequences or effects. To me the first is 'risk your life in exchange to save a life' and the second is 'give up your life to *maybe* indirectly save lives' - I don't know how effective self-immolation has been historically, but it doesn't seem to work nowadays at least.
I understand that it's simpler and neater to address a philosophical problem as a dilemma that never arises in real life, like the trolley problem. I don't disagree with your classification above, though I do think that three of your categories almost never arise in real life, and 'polite actions' are fine when they don't unduly inconvenience me.
When I get up in the morning, I almost never go out the door seeking a moral dilemma - making good choices in their absence is, I think, a more interesting question. I guess assigning moral value to the horns of a dilemma is a less interesting problem to me than figuring out which of infinite possibilities you should even consider. Unfortunately, this doesn't answer your question at all, sorry.
Sure, this doesn't answer my question, but regardless I think it's an interesting take. It's certainly true that I (and likely most people in first world countries) have never had to face any of the dilemmas other than the 'easy to do, small consequences' category - though you could argue most people are constantly failing the 'easy to do, large consequences' category by not donating enough to charity.
"I almost never go out the door seeking a moral dilemma - making good choices in their absence is, I think, a more interesting question"
To me, if you are making choices then there is by necessity some dilemma you are making a choice about. As I've agreed, it's probably in that 'polite' category, but it is still a dilemma - every time you decide whether to hold the elevator for someone, how much to tip your server, etc, that is a dilemma. I believe that making good choices in the moment requires deciding on heuristics beforehand, and to me deciding on those heuristics is the interesting part of moral dilemmas no matter the size.
Strictly speaking a dilemma is a choice between two things - I guess I am saying that those types of defined choices are relatively easy to analyse. Hence, they come up in thought experiments.
I think the more interesting questions can't (or shouldn't) be analysed in that way, and viewing them as dilemmas is a little restrictive. It's possible to say that donating to charity has a large positive impact on the world; I have $200 in my bank account the day before payday; whether to donate to mosquito nets in Africa or save the money is a dilemma. But questions like 'what should I do with my life to have a positive impact in my community?' are not binary, and waiting for someone to present an opportunity/dilemma is a passive way of dealing with the question.
I think it's an interesting question - I guess I'm arguing against treating all decisions as dilemmas.
That's a fair point. I guess I was thinking of dilemmas as being between action and inaction (should I / must I take this particular action) and that applying it to real life situations means coming up with many different possible actions and evaluating each one. As you said though, that doesn't really match the traditional definition so my word choice definitely could have been better.
Yes - I agree that action/inaction is a dilemma. But breaking a free decision into different possibilities and evaluating each one independently misses out on opportunity costs - if you donate to an orphanage, you can't donate to earthquake victims, etc. Maybe what you're looking for is discussion of utility and biases in how people make decisions, particularly in altruistic situations? This would be closer to economics than philosophy, perhaps.
I still think decision-making is a bit freer than you do. I get up in the morning and I can choose to do anything: how do I decide? I could ask ChatGPT to generate 10 suggestions and then rank them and choose the 'best' according to my value system. But somehow I feel this misses the real question of finding something meaningful and productive to do.
I've been trying to figure out the best ways to vibe code.
One obvious case that worked for me is implementing a known well-documented API that is not too arcane. Another is "inverse vibe-coding" where you feed a piece of code to an AI and get it to document it, such as extracting requirements or documenting the API.
AI is pretty great at quickly generating custom html apps for data analysis from a small sample of data, and running it right there in the LLM, in case of Deepseek. I stopped using Excel and Google Sheets completely, they are far inferior for any data analysis task.
What has been working much less well is getting it to write unit tests.
Where things get dicey is when I ask an AI to implement something complicated. It tends to "forget" a big chunk of the request, or generate mock data just to "accomplish the task". When confronted, it apologizes and does it again.
I've also had only marginal success when asking an LLM to port a capability from one version of some module to another: it tends to mangle the code way more than warranted.
I realize that the LLMs are evolving quickly, but still, having some rules of thumb and best practices would be nice.
I've had success, saving a good chunk of dev time, in some quite specific areas:
- translate code from one language to another. Describe your code style in the prompt and it does a very decent job bridging different languages.
- write a self-contained algorithm or function. Describe what you want it to do and roughly how, and it will figure out lots of details, from Api calls to boundary conditions.
- for sysadmin (sorry: devops) tasks, you can get it to write short shell (or perl, awk, python...) scripts, sql queries, etc. Saves lots of time reading thru official docs and stackocerflow entries, but you still need the docs sometimes. (I just had Claude guide me thru a db server migration and replication setup this way).
- I tried to vibe code a small self-contained project, and there the key was to have a good convo w the LLM about how to do it in high level terms. You have to really stress "don't write code yet!!" or it will jump to coding and do it wrong.
I haven't tried the 'agentic' or MCP tools yet, I'll give them a try soon.
Also, for actual interaction at the CLI, I've found great results with https://github.com/sigoden/aichat . Feed it a bunch of LLM api keys, and prompt away.
The key thing with LLMs is to keep in mind the context window. If you're having a long session, remember that every time it reads the whole conversation from the start. If you've been interactively adding features, fixing bugs and getting diffs from a singlr convo, after a while it gets too confusing and the LLM starts making mistakes.
At that point, start a new session, and give it just a paragraph summarizing the project, and the current code. You can try to get the LLM itself to make the summary paragraph for you, check it and open the new session with that.
Cursor IDE is your best bet. Pay $20, remove limits on fast requests, enable large context mode and full folders contents in context. Add BrightData MCP to replace Cursor search and allow the models to actually open any page in full as markdown instead of just snippets that Cursors internal tool offers.
As a rough rule of thumb it costs $2/hour of coding to use Cursor in this “no limit” approach with the best models in “Max” mode.
I think the scaffolding / agent is just as crucial as the LLM. Seems like Claude Code is widely considered SOTA (possibly because Claude is heavily geared to code now) but if you want IDE integration, Roo Code should be worth a look to.
I have had moderate success using an LLM as a way to generate SubStack-like posts/comments for me.
The results were useful, but not correct. They were useful because the wrong-ness still pointed in the direction of correctness and, for what I was doing, faster than the Google searches I was interleaving with the LLM interaction.
I’ve been recently working on doing reinforcement learning for a particular task, and R1 was pretty good at figuring out the algorithm for the verifier. (I.e. use R1 to generate code that will then be used to verify the correctness of a large number of examples, also created by R1. Then train on that, obviously.)
Interested in hearing people's relative rating of the different Deep Research tools out there. Trigger of the question in ROT13 so not to influence too much: Tbbtyr frrzf gb unir aresrq gurvef bire gur jrrxraq...
Not sure if this was an optical use case, but I recently tried to dig up a psych study I vaguely remembered from a documentary I watched some years ago, and I was not able to do so, but it DID hallucinate a bunch of elements of real studies to be more like my description than they actually were. This was with ChatGPT's "deep research" thing, whatever model the free version is.
ChatGPT-o3 DR >>> Gemini-2.5 DR > Claude-4 DR. Raw GPT-o3 is often just as good—if not better—than DR, depending on the topic. I often run o3 first, check the results, then trigger DR to fill in gaps if something’s missing.
Claude and Gemini are ~never worth using IMO. I’ve never had them generate a better answer than the raw Gemini/Claude model itself can. Not sure if it’s just my queries that don’t work well with their search, or if their product just isn’t that good.
I would say it's the prompts - I have regularly seen Gemini DR trading blows with o3 but with it nerfed, I doubt it will happen right now (in fairness, that was only true for paid accounts, free DR used flash which was useless for the job). Good to know I do not need to bother with Claude though.
Do you have a specific prompt where Gemini or Claude can beat OAI’s deep research results? I’ll paste it verbatim into all 3 and compare.
I’ve tried tons of prompting techniques and have my own prompt optimizers written up - nothing can help Gemini or Claude DR do better from what I’ve seen.
With the recent downgrade of Gemini, there's no chance. It barely scratches the surface now (50-70 nonsense sources vs 200+ before) and this morning it even failed to write executive summaries :(
In May I managed to do so repeatedly, enough so that I let ChatGPT Plus lapse - I sadly cannot share the prompt / results as it was research for work.
But fair enough, back to OpenAI I am - looks like there is no need to try Claude...
Deep Research is probably the hardest to get a clear view on - evaluation mostly requires that you already have a good view of the topic (or possibly run the same prompt head to head) and in any case, it's fairly time consuming.
I recommend against comments like this - I basically agree with what you're saying, but I think the outcome that actually happened here on this subthread (now there are even more people arguing about why they don't like Aella) was predictable, and that when Aella is already feeling bad we should be trying to avoid having even more people publicly criticizing her.
I deleted the OP but it did not affect the rest of the thread. Is it possible to reinstate it (for coherence of the thread to anyone seeing this) or kill the entire thread?
Btw, I like how you say it was 'predictable'. It certainly wasn't for me. I guess I've been away from posting on social media too long...
Yeah, sorry, I'm very jaded about this kind of stuff and shouldn't have expected anyone else to have known. I don't know a good way to either restore comments or delete a large number of posts quickly so I'll just let it fall to the bottom of the Open Thread.
I have sympathy for her (her account of her upbringing is bananas) but I don't like her stuff. That being said, nobody should get personal abuse on social media. Vehement disagreement, sure, but not personal insults and threats.
Are you unfamiliar with social media? It's nothing but personal abuse. That's why you shouldn't go on there non-anonymously if you plan on being controversial. Why does Aella deserve any special treatment? I have no idea what the current controversy is but given my limited knowledge of her she appears to be a terrible person and society is probably better off labeling her as such. If you want to make yourself a counter-cultural symbol you can't be too surprised when mainstream culture decides to steamroll you.
To the extent that any deserves anything, everyone deserves not to be personally abused on social media. I don’t care who started it, and who gets it, it’s not “special treatment” for you to choose not to personally abuse someone - unless you’re one of the problem people that should be kicked off of social media.
Meh, cry me a river. It she doesn't want to be called a whore then she shouldn't grandstand how proud she is to be a whore. This is classic wanting to have her cake and eat it too. The only reason she has any notoriety is because she boldly broke sexual norms. Now she's taking flak for breaking sexual norms. You can't publicly strip-mine your private life for clicks and then complain when it's used against you. Either toughen up or don't play the game.
I’m not talking about her. I’m talking about you. You should stop being a bad person and telling people to do mean things, even if someone else is making foolish decisions. In fact, you might even encourage people to try to make the world a better place, even for people you think are making bad decisions.
I'm not a bad person and I'm not telling anyone to do mean things. I think people who publicly make foolish decisions should be ridiculed for it. That serves a valuable social function. Doing what betas consider mean is frequently adaptive. Stop inhibiting the adaptive function of rational social punishment. You make the world worse.
Is she entirely honest though? She claims that no one presents evidence or reasoning for why the things she says are wrong. What I've observed is that she simply ignores the counter-arguments. People become frustrated by this, and then begin to insult her instead because what's the point of trying to be factual with someone like that?
Looks like it's presently impossible to reply to her X as her account is privated. That said, I wouldn't necessarily categorize her as "a nice person trying to be honest with herself". That seems significantly whitewashing.
General tendency to "no, you don't like my account of what I do because you are opposed to honest depiction of liberated sexuality" in response to "maybe being a sex worker is not the greatest career?"
She's self-evidently a severely mentally ill person, who according to herself was raised in a Christian sect (in a way that anyone can identify as psychologically harmful), then more or less destroyed her brain with massive doses of LSD, and is now living with the aftereffects of both of these. I won't write some elaborate examination here because it's offputting and inappropriate to dissect someone else's personality publicly like that, but you should be able to draw connections between these factors and her various behaviors yourself with a modicum of thought.
> She's self-evidently a severely mentally ill person
You've said this several times. Are you a board-certified Psychiatrist or do you have an advanced degree in Psychology to be able to make that diagnosis? If not, you're just slandering her. And if you are a professional, you're acting unprofessionally by commenting on her case.
There's a difference between (A) "I wonder if she isn't suffering from mental illness" and (B) "she's self-evidently a severely mentally ill person." The first example is a legitimate question, at least if it's raised in the context of some observed irrational behaviors. The second is just an ad hominem attack using pseudo-psychological jargon. And BTW, Anonymous just lobbed the same ad hominem stink bomb at me when they said, "I've downgraded my assessment of your mental health accordingly." Kind of a nasty thing to say, don't you think?
And in regard to example A, there is nothing in Aella's behavior that suggests she's anything but an intelligent and articulate woman. I am not a psychologist nor a psychiatrist, but in the following interview, Aella doesn't seem to exhibit any delusional or disorganized thinking, which is generally associated with schizophrenia and bipolar disorder. She's not displaying any agitated behaviors, and she's definitely not exhibiting any catatonic behaviors, nor any other bizarre behaviors. Does it seem like an innocent observation to claim that she's severely mentally ill?
Midwit take. Aella is great, has many wonderful qualities, including incredible curiosity, a deep truthseeking drive, creativity, and the ability to decouple to an unusual extent.
also LSD does not `destroy your brain` - point me to one paper showing neurotoxicity.
Since that first link is about LSD's neurotoxicity, out of curiosity, I asked the ChatGPT oracle what the current status of the research into the long-term effects of LSD is. Take it for what it's worth...
Me: Has LSD been proven to be neurotoxic, and if so what is the mechanism?
ChatGPT said:
LSD (lysergic acid diethylamide) is not generally considered neurotoxic in the traditional sense—that is, it does not kill neurons or cause lasting structural brain damage at normal recreational or clinical doses. However, the topic is nuanced. Here's a breakdown of what is known:
🧠 What the Research Says About LSD and Neurotoxicity
✅ No Evidence of Classic Neurotoxicity
Animal studies have not shown LSD to cause neuronal death at typical dosages.
Human studies (including neuroimaging in modern clinical research) have not found structural brain damage from LSD.
Compared to substances like methamphetamine, alcohol, or even MDMA, LSD is remarkably non-toxic to the brain.
⚠️ Potential Indirect or Functional Neurotoxicity Concerns
While LSD doesn’t appear to kill brain cells, there are some ways it might disrupt or dysregulate brain function in certain contexts:
1. Psychological Disturbances
Persistent psychosis or hallucinogen persisting perception disorder (HPPD) may occur in susceptible individuals.
These are functional disturbances, not structural brain damage, but can be debilitating and long-lasting.
2. Glutamate & Serotonin Systems
LSD is a potent agonist at 5-HT2A receptors, and modulates glutamate release—which, in theory, could cause excitotoxic stress at high doses or in vulnerable brains.
However, no studies have shown excitotoxicity (the mechanism behind glutamate-induced neuronal death) from LSD in vivo in humans or animals at relevant doses.
3. Neuroplasticity vs. Neurotoxicity
LSD induces changes in gene expression, dendritic growth, and synaptic plasticity.
This is often framed as neuroenhancing, not damaging—but it could hypothetically destabilize neural circuits in rare cases.
🧪 Modern Clinical Trials
Recent and ongoing trials using LSD to treat depression, anxiety, and addiction have:
Not reported neurotoxic effects.
Shown no long-term cognitive decline.
Reported transient psychological effects, which are carefully managed in therapeutic settings.
"my value as a person lies in me having great tits" is not something very hopeful to read, because eventually even the perkiest tits get saggy as age goes forward, and if all you have to bolster your self-esteem is "i'm pretty and sexy and horny men desire me!", then what will you do when someone younger and prettier and sexier comes along and the horny men abandon you to chase after her?
I assume they didn't mean "destroy" as in physically destroy white and grey matter or neurons, they meant it realigns your neural patterns to result in more destructive or unacceptable behaviours. This is pretty well-documented.
It's been known since the mid or late Sixties that even one dose of LSD can permanently alter your neurochemistry so as to increase your openness and suggestibility. You don't think a high openness trait correlates to defiance of social norms at all? Or "the ability to decouple"? I mean hell, just read some of her own trip reports, it's clear that it took a toll on her mind.
I'll admit that it's pretty brutal to be called midwit by a pornbrained simp. That stings.
I've tripped at least 125 times, and maybe as many as 150 times (I didn't start counting until after my first year of bi-weekly tripping).
I'm now retired, have lived a fairly successful middle-class life, earning my bread high tech. Can't say it did me any harm. It certainly made my life more interesting.
I wouldn't say "anyone can identify as psychologically harmful" a certain upbringing, as The Nurture Assumption (and Trivers' theory of genetic conflict before it) casts doubt on upbringing (beyond some extremes like not learning language) having much of an effect at all.
To me the obsession with sex seems much of a piece with fundamentalists’ (and evangelicals generally) obsession with sin and sexuality which very often comes to a, ah, crisis, sometimes newsworthy, which afterward seems much the point of the whole thing.
I think she’s not so far from her people as she probably imagines.
I respect the basic theory you're referencing and think it's broadly correct within its limits, but I think you're misapplying it here. Surely you don't disagree that it's possible to traumatize someone in a way which fucks up their functioning permanently or semi-permanently? And if you agree with that surely you can see that children, with their more-plastic brains, are more easily affected?
I think upbringing is like paint: as long as there isn't any lead in it, it doesn't matter what color it is, there's no wall color for the nursery that will make your kid grow up to be Mozart and there's no particular child-rearing plan that will do it either. But if you poison the kid you can for sure worsen his outcomes a great deal from the expected baseline.
I have in fact argued against the concept of "trauma" in an ACX comment section earlier. It was long enough ago that I can't easily find the thread (the Substack activity page only goes back to late November).
Literal poison could have an effect. What I don't believe in is a mental analogue for poison.
In this particular case, it's downstream of everyone that hated Nicholas Decker for being himself turned around and called him "based" when Aella posted a meme picture when interviewing him for her podcast (https://substack.com/home/post/p-165233547?utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web), while continuing to excessively and performatively hate her.
I think she's overrated and an infohazard, but that's reason to ignore her output and encourage others to ignore her output as well (likewise, I think nothing good can come of giving attention to Decker, who is the Leroy Jenkins of naive utilitarians and all utilitarians will suffer guilt-by-association). No good reason to attack her the way many people do.
"In this particular case, it's downstream of everyone that hated Nicholas Decker for being himself turned around and called him "based" when Aella posted a meme picture when interviewing him for her podcast"
I can't make sense of this sentence. I'm sure I'm missing something, but to me it looks like you mashed two or three different drafts of it together in your head, something I've often done myself.
Yeah bad writing, it was also incomplete. Let's try an elaboration:
Aella-hate and Aella-defense are relatively common Rationalist Twitter cycles.
This particular round that culminated in her ~~deleting~~ not deleting, taking her account private seems to have started with people rejecting her assertion that a highly unusual and dangerous kink event is a common female fantasy (that part I missed before).
It was also motivated by the reaction after the suggestive picture posted with Nicholas Decker, Aella, and several other scantily-clad ladies.
Many Twitter people that previously hated Nicholas Decker for his philosophical positions called him "based" after the photo, while continuing to hate on Aella. The difference in reaction was stated as one of the reasons she was so deeply bothered this time, compared to the usual level of attack she receives.
If we're talking about Aella, I'm still seeing her Xeets. She recently posted this series. There's more, but the likes she gets seem to far out-ratio the hateful comments she receives. That doesn't make the hateful comments any less painful, though.
> Just searched my name on Twitter and basically 99% of the (high number) of mentions are viciously negative. It's so crazy that just being an openly weird slutty woman generates such universal hate, completely unaffected by high commitment to (trying to be) kind and truth seeking
> In this moment I feel kind of broken. Just look at the quote tweets already starting in response. I wish I weren't so affected by this but it's pretty overwhelming and heartbreaking. I'm so sad the world is shaped in this way.
Wow. It sucks that people spend their energy making someone feel bad for being different. Most of us grow up watching about a gazillion kids movies about why you shouldn't do that.
It's a little disingenuous to say this about "being different". She makes claims that are wrong or harmful (excluding the sex stuff which i don't care about), and then refuses to retract her claims or consider counter-evidence. People get mad at this for obvious reasons.
I presume this discussion is about Aella's recent Xeet?—the OP deleted their comment. What claims has she made that are wrong or harmful? Seems like she's been pretty upfront about both the advantages and limitations of her surveys. And I assume she isn't lying about her personal life as a child of Fundies and her post-Fundie sexual awakening.
I don't really like playing this game where I do the work of digging through examples from years ago and then you get the much easier job of nitpicking the examples. I know what I've seen and it's your choice to believe me or not and I don't care if you don't.
You're implying that Anonymous is spending "their energy making someone feel bad for being different". I strongly disagree with your assessment, that does not seem to be what Anonymous is doing, at all.
I object strenuously to anything I said being categorized as " making someone feel bad for being different". I originally only pointed out vaguely that classing her merely as "a nice person trying to be honest" is a bowdlerization of the real situation (and even that really as an aside to a post meant to point out that her X account is private and cannot be engaged with in the way desired by the OP). When asked to elaborate, I did this in the most objective way I could. Think of this as a De Boer-esque dislike for dismissal of the actual severe consequences of mental illness.
If you have a more dispassionate and polite way to say "severely mentally ill" which still conveys the same information without any obfuscation or minimization, please outline it.
Obviously, you are either board-certified in Psychiatry or have an advanced degree in Psychology to make the diagnosis that Aella is "severely mentally ill". Which disorder entries in the DSM-5 do you base your diagnosis on? And do you feel qualified to make a remote diagnosis without interviewing the subject?
OC ACXLW #95 — Short-Story Show-and-Tell (Scott Alexander & friends)
Saturday · 14 June 2025 · 2:00 pm – ~5-ish
1970 Port Laurent Pl, Newport Beach, CA 92660-7117
Hi everyone! Finals are over, and I am healed, so I am ready to get back to hosting.
We’re shaking things up this week: no single assigned reading—just our favorite short stories and a loose spotlight on Scott Alexander’s fiction. Show up ready to gush (or gripe) about whatever tale grabbed you most: a neat twist, a sneaky theme, or that line you can’t stop quoting in your head. Five minutes of setup is plenty; we’ll riff from there.
Water will be out, and I’ll toss a few basic snacks on the table. BYO treat to share if the spirit moves you.
Quick reminder: we start chatting at 2 pm; people drift out any time Ring/text if you’re running late or lost.
Scott Alexander Short Stories - Complete List with Links
Featured Stories
The Whispering Earring
A magical earring that always gives perfect advice to make its wearer happier, but warns them to take it off first.
Text: Croissanthology Mirror | Archive.org Collection
Audio: AI Reading
Sort By Controversial
A tech company creates an AI to generate controversial content, leading to the discovery of "Shiri's Scissor" - statements that polarize people destructively.
Text: Slate Star Codex
Audio: Matt Arnold Reading (Available in UNSONG podcast episodes)
Idol Words (The Three Idols)
A temple intern manages three omniscient idols - one tells truth, one lies, one answers randomly - while dealing with various philosophical visitors.
Text: Astral Codex Ten
Audio: Not currently available
The Goddess of Everything Else
An epic poem about the battle between the Goddess of Cancer (representing destructive natural selection) and the Goddess of Everything Else (representing cooperation and transcendence).
Text: Slate Star Codex | First Person Version
Audio: SSC Podcast | Astral Codex Ten Podcast
Complete Short Story Collection
...And I Show You How Deep The Rabbit Hole Goes
A mind-reading superhero discovers the heartbreaking truth that everyone is the hero of their own story.
Text: Slate Star Codex
Audio: Matt Arnold Reading
The Witching Hour
A darkly humorous tale about supernatural occurrences and the thin line between reality and imagination.
Text: Slate Star Codex
Audio: Matt Arnold Reading
A Modern Myth
Contemporary gods deal with modern problems in this satirical take on mythology.
Text: Slate Star Codex
Audio: Matt Arnold Reading
The Study of Anglophysics
Scientists discover a world where language has physical properties - words become objects and follow chemical-like rules.
