Hi, I wrote the review of Effective altruism/rationalism, and really want to hear what people think of it. No reason is required to not be selected, I assume all finalists are great of course.
But I hoped it would start a real debate about how to institutionalise the movements in a less illiberal and elitist way. Instead, I haven't even seen it mentioned in a comment. I want to understand why:
1. It landed as obvious (we've noticed the skulls). In this case I want to hear whether everyone knows this is a big problem, eg sick of the discussion, or if the reason is that you think it is not actually a problem.
2. It landed as wrong/misguided. Please argue
3. It landed as rude/arrogant, poorly written or not the right kind of text. Feel free to give feedback
To me (obviously, that's why I wrote it) what I point to really is a problem on the ground, so I want to hear people's arguments
Wondering if I should go ahead and publish my review (which didn't make it into Scott's post) and thank the people calling it out in these comments, or keep to anonymity on the off chance the review gets elevated into a last-minute honorable mention position, as it did previously.
Either way, I'm really pleased with the quality of the reviews as a whole, and that there are loads of people in these comments calling out reviews other than these 10+ finalists and honorable mentions as their favorites. Obviously I'm sad mine didn't make it, but to see even one person name it as their favorite still warms my heart. See you next year!
"Strikes against Russian industrial capacity continue. The Nevinnomyssky Azot fertilizer plant in Stavropol Krai, one of the top producers of ammonia and nitrogen fertilizers in the country, halted production after drone attacks. Another attack was charted in Orenberg, 1500km from Ukraine, and likely home to strategic missile base. In an effort to blunt the drone campaign, authorities cut mobile services to vast swathes of Russian territory. It ends up being a map of strategic priorities. Oops."
My plan had been to review Fresh Fruit for Rotting Vegetables by Dead Kennedys, but other projects took enough of my time that once I got to the writing stage I quickly deduced I wouldn't be able to finish by the deadline. Perhaps I will do something on a related subject for a later contest.
Would love to see Bukele promoted to finalist! Thought it was really interesting, with analysis by someone living in the country of interest and well written. Have discussed it with several people in real life since reading it. Definitely keen to read and discuss further.
The Musk Algorithm was also great distillation of real world experience.
I really blew it on the review. I didn't read the contest note clearly and started work on an actual book review. DQ! I'll finish it up when I have time and get it in early next year.
Tried to play catch up with a review of Milgram's obedience experiment, in the context of popular fictional character archetypes, but spring is not a good time for writing in my line of work (Apple Grower). I'll finish and post that sometime, but I was off to a good start.
Good contest, there were some really thought-provoking entries in the ones I read - and I got to very few of the ones that ended up being finalists, so I still have plenty more to look forward to.
I wrote the Skibidi Toilet review. I had a ton of fun writing it, glad it got some positive reception and informed some people about one corner of the vast and weird landscape of modern storytelling. :) I'll post a polished-up version to my own blog soon.
To the commenters who vocalized a disdain for learning anything about the topic or even being vaguely compelled to think about it: Hey, your time is your own and you should spend it as you see fit. Maybe next year, you can write a review of rank cowardice so the rest of us can decide if it's right for us.
Iran has had their militarily capacity greatly degraded in recent weeks/months. Setting their nuclear program aside, we know that their air defense and missile launching capabilities have been largely curtailed. However, if somebody thinks this is a great time for regime change coming from within--which is the only place it should come from, self-determination being near sacrosanct to me--I have this thought. The security and police apparatus that is so effective at keeping the Iranian people from succeeding at their protests is roughly intact.
So, any notion that we are suddenly in good position for a popular counter-revolution in Iran had better buckle-up, because it will be a rough ride. Sure is fun and easy to bomb targets--and eventually that means people--but intervening to help a local/national uprising does not appear to be on anyone's menu. Presidents that say "go ahead, we have your back" have not been credible, and so should be taken with salt.
Inviting such an action through a preemptive leadership decapitation action would be a black swan sitting on a black box. no-one knows what will happen squared. Not a great comp, but no one seems very happy about Libya post-Ghaddaffi (mostly due to Wagner/Russian interference, IMO), but Iran is a much higher base-rate competence country that Libya was, so who knows.
> However, if somebody thinks this is a great time for regime change coming from within--which is the only place it should come from, self-determination being near sacrosanct to me--
If it comes from without, how is that any less self-determination than what they have now? Iran isn't a real democracy. Anyone living their is having their life determined by someone else as it is.
Okay, let me address your 3 points in reverse order. 3: Well, all societies have either rules or anarchy, so yes, other people have a lot to say about how you live. Not much for me to disagree with there. 2: Iran not a democracy? Not generally thought of as one, and yet...they do have elections that have actual political consequence. Yes, the Mullah branch controls who is allowed to run, but within that scheme there are still extremists and moderates--the current PM being the most moderate candidate in the last election. They also have women with the right to vote since 1963! Not bad. On the whole, I rate them as slightly less democratic than Israel, which would have a considerably higher grade if so many of their residents weren't denied citizenship/suffrage. But I digress.
3: They got pretty pissed off in Tehran when a woman was murdered in police custody. They went to the streets and made a very big deal of it, and were beaten, jailed and even killed for their trouble. These people want something better, and I hope they can find their way to it, although right now might not be the ideal time. I will say that in the photos of Iran after the bombings, of the people I see only ~half the women have their hair covered, the rest don't like that.
I once heard on some news show a dissident in Syria--this was 10+ya--say that Assad would fall when Syrians made him fall, and any other interference was quite possibly disastrously unhelpful. His preference has aged well.
That's probably why Israel has been targeting low to mid level police and police leadership recently. I understand they have been intentionally assassinating the equivalent of the local police captains, though I haven't seen a lot of detail on it.
I thought this was an excellent take-down of Curtis Yarvin's recent allegation that the Allies starved hundreds of thousands of German prisoners of war to death in 1945:
Yarvin's original X thread was done in excellent Yarvin form, replete with rhetorical wink-winks and "if you read any real history, this wouldn't be a surprise" vibes. I admit to hoping it was complete BS, but trying to hold my judgement for a while, and I'm glad someone did what seems to be a thorough and even-handed job of refuting it.
I agree that Yarvin is, oh gee, let’s just call him a bozo for the sake of brevity, but arctotherium goes on to carp about ‘the elevation of the Tulsa race riot to a massacre’ in his conclusion by citing an article in The Unz Review which is edited by Ron Unz, who per Wikipedia is an antisemitic holocaust denier and a white nationalist so I won’t take arctotherium’s word as gospel.
This is bad. The author is bad. To be fair, I *think* Yarvin is trolling.
We know that former Nazis were treated incredibly poorly and anyone familiar with sources from the period would be aware of it. My personal familiarity of this comes from the diaries of John Rabe, the Nazi who is credited of with personally saving 250k Chinese during the Rape of Nanking. You can read his wiki here (1), watch a trailer for the movie about his life here with Steve Buscemi (2), and buy his diaries under the title "The Good Man of Nanking", which I would recommend.
We know he was basically starved to death. We know this from his diaries but we also know his situation was so dire that in 1948 the mayor of Nanjing traveled through Switzerland to Germany and the people of Nanjing sent him food until his death. Allow me to repeat, a ~64 year-old humanitarian was essentially starved so badly that the people of Nanjing China, during the Civil War and Maoist period, were sending him food. If that was happening to an old humanitarian Nazi bureaucrat...yeah, I can imagine some pretty bad stuff occurring to actual soldiers.
Yarvin is bad here because I *think* he's basically trolling and this is Trump's Hatian cats all over again, where there probably was not a million person execution of captured German soldiers but their living standards and treatment was probably pretty horrific and now we're all talking about this. Yarvin *probably* wants this because it serves his purposes for the Skeletor of the 20th century to be Communists, not Nazis.
This response is worse. It presents no actual evidence except official statistics provided by the very people accused of genocide/abuse, cribbed from a book written by some other guy. Give Yarvin this, I believe he's actually read and interacted with direct sources and now he's spinning/trolling to get clicks and influence. This bozo just cribbed a book someone else wrote about it with, I don't want to say no evidence, but certainly not persuasive evidence. You just...if someone accuses the Soviets or the Maoists or the Japanese of genocide, it is not persuasive to show official Soviet or Maoist or Japanese figures declaring that they totally didn't commit a genocide. The bar is low but you have to actually cross it.
Please don't share stuff like this in the future. It was dumb and it made me angry.
John Rabe was not in any of the prisoner camps. He was starving as a civilian, and as the author made very clear a *lot* of people were starving and going without food in Europe in 1948. John Rabe going hungry as a civilian in Berlin is not evidence that hundreds of thousands of Germans were starved to death in Allied prisoner camps.
The author makes a lot of good points. If this happened, why doesn't anybody claim that it happened until 1989? Why did the West German commission whose sole job was to track down every German that died during or after the war not find hundreds of thousands of starved prisoners? Where is the evidence that such a thing occured? Yarvin doesn't seem to present any.
I read it too, and there are reasons for concern with this author (like, defending residential camps, calling Tulsa a 'race riot?). But the most compelling stats he drew from came from the West German government of the 60's and 70's.
Sounds like the guy is out of ideas and pretty desperate to get attention.
EDIT: Or maybe, if this is intentional, he decided to target a dumber audience than previously. Now the ideas are less abstract and more dramatic, and there is less need for plausibility.
I wrote the Deathbed Ballads review. It didn't make the cut, but least one person seems to have liked it, which I appreciate. Last year, I reviewed Martin Luther's "Bondage of the Will", which looks like it narrowly missed the Honorable Mentions, and I got some good feedback on it after the fact which I still plan on using to make a revised version to publish elsewhere.
Some other topics I considered reviewing this year:
"Taxman" by The Beatles. I wrote a paper in college analyzing this song and tracing out specific references in it to elements of the UK tax system in the 1960s. I think it would only need minor reworking, but I thought the same of my college paper on Bondage of the Will last year and had wound up redoing it from scratch. I decided against it because it was much more of an analysis than a review.
"Identity", a YouTube video where the creator, Abigail Thorn, comes out as a trans woman to her audience after already being established as a moderately big-name YouTuber before starting her transition I watched it a few months into my own transition and found it very moving and applicable. I think it's very well-made and has a number of subtle details I'd be interested in talking about. I decided against reviewing it mostly because I didn't think I could do so anonymously: I have been very active in comments discussions here about trans issues and have cited Identity more than once in those discussions.
Analysing songs from the American Civil War as a corpus for hints at how soldiers thought about the conduct and motivations of the war. I had originally chosen this as my topic and started writing it, but abandoned and pivoted to what I hoped would be a lighter topic because it was very quickly turning out to be too verbose and research-heavy. Not sure how successful I was (gestures vaguely at my 14000 word actual submission). It was also shaping up to be too much an essay and not enough a review.
One other topic I won't share publicly. The reason I didn't review it this year is because it overlaps substantially with a book review I want to do in a future year and I think it works better if I review the book than later than if I review one major topic discussed in the book now.
Taxman. 1 for you 19 for me. Pretty easy to understand complaint. Even for a kid who had yet to pay any taxes in 1966. One of George’s pre-metaphysical songs. No sitar in that one.
Can anyone here who supports the Israeli and American war against Iran explain to me your reasoning? I'm kind of baffled by the support for it. AFAIK the official rationale of Israel/America is that Iran is building a nuclear weapon and so they're engaging in self-defense to stop them, but U.S intelligence says they're not building nukes https://apnews.com/article/us-iran-nuclear-intelligence-b506d130e474c00f6bd653d3d5a8d31a . In particular I would like to know
1. Whether you think Iran is actually building a nuclear weapon
2. Whether you think the war against Iran is legal under international law
3. Whether you think diplomatic alternatives to war have been adequately explored
4. Whether you think regime change is viable and desirable
I think that one habit people really need to get out of is calling governments by the names of their countries, and vice versa. We need to distinguish between "Iran", which is a huge country of 90 million people, and "The Iranian Government", which is a random bunch of unelected thugs that happens to control a capital city.
The morality here is not in question -- when you have an unelected government ruling over a country, it's moral for absolutely anybody, no matter how foreign or humble, to kill any element of that government.
What I don't get is why the US joined in. They had Israel already doing their dirty work for them. They just needed to supply weapons, which they already do and is not against international law, and intelligence, I'm not sure about the law for that but it can be done discreetly. I don't think that would grant them any sort of moral high ground, but it seems like the pragmatic thing to do.
Because the US has deep bunker busting weapons and Israel doesn't (and they can't just hand them over, since they require B2s to deploy which only the US has). For the US it was a cheap free option to finish off buried iranian nuclear sites for free.
I don't think this is a consideration, beyond telling your press office to replace references to "international law" with "rules-based international order" in the statements when you decide to flout it (or at least what you're saying it is when you're citing it against Russia or something).
1. This is somewhat underspecified, which has led to a lot of confusion. Is Iran physically building a nuclear bomb, in the sense of "shaping a collection of 90% enriched Uranium, explosives and various other stuff to be able to produce nuclear yield?" Probably not just yet. But they're definitely doing a lot of stuff that is clearly intended to give them the capability to do that in short order. And from a practical standpoint, we should treat this about the same as one of those people who buys a maybe-not-a-gun-kit that you need to file like three things down to turn into a working gun, even if you can technically argue that "they aren't building a bomb".
2. Yes, so far as international law is a real thing (which it mostly isn't). Iran fired several hundred missiles at Israel in April 2024. That is an act of war by any definition, and there has been no peace agreement since then.
3. What diplomatic alternatives? Iran doesn't want to give up the program, and since Trump tore up the deal in his first term, there hasn't been a good way to get them back in.
4. Desirable? Probably, because the current regime is pretty bad. Viable? Much less so. The record of doing that from the air is not particularly good.
To be clear, I'm not saying I think it was a good idea. It's put Israel in an extremely awkward position where they basically have to keep bombing Iran forever, and that's not a great place to be. The US might be able to get out of it, although that heavily depends on the next few days. But I can also understand Israel feeling like they don't have a lot of options, given Iran's continued sponsorship of programs to make them not exist. Diplomacy is often messy.
We think there's a profound asymmetry in that Iran's ruling regime is really invested in annihilating Israel (the word they often use), and we are not at all invested in somehow erasing Iran from the map. This goes way beyond posture/rhetoric, in that Iran has for the past 45 years consistently funded/trained terrorist groups operating near and inside Israel, and encouraged state actors under its partial control to more hostility against Israel, creating a metaphorical "ring of fire" around it. As a partial list, these are Hizbullah, Hamas, and the regimes of Asad in Syria and Houthis in Yemen.
Israelis sincerely believe that if Iran got a nuclear bomb, the ayatollahs might well be crazy enough to first-strike it against us, even though we'd surely nuke them back (I understand that some reasonable people disagree with this, but it's possible that they underappreciate the investment Iran's made into anti-Israeli activities over the last half-century, to no apparent benefit to their nation). I believe that no reasonable outside observers would put any non-negligible probability on Israel first-striking Iran with nuclear weapons.
So, Israelis broadly agree that Iran getting nukes is an existential threat, even though they might disagree about its size. Netanyahu in particular has made a decades-long career of distracting voters from whatever domestic problems he's mired in by talking about Iran's existential threat, and the substantial part of the population that's fed up with him is really tired of it. NEVERTHELESS, even people who suspect Netanyahu of always maneuvering political decisions towards his own benefit, are still giving the government (and the army and intelligence, especially) the benefit of the doubt, because they feel that anything we can do to prevent Iran from getting nukes is vitally important.
1. Yeah, getting 60% enriched uranium was tough and expensive and they don't need it for anything else
2. I'm not sure. I think it's not more illegal than e.g. the US attacking Iraq, and I think it's definitely less illegal than Russia attacking Ukraine (because that's a war of territorial conquest, which is much much worse than "merely" waging war, both in terms of UN statute and common sense)
3. Hard to say
4. Basically the appetite grows with the eating, somewhat cynically. First two days of the war, no one was thinking of regime change, but Israel has achieved air superiority to a much greater degree, and saw much fewer victims of Iranian missiles, than planned for. Israelis think that most Iranians are fed up with the regime and that it's autocratic, oppressive and undemocratic, but we don't have regime change as a goal in itself, only insofar as it'd (possibly, uncertainly) help remove a brutal and dangerous enemy which the current regime is. It's not clear how viable regime change is, everyone says no one's ever achieved it by bombing and they're probably right; the level of discontent within the country might help but will probably not be enough absent further dramatic developments.
1. Yeah, almost certainly. We follow the converging lines of evidence, right? Iran has had a "peaceful, civilian" nuclear program for decades and have produced:
a) three heavily-guarded and secretive enrichment facilities, one of which was dug into a mountain.
b) zero civilian nuclear reactors.
c) 400kg of 60%-enriched uranium. I.e., the sort of fissile material that no one would ever create unless they wanted to build a weapon.
Everyone agrees on all of this; everyone agrees that their breakout time has been measured in the weeks for a while; everyone knows they could put together and detonate a dirty bomb if they wanted. The only question is whether they're pushing for weaponization (i.e., building a ballistic-/hypersonic-deliverable warhead): Israeli intelligence said yes; American intelligence said no. Eli Lake & Justin Logan had a good debate on the Moynihan Report podcast (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4VtZy6flYJA) which went over similar grounds, and Lake made the point: look at all that the Mossad has accomplished in Iran. They set up a drone factory, called a bunch of high-level generals to an insecure meeting *against explicit orders*, they destroyed anti-air batteries on the ground—Israeli intelligence networks are very deeply entrenched in the regime. American intelligence, on the other hand, well, https://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/usa-spies-iran/. So I think we have good reason to trust the Israelis when they say Iran was actually breaking out, was actually pushing for a weapon.
(One more reason in this direction: the damage to the Axis of Resistance over the past months has been totally disastrous for the regime. They feel much less safe, and it's not unreasonable to think they'd make a last-ditch push for a nuclear deterrent.)
2. Israel and Iran have been in a state of war since October 7, 2023... If we want to play the "who struck first?" game, Iran doesn't win. I think it's a dumb game to play, though, and the strike can simply be justified as a preemptive, preventive measure against the Iranian nuclear threat (see [1]).
3. I do. The best Trump could've done would've been a rewrite of the JCPOA which absolutely did slow Iranian progress toward a bomb... but it did absolutely nothing about (exacerbated, in fact) Iranian support for awful, destabilizing terror networks. Iran is responsible for much of the carnage in Yemen, Lebanon, Syria, and, in fact, Iraq, not to mention Israel & Palestine. This oversight was bad; the terror networks were enabled when we lifted sanctions without sufficiently strict conditions. At worst, this war will put pressure on the Ayatollah to accede to a worse deal.
4. It's absolutely desirable—90 million people are suffering under a terrible authoritarian regime. Whether it's viable is another question: Haviv Rettig Gur (an excellent Israeli historian & journalist) made an appearance on Sam Harris' podcast the other day, and he said something like, "for 40 years, the regime has done nothing but suppress opposition groups. Their one job internally has been to make it impossible for dissidents to offer a realistic, well-organized alternative." I think there's a lot of truth in that, and it makes this very difficult. Because a ground op + occupation is not a good idea! I mean, the logistics alone... [https://deepleft.substack.com/p/against-war-with-iran]. Any sort of regime change will have to be homegrown. I think Israel and the US should make the environment as friendly to it as possible, and Reza Pahlavi should advertise himself to Iranians directly, and so on—but it's ultimately all up to the Iranian people. Israel should be sure to hit only legitimate targets (especially things like the Basij headquarters [https://www.timesofisrael.com/liveblog_entry/israel-confirms-hitting-basij-hq-evin-prison-destruction-of-israel-clock-in-tehran/], which was a very good move) to minimize rally-around-the-flag effects. But that's really all they can (should) do to help.
I think you might need to split this into two responses. One for the US, and the other for Israel. I'm not sure how you could possibly determine that Israel *doesn't* have a "legal" right to declare war against a country that's spent decades supporting multiple terrorist organizations with the primary purpose of destroying Israel, who also recently sent hundreds of missiles directly against Israel. If that's not casus belli then what possibly could be?
As for the other points, Israel couldn't do worse with a different regime, especially if it was popular with the Iranian people (the current regime is not). And diplomacy with a country willing to spend billions on a "we're going to exterminate your people" platform every year seems like a non-starter.
As for the nuclear program - it's just about incontrovertible that Iran has built the capacity to make a nuclear weapon and separately the capacity to mount a nuclear warhead on a mid range missile. They even made a point to show off the missiles and the payload size a few years ago. Whether they have or will take the more minor steps to complete a nuclear warhead and attach it to an existing missile is not known. This is in the face of multiple countries telling them to stop in very serious tones. That they are a major sponsor of international terrorism, including against the US and its allies, makes even the possibility of nuclear armament a significant concern for anyone on the potential receiving end of a nuclear strike.
The responses to you about number 2 in particular ("international law is fake", "the US should not be subject to international law") disturb me and tend to reinforce my opposition to the war if this is the sort of thinking that characterizes relatively thoughtful supporters of it.
Can you elaborate on your thinking on international law? Why are those arguments not thoughtful?
My steelman of those arguments.
Law: a binding custom or practice of a community : a rule of conduct or action prescribed or formally recognized as binding or enforced by a controlling authority [1]
Looking at the defiition I see there are two ways for a (international) law to be recognized at least de facto. Either a binding custom or practice and/or a controlling authority. As there is no world government, I think I can say there is controlling authority so international law doesn't meet that definition. I would argue that a controlling authority is needed for there to be any law, but I will ignore it so I can address the other part; a binding custom or practice.
I do not claim to know all of the treaties and agreements that the United States has signed. The United States is an UN member so has at least agreed to live by the UN Charter.[2] Article 2 of the UN Charter starts as "The Organization and its Members, in pursuit of the Purposes stated in Article 1, shall act in accordance with the following Principles." Bullets 3 and 4 are most germane to whether military force can be used.
3) All Members shall settle their international disputes by peaceful means in such a manner that international peace and security, and justice, are not endangered.
4) All Members shall refrain in their international relations from the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of any state, or in any other manner inconsistent with the Purposes of the United Nations.
The above are supportive that the US may have acted contrary to the UN Charter. But there are two counterarguments.
a) Iran has been attacking US and Israel for the last 45 or so years through proxies. The proxies (Hamas, Hezbollah, Houthis, etc) give Iran some deniability. I guess if one does not accept those proxies are actually supported by Iran that may mean the US is acting badly. But I don't think anybody would argue that because there is so much evidence that Iran is the key (only?) backer of at least the 3 proxies I named.
So, it looks like Iran has been consistently violating 2.3 and 2.4 of the UN Charter. What should the US and Israel do to defend itself? I argue the US and Israel have legitimate reasons to attack Iran with military force.
b) Article 2 is making no claims to be a law. It itself says "principles" and not law or even rule. As the charter was likely debated for a long time, I don't think this is an oversight. So article 2 is not claiming to be law.
So, potentially article 2 can be used to justify the customs and practice part of being law. But also potentially, article 2 was written to give it the veneer of being a law, but the wording itself does not resemble a de jure law. Thus, I would say article 2 is not meant to bind any of the countries. I make this argument because I think the "customs and practices" are meant to address laws that are created by common law (or similar customs in non-Anglio phile world). So is there a custom to not militarily attack other countries? I think it is a worthwhile goal, but almost since the UN Charter's inception, countries have attacked other countries militarily. Russia attacking Czechoslovakia, North Korea attacking South Korea. US becoming militarily engaged in Vietnam. I think there is more evidence that Article 2 is a great ideal, but not really a binding custom or practice.
If the US or Israel has signed on to other treaties and agreements that limit use of their respective militaries, I would love to learn about them.
I appreciate this comment, because I've felt a bit baffled as well but in the opposite direction. It's one of those situations where you listen to someone who disagrees with you and feel lost for how to engage. But after listening to a few podcasts and articles written by people who are opposed to the war, I think I understand why the two sides seem so far apart from each other.
It really all comes down to the Obama Iran deal and whether you think it was stopping Iran from building nuclear weapons. People who support the war think that it was a terrible deal because it wouldn't stop them from making weapons, and people who oppose the war seem to think it did stop them from making weapons and would continue to stop them. I've heard several commentors say something along the lines of:
1. The Obama Iran deal stopped Iran from getting nukes.
2. Trump tore up the deal, and failed to negotiate a new one.
3. Therefore, this war is not actually about Iran getting nukes.
It makes sense if you believe premise one, but people on my side don't and didn't. I remember back when Obama made the Iran deal all the commentators I would read and listen to were in agreement that it gave Iran too much and didn't do enough to get rid of Iran's ability to make a bomb. That maybe Iran would pause it's development, but the deal would leave Iran's ability to start up weapon production again any time they wanted with little ability to stop them. If I recall correctly that was the primary reason why the Republicans in Congress refused to vote for the treaty, which is why Obama had to make the deal as a non-binding executive action (which is why Trump could just toss it when he was elected).
We know that Iran had developed the facilities needed to create nuclear weapons. There's a reason they put the centrifuges under a mountain; it was so that Israel couldn't destroy it. You don't put civilian nuclear power equipment in a bunker under a mountain! Them getting to keep all that equipment and the capability to enrich uranium was not acceptable to our side, and certainly not acceptable to Trump. We are not going to just trust that Iran isn't going to use it going forward, even if they aren't using it right now.
So to answer your point 1: Whether they were in the process of building a nuke, they had the ability to create a nuke and Trump has been very clear for years that Iran having that ability is not acceptable. Yet in our negotiations with Iran they have made it clear that they will not accept any deal that removes their ability to enrich uranium. If they're not going to agree to it, then giving Israel the go ahead to take those facilities out (and then using our bunker busters on the ones Israel can't hit) is our BATNA.
As for your other points:
2. I don't know and I don't really care. If the actions violate a treaty that the US and Israel has signed then I may care, but "International Law" in general is not something I think the US should be subject to. Besides, was Iran following international law all these years as they have funded the Houthis, Hezbollah, and Hamas?
3. Yes, I think diplomatic alternatives have been adequately explored. Iran made it clear that they would not accept any agreement that removes their ability to enrich uranium, and Trump will not accept any agreement that lets them keep that ability.
4. I think regime change could potentially be desirable. The Ayatollah is an evil man who is the head of an oppressive state that openly wishes for the destruction of the United States and many of our allies. A regime that is less evil, less oppressive, and not actively hostile to US interests would be great! The question is how viable that is, which I'm not sure of. In any case, regime change or no they now no longer have the ability to enrich uranium. If regime change is necessary to keep them from re-obtaining that ability, then regime change may be required.
1) Yes, I'd say with ~90% certainty. Otherwise, why would Israel and the US have attacked? Public reports like the one you linked aren't worth the paper they're printed on, the actual intel is likely all classified. Any side can say whatever they want. What matters is the ACTIONS they take. The US and Israel bombing Iran, despite the significant risks, is a pretty strong signal that there was credible intel that they were building a nuclear weapon. Iran refusing to sign a new nuclear deal with the US (despite crippling sanctions) is another strong signal that they are genuinely trying to build a nuclear weapon. ~10% uncertainty because honestly nobody really knows what is actually going on behind the scenes here and there are still technically plausible (though less likely) reasons to believe otherwise; I just think they're unconvincing.
2) International law is mostly fake and doesn't really mean anything. The US has veto power (de facto and de jure, depending on the particular arena) in most matters of international policy anyways. I don't put any stock here.
3) Yes and no, yes in that I think it's possible that a diplomatic policy that conceded much much more to Iran could have possibly succeeded, no in that I don't think that we could have achieved the results we really wanted (stronger guarantees they won't ever try to make nuclear weapons) at this point.
4) Viable? Yes with low confidence, the Iranian government seems pretty competant at staying in power for now, but they're obviously incompetent in a hundred other ways that might make it eaiser. I'd guess regime change would be harder than Sadaam's Iraq, easier than doing it in e.g. China or Russia. Desireable? Medium confidence, the Iranian government is pretty awful as far as governments go so any change would have a good chance of being better in general; but it's still a roll of the dice. There are good reasons to want it to happen and there are good reasons to be more cautious and hope for slow internal reform.
Why would Israel have attacked otherwise? Some variant of the following: Netanyahu wants/needs to stay in power, and he has figured that his best way of keeping a coalition together, and of mitigating the widespread unpopularity of himself and his government, is as a wartime leader rather than a peacetime leader. At the very least, I don't think it's safe to reason from the premise that Netanyahu is acting in Israel's best interests, rather than in his own perceived best interests.
It's worth noting that he's under no particular political threat at the moment (his coalition is pretty much in line), and starting a war now in the hopes of it helping with an election in a year and a half seems counterproductive (if that were his reasoning he'd have preferred it closer to the election).
As I mentioned, I think there are plausible reasons (yours is one of many I've heard), but I don't think they are as likely or convincing as the far more trivial answer, which is that Iran really is trying to build a nuclear weapon and Israel/US really are trying to stop them.
The Israeli planning and groundwork for these attacks go back almost a decade. Israel was waiting for a window where Hezbollah no longer was a constraint on preemption. The opening of Syrian airspace also greatly helped the logistics (midair refueling closer to Iran). It's not like Bibi woke up a few weeks ago, looked at his poll numbers, and decided to Leeroy Jenkins the IDF into Iran.
That's an entirely different point. It's still not safe to reason from the premise that Netanyahu is acting in Israel's best interests, rather than in his own perceived best interests. If you have other reasons, you can put them in response to the original question!
I beleive I answered the question: Israel judged Iran was still a massive threat and had an ideal opportunity to attack before its proxies could regroup. Even some of his political opponents are cheering the outcome so far; Bibi is far from the only hawk in Israel.
This is all good stuff. I agree you answered the original question, but I still don't understand why it's relevant to what I said, rather than to the original question itself.
I am not unambiguously in favor, but I'm on the other side of your arguments?
I think that Iran can clearly see that they will only be safe from hostile foreign action after they have nukes, so they are building nukes. We know they are working on nuclear power, they say it's for civilian purposes, I assume it's for nuclear missiles because they would need to be really stupid to trust that they would be safe without nuclear missiles - see North Korea and Ukraine for the relevant contrast.
I assume the war against Iran is illegal under international law but I don't respect international law; I think the Iran hostage crisis forty years ago is a sufficient casus belli if the requirement is "only invade governments who act badly", but nobody is using it. We're just saying "we want you not to build nukes, so we're invading," and this seems like... honestly a better excuse than "only invade governments who act badly"?
I think we spent twenty years exploring diplomatic alternatives to war, but I also think they are pointless. Neither the Republicans nor the Democrats can be trusted to keep their side of the bargain, so obviously the Iranians won't keep a bargain they don't expect us to keep, and there's really nothing we can pay them worth more to them than being able to nuke attackers.
Regime change is viable (in that there's a loud opposition that protests the government regularly) and desirable (in that the current government seems worse than the opposition). The question is if it is worth paying the immense cost in treasure and blood that would be needed to achieve it, and if foreign intervention will make that cost "World War Three" instead of anything that could be worth paying, and those questions I don't know the answers to.
1: Yeah, I mean, sure, they want one and are putting things in place to finish. Plus, the ballistic missles are ready. But no, they do not have one or they would have tested it and obviated all of this.
2: no, way no, but when has that stopped anyone?
3: Hell to the N-O. Sure, Iran was 'stalling,' but so what? our demands were pretty high (give up all enrichment) and unless you think they were stalling so they could finish the bomb, more time should have been given. (also see staying in JCPOA)
4: Of course, the beautiful people of Iran deserve better, but it's not about deserve. Self-determination is my moral touchstone in these matters, and the people of Iran have managed this before and can do it again.
I hit send a little too early. By "of course" to #4, read "Hell no!" Tried to put this in the subtext, but needed another sentence.
Supporters of the Iraq war, which I remember well, would answer 1: yes, 2: yes 3: yes 4: yes
My answers were 1: yes --(the difference being that we know that they enriched beyond civil use vs all evidence in Iraq pointing otherwise) 2: no 3: no 4: no, with the caveat that the people of Iran could really prosper--lots of intellectual talent there--post Ayatollah.
So those are very different answers. I opposed the Iraq war then, and the Iranian bombing now, sorry for the ambiguity.
Fair enough, I was really just responding to #2 and #4, and your clarification to #4 obviously changes things. Point taken about #3.
Regarding #2, I remember things a little differently---while there was some pretense about legality, it was hard to take that seriously (it was basically the same as the pretense in this case, that the war is preemptive) and it always seemed to me that fundamentally proponents of the Iraq war arrogated the right to themselves to intervene regardless of international law (just as they are doing with Iran here).
Also, yes, I took you to be supporting this war, sorry for not reading more carefully. It was the fact that you were answering the OPs questions (which were directed to supporters) led me to presume that.
I had no thought of anything to review, and am too lazy anyway. If anything it would have been either roadside rest areas or mission-style gas stations, and that’s been done to death I’m sure.
So kudos to all for your creativity in coming up with novel subjects .
I am always tardy in knowing myself, in this case realizing that that Google doc was the thing I was born to review, and savagely.
My house burned down in the terrible Rowena fire in The Dalles, Oregon. Around 60 homes were destroyed in the wildfire, which is suspected to have been started by the cargo train that passes through the area. I was out of town for work at the time and was not able to get home to gather anything. While all my possessions were destroyed, whats more devastating is loss of my beautiful cat, Yuka. I don't know if he remembers this, but Scott played with and complimented Yuka after a meetup in Portland, I want to say in 2020 but the exact date escapes me.
I have been reading this blog for a long time, but I post rarely so I'm not sure if this is an appropriate place to share this. I was urged by many of my friends to make a GoFundMe. This probably doesn't fall under effective altruism. I'm blessed to have a good job and lots of support around me, but dealing with the insurance company is very stressful and anything donated here contributes to my peace of mind. I'm trying to hold what is here off to the side in case the insurance comes through, and if it does I'll be donating anything here to other families in my neighborhood, many of whom did not have insurance and are a lot worse off than me. (I read these open threads so often, but I'm not sure I've seen a GoFundMe so if this is a bad place for this, someone in charge let me know and I'll remove it)
Thank you. All things considered, I'm doing okay mentally, but I am starting to feel the stress as I get into it with the insurance company. I'm planning on talking to a lawyer this week and that should help ease my mind a bit. From my experience talking to a lawyer can only help.
This is the second year that The Emperor of All Maladies didn't make it. I thought it deserved to be a finalist last year, so naturally I would have liked to see it be a finalist this year as well. However, it was a book review in a "not a book review" contest so I could see it getting penalized for that.
There's something that I find really suspicious about the claims of the danger of AI that Scott makes, and some of the posts Scott makes, which I think makes claims of the danger of AI less believable.
Like in the AI 2027 scenario Scott endorsed, even the aligned scenario is pretty dystopic (a small group of people with all the power, no real guarantees of good outcomes despite the scenario trying to paint over it imagining a luxury future). Since both scenarios are pretty bad, and specially since there's a large given chance of the worst scenario, someone who believes them should be expected to oppose AI with all their power, trying to slow it down as much as possible, as early as possible, to improve the end results.
Honestly I'd expect anyone who thinks AI is very likely to go catastrophically wrong, and who cares about morality at all, to be radically militant in their opposition to AI, probably spending most of their wealth in measures against it, after all if the AI gets as powerful as it's claimed, there's no turning back, and the damage would be tremendous. So do we see this kind of opposition?
Obviously there's parts of this opposition that we can't see just looking at Scott's blog, but what I'm confused by is posts like "The Colors Of Her Coat", or the "Make A Personalized AI Kids’ Book" mentioned here (which I haven't read, but from the title can infer its bent). These kinds of posts serve as propaganda for AI, helping hype it up and promoting a positive view of it, which seems really incongruent with thinking the AI will be very likely bad. If AI is so likely to be catastrophic, why is he using his blog, which probably is a large part of the political capital he can use to exert influence, to make posts to say "ooh look how pretty the pictures the computer makes". Surely if it's a matter of such import, any influence we can wield to make the chance of bad AI go down is useful, and any influence that can increase the chance should be avoided.