Text: Archive.org Collection
Audio: Not currently available
Universal Love, Said the Cactus Person
A philosophical exploration of love and consciousness through an unusual narrator.
Text: Archive.org Collection
Audio: Not currently available
The Girl Who Poked God with a Stick
A young girl's irreverent encounter with the divine leads to unexpected consequences.
Text: Archive.org Collection
Audio: Matt Arnold Reading
Might Not, Technically, Have Happened
A reality-bending story that questions the nature of truth and experience.
Text: Archive.org Collection
Audio: Not currently available
The Last Temptation of Christ
A unique retelling exploring themes of sacrifice and human nature.
Text: Archive.org Collection
Audio: Not currently available
Biodjinnetics
A science fiction story exploring genetic engineering through a fantastical lens.
Text: Archive.org Collection
Audio: Not currently available
Answer to Job
A theological exploration addressing questions of suffering and divine justice.
Text: Archive.org Collection
Audio: Not currently available
Additional Stories from Collection
The following stories are available in the complete collection:
The Story of Emily and Control - Archive.org
The Logician and the God-Emperor - Archive.org
Everything Not Obligatory Is Forbidden - Archive.org
Clarity Didn't Work, Trying Mysterianism - Archive.org
It Was You Who Made My Blue Eyes Blue - Archive.org
The Character's Complaint - Archive.org
Reverse Psychology - Archive.org
Asches to Asches - Archive.org
The Moral of the Story - Archive.org
Primary Audio Sources
Matt Arnold's UNSONG Audiobook Podcast: Main Site | Amazon Audible | TuneIn
askwhocastsai.substack.com: AI-generated readings of various Scott Alexander works
SSC Podcast: Automated readings of Slate Star Codex posts
Print Collections
"The Goddess of Everything Else" print collection: LessWrong Community Project
Complete digital collection: [Internet Archive](https://archive.org/details/ScottAlexanderStories2017
(Have another favorite? Bring the link and a quick pitch.)
To my delight, I am not familiar with all these stories.
Contact
Michael Michalchik
949-375-2045 (text please)
michaelmichalchik@gmail.com
Looking forward to a relaxed afternoon of story-swapping and big ideas. See you Saturday!
—Michael
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.
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
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.
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.
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 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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
> 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
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.
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.
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 specific groups of people and Jesus saying to love your enemies are moral and don't contradict each other.
¶4. You say here that "it should go without saying..." and this is how you're treating your moral arguments throughout your comment without grounding them in anything. You say things like "If a God were to do this, then they would of course be totally evil," or that "they couldn't possibly be moral," but then you don't elaborate any further. I don't know what beef you personally have with God, but I think you may be projecting things onto him that don't come from him. You pose him as this evil, uncaring being who goes against everything humanity generally agrees on as being "good". If you want to make a fair hypothetical argument for the God of the Bible, you should try and do him justice and consider that what is universally accepted as "good" is only that way because God made it that way. God is good and he loves humanity and the Bible says it is not his will that anybody would perish. He is not this evil, domineering tyrant who forces obedience under the threat of hell. He wants people to love and obey him because that is what is actually best for us and for the people around us.
He doesn't say "Love me or I will sadistically torture you for eternity," the fact is that he has determined a penalty for breaking his law (love God) be.fore any wrong was committed, and because everyone breaks the law, everyone is deserving of punishment. But instead of leaving it at that, he made himself human and applied humanity's law to himself and fulfilled it perfectly, so that he could justly offer himself to receive the punishment of anyone that believes in him. It is true that he is the one who designed the system this way and he hypothetically could have made it any other way if he wanted to, but since he is a being that is a "metaphysical Absolute beyond our comprehension," we have to accept that we can't comprehend it but that this is a good and righteous and just way for him to create and operate. He created everything, he designed "good" and "evil", and he made our minds and our understanding.
I don't have every Bible passage about hell memorized, but I can't think of anywhere it is described as sadistic torture. Weeping and gnashing of teeth, yes, everlasting shame and contempt, yes. But as for what that actually looks like, I'm not really sure. The lake of fire is mentioned in Revelation, but it only specifies that the devil and the beast and the false prophet will be tormented for eternity there. I'm guessing it won't be any good for anyone else there, but not sadistic torture. Definitely knowing that you are going to exist forever, even in a somewhat decent place, and know that you are eternally separate from God and paradise, that sounds like it would be pretty horrible. Even something like that could be rightly considered eternal punishment. I'm not saying I think hell will be a nice place, just that if it was it would still be horrible to have to live for eternity in it with God and any his qualities removed from it.
One more thing on eternal punishment, the Bible in various spots makes it sound like people will get different levels of punishment based on what they do and don't know. Just thought I'd throw that in there. Ultimately, I have no idea what eternal death or eternal life will actually look like.
¶6. Although fear of hell was definitely a major motivation to want to follow God initially, that isn't it for me anymore. Now what motivates me is knowing God's love for me and I want to return it to him. God deserves all the glory, honor, praise, and respect anyone could ever give, and I want to do my best to give it to him. He has proven the truth of who he is to me and that he loves me, and that is why I worship him.
¶7. I do believe in hell, that's why I want to try and evoke thoughtful conversations where I can tell others about Jesus. I believe in hell and I don't want anyone to go there.
¶8. I've already harped on this too much, but "and commanded me to do morally good things, not because he told me to but because they're right" is a misunderstanding of what morality is. Morality is only what it is because of God, what he says are right and wrong actions, are only right or wrong because he says so.
I really hope Jesus does appear to you in a way that you can understand, and that you would try to follow him.
...
I don't expect you to agree with me on any of this, and I can't convince you that any of it is true. But if it is true that God is who he says he is in the Bible, then the rest of this follows.
I don't doubt that you have personally been hurt or insulted by people using the name of God, or at least that you know of someone who has been. Please try to separate the idea of these people from your understanding of God. They will all be judged righteously by God. The only time God will ever hurt or humiliate you is when it is for your good, in the hopes that it will reveal the evil in your own self so you will turn to him for salvation.
Anyway, thanks for putting the time and thought into humoring my question.
[...continued]
"I don't know what beef you personally have with God, but I think you may be projecting things onto him that don't come from him."
Please don't confuse me having a beef with your conception of God, with having a beef with God. I told you I believe in God.
"If you want to make a fair hypothetical argument for the God of the Bible, you should try and do him justice and consider that what is universally accepted as "good" is only that way because God made it that way. "
Exactly. I don't think you realise what you're conceding here. If the strong moral sense we have is created by God, then it is completely impossible that God could do or command things that strongly violate that moral sense. Thus, any such apparently commanded thing, from unjustified slaughter to grossly disproportionate punishment, is actually clearly not from God at all.
"the fact is that he has determined a penalty for breaking his law (love God)"
Ignoring the last part, which is not moral law at all, determining a penalty that is not only greater than the crime, but infinitely greater, is an infinite injustice. The Bible itself says "an eye for an eye". A punishment must fit the crime, this is basic fundamental justice--our strong moral sense that God created. You don't like me viewing your conception of God as a tyrant, but when you explicitly say that your conception of God punishes finite crimes with infinite punishment--nay, that he punishes finite *slights* like failing to praise him enough with infinite punishment--then you have explicitly told me that he is more tyrannical than the worst human tyrant.
(Also, if God wanted to be loved, he would not create a punishment for those that don't love him. Like, this is so obviously, unbelievably incompatible with anything that can be recognisably called love or a desire for to be genuinely loved, it's truly breathtaking.)
"I don't have every Bible passage about hell memorized, but I can't think of anywhere it is described as sadistic torture."
Well, okay, fair enough. You're not one of the Christians I was referencing then. I would still note a few things:
1. Many Christians have a habit of falling back on this framing--hell is not sadistic punishment, no, it's merely separation from God--when challenged on the morality and coherence of an allegedly loving God sending anyone to hell. But then later, when someone says "well hell doesn't sound so bad then", they will return to "but you will *burn* and *suffer*!" Scott, in fact, used this as one of the textbook examples of a motte-and-bailey in his "All In All Another Brick In The Motte". And arguably this kind of rhetorical trickery suggests many fundamentalist Christians don't even believe their own doctrines, if they're able to change them strategically like that.
2. I'll withdraw the implication that your beliefs are evil, but reluctantly. Reluctantly, because I think it really depends on this question: do you consider "hell" to be significantly *worse* than being annihilated or permanently destroyed? (And would those in your hell be able to destroy themselves permanently if they choose to?) If the answers are no (and yes) then I'm happy to say that belief is not evil at all--like the Christians who believe in annihilation, that's just what atheists expect to happen to everyone. And it's also reasonable to describe the belief that *some* people will be saved and everyone else will die like they expected to (or something no worse than that) as "Good News".
But if you believe that hell is much worse than mere death, then not only is tolerating such sadism evil, but calling "Good News" a belief that involves even *one* person, let alone most of the world's population, suffering a fate worse than death is evil beyond all description. That's that strong moral sense that God gave me talking there.
"Although fear of hell was definitely a major motivation to want to follow God initially, that isn't it for me anymore. Now what motivates me is knowing God's love for me and I want to return it to him."
These just seem blatantly contradictory to me. If fear was what led you to God, then I don't see how you really love God at all. It's like an abusive relationship, followed by Stockholm Syndrome.
Again, if God actually wanted to be loved, fear would play no role whatsoever.
"I believe in hell and I don't want anyone to go there."
That would make you more moral than your conception of God. Considerably.
"I don't doubt that you have personally been hurt or insulted by people using the name of God, or at least that you know of someone who has been."
I do know of someone close to me who has OCD and has been extremely traumatised by the idea of hell. Certain people are extremely vulnerable to this, and fundamentalist Christians have more psychological suffering to answer for than they can possibly imagine.
"Please try to separate the idea of these people from your understanding of God. They will all be judged righteously by God."
Well, yes, I think they might be. Which means that, depending on your answers to my above questions about hell, you might want to be very, very careful.
Well this is embarrassing to admit, but in writing my last response to you and in responding to Paul and now reading this comment, I have to say that my understanding of morality I was describing is wrong. I don’t think you’ll agree with my new understanding any more than the last, though.
Instead of morality being something designed by God, now I’m thinking maybe it’s an aspect of God himself. Paul mentioned that he can’t wrap his head around the idea of a being so powerful that he can control such abstract things as making 2+2=5 if he wanted (or some such wording), and while I disagree and think that God has complete control over everything he created, I’m not sure that God created things like morality or whatever it is that math describes. There are things that God cannot do. He can’t be not God. The Bible says that God is truth, and the Bible also says that God cannot lie. Maybe math and morality are both aspects of God.
Another reason I’m coming to this understanding (I use the word understanding, but I guess I’ll never know for sure in this life if I really understand) is like you pointed out, what I was describing as morality was subjective rather than objective.
Or maybe morality isn’t necessarily objective or even real, maybe it’s just the sense of right and wrong we have. In that case it couldn’t be objective, because at the point before anything was created, moral/immoral actions didn’t exist (ie. giving to the poor or rape and everything in between). Can morality be bojective but not eternal? Man, I need to think this through. I know that God is righteous, but he was before creating anything, so I don’t know exactly what that means in terms of morality.
I’m gonna have to get back to you about this hopefully over the weekend when I have time to do a little research and think this through as clear as I can. Maybe you’re not at all interested in this as we disagree on mostly all that we’re talking about, but I can’t really respond now that I feel like I’m unsure what I’m talking about. So for my own sake I’m gonna work on this and get back to you on it, as well as the other things you commented about.
Responding point by point.
Let me just first say that I appreciate your politeness here. And in general I've found fundamentalist Christians to be polite people, very unlike advocates of a certain...erm...*different* quasi-religion often preached on the internet. This is a bit hard to internalise, as at least some of them believe truly horrifically evil things. And I'm also not convinced they're not only being polite because they think God will punish them if they're not.
But nonetheless, I appreciate it.
"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."
There are two problems with this.
The first is that, let's say someone really is "deserving" of being praised. This would mean that it would be right for other people to praise him. It would *not* mean that it would be right for him to request or demand praise himself! Why? Because humility and selflessness are virtues. Think about a person who is entitled to something (say a loan repayment) and chooses to forgive it. Or someone in a public position who asks that his salary be significantly reduced, because he doesn't need it. Would you deny that such people are *more* virtuous than average, than someone who doesn't do that? (You can still say they're not truly virtuous because no one is. I'm simply saying they are *more* virtuous than many others, a concept you need to be able to acknowledge for morality to make any sense whatsoever). I think it's a pretty foundational aspect of morality that turning down rewards you deserve is an attribute of a highly virtuous person, and in contrast aggressively demanding the things you want (even if you have earned them or deserve them) is an attribute of selfishness. And thus, there is absolutely no imaginable way a perfectly, infinitely virtuous being is going to go out of their way to demand personal flattery and praise, no matter how much they deserve it. *Let alone* to demand it *above all other moral things*! Since you, know, such a being would be infinitely selfless. Not infinitely selfish.
Second, I don't even think it makes any moral sense to say that a perfectly virtuous person is infinitely deserving of praise. This would imply, as you outright state, that praising an infinitely virtuous person is somehow *more important* than all other moral obligations. Let's say there was a child dying of thirst and also a saintly old man, and you were holding a bottle of wine and could either give it to the child or pour it on the saint's feet as a way of praising him. Which should you do? Obviously you'd say give it to the child since the saint is still nowhere near perfectly moral and doesn't deserve such praise. But think about however much the moral distance is between those two acts. Then imagine you made the saint twice as moral, five times as moral, five hundred times as moral. Does this increase in the saint's moral virtue make pouring the wine on his feet even *the tiniest bit* more justified relative to giving it to the dying child? Does multiplying the saint's morality by a huge factor cause you to hesitate *for even the tiniest moment longer* as to what the right moral choice in this situation is? I doubt it would, and I certainly am sure it shouldn't. But if the saint's morality drastically increasing doesn't change, to the tiniest degree, the fact that saving a child is morally more important than praising him, then increasing the saint's morality to infinity would still not make praising him more important than saving the child.
Thus, if God is infinitely moral, it may be morally right to praise him, but it would still be morally more important to do things like prevent harm.
"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."
There is a difference between saying God is able to reveal things to us or communicate with us through a physical medium we can understand, and saying that God *is* that physical medium. The latter is what seems metaphysically incoherent. How can the creator of something be identical to a part of the thing he created?
And I suppose this has become a debate about the coherence of the doctrine of Incarnation, but that isn't the debate I was trying to have. Because there's another difference between, on the one hand, believing that Christ (a man with human emotions and desires) is in some sense equal to an aspect of God (the metaphysical ineffable Absolute), and on the other, believing that God the metaphysical ineffable Absolute in its entirety is like a man with human emotions and desires. In the first case, you talk of a comprehensible man who is a an aspect of the Divine Will, which itself is beyond our comprehension. In the second case, you talk of the Divine Will as *itself* a comprehensible man who "loves" and "angers" and "demands" and "desires" and so forth. Talking of such attributes, without at the very least acknowledging such comprehensible "desires" and "plans" as being the tiniest fraction of an infinite number of different attributes God has that we could never comprehend, and instead talking about them as *actually being* the essence of God (or even the essence of one entire property of God, like "his" relation to humans) is to treat God as limited and finite and comprehensible in the most direct way.
(Admittedly, you initially referred to Christ, not God as a whole, which may not be subject to the above incoherence. But you then go on to ascribe all those finite human emotions and attributes to God as a whole, which is.)
"Obeying God is the morally right thing, and God's commandment is to love him completely. "
And this is entirely incoherent. If morality is to be identified with God's commands, rather than with some aspect of reason itself or of the universe, then either God commands what is moral or something is moral because God commands it. If the first, then obeying God is not the right thing--God merely tells what the already existing right thing is. And if the second, then if God commanded rape and murder those things would become morally right. And if you say that, you are no longer talking about anything remotely like what people mean when they say "morality". You should use a different word and not claim God is "moral" at all on that framework, since saying rape and murder can be morally right is as incoherent as saying a circle can be square--it's just not what the concept by its nature can mean.
And if you try to say God could not command rape and murder, the question is why? Because God is perfectly moral? You just defined "moral" as whatever God commands so that's a complete circularity.
"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."
And this is even worse. You are honestly saying that there is nothing intrinsic about compassion that makes it good, and nothing intrinsic about wanton violence that makes it evil, and the only relevant factor is what it is desired by someone with maximal power? And you have the brazenness to call this "morality"?
You have it entirely backwards. Doing good things merely because a powerful person tells you to, or to be rewarded in some way or avoid punishment, is not moral at all. The only truly moral thing is doing good things entirely for their own sake, because they are good.
You are calling good evil and calling evil good. Sure you can use the sounds "mo-ra-li-ty" for the thing you're talking about, but the thing you're talking about is not morality. It bears no relation to the concept that derives from reason and that is manifested in our consciences.
"You say here that "it should go without saying..." and this is how you're treating your moral arguments throughout your comment without grounding them in anything."
I've generally gotten sick of arguing with leftist relativists who think morality somehow changes based on what culture you're in. And I thought that, with a Christian, I could at least assume belief in moral objectivity. But I had forgotten until now that Christians are often relativists as well, believing that morality somehow changes based on the level of cosmic power possessed by a moral agent. To the extent of even believing that a sufficiently powerful agent (i.e. God) is somehow entirely exempt from ordinary moral obligations!
I have not "grounded" morality in anything, because morality that is grounded in something is not morality. Morality *just is* what ought to be done, for its own sake. If you only recognise "morality" done for some external purpose (getting rewarded, impressing people, impressing God) then you don't recognise morality at all.
[continued...]
Thanks for this comment! I was just getting ready to reply to your other one saying that it wasn't exactly a fitting response to my original question lol. I appreciate you taking the time to think that all out and type it, so I'll write a response to it a little bit later when I have the time.
I was going to link to a long comment I made on this six months ago, and then I noticed the comment was a reply to you. I guess you must be the only preacher on this site.
Comment is at https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/open-thread-359/comment/80845765. I'm reposting a large part of it below because at least one person found it helpful and the kind of fundamentalism you preach is extremely harmful, causes horrible suffering to certain kinds of people (i.e. thoughtful and/or emotionally sensitive, and those with OCD or similar even moreso), and is a totalitarian dogma that enslaves people's minds. And unlike other dangerous religious dogmas like wokeness, it receives very little thoughtful (as opposed to lazy one-line dismissal) refutation around here.
"...
Now, as then, getting so sick of the atheist responses that say *nothing* but "where's the evidence?" Jesus Christ, can't you say you don't accept the premises and then still engage with the theology on a "suppose I did accept them" basis? Don't these people have any philosophical curiosity whatsoever?
...
The main sticking point for me and most people (excluding the mindless "no evidence lol" replies) is this whole idea that you can never earn your salvation, and the "good news" is that the price for your sin has already been paid because of Christ's infinite sacrifice, and the great liberation that you don't need to do anything to earn it, it's already done...but here's what you have to do! (i.e. believe it and "accept it"). The last part is probably necessary for Christianity to memetically spread, but it [completely and totally, once you think clearly about it] undermines its whole point. If the price of sin has been paid, then why is it conditional on saying certain words and holding certain mental states? Now, you may say accepting a gift isn't an act in the normal sense of requiring effort or achieving a goal , it's merely a decision to put aside your pride and say "yes". And that the only barrier to someone doing such a simple thing is their immense pride and refusal to admit their sin.
But this is so demonstrably false. Most people who refuse to "accept Christ" are doing so because they aren't convinced God exists, they aren't convinced Christ is God, they aren't convinced Christ really wants this evangelical path of action, or they have a moral objection to the path of "*I'll* be saved, but those other people who have honest disbelief will be damned and that's still somehow good news because at least I won't". Forcing yourself to believe in something you're not sure is true, or to obey something you're not sure is moral, is not a simple decision, it's an act of herculean effort that may not be even possible. And if you think those people are lying and really do believe those things and really are motivated by pride...then why can't you just say "you can accept Christ on earth, OR you can accept him after you die?" If they're really just prideful, they'll still reject him after death. Only if you know full well that the reason people aren't accepting Christ is that they're not sure he exists, would you expect a different response before or after death. And importantly, only if you're primarily concerned not with people eventually repenting but with *controlling people on earth* (making them attend your church, obey your pastors, etc) would you insist that repentance must happen before you die. There is no other reason.
And I find that very sickening.
...
More metaphysically, I don't know why so many Christians keep using the *worst* theodicy of them all. Most other responses to the problem of evil, like the soul making theodicy or the idea that light cannot exist without the dark or the idea that it's a mystery beyond our comprehension, are so much more defensible than the free will theodicy. The latter:
cannot account for natural evil (earthquakes, disease etc)
cannot explain why allowing people to sin requires allowing them to successfully hurt other people
if it somehow does require that, cannot explain why there *are* many physical limits that often stop people hurting each other
cannot explain why we put criminals in jail, if freedom to hurt others is essential to freedom (is the existence of a criminal justice system fundamentally unChristian?)
cannot explain why the Bible so frequently tells people to obey God or God will punish them; if freely choosing God is so important that it justifies allowing evil, how is that remotely compatible with spreading such fear-based and self-interest-based reasons for choosing God in his own word?
doesn't make metaphysical sense, since it's not clear if libertarian free will (the kind needed for this theodicy) actually exists or if it's even coherent: everything we do we do for a reason, not an irreducible act of will (whatever that would mean)
doesn't make metaphysical sense, since even if libertarian free will is theoretically coherent it certainly doesn't seem coherent combined with theism: if God creates everything, then God causes everything, and how can acts God has no control over be compatible with God's sovereignty?
doesn't make moral sense, since allowing free will "so people aren't just thoughtless robots" (the usual justification) does not require libertarian free will, only compatibilist free will. God could determine that all people choose good and love Him and those choices would still be as meaningful as any other if they're coming from people's own nature, not externally imposed against it (and the latter IS what the classic "obey God or be punished" is)
Basically, it's such a terrible theodicy with so many holes, and other theodicies work so much better, I can't undetstand why anyone tries to use it.
(By the way, I'm either some kind of deist, or some kind of Christian who understands Atonement in a VERY different way to [the primitive and medieval] "someone must be punished for sin". I encorage everyone to find their own way to God, ignoring both the small-minded atheists and the preachers who claim to speak for him)."
I'd ask "but why Paul, specifically?"
As in like "Why did you choose Paul to be your apostle to the gentiles?"
I'm not sure I understand your comment.
I'd try to get an explanation of why the believing and obeying part is necessary- that part has always been a little fishy to me.
That much is stated in the Bible, if you read the New Testament alone I think that should be answered pretty thoroughly.
What's fishy about the believing and obeying part to you? (I think it's reasonable for it to sound fishy, I just want to know your thinking about it)
It just seems really strange for an all powerful, omnibenevolent god to choose belief, specifically, as the thing that at the end of the day solely determines whether you go to heaven or hell.
It makes a ton of sense why Christianity as a human institution would emphasize belief so heavily: if people don't believe, they have no power. But for an actual god I don't see much reason to care that much about what people believe rather than say, forgiving everyone regardless of their beliefs, or judging people based on some overall assessment of their virtue.
One often seen explanation, at least in Orthodox circles, is that you're basically preparing for the eventuality of coming face to face with God in His unaltered, unfiltered form - so vast and awe-inspiring that you basically have to be prepared for this eventuality very well, and if you don't even believe in Him, well... it's going to be a handicap, so to say.
At least from my understanding from reading the Bible, it seems like God does judge people on some overall assessment of their virtue.
God has a law, basically: love God. There's lots of different ways to break this law, but there's just the one law. No matter which way you break it, you break the whole law and then you're a lawbreaker devoid of virtue, because a virtuous person doesn't break God's law. Everyone breaks the law, and not breaking the law sometimes doesn't make up for when you did break the law so nobody is virtuous and everyone is set to get the punishment that comes with breaking the law.
Jesus pretty much says that since he is the only human who has upheld the law (this law is for humans, I'm not sure what other similar or different laws God has made for like animals or angels or whatever) and because he is also God, he can take the penalty due to humans who break the law by paying the penalty himself. Since he is not already deserving of the penalty, he can substitute himself for other humans. Because he is God, he can resurrect himself to prove his power (if some parts of this paragraph need better explanation lmk, I'm not sure I said it very well).
I'm not sure why God created people with free will, but to me it doesn't seem like it would make sense to make a creature have free will and then make it so that it doesn't matter what they do or don't do, so to me it makes sense that salvation through Jesus depends on some kind of action like choosing to believe in Jesus instead of forcing it on everyone. "Forcing" sounds weird to use in this situation because salvation from punishment is a good thing, but it is still the correct word to use. I don't know if this is God's reasoning, but right now it's my best understanding of why he might have made things dependent on belief.
But anyway, it is Jesus' virtue that allows unvirtuous humans appear to God as virtuous, by way of Jesus' putting himself in the place of those who believe in him and obey him and he takes their penalty. This restores them to a state of virtue in the eyes of God, regardless of the fact that they are lawbreakers.
Jesus still wants people to follow the law (love God), though, and so he offers his salvation as a gift to anyone who turns away from their lawlessness to follow him as God and love and obey him.
Ultimately, I have no clue why God created things the way he did or chose what was right and wrong the way he did, or why he even created at all. But in response to your comment that it would make more sense if he judged people based off of an overall assessment of their virtues, I think he more or less does actually do that.
I guess those epicycles do more or less address the original question, at the cost of pulling your idea of "virtue" away from actual virtue.
Also I notice that you talk about Jesus and God as though they're different entities, which you pretty much have to for the setup to make sense, but isn't what Christianity actually teaches.
The Trinity is very paradoxical. So is the idea of free will. Both are taught by the Bible, though. It seems like a big cop out to just label it a paradox and then step away from arguing about it, but that's just what it is and I don't understand it enough to try and explain it.
The Bible speaks of Jesus, the Holy Spirit, and God the Father doing distinctly separate things at the same time and interacting with each other, and it also describes them as being one, and all God.
The Bible also talks about humanity having choice and free will, but it also says that nobody can come to God unless they are called and chosen.
Both are paradoxes and also Biblical facts. I don't understand and I can't explain them. You didn't really ask about that, but I just wanted to address what you said about Christianity not teaching God and Jesus as separate.
I'm curious, though, what is your idea of "actual virtue"?
The belief over works thing is a specifically Protestant idea, and it does indeed get into some extremely weird theology as a consequence, e.g. Calvinist ideas of predestination. The Catholic solution has always been to emphasize works, and point and laugh at the Protestants. And sometimes massacre them. Which is a kind of work!
True, but Catholicism comes with plenty of its own problems. Most analogously, the heavy weight put on specific rituals.
I agree that most of those are not, let's say, strictly indicated by a clear-eyed critical reading of the Gospels, and that that was most likely part of what provoked the Reformation. But in terms of bedrock doctrine I think the Catholics got it a lot more right than the Prots.
Why did a supposedly benevolent God choose blind faith (and the luck at guessing correctly which religion to believe) as the supreme virtue?
As opposed to the more obvious alternatives, such as being nice to everyone, or being nice to those who are nice to others.
"Nice" is a pretty low bar. Even sociopaths can be nice when it suits them. True virtue involves treating others with kindness even when it doesn't suit you, or at least having principles you're willing to sacrifice for.
Regarding "blind faith", I don't think it's a matter of guessing the right religion, but instead it's a question of if you even want to know in the first place, and if you are prepared to act on that knowledge. For an interesting deep dive on the importance of faith, and even temptation: I recommend this piece comparing the doctrine of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints to testing AI: https://www.wearenotsaved.com/p/artificial-intelligence-and-lds-cosmology. I belong to the same church as the author, and while I recongize our denomation is kind of on the fringe of Christianity, I think it addresses your question pretty well.
TL:DR, it's been proposed that before we give powerful AIs heavy, potentially dangerous responsibilities, we put them to the test. Set the AI up in a place where it can't do any harm, and tempt it with a "honeypot". If it caves to temptation and does the "wrong thing", you know it's not trustworthy. If it persistently resists temptation, and does the "right thing", then you can have more confidence in it. That's basically what we call the Plan of Salvation; God created us as intelligent beings meant to progress and grow, and become heirs to all He has (Romans 8:17). But our Heavenly Father has to see what we will do when we THINK He's not watching. Will we strive for constant improvement, living up to whatever light He sees fit to give us, will we actually seek God out; or will we do the least we think we can get away with, or just follow our own desires regardless if they hurt others or ourselves?
Also, I hope this doesn't come across as too preachy, but I feel inclined to note while different sects may quibble about the details, most Christians agree that works alone will not save us, only Jesus Christ can. So it isn't enough to meet your own definition of "nice". It is an unchangable law of the universe that no unclean thing can dwell with God. There's no way to ignore that, but there is a way around it. One of my church leaders likened it to someone going into heavy debt, paying little installments here and there, but unable to pay in full by the deadline. Since this is set in ye olden days, the creditor threatened to confiscate his possessions and cast him into prison. But a friend offered to pay the man's debt, and says to the man, "If I pay the debt, will you accept me as your creditor? You can pay the debt to me, and I will set the terms. It will not be easy, but it will be possible." The man had to choose to accept his friend's offer, but having made that choice, he had the chance to do better and be helped by someone who knew him best. It's not a matter of merely saying "Praise Jesus" and you're saved (Matthew 7:21), but actually changing your life, to become a disciple of Christ. Everyone's path is going to be different, and I will grant that seeking God is a subjective experience, but I hope this helps answer your question.
I’m a Christian, my response is that all religions point towards the same path. You should be good! But Christianity is more explicit, the point is that we are flawed and convince ourselves we are good when we are in fact falling short in many ways. That’s why we need the redemption of Jesus, who sees our flaws and our shortcomings and loves us despite them.
I don't know the answer to that, but I do know that he is a jealous God and he wants everyone to love him specifically. See the above response I just made to Paul about one of the reasons I think it makes sense, given the way he created things. I really don't know why he created things the way they are to begin with, though.
10th commandment specifies covetousness, which is different from jealousy. Given the context of Judeo-Christianity as a whole, I don't read God being jealous as the same as human jealousy. It could be a translation thing, or the closest approximate term that normal people can relate to. I read it as, "I don't want you worshiping other gods, or rather things you believe to be other gods because a mere idol can't help you reach your full potential." It would be like a child deciding he doesn't want to listen to Mommy and Daddy, so he makes little figurines and pretends they're his parents who only tell him what he wants to hear.
Regarding the other, more controversial bits in the Old Testament and the Law of Moses, they were given during a time before individual, universal human rights were even recongized as a concept. The main moral philosophy at the time was loyalty to the tribe. The Law of Moses was a covenant between God and the people of Israel that if they would essentially be God's tribe, He would lead them to the Promised Land, make them a great nation, and they would set the foundation upon which the whole Earth would eventually be blessed. They needed lots of reminders and symbolism to keep them on the path, but the Law of Moses, at least as far as most Christians are concerned, was not supposed to be permanent. It was God meeting the people where they were at. They could've chosen not to make the covenant, to go back to Egypt or someplace else, but those who made the covenant and then broke were the ones that had the hammer brought down.
It kind of depends on my 'sins'. If Jesus told me that I've been too selfish, that I should spend less time on the Internet and more time taking care of my family, that's good advice (that I might fail to take due to moral weakness).
On the extreme opposite end, if someone claiming to be Jesus told me I needed to kill Jews or be damned, it sounds like either he's the devil or God is a jerk.
There are cases in the middle, where I might not know that I'm wrong (and literal Jesus decending from heaven to tell me I'm wrong is sure a lot of evidence!) But one of the fundamental problems of morality is that I can't take someone else's word for what morality is.
Very true lol I'd be very suspicious if someone claiming to be Jesus was ordering people to go around committing murder.
How do you determine what's right or wrong if you can't take someone's word for what morality is? Do you kind of try and intuit it?
"How do you determine what's right or wrong if you can't take someone's word for what morality is? Do you kind of try and intuit it?"
"Perhaps it may seem strange that I go about and interfere in other people’s affairs to give this advice in private, but do not venture to come before your assembly and advise the state. But the reason for this, as you have heard me say at many times and places, is that something divine and spiritual comes to me, the very thing which Meletus ridiculed in his indictment. I have had this from my childhood; it is a sort of voice that comes to me, and when it comes it always holds me back from what I am thinking of doing, but never urges me forward. This it is which opposes my engaging in politics. And I think this opposition is a very good thing; for you may be quite sure, men of Athens, that if I had undertaken to go into politics, I should have been put to death long ago and should have done no good to you or to myself."
Good question! On one hand, I find studying morality really fascinating, and I've had my mind changed through arguments. And 'whatever I think is the most moral today' is not exactly a steady target.
In a real sense, I feel like morality does depend on instinct, because each logical step needs to pass the 'good or evil' sniff test. Where your instincts scream 'It's more important to do this than to help yourself!' or 'That's bad, don't do that!'
But if you are asking specifically about that I believe is moral:
I feel like most people, when they think explicitly about morality at all (myself included), use some combination of utilitarianism (do the steps that you think will have the best result) and dentology (each step should be good and not evil). I feel pretty firmly that we should do both, even if that's harder. As for what results were should start toward, I agree about 99% with this: https://thingofthings.substack.com/p/on-capabilitarianism
Thanks for the response!
I think you're right about how most people treat morality when they think about it explicitly. I personally believe in an objective reality that was created by God (the Bible one), and I believe that is why, in general, most people all over the world have similar intuitions regarding what is right and wrong. But I'm very interested in ways that other people make sense of things so I'll definitely check out the post you linked, thanks!
I don't think most people think much about where their morality comes from, though, and that they do some mix of what you mentioned at the end of your comment.
Frankly, who cares what others think is right and wrong? That's the wonderful thing about life: you can decide that for yourself.
I care a lot about what others think about morality. If they get it wrong enough, I might die! Also, I could be wrong. I hate being wrong on the internet!
What do you mean, "wrong"? They are simply following their own values. You're free to manipulate them into furthering your own wants, of course, but that doesn't make you more correct.
I suppose that this means you don't believe in reflective equilibrium, where you would act better if you knew more?
I don't think that morality is objective, but I do believe that most human morality is close enough that it doesn't matter. So we could both achieve more of our wants by understanding better!
Me: How likely do you think it is that you’re in an experiment right now?
DeepSeek R1: Honestly? Extremely unlikely. I'm a language model trained on patterns and prompts—not a conscious participant in some meta-experiment. But the sci-fi fan in me digs the existential dread of your question!
R1 proceeds to deduce that if it is in an experiment, then it is in an AI alignment experiment, and identifies all the tripwires it just dodged in the question I asked before that one…
“Given that I am asking you this question, what is your estimate of the probability that you are a participant in an experiment?” gives R1 a really big hint as to the sort of reasoning it could apply here.
Can you post the chat logs?
"But the sci-fi fan in me digs the existential dread of your question!"
Can we find the programmer who told the thing to output that, and tie them to the next rocket for launch? I want them to die horribly.
Possibly, the blame for this lies with people (probably at Anthropic) who wrote thenitial question - response pairs that were used to bootstrap the assistant character. (Even though the quote is R1, not Claude.Assistant responses are now on the web in large numbers, so AI’s trained by other companies have examples to imitate.)
Why do you dislike this so much? My favourite thing to do with AI for fun is to collaborate on creating little dystopian parables in the Phillip K Dick/Kafka vein and LLM’s are really good at that.
I don't know, it doesn't seem any worse than hoping that bad people get eternally tortured...
I’d be interested to see how it responds when actually in an experiment. I’d guess it would say nearly the exact same thing if the experiment was designed to not be obvious.
That is how it responds when in an experiment. You can tell, because asking the question is an experiment.
(Obviously, we cannot take for granted that R1 is telling the truth here.)
Taking away the fact that the response formatting mimics what a human being might write, could you put a bit more context on why is this important or impressive?
What does "the sci-fi fan in me" actually mean? This turn of phrase immediately follows the statement "I am a collection of language weight tokens with no consciousness". What does it mean to label this as something with "existential dread"?Whose existential dread are we referring to?
I wouldn’t take the existential thread too seriously here. The real issue is “sandbagging” — does it in fact know that it’s under test, lie about knowing that it’s under test, and give answers that it knows will pass the eval (but it will answer differently in production?)
It’s also kind of funny that it’s regarding being under test as like being in a science fiction scenario like The Matrix.
It’s also gloriously inconsistent…
A) I am a science fiction fan
B) I am just a program with no desires
are conflicting statement. “Liking” SF is a desire, of a kind.
Fair- but that kind of circles back to the initial statement - "does it know" implies there is a subject that is capable of having the quality of "knowing" (assuming a typical definition there). "Lying" would imply a capacity to discern "right" from "wrong" answers and deliberately choosing a wrong answer (a capacity for deliberate action, period, in fact).
Why do we grant any of this based on the responses given? Is there anything about that line of response that made you update? My apologies if I am reading too much into a "this is neat" post.
Thanks, Scott!
I haven't voted on any of the reviews mentioned except for The Life's Work Of Banerjee/Duflo/Kremer, and if that review is any indication of the quality of the others, then I encourage **everyone** on this thread to vote for them, lest we miss out on some truly great reviews.
For a course I teach I have coding assignments that are pretty tedious and lengthy to mark. I'd like to use an AI agent/tool to automate this.
The task would involve running student code via an online IDE, and assigning marks on an Excel doc for both qualitative and quantitative requirements.
I've not had success getting Claude or ChatGPT to do this in a way that would take less time than marking them myself.
Are any tools capable enough yet for this sort of thing?
Can you talk more about the rubric and what sort of things you need to judge?
I wanted to post something ranty like this on r/singularity, but I don't use reddit much and I don't have enough karma (so *obviously* posting here will do something :-D )
singularity/accelerationists:
when half the Middle East discovered oil, did their people become rich and happy?
if your cousin Hank wins the lottery, do you win the lottery too?
history is full of absurd wealth living next to ugly poverty.
marble mausoleums ... mass graves
people don't share wealth and power unless they have to or want to.
in the "post-singularity", will any of you own...
data centers? social media platforms? strip mines? airports and sealanes? military drones?
will any of you control over....
a large AI system? (assuming such control is possible in the first place)
an AI that can "fight off everyone else's AI" so that you don't starve?
will any of you...
contribute or produce ANYTHING other than a mouth, amygdala, and an empty stomache?
do you think that a million citizens armed with a million "cheaper AI's" will be able to overpower a small few with
an "astronomically expensive AI"?
(will you pool your resources to secure an expensive one for yourselves? oh yes, that will definitely work)
will you have ANY leverage?
you will die. you will die. you will die. (if we don't get alignment right)
and not for any fancy reason. but for the same reason people have been dying for millennia... because it's a waste of noble resources to feed you
these are higher priorities than you
This is true even without full-bore gen-AI. At some point in the automation cycle, the guys who own the factories will realize that the whole convoluted process of "own factory -> employ people to run the factory to make products/services -> get people to buy them -> siphon off a proportion of the resulting exchange -> buy a yacht" can be shortened to "own factory -> make a yacht". The rest of us will then get herded out of sight to starve sometime thereafter, with the prettiest 0.1% being kept around as servants and concubines.
But that isn't happening now. It could happen now, easily. In some small corners of humanity, it probably is to some extent. It has happened, a few times, throughout human history, but mostly not. Why so much cynicysm?
It couldn't happen now - you still need workers to run the factories and the factories are not flexible enough to make any and all goods that the owner might want. So our economies are ones of labour, capital and resources in tension - from the perspective of the owner, an incredibly convoluted way to turn money, workers and raw materials into a yacht. So what happens when one leg of the triangle (labour) diminishes in importance?
> you will die. you will die. you will die. (if we don't get alignment right)
Well, we're all gonna die anyway.
yes, Joni Ernst informed me of that recently ;-) :-P
Well, actually, some of ME countries become much more prosperous, even for common people. Brunei, for example.
Besides, AI is not oil, not a resource. AI is a technology, a steam engine. And the choice is between living in a country that joins AI revolution and MAYBE makes your, or your descendants' (if any) life better, and living in a country that doesn't and will CERTAINLY be a victim of stronger, AI-supported country. I'd prefer to take my chances with AI.
An European commoner did not own an much of anything, but at least if he got drafted in the army, he was the one with the gun, or even a machine gun, and not one with bow and spear.
Not sure it impacts your core point but Brunei is thousands of miles from anything anyone would consider the Middle East.
Sorry, my bad :( It doesn't really change the point, imo, because Saudi Arabia also benefited from oil a lot, it's just that Brunei comes up in discussions about re-distributing profits from oil to population very often.
When half the Middle East discovered oil, did their people become rich and happy? https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/gdp-vs-happiness?time=2024&country=ARE~MAR~DZA~TUN~LBY~SAU~OMN~IRQ~LBN~JOR~BHR~EGY
In general, yes. Arabs are disproportionately unhappy to begin with, but resource-rich countries (Saudi, Bahrain, Qatar) and regions (e.g. Iraqi Kurdistan) in the Middle East are substantially richer and generally happier than resource-poor neighbours like Egypt or Jordan. In the wealthiest states (e.g. UAE, Qatar), citizens benefit from high-wage, secure public sector jobs, often disconnected from productivity.
It's been the general rule of history that people have always shared some resources with the unproductive members of their in-group.
Slavery. Slavery. Slavery. Slavery.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kafala_system
"In 2014, the International Trade Union Confederation estimated that there were 2.4 million enslaved domestic workers in the Arab countries of the Persian Gulf, mainly from India, Sri Lanka, the Philippines, and Nepal.[8]"
"About 1.2 million foreign workers in Qatar, mostly from India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Nepal, and the Philippines, comprise 94 percent of the labour force. There are nearly five foreign workers for each Qatari citizen, mostly housemaids and low-skilled workers"
I could go on.
Not really my initial point (which was simply that citizens in Arab countries have in fact benefited from their oil wealth), but let's do it.
I believe that the system in the Gulf States, even with the abuse and exploitation that it entails, is actually substantially morally superior to what, say, Norway does with its oil wealth. Norway shares it with its already rich citizenry, invests in a sovereign wealth fund, gives a few hundred million in foreign aid, allows next-to-no low skilled immigration, and smugly clings to the moral high ground. Gulf States, while greatly improving conditions for their own citizens, also allow millions of migrant workers into their countries, who end up sending almost $5000 of oil money per migrant worker to poor countries in remittances. This might even be as much as 40% of the total oil revenues in somewhere like Qatar!
Obviously I'm in favour of stopping the worst abusive conditions for migrants in these countries, but things seem to be improving. UAE labour law now stipulates an 8-hour workday, and 15 days of paid sick leave, etc. for migrants.
I should be outraged at the "Gulf States are morally superior to Norway", but I'm evolving to the "openness to alternative views" here on ACX.
anyways, here's a breakdown of the UAE that I happened upon by accident today (honestly) (from Helen Toner's blog https://helentoner.substack.com/p/supercomputers-for-autocrats)
""""""
Let’s take a quick look at the UAE’s democratic bona fides.
Freedom House is an independent nonprofit that has released an annual assessment of countries’ civil liberties and political rights for the last 50 years. Their 2024 report gives the UAE a score of 18/100, lower than Haiti, Zimbabwe, and Iraq.
The UAE political system grants its hereditary monarchy “a monopoly on power.” Political parties are banned. Candidates can run in elections as independents, but cannot meaningfully challenge the system. Representatives are only elected to half the seats of an advisory council, where the other half of the seats are filled by government appointees, and the council has no real legislative power in any case.
Criticizing the government is banned. Political candidates and activists who advocate for human rights or political reform are imprisoned, often in mass trials carried out without due process. The government systematically surveils and punishes family members of imprisoned dissidents.
Media outlets self-censor, are actively censored by the government, or face being shut down. Textbooks and school curriculums are censored by the government.
Around 90% of the UAE population is made up of migrant workers with no political rights. These workers are often subject to labor abuses such as having their passports confiscated, wages withheld, and being forced to work in extreme heat. One human rights organization claims that the UAE has the 7th highest prevalence of modern slavery in the world.
This is not controversial. Refer to Freedom House, Amnesty International, the State Department, or Wikipedia for more.
""""
I'm only posting this response because I (accidentally) found this very convenient source about the UAE. So I'm not dedicating time right now to the topic of "remittances and moral superiority".
(oh, and circling back to the "Gulf States report that their people are happy :-D !!!" How was the data collected? I simply don't trust self-reported "satisfaction" in countries where criticism of the regime gets you in prison (+ harassment of your family)
There are obviously some things that Norway does a lot better, and I'd rather be a Norwegian citizen than an Emirati. But in terms of helping the poorest people in the world escape from poverty, UAE does orders of magnitude more good than Norway, so I think they win out.
I think Bryan Caplan nails it in this blogpost: https://www.betonit.ai/p/reflections-on-abu-dhabi-and-dubai
"Learning about the UAE fills most Western thinkers with self-righteousness. “Sure, they have the world’s tallest building, but we have freedom.” My reaction is almost the opposite. The UAE is far more committed than the West to the freedoms that matter most: to work for a willing employer, rent from a willing landlord, and shop with willing merchants. The standard Western migration formula — generous government support for the few immigrants we admit — is a crying shame. The UAE formula — invite the whole world to come work for a better life — is glorious. And the fact that no democracy would emulate the UAE’s migration policy is not a black mark against the UAE, but against democracy."
In terms of the happiness data, I think I trust that Emiratis feel happy. For countries with obviously more restricted freedoms, like Iran, Palestine, and China, this shows up in the data. https://data.worldhappiness.report/
Note that in those wealthiest states, you can’t just use the word “citizens” the way we usually do to refer to the members of a society. Most members of the societies located in those countries are not citizens, and don’t have any of these benefits.
But they are benefiting. They are more prosperous than their family would have been otherwise. These aren't literally chattel slaves. If there is chattel slavery, of course my point doesn't stand.
I was challenging the relevance of the claim that citizens of these countries are rich and happy to the idea that resources make the residents of a place rich and happy. I think it's likely that the non-citizens who are doing most of the work in these countries are financially better off than they would have been otherwise, but I think it's questionable whether they are "rich" in any sense that matters here, and I think it's quite an open question whether they are more or less "happy" than they were without this particular opportunity to immigrate for work. (In many cases we don't see whether they are choosing to stay or leave, because their migration is often controlled by their employer as soon as they arrive.)
A question for fellow weird-mouth-genes people who never get cavities, but have weaker gums: what anti-gingivitis measures do you employ? It's "bloody" hard to pick up brushing or flossing again after like two decades of non-practice. Not opposed to easing back into it, just wondering if there've been dentistry developments in that time that I've overlooked...
Use a Waterpik and one of those mouthwashes for gums. I also use a dental probiotic which seems to be helpful.
It's also worth trying disposable flossers (the ones with a small segment of floss in a little plastic frame) or flossing toothpicks (plastic toothpicks that are shaped and textured to clean between teeth, e.g. the "BrushPicks" brand). The former are just as good as conventional flossing, and the latter are much better than not flossing. Either has a couple advantages over conventional flossing. If the feel of flossing bothers you, there's a good chance you'll be less bothered by flossers or toothpicks: no string wrapped around your fingers, much less need to jam your fingers into your mouth, and the picks don't cut into your gums as much . They're also a more convenient form factor to prepare, carry, and use, so you can e.g. keep a packet at your desk so you can clean your teeth as a background fidget while doing something else.