If Scott thinks the chance of bad ai is so great, and such a big threat, why does he still make posts like that? even if they help shift attitudes only a smidge, given the stakes it still should be taken into account. shouldn't he avoid making them, or even retroactively erase them? even more, why doesn't he try to make posts that help build opposition to AI, like he has never really gone into the economic arguments against AI, which is very relevant for artists. All of this seems at best like a strategic blunder, and at worst, evidence of bad faith. Why should we believe the hyperbolic claims for misaligned AI, if he doesn't even shift his blog away from things that help hype up AI?
To me this just makes these claims not credible, those attitudes are not those of someone for whom AI is the greatest threat facing humanity, they're more those of someone who maybe is helping hype up AI, because maybe they have some investments that would benefit from that hype. I don't want to accuse Scott of being a bad faith actor, maybe he just follows his intellectual whims, maybe he just hasn't considered the part of strategy revolving around his blog posts (itself a bit of a strange omision), or maybe he thinks it's intellectually dishonest to post strategically? (though as long as it's not misrepresenting reality it shouldn't be) but regardless, seeing that kind of very "ai positive" post pretty strongly tells me "this guy doesn't consider this a serious threat"
I don't see a contradiction. AI being useful is a precondition for AI being dangerous in the sense that Scott et al are worried about. Moreover, if I understand the AI safety arguments rightly, the aim is to try to maximize humanity's chance of threading the needle of building a useful and well-aligned ASI and using it to substantially better the human condition. Butlerian Jihad scenarios where there is a concerted effort to kill and bury AI development are considered a failure mode to be avoided, especially the risk that the attempt is unsuccessful (i.e. most countries ban further advanced AI development, but a badly-aligned ASI gets developed and deployed anyway in a non-banning country or a country that fails to enforce its ban well enough), just as much as the scenarios where laissez-faire regulation permits rapid development of unfriendly AIs.
Caveat: I am explaining a position not my own. I expect with moderately high confidence that the current crop of LLMs will plateau in capability well short of ASI or even AGI. They'll prove to be useful tools once the dust settles and the hype dies down, especially for natural language processing and computer vision, and might be an important piece of the puzzle for future AGI development, but I consider Scott's 2027 scenario very unlikely. The only reason I don't dismiss that scenario completely out of hand is that smart, knowledgeable people whose judgement I respect (e.g. Scott) have spent time and effort analyzing the issue and concluded that it is likely.
It's not about AI being useful by itself, it's about reinforcing the view that it's useful in other people's eyes, thus helping drive engagement with it, helping drive hype, helping drive investment, helping drive development (is this a too weak slippery slope? I'm not sure what the weakest link is, but my point is, given the supposed stakes, gambling with the chances doesn't seem rational). The color of the dress post even speculates about post singularity AI giving us wonders, thus helping people be slightly more comfortable with the idea it'll work out alright/it'll end up aligned. But the whole point of the more AI safety concerned people is that alignment is extremely unlikely, so we should be extremely, extremely cautious about continuing development. Maybe butlerian jihad is a failure mode of that, but a big part of the point of people like Eliezer and Scott is that threading that needle is extremely unlikely, so we shouldn't risk it until we're extremely extremely sure. In that effort, and seeing how the capital of the world is prone to hype and short term gain, maximizing opposition to AI, for someone in a pretty influential position, seems to me to be most consistent with the position.
A problem with strategic lying is that people may draw conclusions different from what you intended, and then you have made the situation more difficult for yourself.
If you convince people that AI is useless (which many of them already believe, it seems to be quite popular opinion), that would imply that it is harmless. No need to worry about it, no need to regulate it...
The real AI safety activism is political organization. Right now we're in the "this is so cool!" stage, like Facebook or smart phones in 2009. Soon we'll be in the weaponization stage and lobbyists will go to the wall to prevent regulation or raise taxes on the AI owners to pay for UBI.
There's something that I find really suspicious about the claims of the danger of AI that Scott makes, and some of the posts Scott makes, which I think makes claims of the danger of AI less believable.
Like in the AI 2027 scenario Scott endorsed, even the aligned scenario is pretty dystopic (a small group of people with all the power, no real guarantees of good outcomes despite the scenario trying to paint over it imagining a luxury future). Since both scenarios are pretty bad, and specially since there's a large given chance of the worst scenario, someone who believes them should be expected to oppose AI with all their power, trying to slow it down as much as possible, as early as possible, to improve the end results.
Honestly I'd expect anyone who thinks AI is very likely to go catastrophically wrong, and who cares about morality at all, to be radically militant in their opposition to AI, probably spending most of their wealth in measures against it, after all if the AI gets as powerful as it's claimed, there's no turning back, and the damage would be tremendous. So do we see this kind of opposition?
Obviously there's parts of this opposition that we can't see just looking at Scott's blog, but what I'm confused by is posts like "The Colors Of Her Coat", or the "Make A Personalized AI Kids’ Book" mentioned here (which I haven't read, but from the title can infer its bent). These kinds of posts serve as propaganda for AI, helping hype it up and promoting a positive view of it, which seems really incongruent with thinking the AI will be very likely bad. If AI is so likely to be catastrophic, why is he using his blog, which probably is a large part of the political capital he can use to exert influence, to make posts to say "ooh look how pretty the pictures the computer makes". Surely if it's a matter of such import, any influence we can wield to make the chance of bad AI go down is useful, and any influence that can increase the chance should be avoided.
If Scott thinks the chance of bad ai is so great, and such a big threat, why does he still make posts like that? even if they help shift attitudes only a smidge, given the stakes it still should be taken into account. shouldn't he avoid making them, or even retroactively erase them? even more, why doesn't he try to make posts that help build opposition to AI, like he has never really gone into the economic arguments against AI, which is very relevant for artists. All of this seems at best like a strategic blunder, and at worst, evidence of bad faith. Why should we believe the hyperbolic claims for misaligned AI, if he doesn't even shift his blog away from things that help hype up AI?
To me this just makes these claims not credible, those attitudes are not those of someone for whom AI is the greatest threat facing humanity, they're more those of someone who maybe is helping hype up AI, because maybe they have some investments that would benefit from that hype. I don't want to accuse Scott of being a bad faith actor, maybe he just follows his intellectual whims, maybe he just hasn't considered the part of strategy revolving around his blog posts (itself a bit of a strange omision), or maybe he thinks it's intellectually dishonest to post strategically? (though as long as it's not misrepresenting reality it shouldn't be) but regardless, seeing that kind of very "ai positive" post pretty strongly tells me "this guy doesn't consider this a serious threat"
Scott, you listed "Men" as a finalist, but there's no review titled "Men", and two reviews which include the word "Men" in their titles. Could you please clarify which review you're referring to? Many thanks!
I keep hearing that AI is putting Silicon Valley techies out of work, but I have yet to see any verifiable numbers and sources. If anyone can point to some relatively well-controlled studies (or at least studies with transparent methodologies), I'd appreciate it. In the meantime, it seems like a recent change to the tax code has likely been the real culprit in the current round of layoffs. Tech companies can no longer deduct the full cost of R&D at the end of the year...
A lot of things happened over the past five years that showed up at about the same time:
1) "Free"money went away. It is easier to justify borrowing a lot of money to pay for things like engineers when the interest rate is near 0%. At 5% things change a lot.
2) During Covid Facebook and other 'tech' companies (not Apple) had a huge hiring surge. With no clear idea what to do with the folks hired. This created a bunch of employees with no clear financial justification and when that collided with (1) ...
3) Elon Musk fired about 75% of Twitter and things seemed ... fine? This can encourage other company execs to ask why they have the headcount they do. Especially when combined with (2)
4) The tax changes that you mentioned. I'll note that my employer is sorta tech (we build expensive semiconductor test equipment) and we haven't experienced big layoffs. But we are older and profitable so financially different from a lot of the smaller tech companies.
5) At least one fairly large tech firm, Intel, is in financial trouble. Intel had 130,000 employees in 2022, finished 2024 with about 108,000 and is expected to lay off another 10,000 soon. This isn't because of tax code changes :-)
6) AI is disrupting, but *how* is not clear.
So ... yeah, tax code changes. And maybe that was the biggest factor. But it wasn't the only one.
I'm possibly missing something here, but can't Scott just use a convertible promissory note that triggers on a later financing round or some other appropriate condition? Just put no interest on it until maturity, and intend to forgive the loan if the triggering event doesn't happen prior to maturity. That is a financial instrument that already exists and you don't need to reinvent the wheel here.
The problem is that when the grant is given, there is no for-profit corporation. There’s no entity that has equity to negotiate over. You can’t have a convertible note with a company that doesn’t exist yet.
I suspect the deeper problem is that when a nonprofit converts into a for-profit, in most cases the people involved simply create a new for-profit entity with no formal relation to the nonprofit. The OpenAI situation where the nonprofit clearly has a lot of valuable intellectual property is quite rare.
But it would be great to get something like this working. In general the puzzle of how to fund nonprofits in a way that makes it possible for them to grow and succeed seems unsolved.
Sure, assuming that we mean a formally-registered not for profit. Those are corporate entities with identified officers and etc. They are governed by state incorporation laws and, just as with an LLC or whatever else, can/do enter into contracts or debts with a willing counterparty.
If the not-for-profit corporation has achieved federal tax-exempt status (a separate process conducted by the IRS), then you know that it has full legal status in its state of registry. The IRS by law can't even consider an application for 501(c) status if the applicant isn't "in good standing" as a corporation under its home-state's laws.
The point I was getting at was more like "what would the note be convertible to, since nonprofits can't issue equity", but Kevin made it better in the other subthread.
Inspired by Scott’s occasional forays into speculative fiction, as a way of thinking through strange ideas sideways, I’ve started a fiction blog of my own. The stories lean speculative, sometimes philosophical, sometimes more straightforward, but always written with the hope that the narrative does more than entertain. So far, I have touched on such small topics as the nature of the universe, a direction superintelligent AI can take us, and encountering truly alien lifeforms.
For those who enjoy puzzles: I’ve hidden Easter eggs throughout—some overt, others deeply buried. A few are probably too obscure (sorry), but most are findable with the right mix of attention and paranoia. I’d be curious to know what you spot.
If that sounds like your kind of thing, you’re warmly invited to explore:
Thank you for the kind words! I would very much appreciate a shoutout, if you might be so kind! I hope you subscribe too - I have a couple more in the works now.
I'm kind of surprised none of the game/movie/TV/music reviews made the cut but I guess that's just the ACX audience. Was sort of hoping for at least one token game & TV/movie review to make it in just for variety (and also because I definitely wrote one of those).
The game reviews mostly weren't as good. There is no universal rule that everything related to video games is low quality and low effort but gamers gonna game and do poor work.
Sure, there’s the audience considerations, but I honestly thought the video game reviews here were a bit weak compared to the quality of the kind you can find on other websites. Even if the ACX audience were more open to them, I still don’t think any of them would have made the cut.
The Tv Show reviews were on average much better, but because of how unconventional this year’s format is, I think adding a few token representatives would have decreased variety, ironically enough.
Ollantay was put in that category, although it's a stage play. Other than that, the media review (as opposed to something-else review) that I ranked highest was Kiki's Delivery Service, one of five that earned a 9 from me.
I understand that a perpetual motion machine is prohibited by classical physics. But what about at the quantum level? Since atoms are always in motion, except at absolute zero, could one construct a perpetual motion machine that would continue on until the universe is empty?
Sure, under those rules the machine will have "perpetual motion," but in the classic sense of usting them to power things, as soon as you hook a belt and pulley or a turbine up to that spinning atom you have introduced friction for the purpose of removing energy, so game over!
An atom can stay in motion forever, but that isn’t typically what people mean by a “perpetual motion machine”, they mean something that you can extract useful work from with no energy input, and that is still forbidden by quantum mechanics.
I think there are two categories of perpetual motion machines, which then have strict & relaxed definitions.
1. The truly impossible perpetual motion machine is one that produces net energy. Lots of cranks latch onto this one because it’d be a source of “free energy”. Doesn’t work, even at the quantum level
2a. A machine that keeps running forever (where forever is defined as a reasonably long time). For this, I suspect there are quantum perpetual motion machines, but from a certain perspective most orbits are perpetual motion machines, so it’s not that special.
2b. A machine that keeps running for a truly infinite amount of time. For this I suspect it’s impossible even at the quantum level because you have to grapple with decay of subatomic particles and the heat death of the universe.
My favorite old candidate for a perpetual motion machine was a strong magnet pulling an iron ball up a ramp with a hole near the top.
The thinking was that the ball would drop onto a lower ramp and return to the starting point. An appealing idea at first glance till you think it through and realize that a magnet strong enough to pull the ball up the ramp would be stronger than the force of gravity met at the hole.
Ask anyone who has recovered a magnet from an old hard drive and loosely held it within a couple inches of their refrigerator how gravity would fare in that contest.
Heck, I bought some magnets at Michael’s once to do some cute crafting, laid everything out separately on the table, and struggled to glue before the magnets did their own cute crafting and stuck themselves together.
You can stay in motion...as long as you don't try to extract work (ie energy) from the system. That's also true classically.
Yes, a particle in a well has non-zero kinetic energy even in the ground state. But extracting that requires being able to transition to a lower allowed state...and there aren't any below the ground state. Definitionally.
Stumbled across an article that will probably be of interest to some ACX subscribers. Posted it last week in a reply to somebody, but I'm going to repost it as a top-level comment.
India is always stereotyped as an extremely spiritual place even historically, but there was actually a philosophy called Charvaka or Lokayata which is purely materialist. Most scholars have believed that this philosophy is relatively short-lived and mostly irrelevant for most of Indian history, but new research seems to show things aren't so cut-and-dried. (Notably, the name Lokayata literally means "prevalent among the people.)
There are some flaws with this article - for instance, the quote from Maitreyi in the Upanishads is misleading, since in the original context "no awareness" meant merging with Brahman, not annihilation - but overall there's some really interesting stuff there.
I'll also add one thing not noted in the article: that the oldest strata of Tamil literature, the Sangam poetry, has no references to religion or the supernatural. Tamil culture, especially at this time, was probably descended more directly from the Indus River Valley civilization (whose people likely traveled to the southern tip of the subcontinent) than Northern Indian culture was, having been subject to serious Indo-Aryan admixture, so it's entirely plausible that the Indus River Valley Civilization sites (Harappa, Mohenjo-Daro) had no religion as we would now conceive such things.
That's very speculative, though, and Mohenjo-Daro was structured in multiple levels with a large bath at the center of the city, which would seem to indicate some notion of ritual purity, like that which upholds the caste system, had developed. And ritual purity presumably comes with some degree of religious belief.
Yeah, the Pashupati seal is probably the biggest piece of evidence against the idea that they had no religion. It does seem to portray a god, but for what it's worth the position of Wendy Doniger (a scholar who supports the protoatheist hypothesis for the Indus River Valley Civilization) is that we have no way of knowing what the Pashupati seal is meant to be portraying.
I'm considering changing my job, and perhaps my career, but I feel like my skills are too eclectic at this point, and I'm pretty confused at what my options are, and I'd like to brainstorm with someone because I feel pretty lost. I'm considering hiring a career coach, if only for the sake of someone holding the other end of the brainstorming conversation, but I worry that a regular career coach would try to shoehorn me into one of the mental categories they already have even if it's a bad fit; is there some version of it that may realistically work on someone all over the place and from the general ACX-comments crowd?
UPD. I wrote up broader context in response to a question in a comment; here it is:
I studied linguistics out of passion (understand the common laws of human communication systems yadda yadda), and from there I switched to ML (because natural language processing) in like 2016, before transformers were even invented; ML seemed really cool to me, the closest thing to magic in existing technology. I studied lots of math and other technical stuff as part of my linguistics education (our program was informally known as "mathematical linguistics"), but not as deep as a real mathematicial, and my knowledge of linguistics never became as deep as a true linguist's.
Then I went to France to a PhD school, for a thesis about natural language generation (this was before RLHF); this was not a topic chosen by love, I just wanted some position and I seemed to just like NLP generally and figuring things out.
The PhD broke me due to what felt like any lack of meaning, guidance, goal-setting etc; experiments I designed were not interesting in any ways and failed miserably. I decided that I wanted to be part of a startup, where everyone is working toward a common goal; where my chaotic strengths of broad figuring-things-out and hyperfocus would be valued. Besides, leaving my PhD meant my French residence permit was not valid anymore, and God forbid I'd have to return to Russia, so I was looking for a country that wasn't trying to arrest me or kill me. I didn't get a PhD degree (I do have a Master's).
So I joined an ML startup in a small country in West Asia, and loved the atmosphere. (I'm currently the only ML engineer in this ML startup. We're a team of like 10 people.) My way of getting shit done was finally valued, and I appreciated the stock options. Besides, being startup meant trying to be lean, using smaller, economic methods, instead of any "we were dancing around for 6 months and got a 0.5% improvement in a leaderboard" stuff. In addition, I really found a use for my passion for linguistics. Since our startup is connected with machine translation, being able to read our customers' data and actually understand what goes wrong where had been a really valuable addition to my engineering competences.
But now I've been burning out. Here's why:
· Interactions with the team and especially C-level management.
— The team was initially pretty diverse with people of all backgrounds, so I didn't feel weird being a foreigner and various other labels of weirdo, but now I'm the odd one out.
— Recently, I've developed severe sensory sensitivity, and communicated to them that since they are not willing to allow remote work, I'd like to work from upstairs (we're renting a two-floor house for an office); they felt it was too distant from the team, but allowed me to work from the kitchen. Now, however, they told me that a permanent move outside of the room where everyone works is not acceptable, in any other area even if it wouldn't inconvenience others, because that may threaten the quality of communication (the theory being that communication is much easier when they can walk up to me in the same room than when they have to open a door and see me in another room). I did explain that it influences my productivity, but they said that basically it's not only my productivity that has to be managed, but other teammates' as well (I'm still doubtful other teammates' productivity would suffer from me being in another room as much as mine suffers from a constant sensory overload).
— There was a time when I showed up with my nails polished red (I'm biologically male and look male), and the CTO personally told me that I would have to wash that off, because what if some day I'm in charge of hiring people and they are uncomfortable, or what if my teammates are uncomfortable ("So if I ask them and everyone is OK with it..." — "No, what if they are uncomfortable but too nice to tell you?")
— All of that makes me feel like there is a certain amount of, uh, restriction of my personal independence / agency, because who the hell cares where I sit or how I paint my nails if I ship quality code fast? And being the only ML engineer in the team, I suspect they may not realize that my leaving would actually be an inconvenience, since there is some learning curve to our infrastructure...
· I'm tired of ML / AI as a field. While I was shipping small and cheap solutions, NLP started to suffer megalomania, and everyone hiring NLP engineers seems to have training gigantic chatgpt-like shit in mind, which is not sexy for me (and I still have no experience with it, but I could figure it out). It seems foolish not to use my tired knowledge to *some* benefit, but I would hope to apply it somewhere where I still see a sense of meaning.
In addition, in these recent years searching for meaning, I have pursued various pet projects. For example, I have created a project called theorem marketplace (link: https://theorem-marketplace.com/) and while doing it, figured out some basic web3 development (because I had to create an Ethereum contract with an oracle). Also, I have periods when I'm in love with molecular biology, so I'm considering barging into bioinformatics. (In pure AI, I find interpretability research a la anthropic very sexy, but I have no credentials to signal I would be a good fit; and maybe I wouldn't).
I studied linguistics out of passion (understand the common laws of human communication systems yadda yadda), and from there I switched to ML (because natural language processing) in like 2016, before transformers were even invented; ML seemed really cool to me, the closest thing to magic in existing technology. I studied lots of math and other technical stuff as part of my linguistics education (our program was informally known as "mathematical linguistics"), but not as deep as a real mathematicial, and my knowledge of linguistics never became as deep as a true linguist's.
Then I went to France to a PhD school, for a thesis about natural language generation (this was before RLHF); this was not a topic chosen by love, I just wanted some position and I seemed to just like NLP generally and figuring things out.
The PhD broke me due to what felt like any lack of meaning, guidance, goal-setting etc; experiments I designed were not interesting in any ways and failed miserably. I decided that I wanted to be part of a startup, where everyone is working toward a common goal; where my chaotic strengths of broad figuring-things-out and hyperfocus would be valued. Besides, leaving my PhD meant my French residence permit was not valid anymore, and God forbid I'd have to return to Russia, so I was looking for a country that wasn't trying to arrest me or kill me. I didn't get a PhD degree (I do have a Master's).
So I joined an ML startup in a small country in West Asia, and loved the atmosphere. (I'm currently the only ML engineer in this ML startup. We're a team of like 10 people.) My way of getting shit done was finally valued, and I appreciated the stock options. Besides, being startup meant trying to be lean, using smaller, economic methods, instead of any "we were dancing around for 6 months and got a 0.5% improvement in a leaderboard" stuff. In addition, I really found a use for my passion for linguistics. Since our startup is connected with machine translation, being able to read our customers' data and actually understand what goes wrong where had been a really valuable addition to my engineering competences.
But now I've been burning out. Here's why:
· Interactions with the team and especially C-level management.
— The team was initially pretty diverse with people of all backgrounds, so I didn't feel weird being a foreigner and various other labels of weirdo, but now I'm the odd one out.
— Recently, I've developed severe sensory sensitivity, and communicated to them that since they are not willing to allow remote work, I'd like to work from upstairs (we're renting a two-floor house for an office); they felt it was too distant from the team, but allowed me to work from the kitchen. Now, however, they told me that a permanent move outside of the room where everyone works is not acceptable, in any other area even if it wouldn't inconvenience others, because that may threaten the quality of communication (the theory being that communication is much easier when they can walk up to me in the same room than when they have to open a door and see me in another room). I did explain that it influences my productivity, but they said that basically it's not only my productivity that has to be managed, but other teammates' as well (I'm still doubtful other teammates' productivity would suffer from me being in another room as much as mine suffers from a constant sensory overload).
— There was a time when I showed up with my nails polished red (I'm biologically male and look male), and the CTO personally told me that I would have to wash that off, because what if some day I'm in charge of hiring people and they are uncomfortable, or what if my teammates are uncomfortable ("So if I ask them and everyone is OK with it..." — "No, what if they are uncomfortable but too nice to tell you?")
— All of that makes me feel like there is a certain amount of, uh, restriction of my personal independence / agency, because who the hell cares where I sit or how I paint my nails if I ship quality code fast? And being the only ML engineer in the team, I suspect they may not realize that my leaving would actually be an inconvenience, since there is some learning curve to our infrastructure...
· I'm tired of ML / AI as a field. While I was shipping small and cheap solutions, NLP started to suffer megalomania, and everyone hiring NLP engineers seems to have training gigantic chatgpt-like shit in mind, which is not sexy for me (and I still have no experience with it, but I could figure it out). It seems foolish not to use my tired knowledge to *some* benefit, but I would hope to apply it somewhere where I still see a sense of meaning.
In addition, in these recent years searching for meaning, I have pursued various pet projects. For example, I have created a project called theorem marketplace (link: https://theorem-marketplace.com/) and while doing it, figured out some basic web3 development (because I had to create an Ethereum contract with an oracle). Also, I have periods when I'm in love with molecular biology, so I'm considering barging into bioinformatics. (In pure AI, I find interpretability research a la anthropic very sexy, but I have no credentials to signal I would be a good fit; and maybe I wouldn't).
A right career coach will help *guide* your brainstorming on what you want in your next job/career. My opinion is they should not be prescriptive. My recommendation would be to ask the career coach for examples of former clients and how they helped them. You should also be honest on what help you need (eg help with brainstorming, keeping you accountable to a timeline, providing resources).
A right career coach will help you understand your interests, skills, and experiences so you can find the right new job/career for you. In fact, you may feel it is going one step backwards (evaluating those things again) to allow you to move two steps forward (finding your new job/career). But a right career coach will work with your pace and design a program that fits you. They also should have ready access to resources that would take you more time and effort to find on your own.
I’m going through this process myself and would be happy to exchange notes. Less so a dramatic change and more or a correction, but I’ve spent way too much time contemplating it.
I don't have any notes on my end yet, I'm just trying to pinpoint in what general direction I should be moving, but my current state is much more awayness from an unacceptable situation than any towardness with any specific goal in mind.
Perhaps I should have just written a commend with the specifics of my situation, instead of being silly and vague. But that may take another while...
I work on the Hill, and just flagging that the AI moratorium on states regulating AI for ten years is likely to pass Congress as part of the Republican reconciliation package. The House version includes a blanket ban. The Senate version of the legislation, which blocks states from accessing broadband funding if they pass AI regulations, just passed the Senate parliamentarian's review. This was unexpected. In the Senate, a provision must be primarily related to federal funding to pass this review, and most experts though this provision would be stripped out.
The Senate will then have to pass the bill (it almost certainly will) and then the House and Senate will have to work out the differences in their package in "conference," and then the final version has to pass both chambers. As things stand right now, this is likely (75%+) to happen.
The time to try to get this provision removed - probably in conference - is now (if you oppose this, I do), as there is some Republican dissent on this provision.
Thank you. I agree this is terrible law, and I don't want to wait around for the courts to have their say. I will ask my rep (Tenney) to fight for states rights on this.
This is something that would make sense to be federal. Any state limiting AI use can cause problems for everyone. But if there was ever one time in the history of everything that it's worth using every tool at your disposal to get what you want, that time is now.
Thank you for the insight. I'll see if I can contact my reps in time.
To be clear, the thing likely to pass is a moratorium on states regulating AI. So an AI free-for-all is winning, which is bad. We want to call and say we want states to be able to regulate AI, so we want our reps to vote against the moratorium on AI regulation. Correct?
Yes, exactly. This would technically NOT force states to not regulate AI, but if they want to get access to broadband federal funding, they cannot essentially regulate AI for ten years. Since all states want this funding, it's a lot of pressure.
Calling/emailing never hurts, though requesting virtual meetings if you live in a red state/district or your friends do would be the most helpful. And then pulling any connections that you have.
I just called my congresswoman (D), who had an aide answer, and my senators (R), who had voicemail answer. I left the following message, which anyone reading this can copy and optionally add some nuance regarding broadband funding:
Hi, my name is [name] and I'm a constituent from [town, state]. My phone number is [number]. I'm calling about the Republican reconciliation package. Believe it or not, it includes a moratorium on states' ability to regulate AI. Now, I oppose AI because I think it can become dangerous. I want to preserve states’ ability to regulate AI. So, because the Republican reconciliation package includes a moratorium on states’ ability to regulate AI, I'm calling to ask [representative’s title and name] to either vote against it, or to work hard to remove that part. Thank you very much.
I don't really understand who besides Marc Andreessen thinks this is a good idea? Where is this push to preemptively keep away all AI regulation coming from? Even Altman seems interested in baseline regulations, and certainly Musk and Dario do as well.
Did you miss The OpenAI Files? Good summary place to get caught up to speed on the "sama isn't a straight shooter" position.
David Sacks and Jensen Huang would be another two pushing the memento moratorium, at least. I don't think Zvi has a specific standalone post addressing the issue, just regular weekly references to its status, else I'd point there.
Nah, the time to oppose this was before. At this point it's likely too late. I mentioned a while ago during the Biden administration the AI pause people were making pretty obvious mistakes and it would bite them if Republicans got back into power. Now Republicans are back into power and it's biting them. This is a common issue in politics: if you wait until you're in a position of weakness it is almost always too late.
If it makes you feel any better, it's only a ban on AI specific regulations. You can still pass laws that affect AI but they have to apply to AI and non-AI things equally.
I'm seeing both my state's GOP senators criticize it (Hawley strongly, Schmitt somewhat obliquely as he seems to have some broader goal on AI regulation), as well as MTG and Luna coming out against it from the House. I was surprised the parliamentarian wasn't quietly encouraged to just toss it out to avoid any fight when it gets back to the House, as they have a razor thin margin there and the RW populist opposition is sufficiently eccentric and out on their own island that they may be willing to tank the bill over it.
there is a lot of private concern/dissent... but Republicans tend to fall in line to just pass the package. Still a decent chance to get it stripped in conference
Participating in a review contest is kind of rough: there are a lot more good entries than finalist spots, or even finalists + honorable mentions. Lots of people write something interesting and worthwhile and get nothing for all their work, sometimes not even feedback. To help with that I'm going to award my special Tasty's Consolations Prize, for all the reviews that I liked that didn't make it into the finals (or got honorably mentioned). The winners get nothing except for dubious bragging rights and a warm feeling of being appreciated. I read "only" 50% of all the reviews, so I obviously must have missed lots of worthy entries.
It's clever and it showed me new things and it featured Actual Poetry (the kind that adheres to some predetermined structure of rhymes or meter), what more can I ask.
Enjoyed the sestina so much, I got close to memorizing it.
I should say though: I think the review doesn't do the villanelle justice - the example villanelle really does seem rigid and repetitive and one couldn't blame you for reading and concluding that it's a very restrictive and stilted form based on that example. But how different it can sound in the hands of a great poet! https://allpoetry.com/If-I-Could-Tell-You And of course, the rage-rage-yadda-yadda-something-something-light, is also an example of a villanelle. Maybe it's unfair to unfavorably compare the Reviewer to W. H. Auden, but someone has to defend the honor of the villanelle.
Two celebrated pieces of media, that the reviewer likes on the artistic level both seem to come close to saying the same thing the reviewers pushes back against: "trying to make things better will always inevitably backfire and make everything worse". I'm a little hesitant to praise this review, because it kind of says nothing new that I didn't already agree with.
This is a story of the Reviewers tragic romance. It's exactly the same as a million other such stories, but it doesn't make it less painful to the person it's happening to. Reviewer, I'm sorry it happened to you. I wish you well.
Since he was a kid, the Reviewer has been spinning in his mind an elaborate, anime-like/Marvel-like fantasy world with an extremely convoluted story and worldbuilding, and kept spinning it into adulthood. It's not that this is great art that is going to become next Lord of the Rings or Star Wars, but it seems like there's something worthwhile in anything a person put so much thought into.
As a kid, I had an imaginary world like that too. It seems like this is fairly common. When someone grows up to become a writer, it makes for a good back-story - "at the age of 5, so-and-so was already writing epic fantasy", except that this isn't unique to writers - seemingly lots of people did. Then later we all thought there's no point to it if you're not going to write it down, and writing down is a ton of work, so almost everyone gave up on it, while the Reviewer kept going on and on. Is there a point? Some part of me wants to say this kind of escapism must be unhealthy somehow, or at lest a waste of time, while another part is delighted end sort of envious.
A review of a famously difficult and frustration-inducing game, which is known for constantly destroying your progress and bringing you back to square 1. It is a gimmicky review, but a good one. I'm a little surprised this one didn't make it into the finals. It is also half-autobiography? Yes. It made me want to get Getting Over it and play it solely as a masochistic character building exercise. So far I haven't.
So this is about a clade of songs sharing the same pattern: a dying man tells the narrator a story of how he ended up that way. The pattern changes, mutates, develops pseudopods, plays as a serious tragedy here, as a joke there. The review is a pretty serious analysis, and long. Perhaps it suffers somewhat from not having any kind of grand unifying idea at the end, and it also suffers a little from not including youtube links to the actual songs, for the copyright reasons, I imagine. I suspect lots of readers didn't finish this one.
I enjoyed it for an opportunity to see song evolution in progress and for all the interesting music I got to listen. My favourite of the bunch was The Unfortunate Rake https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1aQd99zfIRo, an entirely serious and heart-breakingly sad ballad, about the hero dying from syphilis.
A review of a Ghibli non-Miyazaki cartoon, adapting a Japanese folk tale. A tale is simple, but serious and sad, and it should provide some food for thought. The Reviewer gets a very gloomy message out of it, that for everyone there's a thing that would be good to do, that would be right and beneficial to do, but that goes so much against our nature, that we'll probably never get ourselves to go ahead and do it. Unfortunately, this rings true to me, and truer than I would have liked. Possibly the review would have done better if the plot summary section had been shorter. On the one hand, the plot summary was essential for the point the Reviewer wanted to make, on the other hand I could imagine readers getting bored there. But it is a review that stuck with me all the same.
Thank you for delving into a dark and terrible subject in the name of anthropology. I don't have you courage and won't be watching the series any time soon, but this makes your investigation all the more valuable. You are the true mythic hero for going where others dare not go, for staring into the abyss, for descending into the cave that is also the underworld somehow. I now understand modern kids slightly better thanks to your efforts.
I just looked at the Rubbermaid review, prompted by your mention. I hope the reviewer is old enough to have experienced the Before - not just Before Amazon, but Before the grocery store had a large display of brushes, mops, and brooms - when the Fuller Brush Man (happy day) came to your door, and gave you a little “extra” if you made a purchase.
I wrote the Deathbed Ballads review. I'm glad you liked it, and I agree with most of your criticisms of it. The length and complexity snuck up on me while writing it. I was about a third of the way through before I realized how much serious scholarship there was on the topic (especially for the Unfortunate Lad and St. James Infirmary) that I needed to engage with in order to treat the topic fairly. I was particularly handicapped by two sources I really wanted to dig into being unavailable on any reasonable terms: one was an academic paper that was behind an extremely steep paywall and the other was a then-temporarily-out-of-print book that I didn't have time to buy and read in time to use by the time I realized I needed it.
If I'd had another couple weeks to work on it, I would have gone back, strengthened the conclusion, and revised the introduction and body of the review to work towards that. And I would have needed to do some additional background research to support the conclusion. The conclusion I probably would have worked towards was further emphasis on the importance of syphilis to the song clade and the significance of the disease to the times, places, and communities where the core elements of the song cropped up: first in big metropolitan commerce hubs like Victorian London, and again in the American black community during the interwar years. In the latter case, there was a big and now-little-remembered epidemic of syphilis that probably had its roots in the American expeditionary force to France in World War One, and the epidemic persisted and spread among a discriminated-against minority community due in large part to marginalization, poverty, lack of access to diagnosis, neglect by public health authorities, and lack of good treatments even for people with access to medical care. I would have liked to have explored that in more detail and connected it to St. James Infirmary, and also explored parallels between the interwar syphilis epidemic and the AIDS epidemic in the gay community in the late 20th century. I only touched on pieces of this, partly because I was out of time and would have needed to do a lot more research to treat it fairly, and partly because the review was already too long.
Another piece I started doing but abandoned was hypothetical cladeogram of the song genre. I gave up on it because it wasn't coming together visually, I was out of time, and it was extremely speculative to begin with and would have needed a ton of explication and qualification to not be misleading.
Part of my problem, timing-wise, was that I started out intending my topic to be an analysis of the lyrical content of the music of the American Civil War as a corpus of data on cultural attitudes about the war's conduct and causes. I abandoned that and switched to what I hoped would be a lighter topic once I found that very quickly becoming too research-heavy. When my "lighter" topic also proved to be too heavy-weight, I had even less time to finish it.
I went back and forth on the question of including youtube links at the top of each section, and might have made the wrong call there. The advantage of including them is obvious. I decided against links or embeds (except for a couple of footnotes where youtube was the best source for an obscure-but-important variant) because of a combination of copyright concerns, clutter concerns (especially for St. James Infirmary, where there are so many major variations), and worries about how the formats of both google docs and substack would handle embedded youtube videos.
I wrote the Getting Over It review--thanks for the kind words! Nice to see a few comments about it here and there to make the hours put into it feel worthwhile. Hope you have a good time (or enlighteningly bad time) trying to get over it ;)
Hopefully this isn't against the spirit because finalists have already been chosen, but since you opened a discussion here, I'll just follow up that I really disliked the review of The Tale of Princess Kaguya. I think the reviewer misreads the story so badly (possibly due to missing cultural context, possibly due to the source material itself, i.e. the original folk tale, being somewhat inconsistent so that the movie makers' efforts to harmonize the themes made it quite subtle and complex) that they had to project an entirely orthogonal point onto it, and I have half a mind to write a counter-review.