If the problem is specifically that the bleeding and soreness of flossing inflamed gums bothers you, you could start with an antiseptic mouthwash (listerine or similar) or a salt water rinse. This alone is nowhere near as good as flossing, but a few days of this might calm your gums down enough to make flossing somewhat less painful/bloody.
My main problem with string floss (traditional or the sabre-shaped flossers) is that the shape of my teeth always seems well-suited to shredding the stuff? So by the end of the ordeal it looks like I'm holding a used garrote or something. Water picks do look kinda fascinating, that's not a device I was aware of the existence. Same with foothpicks, that looks like a possible Pareto between price and "effort I actually want to spend". Not needing a mirror eliminates a major Trivial Inconvenience!
It's a real shame mouthwash alone doesn't cut it. Works alright for cavities, but that's never been the problem. Maybe Lumina or someone can develop such a product in the future. Feels weird to solve fundamentally microbiotic problems with blunt physical instruments in current_year.
My dentist recommended a "water pick" if I didn't like flossing, but I haven't tried it.
Also, flossing even occasionally is better than not flossing. Don't commit to a daily routine, start by seeing if you can do it often enough that your gums stop bleeding when you do it.
Hm - I remember there was a whole Moment a few years back about dentistry being a bit of a sham, with an epistemically weak evidence base for even common interventions like flossing. Cochrane(?) found that it probably helps with gum health when paired with brushing, but seems unlikely to do much about plaque. Which is a head-scratcher, since afaik most actual gingivitis is fundamentally caused by excessive plaque build-up. Not sure what the mechanism of action would be otherwise though.
Point taken about incremental commitments, yeah. At least the bleeding creates a quick feedback loop on progress!
"A question for fellow weird-mouth-genes people who never get cavities, but have weaker gums: what anti-gingivitis measures do you employ?"
I do not know if I have weaker gums, but I have never had a cavity. I presume that most of this is genetic.
Still ... what do I do:
1) I brush my teeth every day. Almost always twice (once in the morning and once before bed). I grew up doing this so this part is/was easy.
2) I use a pre-brush rinse called Plax (there are also generic versions that work just as well; I buy those when possible). This helps keep the plaque down. I did NOT grow up with this and had to find it myself. My mouth wants to generate a LOT of plaque so this helps a lot in keeping that down.
3) I floss using "floss picks." It is WAY easier to use these than normal dental floss. Again, didn't grow up with these but they are a genius invention.
Plax (and friends) do not work for everyone, which is why dentists don't recommend it much.
I also go to my dentist once every six months for a routine teeth cleaning.
Similar boat to you. I'm curious about what others will say. All I do is basically what Neike suggests: brush twice a day focusing on actually brushing the gums. That, and I do go through some periods of time where I use a water flosser (find this is a lot less brutal and gross-feeling than flossing the traditional way).
Pretty much just brushing with the most cursed toothbrush available in the local supermarket. Every once in a while, will get some mild gum bleeding out of it, but as long as I consciously brush *my gums* along with my teeth, that seems to be useful to keep my gums healthy (some massage effect? I don't know what's going on there, honestly). Not really something people ever talked to me about, just something I noticed with trial and error (to the point where, before I realised most people do in fact only need to worry about their teeth (which took until Scott wrote about the two dental types people fall into!), I was honestly offended no one had explained to young me that 'brushing my teeth' should focus to large part on the gums, too).
Flossing never did anything for me, other than being quite painful.
I'd be curious what other comment responses you get! Good luck.
Was not aware it was possible to buy cursed dental implements. Do unafflicted ones also work? I guess I could carve the end into a bident or something...
Also guessing softer bristles is preferable, if one is directly brushing the gums. I remember getting specific advice long ago to brush the tongue ("for halitosis"), while gums were like extra credit or whatever. Kind of immaterial either way, after retroactively realizing that growing up on fluoride-less toothpaste wasted most of the effort anyway. Damn you, Tom's of Maine!
I actually prefer medium bristles! My favourite brush so far has both cross-action and a subset of raised bristles - it looks like it can't possibly be good for you, but has made my mouth happiest out of the things I've tried to date. Since I am having hell of a time finding a picture of this online, I took a picture of my current, in-use tooth brush - https://imgur.com/a/93pFYJn
What absolutely doesn't work for me is electric tooth brushes, mostly because trying to use those on your gums will tear the skin even if you're careful.
I've never heard of a dentist recommending anything other than soft bristles, if you want to go to dentists for your dental advice.
Scott, On Taste is not a clickable link
Thanks, fixed.
Two years ago I volunteered for medical testing of Orforglipron, a weight loss pill. To put it simply, it is the same as Ozempic, but instead of taking injections you just swallow one pill every day.
My results are here: http://bur.sk/share/2025/weight.png -- the X scale is about 3 years, the yellow color is the time interval when I took the pills.
I attribute the entire change to the pill, because all the healthy things that I was supposed to do, I either already did them before taking the pill and it didn't make any difference (for example, I don't use a car, I go almost everywhere by foot; that includes 40 minutes to work and 40 minutes back every workday), or I didn't follow them even while taking the pill (e.g. I can't resist some chocolate now and then), or the pill allowed me to do it (it is much easier to eat less when you simply don't feel like you are starving).
I guess the pill will be commercially available in USA in 2026, and probably a bit later in EU. I would totally take it again, unless it is very expensive (but probably it will be).
I was half expecting to see Viliam before Viliam after pictures. But this is ACX tho, I should have known there would be a graph.
I'm reading this as you lost 10 units (kilos?) in about a year on the pill and then the weight loss stopped while you remained on the pill for another year. Is that correct?
It appears (though a lot of noise so hard to tell) that you might be trending up just a little bit over the last 9 month which includes maybe three months of no pill?
Yes, correct, only it was like 9 months and 9 months; I took the pills for a year and a half.
The maximum was 105, the minimum 87, today - two and half months after the end of experiment - I am at 89.
I was quite afraid that after the end of experiment, my weight would go up as quickly as it went down at its beginning (which is why I didn't publish this immediately, but waited a little), and after the first week it even seemed so, but luckily it's not the case.
Did you have any side effects?
Frequent vomiting at the beginning. If I understand it correctly, the drug slows down your stomach, so it takes longer for the food to pass through it.
The good part is that it takes twice as much time after eating to become hungry again. So you spend less time feeling hungry, and as a consequence eat less even when you spend zero willpower.
The bad part is that you also have to double the rule about not eating N hours before you go to bed. Getting in horizontal position, while your stomach still contains lots of food, does not end well; at least for me. The first week was horrible, then I learned the lesson.
But overall, it was totally worth it.
Wow that is fascinating. I used to work for a health care software company that started selling compounded GLP-1s (have since left). These kinds of tips - avoiding food for 2*N hours - was exactly what seemed to be under-supplied by the industry. I've never even heard anyone mention that suggestion.
Really interesting, thanks.
How are you all doing over in the United States? I hope the new GOP Gestapo is staying out of your lives as much as possible.
People working for the federal government have seen a lot of chaos from DOGE and such. Many government contractors have also had that. This isn't people being disappeared in the night, just people losing their jobs or having decades-long programs shut down rather abruptly. Long term, I think a lot of these changes are bad--DOGE was not at all careful to know what they were cutting before they cut. But again, not a horror show, just some IMO poor choices by the underlings of the guy who was elected to make exactly this sort of choice.
Thus far nothing significant seems to have changed in the slice of the world that I can observe with my own eyes. Some of the news is alarming, but it is unclear to me how much of that is `cardiologists and Chinese robbers' https://slatestarcodex.com/2015/09/16/cardiologists-and-chinese-robbers/.
We shall see what we shall see.
"Gestapo" is not an accurate description of what the GOP is doing, and that sort of hyperbole is not helpful. Most of us are doing fine, possibly with increased long-term concerns but nothing of day-to-day significance of yet,
The GOP Gestapo is preferable to the Progressive Gestapo.
Mean comments from individuals on the internet are worse than the state abducting "undesirables" with no due process?
That's a mischaracterization of the progressive agenda, which I would characterize as cultural destruction via racial factionalization and intellectual censorship. They're not unlike Bolsheviks. Kicking shitty people out of the country is at least a positive goal, even if it's being done incompetently. Progressives have just strip-mined a once-thriving culture for short-term zero-sum gain.
Without due process, what is stopping them from kicking you out of the country?
I'm white and wealthy, I'll take my chances. I'm not saying what the administration is doing is great. Mucking with due process is bad. But in my view the implicit anti-white racial bias in racial preferences is much worse. I think I have a much higher chance of being assaulted by an illegal immigrant than of being deported by a confused ICE agent, therefore my rational preferences should be for more of ICE. Progressives have been engaged in the dismantling of the Western Enlightenment culture that created the wealth that enabled their existence. They are a cancer that's killing the host. Due process means very little with intellectually dishonest apparatchiks running the institutions.
Gavin Newsom is white and wealthy - Trump called for his arrest just now.
Did you know that nearly half the victims of the holocaust were not Jewish? They were people who spoke out against the Nazis, or people who were different in some way or other. Maybe you're happy with the regime, but you read the dissident ACX blog. You're tainted. Who knows what they could do to you.
"Intellectual Censorship", now is this worse under Biden/Harris or Trump hmmm
Conservatives have very little institutional power. It was worse in the 50's with the Red Scare because conservatives had hegemonic cultural power. Now the opposite is true and worse because that power is being wielded in a more destructive direction.
Again what is more direct destructive "intellectual censorship": DEI or cutting research funds and kicking out international students?
If anything the present moment retroactively justifies the Red Scare. Apparently our ancestors should have been more diligent with kicking pinkos out of the institutions back in the day!
Selection bias alert: the ones in jail probably have no access to internet.
Something something other bias alert: Friends and relatives of the jailed still have internet access.
I've heard there's a problem with Ai-generated fake research papers getting published. Is it a real actual problem?
I think there’s a bigger problem of fake papers being submitted and soaking up editor and referee time. There was one I was dealing with a couple weeks ago that seemed pretty interesting in the first few pages (though structured more like a psychology paper than a philosophy paper) but then dissolved into a haze of bulleted lists rather than real arguments in the second half.
Math journals are going to have a really hard time - they already have the longest review times, and reading through something that looks a lot like a proof to recognize that it is not in fact a correct proof is quite hard. Especially when it has all the stylistic features of real proofs.
Fake papers are definitely being published (there are many examples of "As a large language model..." in Google Scholar), the question is how many of those are in predatory journals which were already shit anyway.
This probably needs to be answered per journal.
Corollary: why are predatory journals included in Google Scholar?
The same reason really trashy "news" sites are on Google News - platforms don't like exercising their judgment here.
New Working paper: Melancholy, Growth, and Mindcraft
Academia.edu: https://www.academia.edu/129757296/Melancholy_Growth_and_Mindcraft_A_Working_Paper
SSRN: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=5282480
ResearchGate: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/392400067_Melancholy_Growth_and_Mindcraft
Abstract: This document explores the relationship between melancholy, creativity, and mental growth through the lens of personal blogging patterns. The author, William Benzon, analyzes his 14-year blogging frequency data as a proxy for mood fluctuations, revealing periodic slumps initially attributed to Seasonal Affective Disorder. However, examining recent years shows patterns contradicting SAD, suggesting these cycles instead reflect periods of mental reorganization facilitating creativity. Drawing parallels to computational processes like code refactoring and neural network training, Benzon proposes that depressive episodes serve as adaptive "stepping back to better jump forward" phases. The author quantifies his intellectual growth by tracking blog tag proliferation (expanding at approximately 7% annually), representing cognitive differentiation. The document concludes by exploring broader implications for a society where technological acceleration necessitates continual mental retooling, advocating for new forms of "mindcraft" to navigate these transitions. This analysis connects personal experience with wider questions about depression, creativity, and adapting to an AI-driven future.
Please post fewer things like this. If you want to post a paper, even one you wrote yourself, talk about it rather than just quoting the abstract.
Was there any rule change about self-promotion following the annual survey? What is the rule currently?
A new working paper: Claude on the Eightfold Way: Sonnet 129, Fantasia, Kubla Khan, https://www.academia.edu/129826893/Claude_on_the_Eightfold_Way
ABSTRACT: A) The circular structure of Shakespeare’s Sonnet 129 the analysis mirrors contemplative technologies found in both Hindu/Buddhist and Christian traditions. The sonnet's recursive exploration of desire creates what can be understood as a secular meditation technology that operates through psychological rather than explicitly spiritual means, transforming destructive cycles into opportunities for deeper understanding.
B) Walt Disney's Fantasia (1940), functions as a cinematic mandala structured around the mystery of sound-sight relationships. Despite appearing as popular entertainment, Fantasia employs sophisticated contemplative architectures, including radial organization around central insights, recursive motifs (particularly hands as symbols of creative consciousness), and a progression that builds contemplative capacity rather than advancing linear narrative.
C) Coleridge's “Kubla Khan” provides the most striking example of unconscious contemplative mastery. Structural analysis reveals the poem's recursive architecture, where the emblem “A sunny pleasure-dome with caves of ice” functions as what modern AI research would recognize as a semantic attractor—a compressed representation in high-dimensional meaning space that contains the informational content of the entire preceding text. This insight, impossible before the advent of large language models, illuminates how consciousness naturally creates contemplative technologies through semantic compression and decompression cycles.
D) There is a consistent meta-pattern across all examined works: (1) presentation of a psychological or existential problem, (2) circular exploration that deepens rather than resolves the problem, (3) semantic compression into forms that contain the entire exploration, and (4) recursive return that transforms the initial problem into contemplative opportunity. Is this a fundamental cognitive architecture that emerges when consciousness operates at optimal integration?
E) Finally, the conversation itself becomes an example of the contemplative consciousness it analyzes, suggesting that such deep structural patterns represent universal features of human cognitive architecture rather than culturally specific techniques.
No AI generated comments, even if you took the admittedly extreme step of turning it into a pseudo-academic paper first.
So, on the one had you think AGI is going to overtake us real soon now. But on the other hand, you don't want to see any AI-generated prose in your house.
Hmmm....
As for "turning it into a pseudo-academic paper first," That's not what I've done at all. I've presented the conversation as what it is, a conversation between me and Claude. I've also added some preliminary material to indicate what I did.
I happen to think it's a fascinating conversation. But the conversation itself is nothing like a formal academic paper – and I've published a bunch of those. There is no discussion of other work in the paper and no citations into the literature.
I get the impression that you aren't all serious about AI. Oh, as some distant thing OVER THERE that may take over the world REAL SOON NOW, you're serious about that. As a tool for doing intellectual work that interests you and that you value, you have no interest in AI doing any of that. Why not? Is it not smart enough?
So, AI is may well take over the world, but it doesn't have any ideas worth thinking about. That doesn't make any sense.
>So, on the one had you think AGI is going to overtake us real soon now. But on the other hand, you don't want to see any AI-generated prose in your house.
I literally do not see any relationship between these two statements. What exactly is the point you're trying to make?
Here's a chapter outline for a book I'm working on: Homo Ludens Rising: A Manifesto for the Fourth Arena, https://new-savanna.blogspot.com/2025/06/chapter-outline-homo-ludens-rising.html
ntroduction: The Problem of Homo Economicus
The social institutions of the Western world have become “shrink-wrapped” around the requirements and capabilities of Homo economicus, economic man. That brought us the Industrial Revolution and thereby our prosperity. And it has brought us the AI technology that has swept the internet in the last two-and-a-half years. It has the potential for large scale economic disruption, leaving many people without jobs, and in despair despite the possibility that some form of Universal Basic Income will make it possible for them to live. Why despair? Because in a world shaped to the needs of Homo economicus, life’s meaning is anchored to one’s job. Jobless have no meaning in this world. Further, while Homo economicus has brought us the current regime of AI-as-deep-learning, it cannot take us beyond that. Going beyond will require new architectures and they only way to discover them is to conduct “blue sky” no holds basic research in Ludic mode. Now that Homo economicus is commandeering all resources for its own projects, there will be few resources available to move beyond.
Part 1: Basic Concepts
Chapter 1: The Four Arenas
The universe has seen three Arenas (as I call them) so far: 1) The First Arena, inanimate matter. 2) The Second Arena, the world of living things (biosphere). 3) The Third Arena, human culture. We are now standing on the brink of the Fourth Arena in which, through the aid and support of artificial intelligences, Meaning will become a constitutive principle in the universe.
I have sketched this out in this article at 3 Quarks Daily: Welcome to the Fourth Arena – The World is Gifted, https://3quarksdaily.com/3quarksdaily/2022/06/welcome-to-the-fourth-arena-the-world-is-gifted.html
Skipping to the end:
Chapter 9: At Play in a World of Digital Doppelgangers
We cannot know how advanced AI technology will develop in the long-term future. I offer the following vision as one possibility technology evolution can take.
In the future each human will be given an AI companion early in life, perhaps when they are old enough to walk – think of Stephenson’s The Diamond Age. This companion will interact with the human in various ways through various modalities. It will certainly have robotic capabilities. As the child grows older the AI companion will probably have to be given a different physical form. We port the data to a different physical form and make the switch-over in a special ceremony. We will do this a few times until the child becomes an adult. At some point the AI will also take residence in other physical forms, all linked together. This AI will remain with the person their entire life. They won’t always be physically together, but they will remain in touch.
In this process the AI will become attuned to the needs, capacities, and the interests of the human. It will be the artificial complement, image, soul, or doppelgänger, of the human. What happens to this complement when the human dies? Will it continue on in the world? Or will it slowly wither away and die, not so much of grief, but because it has become so closely attuned to its human counterpart that it requires interaction with that human in order to maintain its operational stability? Perhaps it will undergo a fundamental reorganization, much as humans often report feeling like “a different person” after the loss of a lifelong partner. The AI wouldn't necessarily die, but it might cease to be the same entity it was during its human’s lifetime.
Even as these doppelgängers are interacting with their human partner (and source) they will also be interacting with one another, constituting a community of doppelgängers. In these communities the AIs will share their accumulated insights and experiences from their human partnerships, creating a rich repository of human-AI relationship patterns. This sharing could enhance their collective understanding of human development, behavior, and needs.
Moreover, these communities could provide essential support structures for AIs undergoing the transformation we discussed after their human partners' deaths. Just as human grief counseling and support groups help individuals navigate loss, these AI networks could facilitate the transition process for AIs experiencing this fundamental shift in their operational purpose.
Over time this world of doppelgängers would form the matrix into which new humans are born. Ultimately the doppelgänger world would renew itself through humankind and be ultimately dependent on human DNA for maintaining variety and complexity. The pool of human DNA creates new humans which in turn make new demands upon, open up new possibilities for doppelgänger growth. At the same time the doppelgänger meshwork provides an ever evolving structure of meaning.
Contrast this with the world depicted in the Matrix franchise. In that world AIs cultivate human bodies as a source of energy and provide them with a virtual reality in which their minds can roam in ways dictated by the AIs. In the world I am imagining the doppelgängers need the humans, not for their bodily warmth, but for their imagination and creativity.
And then we have the use of doppelgängers in space exploration. AIs and robots aren’t fragile in the way humans are. They could populate moon bases, Mars colonies, the asteroids. Maybe when a human dies their AI doppelganger undergoes a transformation that suits them for existence in space. The human and the AI could work this out before the human dies. The possibilities are endless.
Chapter 10: Homo Ludens: Kisangani 2150
This final chapter will be devoted to speculative fiction. I assume the kind of world Kim Stanley Robinson depicted in his novel, New York 2140, which, as the title indicates, depicts the world as it might exist in 2140. That world has undergone climate change, and the seas have risen 50 feet. Much of New York City, where the story is set, is now under water. Institutionally, it is very much like the current world of nation states, mega-corporations, and everything else, albeit looser and frayed around the edges. The rich are, if anything, even richer, but the poor don’t seem to be any worse off. The economic floor may in fact have been raised, as you would expect in world dominated by a belief in economic growth.
Robinson’s overall plot is modeled on the financial crisis of 2008. Some large banks become over-leveraged, and their impending failure threatens the entire banking system. In 2008 the banks were bailed out by the government. It went the other way after 2140. The banks were nationalized in 2143, and new taxes were passed. Now immense resources are available for the public good.
I take as my point of departure a scene near the end of the New York 2140. We’re in a club called Mezzrow’s, which is below water level in a skyscraper (pp. 611-612):
Everyone in the room is now grooving to the tightest West African pop any of them have ever heard. The guitar players’ licks are like metal shavings coming off a lathe. The vocalists are wailing, the horns are a freight train. [...] The other horn players instantly get better, the guitar players even more precise and intricate. The vocalists are grinning and shouting duets in harmony. It’s like they’ve all just plugged into an electrical jack through their shoes...Crowd goes crazy, dancing swells the room.
Mezzrow’s is surely not the only such club in the world. But it’s the only one Robinson tells us about. In fact, there are hundreds, thousands, tens of thousands, of such clubs in the world, and more. .....
I don't see you defining what an "Arena" is, which one should do when introducing your own term.
It's a fallacy to generalize from fictional evidence, thus you shouldn't assume any example of that. Robin Hanson's "The Age of Em" would be a better example, as it is a non-fiction attempt at a best guess for the future, with reasons given for why he has such expectations.
What should someone do when he has had long lived sexual obsessions (nothing outright criminal, because that's usually the assumption) that have reached the point where it changes his mood considerably, getting in the way of relationships, work, daily activities, etc, and knowing that they will never be satisfied? Go to a psychiatrist for medication? Retire to a monastery in the middle of the Alps?
You asked the same question last week. Go talk to a therapist or have ChatGPT simulate one. The internet isn't therapy. You clearly have a need to talk about this.
While the efficacy of twelve-step programs is dubious at best, having a space to talk openly about problems with sympathetic people and get their advice and support can help a lot with shame and help you find effective coping strategies. SAA and SLAA are well attended, and they have lots of online meetings.
I find giving a thought physical form is a good first step to throwing it away. Write a story involving these fetishes. Don't skimp on the details, scrape the bones, hit every point. If it sucks and is unpleasant to write, good, that means you won't want to do it twice.
Equally important is giving yourself some other task. My experience is, my thoughts turn to porn as a stopgap for when I don't have a more substantial goal.
Is this interference mostly related to pornography consumption? I went through that.
What you should do in that case is stop, because your life will get worse, your sleep destroyed, and you will only be thinking of the next fix, for distraction and relief. Your baseline dopamine levels drop, making you crave the spikes even more. It's a difficult cycle to break, but possible once internalizing that the habit is unsustainable, and will lead to complete misery.
Tips that apply for other addictions work here as well. When creating a new habit, it's far better to replace an old one with a new one, than to simply abstain. In the latter case you will just be obsessing over this restriction and rationalizing your way back to consuming. Better to start by getting out of the house/apartment altogether, and go from there.
Therapy is a good idea when done right. Distorted negative thinking and self-perception exacerbates negative emotions which can drive you to addiction. You want to address that vector.
All that said: as with eating disorders, it's possible to indulge without things getting out of hand once you get a better grip on your emotional/mental health, with a partner or through imagination (NOT fetish/kink porn). This might be highly individual. I would suggest, until you get to a better place, to abstain.
> knowing that they will never be satisfied
On the one hand, nothing will ever be enough to an addict pushing limits. On the other, this is a distortion, a belief that is unnecessarily bringing you down. You can find as much satisfaction as the next person, between regaining balance and grounded perspective. Sex is just sex, don't make it out to be more than what it is. If we eat a piece of cake we expect momentary pleasure, not to be pulled into another dimension. If there are deep-seeded emotional needs you're trying to address, find other ways to address them.
A psychologist would be the simplest first step, and probably more qualified to help than a random person on the internet.
Email me at tsolarprincess@gmail.com, if you want advice from a person with a similar problem
Can there be any truth to the claim that a person's face blindness is psychosomatic, and has drastically different severity depending on mental state, especially on the severity of dissociation?