(Interestingly I just checked my voting records and I actually gave it a 7, which was above average on my scale. Thinking back on it, I probably still thought that the essay was well-written and its points are well-made, despite missing the mark as a review of the movie per se.)
A simple proposal to make the world (well the US) a slightly better place:
Congress passes a law, imposing a tax & paperwork/compliance requirements on any American company, who serves GPDR/cookie warnings to an American IP address. If you fall into that category, you have to pay some sort of annual tax, and there's Deliberately Annoying Paperwork that you have to file with the government. The point is to harass these companies and make them stop serving cookie warning nag screens to Americans. My personal view is that the GPDR has absolutely ruined the Internet and made the world a worse place.
The law does not prevent companies outside the US from having cookie warnings. If a German website feels like it needs to comply with the GPDR when Americans visit, OK no problem, you're still free to do that. It does not prevent American companies from complying with the GPDR and having cookie warnings when European IP addresses visit their websites. If Disney needs to comply with the GPDR in Europe, again, no problem.
The idea behind the law is to counteract the Brussels effect as it relates to purely internal US web traffic. Millions of American websites harass US citizens with cookie nag screens, even though the GPDR obviously does not legally apply to us. I'm guessing everyone's in-house counsel just told them it was easier to comply. Now, we can change the incentive structure and make it easier for them *not* to comply with Europe's insane laws. Constitutionally the US cannot forbid American websites from having cookie nag screens, but we can certainly make it difficult..... American sovereignty will be restored, and all of us will stop being annoyed by obnoxious European laws :)
Cookie warnings are malicious compliance. GDPR does not require anything like what has been implemented. Everyone should pitch in to punish the perpetrators, not just Americans.
First of all, you're a freak and a weirdo (unlike everyone else on this website! Especially me!) if you don't have cookies generally blocked and use per-site permissions in a browser which implements these to strictly regulate what sites can set cookies at all on an opt-in basis.
Secondly, any decent adblocker will have an annoyances filter which strips the cookie warnings. It takes seconds to add this filter and you should be using an adblocker anyway if you like to browse a usable internet.
1. Some websites (thankfully a minority) are completely locked until you agree to their terms & conditions which include cookies. Adblock can't fix that
2. I use two adblockers, the more powerful/useful one is Ublock Origin, which Google is in the process of removing. I already lost it last week when one of my computers updated, and I only have it on this current browser because I've blocked updates so far
"Some websites (thankfully a minority) are completely locked until you agree to their terms & conditions which include cookies. Adblock can't fix that"
I've never encountered this personally. What websites?
"Ublock Origin, which Google is in the process of removing"
Wait, what? Filthy, if true. Move to Firefox, is my answer to that.
Have you tried the Lite version of the extension? What features do you find lacking? I understand there are some, but I don't seem to suffer from their absence.
You have now made me stand up and cheer for GDPR. Oh gosh, the poor Americans have to click through a warning screen? Welcome to the rest of the world, which gets the Americanised version of everything shoved down our necks. Sorry, the calendar is set to American date format, you'll have to change it. Paper sizes? American. Spelling? Three guesses, and the first two don't count. Default language? English - US of course!
Turn about is fair play, let you Yanks suffer a taste of what we routinely go through.
I mean, I'm as annoyed about American Defaultism as the next European, but I also find cookie warnings incredibly annoying and pointless and would be in favour of any efforts that might make them less ubiquitous.
Depends on what browser and OS you're using, but if it supports extensions at all, it probably lets you use this one.
I use a Firefox fork (Iceraven) on Android, and I think it actually suggested I use this over the older version "I don't care about cookies." If you prefer a Chromium-based one, Kiwi Browser has been recently discontinued, but Edge Canary should work.
I don't want my country- the world hegemon- to bow down to privacy laws implemented in Europe. The EU is free to regulate the EU, but they can't regulate America. I find the whole idea ridiculous. It's a basic sovereignty issue
Oh, I agree completely, and think the US should go much further and threaten to not honor NATO defense agreements as a way to reshape EU laws and regulations particularly repellant to core "American values."
But making "the world (well the US) a slightly better place" is a longer-term thing. You can fix your specific cookie issue in less than a minute.
Of course it would. My proposed policy is that America extend its practice of infringing on the sovereignty of lesser territories to our enemies in Europe, the greatest threat to our freedoms.
"Am I the only one who thinks being able to reject non-essential cookies is actually a useful feature?"
You are not. But getting a *bunch* of dialogs to do this can be really annoying. And you get a bunch of dialogs even if you check "yeah, sure, whatever." Is the annoyance worth the usefulness? Not clear ... especially if the servers just get more sophisticated in how they track you (which is my guess ...)
The thing is, not only GDPR does *not* require the bunch of dialogs, but displaying those dialogs is actually *against* GDPR, which says that denying all cookies should be equally easy as accepting all cookies.
So what you see is not even malicious compliance, but more like malicious pretense of compliance. And your reaction is a proof that this type of corporate propaganda works perfectly.
It is also not clear to me whether the annoyance is worth it, but it very well might? I'm honestly not sure.
It's not just that we can reject cookies now, there's also the side effect that websites are less likely to implement unnecessary tracking cookies in the first place since it now involves a lot more effort.
That said, like the OP, for the sake of this discussion I'm more intersted in discussing what the EU and US laws should be, not so much whether the laws can be worked around by savvy users.
What is your estimate of the cost of Israel’s two-week campaign against Iran?
According to The Economist, from October 7, 2023, up until just before the attack on Iran, Israel had spent approximately $85 billion, or roughly $150 million per day. I estimate that during the campaign against Iran, this daily rate increased to $285 million, due to the use of more sophisticated munitions, advanced military planning, logistical demands, covert ground operations within Iran, and costlier manned and unmanned aerial missions.
Based on that, my ballpark estimate for a two-week campaign likely cost close to $4 billion focused on Iran alone. Would be great to hear your thoughts.
Me too. I know it was silly source material, but the point of the contest is that you can review any kind of silly thing you want to. The quality of the review was pretty high, imo.
Scott, thanks for giving us extra time to read the entrants. I am so mad at myself that I fell Ill and couldn't make use of the extra time. I found it much harder to rate these than the book reviews.
What were people's strategies for rating things that were clearly very well written but not your interest ? Or things that were to your interest that you really enjoyed but were way shallower than other entries ?
Just wanna know if someone else figured out a good rating algorithm. I have been self-conscious about this after realising I was basically the only person who was rating Kindle books on a bell curve and inadvertently ruining the life of every author I was rating 3* (which was the majority).
First I sorted all the reviews in order of most to least favourite. (I compared two reviews side-by-side, and decided which one I liked more, and then repeated that. Specifically I did it by emulating the Selection Sort Algorithm)
Afterwards, I read through my list from top to bottom and asked myself whether the reviews were similar in quality or if the latest review I was reading had a noticeable drop in quality relative to the last one I was reading. If there was, I marked this drop with a dash.
All reviews in between two dashes form what I call a “grouping”. All reviews within a grouping ended up being given similar numerical rating to one another.
My system worked out in such a way that I ended up producing 8 different groupings, which corresponded pretty closely to the 10 point scale. All ratings that were 8 or higher were confined solely within the first/highest grouping.
In terms of metrics, the only one I considered was how much I personally liked the review (relative to the others). I feel like it’s a review’s job to make me interested in its subject. If it doesn’t do so, then it is a point against it.
I know this is biased toward poorly written reviews of interesting subjects scoring better than well-written reviews of banal ones, but let’s face it, banal subjects have no chance in this contest (RIP Skibidi toilet). The only things that are going to make it to finalist anyway are well-written reviews of interesting subjects.
At least that’s how I justified it when I was designing this system. The fact that the mashed potatoes review somehow ended up as a finalist makes me very interested in learning what the author did to convince people to give it such high ratings. I await the official ACX post of it with interest.
For the sake of calibration, I didn't submit my ratings until I'd done 42 of them (I ultimately did 74 in all). I wound up assigning qualitative descriptions to each rating value; 1 was "I award you no points and may God have mercy on your soul", 6 was "replacement level", 10 was "deserves to win it all". My final distribution was (from 1 to 10) 1, 4, 6, 13, 8, 18, 11, 7, 5, 1.
I think I was a pretty rough rater: normed to a bell curve (ask me about my awesome spreadsheet) and penalized the ones I wasn’t interested in.
(I mean, I figured that interest has to matter, right? We want to read reviews that we want to read, not just ones that are written nicely. So if everyone rates opinionatedly, then the most generally interesting ones will do well and we’ll all be happier.)
I definitely punished shallowness (and shortness) in general: I like reviews that take up half my day to read and think about; ones that tell me a new story and teach me something about it. In the end, I think this mostly meant poorer ratings for video game, music, and tv/movie reviews, which I’m not sure how to feel about. On the one hand, it might’ve been good to see more content-type diversity among finalists; on the other, again, if we all prefer lengthy reviews of weird quirky things, why waste time and space?
Saddest ACX post of the year for the 125 odd review losers, of which I am one this time around. Congrats to all the finalists and honorable mentions. I look forward to reading them all. I will go back to find the HMs.
We should try sortition. (link: https://archive.is/ztIRY) In the current US system, there's no way to get the best/smartest/most virtuous/etc. people on the ballot, only those with cash and connections, and how they got those usually makes them least fit to serve/lead. True representatives should be closer to average or median. We have eg Congressional Research Service that can assist. Less corruption, less extremism, less Peter principle. Maintain voting for initiatives/referendums/etc that are more important and less manipulable (as far as, ideas aren't people, so less distortion from social psychology). Biggest problem is getting it past the current system. Something something trading freedom of "we the people" for security of "politicians". More links: https://www.reddit.com/r/todayilearned/comments/1j91das/comment/mhamcg1/)
This problem was already solved a hundred years ago in The Napoleon of Notting Hill. You simply choose the new absolute monarch via random ballot of all adult men.
EDIT: I see Deiseach has predictably beat me to the punch! Damn you, potato-American!
Why do you think it is that we have not really had a sortition system of governance (outside of juries etc) since the 19th century? Why did the places that used to use sortition (such as some parts of Switzerland) cease to do so?
I'm a fan of sortition, but I'll offer a discussion of flaws that I see in it, especially as applied to a modern large liberal democracy like the US.
High variance is a big issue. A 500-person legislature (a bit larger than the current US House of Representatives, a bit smaller than the British House of Commons, and exactly the size of the Boule of Classical Athens) chosen by sortition from any nontrivial eligible population would represent the preferences of the population as a whole with a margin of error of +/-4% if chosen at large. That's probably okay if most important issues are 60/40 or worse, especially in situations (like Athens and most other Mediterranean classical democracies) where there's a rule or norm that major or contentious issues get referred to direct-democracy institutions for ratification. But for anything close to 50/50 the margin of error is going to be uncomfortably significant, especially if the legislature is the final word on the subject.
Athens also used a system where the citizens were divided into ten phyles (sometime translated as "tribes"), each of which got fifty seats in the legislature by sortition. I'd initially assumed that the phyles were class-based like the tribes of the Roman Republic, but what little I can find about them suggests they were more in the nature of geographical districts. Either way, a lot of issues would likely see each phyle having relatively homogenous interests and policy preferences, so on those issues at least the apportionment by phyle would probably make the composition of the legislature more representative and stable.
The modern US would have trouble copying this in a robust way, since we're big enough and non-homogenous enough that our equivalent of phyles would be either too numerous or too internally heterogenous. The obvious counterpart to geographical phyles would be states, which are both, especially if you try to apportion seats by population. One representative chosen at random from Montana would be a terrible sample, while 52 represenatives chosen at random from California could skew significantly depending on how many happened to be chosen from the Bay Area, or the greater LA area, or the Central Valley, or from several other regions with distinct interests and political distributions. My understanding is that most medium states have significant regional and urban/rural divides which would produce very unstable results among the dozen or so representatives those states have.
There are other problems with scaling sortition to a larger population. Classical Athens used sortition to select a 500-person legislature out of maybe 50,000 male citizens. The eligible population was probably quite a bit less than that, since I'm pretty sure the 50k figure includes children and young adults below the minimum age of 30. So 1-2% of the population was in the legislature in a given year. Combined with short terms (one year), this means that somewhere between 30-60% of citizen men who don't die young would probably be chosen at least once in their lifetimes. A bit more or less for any given citizen, depending on how malapportioned the tribes were. And the phyles would have averaged about 5k male citizens each, small enough that you're fairly likely to have at least one current member of your legislature in you immediate social circle and virtually certain to have a friend or relative as a member of the legislature at some point over a period of several years. In the US, a 500-person legislature would be 1/500,000 of the adult citizen population, so your chance of ever serving in Congress in your lifetime (assuming Athens-like annual terms) would be about 0.0112% and your odds of knowing a member of Congress personally wouldn't be much better.
There's also the problem of legibility and trust, which is compounded when the fraction of the population being chosen is so much smaller. For a population of maybe 3k eligible candidates per phyle, it's pretty easy to design a procedure where a large fraction of them or even all of them can observe or even participate in the drawing. I don't know how they did it historically, but having eligible candidates line up and draw colored balls from a bag, or write their own names on something (not sure what: I know Athenians used potshards as ballots in other contexts, but they don't seem mechanically suitable here) and toss it into a pot that would be stirred and drawn from publicly by a group of respectable local citizens. In a population the size of the US, you could do it fairly with any of a number of lottery systems, but it would be a lot harder for individual citizens to be able to observe that closely enough to overcome suspicion that a sinister cabal was fixing the drawing.
The last problem with sortition is that elected representatives are supposed to be better than the average citizen at legislating. The ideal espoused in early modern England was "Not everyone in Parliament should be there, but almost everyone who should be there is". And in the early US, both parties expected this to happen in some form: Federalists expected voters to choose existing established pillars of the community (usually major landowners, successful businessmen, or respected civic leaders), while Jeffersonian Republicans hoped that voters would learn to discern a "natural aristocracy" of people with the requisite talents and virtues. Most Americans, if asked for a gut feel on the subject, would be highly skeptical of this in general but moderately likely to have a higher opinion of their own current representative. The latter is probably more significant, since if some random guy is preferable to your own representative, there's usually at least one or two reasonable approximations thereof on at least the primary election ballot.
Anything close to 50/50 doesn't matter anyway. Either way, about half the population is for it and half is against it. We have much bigger problems from things like some people not bothering to vote, or in the US, all the electoral college nonsense.
Permit me to quote "The Napoleon of Notting Hill":
"The old gentleman opened his eyes with some surprise.
"Are you, then," he said, "no longer a democracy in England?"
Barker laughed.
"The situation invites paradox," he said. "We are, in a sense, the purest democracy. We have become a despotism. Have you not noticed how continually in history democracy becomes despotism? People call it the decay of democracy. It is simply its fulfilment. Why take the trouble to number and register and enfranchise all the innumerable John Robinsons, when you can take one John Robinson with the same intellect or lack of intellect as all the rest, and have done with it? The old idealistic republicans used to found democracy on the idea that all men were equally intelligent. Believe me, the sane and enduring democracy is founded on the fact that all men are equally idiotic. Why should we not choose out of them one as much as another. All that we want for Government is a man not criminal and insane, who can rapidly look over some petitions and sign some proclamations. To think what time was wasted in arguing about the House of Lords, Tories saying it ought to be preserved because it was clever, and Radicals saying it ought to be destroyed because it was stupid, and all the time no one saw that it was right because it was stupid, because that chance mob of ordinary men thrown there by accident of blood, were a great democratic protest against the Lower House, against the eternal insolence of the aristocracy of talents. We have established now in England, the thing towards which all systems have dimly groped, the dull popular despotism without illusions. We want one man at the head of our State, not because he is brilliant or virtuous, but because he is one man and not a chattering crowd. To avoid the possible chance of hereditary diseases or such things, we have abandoned hereditary monarchy. The King of England is chosen like a juryman upon an official rotation list. Beyond that the whole system is quietly despotic, and we have not found it raise a murmur."
Hard agree. My only modification would be that I think we need some degree of selection, so I would preselect for each seat say 8 people (could be any number) with sortition, then have a first vote two weeks later. The people in question can also excuse themselves if eg they are planning to leave the country, are unwell, are facing trial, or (and I hate this category) are indispensable at work (small businesses might disproportionately benefit from this which would be really unfortunate).
After the first vote, are retained those candidates who received from than 20% of the vote, but at least 3.
Those 3/4 candidates then have two more weeks in which to make their case (there could be pre-booked public or even in some cases local tv/radio events for this) and there is a final vote.
My toy idea would be to impanel some three-ish juries per district. Each jury would be empowered to interview candidates; subpoena records, witnesses, and expert testimony; and report out a nomination of maybe 1-3 candidates who should appear on the general election ballot. Or zero, if the jury fails to reach a supermajority to report out a slate of nominees. The general election ballot would then be based on candidates who are nominated by at least one jury, with some kind of runoff or ranked-preference voting to accommodate cases where the juries report out larger slates with little or no overlap.
Might be a stupid question but: why do we need bunker busters for underground facilities, instead of just bombing all the exits? Is a destroyed evevator shaft much easier to repair than I would imagine?
Yes, an elevator shaft or tunnel entrance is far, far easier to repair than an enrichment centerfuge cascade. If the strikes actually managed to directly hit the enrichment hall and most of the uranium Iran had was in those centerfuges, then they have likely suffered a multi-year or even multi-decade setback. Whether or not that actually happened remains to be seen.
"Is a destroyed evevator shaft much easier to repair than I would imagine?"
It is easier and cheaper to excavate a new hole/entrance than it is to repair a mostly blown up facility (especially if the facility has a lot of expensive equipment).
The things we're looking to destroy are extremely valuable and hard to build; it would be extremely worth it to re-excavate a nuclear enrichment facility.
I was thinking there would be an obvious threat of "if you try to dig another entrance we'll bomb it immediately", but you're probably right, for various reasons.
I understand why you thought that because it's something I thought of as well, but imagine Iran unearths the site in like 5 years when the geopolitical situation has changed and now the US is not capable of destroying it.
"...and now the US is not capable of destroying it"
Or even just unwilling.
I expect that part of Trump's calculation on what to do is considering what will happen in the next US president has a very different view of how dangerous Iran is. This would lead to choices that do NOT require follow through by future presidents.
Can a person be wrong about what their motivation or beliefs are? I don’t mean intentionally deceptive - I mean, actually being wrong in their own self-assessments. Why or why not? What evidence can a person give that their motivation or beliefs are what they think they are?
My hunch would be that anyone who says they are only motivated by pursuit of the truth is lying to themselves without realizing it, because doing so gives them social rewards and confidence, whereas truth on something you can’t directly act on has almost zero instrumental effect on pursuit of survival and thriving goals, which are terminal and therefore higher priority than satisfying curiosity.
Yes, easily. It comes from making simple choices where the perceived intent and the actual intent are not contradictory. The whole idea behind thought experiments is to probe at those weak points where the ideas conflict, and see if what you think is actually what you think you think.
(personal example; I used to think I wasn't picky about clothes, until someone took me to a shop containing nothing but shirts with large phrases written on the front in bold, and I realized that actually I have a strong preference for expressing as little as possible with my clothes.)
Yes. A lot of my personal growth has come from realizing that the reasons I think I do certain things (like fight with my wife, or avoid making new friends, or play video games) are not the actual reasons. As an example, this morning I started to get snippy with my wife when she said "Trust me, that was the wrong was to do it." If you had asked me five years ago why I was mad at my wife I would have said that she was demeaning me, or putting me down. This morning I defused it when I realized that I was getting upset because I was feeling incompetent and incapable and the words "trust me" seemed to imply that she thought I didn't trust her and was screwing up the task out of defiance. It's more complicated than that, but the incompetence thing is a real emotional trigger for me, and I figured out several years ago that my fear of my own incompetence was the real reason I did a lot of things that before I would have chocked up to my sense of justice, or needing to defend myself, or wanting to set the record straight, etc. I was able to turn my passive aggressive comments into direct communication to her asking her if she really thought I didn't trust her or didn't know that what she was saying was true, and I found out that she wasn't even aware that she had used the words "trust me" and was just trying to help.
A lot of philosophy and religion is tied up in the idea that we don't understand ourselves and why we really do the things we do or feel the emotions we feel, etc.
Yes, absolutely. Ask anyone who has been a parent or other caretaker of young children. Kids are demonstrably and trivially wrong with extremely high confidence about their own motivations and beliefs all the time.
Yeah, until I had kids I was unaware how much of introspection is actually a learned skill.
Small kids literally do not realize that they are hungry or tired... they just get increasingly angry, and they have no idea why. Like, a hungry child will get angry, and will then throw food on the floor because of the anger, which goes completely against logic. It takes a few years until children learn to recognize "I am hungry now" and "I am tired now" as emotions.
Actually, I suspect that even adult people eating food at midnight is often not caused by actual hunger, but by misinterpreting signals of tiredness for hunger. Both of them are "low on energy", but for different reasons.
So if kids need to learn all of this, it makes sense to suspect that maybe there are things that even many adults do not know. Signals that mean something specific, but we can't decipher them, and it becomes just a generic anger.
I don't think a person can be "right" about their motivations or beliefs.
Step 1 in thinking about your motivations and beliefs is: condense/compress/collapse the totality of your motivations and beliefs into something that fits into a Conscious Thought™.
Then if you're trying to communicate your motivations and beliefs to someone else, step 2 is: condense/compress/collapse the totality of your conscious thoughts about your motivations and beliefs into something that fits into some sentences or paragraphs of whichever language you're using (plus whatever grunts, hand gestures, poetry verses, oil paintings, vlog posts, equations, etc that you have time produce and that you think might help.)
The amount of simplification required for each of these steps is so extreme that the product of each step is more "wrong" than than it is "right."
But on the other hand, if I think "maybe my keys are on the desk" and then I walk to the desk to get the keys, I think i'm right that my intention in going to the desk was to get the keys.
I suppose, to your point, if walking to the desk brings me by the pantry, which is open, and hey, macademia nuts - i can't know for sure whether or not the keys were instrumental to the nuts.
Is there some way to have this cake and eat it, too? Can we evolve it to, "knowledge of your own motivations or beliefs is likely only possible in small scale, limited contexts and even there is questionable?"
On a small scale [why did he walk to the desk?] you're probably a lot more "right" than "wrong" when you think and speak about the belief [he believed the keys were on the desk] and motivation [he wanted to start the car].
But we rarely think/talk about beliefs and motivations at that small scale. Usually we're thinking about something interesting/uncertain/complex/controversial. And yet when thinking/talking about these larger scale, broader context issues we, unavoidably, perform the step 1 and step 1 dramatic oversimplifying processes *without noticing* that we're doing it.
Or to put it another way, I think it's a mistake (that we all make, almost all the time, without being at all aware of it) to think the "knowability" of a thing like [why did he walk to the desk?] is in the same category as the "knowability" of a thing like [is he motivated by pursuit of the truth?].
Epistemic status: Neither immaculate nor defiled ;)
"Can a person be wrong about what their motivation or beliefs are? I don’t mean intentionally deceptive - I mean, actually being wrong in their own self-assessments. Why or why not? What evidence can a person give that their motivation or beliefs are what they think they are? "
If a person states (and seems to be sincere about) that they value "X" and they keep making choices that are anti-X at some point I feel one must conclude that they are either:
a) Very wrong about their valuing X, or
b) Terrible at understanding how the world works (in at least one area of concern).
I'm eliminating "they are hypocrites" here because of the "seems sincere" bit, but if we don't have that then them talking the talk but then doing what they really want also comes into play. But that isn't your question.
I think that (b) is VERY common in other areas (e.g. most people seem to have cause-and-effect for athlete salaries and event ticket prices backwards...) so I don't see why it would be less common for motivations and beliefs.
What is probably also very common is people not wanting to make tradeoffs.
A common belief I see on various message boards is something like, "Great, now that player X has a new $YYY contract ticket and food prices will be going up again."
Almost certainly this is not how things work.
Consider the ticket (and food and parking) prices and player salaries at some time (like today). Say tickets average $100/ticket. And the stadium sells our 85% or whatever.
Imagine, next, that the entire league takes a 25% pay cut. Maybe there was a short strike and the players lost or the owners staged a short lockout. Whatever. There is a drop in pay, but during an off-season so the fans aren't upset because a season got disrupted. But now we have a new set of contracts and the same players (more or less) show up to play.
The fans have already established that they will pay $100/ticket to watch the players play and the same players are playing. Do we expect the owners to drop the ticket prices to $75/ticket or keep the tickets at $100/ticket and pocket the extra money?
The folks who believe that player salaries drive ticket prices expect that the owners will drop ticket prices. Economists, who expect the owners to be trying to maximize revenue, expect that the ticket prices will remain the same because the customers have established that they will pay $100/ticket so why drop prices?
The same thing plays out in the other direction. If players get more do we expect ticket prices to go up? If so, why weren't the ticket prices at that place already?
The *other* view is that the owners charge what they can for tickets and parking and food and the players get some cut of that (about 50% for the NFL). So if the fans stop showing up then ticket prices drop and eventually player salaries drop, too. If fans keep showing up even if/when ticket prices rise then the players' salaries go up because the owners have more money to spend on player salaries and many of the owners want to win (also, many leagues have salary caps and floors that are based on league revenue).
Economists generally believe that rising ticket prices drive rising player salaries rather than the other way around. Lots of fans think the causality runs the other way.
I would have thought "high athlete salaries = higher event prices to cover the costs" but is it in truth "high event prices = can then pay higher salaries to the stars"?
I sort of agree with your conclusion, but not with your argument for it.
We absolutely do not live in a world where people only act on things that have instrumental effect on pursuit of survival and thriving, and there are plenty of examples of people choosing to satisfy curiosity over survival (functionally, anyway, usually they are not aware of just how badly their curiosity will backfire).
> usually they are not aware of just how badly their curiosity will backfire
Yes but i think this is the key: in these situations, they didn't understand their risks. I think people understand 'risk of upsetting my group' FAR more intuitively than they understand other risks. I don't think people risk tribal membership ejection nearly as readily as they risk e.g. bodily harm, because you can heal a broken limb far more easily and reliably than a broken reputation.
This question is tough for me to get a handle on. In part, I think that's because the line between belief and unbelief isn't well-defined. In part, that's because belief has an important role in group membership. Robin Hanson's idea that it's easier to talk about group values by gesturing at something sacred rather than just being explicit about those values is relevant. In that way, belief is a kind of social ritual, where we don't just privately believe and suspect that other people privately believe, but we see each other making professions of belief.
I think too about how important COVID denial and COVID vaccine skepticism are as markers of membership in certain groups. People literally died for those beliefs. It's hard to think of a stronger indicator of belief than this. At the same time, I'd say that they engaged in some serious motivated reasoning to arrive at those views. That points to some shakiness of belief. They made a much bigger bet on those beliefs than any bet I'd make that they didn't really believe those things, though.
I don't think this is true. They may have died _as a result of those beliefs_ - but dying _for_ a belief means taking a risk you believe to be fatal, due to the belief. If you think COVID was all exaggerated, you aren't taking what _you_ believe to be a fatal risk, regardless of what it is.
From their perspectives, people who took the covid vaccines themselves were taking on risk for their beliefs: they took a mass-manufactured chemical product made by corporations that lie, in order to avoid something with a low fatality rate. They'd say _you_ engaged in motivated reasoning.
It seems to me, then, that whenever we look at reasoning of people with different value structures, we think _all_ of their reasoning is motivated, whereas our own is pure and based on the truth. To me it seems most likely, then, that it's always subservient to group membership.
Sometimes the part of your brain that rationalises decisions is not aware of the part driving the decisions (hunger, and so forth), so I would say not only is it possible but relatively common.
I think people can and often are wrong about these things. Another thing they're often very wrong about is the origin of their beliefs and motivation.
That said, I wouldn't automatically discount as false a claim about being interested in finding the truth. I know I am personally interested in discovering the truth even when there are negative social consequences for doing so.
Of course, I could be wrong about my own motivation, but if you want to place this in the context of the surviving and thriving framework, curiosity often leads to unexpected discoveries that have a huge survival advantage but it is not possible to predict initially which discoveries that would be and how to even begin to go about making them. All you can do is try lots and lots of things and try to make connections between those things and notice patterns etc. So it seems to me that an innate drive towards general curiosity without any underlying social motivation is something evolution very well could have produced.
I agree that this is true - curiosity is totally a thing. But I think people will generally avoid being curious about things if that curiosity itself poses an existential risk to them. Given how socially oriented we are, being curious about, e.g. the relationship between genetics and iq can pose an existential risk.
Any folks close to the topic have thoughts on the FDA commissioner’s plans to cut drug approval time by months? Are they doing it “right?” Estimated lives / QALYs saved?
It's more talk than concrete action at this point. The FDA unveiled their new AI chatbot "Elsa" recently to help cut down review times, and despite the hype marketing from the commissioner, the insider sentiment was far less bullish. That said, there is no reason why AI should not significantly reduce review times if implemented properly, but the FDA is more in the vision / intention setting stage at this point. And most of their accelerated review pathways they have created give them all sorts of outs if they, in fact, cannot get it done.
What do y'all think about this foreign policy for the Middle East from the perspective of the USA?
1. We must achieve complete independence from reliance on Middle Eastern oil by any means necessary--offshore drilling, fracking, investing in nuclear power, solar, wind, whatever.
2. Then we get out. Completely. Iran closes the Strait of Hormuz? Fine, we don't need the oil from the Persian Gulf. Houthis shooting ships in the Red Sea? That's not our main shipping lane anyway. Someone attacks Israel? I'm fine with selling weapons to the Israelis, but they've done a good job of defending themselves over the past 60 years. They can survive without our help. Palestinian statehood? Let someone else figure it out.
1. Oil is a commodity. "Independence" is impossible unless you're willing to set up a system where the price of oil is different from the rest of the world. Which basically means complete autarky and is impractical. If you simply want the US to not be directly reliant on it then the US already has that and always has. I think the Middle East is like 5% of our oil.
2. The US is highly integrated into East Asia and Europe which DO rely on Middle Eastern oil. They also rely on those trade routes. Unless you can get the EU, China, Japan, etc to sign on to energy independence and avoid their biggest trade routes you'd still have to care. Now, you might think "if they're primarily the ones benefitting why don't they help" and in that case welcome to the American diplomatic position since like the 1980s.
3. The Middle East is important strategically if you want to defend Europe or North Africa and it gives us a strong ability to influence South and East Asia in one shared defense perimeter that's continuous with Europe and North Africa.
The folks pushing energy independence often want to see Europe and Japan [maybe not China!] pay "their fair share" for the naval power to keep sea lanes (including the Persian Gulf) open. This tends to get lost, but should be kept in mind while thinking about this.
"Why is the US paying our Navy keeping the Persian Gulf oil flowing to China?" probably captures the spirit of this (whether the facts are correct or not).
The main benefit of middle east right now is a source of investment, and a lax regulatory regime. We can build all the AI plants we want in Saudi Arabia.
The cost is jihadi fundamentalism willing to blow stuff up to gain god's favor.
If we withdraw China will swoop in and replace us.
We stopped trying for boots on the ground regime change, and effectively stopped mediating in Israel/Palestine except insofar as it improves regional stability (i.e. Abraham accords great justice for Palestinians who cares)
Couldn't be more satisfied with the current approach, actually
I believe the argument is that the US gets to stay the world hegemon (also) by keeping others down. They can't afford having a competitor that has access to both advanced technology and plentiful resources.
Yes, that is obviously the argument. But, again, why is it important to be the world hegemon? If I read OP correctly, they don't think that is intrinsically valuable. And after all, it is safe to say that, of all the people in the world who are living happy lives, most do not reside in the world hegemony. So, again, why does it matter?
I don't understand. The Gulf states offer the US stuff it wants: a lot of space and lax regulatory regime and energy that they are willing to trade in exchange for military protection. If we don't do it China will offer it instead and we would be relatively weaker.
Having power and a higher share of global economy/effective resource control without giving up nice things like being able to stop government from bulldozing my house with eminent domain to build an AI chip fan seems good for me/US foreign policy
I don't understand why you think the US wants those things. Those sound like things that US companies doing business overseas might want, but not the US govt per se. Nor do I understand how "China swooping in" would change anything in that regard.
>energy that they are willing to trade in exchange for military protection.
So, your claim is that, if the US conducts foreign policy in the Middle East that is to Saudi Arabia's liking, it will let US companies build AI chip and energy facilities, but if not, then China will "swoop in" and replace the US as Saudi Arabia's security guarantor, and Saudi Arabia will instead let Chinese companies build those facilities? Seems like you are positing a force projection capacity that China does not currently seem to have.
And, why not build those factories in Mexico or elsewhere in Latin America?
How hard is it to build AI plants in rural Arizona or Texas? I have my share of problems with using eminent domain, but there's a lot of empty land in the US.
That is a not a very apt comparison. High speed rail is built with government funds and hence is subject to political considerations (eg, in California, the requirement that it actually serve the people who need it most, rather than bypassing them). And both Arizona and Texas have grown rapidly; there seem to be few constraints on economic development.
Due to advancements in energy production (something something fracking, ask somebody actually in the energy sector) the US is a net energy exporter. We probably still want access to the Middle East but, honestly, if the Middle East shut down it would probably make our own oil and energy reserves far more valuable.
The issue is that, well, the rest of the world still needs cheap oil, which means the Middle East. A world in which cheap oil keeps flowing to Europe and developing countries is a better world because developing countries deserve a decent standard of living and because we like Europe, it's full of the history and funny accents :).
But yeah, fundamentally, the US no longer needs the Middle East for its energy needs and is, at best, providing a free security good to the rest of the world and, at worst, meddling in a volatile region out of habit and the influence of varying lobbying groups (Israel, yes, but also the Saudis and Emirates and their ilk).
Wow, I think that, of the finalists and honorable mentions I only read the Watergate one (it was really good!). Good to know, there is a lot of good content to be read on the coming weeks then.
Shout-out to the review on human sexuality. Thought it was well written and had an original deep insight, even if it seems a bit flawed/incomplete. Would really have liked it to see a discussion here of it
Hey, author here; thanks for the shout out. Definitely ran out of time on this/was a little rusty at essay writing, I don't think I quite did a good enough job conveying the original insight, which is a shame. But it was still really fun to have written it, to have put something out there that was read by probably hundreds of people.
The short summary/TL;DR is that human sexuality is fundamentally tied into our status detecting systems, and this explains most of the weirdness around sex, such as people being into being cucked or the prevalence of violent fantasies.
What parts of it seemed incomplete/ in need of elaboration to you?
Im going to comment both here and on the post. Who knows, maybe the algorithm takes this and signal boosts your post
I really enjoyed the status approach to sexuality but I still think what you call low-status hotness (LSH) is kinda mysterious
While I buy the idea that submitting to a high status partner and surrendering responsibility may be hot or attractive to some people, I think there is more at play in some of these fetishes. It seems like the very act of lowering one's status (either physically by pain or socially by humiliation) is the goal of the drive here, not the second-hand consequence of submitting.
This part, where pain or humiliation turns into pleasure feels like a gap not only in your system but in most explanations of human sexuality imo. I think without explaining this gap some extreme fetishes like straight up CBT or SPH remain unaccounted.
I dont know, maybe by taking pain or humiliation you increase the "status-delta" between you and your partner and it makes them hotter? This could be a viable explanation but still seems to ignore the fact that the pain is the goal for some people
Surprised that the Testosterone review didn't make it and kinda disappointed (1). I thought it was well argued and potentially worth making the lifestyle change and I wanted to see the ACX commentariat tear into it and see how it fared.
It was one of the good ones. I did have an issue with it: I didn't know whether I should trust the author to be unbiased enough. The author was certainly very convinced by the conclusion. They did discuss some drawbacks, but I didn't know enough to say whether it was a fair treatment. They were very dismissive of the downsides, and it sounded very surprising to me that this should be all that there is.
I did give it a good grade. I would have liked the review to reach the final, so that I learn more about it from the comments.
I skimmed it, got really interested and promised myself that I would go back, read in detail and rate it. Oh well. At least you reminded me to read it fully, I really started considering the lifestyle change as well
Ah, ACX commetariat, I am disappointed that "11 Poetic Forms, Reviewed in Verse" wasn't a finalist. It was so fun! I didn't expect it to win but I really hoped it would at least place.
The concept was good, and probably if Scott had written it it would have been great, but the author doesn't have quite that level of verbal cleverness and so it didn't make me smile as much as I'd have liked. This kept me from rating it more highly.
My friend is a journalist and he has been writing about the US Aid cuts in Southern Africa. He has mainly been focusing on South Africa, but recently went to Mozambique to see the effects there.
It seems to be nothing short of a total catastrophe. As in, tons of children just dying of HIV levels of catastrophe. The country's health systems seems to have been entirely propped up by USAID funding.
There are certainly debates you could have as to whether or not it is good for a country to be so reliant on USAID, but unfortunately it was and with the cuts, we are now seeing dire consequences. I've linked the article below if you want to read more. Was hoping some EA type people could see this.
Either they're a dependent satrapy or they're not. They can't have it both ways. Well they can, but then hundreds of thousands of their people will die. And they will blame the US for it. And most people will believe them.
Without forcing people to virtue signal, I am amazed at the types of comments a post like this gets.
It reads like intellectualizing. You even explicitly say "There are certainly debates you could have as to whether or not it is good for a country to be so reliant on USAID, but unfortunately it was and with the cuts, we are now seeing dire consequences."....and the commenters jump exactly on that part.
Kids with AIDs are dying. Skilled forecasters estimate that the PEPFAR stop due to claimed "fraud, abuse and waste in USAID" will directly cost the lives of ~half a million people per year.
Deaths after one year: [257,500 - 515,000 - 772,500]
Deaths after four years: [1,015,000 - 1,998,750 - 2,953,750]
I will repeat- half a million lives per year. Even if you disagree with USAID, or think there is actual abuse, or there is nothing good about foreign aid, or it can make countries dependent, or it can foster some corruption in countries, I posit that half a million dying is an moral outrage. I would urge any commenter to recalibrate their moral compass if this is one of the first responses you have to reading the associated article. Hope indeed some EA funders will see this.
Half a million dying from an intentional, created illness is a moral outrage. Half a million dying from influenza is just an ordinary decade (and, judging by the vaccine's effectiveness, not preventable at any rate).
Africa Wins Again is a perfect slogan for the deadliness of Africa-in-general. Lions, snakes, sleeping sickness, monkeypox, ebola...
I will not be outraged because of something that I did not do. Passively letting someone die, who I could save, is not a moral outrage. It is a moral lacuna. It is not deliberately performing genocide.
Let me be perfectly clear: The perfectly preventable deaths of Ukrainians from 2022 to 2025 are on OUR HEADS. We voted for them, we got them -- blood and gore. Even the soldiers infected with HIV, deliberately, are on our heads.
I will NOT be shamed for letting someone die from their own actions. Shame on America, shame on US, sure, but shame us for what we've done. It's far more shameful than our inaction.
> Skilled forecasters estimate that the PEPFAR stop due to claimed "fraud, abuse and waste in USAID" will directly cost the lives of ~half a million people per year.
The article you link to doesn't say that. It estimates what will happen if the waiver PEPFAR has been granted that allows it to continue operations doesn't work and PEPFAR is effectively cancelled. But PEPFAR is not currently stopped, though there were disruptions to its operations that are still being worked out.
Correct, I should have made that explicit. From the sources I have read, and the above-linked article, the fact that a waiver exists actually does not mean PEPFAR is continuing. Supply chain projects are not being picked up.
At different points in this century, the UN has projected a 2100 population for Africa at 2 billion and 4 billion. I don’t know what they’re thinking now or if there’s any reason to pay attention to them.
But offering such numbers in this context, is not necessarily bound to shut down discussion of the future. Especially when tagged with “how could we be missing 5 million people?” etc.
A country that cannot fund a bookmobile to drop off in rural areas the ARVs it is sitting on, is unlikely to know how many people live in it, nor what they die of when they die.
Reading that, one has to wonder what the hell the government of Mozambique is doing. If I look up Wikipedia, it is a poor, underdeveloped and indebted country. On the other hand, apparently with development policies and loosening up regulation, the economy grew very fast. One more case of "the GDP is soaring but people think they're not doing well"?
So if the economy *is* growing, where's the money going? Corruption, it would seem, as well as the lingering effects of the civil war and new uprisings in the north. (Thank you Google AI for the précis):
"Mozambique's economy in 2025 is experiencing a mixed outlook. While facing contraction in the first quarter, there are projections for a gradual recovery, with expectations of 2.7% to 3.0% real GDP growth by the end of the year. The recovery is expected to be driven by the extractive sector, particularly gas production, and agriculture. However, challenges remain, including inflation, fiscal deficits, and the ongoing impact of the Islamist insurgency in the north."
Apparently it is also a popular tourist destination. So there is *some* money there, but who holds the purse strings or where it's going is the question.
"Mozambique’s economic structure is determined largely by the extractives sector, with its large gas reserves of 180 million cubic feet, the third largest in Africa. There has been only limited structural transformation of the economy, with a slight shift from agriculture to services. In 2001, the services sector was the main contributor to GDP growth, accounting for 50%, followed by agriculture at 32.2%, industry (including extractives) at 18%, and manufacturing at 12.2%. Two decades later, economic activity continues to be driven by the services sector, which accounted for 51.7% of GDP in 2021, while agriculture’s share had fallen to 28%. Mozambique’s structural transformation is hampered by skills shortages and a high illiteracy rate among 15- to 34-year-olds (31.4%), skills mismatches, lack of infrastructure, high public debt, and a low level of industrialization."
According to the linked story, once the USAID money stopped flowing, that was it. Nothing happened. Nobody else stepped in. No home-grown solutions or attempts by the government to intervene, no other agencies or charities. If the government is this bad, then the country might as well become a satrapy of the USA
More specifically what happened is the government basically borrowed a bunch of Chinese money because they didn't like that the US wanted things like transparency or anti-corruption. They even cut services and expected the US to pick up the slack. They were betting the US would keep funding them because of stuff like... well, this story. Basically that no matter how much they favored China or cut their own public services the US would continue to pay because otherwise ordinary people would suffer.
But then China pulled back on funding as it became increasingly clear Mozambique was not going to be able to repay them or develop. And then the US cut aid. At first a little to signal displeasure then when the US did zero based budgeting it couldn't justify continuing in Mozambique generally. And now Mozambique is left in a deep crisis. It's unfortunate for the average person but it's the result of extremely bad local leadership.
I imagine China would have been interested in things like the natural gas reserves? When you've managed to frick up your government to the point that it's not even worth it for a colonising power to come along to scoop up your natural assets, that's pretty bad.
I realise they're still struggling with an underdeveloped country and a past civil war plus new insurgency in the north of the country, but it does sound unhappily like much of post-independence Africa where the new rulers decided they'd divvy up the spoils amongst themselves, and to hell with the citizens, they're not even all our tribesmen.
Mozambique does have natural gas but not a ton of it. It's ranked about 90th if I recall correctly, something like .03% of global production. That places it alongside such energy superpowers as Latvia. Most of Mozambique's exports are agricultural products in a broad sense. Stuff like nuts but also wood. And all exports are only about $12 billion and exports to China are only about $750 million. Mostly niche agricultural products and high quality lumber.
China's plan for Mozambique was, fairly transparently, "We come in and run the Chinese economic playbook. You undergo rapid industrialization to middle income and reorient your trade to focus on China." Not a bad idea overall except the part where none of that actually happened for a variety of reasons. But mostly, in my opinion, corruption and more general dysfunction.
I will say Mozambique is uniquely bad even among dysfunctional African states. It's undoubtedly in the top three and has an okay shot at being the worst. Though that honor probably goes to Republic of the Congo (not the DRC, the other one). But it's close.
On the one hand, there is significant human suffering. These individuals are suffering and that is obviously bad.
On the other hand, this is a predictable consequence of Mozambique's actions which have repeatedly taken the US for granted and prioritized China. The reason the US funds Mozambique's healthcare system is they cut domestic funding in order to repay China and expected the US to pick up the slack. It was supremely foolish of Mozambique's leadership to expect US taxpayers to (indirectly) finance Chinese debt repayments.
China owns about 7.5% of Mozambique’s debt (or about 14% of the Mozambique’s external debt). Government spending on healthcare increasing from 2016 though 2022, going from 29% to 36% of total healthcare spending. The World Bank doesn’t have numbers more recent than 2022, but I haven’t seen any reports of subsequent cuts.
Eliminating healthcare aid to Mozambique in the hopes that will respond by defaulting on its debt strikes me as crazy on multiple levels. For one thing, Mozambique is currently running a deficit, so I doubt that defaulting on their debt would allow the government to increase healthcare spending at all, much less increase it enough to replace the money from USAID. For another, a default will harm all creditors, not just China.
Mozambique has been hiding how much debt it owes. Thus the hidden debt crisis. Anyone who says they know what percentage of Mozambique's debt is owed to China is lying. Further, total healthcare spending includes foreign aid, so that number does not indicate THE GOVERNMENT increased healthcare spending. So that statistic is misleading.
No one wants Mozambique to default on its debts. Including the US. Unless by default you mean the negotiated debt restructuring process Mozambique has asked for.
However, as FLWAB says, if you side with US rivals and cut spending to pay back US rivals (effectively transferring in net American money to China) and lie about how much debt you have and turn down transparency/anti-corruption requests then the result is unsurprising. And, to be honest, your fault.
I don't think the hope is that they'll default on their debt, and I think the idea is that if you prioritize US rivals over the US, it's not surprising if the US stops paying for your medical bills.
What are the long term consequences of developed nations propping up an entire continent which seems wholly incapable of caring for itself? Is it even desirable in utilitarian terms over the long term? What could go wrong?
What I am bringing up is that the key to an effective future eventually depends upon the concerned individual or group taking responsibility for themselves. My concern is that we are treating the people of Africa like children or livestock rather than as responsible human adults that need to take control of their own destiny.
IOW I worry we are promoting dysfunctionality and dependency. Of course, I am often wrong.
That is way too general an argument. Why is the specific aid in question an example of the phenomenon you are referring to? We are talking about medicine for sick people; we aren't talking about propping up core government functions.
I was indeed generalizing the argument. Trying to take it up a level of abstraction. Sorry.
Delivering drugs to sick people seems like commendable work to me. My question is whether the larger pattern of sending in solutions to their problems is the long term best solution. It seems like we are addressing the symptoms and by doing so interfering with their ability to become self sufficient.
Delivering drugs to sick people is fine, if they're reasonably cheap and don't lead to antbiotic resistance. Ivermectin is fine, I'll walk on hot coals for that. I won't do the same for HIV drugs -- they're expensive, and this whole "we let orphans live in the middle of the boonies" so that they are impossible to supervise without costing millions of unnecessary dollars... that's just ridiculous.
One orphanage. We have the plans from covid19. Build it there.
>My question is whether the larger pattern of sending in solutions to their problems is the long term best solution.
Yes, that is very clear. But the issue is that you can raise that question about any aid. Lend-Lease, for example: "Delivering weapons to people resisting Nazi aggression seems like commendable work to me. My question is whether the larger pattern of sending in solutions to their problems is the long term best solution. It seems like we are addressing the symptoms and by doing so interfering with their ability to become self sufficient." So, at some point, you need to make a claim that THIS PARTICULAR aid program is counterproductive in that manner.
Depends. We can get a lot out of certain "charity work" (that's called R&D for when we finish depleting our own aquifers). Ivermectin is cheap and safe, it's not a drug that we spend oodles on to make in quantity (likewise antibiotics).
HIV drugs... that's expensive.
All the t-shirts they've got, they are castoffs from America, where people won't buy a t-shirt if they don't like the logo. That's cheap writeoffs.
I'm not sure if Africa is wholly incapable of caring for itself...
Why aren’t they more self sufficient?* If the rest of the world didn’t exist at all, what would be happening there? How would they respond to HIV and countless other diseases and ailments? How would their governments and major institutions work?
By providing aid and relief are we interfering with the natural process of them evolving respectable institutions and social fabric?
Africa is not self-sufficient because people never needed to look to the future there. Food is too easy to grow, and they don't have winters. Future-oriented thought is rare there, and not very encouraged by the climate, or by the populace.
If there weren't the rest of the world, they'd simply let the disease kill people and breed all over again.
I'm not sure you HAVE a natural process of them evolving respectable institutions and social fabric. What you have is a tremendous reservoir of biodiversity, precisely because selection pressure is next-to-nonexistent.
That's nice hyperbole disguised as rationality, but the entire continent is not "wholly incapable of caring for itself", some countries are just not capable of caring for all HIV patients. Hopefully, with new medical treatments and economic growth it will be less of a problem in the future.
HIV is just one of countless problems. Setting aside any hyperbole, the question is are we making them better through our aid or are we fostering dependency, free riding and general institutional dysfunction?
Aid is bad when it's tied up with conditions that give the aid-giver some kind of hostile soft power over you, dependency structures are part of this problem. But It's good when it prevents millions from dying in between now and when a vaccine is being developed. In general, Africans would prefer mutual economic development to aid, but HIV is one example where immediate medium-term aid is needed until advanced medical infrastructure that physically cannot exist in Africa yet has time to develop. It would be incredibly hard to argue that PEPFAR saving something like 20 million lives is a worse outcome than simply being free of dependency.
So I can agree that mutual economic growth is preferable to aid, maybe even in general, but some cases are just... good.
Do you believe that Omicron was a netgood to the world? If so, would you support more revocation of HIV/AIDS funding? If not, how do you explain the creation of Omicron?
Yes. Many of the rationalists on this substack seem to lack any historical context and also seem to be woefully unable to think outside their tightly constrained intellectual boxes. Of course, most of the youngsters on this stack weren't alive during the initial phase of the US AIDS epidemic in the early 1980s. They might think of HIV/AIDS as a treatable disease. But NY City hospitals were overwhelmed with AIDS patients who required months of care and who inevitably died. Initially, the mode of transmission was unknown, and medical staff were accidentally infected with patients' body fluids. It was a real shitshow. ICUs were overwhelmed, and they had trouble finding space for non-AIDS patients who needed intensive critical care. So the surge in AIDS cases affected the non-infected population as well.
Now that we know hella lot more about HIV, we've discovered that immunocompromised people are mutational petri dishes for other pathogens. Luckily, most of those mutations can't overcome healthy immune systems, but occasionally they might. For instance, the Omicron variant of SARS-CoV-2 probably got its start in an immunocompromised person with HIV in central Africa.
Being laissez-faire is all very well and good, until it comes back to bite you on the ass.
Given the rise of Omicron, would you support defunding HIV-maintenance drugs in the 3rd world, as a way to encourage "less lethal mutations"? I think you could argue that Omicron, itself, is worth the cost in "deaths of HIV positive people."
AIDS, and more tightly speaking, gays committed genocide of the hemophiliac population. I'm not going to say this was intentional, mind, but I'm just bringing it up, in a subthread where folks are trying to shame Americans for inaction. This was not inaction on the part of gays, they were trying to make money by selling their blood.
It took about 4 years after the start of the AIDS epidemic, and about 2 years after the HIV virus was identified as the cause of AIDS, before the Red Cross and other blood banks started screening for it. Granted, it took about a year to develop an ELISA test for HIV, but IIRC there was a lot of resistance to the idea that HIV was the cause of AIDS, and then there was another round of resistance to screening (because of cost). I just checked with ChatGPT, and it says that ~6,000–10,000 hemophiliacs and ~4,000–6,000 transfusion recipients died from HIV contaminated blood products in the US. I'm surprised it was that low.
But remember, it wasn't just gays who caught HIV. I asked ChatGPT and says that ~23% of AIDS cases were women who caught it from heterosexual sex. Also, IV drug users were at higher risk. Right now in sub-Saharan Africa, more than half the cases are women. And the infections happen predominantly through heterosexual sex.
As a historically-challenged person stuck in his intellectual box, my question wasn’t really about HIV. My question was about whether we are on net creating dependency and fostering negative sociology-cultural responses to the myriad challenges facing the billions of people on this continent. Feel free to disagree. I have an open mind.
In theory USAID is supposed to be helping countries get off aid. In practice I'm guessing they often fail at that part, and it sounds like they failed on Mozambique. That said the stakes are high enough that I'd prefer a "keep trying to reform until you get something that works" approach (even though it'll be slow, error-prone and relatively expensive) over a "sharp cuts and millions die" approach.
I was prepared to feel whatever feelings that article might call forth, and I know the only socially acceptable ones will be pity and recrimination against the correct quarter.
But I defy anyone to read it and not have *any* qualms about the sustainability of this … system. And I’m not sure the remote HIV-positive children and their grandmothers aren’t right in feeling that their own countrymen in the form of their “activists” abandoned them.
Is this the future people really want for the world?
I don't see what the activists are supposed to do. They have no income, now they have to spend their time in surviving instead of delivering medicine and caring for the children.
Perhaps a jaded view but the absolute abruptness with which they broke off contact, inevitably suggested to me that they were gatekeepers of the medicine, taking their cut of aid funds, more than dedicated medical personnel.
It would’ve interesting to know what they are doing now to survive.
The article said now they're doing subsistence farming and peddling wares in street markets.
I wouldn't phrase it as "taking their cut of aid funds", it sounds like distributing medicine was a full time job. Nobody would be doing that for free in a developed country either.
In a developed country, like, say, Mexico, they'd be in an orphanage. Or doing productive work, so that their HIV drugs could be paid for.
Actually, these two can be combined, in a developed country. It wouldn't take that much work for Mozambique to "hire apprentices" for skilled labor (that's an orphanage, with one nurse to deliver the HIV drugs).
Their concern is touching, then, and no doubt just such an excess of concern, for the least among them and for the future, is what got them into this pickle in the first place. We may wish to organize along similar lines, for our moral betterment.
This is true. It sounds like most of this could be fixed with "one orphanage" which centralizes the children and makes them close enough that one nurse could care for all of them.
I feel like despite the good intentions of individual actors, this is one of those modern situations that both kind of needs to work, and also must never *really work*.
Wuhan was working on a bunch of Actual Fixes for this particular situation.... Up to and including "murdering them all." I agree that charities are unlikely to fix this "issue" (as HIV treatment doesn't actually fix the disease, and seems to just make it more likely to spread... Take the 12-18 year olds in Mozambique. Sex trade is low-skill and high pay. Voila! More HIV. more need for charity.).
I've heard that modern treatment, if used according to guidelines, can make it all but impossible to spread HIV through sex. Is that not correct? Or was treatment in Africa not actually used according to guidelines?
Does the Longer term sustainable solution involve them building a culture and institutions which fosters monogamy and a revulsion toward prostitution and anal sex? Does aid interfere with this cultural development?
South Africa's still the place where squatters were using a multi-story elevator shaft as a toilet, right? I'm not exactly surprised that a country that throws squatters out of skyscrapers has "health system problems" -- there's a clear disregard for human life in South Africa.
A note that this was seven years ago. In 2021, folks were rioting until they ran out of food (in America, the riots ended when the nikes/legos/etc were gone) -- they literally destroyed the infrastructure necessary to eat.
I’m not sure what you are trying to say, but the linked article was very interesting and the picture especially so.
That picture is what America’s public lands are going to look like when Mike Lee and Matt Yglesias get through with them.
That’s the dream, when lunatic left and lunatic libertarian join hands and shout down what the internet so cutely terms “normies” but The Onion typically used to refer to as The Last American Adult.
Alpha School was also my favorite of all. I was a bit worried this preference might be idiosyncratic, so I'm also very glad it made it into the finalists.
I can think of steelman arguments that neocolonialism is a coherent concept, but I think you actually have to define it in a way that people in the EA community will take seriously, and see as something clearly negative.
For example, the post links to this definition (not your direct quote, but the same piece):
"Neocolonialism can be described as the subtle propagation of socio-economic and political activity by former colonial rulers aimed at reinforcing capitalism, neo-liberal globalization, and cultural subjugation of their former colonies."
If, like many EAs, you believe that capitalism and neoliberal globalization are very good things for lower income countries, and that Western/Rich country culture tends to be better (e.g. more open and tolerant, better institutions) than the culture in most poor countries, then you'll have to also make the argument that neocolonialism may be a bad thing!
Fair - I was unfairly connecting your argument with something you don't necessarily agree with.
I think the critique of the quote that you did use: "the actions and effects of certain remnant features and agents of the colonial era in a given society” would be similar, though. These actions and effects of these features and agents could clearly be positive, and you may need to make the case that they aren't.
You also connect Africa's continued poverty to colonialism and neo-colonialism, but I don't think this is justified. While there are clearly some direct negative downstream effects of certain colonial and post-colonial policies, I don't see a clear counterfactual where the rest of Africa was not colonised by western powers, and became more successful and prosperous.
Why would I "need" to? The purpose of the blogpost wasn't to say whether neocolonialism is good or bad, it was to see whether it applies to EA. People can make whatever normative judgement they want from that analysis. If you want a discussion on normativity go read the comments, where you'll find things like:
We do have more academic ways to study the effects of colonialism on Africa. For example, we can compare groups that were ethnically partitioned by the colonizers vs those that weren't. When we do so we find (https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w17620/w17620.pdf):
> we find that the incidence, severity and duration of violence are higher in the historical homelands of partitioned groups. Third, we shed some light on the mechanisms showing that military interventions from neighboring countries are much more likely in the homelands of split groups. Fourth, our exploration of the status of ethnic groups in the political arena reveals that partitioned ethnicities are systematically discriminated from the national government and are more likely to participate in ethnic civil wars. Fifth, using individual-level data we document that respondents identifying with split groups have lower access to public goods and worse educational outcomes. The uncovered evidence brings in the foreground the detrimental repercussions of ethnic partitioning.
We also have historical records of what colonizers did in the colonies, e.g. king leopold's "congo free state" was responsible for the deaths of *millions* of people [~half the population], through brutal forced labor practices, decreased agricultural productivity and the destruction of many local economies: https://www.amazon.com/King-Leopolds-Ghost-Heroism-Colonial/dp/0618001905 (the 10 million cited in this book is disputed by some scholars, but all scholars agree that it's in the millions) And it's not like Belgian meddling in Congo is all in the distant past, as recently as 1961 did they assassinate Patrice Lumumba, the first democratically elected prime minister of the DRC: Neocolonialism is ongoing. I mean, basically all scholars of colonialism agree that it was bad for the colonies, maybe scroll through the wikipedia page if you want to see some further research: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Analysis_of_European_colonialism_and_colonization#Colonial_actions_and_their_impacts
[...]
Before the european colonizers the difference between Hutis and Tutsis was mainly a fluid socioeconomic one, not a rigid ethnic one. Think: Hutu as word for the stereotypical farmer (class) and Tutsi as a word for stereotypical pastoralist (class). But then the Belgians came and not only transformed it into a racial division, they also invented a story that Tutsi's came from the north and were closer to europeans and therefore the superior race. They backed this up with pseudo-scientific measurement (think skull stuff) to give it legitimacy. Then they gave Tutsis exclusive access to education, government jobs, and power, while Hutus were relegated to manual labor. To lock it in place they mandated ethnic ID cards, permanently locking people into Hutu or Tutsi categories based on ancestry, eliminating fluidity (previously, it was more like a class so Hutus could become Tutsis through things like cattle ownership or marriage).
If you think the Belgians couldn't have done more to guarantee an ethnic conflict, you don't know the Belgians: as decolonization neared they abruptly shifted support to the Hutu majority, fearing Tutsi-led independence movements. Then they armed Hutu extremists and allowed anti-Tutsi propaganda. This lead to mass killings, which were reciprocated with more massacres on and on and on, culminating in the Rwandan genocide (where ~75% of the Tutsi population was exterminated).
Again, if we treat this like a courtroom, we can't have a quantitative mathematical proof that Belgium created the massacres (though some quantitative studies come about as close as you possibly can with a historical case without a control group). And we don't have a direct decree for the massacres from Belgium (There is no secret tape of a Belgian saying "execute order 66, or something). But if instead we look at it like researchers it's pretty clear to say that Belgium created it. You know who also believes that? The Belgians, not only the contemporary Belgians (e.g. historian Filip Reyntjens wrote that the ID cards made the genocide "logistically possible") but even the colonizers themselves (e.g. Colonial administrator Pierre Ryckmans admitted: "We created a monster")
While I will always appreciate calls for more clarifications, you could also try to understand the arguments against your priors using your own skills and knowledge.
I understand some arguments against my priors here. My call for clarification was more about working out if I actually disagree with Bob's claims.
I usually disagree with neocolonialist critiques because they're insufficiently utilitarian. But if it's defined in a utilitarian way: "x is only neocolonial if it actually causes harm", I may agree with this critique.
If self promotion is allowed here, I'd love to plug a recent essay on having a baby and infant suffering.
My new baby brought loads of joy into our little world, but also really unexpected levels of suffering (given that babies are conscious in any relevant way), which made me tentatively update my views slightly away from the pro-natalism that tends to be popular in these circles, and towards the universe being net-negative.
That is a much better and more moving essay than I expected, thank you for writing and sharing it. Sorry I don't have anything substantive to say about it (it's past midnight here), but I did share it, and may revisit it later this week for a more proper reread.
That is a much better and more moving essay than I expected, thank you for writing and sharing it. Sorry I don't have anything substantive to say about it (it's past midnight here), but I did share it, and may revisit it later this week for a more proper reread.
In AI news, the FutureHouse platform is really impressive for scouring biology literature. It's really good making literature summaries and searching out instances of things in the literature, including documents like unpublished Ph.D. thesis. It is at least as good at ChatGPT at finding stuff and is much better at sourcing and not making stuff up. Sometimes it doesn't quite understand my question and answers a slightly different question, but it doesn't lie.
I'm intrigued by the idea that this bunch no one has heard of has a better research tool than ChatGPT. The only thing I can think is that ChatGPT is too much of a generalist. Sometimes its job is to make stuff up, sometimes it's a research tool, sometimes it just vibes with and affirms you. Likewise, it's a bad therapy AI because it's too agreeable, but it wouldn't be that hard to constrain it some so that it stops telling you that you that with the week you've had, you deserve some meth.
On a personal note I am miserable that a lot of my science professor skills are being taken over by AI but I recognize this as a positive for humanity.
Important to remember that there are many more blood types than most people realize. 47 total fully established, but probably many more in the “wild” and undiscovered, considering how massive, widespread, and often isolated human populations are.
Scott -- I represent VC investors, including one fairly high-profile investor/donor that makes grants. Happy to discuss this with you. Shoot me an email to set up a time if you wish. www.hilarymiller.tel
Hi, Jesus it depends on what your objectives are. Some people have purely donative intent in supporting certain kinds of activities. There are advantages and disadvantages to each approach.
I wrote an essay that might interest this crowd: “How to Stare Into the Sun.” (though I admit it’s more lyrical and poetic than some here may prefer)
It’s about chronic avoidance, emotional pain, and the strategies we use (consciously or not) to protect ourselves from feeling. I draw on behavioral psychology, and personal introspection to explore how avoidance loops are formed, and how to break them.
If you’ve ever intellectualised your emotions to the point of dissociation, or used hyper-rationality as a defense against vulnerability, this might resonate. There are references to Faye Webster, fight-or-flight responses, and why fear of love is often more dangerous than heartbreak itself.
About 15 years ago I noticed that I was being avoidant in certain situations. Not major stuff but, like, being nervous asking a Target employee where I could find detergent.. I call this "micro fear."
I bought a baseball pitch counter and carried it around for a week. Every time I caught myself being avoidant, I clicked the pitch counter. It ended up being a few dozen.
After that I decided to try reversing my behavior. I would go to Target and make it a goal to ask where I could find things, even if I already knew where they were.
Within a week I felt my background anxiety falling through the floor. I'm still avoidant sometimes, but only like 10% of what it used to be.
Note: I was never diagnosed with an anxiety disorder, and I don't think I had one. I'm just an introvert who got too comfortable staying in my technology bubble.
Hi, I wrote the review of Effective altruism/rationalism, and really want to hear what people think of it. No reason is required to not be selected, I assume all finalists are great of course.
But I hoped it would start a real debate about how to institutionalise the movements in a less illiberal and elitist way. Instead, I haven't even seen it mentioned in a comment. I want to understand why:
1. It landed as obvious (we've noticed the skulls). In this case I want to hear whether everyone knows this is a big problem, eg sick of the discussion, or if the reason is that you think it is not actually a problem.
2. It landed as wrong/misguided. Please argue
3. It landed as rude/arrogant, poorly written or not the right kind of text. Feel free to give feedback
To me (obviously, that's why I wrote it) what I point to really is a problem on the ground, so I want to hear people's arguments
Wondering if I should go ahead and publish my review (which didn't make it into Scott's post) and thank the people calling it out in these comments, or keep to anonymity on the off chance the review gets elevated into a last-minute honorable mention position, as it did previously.
Either way, I'm really pleased with the quality of the reviews as a whole, and that there are loads of people in these comments calling out reviews other than these 10+ finalists and honorable mentions as their favorites. Obviously I'm sad mine didn't make it, but to see even one person name it as their favorite still warms my heart. See you next year!
Logistics continue to be a crucial element to warfighting.
https://jsargentr.substack.com/p/last-week-in-logistics-16-june-to
"Strikes against Russian industrial capacity continue. The Nevinnomyssky Azot fertilizer plant in Stavropol Krai, one of the top producers of ammonia and nitrogen fertilizers in the country, halted production after drone attacks. Another attack was charted in Orenberg, 1500km from Ukraine, and likely home to strategic missile base. In an effort to blunt the drone campaign, authorities cut mobile services to vast swathes of Russian territory. It ends up being a map of strategic priorities. Oops."
My plan had been to review Fresh Fruit for Rotting Vegetables by Dead Kennedys, but other projects took enough of my time that once I got to the writing stage I quickly deduced I wouldn't be able to finish by the deadline. Perhaps I will do something on a related subject for a later contest.
I've gathered the courage and agency to start writing about Agency, and my path to understanding it: https://onlyluck.substack.com/p/good-luck
Maybe someone will find value in my exploration, and by subscribing, serve as an external motivator for me to write more.
Would love to see Bukele promoted to finalist! Thought it was really interesting, with analysis by someone living in the country of interest and well written. Have discussed it with several people in real life since reading it. Definitely keen to read and discuss further.
The Musk Algorithm was also great distillation of real world experience.
I really blew it on the review. I didn't read the contest note clearly and started work on an actual book review. DQ! I'll finish it up when I have time and get it in early next year.
Tried to play catch up with a review of Milgram's obedience experiment, in the context of popular fictional character archetypes, but spring is not a good time for writing in my line of work (Apple Grower). I'll finish and post that sometime, but I was off to a good start.
EC/VC lawyer here. Happy to connect if you still need help drafting/structuring.
Good contest, there were some really thought-provoking entries in the ones I read - and I got to very few of the ones that ended up being finalists, so I still have plenty more to look forward to.
I wrote the Skibidi Toilet review. I had a ton of fun writing it, glad it got some positive reception and informed some people about one corner of the vast and weird landscape of modern storytelling. :) I'll post a polished-up version to my own blog soon.
To the commenters who vocalized a disdain for learning anything about the topic or even being vaguely compelled to think about it: Hey, your time is your own and you should spend it as you see fit. Maybe next year, you can write a review of rank cowardice so the rest of us can decide if it's right for us.
Amen.
Iran has had their militarily capacity greatly degraded in recent weeks/months. Setting their nuclear program aside, we know that their air defense and missile launching capabilities have been largely curtailed. However, if somebody thinks this is a great time for regime change coming from within--which is the only place it should come from, self-determination being near sacrosanct to me--I have this thought. The security and police apparatus that is so effective at keeping the Iranian people from succeeding at their protests is roughly intact.
So, any notion that we are suddenly in good position for a popular counter-revolution in Iran had better buckle-up, because it will be a rough ride. Sure is fun and easy to bomb targets--and eventually that means people--but intervening to help a local/national uprising does not appear to be on anyone's menu. Presidents that say "go ahead, we have your back" have not been credible, and so should be taken with salt.
Inviting such an action through a preemptive leadership decapitation action would be a black swan sitting on a black box. no-one knows what will happen squared. Not a great comp, but no one seems very happy about Libya post-Ghaddaffi (mostly due to Wagner/Russian interference, IMO), but Iran is a much higher base-rate competence country that Libya was, so who knows.
Still, don't do it.
> However, if somebody thinks this is a great time for regime change coming from within--which is the only place it should come from, self-determination being near sacrosanct to me--
If it comes from without, how is that any less self-determination than what they have now? Iran isn't a real democracy. Anyone living their is having their life determined by someone else as it is.
Okay, let me address your 3 points in reverse order. 3: Well, all societies have either rules or anarchy, so yes, other people have a lot to say about how you live. Not much for me to disagree with there. 2: Iran not a democracy? Not generally thought of as one, and yet...they do have elections that have actual political consequence. Yes, the Mullah branch controls who is allowed to run, but within that scheme there are still extremists and moderates--the current PM being the most moderate candidate in the last election. They also have women with the right to vote since 1963! Not bad. On the whole, I rate them as slightly less democratic than Israel, which would have a considerably higher grade if so many of their residents weren't denied citizenship/suffrage. But I digress.
3: They got pretty pissed off in Tehran when a woman was murdered in police custody. They went to the streets and made a very big deal of it, and were beaten, jailed and even killed for their trouble. These people want something better, and I hope they can find their way to it, although right now might not be the ideal time. I will say that in the photos of Iran after the bombings, of the people I see only ~half the women have their hair covered, the rest don't like that.
I once heard on some news show a dissident in Syria--this was 10+ya--say that Assad would fall when Syrians made him fall, and any other interference was quite possibly disastrously unhelpful. His preference has aged well.
That's probably why Israel has been targeting low to mid level police and police leadership recently. I understand they have been intentionally assassinating the equivalent of the local police captains, though I haven't seen a lot of detail on it.
Well, shit...They are setting up for a decapitation, if so. What are your sources?
Today there were strikes on the Basij (a group of state-sanctioned gangs who beat and rape women who protest the regime), and a notorious political-prison: https://www.timesofisrael.com/liveblog_entry/israel-confirms-hitting-basij-hq-evin-prison-destruction-of-israel-clock-in-tehran/. Not sure about police-assassinations...
I thought this was an excellent take-down of Curtis Yarvin's recent allegation that the Allies starved hundreds of thousands of German prisoners of war to death in 1945:
https://arctotherium.substack.com/p/right-wing-pseudohistory-part-1
Yarvin's original X thread was done in excellent Yarvin form, replete with rhetorical wink-winks and "if you read any real history, this wouldn't be a surprise" vibes. I admit to hoping it was complete BS, but trying to hold my judgement for a while, and I'm glad someone did what seems to be a thorough and even-handed job of refuting it.
I agree that Yarvin is, oh gee, let’s just call him a bozo for the sake of brevity, but arctotherium goes on to carp about ‘the elevation of the Tulsa race riot to a massacre’ in his conclusion by citing an article in The Unz Review which is edited by Ron Unz, who per Wikipedia is an antisemitic holocaust denier and a white nationalist so I won’t take arctotherium’s word as gospel.
The German POWs in Texas and Oklahoma had such a pleasant time working on local farms that some returned for reunions, for years.