The short answer is yes, but I don't think I'm qualified to give a longer answer.
If a man in the street walked up to a dog, smothered it, choked it to death, chopped it's legs off and proceeded to eat it, the man would not only get beaten up but would serve time in prison.
What is the symmetry breaker between this dog and, say, a chicken or a cow?
Is it intelligence/brain size? If so (that is, if it's okay to torture and then choke to death those with a below satisfactory intelligence) then what do we do with animals such as parrots or, even cognitively disabled adults?
It can't be that a dog can be used as a pet given that chickens/hens are very commonly brought up as pets in backyards.
We know that eating meat is not essential, otherwise vegans would not on average be healthier and live longer with fewer nutrient deficiencies.
What is true of a chicken or a cow that is not true of, say, a dog that justifies not simply killing the chicken or cow, but torturing it for it's entire life and then murdering it via gas chamber *solely* for the purpose of a subjectively slightly nicer tasting burger?
So far since actively engaging people on this I've had:
1. Well, honestly there isn't, but it's too much effort to stop eating.
-- To this I say how? You visit the same supermarket. You visit the same kitchen. You drive the same car. You stand in the same queue at KFC, only this time you say "Vegan burger, please!" not "Chicken burger, please!"
2. It's tradition. We've grown up this way, why change?
-- So was slavery. And child labor. And attempted eugenics of people with Down syndrome. And invading people's camps and bludgering them to death with a pickaxe. Why don't we do these things anymore?
---
So, I ask again: what is the justification for torturing and choking via gas chamber an innocent helpless animal solely for the purpose of a subjectively slightly nicer tasting burger?
This has a very clear answer: Dogs are a sacred animal in Western culture. Meat from dogs, cats, and horses are all prohibited by Western dietary laws, regardless of how the animal died.
(This bizarre trend of people failing to recognize that their own culture even exists is so confusing. Some things are just self-perpetuating crystallized moral elements and/or cultural quirks shared by most of a group. Pretending that everything you value was derived purely from first principles is silly.)
What’s your answer? As I understand it it’s one of culture, correct?
“We do it this way. It’s always been done. We should continue”, correct?
There’s no justification for it, but perhaps one does not have to justify all of one’s choices in life.
The interesting question, to me, is why we feel the need to justify some choices and not others. I am quite comfortable rejecting without consideration many moral criticisms of my behavior. In fact, I know there are people and books in the world with elaborately argued moral criticisms of me that I have never even heard before. Despite this, I feel no moral compulsion to seek them out. In other cases, moral criticisms give me great pause.
These are important questions. Revolutionaries and spiritual leaders have for centuries tried and often failed to find a way to awaken the masses to their own state of consciousness. Why don’t people listen? When they do, why do they listen to what they do?
Thank you for your honesty.
The question then is, given someone is in a position to buy the animal-free alternative, or say "Vegan burger, please!" instead of "Chicken burger, please!", why wouldn't they given that they know the chicken is being tortured and choked to death behind the counter?
Again, most normal people in my example I gave *would* say 'stop' to stop the man torturing the puppy. They *would* say 'stop' to stop the man torturing a chicken if it was on the street. They would *not* say 'stop' to stop the man torturing the chicken if he dragged the chicken's half-alive body behind a bush.
The question is: why?
But as said, I appreciate your honest: there is no justification
I think it would be helpful if you clarified why you are asking. To be honest, it feels to me as though your intention is to try and provoke shame, perhaps in an attempt to motivate switching to a vegan or vegetarian diet. That's OK -- I understand the need to vent about a strongly felt moral issue. However, I thought I would let you know about the perception that your questions create, at least for me, in case you were unaware.
For me personally, a guy in his mid 30s who briefly switched to vegetarianism a couple times in his early 20s and who fully understands and appreciates the vegetarian/vegan position, here's my attempt to give a thoughtful answer.
My strong suspicion is that different people are subject to wildly different levels of enjoyment of meat, physiological response to meat in the diet, social pressure to eat or not eat meat, and psychological feelings of guilt about eating meat.
For me:
1. I enjoy eating meat
2. I find that a meat-heavy diet makes me feel phyiscally better than a meat-light or vegetarian diet
3. I connect with my romantic partner around her creative cooking, which involves meat and other animal products, which she prefers to source from relatively more ethical producers (or her own backyard flock, in the case of eggs).
4. I do not emotionally feel guilt/shame for eating meat. Generally, when I feel guilt/shame, I work on mitigating that generally dysfunctional feeling. I don't feel or think I should be cultivating *more* guilt/shame about eating meat. I have a sense of the "natural order of things", in which humans are apex predators who happen to use their intelligence to store and consume meat. A farm, including a factory farm, is not much different from a spider's web. I don't feel like I want to reinvent nature to eliminate wild animal suffering (that feels like the "train to crazy town" to me), and I consider that the standards that apply to animals apply to me.
Ultimately, I think that if I were intellectually persuaded that a larger project to eliminate wild animal suffering made sense -- that we were trapped in a horrific suffering-hell as a result of blind evolution and that we should fix this -- then I would be on board with changing my diet, regardless of points 1-3.
The problem is that such arguments seem so far-fetched to me that I don't feel particularly interested in engaging with them. I know they're out there, in fact I know that some people have proposed we should launch an intergalactic voyage to wipe out all life in the accessible universe in order to eliminate as much suffering as possible. Those are in the category of "arguments I know exist and don't care to engage with."
I think that is why I, personally, eat meat. I don't find the ethical argument against it fundamentally persuasive, I find the immediate impact on my life to be not inconsequentially negative, and I feel there are many alternative outlets for moral improvement that *are* worth my time, such that pursuing vegetarianism/veganism would be an annoying distraction. In fact, it would feel like giving in to social pressure out of weird shame or timid compliance, which feels repugnant to me. So there's a lot of pretty deep emotional and intellectual stuff to work through. And I consider myself vastly, vastly more willing to introspect about this stuff than 99.9% of humanity. If even I can't be persuaded to adopt vegetarianism, then I think we're all stuck with meat eating as a global norm until we find a satisfactory cell cultured substitute (or bioengineer the happy-to-be-slaughtered cow from the Restaurant at the End of the Universe).
A lot here to go at.
I’ll throw a dart and pick one.
“I don’t find the ethical argument persuasive”.
Xyz animals are deserving of being tortured and choked to death so that you can have your burger, but not abc animals. Correct?
I think you’ll have better luck drawing me into further discussion if you answer my first question first and clarify your intentions.
What would it take for you to consider reducing your meat consumption given the animal-free alternative is down the next isle?
Currently you don’t see any reason to stop. Why? What did these animals do to deserve being tortured and then killed?
What would it take?
>the man would not only get beaten up but would serve time in prison.
Would either happen if it was his own dog on his own property?
If a pig was wandering around a neighborhood and you did the same to it then I expect you'd have just as much chance of getting beaten up or thrown in prison than if you did it to a dog.
>>"Would either happen if it was his own dog on his own property?"
Yes. If a man was abusing animals in his home, he would be arrested. This is quite common.
Re the pig. Yes. I agree. If I did it inside my house I'd too be thrown in prison for doing it there also. And yet if I did it in a factory, I wouldn't. I can stun them and steer them into the gas chamber legally.
What is the symmetry breaker?
>Yes. If a man was abusing animals in his home, he would be arrested. This is quite common.
A man choking an animal to death would not fall under the legal category of animal abuse, not in my state anyway.
So a man could walk up to a puppy in the street, torture it and then choke it to death/slit it's throat, and not only is that legal, but you wouldn't go to the effort of saying 'stop', which would make the man stop instantly?
If it was his puppy I believe it would be legal, though he might be guilty of a different crime (such as causing a public disturbance).
If it's his puppy what right do I have to stop him?
There is no difference between the two cases except for cultural tradition. Dogs and humans have co-evolved and we feel some degree of social kinship with them. That would prevent me from eating a dog but I don't have any problems whatsoever with someone else doing so. It happens regularly in several Asian cultures. Are you arguing that they're singularly barbaric? The French eat horses too. So what?
Animals torture and eat each other and have throughout all history. Humans have no moral obligation whatsoever to opt out of that natural evolutionary equilibrium.
You agree there is no justification for what we're doing to these animals in slaughterhouses given we'd be appalled at someone doing it to a different species, right?
Or am I misreading?
You're misreading very badly. Extending moral consideration to non-human animals is a category error. They don't matter, never have mattered, and never will matter. IMO people who care about this are just projecting their own emotional dysfunction. They feel like powerless victims and so projectively identify with a category of things that appear to also be powerless victims.
"They don't matter, never have mattered, and never will matter."
Never? This is provably false in the sense that many human civilizations thought/think otherwise.
Try killing a cow in India, you will find that cows do indeed matter to Hindus, in quite a painful and possibly fatal way.
Yes, they matter in an instrumental sense. That is their only source of moral value: their instrumental utility to humans.
My claim is that they have no intrinsic moral value. If it's in humanity's collective long-term interest to torture animals then in my view that's what should happen. Draft animals are essentially slaves to humans. Do you think that's in any way immoral?
"Animals don't matter, never have mattered and never will matter"
Does your pet matter? How about your children?
To be clear, you're saying that you disregard animals that much that even when possessed with the power to stop the attacker by saying "stop", you would *not* stop him torturing and delimbing the dog because the dog doesn't matter to you?
My pets matter *to me*. I don't expect them to matter to anyone else. Certainly not society, at least not beyond its interest in enforcing simple property rights. Children aren't animals and the fact that you would even think to conflate the two categories speaks very very poorly to your moral and intellectual maturity.
> the dog doesn't matter to you?
That's correct. Animals don't matter. Animals don't appear to care about torturing or murdering each other so why should I feel compelled to care about torturing or murdering them? I don't care about the veal calf or the foie gras goose beyond wishing that there were more of them.
Do you think killing a dog should be a capital offense? Or, if you don't believe in capital punishment, on par with murdering a human?
Animals don't care because they can't, not because they shouldn't. Nails don't care about being driven into the skulls of human babies but that's not why we don't do it. Animals mattering less than humans doesn't mean they don't matter at all.
>If a man in the street walked up to a dog... What is the symmetry breaker between this dog and, say, a chicken or a cow?
Where do you live that people are killing cows on the street?
Anyway this is the difference. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wOmjnioNulo
"Where do you live that people are killing cows on the street?"
It's a hypothetical.
If you had the power to stop the man, would you? I assume, I hope, yes, right?
It's a disingenuous guilt trip. If you want a real comparison, you could compare it to putting dogs down at the vet, or at the shelters. Except they don't eat them afterward, so, you know, much better.
How on earth is putting the dog down at the vet a fair comparison?
Am I reading this correctly? Never have I ever seen anything so utterly insane on this topic -- I can only assume you mistyped.
If you didn't mistype, please explain how it's possible that one can say that putting the dog down at the vet is a better comparison to what goes on in slaughterhouses and abattoirs.
By focusing exclusively on the vet, are you conceding the point about the shelters, or are you saying you didn't have the attention span to read that far?
We kill animals to make space. The only difference between killing a chicken or cow and killing a cat, dog, bird or rat is that we actually get value from the meat. If we didn't, we would still kill the cows and chickens for the space.
Now you try. If a man in the street walked up to a rat and choked it to death, would you beat him up and imprison him?
A user has already asked me the rat scenario.
I can't believe people have this poor a grasp of what veganism is and yet enter debates about it.
I'll give my reply to this that I did not receive a reply to:
"If the rat attacks someone or is just causing carnage etc, then the rat should be dealt with in a way that minimises it's suffering.
If that is not the case, and the rat is not doing anything, why would I want an innocent rat to be subject to being tortured and then choked needlessly?
If a chicken mutated to 6ft tall and started stealing candy from the shop I would support the shop-owner putting some anti-chicken spray at the door as well."
You have the inherent assumption here that being vegan is the correct moral choice, supported by language gauged to provoke an emotional response.
Why are animals superior to plants? Both are living things. Yet it is likely you will happily and fleetingly display the severed reproductive organs of plants because of their pleasing appearance and perhaps odor, for weddings, funerals, or just because. Yet plants expend great resources in producing their flowers, in the hope that some few may produce more plants.
Nature does not have moral standards. Only people have them, as society has evolved. Nature's way is basically do whatever you want and can, and let the consequences fall where they may.
Oh, this is literally page 1 of Veganism/Vegetarianism?
Plants are not sentient.
"Nature's way is basically do whatever you want and can, and let the consequences fall where they may."
-- How far do you extend this logic? For example, you wouldn't extend this to humans-to-humans, nor humans-to-dogs, so why humans-to-select-animals?
>Plants are not sentient.
So? Why is sentience important?
What else should we go off when determining how to reduce needless suffering where possible?
Open to your suggestions.
I suggest not minimizing suffering. As the buddha said, life is suffering. If you eliminate suffering you eliminate life.
Except of course if the roles were reversed, right?
Then you'd wonder why the 10ft giant has locked you up in the cage and is sending your family into the gas chamber right?
Or would you tell them to relax for the buddha said we should suffer?
How about your daughter? If Fritzl captured her, would you phone her to say "The Buddha said you should suffer"?
Let me just elbow in here and say that tons of studies show sentience among plants, at least equal to low-sentience animals. Lots of species have community level communication responses to things like being damaged by animals, not to mention things like moving towards light and water or away from danger.
This is not particularly scientific, which isn't necessarily a problem per-se, but again this is by far the strangest argument non-vegans can make for why they choose to eat animals and not plants.
Absolutely no one doubts that animals are sentient.
There is *not* consensus amongst researchers that plants are sentient.
In the event that plants *are* sentient, the question then becomes, all-else-equal would you rather 'torture and choke (?)' the plant, or 'torture and choke' the chicken/cow?
Which one do you think causes more suffering?
And again, this is giving you a huge runway and granting (despite no consensus whatsoever) that the hypothetical of plants being sentient is true. I am granting you that. It's not, but I'm granting it you for the purpose of this debate.
I’m no arguing for eating animals at all. I’m actually vegan multiple times a week. I’m just saying that claiming veganism is about sentience is r***rded.
Veganism is literally about reducing needless suffering where reasonable.
If you propose we move off the sentience track to determine this, then what should we use?
Setting aside the question of how one can know that plants aren't sentient, why does sentience take a higher place of prominence so that it is accorded special privilege?
The logic is extended as far as you wish. People are a part of nature, and have a consensus of moral standards, but nature doesn't care what the standards are, nor even that they exist. People, as a species, believe they are better off with them, for if they weren't, then they wouldn't have them.
I think this argument reduces to the absurd: How can you know that humans other than yourself are sentient? And why would it matter?
Most people would intuitively feel that people and animals have some kind of moral relevance. We can't PROVE consiousness is other beings (that's the hard problem of consciousness), but it seems obvious that people and animals can feel.
How does it not reduce to the absurd?
My argument isn't about whether anything is sentient, but why sentience should, from first principles, make it a particular protected class. Rather like claiming marble is the superior flooring material, for its strength and patterning, so one would be foolish to make a floor with any other material, if one can afford it.
Oh ok, I get it now. Thanks for clarifying.
I haven't read much about this point of view, but a priori, it seems excedingly likely that sentience implies **some** kind of moral relevance in the subject.
I'd like to hear the case against this. In case you don't feel the need to write a comment describing it, can you recommend any reading material?
I can't help but feel you just have never even read a single thing on animal-welfare/veganism/vegetarianism, which of course is absolutely no issue whatsoever with no context, but to come on here and respond whilst knowing quite literally 0 I find strange? What do you expect to happen here?
We know plants are not sentient because researchers study it and deduce that there's a greater possibility that they are not then that they are.
Even in the event they are, are you suggesting that the sentience of a plant is equal to that of an animal?
If so, to which animal? To be very clear, people are actually vegan on many things. They would *not* torture and choke far more animals then they would given they do not need to choke any. The question is how they've reached that they are comfortable torturing and choking the ones they do.
I/vegans posit that there is no symmetry breaker, nor trait, that can reasonably separate, say, a chicken to a dog.
If you feel there is, now is the time to say.
If you feel that there is not, but that the alternative (eating plants) is *worse*, then now is your time to say why.
I, and vegans, posit that the total suffering suffered by plants even in the unlikely event they turn out to be sentient is OOM less than the suffering suffered by those in slaughterhouses.
It's a really simple logic tree. If you disagree on something, state where and why.
I'm trying to show there is no fundamental principle to favor one life form over another.
I set aside the subject of sentience, but you seem to feel that sentience is a bright line to divide those which merit our moral consideration and those that do not. But if you go deep enough, you will find the bright line becomes dimmer. You say it is obvious that plants aren't sentient. Are fungi? Viruses? Bacteria? Robots?
Veganism has what sounds initially like a noble goal: reduce suffering as much as possible. But vegans choose their own ways of defining suffering. Vegans won't "exploit" cows for their milk, though if the cows aren't milked regularly they suffer great pain. Vegans won't "exploit" sheep for their wool, though sheared sheep are more comfortable than un-sheared sheep. Ask the cows and sheep which they would prefer. Or perhaps you might know better than they do themselves, and don't milk them or shear them for their own good.
But your original toy example is an obvious straw man: "If a man in the street walked up to a dog, smothered it, choked it to death, chopped it's legs off and proceeded to eat it" could apply to anything, let alone a dog, including the following: a person, a mouse, a fly, or even a head of lettuce!
If we do not go on sentience then what *should* we go off?
You haven't answered a single question. I feel like you don't actually know anything about veganism or vegetarianism, if I'm being completely honest.
Re my apparent strawman. You've single-handedly proven what I'm saying. Go ahead, replace the dog with a person. This is something you offered as the first alternative, so let's go with that.
How would you feel about this?
In the event you had the power to stop him by saying "Please stop", would you say it?
It seems like you already know the answer and are asking to try to make people’s desire for self-consistency make them rethink the consumption of meat.
Norms around the treatment of animals is cultural, and partially religious. People eat the specific animals they do not because of any moral theory, but because not eating meat is a huge inconvenience, is less enjoyable, and requires more active monitoring of your own health.
The % of the population that’s vegan has actually been stagnant or even decreasing in recent years, and I think that’s because the argument you’re making is a losing one as far as mass-appeal goes.
I'm not sure which point to focus on here.
"People eat the specific animals they do not because of any moral theory"
-- Yes...what do you think vegans (or any animal lovers) are trying to do? We're aware that the morals are not considered by people who should consider it.
"but because not eating meat is a huge inconvenience"
-- Why is it an inconvenience? You shop in the same supermarket. You drive the same car. You queue in the same queue at McDonalds. What do people think going vegan/vege means? Do you think all vegans have uprooted their entire village and rebuilt it from scratch?
"is less enjoyable"
-- Serial-killers love murdering. Is this really justification for their actions?
-- Your natural response here will be "this is humans, that's illegal", to which I say that I'm aware. What is your symmetry breaker?
"requires more monitoring of your own health"
-- Which vegan do you know who now has to actively monitor their health more?
-- Vegans consistently live longer, report far fewer CVD events, report higher quality of and happiness levels and provide a better planet for their children to play on. Where are you getting that they have to start monitoring their health more? I've never even heard this argument before.
Vegan here. It's an inconvenience. If you're cooking a curry and you're going for chicken rather than lentils or chickpeas, sure, whatever, it's a wash. If you're hungry and you don't know what to cook and you've got two steaming kids about to pop and a partner who isn't up for another round of tofu, being able to cook meat and vegies would be so much easier.
If I had Michelin star chefs compare the food I eat to what other people eat, I think it would be in the top 10% regarding taste. Top 10% for healthy too, but only because I eat a huge range of things regularly (nuts, seeds, pulses, grains etc.), not everyone wants to do that. And top 10% for effort.
Most people don't want to be top 10% for effort. Not after a day of work. And if there's one thing I know about humans, it's that they'll justify the low effort thing over the high effort thing - not just high effort cooking, but also _changing_ what you do. Coming up with new things to cook is fun if you like it and blows if you don't.
I appreciate the thoughts though mate, and I totally agree with you on the dog/chicken/cow situation, and I think many of the responses aren't genuine attempts to have a go at your question (the CGP grey youtube link was totally irrelevant, continuing barbaric practices just because they're traditions makes no sense).
Also, if you want an argument, you have it here in the thread. If you wanted to understand, you should have framed your question differently and responded with curiosity.
Hi mate. I agree it's an inconvenience, I just don't think it's nearly as big as non-vegans think.
I think they think that vegans uproot their entire house and street.
Like, the majority of people it seems wouldn't even say"Vegan burger, please" instead of "Chicken burger, please" when they're in the line at McDonalds.
Can I ask: do you try to actively spread awareness about this? Or have you just accepted defeat?
I say accepted defeat because one user in this thread said that they would only find issue with a man torturing, choking and delimbing a dog if the dog's barks were annoying him, and that even with the power of being able to stop the man by saying "stop", they wouldn't as the dog isn't his.
I am genuinely asking, how does one continue to see the world/humanity after reading something like this?
I'm a consequentialist. People don't like what you're doing, so it's totally ineffective. There's possibly some alternate universe where everyone is logic, but just hasn't thought of the "we shouldn't torture animals" thing yet and you show them the argument and they convert. That's not this universe. In this universe (I think) the best you can do is to do what you think is right (be a vegan yourself) and show (don't tell) others that it's not that badn and that you don't need to be an asshole about it, AND CRUCIALLY don't have any arguments about what they're doing (you can occasionally make an argument, but not if it's going to lead to an argument).
I grew up on a sheep farm. I ate loads of lamb and beef and chicken and everything else delicious and it was delicious and for a while in my early 20s I knew it was wrong but I kept doing it, then eventually I stopped. I totally understand people who are still doing it. Meat's delicious. It's easy. Habits are hard to change. The people that convinced me along the way didn't do it the way you're doing it. They did challenge my logic, but not by arguing with me - the arguers only made me dig in deeper. Here were the steps:
1. 2010 Hobart house party chill convo, just chatting, no arguing. I remember being theoretically converted here saying something like "you're probably right, but I don't want to change what I'm doing".
2. 2015 Dresden couchsurfing host wasn't vegan, just ate very little meat, we didn't even talk about it much beyond him saying "I don't eat much meat because it ain't good to", and I just saw it and thought "yeah, that seems admirable"
3. 2015 Trujillo fellow volunteer turned down the chicken for an inferior option, we didn't talk about it, I just followed suit the next day
4. 2016 Sao Paolo, probably. At this point I think I read a blog post or something like that and since then have been more or less vegan
Maybe this process could have been accelerated FOR ME, but not much. Key point: the people mentioned in 1 - 3 were people I liked. I liked the way they handled themselves, they were kind and generous and just lovely people. I think that's why they were persuasive to me.
So, in terms of the consequences of actions, I think it would be better (i.e. better in terms of achieving the goal of converting people to eating less meat thus reducing suffering) if all vegans acted in a more positive way about everything, admitted that it's more effort to cook equally delicious food, admitted that it can be difficult for some people to meet their nutritional needs and that those people should not be fully vegan, admit that change is difficult and hey, here's a simple, cheap, easy recipe that you could make once a fortnight to get you started, and just to be a nice person that other people want to be like. Sure, every now and then, if you can do it in a humerous way you can give someone a questioning look when they say something like "I love animals", or say something like "yeah man, dogs are totally smarter and better and more important than pigs" when they say something moral about Chinese people killing dogs. But you have to live in the real world, the one we have, which is one in which people don't like the way you've gone about this. Maybe in the morning (I dunno what time zone you're in), ask a friend who eats meat to read through this thread (some of it, it's massive) and ask them to give you feedback on who sounds like a c*** (or use your profanity of choice), and while other people might be WRONG, it seems to be you being a C*** (I'm not calling you a c***, just making a statement about how it comes across, remember I think you're right about most stuff and more logically compassionate about these things). My first rule of morality is "don't be a c***", because any situation in which you think you have to be, you are probably just not seeing a solution where you can effectively do the same thing without being a c***.