It is an excellent takedown.
Yarvin is very capable at *sounding* like he's deeply knowledgeable about a given topic. So it helps to apply actual logic to his nonsense.
.....
This is bad. The author is bad. To be fair, I *think* Yarvin is trolling.
We know that former Nazis were treated incredibly poorly and anyone familiar with sources from the period would be aware of it. My personal familiarity of this comes from the diaries of John Rabe, the Nazi who is credited of with personally saving 250k Chinese during the Rape of Nanking. You can read his wiki here (1), watch a trailer for the movie about his life here with Steve Buscemi (2), and buy his diaries under the title "The Good Man of Nanking", which I would recommend.
We know he was basically starved to death. We know this from his diaries but we also know his situation was so dire that in 1948 the mayor of Nanjing traveled through Switzerland to Germany and the people of Nanjing sent him food until his death. Allow me to repeat, a ~64 year-old humanitarian was essentially starved so badly that the people of Nanjing China, during the Civil War and Maoist period, were sending him food. If that was happening to an old humanitarian Nazi bureaucrat...yeah, I can imagine some pretty bad stuff occurring to actual soldiers.
Yarvin is bad here because I *think* he's basically trolling and this is Trump's Hatian cats all over again, where there probably was not a million person execution of captured German soldiers but their living standards and treatment was probably pretty horrific and now we're all talking about this. Yarvin *probably* wants this because it serves his purposes for the Skeletor of the 20th century to be Communists, not Nazis.
This response is worse. It presents no actual evidence except official statistics provided by the very people accused of genocide/abuse, cribbed from a book written by some other guy. Give Yarvin this, I believe he's actually read and interacted with direct sources and now he's spinning/trolling to get clicks and influence. This bozo just cribbed a book someone else wrote about it with, I don't want to say no evidence, but certainly not persuasive evidence. You just...if someone accuses the Soviets or the Maoists or the Japanese of genocide, it is not persuasive to show official Soviet or Maoist or Japanese figures declaring that they totally didn't commit a genocide. The bar is low but you have to actually cross it.
Please don't share stuff like this in the future. It was dumb and it made me angry.
(1) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Rabe
(2) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4IPnkLA5__Y
John Rabe was not in any of the prisoner camps. He was starving as a civilian, and as the author made very clear a *lot* of people were starving and going without food in Europe in 1948. John Rabe going hungry as a civilian in Berlin is not evidence that hundreds of thousands of Germans were starved to death in Allied prisoner camps.
The author makes a lot of good points. If this happened, why doesn't anybody claim that it happened until 1989? Why did the West German commission whose sole job was to track down every German that died during or after the war not find hundreds of thousands of starved prisoners? Where is the evidence that such a thing occured? Yarvin doesn't seem to present any.
I read it too, and there are reasons for concern with this author (like, defending residential camps, calling Tulsa a 'race riot?). But the most compelling stats he drew from came from the West German government of the 60's and 70's.
Sounds like the guy is out of ideas and pretty desperate to get attention.
EDIT: Or maybe, if this is intentional, he decided to target a dumber audience than previously. Now the ideas are less abstract and more dramatic, and there is less need for plausibility.
I wrote the Deathbed Ballads review. It didn't make the cut, but least one person seems to have liked it, which I appreciate. Last year, I reviewed Martin Luther's "Bondage of the Will", which looks like it narrowly missed the Honorable Mentions, and I got some good feedback on it after the fact which I still plan on using to make a revised version to publish elsewhere.
Some other topics I considered reviewing this year:
"Taxman" by The Beatles. I wrote a paper in college analyzing this song and tracing out specific references in it to elements of the UK tax system in the 1960s. I think it would only need minor reworking, but I thought the same of my college paper on Bondage of the Will last year and had wound up redoing it from scratch. I decided against it because it was much more of an analysis than a review.
"Identity", a YouTube video where the creator, Abigail Thorn, comes out as a trans woman to her audience after already being established as a moderately big-name YouTuber before starting her transition I watched it a few months into my own transition and found it very moving and applicable. I think it's very well-made and has a number of subtle details I'd be interested in talking about. I decided against reviewing it mostly because I didn't think I could do so anonymously: I have been very active in comments discussions here about trans issues and have cited Identity more than once in those discussions.
Analysing songs from the American Civil War as a corpus for hints at how soldiers thought about the conduct and motivations of the war. I had originally chosen this as my topic and started writing it, but abandoned and pivoted to what I hoped would be a lighter topic because it was very quickly turning out to be too verbose and research-heavy. Not sure how successful I was (gestures vaguely at my 14000 word actual submission). It was also shaping up to be too much an essay and not enough a review.
One other topic I won't share publicly. The reason I didn't review it this year is because it overlaps substantially with a book review I want to do in a future year and I think it works better if I review the book than later than if I review one major topic discussed in the book now.
That was one of the few reviews I read, thank you for the write-up "Tie me Kangaroo".
Just too much overall material, I was overwhelmed.
Taxman. 1 for you 19 for me. Pretty easy to understand complaint. Even for a kid who had yet to pay any taxes in 1966. One of George’s pre-metaphysical songs. No sitar in that one.
Can anyone here who supports the Israeli and American war against Iran explain to me your reasoning? I'm kind of baffled by the support for it. AFAIK the official rationale of Israel/America is that Iran is building a nuclear weapon and so they're engaging in self-defense to stop them, but U.S intelligence says they're not building nukes https://apnews.com/article/us-iran-nuclear-intelligence-b506d130e474c00f6bd653d3d5a8d31a . In particular I would like to know
1. Whether you think Iran is actually building a nuclear weapon
2. Whether you think the war against Iran is legal under international law
3. Whether you think diplomatic alternatives to war have been adequately explored
4. Whether you think regime change is viable and desirable
I think that one habit people really need to get out of is calling governments by the names of their countries, and vice versa. We need to distinguish between "Iran", which is a huge country of 90 million people, and "The Iranian Government", which is a random bunch of unelected thugs that happens to control a capital city.
The morality here is not in question -- when you have an unelected government ruling over a country, it's moral for absolutely anybody, no matter how foreign or humble, to kill any element of that government.
What I don't get is why the US joined in. They had Israel already doing their dirty work for them. They just needed to supply weapons, which they already do and is not against international law, and intelligence, I'm not sure about the law for that but it can be done discreetly. I don't think that would grant them any sort of moral high ground, but it seems like the pragmatic thing to do.
Because the US has deep bunker busting weapons and Israel doesn't (and they can't just hand them over, since they require B2s to deploy which only the US has). For the US it was a cheap free option to finish off buried iranian nuclear sites for free.
The US is signalling to its peer enemies. Iran itself is immaterial, other than they made an easy target (through losses of Hezbollah/Syria/Lebanon).
> is not against international law,
I don't think this is a consideration, beyond telling your press office to replace references to "international law" with "rules-based international order" in the statements when you decide to flout it (or at least what you're saying it is when you're citing it against Russia or something).
It has signaling value. TACO Trump is not a good look on the world stage, and Israel basically tossed Trump a perfect alley-oop.
1. This is somewhat underspecified, which has led to a lot of confusion. Is Iran physically building a nuclear bomb, in the sense of "shaping a collection of 90% enriched Uranium, explosives and various other stuff to be able to produce nuclear yield?" Probably not just yet. But they're definitely doing a lot of stuff that is clearly intended to give them the capability to do that in short order. And from a practical standpoint, we should treat this about the same as one of those people who buys a maybe-not-a-gun-kit that you need to file like three things down to turn into a working gun, even if you can technically argue that "they aren't building a bomb".
2. Yes, so far as international law is a real thing (which it mostly isn't). Iran fired several hundred missiles at Israel in April 2024. That is an act of war by any definition, and there has been no peace agreement since then.
3. What diplomatic alternatives? Iran doesn't want to give up the program, and since Trump tore up the deal in his first term, there hasn't been a good way to get them back in.
4. Desirable? Probably, because the current regime is pretty bad. Viable? Much less so. The record of doing that from the air is not particularly good.
To be clear, I'm not saying I think it was a good idea. It's put Israel in an extremely awkward position where they basically have to keep bombing Iran forever, and that's not a great place to be. The US might be able to get out of it, although that heavily depends on the next few days. But I can also understand Israel feeling like they don't have a lot of options, given Iran's continued sponsorship of programs to make them not exist. Diplomacy is often messy.
Disclaimer, I'm Israeli.
We think there's a profound asymmetry in that Iran's ruling regime is really invested in annihilating Israel (the word they often use), and we are not at all invested in somehow erasing Iran from the map. This goes way beyond posture/rhetoric, in that Iran has for the past 45 years consistently funded/trained terrorist groups operating near and inside Israel, and encouraged state actors under its partial control to more hostility against Israel, creating a metaphorical "ring of fire" around it. As a partial list, these are Hizbullah, Hamas, and the regimes of Asad in Syria and Houthis in Yemen.
Israelis sincerely believe that if Iran got a nuclear bomb, the ayatollahs might well be crazy enough to first-strike it against us, even though we'd surely nuke them back (I understand that some reasonable people disagree with this, but it's possible that they underappreciate the investment Iran's made into anti-Israeli activities over the last half-century, to no apparent benefit to their nation). I believe that no reasonable outside observers would put any non-negligible probability on Israel first-striking Iran with nuclear weapons.
So, Israelis broadly agree that Iran getting nukes is an existential threat, even though they might disagree about its size. Netanyahu in particular has made a decades-long career of distracting voters from whatever domestic problems he's mired in by talking about Iran's existential threat, and the substantial part of the population that's fed up with him is really tired of it. NEVERTHELESS, even people who suspect Netanyahu of always maneuvering political decisions towards his own benefit, are still giving the government (and the army and intelligence, especially) the benefit of the doubt, because they feel that anything we can do to prevent Iran from getting nukes is vitally important.
1. Yeah, getting 60% enriched uranium was tough and expensive and they don't need it for anything else
2. I'm not sure. I think it's not more illegal than e.g. the US attacking Iraq, and I think it's definitely less illegal than Russia attacking Ukraine (because that's a war of territorial conquest, which is much much worse than "merely" waging war, both in terms of UN statute and common sense)
3. Hard to say
4. Basically the appetite grows with the eating, somewhat cynically. First two days of the war, no one was thinking of regime change, but Israel has achieved air superiority to a much greater degree, and saw much fewer victims of Iranian missiles, than planned for. Israelis think that most Iranians are fed up with the regime and that it's autocratic, oppressive and undemocratic, but we don't have regime change as a goal in itself, only insofar as it'd (possibly, uncertainly) help remove a brutal and dangerous enemy which the current regime is. It's not clear how viable regime change is, everyone says no one's ever achieved it by bombing and they're probably right; the level of discontent within the country might help but will probably not be enough absent further dramatic developments.
1. Yeah, almost certainly. We follow the converging lines of evidence, right? Iran has had a "peaceful, civilian" nuclear program for decades and have produced:
a) three heavily-guarded and secretive enrichment facilities, one of which was dug into a mountain.
b) zero civilian nuclear reactors.
c) 400kg of 60%-enriched uranium. I.e., the sort of fissile material that no one would ever create unless they wanted to build a weapon.
Everyone agrees on all of this; everyone agrees that their breakout time has been measured in the weeks for a while; everyone knows they could put together and detonate a dirty bomb if they wanted. The only question is whether they're pushing for weaponization (i.e., building a ballistic-/hypersonic-deliverable warhead): Israeli intelligence said yes; American intelligence said no. Eli Lake & Justin Logan had a good debate on the Moynihan Report podcast (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4VtZy6flYJA) which went over similar grounds, and Lake made the point: look at all that the Mossad has accomplished in Iran. They set up a drone factory, called a bunch of high-level generals to an insecure meeting *against explicit orders*, they destroyed anti-air batteries on the ground—Israeli intelligence networks are very deeply entrenched in the regime. American intelligence, on the other hand, well, https://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/usa-spies-iran/. So I think we have good reason to trust the Israelis when they say Iran was actually breaking out, was actually pushing for a weapon.
(One more reason in this direction: the damage to the Axis of Resistance over the past months has been totally disastrous for the regime. They feel much less safe, and it's not unreasonable to think they'd make a last-ditch push for a nuclear deterrent.)
2. Israel and Iran have been in a state of war since October 7, 2023... If we want to play the "who struck first?" game, Iran doesn't win. I think it's a dumb game to play, though, and the strike can simply be justified as a preemptive, preventive measure against the Iranian nuclear threat (see [1]).
3. I do. The best Trump could've done would've been a rewrite of the JCPOA which absolutely did slow Iranian progress toward a bomb... but it did absolutely nothing about (exacerbated, in fact) Iranian support for awful, destabilizing terror networks. Iran is responsible for much of the carnage in Yemen, Lebanon, Syria, and, in fact, Iraq, not to mention Israel & Palestine. This oversight was bad; the terror networks were enabled when we lifted sanctions without sufficiently strict conditions. At worst, this war will put pressure on the Ayatollah to accede to a worse deal.
4. It's absolutely desirable—90 million people are suffering under a terrible authoritarian regime. Whether it's viable is another question: Haviv Rettig Gur (an excellent Israeli historian & journalist) made an appearance on Sam Harris' podcast the other day, and he said something like, "for 40 years, the regime has done nothing but suppress opposition groups. Their one job internally has been to make it impossible for dissidents to offer a realistic, well-organized alternative." I think there's a lot of truth in that, and it makes this very difficult. Because a ground op + occupation is not a good idea! I mean, the logistics alone... [https://deepleft.substack.com/p/against-war-with-iran]. Any sort of regime change will have to be homegrown. I think Israel and the US should make the environment as friendly to it as possible, and Reza Pahlavi should advertise himself to Iranians directly, and so on—but it's ultimately all up to the Iranian people. Israel should be sure to hit only legitimate targets (especially things like the Basij headquarters [https://www.timesofisrael.com/liveblog_entry/israel-confirms-hitting-basij-hq-evin-prison-destruction-of-israel-clock-in-tehran/], which was a very good move) to minimize rally-around-the-flag effects. But that's really all they can (should) do to help.
I think you might need to split this into two responses. One for the US, and the other for Israel. I'm not sure how you could possibly determine that Israel *doesn't* have a "legal" right to declare war against a country that's spent decades supporting multiple terrorist organizations with the primary purpose of destroying Israel, who also recently sent hundreds of missiles directly against Israel. If that's not casus belli then what possibly could be?
As for the other points, Israel couldn't do worse with a different regime, especially if it was popular with the Iranian people (the current regime is not). And diplomacy with a country willing to spend billions on a "we're going to exterminate your people" platform every year seems like a non-starter.
As for the nuclear program - it's just about incontrovertible that Iran has built the capacity to make a nuclear weapon and separately the capacity to mount a nuclear warhead on a mid range missile. They even made a point to show off the missiles and the payload size a few years ago. Whether they have or will take the more minor steps to complete a nuclear warhead and attach it to an existing missile is not known. This is in the face of multiple countries telling them to stop in very serious tones. That they are a major sponsor of international terrorism, including against the US and its allies, makes even the possibility of nuclear armament a significant concern for anyone on the potential receiving end of a nuclear strike.
The responses to you about number 2 in particular ("international law is fake", "the US should not be subject to international law") disturb me and tend to reinforce my opposition to the war if this is the sort of thinking that characterizes relatively thoughtful supporters of it.
Can you elaborate on your thinking on international law? Why are those arguments not thoughtful?
My steelman of those arguments.
Law: a binding custom or practice of a community : a rule of conduct or action prescribed or formally recognized as binding or enforced by a controlling authority [1]
Looking at the defiition I see there are two ways for a (international) law to be recognized at least de facto. Either a binding custom or practice and/or a controlling authority. As there is no world government, I think I can say there is controlling authority so international law doesn't meet that definition. I would argue that a controlling authority is needed for there to be any law, but I will ignore it so I can address the other part; a binding custom or practice.
I do not claim to know all of the treaties and agreements that the United States has signed. The United States is an UN member so has at least agreed to live by the UN Charter.[2] Article 2 of the UN Charter starts as "The Organization and its Members, in pursuit of the Purposes stated in Article 1, shall act in accordance with the following Principles." Bullets 3 and 4 are most germane to whether military force can be used.
3) All Members shall settle their international disputes by peaceful means in such a manner that international peace and security, and justice, are not endangered.
4) All Members shall refrain in their international relations from the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of any state, or in any other manner inconsistent with the Purposes of the United Nations.
The above are supportive that the US may have acted contrary to the UN Charter. But there are two counterarguments.
a) Iran has been attacking US and Israel for the last 45 or so years through proxies. The proxies (Hamas, Hezbollah, Houthis, etc) give Iran some deniability. I guess if one does not accept those proxies are actually supported by Iran that may mean the US is acting badly. But I don't think anybody would argue that because there is so much evidence that Iran is the key (only?) backer of at least the 3 proxies I named.
So, it looks like Iran has been consistently violating 2.3 and 2.4 of the UN Charter. What should the US and Israel do to defend itself? I argue the US and Israel have legitimate reasons to attack Iran with military force.
b) Article 2 is making no claims to be a law. It itself says "principles" and not law or even rule. As the charter was likely debated for a long time, I don't think this is an oversight. So article 2 is not claiming to be law.
So, potentially article 2 can be used to justify the customs and practice part of being law. But also potentially, article 2 was written to give it the veneer of being a law, but the wording itself does not resemble a de jure law. Thus, I would say article 2 is not meant to bind any of the countries. I make this argument because I think the "customs and practices" are meant to address laws that are created by common law (or similar customs in non-Anglio phile world). So is there a custom to not militarily attack other countries? I think it is a worthwhile goal, but almost since the UN Charter's inception, countries have attacked other countries militarily. Russia attacking Czechoslovakia, North Korea attacking South Korea. US becoming militarily engaged in Vietnam. I think there is more evidence that Article 2 is a great ideal, but not really a binding custom or practice.
If the US or Israel has signed on to other treaties and agreements that limit use of their respective militaries, I would love to learn about them.
[1] https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/law
[2] https://www.un.org/en/about-us/un-charter/full-text
I appreciate this comment, because I've felt a bit baffled as well but in the opposite direction. It's one of those situations where you listen to someone who disagrees with you and feel lost for how to engage. But after listening to a few podcasts and articles written by people who are opposed to the war, I think I understand why the two sides seem so far apart from each other.
It really all comes down to the Obama Iran deal and whether you think it was stopping Iran from building nuclear weapons. People who support the war think that it was a terrible deal because it wouldn't stop them from making weapons, and people who oppose the war seem to think it did stop them from making weapons and would continue to stop them. I've heard several commentors say something along the lines of:
1. The Obama Iran deal stopped Iran from getting nukes.
2. Trump tore up the deal, and failed to negotiate a new one.
3. Therefore, this war is not actually about Iran getting nukes.
It makes sense if you believe premise one, but people on my side don't and didn't. I remember back when Obama made the Iran deal all the commentators I would read and listen to were in agreement that it gave Iran too much and didn't do enough to get rid of Iran's ability to make a bomb. That maybe Iran would pause it's development, but the deal would leave Iran's ability to start up weapon production again any time they wanted with little ability to stop them. If I recall correctly that was the primary reason why the Republicans in Congress refused to vote for the treaty, which is why Obama had to make the deal as a non-binding executive action (which is why Trump could just toss it when he was elected).
We know that Iran had developed the facilities needed to create nuclear weapons. There's a reason they put the centrifuges under a mountain; it was so that Israel couldn't destroy it. You don't put civilian nuclear power equipment in a bunker under a mountain! Them getting to keep all that equipment and the capability to enrich uranium was not acceptable to our side, and certainly not acceptable to Trump. We are not going to just trust that Iran isn't going to use it going forward, even if they aren't using it right now.
So to answer your point 1: Whether they were in the process of building a nuke, they had the ability to create a nuke and Trump has been very clear for years that Iran having that ability is not acceptable. Yet in our negotiations with Iran they have made it clear that they will not accept any deal that removes their ability to enrich uranium. If they're not going to agree to it, then giving Israel the go ahead to take those facilities out (and then using our bunker busters on the ones Israel can't hit) is our BATNA.
As for your other points:
2. I don't know and I don't really care. If the actions violate a treaty that the US and Israel has signed then I may care, but "International Law" in general is not something I think the US should be subject to. Besides, was Iran following international law all these years as they have funded the Houthis, Hezbollah, and Hamas?
3. Yes, I think diplomatic alternatives have been adequately explored. Iran made it clear that they would not accept any agreement that removes their ability to enrich uranium, and Trump will not accept any agreement that lets them keep that ability.
4. I think regime change could potentially be desirable. The Ayatollah is an evil man who is the head of an oppressive state that openly wishes for the destruction of the United States and many of our allies. A regime that is less evil, less oppressive, and not actively hostile to US interests would be great! The question is how viable that is, which I'm not sure of. In any case, regime change or no they now no longer have the ability to enrich uranium. If regime change is necessary to keep them from re-obtaining that ability, then regime change may be required.
1) Yes, I'd say with ~90% certainty. Otherwise, why would Israel and the US have attacked? Public reports like the one you linked aren't worth the paper they're printed on, the actual intel is likely all classified. Any side can say whatever they want. What matters is the ACTIONS they take. The US and Israel bombing Iran, despite the significant risks, is a pretty strong signal that there was credible intel that they were building a nuclear weapon. Iran refusing to sign a new nuclear deal with the US (despite crippling sanctions) is another strong signal that they are genuinely trying to build a nuclear weapon. ~10% uncertainty because honestly nobody really knows what is actually going on behind the scenes here and there are still technically plausible (though less likely) reasons to believe otherwise; I just think they're unconvincing.
2) International law is mostly fake and doesn't really mean anything. The US has veto power (de facto and de jure, depending on the particular arena) in most matters of international policy anyways. I don't put any stock here.
3) Yes and no, yes in that I think it's possible that a diplomatic policy that conceded much much more to Iran could have possibly succeeded, no in that I don't think that we could have achieved the results we really wanted (stronger guarantees they won't ever try to make nuclear weapons) at this point.
4) Viable? Yes with low confidence, the Iranian government seems pretty competant at staying in power for now, but they're obviously incompetent in a hundred other ways that might make it eaiser. I'd guess regime change would be harder than Sadaam's Iraq, easier than doing it in e.g. China or Russia. Desireable? Medium confidence, the Iranian government is pretty awful as far as governments go so any change would have a good chance of being better in general; but it's still a roll of the dice. There are good reasons to want it to happen and there are good reasons to be more cautious and hope for slow internal reform.
Why would Israel have attacked otherwise? Some variant of the following: Netanyahu wants/needs to stay in power, and he has figured that his best way of keeping a coalition together, and of mitigating the widespread unpopularity of himself and his government, is as a wartime leader rather than a peacetime leader. At the very least, I don't think it's safe to reason from the premise that Netanyahu is acting in Israel's best interests, rather than in his own perceived best interests.
It's worth noting that he's under no particular political threat at the moment (his coalition is pretty much in line), and starting a war now in the hopes of it helping with an election in a year and a half seems counterproductive (if that were his reasoning he'd have preferred it closer to the election).
As I mentioned, I think there are plausible reasons (yours is one of many I've heard), but I don't think they are as likely or convincing as the far more trivial answer, which is that Iran really is trying to build a nuclear weapon and Israel/US really are trying to stop them.
The Israeli planning and groundwork for these attacks go back almost a decade. Israel was waiting for a window where Hezbollah no longer was a constraint on preemption. The opening of Syrian airspace also greatly helped the logistics (midair refueling closer to Iran). It's not like Bibi woke up a few weeks ago, looked at his poll numbers, and decided to Leeroy Jenkins the IDF into Iran.
That's an entirely different point. It's still not safe to reason from the premise that Netanyahu is acting in Israel's best interests, rather than in his own perceived best interests. If you have other reasons, you can put them in response to the original question!
I beleive I answered the question: Israel judged Iran was still a massive threat and had an ideal opportunity to attack before its proxies could regroup. Even some of his political opponents are cheering the outcome so far; Bibi is far from the only hawk in Israel.
This is all good stuff. I agree you answered the original question, but I still don't understand why it's relevant to what I said, rather than to the original question itself.
But attacking Iran without good reason would make him less popular, not more so. This smells more and more like a conspiracy theory.
"But attacking Iran without good reason would make him less popular, not more so."
I have absolutely no confidence that this is true.
I am not unambiguously in favor, but I'm on the other side of your arguments?
I think that Iran can clearly see that they will only be safe from hostile foreign action after they have nukes, so they are building nukes. We know they are working on nuclear power, they say it's for civilian purposes, I assume it's for nuclear missiles because they would need to be really stupid to trust that they would be safe without nuclear missiles - see North Korea and Ukraine for the relevant contrast.
I assume the war against Iran is illegal under international law but I don't respect international law; I think the Iran hostage crisis forty years ago is a sufficient casus belli if the requirement is "only invade governments who act badly", but nobody is using it. We're just saying "we want you not to build nukes, so we're invading," and this seems like... honestly a better excuse than "only invade governments who act badly"?
I think we spent twenty years exploring diplomatic alternatives to war, but I also think they are pointless. Neither the Republicans nor the Democrats can be trusted to keep their side of the bargain, so obviously the Iranians won't keep a bargain they don't expect us to keep, and there's really nothing we can pay them worth more to them than being able to nuke attackers.
Regime change is viable (in that there's a loud opposition that protests the government regularly) and desirable (in that the current government seems worse than the opposition). The question is if it is worth paying the immense cost in treasure and blood that would be needed to achieve it, and if foreign intervention will make that cost "World War Three" instead of anything that could be worth paying, and those questions I don't know the answers to.
The nuke thing seems to be a grey area..apparently they have a lot of semi enriched Uranium.
Great ?'s
1: Yeah, I mean, sure, they want one and are putting things in place to finish. Plus, the ballistic missles are ready. But no, they do not have one or they would have tested it and obviated all of this.
2: no, way no, but when has that stopped anyone?
3: Hell to the N-O. Sure, Iran was 'stalling,' but so what? our demands were pretty high (give up all enrichment) and unless you think they were stalling so they could finish the bomb, more time should have been given. (also see staying in JCPOA)
4: Of course, the beautiful people of Iran deserve better, but it's not about deserve. Self-determination is my moral touchstone in these matters, and the people of Iran have managed this before and can do it again.
Of course the current regime is the consequence of a revolution.
How is any of this different from what a supporter of the Iraq war would have said in response to the same questions?
I hit send a little too early. By "of course" to #4, read "Hell no!" Tried to put this in the subtext, but needed another sentence.
Supporters of the Iraq war, which I remember well, would answer 1: yes, 2: yes 3: yes 4: yes
My answers were 1: yes --(the difference being that we know that they enriched beyond civil use vs all evidence in Iraq pointing otherwise) 2: no 3: no 4: no, with the caveat that the people of Iran could really prosper--lots of intellectual talent there--post Ayatollah.
So those are very different answers. I opposed the Iraq war then, and the Iranian bombing now, sorry for the ambiguity.
Fair enough, I was really just responding to #2 and #4, and your clarification to #4 obviously changes things. Point taken about #3.
Regarding #2, I remember things a little differently---while there was some pretense about legality, it was hard to take that seriously (it was basically the same as the pretense in this case, that the war is preemptive) and it always seemed to me that fundamentally proponents of the Iraq war arrogated the right to themselves to intervene regardless of international law (just as they are doing with Iran here).
Also, yes, I took you to be supporting this war, sorry for not reading more carefully. It was the fact that you were answering the OPs questions (which were directed to supporters) led me to presume that.
Just read the comment again, I see now it was SPECIFICALLY not addressed towards me. Oops.
I had no thought of anything to review, and am too lazy anyway. If anything it would have been either roadside rest areas or mission-style gas stations, and that’s been done to death I’m sure.
So kudos to all for your creativity in coming up with novel subjects .
I am always tardy in knowing myself, in this case realizing that that Google doc was the thing I was born to review, and savagely.
My house burned down in the terrible Rowena fire in The Dalles, Oregon. Around 60 homes were destroyed in the wildfire, which is suspected to have been started by the cargo train that passes through the area. I was out of town for work at the time and was not able to get home to gather anything. While all my possessions were destroyed, whats more devastating is loss of my beautiful cat, Yuka. I don't know if he remembers this, but Scott played with and complimented Yuka after a meetup in Portland, I want to say in 2020 but the exact date escapes me.
I have been reading this blog for a long time, but I post rarely so I'm not sure if this is an appropriate place to share this. I was urged by many of my friends to make a GoFundMe. This probably doesn't fall under effective altruism. I'm blessed to have a good job and lots of support around me, but dealing with the insurance company is very stressful and anything donated here contributes to my peace of mind. I'm trying to hold what is here off to the side in case the insurance comes through, and if it does I'll be donating anything here to other families in my neighborhood, many of whom did not have insurance and are a lot worse off than me. (I read these open threads so often, but I'm not sure I've seen a GoFundMe so if this is a bad place for this, someone in charge let me know and I'll remove it)
https://gofund.me/0e769de1
Well shit, very sorry to hear all of that.
Thank you. All things considered, I'm doing okay mentally, but I am starting to feel the stress as I get into it with the insurance company. I'm planning on talking to a lawyer this week and that should help ease my mind a bit. From my experience talking to a lawyer can only help.
I'm shocked that my two favorites among the 28 reviews I read did not make it into the finalists/honorable mentions:
- Two years of parenthood [a father's perspective]
- The emperor of all maladies [cancer and the history of its treatments]
For those wanting to read the best reviews, I highly recommend visiting those, presumably in addition to the ones Scott mentioned.
This is the second year that The Emperor of All Maladies didn't make it. I thought it deserved to be a finalist last year, so naturally I would have liked to see it be a finalist this year as well. However, it was a book review in a "not a book review" contest so I could see it getting penalized for that.
Oh no, JFK Conspiracies lost! I liked that one, it was clever and insightful.
I did too! It was easily the most fun to read...
There's something that I find really suspicious about the claims of the danger of AI that Scott makes, and some of the posts Scott makes, which I think makes claims of the danger of AI less believable.
Like in the AI 2027 scenario Scott endorsed, even the aligned scenario is pretty dystopic (a small group of people with all the power, no real guarantees of good outcomes despite the scenario trying to paint over it imagining a luxury future). Since both scenarios are pretty bad, and specially since there's a large given chance of the worst scenario, someone who believes them should be expected to oppose AI with all their power, trying to slow it down as much as possible, as early as possible, to improve the end results.
Honestly I'd expect anyone who thinks AI is very likely to go catastrophically wrong, and who cares about morality at all, to be radically militant in their opposition to AI, probably spending most of their wealth in measures against it, after all if the AI gets as powerful as it's claimed, there's no turning back, and the damage would be tremendous. So do we see this kind of opposition?
Obviously there's parts of this opposition that we can't see just looking at Scott's blog, but what I'm confused by is posts like "The Colors Of Her Coat", or the "Make A Personalized AI Kids’ Book" mentioned here (which I haven't read, but from the title can infer its bent). These kinds of posts serve as propaganda for AI, helping hype it up and promoting a positive view of it, which seems really incongruent with thinking the AI will be very likely bad. If AI is so likely to be catastrophic, why is he using his blog, which probably is a large part of the political capital he can use to exert influence, to make posts to say "ooh look how pretty the pictures the computer makes". Surely if it's a matter of such import, any influence we can wield to make the chance of bad AI go down is useful, and any influence that can increase the chance should be avoided.
If Scott thinks the chance of bad ai is so great, and such a big threat, why does he still make posts like that? even if they help shift attitudes only a smidge, given the stakes it still should be taken into account. shouldn't he avoid making them, or even retroactively erase them? even more, why doesn't he try to make posts that help build opposition to AI, like he has never really gone into the economic arguments against AI, which is very relevant for artists. All of this seems at best like a strategic blunder, and at worst, evidence of bad faith. Why should we believe the hyperbolic claims for misaligned AI, if he doesn't even shift his blog away from things that help hype up AI?
To me this just makes these claims not credible, those attitudes are not those of someone for whom AI is the greatest threat facing humanity, they're more those of someone who maybe is helping hype up AI, because maybe they have some investments that would benefit from that hype. I don't want to accuse Scott of being a bad faith actor, maybe he just follows his intellectual whims, maybe he just hasn't considered the part of strategy revolving around his blog posts (itself a bit of a strange omision), or maybe he thinks it's intellectually dishonest to post strategically? (though as long as it's not misrepresenting reality it shouldn't be) but regardless, seeing that kind of very "ai positive" post pretty strongly tells me "this guy doesn't consider this a serious threat"
I don't see a contradiction. AI being useful is a precondition for AI being dangerous in the sense that Scott et al are worried about. Moreover, if I understand the AI safety arguments rightly, the aim is to try to maximize humanity's chance of threading the needle of building a useful and well-aligned ASI and using it to substantially better the human condition. Butlerian Jihad scenarios where there is a concerted effort to kill and bury AI development are considered a failure mode to be avoided, especially the risk that the attempt is unsuccessful (i.e. most countries ban further advanced AI development, but a badly-aligned ASI gets developed and deployed anyway in a non-banning country or a country that fails to enforce its ban well enough), just as much as the scenarios where laissez-faire regulation permits rapid development of unfriendly AIs.
Caveat: I am explaining a position not my own. I expect with moderately high confidence that the current crop of LLMs will plateau in capability well short of ASI or even AGI. They'll prove to be useful tools once the dust settles and the hype dies down, especially for natural language processing and computer vision, and might be an important piece of the puzzle for future AGI development, but I consider Scott's 2027 scenario very unlikely. The only reason I don't dismiss that scenario completely out of hand is that smart, knowledgeable people whose judgement I respect (e.g. Scott) have spent time and effort analyzing the issue and concluded that it is likely.
It's not about AI being useful by itself, it's about reinforcing the view that it's useful in other people's eyes, thus helping drive engagement with it, helping drive hype, helping drive investment, helping drive development (is this a too weak slippery slope? I'm not sure what the weakest link is, but my point is, given the supposed stakes, gambling with the chances doesn't seem rational). The color of the dress post even speculates about post singularity AI giving us wonders, thus helping people be slightly more comfortable with the idea it'll work out alright/it'll end up aligned. But the whole point of the more AI safety concerned people is that alignment is extremely unlikely, so we should be extremely, extremely cautious about continuing development. Maybe butlerian jihad is a failure mode of that, but a big part of the point of people like Eliezer and Scott is that threading that needle is extremely unlikely, so we shouldn't risk it until we're extremely extremely sure. In that effort, and seeing how the capital of the world is prone to hype and short term gain, maximizing opposition to AI, for someone in a pretty influential position, seems to me to be most consistent with the position.
A problem with strategic lying is that people may draw conclusions different from what you intended, and then you have made the situation more difficult for yourself.
If you convince people that AI is useless (which many of them already believe, it seems to be quite popular opinion), that would imply that it is harmless. No need to worry about it, no need to regulate it...
The real AI safety activism is political organization. Right now we're in the "this is so cool!" stage, like Facebook or smart phones in 2009. Soon we'll be in the weaponization stage and lobbyists will go to the wall to prevent regulation or raise taxes on the AI owners to pay for UBI.
There's something that I find really suspicious about the claims of the danger of AI that Scott makes, and some of the posts Scott makes, which I think makes claims of the danger of AI less believable.
Like in the AI 2027 scenario Scott endorsed, even the aligned scenario is pretty dystopic (a small group of people with all the power, no real guarantees of good outcomes despite the scenario trying to paint over it imagining a luxury future). Since both scenarios are pretty bad, and specially since there's a large given chance of the worst scenario, someone who believes them should be expected to oppose AI with all their power, trying to slow it down as much as possible, as early as possible, to improve the end results.
Honestly I'd expect anyone who thinks AI is very likely to go catastrophically wrong, and who cares about morality at all, to be radically militant in their opposition to AI, probably spending most of their wealth in measures against it, after all if the AI gets as powerful as it's claimed, there's no turning back, and the damage would be tremendous. So do we see this kind of opposition?
Obviously there's parts of this opposition that we can't see just looking at Scott's blog, but what I'm confused by is posts like "The Colors Of Her Coat", or the "Make A Personalized AI Kids’ Book" mentioned here (which I haven't read, but from the title can infer its bent). These kinds of posts serve as propaganda for AI, helping hype it up and promoting a positive view of it, which seems really incongruent with thinking the AI will be very likely bad. If AI is so likely to be catastrophic, why is he using his blog, which probably is a large part of the political capital he can use to exert influence, to make posts to say "ooh look how pretty the pictures the computer makes". Surely if it's a matter of such import, any influence we can wield to make the chance of bad AI go down is useful, and any influence that can increase the chance should be avoided.
If Scott thinks the chance of bad ai is so great, and such a big threat, why does he still make posts like that? even if they help shift attitudes only a smidge, given the stakes it still should be taken into account. shouldn't he avoid making them, or even retroactively erase them? even more, why doesn't he try to make posts that help build opposition to AI, like he has never really gone into the economic arguments against AI, which is very relevant for artists. All of this seems at best like a strategic blunder, and at worst, evidence of bad faith. Why should we believe the hyperbolic claims for misaligned AI, if he doesn't even shift his blog away from things that help hype up AI?
To me this just makes these claims not credible, those attitudes are not those of someone for whom AI is the greatest threat facing humanity, they're more those of someone who maybe is helping hype up AI, because maybe they have some investments that would benefit from that hype. I don't want to accuse Scott of being a bad faith actor, maybe he just follows his intellectual whims, maybe he just hasn't considered the part of strategy revolving around his blog posts (itself a bit of a strange omision), or maybe he thinks it's intellectually dishonest to post strategically? (though as long as it's not misrepresenting reality it shouldn't be) but regardless, seeing that kind of very "ai positive" post pretty strongly tells me "this guy doesn't consider this a serious threat"
Scott, you listed "Men" as a finalist, but there's no review titled "Men", and two reviews which include the word "Men" in their titles. Could you please clarify which review you're referring to? Many thanks!
I am almost certain it's "The Men Are Not Alright," which was really excellent.
(Though I don't think I read any others with "Men" in the title, so if that one is *really* really excellent, I could be wrong...)
I keep hearing that AI is putting Silicon Valley techies out of work, but I have yet to see any verifiable numbers and sources. If anyone can point to some relatively well-controlled studies (or at least studies with transparent methodologies), I'd appreciate it. In the meantime, it seems like a recent change to the tax code has likely been the real culprit in the current round of layoffs. Tech companies can no longer deduct the full cost of R&D at the end of the year...
https://qz.com/tech-layoffs-tax-code-trump-section-174-microsoft-meta-1851783502
I think "real culprit" may be a bit strong.
A lot of things happened over the past five years that showed up at about the same time:
1) "Free"money went away. It is easier to justify borrowing a lot of money to pay for things like engineers when the interest rate is near 0%. At 5% things change a lot.
2) During Covid Facebook and other 'tech' companies (not Apple) had a huge hiring surge. With no clear idea what to do with the folks hired. This created a bunch of employees with no clear financial justification and when that collided with (1) ...
3) Elon Musk fired about 75% of Twitter and things seemed ... fine? This can encourage other company execs to ask why they have the headcount they do. Especially when combined with (2)
4) The tax changes that you mentioned. I'll note that my employer is sorta tech (we build expensive semiconductor test equipment) and we haven't experienced big layoffs. But we are older and profitable so financially different from a lot of the smaller tech companies.
5) At least one fairly large tech firm, Intel, is in financial trouble. Intel had 130,000 employees in 2022, finished 2024 with about 108,000 and is expected to lay off another 10,000 soon. This isn't because of tax code changes :-)
6) AI is disrupting, but *how* is not clear.
So ... yeah, tax code changes. And maybe that was the biggest factor. But it wasn't the only one.
I'm possibly missing something here, but can't Scott just use a convertible promissory note that triggers on a later financing round or some other appropriate condition? Just put no interest on it until maturity, and intend to forgive the loan if the triggering event doesn't happen prior to maturity. That is a financial instrument that already exists and you don't need to reinvent the wheel here.
The problem is that when the grant is given, there is no for-profit corporation. There’s no entity that has equity to negotiate over. You can’t have a convertible note with a company that doesn’t exist yet.
I suspect the deeper problem is that when a nonprofit converts into a for-profit, in most cases the people involved simply create a new for-profit entity with no formal relation to the nonprofit. The OpenAI situation where the nonprofit clearly has a lot of valuable intellectual property is quite rare.
But it would be great to get something like this working. In general the puzzle of how to fund nonprofits in a way that makes it possible for them to grow and succeed seems unsolved.
Does that work if the counterparty is currently a nonprofit?
Sure, assuming that we mean a formally-registered not for profit. Those are corporate entities with identified officers and etc. They are governed by state incorporation laws and, just as with an LLC or whatever else, can/do enter into contracts or debts with a willing counterparty.
If the not-for-profit corporation has achieved federal tax-exempt status (a separate process conducted by the IRS), then you know that it has full legal status in its state of registry. The IRS by law can't even consider an application for 501(c) status if the applicant isn't "in good standing" as a corporation under its home-state's laws.
> Sure, assuming that we mean a formally-registered not for profit.
There isn't any other kind of nonprofit. If you're not formally registered, you're a sole proprietorship, and those aren't nonprofit.
The point I was getting at was more like "what would the note be convertible to, since nonprofits can't issue equity", but Kevin made it better in the other subthread.
Inspired by Scott’s occasional forays into speculative fiction, as a way of thinking through strange ideas sideways, I’ve started a fiction blog of my own. The stories lean speculative, sometimes philosophical, sometimes more straightforward, but always written with the hope that the narrative does more than entertain. So far, I have touched on such small topics as the nature of the universe, a direction superintelligent AI can take us, and encountering truly alien lifeforms.
For those who enjoy puzzles: I’ve hidden Easter eggs throughout—some overt, others deeply buried. A few are probably too obscure (sorry), but most are findable with the right mix of attention and paranoia. I’d be curious to know what you spot.
If that sounds like your kind of thing, you’re warmly invited to explore:
https://sisyphusofmyth.substack.com
And if you do read, I’d love to hear what you think, especially if you think you’ve cracked one.
I liked the stories, but I am not in the mood for puzzles, so I didn't try to find any.
Thank you for the kind words! I would very much appreciate a shoutout, if you might be so kind! I hope you subscribe too - I have a couple more in the works now.
I'm kind of surprised none of the game/movie/TV/music reviews made the cut but I guess that's just the ACX audience. Was sort of hoping for at least one token game & TV/movie review to make it in just for variety (and also because I definitely wrote one of those).
The game reviews mostly weren't as good. There is no universal rule that everything related to video games is low quality and low effort but gamers gonna game and do poor work.
I can accept that they mostly weren't as good--I read several of them myself--but I don't agree that none of them were worth showcasing.
Sure, there’s the audience considerations, but I honestly thought the video game reviews here were a bit weak compared to the quality of the kind you can find on other websites. Even if the ACX audience were more open to them, I still don’t think any of them would have made the cut.
The Tv Show reviews were on average much better, but because of how unconventional this year’s format is, I think adding a few token representatives would have decreased variety, ironically enough.
Ollantay was put in that category, although it's a stage play. Other than that, the media review (as opposed to something-else review) that I ranked highest was Kiki's Delivery Service, one of five that earned a 9 from me.
I really enjoyed the review of Dylan’s “Simple Twist of Fate”
I am a little surprised about that, but oh well. We like our books!
I understand that a perpetual motion machine is prohibited by classical physics. But what about at the quantum level? Since atoms are always in motion, except at absolute zero, could one construct a perpetual motion machine that would continue on until the universe is empty?
Sure, under those rules the machine will have "perpetual motion," but in the classic sense of usting them to power things, as soon as you hook a belt and pulley or a turbine up to that spinning atom you have introduced friction for the purpose of removing energy, so game over!
In the sense you're describing, by the Third Law, it is in fact impossible to create a machine that ISN'T a "perpetual motion machine."
An atom can stay in motion forever, but that isn’t typically what people mean by a “perpetual motion machine”, they mean something that you can extract useful work from with no energy input, and that is still forbidden by quantum mechanics.
I think there are two categories of perpetual motion machines, which then have strict & relaxed definitions.
1. The truly impossible perpetual motion machine is one that produces net energy. Lots of cranks latch onto this one because it’d be a source of “free energy”. Doesn’t work, even at the quantum level
2a. A machine that keeps running forever (where forever is defined as a reasonably long time). For this, I suspect there are quantum perpetual motion machines, but from a certain perspective most orbits are perpetual motion machines, so it’s not that special.
2b. A machine that keeps running for a truly infinite amount of time. For this I suspect it’s impossible even at the quantum level because you have to grapple with decay of subatomic particles and the heat death of the universe.
My favorite old candidate for a perpetual motion machine was a strong magnet pulling an iron ball up a ramp with a hole near the top.
The thinking was that the ball would drop onto a lower ramp and return to the starting point. An appealing idea at first glance till you think it through and realize that a magnet strong enough to pull the ball up the ramp would be stronger than the force of gravity met at the hole.
Ask anyone who has recovered a magnet from an old hard drive and loosely held it within a couple inches of their refrigerator how gravity would fare in that contest.
Heck, I bought some magnets at Michael’s once to do some cute crafting, laid everything out separately on the table, and struggled to glue before the magnets did their own cute crafting and stuck themselves together.
> but from a certain perspective most orbits are perpetual motion machines
Don't orbiting objects lose energy through gravitational waves, leading to the eventual decay of the orbit?
Yes, that's why they're not in the "truly infinite" category 2b.
You can stay in motion...as long as you don't try to extract work (ie energy) from the system. That's also true classically.
Yes, a particle in a well has non-zero kinetic energy even in the ground state. But extracting that requires being able to transition to a lower allowed state...and there aren't any below the ground state. Definitionally.
Stumbled across an article that will probably be of interest to some ACX subscribers. Posted it last week in a reply to somebody, but I'm going to repost it as a top-level comment.
India is always stereotyped as an extremely spiritual place even historically, but there was actually a philosophy called Charvaka or Lokayata which is purely materialist. Most scholars have believed that this philosophy is relatively short-lived and mostly irrelevant for most of Indian history, but new research seems to show things aren't so cut-and-dried. (Notably, the name Lokayata literally means "prevalent among the people.)
https://blog.apaonline.org/2020/06/16/the-untold-history-of-indias-vital-atheist-philosophy/
There are some flaws with this article - for instance, the quote from Maitreyi in the Upanishads is misleading, since in the original context "no awareness" meant merging with Brahman, not annihilation - but overall there's some really interesting stuff there.
I'll also add one thing not noted in the article: that the oldest strata of Tamil literature, the Sangam poetry, has no references to religion or the supernatural. Tamil culture, especially at this time, was probably descended more directly from the Indus River Valley civilization (whose people likely traveled to the southern tip of the subcontinent) than Northern Indian culture was, having been subject to serious Indo-Aryan admixture, so it's entirely plausible that the Indus River Valley Civilization sites (Harappa, Mohenjo-Daro) had no religion as we would now conceive such things.
That's very speculative, though, and Mohenjo-Daro was structured in multiple levels with a large bath at the center of the city, which would seem to indicate some notion of ritual purity, like that which upholds the caste system, had developed. And ritual purity presumably comes with some degree of religious belief.
Doesn't the existence of this seal, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pashupati_seal, with the classic horned god, disprove that?
Yeah, the Pashupati seal is probably the biggest piece of evidence against the idea that they had no religion. It does seem to portray a god, but for what it's worth the position of Wendy Doniger (a scholar who supports the protoatheist hypothesis for the Indus River Valley Civilization) is that we have no way of knowing what the Pashupati seal is meant to be portraying.
I'm considering changing my job, and perhaps my career, but I feel like my skills are too eclectic at this point, and I'm pretty confused at what my options are, and I'd like to brainstorm with someone because I feel pretty lost. I'm considering hiring a career coach, if only for the sake of someone holding the other end of the brainstorming conversation, but I worry that a regular career coach would try to shoehorn me into one of the mental categories they already have even if it's a bad fit; is there some version of it that may realistically work on someone all over the place and from the general ACX-comments crowd?
UPD. I wrote up broader context in response to a question in a comment; here it is:
I studied linguistics out of passion (understand the common laws of human communication systems yadda yadda), and from there I switched to ML (because natural language processing) in like 2016, before transformers were even invented; ML seemed really cool to me, the closest thing to magic in existing technology. I studied lots of math and other technical stuff as part of my linguistics education (our program was informally known as "mathematical linguistics"), but not as deep as a real mathematicial, and my knowledge of linguistics never became as deep as a true linguist's.
Then I went to France to a PhD school, for a thesis about natural language generation (this was before RLHF); this was not a topic chosen by love, I just wanted some position and I seemed to just like NLP generally and figuring things out.
The PhD broke me due to what felt like any lack of meaning, guidance, goal-setting etc; experiments I designed were not interesting in any ways and failed miserably. I decided that I wanted to be part of a startup, where everyone is working toward a common goal; where my chaotic strengths of broad figuring-things-out and hyperfocus would be valued. Besides, leaving my PhD meant my French residence permit was not valid anymore, and God forbid I'd have to return to Russia, so I was looking for a country that wasn't trying to arrest me or kill me. I didn't get a PhD degree (I do have a Master's).
So I joined an ML startup in a small country in West Asia, and loved the atmosphere. (I'm currently the only ML engineer in this ML startup. We're a team of like 10 people.) My way of getting shit done was finally valued, and I appreciated the stock options. Besides, being startup meant trying to be lean, using smaller, economic methods, instead of any "we were dancing around for 6 months and got a 0.5% improvement in a leaderboard" stuff. In addition, I really found a use for my passion for linguistics. Since our startup is connected with machine translation, being able to read our customers' data and actually understand what goes wrong where had been a really valuable addition to my engineering competences.
But now I've been burning out. Here's why:
· Interactions with the team and especially C-level management.
— The team was initially pretty diverse with people of all backgrounds, so I didn't feel weird being a foreigner and various other labels of weirdo, but now I'm the odd one out.
— Recently, I've developed severe sensory sensitivity, and communicated to them that since they are not willing to allow remote work, I'd like to work from upstairs (we're renting a two-floor house for an office); they felt it was too distant from the team, but allowed me to work from the kitchen. Now, however, they told me that a permanent move outside of the room where everyone works is not acceptable, in any other area even if it wouldn't inconvenience others, because that may threaten the quality of communication (the theory being that communication is much easier when they can walk up to me in the same room than when they have to open a door and see me in another room). I did explain that it influences my productivity, but they said that basically it's not only my productivity that has to be managed, but other teammates' as well (I'm still doubtful other teammates' productivity would suffer from me being in another room as much as mine suffers from a constant sensory overload).
— There was a time when I showed up with my nails polished red (I'm biologically male and look male), and the CTO personally told me that I would have to wash that off, because what if some day I'm in charge of hiring people and they are uncomfortable, or what if my teammates are uncomfortable ("So if I ask them and everyone is OK with it..." — "No, what if they are uncomfortable but too nice to tell you?")
— All of that makes me feel like there is a certain amount of, uh, restriction of my personal independence / agency, because who the hell cares where I sit or how I paint my nails if I ship quality code fast? And being the only ML engineer in the team, I suspect they may not realize that my leaving would actually be an inconvenience, since there is some learning curve to our infrastructure...
· I'm tired of ML / AI as a field. While I was shipping small and cheap solutions, NLP started to suffer megalomania, and everyone hiring NLP engineers seems to have training gigantic chatgpt-like shit in mind, which is not sexy for me (and I still have no experience with it, but I could figure it out). It seems foolish not to use my tired knowledge to *some* benefit, but I would hope to apply it somewhere where I still see a sense of meaning.
In addition, in these recent years searching for meaning, I have pursued various pet projects. For example, I have created a project called theorem marketplace (link: https://theorem-marketplace.com/) and while doing it, figured out some basic web3 development (because I had to create an Ethereum contract with an oracle). Also, I have periods when I'm in love with molecular biology, so I'm considering barging into bioinformatics. (In pure AI, I find interpretability research a la anthropic very sexy, but I have no credentials to signal I would be a good fit; and maybe I wouldn't).
What's your education/career background?
Okay, I wrote up broader context.
I studied linguistics out of passion (understand the common laws of human communication systems yadda yadda), and from there I switched to ML (because natural language processing) in like 2016, before transformers were even invented; ML seemed really cool to me, the closest thing to magic in existing technology. I studied lots of math and other technical stuff as part of my linguistics education (our program was informally known as "mathematical linguistics"), but not as deep as a real mathematicial, and my knowledge of linguistics never became as deep as a true linguist's.
Then I went to France to a PhD school, for a thesis about natural language generation (this was before RLHF); this was not a topic chosen by love, I just wanted some position and I seemed to just like NLP generally and figuring things out.
The PhD broke me due to what felt like any lack of meaning, guidance, goal-setting etc; experiments I designed were not interesting in any ways and failed miserably. I decided that I wanted to be part of a startup, where everyone is working toward a common goal; where my chaotic strengths of broad figuring-things-out and hyperfocus would be valued. Besides, leaving my PhD meant my French residence permit was not valid anymore, and God forbid I'd have to return to Russia, so I was looking for a country that wasn't trying to arrest me or kill me. I didn't get a PhD degree (I do have a Master's).
So I joined an ML startup in a small country in West Asia, and loved the atmosphere. (I'm currently the only ML engineer in this ML startup. We're a team of like 10 people.) My way of getting shit done was finally valued, and I appreciated the stock options. Besides, being startup meant trying to be lean, using smaller, economic methods, instead of any "we were dancing around for 6 months and got a 0.5% improvement in a leaderboard" stuff. In addition, I really found a use for my passion for linguistics. Since our startup is connected with machine translation, being able to read our customers' data and actually understand what goes wrong where had been a really valuable addition to my engineering competences.
But now I've been burning out. Here's why:
· Interactions with the team and especially C-level management.
— The team was initially pretty diverse with people of all backgrounds, so I didn't feel weird being a foreigner and various other labels of weirdo, but now I'm the odd one out.
— Recently, I've developed severe sensory sensitivity, and communicated to them that since they are not willing to allow remote work, I'd like to work from upstairs (we're renting a two-floor house for an office); they felt it was too distant from the team, but allowed me to work from the kitchen. Now, however, they told me that a permanent move outside of the room where everyone works is not acceptable, in any other area even if it wouldn't inconvenience others, because that may threaten the quality of communication (the theory being that communication is much easier when they can walk up to me in the same room than when they have to open a door and see me in another room). I did explain that it influences my productivity, but they said that basically it's not only my productivity that has to be managed, but other teammates' as well (I'm still doubtful other teammates' productivity would suffer from me being in another room as much as mine suffers from a constant sensory overload).
— There was a time when I showed up with my nails polished red (I'm biologically male and look male), and the CTO personally told me that I would have to wash that off, because what if some day I'm in charge of hiring people and they are uncomfortable, or what if my teammates are uncomfortable ("So if I ask them and everyone is OK with it..." — "No, what if they are uncomfortable but too nice to tell you?")
— All of that makes me feel like there is a certain amount of, uh, restriction of my personal independence / agency, because who the hell cares where I sit or how I paint my nails if I ship quality code fast? And being the only ML engineer in the team, I suspect they may not realize that my leaving would actually be an inconvenience, since there is some learning curve to our infrastructure...
· I'm tired of ML / AI as a field. While I was shipping small and cheap solutions, NLP started to suffer megalomania, and everyone hiring NLP engineers seems to have training gigantic chatgpt-like shit in mind, which is not sexy for me (and I still have no experience with it, but I could figure it out). It seems foolish not to use my tired knowledge to *some* benefit, but I would hope to apply it somewhere where I still see a sense of meaning.
In addition, in these recent years searching for meaning, I have pursued various pet projects. For example, I have created a project called theorem marketplace (link: https://theorem-marketplace.com/) and while doing it, figured out some basic web3 development (because I had to create an Ethereum contract with an oracle). Also, I have periods when I'm in love with molecular biology, so I'm considering barging into bioinformatics. (In pure AI, I find interpretability research a la anthropic very sexy, but I have no credentials to signal I would be a good fit; and maybe I wouldn't).
I've done this with Claude. You might want to start there and use it with a coach.
A right career coach will help *guide* your brainstorming on what you want in your next job/career. My opinion is they should not be prescriptive. My recommendation would be to ask the career coach for examples of former clients and how they helped them. You should also be honest on what help you need (eg help with brainstorming, keeping you accountable to a timeline, providing resources).
A right career coach will help you understand your interests, skills, and experiences so you can find the right new job/career for you. In fact, you may feel it is going one step backwards (evaluating those things again) to allow you to move two steps forward (finding your new job/career). But a right career coach will work with your pace and design a program that fits you. They also should have ready access to resources that would take you more time and effort to find on your own.
I’m going through this process myself and would be happy to exchange notes. Less so a dramatic change and more or a correction, but I’ve spent way too much time contemplating it.
Go ahead and share your wisdom.
I don't have any notes on my end yet, I'm just trying to pinpoint in what general direction I should be moving, but my current state is much more awayness from an unacceptable situation than any towardness with any specific goal in mind.
Perhaps I should have just written a commend with the specifics of my situation, instead of being silly and vague. But that may take another while...
The AI safety/alignment/regulation space needs people like you. Desperately.
I work on the Hill, and just flagging that the AI moratorium on states regulating AI for ten years is likely to pass Congress as part of the Republican reconciliation package. The House version includes a blanket ban. The Senate version of the legislation, which blocks states from accessing broadband funding if they pass AI regulations, just passed the Senate parliamentarian's review. This was unexpected. In the Senate, a provision must be primarily related to federal funding to pass this review, and most experts though this provision would be stripped out.
The Senate will then have to pass the bill (it almost certainly will) and then the House and Senate will have to work out the differences in their package in "conference," and then the final version has to pass both chambers. As things stand right now, this is likely (75%+) to happen.
The time to try to get this provision removed - probably in conference - is now (if you oppose this, I do), as there is some Republican dissent on this provision.
Thank you. I agree this is terrible law, and I don't want to wait around for the courts to have their say. I will ask my rep (Tenney) to fight for states rights on this.
This is something that would make sense to be federal. Any state limiting AI use can cause problems for everyone. But if there was ever one time in the history of everything that it's worth using every tool at your disposal to get what you want, that time is now.
Thank you for the insight. I'll see if I can contact my reps in time.
To be clear, the thing likely to pass is a moratorium on states regulating AI. So an AI free-for-all is winning, which is bad. We want to call and say we want states to be able to regulate AI, so we want our reps to vote against the moratorium on AI regulation. Correct?
Yes, exactly. This would technically NOT force states to not regulate AI, but if they want to get access to broadband federal funding, they cannot essentially regulate AI for ten years. Since all states want this funding, it's a lot of pressure.
Calling/emailing never hurts, though requesting virtual meetings if you live in a red state/district or your friends do would be the most helpful. And then pulling any connections that you have.
Thanks!
I just called my congresswoman (D), who had an aide answer, and my senators (R), who had voicemail answer. I left the following message, which anyone reading this can copy and optionally add some nuance regarding broadband funding:
Hi, my name is [name] and I'm a constituent from [town, state]. My phone number is [number]. I'm calling about the Republican reconciliation package. Believe it or not, it includes a moratorium on states' ability to regulate AI. Now, I oppose AI because I think it can become dangerous. I want to preserve states’ ability to regulate AI. So, because the Republican reconciliation package includes a moratorium on states’ ability to regulate AI, I'm calling to ask [representative’s title and name] to either vote against it, or to work hard to remove that part. Thank you very much.
That's perfect! Offices keep track of how many calls they receive in support/opposition to issues.
TBH it's the first time I've called my reps in probably a decade. I'm trying to get better about that, and this is an important issue.
Wohoo congrats! Never a bad thing. Good time to get more involved in issues you care about.
I don't really understand who besides Marc Andreessen thinks this is a good idea? Where is this push to preemptively keep away all AI regulation coming from? Even Altman seems interested in baseline regulations, and certainly Musk and Dario do as well.
I think they are saying different things publicly vs privately. Altman especially has been having a lot of conversations with the admin
Big if true. I might have to reconsider my “Altman means well and is not actually a super villain” stance.
Did you miss The OpenAI Files? Good summary place to get caught up to speed on the "sama isn't a straight shooter" position.
David Sacks and Jensen Huang would be another two pushing the memento moratorium, at least. I don't think Zvi has a specific standalone post addressing the issue, just regular weekly references to its status, else I'd point there.
Oh yeah forgot about Sacks. What a nightmare this whole thing is
It's very telling that a good portion of the people who have worked with him completely distrust him
Musk is genuinely opposed to the ban, but his advocacy has been carried out in an ineffective manner
Nah, the time to oppose this was before. At this point it's likely too late. I mentioned a while ago during the Biden administration the AI pause people were making pretty obvious mistakes and it would bite them if Republicans got back into power. Now Republicans are back into power and it's biting them. This is a common issue in politics: if you wait until you're in a position of weakness it is almost always too late.
If it makes you feel any better, it's only a ban on AI specific regulations. You can still pass laws that affect AI but they have to apply to AI and non-AI things equally.
I'm seeing both my state's GOP senators criticize it (Hawley strongly, Schmitt somewhat obliquely as he seems to have some broader goal on AI regulation), as well as MTG and Luna coming out against it from the House. I was surprised the parliamentarian wasn't quietly encouraged to just toss it out to avoid any fight when it gets back to the House, as they have a razor thin margin there and the RW populist opposition is sufficiently eccentric and out on their own island that they may be willing to tank the bill over it.
there is a lot of private concern/dissent... but Republicans tend to fall in line to just pass the package. Still a decent chance to get it stripped in conference
Thanks for the hopeful news!
Participating in a review contest is kind of rough: there are a lot more good entries than finalist spots, or even finalists + honorable mentions. Lots of people write something interesting and worthwhile and get nothing for all their work, sometimes not even feedback. To help with that I'm going to award my special Tasty's Consolations Prize, for all the reviews that I liked that didn't make it into the finals (or got honorably mentioned). The winners get nothing except for dubious bragging rights and a warm feeling of being appreciated. I read "only" 50% of all the reviews, so I obviously must have missed lots of worthy entries.
* 11 Poetic Forms, Reviewed in Verse
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1d0vRSj1E93joWWvbUen2XGuDjN_mM94ybMIAADzM2fo/edit?tab=t.0#heading=h.bdyc6ymrmrt2
It's clever and it showed me new things and it featured Actual Poetry (the kind that adheres to some predetermined structure of rhymes or meter), what more can I ask.
Enjoyed the sestina so much, I got close to memorizing it.
I should say though: I think the review doesn't do the villanelle justice - the example villanelle really does seem rigid and repetitive and one couldn't blame you for reading and concluding that it's a very restrictive and stilted form based on that example. But how different it can sound in the hands of a great poet! https://allpoetry.com/If-I-Could-Tell-You And of course, the rage-rage-yadda-yadda-something-something-light, is also an example of a villanelle. Maybe it's unfair to unfavorably compare the Reviewer to W. H. Auden, but someone has to defend the honor of the villanelle.
* “As Little as Possible”: Slave Morality in Chinatown and Spec Ops: The Line https://docs.google.com/document/d/1d0vRSj1E93joWWvbUen2XGuDjN_mM94ybMIAADzM2fo/edit?tab=t.0#heading=h.ylmh0fxq3gss
Two celebrated pieces of media, that the reviewer likes on the artistic level both seem to come close to saying the same thing the reviewers pushes back against: "trying to make things better will always inevitably backfire and make everything worse". I'm a little hesitant to praise this review, because it kind of says nothing new that I didn't already agree with.
* Earth
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1d0vRSj1E93joWWvbUen2XGuDjN_mM94ybMIAADzM2fo/edit?tab=t.0#heading=h.9b5iqpz1vxbb
It's a fun sci-fi story parodying YouTube/gaming culture and video game auteur culture about present day Earth being horrible.
* Love
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1a3q0Z2tuPLLbDeg5-pfEffkajGjrfPDwE7ZMs7uaWQs/edit?tab=t.0#heading=h.i8v5hwoui0lf
This is a story of the Reviewers tragic romance. It's exactly the same as a million other such stories, but it doesn't make it less painful to the person it's happening to. Reviewer, I'm sorry it happened to you. I wish you well.
* My Imagination
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1a3q0Z2tuPLLbDeg5-pfEffkajGjrfPDwE7ZMs7uaWQs/edit?tab=t.0#heading=h.5p8ou8bafkgh
Since he was a kid, the Reviewer has been spinning in his mind an elaborate, anime-like/Marvel-like fantasy world with an extremely convoluted story and worldbuilding, and kept spinning it into adulthood. It's not that this is great art that is going to become next Lord of the Rings or Star Wars, but it seems like there's something worthwhile in anything a person put so much thought into.
As a kid, I had an imaginary world like that too. It seems like this is fairly common. When someone grows up to become a writer, it makes for a good back-story - "at the age of 5, so-and-so was already writing epic fantasy", except that this isn't unique to writers - seemingly lots of people did. Then later we all thought there's no point to it if you're not going to write it down, and writing down is a ton of work, so almost everyone gave up on it, while the Reviewer kept going on and on. Is there a point? Some part of me wants to say this kind of escapism must be unhealthy somehow, or at lest a waste of time, while another part is delighted end sort of envious.
* Rubbermaid products
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1a3q0Z2tuPLLbDeg5-pfEffkajGjrfPDwE7ZMs7uaWQs/edit?tab=t.0#heading=h.7c5deelkzhqz
A paean to the brand of cleaning utensils and more, and a manual on how to clean a toilet. Very Some Guy-core.
* The World as a Whole
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1jYVJFIz5-aMi0LCgsC9AN6BncJDNVGaMU37QmwZ1vzA/edit?tab=t.0#heading=h.hw9u0dhx3ksg
I don't have much to say about this one. It is another bleak one capturing real pain and horror at the badness of the world.
* GETTING OVER IT WITH BENNETT FODDY: a perfect review in which I fail https://docs.google.com/document/d/1B3YxYxLVFjKGicaEkqvt353kt0uimn0PSUQv1PyaHuI/edit?tab=t.0#heading=h.bfsgvhmf2607
A review of a famously difficult and frustration-inducing game, which is known for constantly destroying your progress and bringing you back to square 1. It is a gimmicky review, but a good one. I'm a little surprised this one didn't make it into the finals. It is also half-autobiography? Yes. It made me want to get Getting Over it and play it solely as a masochistic character building exercise. So far I haven't.
* Deathbed Ballads
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1hjIUcKi-vIM9RGRZDWPRyUtzZLlVrpaY6Jy81iZVYi4/edit?tab=t.0#heading=h.mnx8wqk31rum
So this is about a clade of songs sharing the same pattern: a dying man tells the narrator a story of how he ended up that way. The pattern changes, mutates, develops pseudopods, plays as a serious tragedy here, as a joke there. The review is a pretty serious analysis, and long. Perhaps it suffers somewhat from not having any kind of grand unifying idea at the end, and it also suffers a little from not including youtube links to the actual songs, for the copyright reasons, I imagine. I suspect lots of readers didn't finish this one.
I enjoyed it for an opportunity to see song evolution in progress and for all the interesting music I got to listen. My favourite of the bunch was The Unfortunate Rake https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1aQd99zfIRo, an entirely serious and heart-breakingly sad ballad, about the hero dying from syphilis.
* The Tale Of The Princess Kaguya
https://docs.google.com/document/d/17WAcFrTOExgendrk2lGTxRIR4LVC3ZGbiU5Xe3kF4mg/edit?tab=t.0#heading=h.uzxd2fc95slp
A review of a Ghibli non-Miyazaki cartoon, adapting a Japanese folk tale. A tale is simple, but serious and sad, and it should provide some food for thought. The Reviewer gets a very gloomy message out of it, that for everyone there's a thing that would be good to do, that would be right and beneficial to do, but that goes so much against our nature, that we'll probably never get ourselves to go ahead and do it. Unfortunately, this rings true to me, and truer than I would have liked. Possibly the review would have done better if the plot summary section had been shorter. On the one hand, the plot summary was essential for the point the Reviewer wanted to make, on the other hand I could imagine readers getting bored there. But it is a review that stuck with me all the same.
* ******* ******
https://docs.google.com/document/d/17WAcFrTOExgendrk2lGTxRIR4LVC3ZGbiU5Xe3kF4mg/edit?tab=t.0#heading=h.l0j92yt4nqxc
Thank you for delving into a dark and terrible subject in the name of anthropology. I don't have you courage and won't be watching the series any time soon, but this makes your investigation all the more valuable. You are the true mythic hero for going where others dare not go, for staring into the abyss, for descending into the cave that is also the underworld somehow. I now understand modern kids slightly better thanks to your efforts.
I just looked at the Rubbermaid review, prompted by your mention. I hope the reviewer is old enough to have experienced the Before - not just Before Amazon, but Before the grocery store had a large display of brushes, mops, and brooms - when the Fuller Brush Man (happy day) came to your door, and gave you a little “extra” if you made a purchase.
I wrote the Deathbed Ballads review. I'm glad you liked it, and I agree with most of your criticisms of it. The length and complexity snuck up on me while writing it. I was about a third of the way through before I realized how much serious scholarship there was on the topic (especially for the Unfortunate Lad and St. James Infirmary) that I needed to engage with in order to treat the topic fairly. I was particularly handicapped by two sources I really wanted to dig into being unavailable on any reasonable terms: one was an academic paper that was behind an extremely steep paywall and the other was a then-temporarily-out-of-print book that I didn't have time to buy and read in time to use by the time I realized I needed it.
If I'd had another couple weeks to work on it, I would have gone back, strengthened the conclusion, and revised the introduction and body of the review to work towards that. And I would have needed to do some additional background research to support the conclusion. The conclusion I probably would have worked towards was further emphasis on the importance of syphilis to the song clade and the significance of the disease to the times, places, and communities where the core elements of the song cropped up: first in big metropolitan commerce hubs like Victorian London, and again in the American black community during the interwar years. In the latter case, there was a big and now-little-remembered epidemic of syphilis that probably had its roots in the American expeditionary force to France in World War One, and the epidemic persisted and spread among a discriminated-against minority community due in large part to marginalization, poverty, lack of access to diagnosis, neglect by public health authorities, and lack of good treatments even for people with access to medical care. I would have liked to have explored that in more detail and connected it to St. James Infirmary, and also explored parallels between the interwar syphilis epidemic and the AIDS epidemic in the gay community in the late 20th century. I only touched on pieces of this, partly because I was out of time and would have needed to do a lot more research to treat it fairly, and partly because the review was already too long.
Another piece I started doing but abandoned was hypothetical cladeogram of the song genre. I gave up on it because it wasn't coming together visually, I was out of time, and it was extremely speculative to begin with and would have needed a ton of explication and qualification to not be misleading.
Part of my problem, timing-wise, was that I started out intending my topic to be an analysis of the lyrical content of the music of the American Civil War as a corpus of data on cultural attitudes about the war's conduct and causes. I abandoned that and switched to what I hoped would be a lighter topic once I found that very quickly becoming too research-heavy. When my "lighter" topic also proved to be too heavy-weight, I had even less time to finish it.
I went back and forth on the question of including youtube links at the top of each section, and might have made the wrong call there. The advantage of including them is obvious. I decided against links or embeds (except for a couple of footnotes where youtube was the best source for an obscure-but-important variant) because of a combination of copyright concerns, clutter concerns (especially for St. James Infirmary, where there are so many major variations), and worries about how the formats of both google docs and substack would handle embedded youtube videos.