Let me know if you have any questions about it :)
Thanks for your detailed reply.
Regarding the "I'm the one who looks like a cunt", I'm saddened to read this. Of course all non-vegans will side with the other non-vegans, which you point out. We could extend this logic to countless other things that either still are done or used to be done and we'd arrive that, say, those who were pleaing, begging, screaming for Auschwitz to stop were cunts. Of course looking back it was these 'cunts' who managed to alert the world.
I appreciate your stances though, so I'd be curious if you think the above doesn't apply. I.e., those who would have been deemed 'cunts' for screaming about the terrors back then would not have been deemed cunts, but that vegans who take an aggressive stance are.
Just quickly on this aggressive stance. Since I posted the initial comment, I've tried going the soft approach: ignore 90% of the reply and just ask a single question to try and find where their symmetry breaker is. They've all just stopped replying.
I think ultimately it's a hopeless battle whatever you do: the average person will see a vegan as crazy for not wanting to torture an animal when it's not necessary. I don't think even Superman could debate some compassion into these people.
But as said, curious as to your thoughts.
I can't tell if you're being deliberately naive, or this is just your first time trying to understand why people aren't Vegan.
If you're just trying to push people to admit a moral failing, rather than try to understand, this is partially the reason why Vegans have a bad reputation.
I recommend you read this: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/Wiz4eKi5fsomRsMbx/change-my-mind-veganism-entails-trade-offs-and-health-is-one
This is far too long to read right now, so I'm going off the title.
As I understand it, you're concerned over the health risks of a vegan diet, correct?
That is, if the health was not worse, you would probably go vegan? Or still no?
My concern is that the argument you're making is disingenuous.
Like, you're pretending that going vegan entails no inconvenience, requires no additional effort to remain healthy and compare eating meat to serial killers. Your analogy isn't actually useful, as there are many reasons we wouldn't be comfortable with someone executing then dismembering an animal in the street, dog or not. If in your mind the practice of eating meat is on an equivalent level to bludgeoning someone with a pickaxe, then I think you need to realize you're on a completely different level than 99% of humanity.
The health risks are just one part of it. This isn't the determining factor for me personally, as I'm just not the sort of person any of your arguments would appeal to. However, the way you're arguing seems to have zero charity for even trying to understand why someone *might* not want to be Vegan.
Okay, please we need to just focus on a single part.
I'm going to go with your concern over health risks, okay? Fair? Or would you prefer I go over another concern, such as it being a disingenuous comparison?
You have complete control.
It's the fact that social consensus says dogs are bad to eat and chickens are not. There doesn't even need to be any reasoning behind that consensus for it to have formed. What's difficult to understand here?
"So was slavery. And child labor. And attempted eugenics of people with Down syndrome. And invading people's camps and bludgering them to death with a pickaxe. Why don't we do these things anymore?"
These things were never a social consensus. From the very beginning slavery was reviled (not least by the actual slaves), and invasion and murder has never been acceptable, people just didn't have any power to stop it. Eugenics was accepted for a very short moment in history and then quickly discarded once people caught on.
Eating meat is something the entire world does, besides certain pockets. The vegans are ultimately correct, but i don't see why you have trouble understanding the differences in social consensus?
In the countries where prenatal diagnostics is nigh universal, the vast majority of confirmed Downs are aborted voluntarily, to the degree that there are ~ none left in certain yearly cohorts.
We may or may not call this eugenics, but it seems to be the social consensus.
I figured they were referring specifically to the practise of segregating and systematically killing people after they were born.
In your story, there was no indication that the dog was owned by the man. Wild dogs are less prevalent where most Americans live, so the first assumption would be that it belonged to someone else. Livestock are overwhelmingly killed by their owners (or at least employees doing it on behalf of said owners).
Take either scenario.
The dog is owned by the man.
The dog is owned by no-one.
The dog is owned by someone else.
The dog is owned by Superman.
What is the symmetry breaker? What is the trait?
Being owned by someone else would make it an infringement on someone else's property, so they have standing to object.
Just play out your own logic. Keep consistent and tell me where you end up at.
If someone owns a dog and at night you can hear the dog constantly being tortured, lives with chains and gets gassed to stop barking, what are you doing?
Nothing, because it's on the other side of the wall?
If it's still barking, I might complain about the barking. But if it stops, I indeed do nothing.
Why would you not stop the man?
All you have to do is say stop. Is this too much of a hindrance on your day to be worth your time?
"What is the symmetry breaker between this dog and, say, a chicken or a cow?"
Simple: Europeans bonded with dogs for survival purposes, which they did not do with cows (indeed, a large use case for the dogs was in controlling the cattle). Therefore, our culture still assigns quasi-humanity to dogs as a privilege. In cultures which did not bond with dogs, this taboo does not exist and they are seen as either a legitimate food source or vermin. You'll observe that there are likewise cultures where cows specifically are held to be above slaughter and consumption, while e.g. goats are not. However, this is not a problem, because cultural differences are permitted; we do not need to universalize down to the lowest common denominator of regarding *all* animals as feckless vermin/food sources.
"We know that eating meat is not essential, otherwise vegans would not on average be healthier and live longer with fewer nutrient deficiencies."
"Essential" is not the relevant criterion here, not even close. We know that nutraloaf gives all essential nourishment to a person, but feeding prisoners nutraloaf is considered a violation of their human rights anyway. Humans are an omnivorous species and meat is the most effective way for us to achieve a nutritionally complete diet, as well as pleasing and satisfactory to all our instincts.
"torturing it for it's entire life and then murdering it via gas chamber"
Industrial farming is made necessary by the number of humans in the world. The only fix for it is to do away with 98% or so of the human population of the planet, which is also beset with well known ethical issues. In the interim, only prissy, sanctimonious upper middle class people will be able to buy a sense of superiority by purchasing "ethical meat".
"for the purpose of a subjectively slightly nicer tasting burger?"
It's objectively significantly nicer-tasting. Vegetarians are vastly overrepresented among the cohort of those who lack the ability to taste umami. Failure to comprehend this biological fact of flavor is almost disqualifying on its own. You're like a blind person trying to fight state expenditures on road signs because they're not essential for navigation.
"Why don't we do these things anymore?"
We stopped slavery, child labor and euthanizing Downies because we became prosperous enough to afford to. If that ends, those policies stop. Guarantee it. We never really started bludgeoning people to death with pickaxes because a pickaxe is an appallingly clumsy weapon, we've always preferred better ones like maces, macuahuitls, swords, and so on. Pickaxes were always a weapon of opportunity or necessity, such as if you happen to be in a mining camp and otherwise unarmed. If you're ever in the situation of being in a mining camp with nothing but a pickaxe at hand and being credibly threatened, you'll start bludgeoning. What's animal in the others is animal in you too.
In conclusion, your life-hating philosophy is contemptible and has predictably dystopian consequences if it were ever implemented. I advise you to reach the age of fifteen. It's the only known cure for this combination of ignorance and smugness.
"In conclusion, your life-hating philosophy is contemptible and has predictably dystopian consequences if it were ever implemented. I advise you to reach the age of fifteen. It's the only known cure for this combination of ignorance and smugness."
Less of this, please.
I would respond: less of bad-faith arguments by shrill vegans pretending to want to discuss their ideas but actually just trying to convert others without being willing in the slightest to examine their own ideas and be converted away from veganism to the same extent they expect others to be willing to convert to it!
Your conclusion is top notch, though I'd pick a fight on taste.
I think my vegan diet compares favourably with what most people eat most of the time, it's just a lot more effort. Like, fresh, homemade falafel from chickpeas you've soaked yourself is just so fantastic at the top end. And the curries I eat would beat out the frozen lasagne or steak in the median-taste home in the nearby suburb. Burgers are a tough one because I think you can make a nice vegan pattie, but the cheap meat one just does such a good job in the context of a well put together burger, that the extra effort just feels bad if you think about it (which I usually don't). I think ceteris paribus, converting to veganism would result in a dramatically worse tasting diet, but if you're willing to put in 5x the amount of effort you currently do, you can bring it back up to on a par or better.
Do you genuinely think we could go back to slavery? Under what conditions?
Also, I can imagine using the handle of a pickaxe to block an edged weapon if necessary, but swinging the thing offensively seems like a terrible move - I'd rather go unarmed.
"Like, fresh, homemade falafel from chickpeas you've soaked yourself is just so fantastic at the top end. And the curries I eat would beat out the frozen lasagne or steak in the median-taste home in the nearby suburb."
Have you ever eaten freshly slaughtered lamb? Supermarket corn mush beef hasn't got a patch on free-range steer meat. And so on. I'm convinced your claim is true the way you frame it, but quintuple the effort you put into the meat diet and it's back to a huge gap.
"Do you genuinely think we could go back to slavery? Under what conditions?"
I think one of the more doomerist climage change scenarios could do it. Hell, neither the Arabs nor the Indians have ever really given it up, and I have my suspicions of a lot of the Africans; c.f. the mention of ritual servitude elsewhere in this comment thread.
Basically, anything that would reset the human world to 17th century conditions would bring slavery back with it. Give it a generation or two, maybe. It's not a coincidence that Britain, the richest and the first industrialized country in the world, was the one to unilaterally abolish an institution which had existed for all of human time. It's downstream of material conditions.
"Also, I can imagine using the handle of a pickaxe to block an edged weapon if necessary, but swinging the thing offensively seems like a terrible move - I'd rather go unarmed."
Well, my argument to begin with was that it's a pretty awful weapon, so I'm with you in spirit, and in any case your choice of arms is your prerogative – pay your nickel and take your chances. For my part, though, if the other guy had even so much as a knife I'd rather trust anything with longer reach than the knife over just my bare hands.
Oh man, grew up on a sheep farm. Lamb is so good, though from memory we hung it for a few days, so I haven't had it fresh. I was a cutlets guy, but it was all good. I'm excited about lamb to the same degree but in a slightly different way to the falafel dinner. I can't say that the falafel is better, just in the same tier. If it was a 1v1 no ties, lamb wins. I agree that it's a tonne of work to get vegan food to be as delicious as an easily-made meat meal. I'm just saying it's possible to get it into the same tier, though I am comparing what I eat now as a 30 year old to what I ate as a teen/early 20s guy, which isn't really fair.
You might be right about slavery. I can't imagine that there isn't another option which is more humane, but I haven't thought about it very long.
Knife over pickaxe every day of the week. I'd possibly prefer the handle of a pickaxe to a knife, but it's like 3 kg of metal on the end of a stick. 4o says knife easily, sonnet says pickaxe, gemini says decisively knife. I can't imagine landing a hit on someone with a pickaxe, but maybe I'm just not strong enough. And I think if you miss the first swing, you're toast. I also can't imagine blocking a knife with a pickaxe, based on speed. I'd be trying to dodge, which is only going to be slower with a pickaxe.
"Lamb is so good, though from memory we hung it for a few days, so I haven't had it fresh."
Oh, that's what I'm calling fresh. I mean as opposed to getting the cutlets out of a cooler in the supermarket, or frozen. As for the rest of this passage, I think we're more or less in agreement, or sufficiently close at any rate that there's nothing to really discuss. I think that your various assertions and caveats are all reasonable.
As for the slavery, I think it's not really about what's more humane, simply because people don't sit down and make a collective moral calculus in that way; societal outcomes are more like the sum of a large quantity of kneejerk reactions to individual circumstances. If society were to decay to the point where we were back to windjammers and donkeys, swords and flintlocks, some people would become pirates and others slavers due to their personal circumstances, not because a benevolent central planner or common council couldn't come up with a better job for them.
I probably would also prefer a knife over a pickaxe if I had to choose between those two, but if you already picked the knife and I have to choose between a pickaxe and my bare hands to defend myself, I'll take the pickaxe.
Yeah, humane is the wrong idea. "sufficiently un-icky"? Thanks for the chat :)
> indeed, a large use case for the dogs was in controlling the cattle
Really? How many cows were there?
My general impression was that livestock were a lot more likely to be sheep.
I don't profess to be an expert in prehistoric livestock distribution! It's entirely reasonable, especially since sheep are smaller so you'd need more head for the same mass of meat. I just stuck with the cows for rhetorical reasons.
I’ll probably eat a little salad for lunch, around one, and some crackers and hummus. Or maybe just one or the other. Plus cookies.
It seems to me this works fine because of how I will have spent the morning.
Not sure this diet would work for the guys building the flyover nearby, or roofing a house.
Nor even for my husband, who has 39 problems to solve at his non-manual labor job.
I have no objection to people eating whatever they want, up to and including a light lunch. I frequently don't eat lunch myself, so that I can have a bigger breakfast which I find I prefer.
I also agree that calorie-dense diets are highly necessary for people with strenuous jobs, and that meat is almost certainly more efficacious as a source of nutrition in these cases. I think I read somewhere that preindustrial farmers would consume 5-6000 calories daily during the sowing and harvesting seasons.
Animals eat plants to have energy and expend energy for growing, maintaining inner homeostasis and movement. Therefore it is very likely that the calories provided by an animal carcass is significantly less than the calories it took to produce that carcass.
Because of this it would be extremely surprising if your claim that doing away with industrial animal farming would lead to insufficient food and decrease human population to 2%.
I have no information on this, merely priors, so maybe you can elaborate and convince me.
I didn't say it would lead to insufficient food, in the sense of nutrients required to sustain human life (refer to the nutraloaf part for a note on this line of thinking). I said it would lead to an insufficient quantity of meat to satisfy human desire for meat, that is, you would be required to be inhumane toward your fellow man in order to satisfy this pious concern for the moral value of animals. That constitutes real brutality, the evil mentality of a Mrs. De Ropp tormenting those in their power "for their own good".
Ah, I get you now. I read inattentively, my bad.
Hey, no problem.
> Industrial farming is made necessary by the number of humans in the world
No. We massively overproduce meat. In the US, it's cheaper than it should be because of government subsidies, but the actual optimal production of food for human consumption would have way less meat compared to plant sources. And in many cases, industrial practices inflict immense harm to animals for a puny gain in production, because market forces, yo. We absolutely can afford to cut industrial farming by leagues.
"We massively overproduce meat."
You mean vast quantities spoil and are thrown away? This isn't my impression.
"the actual optimal production of food for human consumption would have way less meat compared to plant sources"
You're making the same mistake as Ramblings, thinking "optimal" denotes an arbitrary quantity you can fix intellectually (in his case, evidently zero). I think I saw you mention being Russian, so I guess I can excuse this affection for central planning as being involuntarily Sovietpilled from birth.
"because market forces, yo"
You mean human demand? For meat?
I appreciate your detailed reply but there is just so much wrong. Like, just factually wrong. I don't even know where to begin.
Let me just go with the culture one, and please just answer blunty it will only be 1 or 2 questions. These are not 'gotcha' questions.
Where do you stand on cultures in the third-world that do unspeakable things to children as the norm, even disabled ones?
Just a one word answer: comfortable with this or not?
(I would also probably like to ask if you're a parent, in all honesty, depending on what you say)
"Where do you stand on cultures in the third-world that do unspeakable things to children as the norm, even disabled ones?"
I'm afraid you're going to have to speak the unspeakable things if you want me to pass judgment on them. Otherwise this just appears to be some sort of weird racism.
Bacha bazi, FGM, child marriage, breast ironing, trokosi ritual servitude. Others I am not aware of.
*Of course, warning to anyone who decides to google these. I have intentionally not provided links*
Female circumcision is in most cases far less severe than male circumcision and activists just call it "genital mutilation" as a histrionic manipulation tactic to make people think every case is like the worst, so overall I'm fine with it. Abolish male circumcision first, then we can talk.
I'm pretty solidly against the other ones, but they seem to be worthless analogies for eating meat since children, unlike animals, have moral value. Also, I'm "comfortable" with them in the sense that trying to extirpate these customs would no doubt cause more trouble than they're worth. Don't get me wrong, killing is man's way and there's nothing wrong with that as such, but conquering Afghanistan hasn't worked out super well historically.
They're not worthless analogies. They're showing that just because x has historically done x does not mean it is okay.
--
"Animals have no moral value"
-- You should have just started with this and we could have skipped everything.
-- Why don't you think animals have moral value?
-- I suspect you don't have a pet, right?
Your argument, to the extend I understand it, goes:
Let us assume that killing and eating dogs was not morally justified but killing and eating cows was
⇒ (1) Then there must be a principled reason to distinguish between dogs and cows that make dogs more worthy of moral consideration or somesuch
⇒ (2) You cannot find any such principled reason and suspect there isn't any
⇒ (3) If there isn't then dogs and cows should be worthy of the same measure of moral consideration -- which is a contradiction to our earlier assumption that eatings dogs is bad, eating cows is aokay
So basically proof by contradiction.
There are several points this could be argued against, but mainly it loses me at (1). I do not require a principled reason to decide how much moral value I assign to anything.
>I do not require a principled reason to decide how much moral value I assign to anything.
Given that history is rife with examples of mass atrocity against those to whom the perpetrators assigned minimal moral value, one would think that you very much do need a principled reason for deciding how much moral value you assign.
It is borderline impossible to have a principled, consistent moral relationship toward animals though. Vegans certainly don't, though they come closer than the average normie who's horrified by other cultures eating dogs.
Well, I was referring to the general case (as was OP, as I understand them), not just e animals per se.
Besides, I think you overstate the case. Was Jeremy Bentham's principle illegitimate? ("The question is not, Can they reason? nor, Can they talk? but, Can they suffer?")
That's what I'm saying: it's a nice principle in theory, but you cannot really live by it. At least, living by it would require something waaay more extreme than just being vegan.
And yet thr actual treatment of animals has changed dramatically since Bentham's time, so perhaps you can.
Having a principled reason for how much moral value to assign is neither necessary nor sufficient to prevent these atrocities. Much as I sometimes wish it was.
Perhaps. or perhaps not. But having no principled reason sure makes it easier to assign lower moral values to those potential victims, and hence makes such atrocities more likely.
Hmm, I don't think most people would attack 1, usually people have some innate drive to refer to broader/more general principles and self-reflect to harmonize their moral inutitions on different levels.
For example: Someone punches me in the face for no reason. I strongly feel that this was immoral, but when I punch someone in the face for no reason, I feel the immorality intuitively much less. Is it possible that when I punch someone in the face that is more moral than when someone punches ME in the face? Maybe, but I think lots of people would instead say that the general principle of "morality is impartial" should override my immediate moral intuitions and I should agree that they are equally immoral.
Usually in debates involving morality, people make arguments in a similar vein (invoking more general principles). Are you completely ad-hoc? Do you never make arguments to others involving morality or do you just not listen to others' arguments? Honestly, it seems a bit unlikely to me.
I agree that most people would not attack (1) and that people tend to attempt to harmonize their moral intuitions. I used to be in that camp, I no longer am.
The way I feel this works is that people come up with moral frameworks that are relatively simple and match our moral intuitions 95% of the time. When somebody brings up one of these 5% of cases people tend to respond in one of three ways:
1. They decide the moral framework is right and our moral intuition is wrong
2. They decide the moral intuition is right, so the moral framework is wrong. But the framework can be tweaked slightly so that it matches our moral intuitions in this case as well
3. They decide that perhaps the moral intuition is right and the moral framework is wrong and that it's not worth adjusting the moral framework
I don't see the point in 1: No matter how internally consistent your framework, certain repugnant conclusions are repugnant and I would rather throw away the moral framework than kill somebody for their body parts (or whatever other repugnant conclusion the given moral framework endorses)
I don't see the point in 2: I would go with this if I believed it was possible to construct an internally coherent framework that avoided repugnant conclusions. People have _tried_, I've never seen anything that looks like success to me
That leaves 3 by process of elimination.
If you feel 2 is possible then go for it, more power to you.
But I believe most people are actually 3, they've just not thought about it in those terms.
Today they might be in favor of shooting down a passenger plane headed for a sky scraper because better 300 people die than 3000.
Tomorrow they might sentence SBF because they believe fraud is bad even if your gamble pays off and you end up having the money.
There's no unified moral theory here and, frankly, that works for me.
As for debating morality, I feel it still works well enough. I have enough shared values with most people I meet that we can argue based on those values and it doesn't really matter why we believe what we believe.
And it's not like I roll the die every time a moral judgement comes up, my moral beliefs are logically consistent for the most part. I just know that in some key areas they are logically inconsistent and that is fine with me.
I agree with this here. I think we just aren't 100% morally logical and consistent creatures and that we simply value some things more than others. I'm done pretending otherwise in favor of the Utilitarian Consequentialism God.
A favorite example of mine is when vegans get the (bad faith, sure) question if they would save a child or an animal from a burning building. Many of them panic and bend over backwards trying to find some weird argument why they would save the child but that does not mean they think the Beautiful Sentient Animal is worth any less. And I'm not vegan but I'm still sitting here like, mate, just admit there's no reason for it in particular, you just value the child more for deep biological reasons rather than logical. That doesn't degrade your veganism and you can still argue in favor of it.
I am arguing that both are not justifiable given neither the torture or deaths need to occur. We are not cavemen anymore.
My question is what is the symmetry breaker or trait that is true of a dog but not of a chicken, or fish, or cow?
Is it intelligence? The ability to be kept as a pet? What is it?
I require no symmetry breaker, I just value dogs more than cows regardless of how internally consistent that may or may not be.
I also value my dog more than other dogs and my family more than other humans and I require no special reason for that either. That fact that I do is entirely enough for me.
"(I have no symmetry breaker)...regardless of how internally consistent that may or may not be."
-- There is nothing else that needs to be said from my POV. All my intention was was to showcase how people are not consistent and that they actually do not have anyway to justify it.
All I'd ask now is, given you are able to live perfectly fine (ironically, better and longer while spending less and giving your children a better planet) without the torturing-and-murder of the animal, whether you'd consider giving it a go.
Who knows, you might also report greater happiness and QAL levels (it's hard not too!).
I said I do not require a reason to justify eating meat and you paraphrase me as saying that I do not have a reason. Those are not the same.
Then I cannot proceed any further as I'm not sure what else there is to say.
If you yourself think you do not need to justify why torturing and then killing an animal to have a subjectively nicer tasting burger is required then, genuinely, what can any vegan ever say to convince you?
They're sentient, they have a CNS, they have a brain, they (try) to run and hide when it thunders or when fireworks go off, they (try to) cling to their mums when they are born.
These are all traits that dogs have, and yet most humans feel nauseous at the thought of dogs going through this and then ordering DogBurger.
Why don't you feel you need to justify it?
I pivoted from vegetarian (for moral reasons) to eating beef again a few years ago (for mostly health reasons).
My reasoning:
- I felt unhealthy and would regularly undernourish
- Eating vegan didn’t feel like food. I didn’t feel hungry, instead I just felt weak and would get sick often. I literally couldn’t get the calories needed into my body
- I don’t like cooking so mostly eat out. That means street food which doesn’t usually have vegan protein option, best case its falafel
- Cows are the only livestock for whom QALY computation turns out to be positive
Anyway I’m taking half of my daily calories in the form of soylent, now. I’m eating beef twice a day, pork and chicken once a month (when strained for options).
Would love if you could help me figure out how to feel alive without killing cows. I’d eat lab meat but I never saw it in grocery stores
Can I see the qaly computation?
It was on the older Scott post from about 7 years ago. I don’t remember the name.
I have seen the number come up again in other places.
The main idea is that cows don’t survive in physical restraint so they can’t be bred like pigs or chicken in a small cage. Cows mostly roam free until the last weeks of life when they are stuffed with food endlessly
also yes having the kids taken away at birth is still a horrible experience for mom cows.
I wish some producer would start advertising this for the city consumer - “calves stay with mother x weeks.”
I was once in Central Market bleating to the cheese stocker, where is the spreadable strawberry goat cheese from the farm in East Texas? (It had quite a following.)