I wrote the Getting Over It review--thanks for the kind words! Nice to see a few comments about it here and there to make the hours put into it feel worthwhile. Hope you have a good time (or enlighteningly bad time) trying to get over it ;)
Hopefully this isn't against the spirit because finalists have already been chosen, but since you opened a discussion here, I'll just follow up that I really disliked the review of The Tale of Princess Kaguya. I think the reviewer misreads the story so badly (possibly due to missing cultural context, possibly due to the source material itself, i.e. the original folk tale, being somewhat inconsistent so that the movie makers' efforts to harmonize the themes made it quite subtle and complex) that they had to project an entirely orthogonal point onto it, and I have half a mind to write a counter-review.
(Interestingly I just checked my voting records and I actually gave it a 7, which was above average on my scale. Thinking back on it, I probably still thought that the essay was well-written and its points are well-made, despite missing the mark as a review of the movie per se.)
A simple proposal to make the world (well the US) a slightly better place:
Congress passes a law, imposing a tax & paperwork/compliance requirements on any American company, who serves GPDR/cookie warnings to an American IP address. If you fall into that category, you have to pay some sort of annual tax, and there's Deliberately Annoying Paperwork that you have to file with the government. The point is to harass these companies and make them stop serving cookie warning nag screens to Americans. My personal view is that the GPDR has absolutely ruined the Internet and made the world a worse place.
The law does not prevent companies outside the US from having cookie warnings. If a German website feels like it needs to comply with the GPDR when Americans visit, OK no problem, you're still free to do that. It does not prevent American companies from complying with the GPDR and having cookie warnings when European IP addresses visit their websites. If Disney needs to comply with the GPDR in Europe, again, no problem.
The idea behind the law is to counteract the Brussels effect as it relates to purely internal US web traffic. Millions of American websites harass US citizens with cookie nag screens, even though the GPDR obviously does not legally apply to us. I'm guessing everyone's in-house counsel just told them it was easier to comply. Now, we can change the incentive structure and make it easier for them *not* to comply with Europe's insane laws. Constitutionally the US cannot forbid American websites from having cookie nag screens, but we can certainly make it difficult..... American sovereignty will be restored, and all of us will stop being annoyed by obnoxious European laws :)
I'd just make it so cookie warnings have to follow some kind of standard that makes it trivial for your browser to deal with them.
Cookie warnings are malicious compliance. GDPR does not require anything like what has been implemented. Everyone should pitch in to punish the perpetrators, not just Americans.
First of all, you're a freak and a weirdo (unlike everyone else on this website! Especially me!) if you don't have cookies generally blocked and use per-site permissions in a browser which implements these to strictly regulate what sites can set cookies at all on an opt-in basis.
Secondly, any decent adblocker will have an annoyances filter which strips the cookie warnings. It takes seconds to add this filter and you should be using an adblocker anyway if you like to browse a usable internet.
I use Adblock to nuke nag screens regularly, but:
1. Some websites (thankfully a minority) are completely locked until you agree to their terms & conditions which include cookies. Adblock can't fix that
2. I use two adblockers, the more powerful/useful one is Ublock Origin, which Google is in the process of removing. I already lost it last week when one of my computers updated, and I only have it on this current browser because I've blocked updates so far
"Some websites (thankfully a minority) are completely locked until you agree to their terms & conditions which include cookies. Adblock can't fix that"
I've never encountered this personally. What websites?
"Ublock Origin, which Google is in the process of removing"
Wait, what? Filthy, if true. Move to Firefox, is my answer to that.
Have you tried the Lite version of the extension? What features do you find lacking? I understand there are some, but I don't seem to suffer from their absence.
> First of all, you're a freak and a weirdo (unlike everyone else on this website! Especially me!)
Yeah come for Scott’s writing and stay to hang out with fellow weirdos.
You have now made me stand up and cheer for GDPR. Oh gosh, the poor Americans have to click through a warning screen? Welcome to the rest of the world, which gets the Americanised version of everything shoved down our necks. Sorry, the calendar is set to American date format, you'll have to change it. Paper sizes? American. Spelling? Three guesses, and the first two don't count. Default language? English - US of course!
Turn about is fair play, let you Yanks suffer a taste of what we routinely go through.
No. We have 300 million people and more money than God so we get to set the rules. No fucking cookies.
I mean, I'm as annoyed about American Defaultism as the next European, but I also find cookie warnings incredibly annoying and pointless and would be in favour of any efforts that might make them less ubiquitous.
Get a browser extension. I use "I still don't care about cookies."
Is there any equivalent of this for mobile browsers?
Depends on what browser and OS you're using, but if it supports extensions at all, it probably lets you use this one.
I use a Firefox fork (Iceraven) on Android, and I think it actually suggested I use this over the older version "I don't care about cookies." If you prefer a Chromium-based one, Kiwi Browser has been recently discontinued, but Edge Canary should work.
I don't want my country- the world hegemon- to bow down to privacy laws implemented in Europe. The EU is free to regulate the EU, but they can't regulate America. I find the whole idea ridiculous. It's a basic sovereignty issue
I wonder how many people in the US agree with your sentiment? Any estimates?
Oh, I agree completely, and think the US should go much further and threaten to not honor NATO defense agreements as a way to reshape EU laws and regulations particularly repellant to core "American values."
But making "the world (well the US) a slightly better place" is a longer-term thing. You can fix your specific cookie issue in less than a minute.
And that *wouldn't* count as imposing regulations on another country, "a basic sovereignty issue", as the comment you completely agree with puts it?
Of course it would. My proposed policy is that America extend its practice of infringing on the sovereignty of lesser territories to our enemies in Europe, the greatest threat to our freedoms.
Am I the only one who thinks being able to reject non-essential cookies is actually a useful feature?
(obviously the UX should be better though, ideally a choice you make once in your browser instead of separately on every website; something like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_Privacy_Control)
"Am I the only one who thinks being able to reject non-essential cookies is actually a useful feature?"
You are not. But getting a *bunch* of dialogs to do this can be really annoying. And you get a bunch of dialogs even if you check "yeah, sure, whatever." Is the annoyance worth the usefulness? Not clear ... especially if the servers just get more sophisticated in how they track you (which is my guess ...)
The thing is, not only GDPR does *not* require the bunch of dialogs, but displaying those dialogs is actually *against* GDPR, which says that denying all cookies should be equally easy as accepting all cookies.
So what you see is not even malicious compliance, but more like malicious pretense of compliance. And your reaction is a proof that this type of corporate propaganda works perfectly.
It is also not clear to me whether the annoyance is worth it, but it very well might? I'm honestly not sure.
It's not just that we can reject cookies now, there's also the side effect that websites are less likely to implement unnecessary tracking cookies in the first place since it now involves a lot more effort.
Well, YOU could try Consent-O-Matic.
Good idea, I just installed it.
That said, like the OP, for the sake of this discussion I'm more intersted in discussing what the EU and US laws should be, not so much whether the laws can be worked around by savvy users.
What is your estimate of the cost of Israel’s two-week campaign against Iran?
According to The Economist, from October 7, 2023, up until just before the attack on Iran, Israel had spent approximately $85 billion, or roughly $150 million per day. I estimate that during the campaign against Iran, this daily rate increased to $285 million, due to the use of more sophisticated munitions, advanced military planning, logistical demands, covert ground operations within Iran, and costlier manned and unmanned aerial missions.
Based on that, my ballpark estimate for a two-week campaign likely cost close to $4 billion focused on Iran alone. Would be great to hear your thoughts.
That seems reasonable.
I want to acknowledge the review of "The World as a Whole" - it was my favorite one this year.
The skibidi toilet review deserved to be on the finalists list smh 😔
I genuinely liked it.
Me too. I know it was silly source material, but the point of the contest is that you can review any kind of silly thing you want to. The quality of the review was pretty high, imo.
Skibidi
Scooby Doo
Scott, thanks for giving us extra time to read the entrants. I am so mad at myself that I fell Ill and couldn't make use of the extra time. I found it much harder to rate these than the book reviews.
What were people's strategies for rating things that were clearly very well written but not your interest ? Or things that were to your interest that you really enjoyed but were way shallower than other entries ?
Just wanna know if someone else figured out a good rating algorithm. I have been self-conscious about this after realising I was basically the only person who was rating Kindle books on a bell curve and inadvertently ruining the life of every author I was rating 3* (which was the majority).
Pure vibes! Rubrics are for try-hards! It feels like an 8 to me!
Here was the system I ended up using.
First I sorted all the reviews in order of most to least favourite. (I compared two reviews side-by-side, and decided which one I liked more, and then repeated that. Specifically I did it by emulating the Selection Sort Algorithm)
Afterwards, I read through my list from top to bottom and asked myself whether the reviews were similar in quality or if the latest review I was reading had a noticeable drop in quality relative to the last one I was reading. If there was, I marked this drop with a dash.
All reviews in between two dashes form what I call a “grouping”. All reviews within a grouping ended up being given similar numerical rating to one another.
My system worked out in such a way that I ended up producing 8 different groupings, which corresponded pretty closely to the 10 point scale. All ratings that were 8 or higher were confined solely within the first/highest grouping.
In terms of metrics, the only one I considered was how much I personally liked the review (relative to the others). I feel like it’s a review’s job to make me interested in its subject. If it doesn’t do so, then it is a point against it.
I know this is biased toward poorly written reviews of interesting subjects scoring better than well-written reviews of banal ones, but let’s face it, banal subjects have no chance in this contest (RIP Skibidi toilet). The only things that are going to make it to finalist anyway are well-written reviews of interesting subjects.
At least that’s how I justified it when I was designing this system. The fact that the mashed potatoes review somehow ended up as a finalist makes me very interested in learning what the author did to convince people to give it such high ratings. I await the official ACX post of it with interest.
For the sake of calibration, I didn't submit my ratings until I'd done 42 of them (I ultimately did 74 in all). I wound up assigning qualitative descriptions to each rating value; 1 was "I award you no points and may God have mercy on your soul", 6 was "replacement level", 10 was "deserves to win it all". My final distribution was (from 1 to 10) 1, 4, 6, 13, 8, 18, 11, 7, 5, 1.
I think I was a pretty rough rater: normed to a bell curve (ask me about my awesome spreadsheet) and penalized the ones I wasn’t interested in.
(I mean, I figured that interest has to matter, right? We want to read reviews that we want to read, not just ones that are written nicely. So if everyone rates opinionatedly, then the most generally interesting ones will do well and we’ll all be happier.)
I definitely punished shallowness (and shortness) in general: I like reviews that take up half my day to read and think about; ones that tell me a new story and teach me something about it. In the end, I think this mostly meant poorer ratings for video game, music, and tv/movie reviews, which I’m not sure how to feel about. On the one hand, it might’ve been good to see more content-type diversity among finalists; on the other, again, if we all prefer lengthy reviews of weird quirky things, why waste time and space?
Saddest ACX post of the year for the 125 odd review losers, of which I am one this time around. Congrats to all the finalists and honorable mentions. I look forward to reading them all. I will go back to find the HMs.
We should try sortition. (link: https://archive.is/ztIRY) In the current US system, there's no way to get the best/smartest/most virtuous/etc. people on the ballot, only those with cash and connections, and how they got those usually makes them least fit to serve/lead. True representatives should be closer to average or median. We have eg Congressional Research Service that can assist. Less corruption, less extremism, less Peter principle. Maintain voting for initiatives/referendums/etc that are more important and less manipulable (as far as, ideas aren't people, so less distortion from social psychology). Biggest problem is getting it past the current system. Something something trading freedom of "we the people" for security of "politicians". More links: https://www.reddit.com/r/todayilearned/comments/1j91das/comment/mhamcg1/)
This problem was already solved a hundred years ago in The Napoleon of Notting Hill. You simply choose the new absolute monarch via random ballot of all adult men.
EDIT: I see Deiseach has predictably beat me to the punch! Damn you, potato-American!
Why do you think it is that we have not really had a sortition system of governance (outside of juries etc) since the 19th century? Why did the places that used to use sortition (such as some parts of Switzerland) cease to do so?
I'm a fan of sortition, but I'll offer a discussion of flaws that I see in it, especially as applied to a modern large liberal democracy like the US.
High variance is a big issue. A 500-person legislature (a bit larger than the current US House of Representatives, a bit smaller than the British House of Commons, and exactly the size of the Boule of Classical Athens) chosen by sortition from any nontrivial eligible population would represent the preferences of the population as a whole with a margin of error of +/-4% if chosen at large. That's probably okay if most important issues are 60/40 or worse, especially in situations (like Athens and most other Mediterranean classical democracies) where there's a rule or norm that major or contentious issues get referred to direct-democracy institutions for ratification. But for anything close to 50/50 the margin of error is going to be uncomfortably significant, especially if the legislature is the final word on the subject.
Athens also used a system where the citizens were divided into ten phyles (sometime translated as "tribes"), each of which got fifty seats in the legislature by sortition. I'd initially assumed that the phyles were class-based like the tribes of the Roman Republic, but what little I can find about them suggests they were more in the nature of geographical districts. Either way, a lot of issues would likely see each phyle having relatively homogenous interests and policy preferences, so on those issues at least the apportionment by phyle would probably make the composition of the legislature more representative and stable.
The modern US would have trouble copying this in a robust way, since we're big enough and non-homogenous enough that our equivalent of phyles would be either too numerous or too internally heterogenous. The obvious counterpart to geographical phyles would be states, which are both, especially if you try to apportion seats by population. One representative chosen at random from Montana would be a terrible sample, while 52 represenatives chosen at random from California could skew significantly depending on how many happened to be chosen from the Bay Area, or the greater LA area, or the Central Valley, or from several other regions with distinct interests and political distributions. My understanding is that most medium states have significant regional and urban/rural divides which would produce very unstable results among the dozen or so representatives those states have.
There are other problems with scaling sortition to a larger population. Classical Athens used sortition to select a 500-person legislature out of maybe 50,000 male citizens. The eligible population was probably quite a bit less than that, since I'm pretty sure the 50k figure includes children and young adults below the minimum age of 30. So 1-2% of the population was in the legislature in a given year. Combined with short terms (one year), this means that somewhere between 30-60% of citizen men who don't die young would probably be chosen at least once in their lifetimes. A bit more or less for any given citizen, depending on how malapportioned the tribes were. And the phyles would have averaged about 5k male citizens each, small enough that you're fairly likely to have at least one current member of your legislature in you immediate social circle and virtually certain to have a friend or relative as a member of the legislature at some point over a period of several years. In the US, a 500-person legislature would be 1/500,000 of the adult citizen population, so your chance of ever serving in Congress in your lifetime (assuming Athens-like annual terms) would be about 0.0112% and your odds of knowing a member of Congress personally wouldn't be much better.
There's also the problem of legibility and trust, which is compounded when the fraction of the population being chosen is so much smaller. For a population of maybe 3k eligible candidates per phyle, it's pretty easy to design a procedure where a large fraction of them or even all of them can observe or even participate in the drawing. I don't know how they did it historically, but having eligible candidates line up and draw colored balls from a bag, or write their own names on something (not sure what: I know Athenians used potshards as ballots in other contexts, but they don't seem mechanically suitable here) and toss it into a pot that would be stirred and drawn from publicly by a group of respectable local citizens. In a population the size of the US, you could do it fairly with any of a number of lottery systems, but it would be a lot harder for individual citizens to be able to observe that closely enough to overcome suspicion that a sinister cabal was fixing the drawing.
The last problem with sortition is that elected representatives are supposed to be better than the average citizen at legislating. The ideal espoused in early modern England was "Not everyone in Parliament should be there, but almost everyone who should be there is". And in the early US, both parties expected this to happen in some form: Federalists expected voters to choose existing established pillars of the community (usually major landowners, successful businessmen, or respected civic leaders), while Jeffersonian Republicans hoped that voters would learn to discern a "natural aristocracy" of people with the requisite talents and virtues. Most Americans, if asked for a gut feel on the subject, would be highly skeptical of this in general but moderately likely to have a higher opinion of their own current representative. The latter is probably more significant, since if some random guy is preferable to your own representative, there's usually at least one or two reasonable approximations thereof on at least the primary election ballot.
Anything close to 50/50 doesn't matter anyway. Either way, about half the population is for it and half is against it. We have much bigger problems from things like some people not bothering to vote, or in the US, all the electoral college nonsense.
Permit me to quote "The Napoleon of Notting Hill":
"The old gentleman opened his eyes with some surprise.
"Are you, then," he said, "no longer a democracy in England?"
Barker laughed.
"The situation invites paradox," he said. "We are, in a sense, the purest democracy. We have become a despotism. Have you not noticed how continually in history democracy becomes despotism? People call it the decay of democracy. It is simply its fulfilment. Why take the trouble to number and register and enfranchise all the innumerable John Robinsons, when you can take one John Robinson with the same intellect or lack of intellect as all the rest, and have done with it? The old idealistic republicans used to found democracy on the idea that all men were equally intelligent. Believe me, the sane and enduring democracy is founded on the fact that all men are equally idiotic. Why should we not choose out of them one as much as another. All that we want for Government is a man not criminal and insane, who can rapidly look over some petitions and sign some proclamations. To think what time was wasted in arguing about the House of Lords, Tories saying it ought to be preserved because it was clever, and Radicals saying it ought to be destroyed because it was stupid, and all the time no one saw that it was right because it was stupid, because that chance mob of ordinary men thrown there by accident of blood, were a great democratic protest against the Lower House, against the eternal insolence of the aristocracy of talents. We have established now in England, the thing towards which all systems have dimly groped, the dull popular despotism without illusions. We want one man at the head of our State, not because he is brilliant or virtuous, but because he is one man and not a chattering crowd. To avoid the possible chance of hereditary diseases or such things, we have abandoned hereditary monarchy. The King of England is chosen like a juryman upon an official rotation list. Beyond that the whole system is quietly despotic, and we have not found it raise a murmur."
Hard agree. My only modification would be that I think we need some degree of selection, so I would preselect for each seat say 8 people (could be any number) with sortition, then have a first vote two weeks later. The people in question can also excuse themselves if eg they are planning to leave the country, are unwell, are facing trial, or (and I hate this category) are indispensable at work (small businesses might disproportionately benefit from this which would be really unfortunate).
After the first vote, are retained those candidates who received from than 20% of the vote, but at least 3.
Those 3/4 candidates then have two more weeks in which to make their case (there could be pre-booked public or even in some cases local tv/radio events for this) and there is a final vote.
My toy idea would be to impanel some three-ish juries per district. Each jury would be empowered to interview candidates; subpoena records, witnesses, and expert testimony; and report out a nomination of maybe 1-3 candidates who should appear on the general election ballot. Or zero, if the jury fails to reach a supermajority to report out a slate of nominees. The general election ballot would then be based on candidates who are nominated by at least one jury, with some kind of runoff or ranked-preference voting to accommodate cases where the juries report out larger slates with little or no overlap.
I think that is much too complicated and loses the core advantage of sortition?
Might be a stupid question but: why do we need bunker busters for underground facilities, instead of just bombing all the exits? Is a destroyed evevator shaft much easier to repair than I would imagine?
Yes, an elevator shaft or tunnel entrance is far, far easier to repair than an enrichment centerfuge cascade. If the strikes actually managed to directly hit the enrichment hall and most of the uranium Iran had was in those centerfuges, then they have likely suffered a multi-year or even multi-decade setback. Whether or not that actually happened remains to be seen.
"Is a destroyed evevator shaft much easier to repair than I would imagine?"
It is easier and cheaper to excavate a new hole/entrance than it is to repair a mostly blown up facility (especially if the facility has a lot of expensive equipment).
Or to put it another way, Iran's nuclear budget wasn't mostly going towards elevator shafts.
The things we're looking to destroy are extremely valuable and hard to build; it would be extremely worth it to re-excavate a nuclear enrichment facility.
The act of bombing another country is generally something you don't want to have to do more than once.
I was thinking there would be an obvious threat of "if you try to dig another entrance we'll bomb it immediately", but you're probably right, for various reasons.
I understand why you thought that because it's something I thought of as well, but imagine Iran unearths the site in like 5 years when the geopolitical situation has changed and now the US is not capable of destroying it.
"...and now the US is not capable of destroying it"
Or even just unwilling.
I expect that part of Trump's calculation on what to do is considering what will happen in the next US president has a very different view of how dangerous Iran is. This would lead to choices that do NOT require follow through by future presidents.
Can a person be wrong about what their motivation or beliefs are? I don’t mean intentionally deceptive - I mean, actually being wrong in their own self-assessments. Why or why not? What evidence can a person give that their motivation or beliefs are what they think they are?
My hunch would be that anyone who says they are only motivated by pursuit of the truth is lying to themselves without realizing it, because doing so gives them social rewards and confidence, whereas truth on something you can’t directly act on has almost zero instrumental effect on pursuit of survival and thriving goals, which are terminal and therefore higher priority than satisfying curiosity.
Yes, easily. It comes from making simple choices where the perceived intent and the actual intent are not contradictory. The whole idea behind thought experiments is to probe at those weak points where the ideas conflict, and see if what you think is actually what you think you think.
(personal example; I used to think I wasn't picky about clothes, until someone took me to a shop containing nothing but shirts with large phrases written on the front in bold, and I realized that actually I have a strong preference for expressing as little as possible with my clothes.)
Yes. A lot of my personal growth has come from realizing that the reasons I think I do certain things (like fight with my wife, or avoid making new friends, or play video games) are not the actual reasons. As an example, this morning I started to get snippy with my wife when she said "Trust me, that was the wrong was to do it." If you had asked me five years ago why I was mad at my wife I would have said that she was demeaning me, or putting me down. This morning I defused it when I realized that I was getting upset because I was feeling incompetent and incapable and the words "trust me" seemed to imply that she thought I didn't trust her and was screwing up the task out of defiance. It's more complicated than that, but the incompetence thing is a real emotional trigger for me, and I figured out several years ago that my fear of my own incompetence was the real reason I did a lot of things that before I would have chocked up to my sense of justice, or needing to defend myself, or wanting to set the record straight, etc. I was able to turn my passive aggressive comments into direct communication to her asking her if she really thought I didn't trust her or didn't know that what she was saying was true, and I found out that she wasn't even aware that she had used the words "trust me" and was just trying to help.
A lot of philosophy and religion is tied up in the idea that we don't understand ourselves and why we really do the things we do or feel the emotions we feel, etc.
Yes, absolutely. Ask anyone who has been a parent or other caretaker of young children. Kids are demonstrably and trivially wrong with extremely high confidence about their own motivations and beliefs all the time.
Yeah, until I had kids I was unaware how much of introspection is actually a learned skill.
Small kids literally do not realize that they are hungry or tired... they just get increasingly angry, and they have no idea why. Like, a hungry child will get angry, and will then throw food on the floor because of the anger, which goes completely against logic. It takes a few years until children learn to recognize "I am hungry now" and "I am tired now" as emotions.
Actually, I suspect that even adult people eating food at midnight is often not caused by actual hunger, but by misinterpreting signals of tiredness for hunger. Both of them are "low on energy", but for different reasons.
So if kids need to learn all of this, it makes sense to suspect that maybe there are things that even many adults do not know. Signals that mean something specific, but we can't decipher them, and it becomes just a generic anger.
I don't think a person can be "right" about their motivations or beliefs.
Step 1 in thinking about your motivations and beliefs is: condense/compress/collapse the totality of your motivations and beliefs into something that fits into a Conscious Thought™.
Then if you're trying to communicate your motivations and beliefs to someone else, step 2 is: condense/compress/collapse the totality of your conscious thoughts about your motivations and beliefs into something that fits into some sentences or paragraphs of whichever language you're using (plus whatever grunts, hand gestures, poetry verses, oil paintings, vlog posts, equations, etc that you have time produce and that you think might help.)
The amount of simplification required for each of these steps is so extreme that the product of each step is more "wrong" than than it is "right."
On the one hand, yes, i love it.
But on the other hand, if I think "maybe my keys are on the desk" and then I walk to the desk to get the keys, I think i'm right that my intention in going to the desk was to get the keys.
I suppose, to your point, if walking to the desk brings me by the pantry, which is open, and hey, macademia nuts - i can't know for sure whether or not the keys were instrumental to the nuts.
Is there some way to have this cake and eat it, too? Can we evolve it to, "knowledge of your own motivations or beliefs is likely only possible in small scale, limited contexts and even there is questionable?"
For sure.
On a small scale [why did he walk to the desk?] you're probably a lot more "right" than "wrong" when you think and speak about the belief [he believed the keys were on the desk] and motivation [he wanted to start the car].
But we rarely think/talk about beliefs and motivations at that small scale. Usually we're thinking about something interesting/uncertain/complex/controversial. And yet when thinking/talking about these larger scale, broader context issues we, unavoidably, perform the step 1 and step 1 dramatic oversimplifying processes *without noticing* that we're doing it.
Or to put it another way, I think it's a mistake (that we all make, almost all the time, without being at all aware of it) to think the "knowability" of a thing like [why did he walk to the desk?] is in the same category as the "knowability" of a thing like [is he motivated by pursuit of the truth?].
Epistemic status: Neither immaculate nor defiled ;)
"Can a person be wrong about what their motivation or beliefs are? I don’t mean intentionally deceptive - I mean, actually being wrong in their own self-assessments. Why or why not? What evidence can a person give that their motivation or beliefs are what they think they are? "
If a person states (and seems to be sincere about) that they value "X" and they keep making choices that are anti-X at some point I feel one must conclude that they are either:
a) Very wrong about their valuing X, or
b) Terrible at understanding how the world works (in at least one area of concern).
I'm eliminating "they are hypocrites" here because of the "seems sincere" bit, but if we don't have that then them talking the talk but then doing what they really want also comes into play. But that isn't your question.
I think that (b) is VERY common in other areas (e.g. most people seem to have cause-and-effect for athlete salaries and event ticket prices backwards...) so I don't see why it would be less common for motivations and beliefs.
What is probably also very common is people not wanting to make tradeoffs.
> e.g. most people seem to have cause-and-effect for athlete salaries and event ticket prices backwards..
can you say more about this?
Sure.
A common belief I see on various message boards is something like, "Great, now that player X has a new $YYY contract ticket and food prices will be going up again."
Almost certainly this is not how things work.
Consider the ticket (and food and parking) prices and player salaries at some time (like today). Say tickets average $100/ticket. And the stadium sells our 85% or whatever.
Imagine, next, that the entire league takes a 25% pay cut. Maybe there was a short strike and the players lost or the owners staged a short lockout. Whatever. There is a drop in pay, but during an off-season so the fans aren't upset because a season got disrupted. But now we have a new set of contracts and the same players (more or less) show up to play.
The fans have already established that they will pay $100/ticket to watch the players play and the same players are playing. Do we expect the owners to drop the ticket prices to $75/ticket or keep the tickets at $100/ticket and pocket the extra money?
The folks who believe that player salaries drive ticket prices expect that the owners will drop ticket prices. Economists, who expect the owners to be trying to maximize revenue, expect that the ticket prices will remain the same because the customers have established that they will pay $100/ticket so why drop prices?
The same thing plays out in the other direction. If players get more do we expect ticket prices to go up? If so, why weren't the ticket prices at that place already?
The *other* view is that the owners charge what they can for tickets and parking and food and the players get some cut of that (about 50% for the NFL). So if the fans stop showing up then ticket prices drop and eventually player salaries drop, too. If fans keep showing up even if/when ticket prices rise then the players' salaries go up because the owners have more money to spend on player salaries and many of the owners want to win (also, many leagues have salary caps and floors that are based on league revenue).
Economists generally believe that rising ticket prices drive rising player salaries rather than the other way around. Lots of fans think the causality runs the other way.
I would have thought "high athlete salaries = higher event prices to cover the costs" but is it in truth "high event prices = can then pay higher salaries to the stars"?
Yes, "high event prices = can then pay higher salaries to the stars" is more accurate. I elaborated a bit more on why/how in a response to Mark Neyer.
I sort of agree with your conclusion, but not with your argument for it.
We absolutely do not live in a world where people only act on things that have instrumental effect on pursuit of survival and thriving, and there are plenty of examples of people choosing to satisfy curiosity over survival (functionally, anyway, usually they are not aware of just how badly their curiosity will backfire).
> usually they are not aware of just how badly their curiosity will backfire
Yes but i think this is the key: in these situations, they didn't understand their risks. I think people understand 'risk of upsetting my group' FAR more intuitively than they understand other risks. I don't think people risk tribal membership ejection nearly as readily as they risk e.g. bodily harm, because you can heal a broken limb far more easily and reliably than a broken reputation.
This question is tough for me to get a handle on. In part, I think that's because the line between belief and unbelief isn't well-defined. In part, that's because belief has an important role in group membership. Robin Hanson's idea that it's easier to talk about group values by gesturing at something sacred rather than just being explicit about those values is relevant. In that way, belief is a kind of social ritual, where we don't just privately believe and suspect that other people privately believe, but we see each other making professions of belief.
I think too about how important COVID denial and COVID vaccine skepticism are as markers of membership in certain groups. People literally died for those beliefs. It's hard to think of a stronger indicator of belief than this. At the same time, I'd say that they engaged in some serious motivated reasoning to arrive at those views. That points to some shakiness of belief. They made a much bigger bet on those beliefs than any bet I'd make that they didn't really believe those things, though.
> People literally died for those beliefs
I don't think this is true. They may have died _as a result of those beliefs_ - but dying _for_ a belief means taking a risk you believe to be fatal, due to the belief. If you think COVID was all exaggerated, you aren't taking what _you_ believe to be a fatal risk, regardless of what it is.
From their perspectives, people who took the covid vaccines themselves were taking on risk for their beliefs: they took a mass-manufactured chemical product made by corporations that lie, in order to avoid something with a low fatality rate. They'd say _you_ engaged in motivated reasoning.
It seems to me, then, that whenever we look at reasoning of people with different value structures, we think _all_ of their reasoning is motivated, whereas our own is pure and based on the truth. To me it seems most likely, then, that it's always subservient to group membership.
Sometimes the part of your brain that rationalises decisions is not aware of the part driving the decisions (hunger, and so forth), so I would say not only is it possible but relatively common.
I’d go farther and say that low level self awareness is something of a rarity.
I think people can and often are wrong about these things. Another thing they're often very wrong about is the origin of their beliefs and motivation.
That said, I wouldn't automatically discount as false a claim about being interested in finding the truth. I know I am personally interested in discovering the truth even when there are negative social consequences for doing so.
Of course, I could be wrong about my own motivation, but if you want to place this in the context of the surviving and thriving framework, curiosity often leads to unexpected discoveries that have a huge survival advantage but it is not possible to predict initially which discoveries that would be and how to even begin to go about making them. All you can do is try lots and lots of things and try to make connections between those things and notice patterns etc. So it seems to me that an innate drive towards general curiosity without any underlying social motivation is something evolution very well could have produced.
I agree that this is true - curiosity is totally a thing. But I think people will generally avoid being curious about things if that curiosity itself poses an existential risk to them. Given how socially oriented we are, being curious about, e.g. the relationship between genetics and iq can pose an existential risk.
Any folks close to the topic have thoughts on the FDA commissioner’s plans to cut drug approval time by months? Are they doing it “right?” Estimated lives / QALYs saved?
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2025/06/19/faster-fda-drug-approval/
It's more talk than concrete action at this point. The FDA unveiled their new AI chatbot "Elsa" recently to help cut down review times, and despite the hype marketing from the commissioner, the insider sentiment was far less bullish. That said, there is no reason why AI should not significantly reduce review times if implemented properly, but the FDA is more in the vision / intention setting stage at this point. And most of their accelerated review pathways they have created give them all sorts of outs if they, in fact, cannot get it done.
Prediction Market for the winner when? My money is on The ACX Commentariat
What do y'all think about this foreign policy for the Middle East from the perspective of the USA?
1. We must achieve complete independence from reliance on Middle Eastern oil by any means necessary--offshore drilling, fracking, investing in nuclear power, solar, wind, whatever.
2. Then we get out. Completely. Iran closes the Strait of Hormuz? Fine, we don't need the oil from the Persian Gulf. Houthis shooting ships in the Red Sea? That's not our main shipping lane anyway. Someone attacks Israel? I'm fine with selling weapons to the Israelis, but they've done a good job of defending themselves over the past 60 years. They can survive without our help. Palestinian statehood? Let someone else figure it out.
1. Oil is a commodity. "Independence" is impossible unless you're willing to set up a system where the price of oil is different from the rest of the world. Which basically means complete autarky and is impractical. If you simply want the US to not be directly reliant on it then the US already has that and always has. I think the Middle East is like 5% of our oil.
2. The US is highly integrated into East Asia and Europe which DO rely on Middle Eastern oil. They also rely on those trade routes. Unless you can get the EU, China, Japan, etc to sign on to energy independence and avoid their biggest trade routes you'd still have to care. Now, you might think "if they're primarily the ones benefitting why don't they help" and in that case welcome to the American diplomatic position since like the 1980s.
3. The Middle East is important strategically if you want to defend Europe or North Africa and it gives us a strong ability to influence South and East Asia in one shared defense perimeter that's continuous with Europe and North Africa.
The folks pushing energy independence often want to see Europe and Japan [maybe not China!] pay "their fair share" for the naval power to keep sea lanes (including the Persian Gulf) open. This tends to get lost, but should be kept in mind while thinking about this.
"Why is the US paying our Navy keeping the Persian Gulf oil flowing to China?" probably captures the spirit of this (whether the facts are correct or not).
Re #1, we are already close enough to independence. https://www.eia.gov/energyexplained/oil-and-petroleum-products/imports-and-exports.php
The main benefit of middle east right now is a source of investment, and a lax regulatory regime. We can build all the AI plants we want in Saudi Arabia.
The cost is jihadi fundamentalism willing to blow stuff up to gain god's favor.
If we withdraw China will swoop in and replace us.
We stopped trying for boots on the ground regime change, and effectively stopped mediating in Israel/Palestine except insofar as it improves regional stability (i.e. Abraham accords great justice for Palestinians who cares)
Couldn't be more satisfied with the current approach, actually
>If we withdraw China will swoop in and replace us
But why does that matter, given OP's implied premise?
I believe the argument is that the US gets to stay the world hegemon (also) by keeping others down. They can't afford having a competitor that has access to both advanced technology and plentiful resources.
Yes, that is obviously the argument. But, again, why is it important to be the world hegemon? If I read OP correctly, they don't think that is intrinsically valuable. And after all, it is safe to say that, of all the people in the world who are living happy lives, most do not reside in the world hegemony. So, again, why does it matter?
I don't understand. The Gulf states offer the US stuff it wants: a lot of space and lax regulatory regime and energy that they are willing to trade in exchange for military protection. If we don't do it China will offer it instead and we would be relatively weaker.
Having power and a higher share of global economy/effective resource control without giving up nice things like being able to stop government from bulldozing my house with eminent domain to build an AI chip fan seems good for me/US foreign policy
>a lot of space and lax regulatory regime
I don't understand why you think the US wants those things. Those sound like things that US companies doing business overseas might want, but not the US govt per se. Nor do I understand how "China swooping in" would change anything in that regard.
>energy that they are willing to trade in exchange for military protection.
But that is not how it works, is it? The Gulf states sell their oil on the open market' they don't trade it for military protection. And the US import very little oil from the Persian Gulf https://www.eia.gov/dnav/pet/pet_move_impcus_a2_nus_epc0_im0_mbblpd_a.htm
Who cares about oil US is self sufficient. I was talking about industrial and land capacity.
I'm saying Saudi Arabia is willing to build giant AI chip and energy facilities that the US can't for environmental regulatory reasons.
The US government of course cares about maximizing economic and strategic leverage of US aggregate entities.
So, your claim is that, if the US conducts foreign policy in the Middle East that is to Saudi Arabia's liking, it will let US companies build AI chip and energy facilities, but if not, then China will "swoop in" and replace the US as Saudi Arabia's security guarantor, and Saudi Arabia will instead let Chinese companies build those facilities? Seems like you are positing a force projection capacity that China does not currently seem to have.
And, why not build those factories in Mexico or elsewhere in Latin America?
How hard is it to build AI plants in rural Arizona or Texas? I have my share of problems with using eminent domain, but there's a lot of empty land in the US.
Impossible. We wasted billions and billions of dollars trying to build high speed rail, etc.
It's not about 'empty land' it's about bypassing environmental regulations.
That is a not a very apt comparison. High speed rail is built with government funds and hence is subject to political considerations (eg, in California, the requirement that it actually serve the people who need it most, rather than bypassing them). And both Arizona and Texas have grown rapidly; there seem to be few constraints on economic development.
"Impossible," they say, while OpenAI currently builds the massive StarGate plant in Texas: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GhIJs4zbH0o
This seems out of date and probably bad.
Due to advancements in energy production (something something fracking, ask somebody actually in the energy sector) the US is a net energy exporter. We probably still want access to the Middle East but, honestly, if the Middle East shut down it would probably make our own oil and energy reserves far more valuable.
The issue is that, well, the rest of the world still needs cheap oil, which means the Middle East. A world in which cheap oil keeps flowing to Europe and developing countries is a better world because developing countries deserve a decent standard of living and because we like Europe, it's full of the history and funny accents :).
But yeah, fundamentally, the US no longer needs the Middle East for its energy needs and is, at best, providing a free security good to the rest of the world and, at worst, meddling in a volatile region out of habit and the influence of varying lobbying groups (Israel, yes, but also the Saudis and Emirates and their ilk).
Wow, I think that, of the finalists and honorable mentions I only read the Watergate one (it was really good!). Good to know, there is a lot of good content to be read on the coming weeks then.
Shout-out to the review on human sexuality. Thought it was well written and had an original deep insight, even if it seems a bit flawed/incomplete. Would really have liked it to see a discussion here of it
Hey, author here; thanks for the shout out. Definitely ran out of time on this/was a little rusty at essay writing, I don't think I quite did a good enough job conveying the original insight, which is a shame. But it was still really fun to have written it, to have put something out there that was read by probably hundreds of people.
Maybe there can be a bit of a discussion here; the essay is hosted at https://cosmiczenithcanon.substack.com/p/acx-not-a-book-review-entrant-review.
The short summary/TL;DR is that human sexuality is fundamentally tied into our status detecting systems, and this explains most of the weirdness around sex, such as people being into being cucked or the prevalence of violent fantasies.
What parts of it seemed incomplete/ in need of elaboration to you?
Im going to comment both here and on the post. Who knows, maybe the algorithm takes this and signal boosts your post
I really enjoyed the status approach to sexuality but I still think what you call low-status hotness (LSH) is kinda mysterious
While I buy the idea that submitting to a high status partner and surrendering responsibility may be hot or attractive to some people, I think there is more at play in some of these fetishes. It seems like the very act of lowering one's status (either physically by pain or socially by humiliation) is the goal of the drive here, not the second-hand consequence of submitting.
This part, where pain or humiliation turns into pleasure feels like a gap not only in your system but in most explanations of human sexuality imo. I think without explaining this gap some extreme fetishes like straight up CBT or SPH remain unaccounted.
I dont know, maybe by taking pain or humiliation you increase the "status-delta" between you and your partner and it makes them hotter? This could be a viable explanation but still seems to ignore the fact that the pain is the goal for some people
Surprised that the Testosterone review didn't make it and kinda disappointed (1). I thought it was well argued and potentially worth making the lifestyle change and I wanted to see the ACX commentariat tear into it and see how it fared.
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1jYVJFIz5-aMi0LCgsC9AN6BncJDNVGaMU37QmwZ1vzA/edit?tab=t.0#heading=h.c6lh7sev0o6s
(1) I say that and then I'm like "Oh yeah, I didn't vote".
It was one of the good ones. I did have an issue with it: I didn't know whether I should trust the author to be unbiased enough. The author was certainly very convinced by the conclusion. They did discuss some drawbacks, but I didn't know enough to say whether it was a fair treatment. They were very dismissive of the downsides, and it sounded very surprising to me that this should be all that there is.
I did give it a good grade. I would have liked the review to reach the final, so that I learn more about it from the comments.
I skimmed it, got really interested and promised myself that I would go back, read in detail and rate it. Oh well. At least you reminded me to read it fully, I really started considering the lifestyle change as well
Ah, ACX commetariat, I am disappointed that "11 Poetic Forms, Reviewed in Verse" wasn't a finalist. It was so fun! I didn't expect it to win but I really hoped it would at least place.
Agree! I don't even like poetry very much, but I quite enjoyed that one. I really thought it deserved to be a finalist.
Completely agree. It was one of my two 10s. Hats off to the writer.
The concept was good, and probably if Scott had written it it would have been great, but the author doesn't have quite that level of verbal cleverness and so it didn't make me smile as much as I'd have liked. This kept me from rating it more highly.
I'm not a lawyer but what's wrong with the YC SAFE for #1?
Doesn't work if the recipient is currently a nonprofit, I think.
My friend is a journalist and he has been writing about the US Aid cuts in Southern Africa. He has mainly been focusing on South Africa, but recently went to Mozambique to see the effects there.
It seems to be nothing short of a total catastrophe. As in, tons of children just dying of HIV levels of catastrophe. The country's health systems seems to have been entirely propped up by USAID funding.
There are certainly debates you could have as to whether or not it is good for a country to be so reliant on USAID, but unfortunately it was and with the cuts, we are now seeing dire consequences. I've linked the article below if you want to read more. Was hoping some EA type people could see this.
https://groundup.org.za/article/mozambique-these-children-usaid-left-to-die-part-1-the-abandonment-orphans-with-hiv/
Either they're a dependent satrapy or they're not. They can't have it both ways. Well they can, but then hundreds of thousands of their people will die. And they will blame the US for it. And most people will believe them.
Without forcing people to virtue signal, I am amazed at the types of comments a post like this gets.
It reads like intellectualizing. You even explicitly say "There are certainly debates you could have as to whether or not it is good for a country to be so reliant on USAID, but unfortunately it was and with the cuts, we are now seeing dire consequences."....and the commenters jump exactly on that part.
Kids with AIDs are dying. Skilled forecasters estimate that the PEPFAR stop due to claimed "fraud, abuse and waste in USAID" will directly cost the lives of ~half a million people per year.
https://asteriskmag.substack.com/p/forecast-the-impact-of-usaid-hivaids
Deaths after one year: [257,500 - 515,000 - 772,500]
Deaths after four years: [1,015,000 - 1,998,750 - 2,953,750]
I will repeat- half a million lives per year. Even if you disagree with USAID, or think there is actual abuse, or there is nothing good about foreign aid, or it can make countries dependent, or it can foster some corruption in countries, I posit that half a million dying is an moral outrage. I would urge any commenter to recalibrate their moral compass if this is one of the first responses you have to reading the associated article. Hope indeed some EA funders will see this.
Half a million dying from an intentional, created illness is a moral outrage. Half a million dying from influenza is just an ordinary decade (and, judging by the vaccine's effectiveness, not preventable at any rate).
Africa Wins Again is a perfect slogan for the deadliness of Africa-in-general. Lions, snakes, sleeping sickness, monkeypox, ebola...
I will not be outraged because of something that I did not do. Passively letting someone die, who I could save, is not a moral outrage. It is a moral lacuna. It is not deliberately performing genocide.
Let me be perfectly clear: The perfectly preventable deaths of Ukrainians from 2022 to 2025 are on OUR HEADS. We voted for them, we got them -- blood and gore. Even the soldiers infected with HIV, deliberately, are on our heads.
I will NOT be shamed for letting someone die from their own actions. Shame on America, shame on US, sure, but shame us for what we've done. It's far more shameful than our inaction.
> Skilled forecasters estimate that the PEPFAR stop due to claimed "fraud, abuse and waste in USAID" will directly cost the lives of ~half a million people per year.
The article you link to doesn't say that. It estimates what will happen if the waiver PEPFAR has been granted that allows it to continue operations doesn't work and PEPFAR is effectively cancelled. But PEPFAR is not currently stopped, though there were disruptions to its operations that are still being worked out.
Correct, I should have made that explicit. From the sources I have read, and the above-linked article, the fact that a waiver exists actually does not mean PEPFAR is continuing. Supply chain projects are not being picked up.
https://retrovirology.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s12977-025-00657-2
https://www.bushcenter.org/publications/two-minute-take-pepfar-update
https://asteriskmag.com/issues/10/how-to-triage-billion-in-aid-cuts (slightly more hopeful, people are stepping in)
Edit - for more finegrained levels of cuts:
https://www.cgdev.org/blog/new-estimates-usaid-cuts
https://www.cgdev.org/blog/usaid-cuts-new-estimates-country-level
At different points in this century, the UN has projected a 2100 population for Africa at 2 billion and 4 billion. I don’t know what they’re thinking now or if there’s any reason to pay attention to them.
But offering such numbers in this context, is not necessarily bound to shut down discussion of the future. Especially when tagged with “how could we be missing 5 million people?” etc.
A country that cannot fund a bookmobile to drop off in rural areas the ARVs it is sitting on, is unlikely to know how many people live in it, nor what they die of when they die.
Reading that, one has to wonder what the hell the government of Mozambique is doing. If I look up Wikipedia, it is a poor, underdeveloped and indebted country. On the other hand, apparently with development policies and loosening up regulation, the economy grew very fast. One more case of "the GDP is soaring but people think they're not doing well"?
So if the economy *is* growing, where's the money going? Corruption, it would seem, as well as the lingering effects of the civil war and new uprisings in the north. (Thank you Google AI for the précis):
"Mozambique's economy in 2025 is experiencing a mixed outlook. While facing contraction in the first quarter, there are projections for a gradual recovery, with expectations of 2.7% to 3.0% real GDP growth by the end of the year. The recovery is expected to be driven by the extractive sector, particularly gas production, and agriculture. However, challenges remain, including inflation, fiscal deficits, and the ongoing impact of the Islamist insurgency in the north."
Apparently it is also a popular tourist destination. So there is *some* money there, but who holds the purse strings or where it's going is the question.
https://www.afdb.org/en/countries/southern-africa/mozambique/mozambique-economic-outlook
"Mozambique’s economic structure is determined largely by the extractives sector, with its large gas reserves of 180 million cubic feet, the third largest in Africa. There has been only limited structural transformation of the economy, with a slight shift from agriculture to services. In 2001, the services sector was the main contributor to GDP growth, accounting for 50%, followed by agriculture at 32.2%, industry (including extractives) at 18%, and manufacturing at 12.2%. Two decades later, economic activity continues to be driven by the services sector, which accounted for 51.7% of GDP in 2021, while agriculture’s share had fallen to 28%. Mozambique’s structural transformation is hampered by skills shortages and a high illiteracy rate among 15- to 34-year-olds (31.4%), skills mismatches, lack of infrastructure, high public debt, and a low level of industrialization."
According to the linked story, once the USAID money stopped flowing, that was it. Nothing happened. Nobody else stepped in. No home-grown solutions or attempts by the government to intervene, no other agencies or charities. If the government is this bad, then the country might as well become a satrapy of the USA
Cogently written as usual. And the medicine is still there …
More specifically what happened is the government basically borrowed a bunch of Chinese money because they didn't like that the US wanted things like transparency or anti-corruption. They even cut services and expected the US to pick up the slack. They were betting the US would keep funding them because of stuff like... well, this story. Basically that no matter how much they favored China or cut their own public services the US would continue to pay because otherwise ordinary people would suffer.
But then China pulled back on funding as it became increasingly clear Mozambique was not going to be able to repay them or develop. And then the US cut aid. At first a little to signal displeasure then when the US did zero based budgeting it couldn't justify continuing in Mozambique generally. And now Mozambique is left in a deep crisis. It's unfortunate for the average person but it's the result of extremely bad local leadership.
I imagine China would have been interested in things like the natural gas reserves? When you've managed to frick up your government to the point that it's not even worth it for a colonising power to come along to scoop up your natural assets, that's pretty bad.
I realise they're still struggling with an underdeveloped country and a past civil war plus new insurgency in the north of the country, but it does sound unhappily like much of post-independence Africa where the new rulers decided they'd divvy up the spoils amongst themselves, and to hell with the citizens, they're not even all our tribesmen.
Mozambique does have natural gas but not a ton of it. It's ranked about 90th if I recall correctly, something like .03% of global production. That places it alongside such energy superpowers as Latvia. Most of Mozambique's exports are agricultural products in a broad sense. Stuff like nuts but also wood. And all exports are only about $12 billion and exports to China are only about $750 million. Mostly niche agricultural products and high quality lumber.
China's plan for Mozambique was, fairly transparently, "We come in and run the Chinese economic playbook. You undergo rapid industrialization to middle income and reorient your trade to focus on China." Not a bad idea overall except the part where none of that actually happened for a variety of reasons. But mostly, in my opinion, corruption and more general dysfunction.
I will say Mozambique is uniquely bad even among dysfunctional African states. It's undoubtedly in the top three and has an okay shot at being the worst. Though that honor probably goes to Republic of the Congo (not the DRC, the other one). But it's close.
On the one hand, there is significant human suffering. These individuals are suffering and that is obviously bad.
On the other hand, this is a predictable consequence of Mozambique's actions which have repeatedly taken the US for granted and prioritized China. The reason the US funds Mozambique's healthcare system is they cut domestic funding in order to repay China and expected the US to pick up the slack. It was supremely foolish of Mozambique's leadership to expect US taxpayers to (indirectly) finance Chinese debt repayments.
China owns about 7.5% of Mozambique’s debt (or about 14% of the Mozambique’s external debt). Government spending on healthcare increasing from 2016 though 2022, going from 29% to 36% of total healthcare spending. The World Bank doesn’t have numbers more recent than 2022, but I haven’t seen any reports of subsequent cuts.
Eliminating healthcare aid to Mozambique in the hopes that will respond by defaulting on its debt strikes me as crazy on multiple levels. For one thing, Mozambique is currently running a deficit, so I doubt that defaulting on their debt would allow the government to increase healthcare spending at all, much less increase it enough to replace the money from USAID. For another, a default will harm all creditors, not just China.
Mozambique has been hiding how much debt it owes. Thus the hidden debt crisis. Anyone who says they know what percentage of Mozambique's debt is owed to China is lying. Further, total healthcare spending includes foreign aid, so that number does not indicate THE GOVERNMENT increased healthcare spending. So that statistic is misleading.
No one wants Mozambique to default on its debts. Including the US. Unless by default you mean the negotiated debt restructuring process Mozambique has asked for.
However, as FLWAB says, if you side with US rivals and cut spending to pay back US rivals (effectively transferring in net American money to China) and lie about how much debt you have and turn down transparency/anti-corruption requests then the result is unsurprising. And, to be honest, your fault.
I don't think the hope is that they'll default on their debt, and I think the idea is that if you prioritize US rivals over the US, it's not surprising if the US stops paying for your medical bills.
What are the long term consequences of developed nations propping up an entire continent which seems wholly incapable of caring for itself? Is it even desirable in utilitarian terms over the long term? What could go wrong?
1. If you have an argument that the long term costs outweigh the long term benefits, then please present it.
2. I could be wrong, but it seems that you are treating "countries " as the unit of concern, rather than human beings.
Re #2, see https://www.britannica.com/topic/human-security
What I am bringing up is that the key to an effective future eventually depends upon the concerned individual or group taking responsibility for themselves. My concern is that we are treating the people of Africa like children or livestock rather than as responsible human adults that need to take control of their own destiny.
IOW I worry we are promoting dysfunctionality and dependency. Of course, I am often wrong.
That is way too general an argument. Why is the specific aid in question an example of the phenomenon you are referring to? We are talking about medicine for sick people; we aren't talking about propping up core government functions.
I was indeed generalizing the argument. Trying to take it up a level of abstraction. Sorry.
Delivering drugs to sick people seems like commendable work to me. My question is whether the larger pattern of sending in solutions to their problems is the long term best solution. It seems like we are addressing the symptoms and by doing so interfering with their ability to become self sufficient.
Delivering drugs to sick people is fine, if they're reasonably cheap and don't lead to antbiotic resistance. Ivermectin is fine, I'll walk on hot coals for that. I won't do the same for HIV drugs -- they're expensive, and this whole "we let orphans live in the middle of the boonies" so that they are impossible to supervise without costing millions of unnecessary dollars... that's just ridiculous.
One orphanage. We have the plans from covid19. Build it there.
>My question is whether the larger pattern of sending in solutions to their problems is the long term best solution.
Yes, that is very clear. But the issue is that you can raise that question about any aid. Lend-Lease, for example: "Delivering weapons to people resisting Nazi aggression seems like commendable work to me. My question is whether the larger pattern of sending in solutions to their problems is the long term best solution. It seems like we are addressing the symptoms and by doing so interfering with their ability to become self sufficient." So, at some point, you need to make a claim that THIS PARTICULAR aid program is counterproductive in that manner.
Depends. We can get a lot out of certain "charity work" (that's called R&D for when we finish depleting our own aquifers). Ivermectin is cheap and safe, it's not a drug that we spend oodles on to make in quantity (likewise antibiotics).
HIV drugs... that's expensive.
All the t-shirts they've got, they are castoffs from America, where people won't buy a t-shirt if they don't like the logo. That's cheap writeoffs.
I'm not sure if Africa is wholly incapable of caring for itself...
Why aren’t they more self sufficient?* If the rest of the world didn’t exist at all, what would be happening there? How would they respond to HIV and countless other diseases and ailments? How would their governments and major institutions work?
By providing aid and relief are we interfering with the natural process of them evolving respectable institutions and social fabric?
Just asking the question.
Africa is not self-sufficient because people never needed to look to the future there. Food is too easy to grow, and they don't have winters. Future-oriented thought is rare there, and not very encouraged by the climate, or by the populace.
If there weren't the rest of the world, they'd simply let the disease kill people and breed all over again.
I'm not sure you HAVE a natural process of them evolving respectable institutions and social fabric. What you have is a tremendous reservoir of biodiversity, precisely because selection pressure is next-to-nonexistent.
That's nice hyperbole disguised as rationality, but the entire continent is not "wholly incapable of caring for itself", some countries are just not capable of caring for all HIV patients. Hopefully, with new medical treatments and economic growth it will be less of a problem in the future.
HIV is just one of countless problems. Setting aside any hyperbole, the question is are we making them better through our aid or are we fostering dependency, free riding and general institutional dysfunction?
What is your take on this question?
Aid is bad when it's tied up with conditions that give the aid-giver some kind of hostile soft power over you, dependency structures are part of this problem. But It's good when it prevents millions from dying in between now and when a vaccine is being developed. In general, Africans would prefer mutual economic development to aid, but HIV is one example where immediate medium-term aid is needed until advanced medical infrastructure that physically cannot exist in Africa yet has time to develop. It would be incredibly hard to argue that PEPFAR saving something like 20 million lives is a worse outcome than simply being free of dependency.
So I can agree that mutual economic growth is preferable to aid, maybe even in general, but some cases are just... good.
Do you believe that Omicron was a netgood to the world? If so, would you support more revocation of HIV/AIDS funding? If not, how do you explain the creation of Omicron?
Yeah, even if we want longer term sustainable change, sometimes immediate aid is the best answer.
I know that a couple of African economists have affirmed their belief in the latter.
Yes. Many of the rationalists on this substack seem to lack any historical context and also seem to be woefully unable to think outside their tightly constrained intellectual boxes. Of course, most of the youngsters on this stack weren't alive during the initial phase of the US AIDS epidemic in the early 1980s. They might think of HIV/AIDS as a treatable disease. But NY City hospitals were overwhelmed with AIDS patients who required months of care and who inevitably died. Initially, the mode of transmission was unknown, and medical staff were accidentally infected with patients' body fluids. It was a real shitshow. ICUs were overwhelmed, and they had trouble finding space for non-AIDS patients who needed intensive critical care. So the surge in AIDS cases affected the non-infected population as well.
Now that we know hella lot more about HIV, we've discovered that immunocompromised people are mutational petri dishes for other pathogens. Luckily, most of those mutations can't overcome healthy immune systems, but occasionally they might. For instance, the Omicron variant of SARS-CoV-2 probably got its start in an immunocompromised person with HIV in central Africa.
Being laissez-faire is all very well and good, until it comes back to bite you on the ass.
Given the rise of Omicron, would you support defunding HIV-maintenance drugs in the 3rd world, as a way to encourage "less lethal mutations"? I think you could argue that Omicron, itself, is worth the cost in "deaths of HIV positive people."
AIDS, and more tightly speaking, gays committed genocide of the hemophiliac population. I'm not going to say this was intentional, mind, but I'm just bringing it up, in a subthread where folks are trying to shame Americans for inaction. This was not inaction on the part of gays, they were trying to make money by selling their blood.
It took about 4 years after the start of the AIDS epidemic, and about 2 years after the HIV virus was identified as the cause of AIDS, before the Red Cross and other blood banks started screening for it. Granted, it took about a year to develop an ELISA test for HIV, but IIRC there was a lot of resistance to the idea that HIV was the cause of AIDS, and then there was another round of resistance to screening (because of cost). I just checked with ChatGPT, and it says that ~6,000–10,000 hemophiliacs and ~4,000–6,000 transfusion recipients died from HIV contaminated blood products in the US. I'm surprised it was that low.
But remember, it wasn't just gays who caught HIV. I asked ChatGPT and says that ~23% of AIDS cases were women who caught it from heterosexual sex. Also, IV drug users were at higher risk. Right now in sub-Saharan Africa, more than half the cases are women. And the infections happen predominantly through heterosexual sex.
As a historically-challenged person stuck in his intellectual box, my question wasn’t really about HIV. My question was about whether we are on net creating dependency and fostering negative sociology-cultural responses to the myriad challenges facing the billions of people on this continent. Feel free to disagree. I have an open mind.
In theory USAID is supposed to be helping countries get off aid. In practice I'm guessing they often fail at that part, and it sounds like they failed on Mozambique. That said the stakes are high enough that I'd prefer a "keep trying to reform until you get something that works" approach (even though it'll be slow, error-prone and relatively expensive) over a "sharp cuts and millions die" approach.
I was prepared to feel whatever feelings that article might call forth, and I know the only socially acceptable ones will be pity and recrimination against the correct quarter.
But I defy anyone to read it and not have *any* qualms about the sustainability of this … system. And I’m not sure the remote HIV-positive children and their grandmothers aren’t right in feeling that their own countrymen in the form of their “activists” abandoned them.
Is this the future people really want for the world?
I don't see what the activists are supposed to do. They have no income, now they have to spend their time in surviving instead of delivering medicine and caring for the children.
Perhaps a jaded view but the absolute abruptness with which they broke off contact, inevitably suggested to me that they were gatekeepers of the medicine, taking their cut of aid funds, more than dedicated medical personnel.
It would’ve interesting to know what they are doing now to survive.
The article said now they're doing subsistence farming and peddling wares in street markets.
I wouldn't phrase it as "taking their cut of aid funds", it sounds like distributing medicine was a full time job. Nobody would be doing that for free in a developed country either.
In a developed country, like, say, Mexico, they'd be in an orphanage. Or doing productive work, so that their HIV drugs could be paid for.
Actually, these two can be combined, in a developed country. It wouldn't take that much work for Mozambique to "hire apprentices" for skilled labor (that's an orphanage, with one nurse to deliver the HIV drugs).
Their concern is touching, then, and no doubt just such an excess of concern, for the least among them and for the future, is what got them into this pickle in the first place. We may wish to organize along similar lines, for our moral betterment.
This is true. It sounds like most of this could be fixed with "one orphanage" which centralizes the children and makes them close enough that one nurse could care for all of them.
I feel like despite the good intentions of individual actors, this is one of those modern situations that both kind of needs to work, and also must never *really work*.
Wuhan was working on a bunch of Actual Fixes for this particular situation.... Up to and including "murdering them all." I agree that charities are unlikely to fix this "issue" (as HIV treatment doesn't actually fix the disease, and seems to just make it more likely to spread... Take the 12-18 year olds in Mozambique. Sex trade is low-skill and high pay. Voila! More HIV. more need for charity.).
I've heard that modern treatment, if used according to guidelines, can make it all but impossible to spread HIV through sex. Is that not correct? Or was treatment in Africa not actually used according to guidelines?
Does the Longer term sustainable solution involve them building a culture and institutions which fosters monogamy and a revulsion toward prostitution and anal sex? Does aid interfere with this cultural development?
South Africa's still the place where squatters were using a multi-story elevator shaft as a toilet, right? I'm not exactly surprised that a country that throws squatters out of skyscrapers has "health system problems" -- there's a clear disregard for human life in South Africa.
https://mainichi.jp/english/articles/20180729/p2a/00m/0na/011000c
A note that this was seven years ago. In 2021, folks were rioting until they ran out of food (in America, the riots ended when the nikes/legos/etc were gone) -- they literally destroyed the infrastructure necessary to eat.
Not very knowledgeable about Mozambique...
I’m not sure what you are trying to say, but the linked article was very interesting and the picture especially so.
That picture is what America’s public lands are going to look like when Mike Lee and Matt Yglesias get through with them.
That’s the dream, when lunatic left and lunatic libertarian join hands and shout down what the internet so cutely terms “normies” but The Onion typically used to refer to as The Last American Adult.
I'm glad Alpha School made it to the finalists. I meant to rate it highly after reading it, but I forgot.
That's my prediction for this year's winner.
Alpha School was also my favorite of all. I was a bit worried this preference might be idiosyncratic, so I'm also very glad it made it into the finalists.
For those of you interested in Effective Altruism and Neocolonialism, I wrote an overview of the arguments and counterarguments of whether EA is neocolonial: https://bobjacobs.substack.com/p/is-effective-altruism-neocolonial
I can think of steelman arguments that neocolonialism is a coherent concept, but I think you actually have to define it in a way that people in the EA community will take seriously, and see as something clearly negative.
For example, the post links to this definition (not your direct quote, but the same piece):
"Neocolonialism can be described as the subtle propagation of socio-economic and political activity by former colonial rulers aimed at reinforcing capitalism, neo-liberal globalization, and cultural subjugation of their former colonies."
If, like many EAs, you believe that capitalism and neoliberal globalization are very good things for lower income countries, and that Western/Rich country culture tends to be better (e.g. more open and tolerant, better institutions) than the culture in most poor countries, then you'll have to also make the argument that neocolonialism may be a bad thing!
There's a reason I did not use that quote, and did use the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy and the Encyclopedia Britannica.
Fair - I was unfairly connecting your argument with something you don't necessarily agree with.
I think the critique of the quote that you did use: "the actions and effects of certain remnant features and agents of the colonial era in a given society” would be similar, though. These actions and effects of these features and agents could clearly be positive, and you may need to make the case that they aren't.
You also connect Africa's continued poverty to colonialism and neo-colonialism, but I don't think this is justified. While there are clearly some direct negative downstream effects of certain colonial and post-colonial policies, I don't see a clear counterfactual where the rest of Africa was not colonised by western powers, and became more successful and prosperous.
Why would I "need" to? The purpose of the blogpost wasn't to say whether neocolonialism is good or bad, it was to see whether it applies to EA. People can make whatever normative judgement they want from that analysis. If you want a discussion on normativity go read the comments, where you'll find things like:
We do have more academic ways to study the effects of colonialism on Africa. For example, we can compare groups that were ethnically partitioned by the colonizers vs those that weren't. When we do so we find (https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w17620/w17620.pdf):
> we find that the incidence, severity and duration of violence are higher in the historical homelands of partitioned groups. Third, we shed some light on the mechanisms showing that military interventions from neighboring countries are much more likely in the homelands of split groups. Fourth, our exploration of the status of ethnic groups in the political arena reveals that partitioned ethnicities are systematically discriminated from the national government and are more likely to participate in ethnic civil wars. Fifth, using individual-level data we document that respondents identifying with split groups have lower access to public goods and worse educational outcomes. The uncovered evidence brings in the foreground the detrimental repercussions of ethnic partitioning.
We can do similar studies showing that how colonizers drew the borders had negative effects: https://books.google.be/books?id=KpUqnwEACAAJ&redir_esc=y
We also have historical records of what colonizers did in the colonies, e.g. king leopold's "congo free state" was responsible for the deaths of *millions* of people [~half the population], through brutal forced labor practices, decreased agricultural productivity and the destruction of many local economies: https://www.amazon.com/King-Leopolds-Ghost-Heroism-Colonial/dp/0618001905 (the 10 million cited in this book is disputed by some scholars, but all scholars agree that it's in the millions) And it's not like Belgian meddling in Congo is all in the distant past, as recently as 1961 did they assassinate Patrice Lumumba, the first democratically elected prime minister of the DRC: Neocolonialism is ongoing. I mean, basically all scholars of colonialism agree that it was bad for the colonies, maybe scroll through the wikipedia page if you want to see some further research: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Analysis_of_European_colonialism_and_colonization#Colonial_actions_and_their_impacts
[...]
Before the european colonizers the difference between Hutis and Tutsis was mainly a fluid socioeconomic one, not a rigid ethnic one. Think: Hutu as word for the stereotypical farmer (class) and Tutsi as a word for stereotypical pastoralist (class). But then the Belgians came and not only transformed it into a racial division, they also invented a story that Tutsi's came from the north and were closer to europeans and therefore the superior race. They backed this up with pseudo-scientific measurement (think skull stuff) to give it legitimacy. Then they gave Tutsis exclusive access to education, government jobs, and power, while Hutus were relegated to manual labor. To lock it in place they mandated ethnic ID cards, permanently locking people into Hutu or Tutsi categories based on ancestry, eliminating fluidity (previously, it was more like a class so Hutus could become Tutsis through things like cattle ownership or marriage).
If you think the Belgians couldn't have done more to guarantee an ethnic conflict, you don't know the Belgians: as decolonization neared they abruptly shifted support to the Hutu majority, fearing Tutsi-led independence movements. Then they armed Hutu extremists and allowed anti-Tutsi propaganda. This lead to mass killings, which were reciprocated with more massacres on and on and on, culminating in the Rwandan genocide (where ~75% of the Tutsi population was exterminated).
Again, if we treat this like a courtroom, we can't have a quantitative mathematical proof that Belgium created the massacres (though some quantitative studies come about as close as you possibly can with a historical case without a control group). And we don't have a direct decree for the massacres from Belgium (There is no secret tape of a Belgian saying "execute order 66, or something). But if instead we look at it like researchers it's pretty clear to say that Belgium created it. You know who also believes that? The Belgians, not only the contemporary Belgians (e.g. historian Filip Reyntjens wrote that the ID cards made the genocide "logistically possible") but even the colonizers themselves (e.g. Colonial administrator Pierre Ryckmans admitted: "We created a monster")
While I will always appreciate calls for more clarifications, you could also try to understand the arguments against your priors using your own skills and knowledge.
I understand some arguments against my priors here. My call for clarification was more about working out if I actually disagree with Bob's claims.
I usually disagree with neocolonialist critiques because they're insufficiently utilitarian. But if it's defined in a utilitarian way: "x is only neocolonial if it actually causes harm", I may agree with this critique.
And/or engage with what I actually wrote (which was based on renowned encyclopedias, and not one person's viewpoint)
The term "neocolonialism" strikes me as poorly defined.
In my post or in online discourse?
Online and offline discource.
Yeah most philosophical/social science concepts are used much more loosely by laypeople.
By "offline" I was including academics.
Like, all of them? Even the historians, political theorists, etc, that study this for a living?
If self promotion is allowed here, I'd love to plug a recent essay on having a baby and infant suffering.
My new baby brought loads of joy into our little world, but also really unexpected levels of suffering (given that babies are conscious in any relevant way), which made me tentatively update my views slightly away from the pro-natalism that tends to be popular in these circles, and towards the universe being net-negative.
https://torchestogether.substack.com/p/most-of-the-world-is-an-adorably?r=1j27ud
That is a much better and more moving essay than I expected, thank you for writing and sharing it. Sorry I don't have anything substantive to say about it (it's past midnight here), but I did share it, and may revisit it later this week for a more proper reread.
That is a much better and more moving essay than I expected, thank you for writing and sharing it. Sorry I don't have anything substantive to say about it (it's past midnight here), but I did share it, and may revisit it later this week for a more proper reread.
In AI news, the FutureHouse platform is really impressive for scouring biology literature. It's really good making literature summaries and searching out instances of things in the literature, including documents like unpublished Ph.D. thesis. It is at least as good at ChatGPT at finding stuff and is much better at sourcing and not making stuff up. Sometimes it doesn't quite understand my question and answers a slightly different question, but it doesn't lie.
I'm intrigued by the idea that this bunch no one has heard of has a better research tool than ChatGPT. The only thing I can think is that ChatGPT is too much of a generalist. Sometimes its job is to make stuff up, sometimes it's a research tool, sometimes it just vibes with and affirms you. Likewise, it's a bad therapy AI because it's too agreeable, but it wouldn't be that hard to constrain it some so that it stops telling you that you that with the week you've had, you deserve some meth.
On a personal note I am miserable that a lot of my science professor skills are being taken over by AI but I recognize this as a positive for humanity.
re: "this bunch no one has heard of has a better research tool than ChatGPT" maybe it's because of https://sarahconstantin.substack.com/p/ai-deep-research-tools-reviewed? Although I am keen to try out otto-SR from https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.06.13.25329541v1.full-text if it ever becomes available.
There's a new type of blood! Biology is wild.
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/french-scientists-discover-new-blood-type-guadeloupe-woman/
Important to remember that there are many more blood types than most people realize. 47 total fully established, but probably many more in the “wild” and undiscovered, considering how massive, widespread, and often isolated human populations are.
Most of those don't seem to really matter for transfusions.
Scott -- I represent VC investors, including one fairly high-profile investor/donor that makes grants. Happy to discuss this with you. Shoot me an email to set up a time if you wish. www.hilarymiller.tel
What would you recommend:
- Scott's approach of "something like a grant which is convertible to equity if the grantee becomes a startup", or
- The approach of donating to something like OpenAI (e.g. a nonprofit which controla a for-profit startup)
?
Hi, Jesus it depends on what your objectives are. Some people have purely donative intent in supporting certain kinds of activities. There are advantages and disadvantages to each approach.
I wrote an essay that might interest this crowd: “How to Stare Into the Sun.” (though I admit it’s more lyrical and poetic than some here may prefer)
It’s about chronic avoidance, emotional pain, and the strategies we use (consciously or not) to protect ourselves from feeling. I draw on behavioral psychology, and personal introspection to explore how avoidance loops are formed, and how to break them.
If you’ve ever intellectualised your emotions to the point of dissociation, or used hyper-rationality as a defense against vulnerability, this might resonate. There are references to Faye Webster, fight-or-flight responses, and why fear of love is often more dangerous than heartbreak itself.
Would love to hear thoughts from anyone who reads it. https://velvetnoise.substack.com/p/how-to-stare-into-the-sun-and-dive
About 15 years ago I noticed that I was being avoidant in certain situations. Not major stuff but, like, being nervous asking a Target employee where I could find detergent.. I call this "micro fear."
I bought a baseball pitch counter and carried it around for a week. Every time I caught myself being avoidant, I clicked the pitch counter. It ended up being a few dozen.
After that I decided to try reversing my behavior. I would go to Target and make it a goal to ask where I could find things, even if I already knew where they were.
Within a week I felt my background anxiety falling through the floor. I'm still avoidant sometimes, but only like 10% of what it used to be.
Note: I was never diagnosed with an anxiety disorder, and I don't think I had one. I'm just an introvert who got too comfortable staying in my technology bubble.