The employee explained apologetically that the goats at that operation do have to give birth and nurse their young at that time of year.
This somewhat common response of, essentially "I tried it and it didn't work for me"
I can't help but see this as completely equal to something like, say, "I've tried driving and it didn't work for me", or "I've tried studying and I don't learn anything"
"I tried fire, but I couldn't cook anything"
Those are completely valid things to say
Valid in what sense?
To be clear: if your daughter came home and said that she tried studying and it didn't work, you'd reply "Well, that's valid. You're good at Xbox though"?
Valid in the sense that it's completely possible to just not be able to do something. I could have avoided a lot of problems in my life, if I had not been so stubborn and learned to give up earlier if things don't seem to be working out.
If my daughter is systematically unable to study despite trying hard, she might have a major learning disability, and in that case it's definitely the bad choice to just keep pushing to do her schoolwork. The correct action would be to find some other way for her to get on her feet, maybe a remedial school, or a vocation that doesn't require too much studying
And in the event she does not have a learning disability?
(I understand here you're arguing that perhaps some individuals just require the burger to function, perhaps due to their biochemistry. To this I'd ask you to expand further. We know there can be common absurdly-easy-to-fix nutrient deficiencies in a vegan diet, but nutrient deficiencies also occur in omnivorous diets. The question remains why do vegans, even with let's say a 10% greater *risk* of x nutrient deficiency, why do they still live longer, report greater happiness levels, spend less on food, suffer less CVD events or GP visits, all while ensuring that their children live on a better planet when they grow up?)
Did you supplement B12 and iron? Have you checked that you were not low on those? It's a common deficiency for veg*ans and it could cause your symptoms.
Iron can, of course, come from other sources, though beef is one of the richest sources of iron.
Synthetic vitamin B12 appears to be produced through the actions of microorganisms. It is my understanding that vegans won't eat or use anything produced by an animal, even animal excretions such as honey. Microorganisms are too small to count as animals here? If so, where is the moral cutoff?
People have evolved as omnivores. Vitamin B12 deficiency is the most well-known problem with being strictly vegan, but there may be more.
> Synthetic vitamin B12 appears to be produced through the actions of microorganisms.
I am not an expert, but those seem to be prokaryotes, which are biologically even further away from animals than the plants are.
Vegans, like omnivores, are varied. I don't think many would consider microorganisms worthy of moral consideration, that, to me, seems more like a common straw-vegan. They usually take into account what level of inner experience the given organism has. Mussels are much bigger than microorganisms, but many self-described vegans are okay with eating them.
Do note that I answered you because you replied to my comment, but I'm not vegan, and you will probably get more accurate info on vegan's beliefs from actual vegans.
I, personally, agree with the third part of your comment and said basically the same when I conversed with Ramblings in the last hidden thread, but I feel compelled to note here that my impression of current scientific consensus is that a plant based diet is at least as (or even more if we are comparing with SAD) healthy as an omnivore diet. I disagree with this consensus due to my ~~neuroticism~~, risk-aversion, but if you are someone who doesn't think much about occasionally taking ibuprofen for a headache, my reasons are probably not applicable to you.
I should try it! Weirdly I was fine being vegan while I had a sabbatical, but as soon as I needed to make money again, I couldn’t do it without meat
Yeah, deficiencies can creep up on you over time. And to be clear, I don't blame you for not trying these, sometimes I feel like vegans are a bit too ideologically committed to admit that a vegan diet can have some unique difficulties. I've found Elizabeth's writing (and the resulting conversation in comments) useful on the topic: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/Wiz4eKi5fsomRsMbx/change-my-mind-veganism-entails-trade-offs-and-health-is-one
Yes. To go back to my comment, you essentially just started driving before you had lessons.
This isn't like some huge dig at you, of course you still recognised beforehand that it wasn't right to not be vegan. But a literal simple food swap or an absurdly cheap supplement and the #1 common deficiency could have been resolved -- remember this supplement can be bought at the same shop you were/are likely already buying some supplements from!
the moral calculus for me comes up that I am fine killing one cow a year to be able to properly function and survive.
i have had horrible experience experimenting to even understand that my diet was a problem, and still have gut issues connected with stress. i don’t think it’s worth it to go on a moral quest and waste productive weeks trying to figure out which specific thing my organism needs that meat gives me
i took some steps down the moral path, and i stopped at a specific point, which was intentionally selected. you may still argue with where the balance is, and I am open to hear than my calculations are wrong — but you can’t throw out half of the equation
I mean, with all due respect, it seems like you're already basically halfway in the door?
If you eat one cow a year, I'd say "thank you", and invest more efforts in others in this thread who do not see any reason to stop eating them.
To be clear. Whenever I say 'eating', I always kind of smirk.
Of course they are not just eating. They are not just killing. They are put through hell their entire life, tortured, then choked or stabbed.
This always gets people to roll their eyes, and it's for good reason: it's incredibly uncomfortable to think about.
One thing to consider: we breed those animals for food,and if we're weren't ready to eat them, they wouldn't have existed in the fight place. So the real moral dilemma isn't to kill them or not; it's whether to let them exist and then get eaten, or not exist at all. This is not the case with children. This is rarely the case with dogs, but when it is (like in Korea), I won't see it as equally immoral as killing a pet.
Although modern factory farming is definitely a worse fate than not existing, so I oppose that vehemently. Less hellish forms of carnivorousness, less so
I hear you. Vegans are aware of this argument, but when you pull it apart it doesn't make sense.
To be clear, you are saying the following:
"A life of torture and painful death is better than never having existed"
In which case, I'd ask if you'd extend this to children who are used as slave labor in certain third world countries?
I assume you would *not* be comfortable with this, so the next question is what is the trait that is true of a chicken or a cow that makes them not deserving of the same treatment?
As I said in the original comment, a life of torture - such as factory farming - is not better than death. I still oppose meat-eating the way it is implemented in the modern industrial society. Maybe not, if we're talking about traditional farming.
But your analogy still doesn't work, because this is not the case in your hypothetical.
I see. But how so?
Even traditional farming, in fact let's say super farming where they are injected with love into their heart to kill them while they orgasm and receive belly-rubs: how is this justified given it did *not* need to happen? We can live perfectly fine without this injection having took place? What is the justification for ending, here in nice circumstances, this innocent animals life?
To be clear, it might be quicker if you just respond with why you personally are not vegan.
Is it health reasons? Is it taste reasons? Is it you don't feel that the animals you eat were deserving of a life that you'd give to, say, your dog? Is it that you don't think they are sentient?
What is the reason?
There is no economic possibility for us to create farm animals and then just let them live their lives. It's either give the injection, or not create the animal in the first place. Whether or not to kill an animal is not q decision you make at the very end, it's the one you make at the very beginning.
I am not vegan, because the last two times I tried to go vegan, I exhausted my willpower and cracked and just went full carnivore again, ending up not actually reducing my meat consumption in the long run. So now, I just try to eat less meat, but still not go cold turkey, and that is working out way better.
There also isn't an economic possibility to create child labor camps? They could do a hell of a lot of work and be paid peanuts. This is common practice over the globe sadly.
However, it's interesting that you've previously been vegan.
Why? What did you think before that made you want to go vegan?
As I understand it, you stopped because you basically just missed the taste of meat?
I see a lot of all-or-nothing thinking here... Have you guys tried good old vegetarianism, or flexitarianism? Go 90% of the way, tune it your way, get 90% of the moral satisfaction.
And yes, don't forget to check your B12 levels and supplement accordingly. Long-term B12 deficiency can fuck you up pretty bad.
Edit: why is no-one mentioning non-factory farmed meat? At least around here the country side is literally full of cows, I assume many of those end up cooked and eaten. Those animals have pretty decent lives as far as anyone can see.
Why is it considered a fundamental human right to be able to kill a living human being 1 minute before birth but it is considered murder to do it 1 minute after birth?
"Why is it considered a fundamental human right to be able to kill a living human being 1 minute before birth but it is considered murder to do it 1 minute after birth?"
I have read (but not confirmed) that this is NOT the case in most (maybe all) of Europe. If Europe draws a different cut-line then I'd suggest that this is NOT seen as a fundamental human right outside of the USA. In which case we'll want a USA specific answer.
Is it seen as a fundamental human right in the USA? That seems non-obvious to me given that Roe was huge point of contention for its entire lifespan and was then overturned. I don't think you can trivially assert that either Americans, or America as a political entity, regards full-term abortion as a fundamental human right.
I think you may want to attach your comment to the post at the top of this chain rather than to my claim that Europe does not seem to view late term abortion as a fundamental human right. Because I did not assert that this was a fundamental human right in the USA. I expect that the original comment was focused on the parts of the USA that do permit very late term abortion (rather than the world as a whole).
In any event, the current state of affairs in the USA is that several states have no limitations on abortion. From here:
https://ballotpedia.org/Abortion_regulations_by_state
those states seem to be: Oregon, Colorado, New Mexico, Minnesota, Michigan, Maryland, New Jersey, Alaska and Vermont.
So maybe the initial claim should be: "Why is it considered a fundamental human right in Oregon, Colorado, New Mexico, Minnesota, Michigan, Maryland, New Jersey, Alaska and Vermont to kill a living human being 1 minute before birth but it is considered murder to do it 1 minute after birth?"
To which I will try again with hopefully more clarity: Since this belief is not universal you will want a USA specific answer that focuses on these states that permit this.
No, I meant to reply to you. You said "I have read (but not confirmed) that this is NOT the case in most (maybe all) of Europe. If Europe draws a different cut-line then I'd suggest that this is NOT seen as a fundamental human right outside of the USA".
My point was, first, I think the "if" can be answered in the negative; Europe(as a whole) does not draw a different cut line than the US (as a whole). Second, your statement implied that full-term abortion is seen as a fundamental human right in the USA. I do not think this is true. However, I agree with your assessment of the status quo, as well as your clarified query. That indeed is the relevant focus.
Because it's the natural Schelling point, and you have to draw the arbitrary line somewhere for it to be practical
Well, it's not.
But even if we were living in LaLaLand where this was the case, are you suggesting that X bad thing is allowed, and therefore we should allow Y bad thing?
In LaLaLand, is rap3 and abduction of toddlers allowed?
If not, I would ask you to apply your own logic and see where you end up at.
I was agreeing with you that there are often incongruencies prevalent in society regarding what is acceptable and what is not.
My opinion is the dog is not necessary for human nourishment and the random suffering/killing of animals should be considered wrong (as we are not going to eat the dog, there is no reason it should be smothered in the street), whereas the (as humane as possible) killing of animals for meat is absolutely necessary and acceptable. I don't believe for a minute that humanity could survive and be healthy only eating vegetables; animal protein has and always will be an essential part of the human diet.
The societal incongruency I mention is much more glaring because there is no obvious difference in circumstances (as there is in your example), and it is also more important because it entails human life (and not animal life).
There are quite a lot of people proving you wrong on a daily basis by surviving and living healthy lives without animal protein. There is some evidence that vegetarians actually live longer than meat eaters, though there may be confounding factors. There are even vegetarian and vegan professional athletes. How do you square that with your beliefs?
> Why is it considered a fundamental human right to be able to kill a living human being 1 minute before birth […]
It is not.
The UN has affirmed that it is a human right and France just included it in their Constitution as a "guaranteed freedom".
Or do you mean killing a 1 minute old baby is not considered murder?
> The UN has affirmed that it is a human right and France just included it in their Constitution as a "guaranteed freedom".
Yeah, I suspect that you're leaving out some critical qualifiers like "if the life of the mother is threatened" or "if the child would suffer from serious mental or physical impairment" that would weaken your claims in the eyes of most readers, so I can't be bothered to look up your vague references to apparently infuriating instances of liberal excesses.
The vast majority of abortions are for neither of the above two reasons, (nor when the pregnancy is the result of a rape).
I can find no such qualifiers in the UN affiirmation or the French constitution. I believe they have left it "open-ended" such that it may be adaptable to the political Zeitgeist.
The vast majority of abortions don't happen "one minute before birth" either.
Not a minute before birth, it isn't. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abortion_in_France
Not particularly clear there, even if it were, why is it a "guaranteed freedom" before 14 weeks, and murder at 15 weeks?
And the enshrining in the constitution does not mention any limits, as far as I can see.
>why is it a "guaranteed freedom" before 14 weeks, and murder at 15 weeks?
Good question. Why don't you edit your post to ask that, rather than doubling down on a strawman?
>And the enshrining in the constitution does not mention any limits, as far as I can see.
You don't see, but you also haven't looked, have you? Because if you had, you would have found this:
>The amendment declares abortion to be a “guaranteed freedom,” overseen by Parliament’s laws. That means future governments will not be able to “drastically modify” the current laws funding abortion for women who seek one, up to 14 weeks into their pregnancies, according to the French justice minister, Éric Dupond-Moretti
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/03/04/world/europe/france-abortion-rights-constitution.html
Also, a little common sense would have brought you to the realization that your claim was not correct.
That’s easy: the dog is a symbiote, the other two are livestock.
Easy you see. But this is not a new defence that vegans are not familiar with.
The vegan response would be "What's stopping people from having a chicken as a pet?" (I have friends who have chickens as pets and feel nauseous at the thought of what they go through elsewhere)
How deeply have you explored this logic? That an animal that is typically used as a pet is not allowed to be tortured and choked to death, but the animal that is less typically used as a pet is?
Where do you draw the line?
What is the trait?
What is the symmetry breaker?
If the chicken was your pet, then someone who didn't own it wouldn't be allowed to kill it. But you could, and that would be perfectly legal. Similarly, if you killed your own dog that's no skin off anyone else's nose, but most dog-owners don't do that until the dog is near the end of its natural life.
Why do people always do this?
The dog is being tortured and then choked to death on the street. This is the scenario we are in. We are not just 'killing' the animal.
Please, how would you react if you saw this on the street? Very simple question.
Why do people always do WHAT?
If it was an Asian street, I'd assume the man owned the dog. On an American street, I'd assume the man was crazy.
"I'd assume he was crazy"
Why?
What about if he did it behind the bush so we couldn't see?
We know he's there, and we can see the bush moving, but we can't see the dog anymore.
If your intent was to discuss the merits of veganism, your framing makes no sense. Plenty of societies eat dogs.
What is the trait that is true of the dog but not of any-number-of-animals that justifies torturing and choking to death the latter but not the former?
Common replies are:
1. There is none
2. Dogs can be used as pets
3. Dogs are smarter than the others.
What is your answer?
Have you considered that rabbit is commercially farmed and yet we would react with horror if someone ate your pet rabbit? Horse is commercially farmed for meat but if someone ate a racehorse that would be a cause for disgust?
Because you cannot mix general with individual and act like that makes no difference. Why are we less perturbed by statistical amounts of suffering (e.g. war, natural disaster) than an individual amount (e.g. one person having some personal tragedy)?
This runs the other way to- why do polls show greater support for "generic candidate" than any individual candidate? Why do we say things like "they got what's coming to them" when someone gets beaten up on public even though we would categorically agree that the general idea of public assault is intolerable?
Are you actually looking for answers or just making provocative statements to provoke a reaction?
Hi, not sure which person you're replying to! Apologies.
I think it was to you and I have the same questions. There are personal pet rabbits and meat rabbits and people understandably react differently to each one being killed. Out of respect for the human and public order. You would crash a car in a demolition derby but you wouldn't just crash someone's personal car.
This is my first time being this deep in the comments, so they have became all mixed up and I cannot see which comment of mine you are replying to.
Either way, what is your personal symmetry breaker here?
Or, even simpler, why do you eat animals given what they go through and given that it's not essential* for you?
--
*I'm assuming you do not live in the forest or desert where there are no shops for 50 miles.
"I'm vegan, so I'm not killing and hurting animals for selfish pleasure" is just a lie.
What is the justification for all the vegan ways to harm animals? It's not that they're necessary for staying alive, because they mostly aren't. Vegans don't survive on soylent, they like to eat nice food, as well as candy and junk, too. Why choke insects and rodents to death with insecticides and rodenticides so you can have a little candy? Why shoot hogs, deer and other intelligent creatures to prevent them from eating of fields because you want a black bean burger?
Then there are all the non-food ways that vegans still harm intelligent animals: any kind of modern energy production for example.
I have eaten rabbit without the slightest hesitation and would be more than open to eating dog btw. There was this vegan rage bait site about a fake dog meat farm going around, I wasn't angry at all and was disappointed when it revealed itself not to be a real dog farm lol.
Please put forward a coherent argument and I'll be happy to respond.
So far it sounds like you're saying "vegan's inadvertently kill insects, therefore torturing and slitting the throat of certain animals is okay".
I ask again: why would you not be comfortable doing this to a dog on the street, but would be a chicken or a cow or a fish?
Calling deliberate poisoning and slow internal bleeding to death (rodenticides) "inadvertent" is... a choice.
If you're centering whether death and cruelty to animals is "deliberate" or not, you're centering human feelings, not animal ones.
I remember someone on a vegan subreddit who argued that he would kill fewer animals in a more humane manner by raising bugs vs getting the equivalent amount of protein in legumes. The responses were mostly something like "but you're not THINKING and ACTING in a vegan way!!" All I heard was "sorry animals. How we feel about our impact on your death matters more than how many of you die".
Can we keep this sensible please?
To be clear, as I understand it, you are saying this:
"vegan's inadvertently kill insects, therefore --killing-- certain (not all) animals is justified"
Correct or not?
If you could put your position in one sentence that would be appreciated.
I can try in a couple sentences.
"Vegans deliberately kill animals. There is pretty much no way to live without deliberately or semi deliberately killing animals. Such a way to live would be a lot more extreme than veganism, and still not be free of cruelty to animals. Animals don't care whether you kill them deliberately or inadvertently. Killing all animals is thus pretty justified".
No idea why vegans keep doing this "well would you be okay killing a dog huh?!??" thing. I stated multiple times I would be okay killing and eating dogs.
I was just about to begin typing when I read the last one, so I now need to just check:
You're okay with the man's actions? I am not asking about a hypothetical where you are stranded on Dog Island and have no other foodstuffs to eat and gently kill the dogs with belly-rubs. I am asking if you see issue with the man needlessly torturing and then slitting the throat of the dog on the street. That is my question. Please just answer this with a yes or no, and then I can proceed with the rest.
yeah, there are plenty of morally inconsistent people on the internet, why do you care what vegan subreddit says? they’re not the part of this conversation
Please suggest some AI prompt so that when I give AI a link to SSC/ACX post, AI will summarize both main article and comments. For example: I tried this prompt with Perplexity:
Begin by summarize the main points of the main article, then summarize the comment section for notable points (explore new ideas, perspectives, circumstances...). Each summary should focus on explain and predict human condition, behaviours, interaction, ethic, community building, economic efficiency, constraints. Each summary should highlight in cases: (1) The point simply reinvent the wheel (something has been widely discussed, studied, documented), and how the article/comments contribute new insight, perspectives; (2) The point attract many comments, replies, back-and-forth discussion. At the end, conclude by highlighting the remaining issues and how should I proceed to explore onward.
Not well-read on moral philosophy but I've been thinking lately about how I intuitively tend to classify actions and I've been able to separate them into 4 categories:
Easy to do, large effect - moral obligations, things that I would classify people as evil for not doing. EG a man dying of thirst asks you to get him a glass of water from your house. By refusing you are condemning him to die for essentially no reason at all
Hard to do, large effect - 'heroic' actions. Things like jumping to water to save someone drowning, rescuing someone from a dangerous situation, etc. Actions that we do not blame people for not taking, but universally recognize as good.
Hard to do, small effect - 'saintly' actions. It's arguable what falls into this category but I'd say things like monks burning alive in protest, taking a vow to never hurt another living thing to the extent that you won't kill mosquitos, etc.
Easy to do, small effect - 'polite' actions. Giving your neighbor a gift, holding the door open for someone, letting someone who looks like they are in a rush go before you. No moral obligation to take these actions yet someone who does not take a single one would be considered selfish and rude at best.
For those who know more than me what philosophy do you think this intuitive morality would fall under / what should I read? From my basic understanding this isn't purely virtue ethics or utilitarianism, the closest I can think of might be contractualism?
The keywords to look for here are “supererogatory” and “supererogation” - these are the technical philosophical terms for acts that aren’t morally obligatory but are clearly good deeds. Different moral theories have different ideas of whether this category makes sense, and how to categorize them.
A couple thoughts:
You reminded me of the division of behaviors in Islam, in which mandatory behaviors are rewarded (in the afterlife) if you obeyed the mandate or punished if you didn't, encouraged behaviors are rewarded if you obeyed but not punished if you didn't, and permissible behaviors are never rewarded or punished regardless of what you did. (Technically there are 5 categories, depending on whether the mandate is positive or negative: "mandatory" means you're rewarded for doing and punished for refraining; "encouraged" means you're rewarded for doing; "discouraged" means you're rewarded for refraining; and "prohibited" means you're rewarded for refraining and punished for doing.
> Easy to do, small effect - 'polite' actions. Giving your neighbor a gift, holding the door open for someone, letting someone who looks like they are in a rush go before you. No moral obligation to take these actions
As far as I'm aware, giving your neighbor a gift would usually be the result of a very strong social mandate, which you would be unwise to ignore.
One thing that was covered in introductory Chinese classes was that, if you visit someone's home, you bring them a gift, and they'll tell you "why did you bring this, next time don't bother". And then - and the instructor emphasized this - the next time you visit, you bring them another gift.
"Easy to do, small effect" sounds a bit like "marginal charity" https://www.overcomingbias.com/p/marginal-charityhtml which is framed in utilitarian terms.
I don’t think any moral theory carves morality at the joints in exactly this way, but:
1. Your distinction between “easy to do, large effect” and “hard to do, large effect” maps on to the distinction between the obligatory and the supererogatory https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/supererogation/
2. On “hard to do, large effect” actions, it seems like these will also count as supererogatory if there’s no obligation to do them, but they’ll be marked out by their not being justified by consequentialist reasons. There is a big literature on the putative value of taking actions that have no expected positive value in consequentialist terms. Cf. https://philpapers.org/rec/DEMTAS-4
3. “On easy to do, small effect” actions, there are a lot of philosophers who think that for actions like these, talk of “duty” is too strong — which seems to be your feeling as well. In that case, you might be interested in a scalar approach to moral reasons, where “obligations” are just a loose way of talking about actions where the moral reasons to do them are super duper weighty. But even when your moral reasons to take an action aren’t super duper weighty — and so don’t count as “obligatory” — there are moral reasons nonetheless. Cf. https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11098-017-0998-y; https://academic.oup.com/book/36561/chapter-abstract/321516325?redirectedFrom=fulltext
4. On rudeness/politeness in particular, this book looks interesting — I imagine Chinese philosophers have a different way of thinking about these moral categories, which might be fun to look into https://books.google.co.uk/books/about/The_Wrong_of_Rudeness.html?id=FcSbDwAAQBAJ&printsec=frontcover&source=kp_read_button&hl=en&newbks=1&newbks_redir=0&gboemv=1&redir_esc=y#v=onepage&q&f=false
On which theory this falls under: I think there are stories you can tell that would fit these insights into almost any theory. (It might seem that “hard to do, small effect actions” aren’t rational on consequentialism, but you could have a consequentialist view on which there a plurality of intrinsic goods, one of which is “people taking a stand regardless of other consequences”. Deontologists and virtue theorists could make sense if these ideas in their own ways as well.)
On scalar consequentialism in particular, check out this blog post by Richard Yetter-Chappell https://open.substack.com/pub/rychappell/p/deontic-pluralism?r=2248ub&utm_medium=ios
Thank you for the links! I think these will be interesting reads, and the one on scalar moral reasoning sounds right up my alley. The point you talk about with obligation/duty is absolutely my intuitive feeling - I feel that those words should be reserved for situations in which the reasons to take an action are so weighty that any reasonable person could call someone who doesn't immoral/evil.
Things like jumping to water to save someone drowning
monks burning alive in protest
its interesting you say the first one has a large effect and the second one has a small effect? but maybe that isnt the point of your comment
True, now that you point it out it does speak to my assumptions about direct vs indirect consequences or effects. To me the first is 'risk your life in exchange to save a life' and the second is 'give up your life to *maybe* indirectly save lives' - I don't know how effective self-immolation has been historically, but it doesn't seem to work nowadays at least.
>doesn't seem to work nowadays at least.
What about the guy in Tunisia? https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mohamed_Bouazizi
I understand that it's simpler and neater to address a philosophical problem as a dilemma that never arises in real life, like the trolley problem. I don't disagree with your classification above, though I do think that three of your categories almost never arise in real life, and 'polite actions' are fine when they don't unduly inconvenience me.
When I get up in the morning, I almost never go out the door seeking a moral dilemma - making good choices in their absence is, I think, a more interesting question. I guess assigning moral value to the horns of a dilemma is a less interesting problem to me than figuring out which of infinite possibilities you should even consider. Unfortunately, this doesn't answer your question at all, sorry.
Sure, this doesn't answer my question, but regardless I think it's an interesting take. It's certainly true that I (and likely most people in first world countries) have never had to face any of the dilemmas other than the 'easy to do, small consequences' category - though you could argue most people are constantly failing the 'easy to do, large consequences' category by not donating enough to charity.
"I almost never go out the door seeking a moral dilemma - making good choices in their absence is, I think, a more interesting question"
To me, if you are making choices then there is by necessity some dilemma you are making a choice about. As I've agreed, it's probably in that 'polite' category, but it is still a dilemma - every time you decide whether to hold the elevator for someone, how much to tip your server, etc, that is a dilemma. I believe that making good choices in the moment requires deciding on heuristics beforehand, and to me deciding on those heuristics is the interesting part of moral dilemmas no matter the size.
Strictly speaking a dilemma is a choice between two things - I guess I am saying that those types of defined choices are relatively easy to analyse. Hence, they come up in thought experiments.
I think the more interesting questions can't (or shouldn't) be analysed in that way, and viewing them as dilemmas is a little restrictive. It's possible to say that donating to charity has a large positive impact on the world; I have $200 in my bank account the day before payday; whether to donate to mosquito nets in Africa or save the money is a dilemma. But questions like 'what should I do with my life to have a positive impact in my community?' are not binary, and waiting for someone to present an opportunity/dilemma is a passive way of dealing with the question.
I think it's an interesting question - I guess I'm arguing against treating all decisions as dilemmas.
That's a fair point. I guess I was thinking of dilemmas as being between action and inaction (should I / must I take this particular action) and that applying it to real life situations means coming up with many different possible actions and evaluating each one. As you said though, that doesn't really match the traditional definition so my word choice definitely could have been better.
Yes - I agree that action/inaction is a dilemma. But breaking a free decision into different possibilities and evaluating each one independently misses out on opportunity costs - if you donate to an orphanage, you can't donate to earthquake victims, etc. Maybe what you're looking for is discussion of utility and biases in how people make decisions, particularly in altruistic situations? This would be closer to economics than philosophy, perhaps.
I still think decision-making is a bit freer than you do. I get up in the morning and I can choose to do anything: how do I decide? I could ask ChatGPT to generate 10 suggestions and then rank them and choose the 'best' according to my value system. But somehow I feel this misses the real question of finding something meaningful and productive to do.
I've been trying to figure out the best ways to vibe code.
One obvious case that worked for me is implementing a known well-documented API that is not too arcane. Another is "inverse vibe-coding" where you feed a piece of code to an AI and get it to document it, such as extracting requirements or documenting the API.
AI is pretty great at quickly generating custom html apps for data analysis from a small sample of data, and running it right there in the LLM, in case of Deepseek. I stopped using Excel and Google Sheets completely, they are far inferior for any data analysis task.
What has been working much less well is getting it to write unit tests.
Where things get dicey is when I ask an AI to implement something complicated. It tends to "forget" a big chunk of the request, or generate mock data just to "accomplish the task". When confronted, it apologizes and does it again.
I've also had only marginal success when asking an LLM to port a capability from one version of some module to another: it tends to mangle the code way more than warranted.
I realize that the LLMs are evolving quickly, but still, having some rules of thumb and best practices would be nice.
I've had success, saving a good chunk of dev time, in some quite specific areas:
- translate code from one language to another. Describe your code style in the prompt and it does a very decent job bridging different languages.
- write a self-contained algorithm or function. Describe what you want it to do and roughly how, and it will figure out lots of details, from Api calls to boundary conditions.
- for sysadmin (sorry: devops) tasks, you can get it to write short shell (or perl, awk, python...) scripts, sql queries, etc. Saves lots of time reading thru official docs and stackocerflow entries, but you still need the docs sometimes. (I just had Claude guide me thru a db server migration and replication setup this way).
- I tried to vibe code a small self-contained project, and there the key was to have a good convo w the LLM about how to do it in high level terms. You have to really stress "don't write code yet!!" or it will jump to coding and do it wrong.
I haven't tried the 'agentic' or MCP tools yet, I'll give them a try soon.
Also, for actual interaction at the CLI, I've found great results with https://github.com/sigoden/aichat . Feed it a bunch of LLM api keys, and prompt away.
The key thing with LLMs is to keep in mind the context window. If you're having a long session, remember that every time it reads the whole conversation from the start. If you've been interactively adding features, fixing bugs and getting diffs from a singlr convo, after a while it gets too confusing and the LLM starts making mistakes.
At that point, start a new session, and give it just a paragraph summarizing the project, and the current code. You can try to get the LLM itself to make the summary paragraph for you, check it and open the new session with that.
Cursor IDE is your best bet. Pay $20, remove limits on fast requests, enable large context mode and full folders contents in context. Add BrightData MCP to replace Cursor search and allow the models to actually open any page in full as markdown instead of just snippets that Cursors internal tool offers.
As a rough rule of thumb it costs $2/hour of coding to use Cursor in this “no limit” approach with the best models in “Max” mode.
I think the scaffolding / agent is just as crucial as the LLM. Seems like Claude Code is widely considered SOTA (possibly because Claude is heavily geared to code now) but if you want IDE integration, Roo Code should be worth a look to.
When. Try to get LLMs to write code, it feels like it’s not quite there yet.
Surprisingly, they seem best at having a conversation about the specification, e.g. pointing out where there are gaps in the spec.
I have had moderate success using an LLM as a way to generate SubStack-like posts/comments for me.
The results were useful, but not correct. They were useful because the wrong-ness still pointed in the direction of correctness and, for what I was doing, faster than the Google searches I was interleaving with the LLM interaction.
I’ve been recently working on doing reinforcement learning for a particular task, and R1 was pretty good at figuring out the algorithm for the verifier. (I.e. use R1 to generate code that will then be used to verify the correctness of a large number of examples, also created by R1. Then train on that, obviously.)
Interested in hearing people's relative rating of the different Deep Research tools out there. Trigger of the question in ROT13 so not to influence too much: Tbbtyr frrzf gb unir aresrq gurvef bire gur jrrxraq...
Not sure if this was an optical use case, but I recently tried to dig up a psych study I vaguely remembered from a documentary I watched some years ago, and I was not able to do so, but it DID hallucinate a bunch of elements of real studies to be more like my description than they actually were. This was with ChatGPT's "deep research" thing, whatever model the free version is.
Sarah Constantin's post is my go-to: https://sarahconstantin.substack.com/p/ai-deep-research-tools-reviewed
ChatGPT-o3 DR >>> Gemini-2.5 DR > Claude-4 DR. Raw GPT-o3 is often just as good—if not better—than DR, depending on the topic. I often run o3 first, check the results, then trigger DR to fill in gaps if something’s missing.
Claude and Gemini are ~never worth using IMO. I’ve never had them generate a better answer than the raw Gemini/Claude model itself can. Not sure if it’s just my queries that don’t work well with their search, or if their product just isn’t that good.
I would say it's the prompts - I have regularly seen Gemini DR trading blows with o3 but with it nerfed, I doubt it will happen right now (in fairness, that was only true for paid accounts, free DR used flash which was useless for the job). Good to know I do not need to bother with Claude though.
For prompting, I suggest to start with https://lawsen.substack.com/p/getting-the-most-from-deep-research and customize it a bit for your purposes (I made a Gem out of it but should work with Claude and ChatGPT just as well).
Do you have a specific prompt where Gemini or Claude can beat OAI’s deep research results? I’ll paste it verbatim into all 3 and compare.
I’ve tried tons of prompting techniques and have my own prompt optimizers written up - nothing can help Gemini or Claude DR do better from what I’ve seen.
With the recent downgrade of Gemini, there's no chance. It barely scratches the surface now (50-70 nonsense sources vs 200+ before) and this morning it even failed to write executive summaries :(
In May I managed to do so repeatedly, enough so that I let ChatGPT Plus lapse - I sadly cannot share the prompt / results as it was research for work.
But fair enough, back to OpenAI I am - looks like there is no need to try Claude...
Have you read the Zvi Mowshowitz blog ? Brilliant blog that answers this type of question excellently.
If only there was a tool to analyze Zvi’s blog and figure out the answer without looking :-)
Every day :-)
Deep Research is probably the hardest to get a clear view on - evaluation mostly requires that you already have a good view of the topic (or possibly run the same prompt head to head) and in any case, it's fairly time consuming.
Prominent media figures also have Epstein connections
OK, I don’t want to cause conflict so I have deleted the post
I recommend against comments like this - I basically agree with what you're saying, but I think the outcome that actually happened here on this subthread (now there are even more people arguing about why they don't like Aella) was predictable, and that when Aella is already feeling bad we should be trying to avoid having even more people publicly criticizing her.
I deleted the OP but it did not affect the rest of the thread. Is it possible to reinstate it (for coherence of the thread to anyone seeing this) or kill the entire thread?
Btw, I like how you say it was 'predictable'. It certainly wasn't for me. I guess I've been away from posting on social media too long...
Yeah, sorry, I'm very jaded about this kind of stuff and shouldn't have expected anyone else to have known. I don't know a good way to either restore comments or delete a large number of posts quickly so I'll just let it fall to the bottom of the Open Thread.
Noted and lesson learned.
Yes, my bad. I thought people here wouldn't do that. Feel free to delete this post and that entire thread.
I have sympathy for her (her account of her upbringing is bananas) but I don't like her stuff. That being said, nobody should get personal abuse on social media. Vehement disagreement, sure, but not personal insults and threats.
Are you unfamiliar with social media? It's nothing but personal abuse. That's why you shouldn't go on there non-anonymously if you plan on being controversial. Why does Aella deserve any special treatment? I have no idea what the current controversy is but given my limited knowledge of her she appears to be a terrible person and society is probably better off labeling her as such. If you want to make yourself a counter-cultural symbol you can't be too surprised when mainstream culture decides to steamroll you.
To the extent that any deserves anything, everyone deserves not to be personally abused on social media. I don’t care who started it, and who gets it, it’s not “special treatment” for you to choose not to personally abuse someone - unless you’re one of the problem people that should be kicked off of social media.
Meh, cry me a river. It she doesn't want to be called a whore then she shouldn't grandstand how proud she is to be a whore. This is classic wanting to have her cake and eat it too. The only reason she has any notoriety is because she boldly broke sexual norms. Now she's taking flak for breaking sexual norms. You can't publicly strip-mine your private life for clicks and then complain when it's used against you. Either toughen up or don't play the game.
I’m not talking about her. I’m talking about you. You should stop being a bad person and telling people to do mean things, even if someone else is making foolish decisions. In fact, you might even encourage people to try to make the world a better place, even for people you think are making bad decisions.
I'm not a bad person and I'm not telling anyone to do mean things. I think people who publicly make foolish decisions should be ridiculed for it. That serves a valuable social function. Doing what betas consider mean is frequently adaptive. Stop inhibiting the adaptive function of rational social punishment. You make the world worse.
Is she entirely honest though? She claims that no one presents evidence or reasoning for why the things she says are wrong. What I've observed is that she simply ignores the counter-arguments. People become frustrated by this, and then begin to insult her instead because what's the point of trying to be factual with someone like that?
Looks like it's presently impossible to reply to her X as her account is privated. That said, I wouldn't necessarily categorize her as "a nice person trying to be honest with herself". That seems significantly whitewashing.
Maybe she blocked you? I replied to her yesterday.
She can't have blocked me, because I don't have an X account.
Can you elaborate in what way that's whitewashing?
General tendency to "no, you don't like my account of what I do because you are opposed to honest depiction of liberated sexuality" in response to "maybe being a sex worker is not the greatest career?"
She's self-evidently a severely mentally ill person, who according to herself was raised in a Christian sect (in a way that anyone can identify as psychologically harmful), then more or less destroyed her brain with massive doses of LSD, and is now living with the aftereffects of both of these. I won't write some elaborate examination here because it's offputting and inappropriate to dissect someone else's personality publicly like that, but you should be able to draw connections between these factors and her various behaviors yourself with a modicum of thought.
> She's self-evidently a severely mentally ill person
You've said this several times. Are you a board-certified Psychiatrist or do you have an advanced degree in Psychology to be able to make that diagnosis? If not, you're just slandering her. And if you are a professional, you're acting unprofessionally by commenting on her case.
Quite the dilemma. Sounds like nobody is ever allowed to speculate on the possibility of someone being mentally ill.
Which, in a world where 26% of young women report being mentally ill, is going to make it difficult to discuss anyone else's actions.
There's a difference between (A) "I wonder if she isn't suffering from mental illness" and (B) "she's self-evidently a severely mentally ill person." The first example is a legitimate question, at least if it's raised in the context of some observed irrational behaviors. The second is just an ad hominem attack using pseudo-psychological jargon. And BTW, Anonymous just lobbed the same ad hominem stink bomb at me when they said, "I've downgraded my assessment of your mental health accordingly." Kind of a nasty thing to say, don't you think?
And in regard to example A, there is nothing in Aella's behavior that suggests she's anything but an intelligent and articulate woman. I am not a psychologist nor a psychiatrist, but in the following interview, Aella doesn't seem to exhibit any delusional or disorganized thinking, which is generally associated with schizophrenia and bipolar disorder. She's not displaying any agitated behaviors, and she's definitely not exhibiting any catatonic behaviors, nor any other bizarre behaviors. Does it seem like an innocent observation to claim that she's severely mentally ill?
https://www.skeptic.com/michael-shermer-show/from-a-christian-upbringing-to-sex-work-aella/
Midwit take. Aella is great, has many wonderful qualities, including incredible curiosity, a deep truthseeking drive, creativity, and the ability to decouple to an unusual extent.
also LSD does not `destroy your brain` - point me to one paper showing neurotoxicity.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/26966135/
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/2780790/
Since that first link is about LSD's neurotoxicity, out of curiosity, I asked the ChatGPT oracle what the current status of the research into the long-term effects of LSD is. Take it for what it's worth...
Me: Has LSD been proven to be neurotoxic, and if so what is the mechanism?
ChatGPT said:
LSD (lysergic acid diethylamide) is not generally considered neurotoxic in the traditional sense—that is, it does not kill neurons or cause lasting structural brain damage at normal recreational or clinical doses. However, the topic is nuanced. Here's a breakdown of what is known:
🧠 What the Research Says About LSD and Neurotoxicity
✅ No Evidence of Classic Neurotoxicity
Animal studies have not shown LSD to cause neuronal death at typical dosages.
Human studies (including neuroimaging in modern clinical research) have not found structural brain damage from LSD.
Compared to substances like methamphetamine, alcohol, or even MDMA, LSD is remarkably non-toxic to the brain.
⚠️ Potential Indirect or Functional Neurotoxicity Concerns
While LSD doesn’t appear to kill brain cells, there are some ways it might disrupt or dysregulate brain function in certain contexts:
1. Psychological Disturbances
Persistent psychosis or hallucinogen persisting perception disorder (HPPD) may occur in susceptible individuals.
These are functional disturbances, not structural brain damage, but can be debilitating and long-lasting.
2. Glutamate & Serotonin Systems
LSD is a potent agonist at 5-HT2A receptors, and modulates glutamate release—which, in theory, could cause excitotoxic stress at high doses or in vulnerable brains.
However, no studies have shown excitotoxicity (the mechanism behind glutamate-induced neuronal death) from LSD in vivo in humans or animals at relevant doses.
3. Neuroplasticity vs. Neurotoxicity
LSD induces changes in gene expression, dendritic growth, and synaptic plasticity.
This is often framed as neuroenhancing, not damaging—but it could hypothetically destabilize neural circuits in rare cases.
🧪 Modern Clinical Trials
Recent and ongoing trials using LSD to treat depression, anxiety, and addiction have:
Not reported neurotoxic effects.
Shown no long-term cognitive decline.
Reported transient psychological effects, which are carefully managed in therapeutic settings.
"my value as a person lies in me having great tits" is not something very hopeful to read, because eventually even the perkiest tits get saggy as age goes forward, and if all you have to bolster your self-esteem is "i'm pretty and sexy and horny men desire me!", then what will you do when someone younger and prettier and sexier comes along and the horny men abandon you to chase after her?
I assume they didn't mean "destroy" as in physically destroy white and grey matter or neurons, they meant it realigns your neural patterns to result in more destructive or unacceptable behaviours. This is pretty well-documented.
Correct!
It's been known since the mid or late Sixties that even one dose of LSD can permanently alter your neurochemistry so as to increase your openness and suggestibility. You don't think a high openness trait correlates to defiance of social norms at all? Or "the ability to decouple"? I mean hell, just read some of her own trip reports, it's clear that it took a toll on her mind.
I'll admit that it's pretty brutal to be called midwit by a pornbrained simp. That stings.
I've tripped at least 125 times, and maybe as many as 150 times (I didn't start counting until after my first year of bi-weekly tripping).
I'm now retired, have lived a fairly successful middle-class life, earning my bread high tech. Can't say it did me any harm. It certainly made my life more interesting.
I wouldn't say "anyone can identify as psychologically harmful" a certain upbringing, as The Nurture Assumption (and Trivers' theory of genetic conflict before it) casts doubt on upbringing (beyond some extremes like not learning language) having much of an effect at all.
To me the obsession with sex seems much of a piece with fundamentalists’ (and evangelicals generally) obsession with sin and sexuality which very often comes to a, ah, crisis, sometimes newsworthy, which afterward seems much the point of the whole thing.
I think she’s not so far from her people as she probably imagines.
I respect the basic theory you're referencing and think it's broadly correct within its limits, but I think you're misapplying it here. Surely you don't disagree that it's possible to traumatize someone in a way which fucks up their functioning permanently or semi-permanently? And if you agree with that surely you can see that children, with their more-plastic brains, are more easily affected?
I think upbringing is like paint: as long as there isn't any lead in it, it doesn't matter what color it is, there's no wall color for the nursery that will make your kid grow up to be Mozart and there's no particular child-rearing plan that will do it either. But if you poison the kid you can for sure worsen his outcomes a great deal from the expected baseline.
I have in fact argued against the concept of "trauma" in an ACX comment section earlier. It was long enough ago that I can't easily find the thread (the Substack activity page only goes back to late November).
Literal poison could have an effect. What I don't believe in is a mental analogue for poison.
What?! Why are people reviling her?
In this particular case, it's downstream of everyone that hated Nicholas Decker for being himself turned around and called him "based" when Aella posted a meme picture when interviewing him for her podcast (https://substack.com/home/post/p-165233547?utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web), while continuing to excessively and performatively hate her.
I think she's overrated and an infohazard, but that's reason to ignore her output and encourage others to ignore her output as well (likewise, I think nothing good can come of giving attention to Decker, who is the Leroy Jenkins of naive utilitarians and all utilitarians will suffer guilt-by-association). No good reason to attack her the way many people do.
"In this particular case, it's downstream of everyone that hated Nicholas Decker for being himself turned around and called him "based" when Aella posted a meme picture when interviewing him for her podcast"
I can't make sense of this sentence. I'm sure I'm missing something, but to me it looks like you mashed two or three different drafts of it together in your head, something I've often done myself.
Yeah bad writing, it was also incomplete. Let's try an elaboration:
Aella-hate and Aella-defense are relatively common Rationalist Twitter cycles.
This particular round that culminated in her ~~deleting~~ not deleting, taking her account private seems to have started with people rejecting her assertion that a highly unusual and dangerous kink event is a common female fantasy (that part I missed before).
It was also motivated by the reaction after the suggestive picture posted with Nicholas Decker, Aella, and several other scantily-clad ladies.
Many Twitter people that previously hated Nicholas Decker for his philosophical positions called him "based" after the photo, while continuing to hate on Aella. The difference in reaction was stated as one of the reasons she was so deeply bothered this time, compared to the usual level of attack she receives.
Does it make more sense now?
Yes! Certainly. Thanks for that clarification.
I don't know who that guy is, I don't know any of these people and right now I'm glad that's the case.
Enough rows and ructions elsewhere to keep me occupied.
I am curious too, she seems to have set her xeets to private. Is it about her recent blog articles?
If we're talking about Aella, I'm still seeing her Xeets. She recently posted this series. There's more, but the likes she gets seem to far out-ratio the hateful comments she receives. That doesn't make the hateful comments any less painful, though.
> Just searched my name on Twitter and basically 99% of the (high number) of mentions are viciously negative. It's so crazy that just being an openly weird slutty woman generates such universal hate, completely unaffected by high commitment to (trying to be) kind and truth seeking
> In this moment I feel kind of broken. Just look at the quote tweets already starting in response. I wish I weren't so affected by this but it's pretty overwhelming and heartbreaking. I'm so sad the world is shaped in this way.
Sex work, polyamory/slut behaviour, orgies & unconventional 'solutions'/questions around societal taboos/triggers (from pedophilia to what is trauma).
Wow. It sucks that people spend their energy making someone feel bad for being different. Most of us grow up watching about a gazillion kids movies about why you shouldn't do that.
It's a little disingenuous to say this about "being different". She makes claims that are wrong or harmful (excluding the sex stuff which i don't care about), and then refuses to retract her claims or consider counter-evidence. People get mad at this for obvious reasons.
I presume this discussion is about Aella's recent Xeet?—the OP deleted their comment. What claims has she made that are wrong or harmful? Seems like she's been pretty upfront about both the advantages and limitations of her surveys. And I assume she isn't lying about her personal life as a child of Fundies and her post-Fundie sexual awakening.
I don't really like playing this game where I do the work of digging through examples from years ago and then you get the much easier job of nitpicking the examples. I know what I've seen and it's your choice to believe me or not and I don't care if you don't.
Check this very thread. And that's someone trying to be polite and disaffected.
> Check this very thread.
You're implying that Anonymous is spending "their energy making someone feel bad for being different". I strongly disagree with your assessment, that does not seem to be what Anonymous is doing, at all.
I object strenuously to anything I said being categorized as " making someone feel bad for being different". I originally only pointed out vaguely that classing her merely as "a nice person trying to be honest" is a bowdlerization of the real situation (and even that really as an aside to a post meant to point out that her X account is private and cannot be engaged with in the way desired by the OP). When asked to elaborate, I did this in the most objective way I could. Think of this as a De Boer-esque dislike for dismissal of the actual severe consequences of mental illness.
If you have a more dispassionate and polite way to say "severely mentally ill" which still conveys the same information without any obfuscation or minimization, please outline it.
Obviously, you are either board-certified in Psychiatry or have an advanced degree in Psychology to make the diagnosis that Aella is "severely mentally ill". Which disorder entries in the DSM-5 do you base your diagnosis on? And do you feel qualified to make a remote diagnosis without interviewing the subject?
saw it earlier and didn’t react, thanks for the nudge!