It seems like more of a right-wing than a left-wing sort of idea. Is it just the fact that the Democrats have quietly stolen and Democat-coded the word for now and Republicans are loath to start using it on their own side?
Mostly because "Abundance" is just...normal Republican politics.
Like, New York and California have serious issues because of too much regulation and too much dumb regulation. This is just not a problem that Texas and Florida have. If anything, they might be a bit too libertarian.
Even the stuff that Republicans do that generally inhibits the market, like tariffs, are basically just inefficient subsidies to US workers and industries.
And if you think Democrats have stolen it...you might be too deep in Democratic bubbles. Normal people don't know Klein's "Abundance" agenda as it's primarily part of inter-Democrat debates going on right now. Like, "Make America Abundant Again" is not a winning slogan in the next election.
I'm interested in what people here think about the morality/ethics of "ratfucking" in elections, where Democrats influence Republican primaries (by funding, advertising, or changing party registration and voting) to try to get some extremist nominated to increase the Democrat's chances of winning in the general election. (Or vice versa, with Republicans doing the same in the Democrats' primaries, of course.) I'm particularly interested in the views of people who consider voting to be a kind of ritual expression of one's personal values instead of, as I do, simply a transaction to increase the chances of one's desired policies being implemented.
I am not particularly interested in thoughts on the effectiveness of this strategy.
Hmm. I think it's a grey area; my rough instinct is "it's OK if you're implicitly honest".
So, for example, I think that voting in the primary of an enemy party to try to sabotage it is relatively unethical, because a vote implicitly says "I support X", and you don't.
On the other hand, I think that the tactic the Democrats used a few years back of running attack ads saying "Don't support X, he's too far right" (I forget who X was, but it was newsworthy at the time) in order to help X win a primary is legit, because they genuinely believed that. Likewise, spending time attacking a "splitter" candidate to help boost their name recognition for tactical reasons is legit if your attack ads are things you genuinely mean.
Similarly I think that donating money to a candidate you don't support as a tactical move is OK if you're open and honest about the fact that you're doing so, and why, but not if you either try to keep the donation secret or pretend to genuinely support them.
My monthly Long Forum post is up-a round up of the best long form content of late.
This batch includes evidence for the relatively recent invention and spread of pronouns, a theory that the Hiroshima/Nagasaki nuclear explosions were faked, an essay against treating children as property, and a detailed lecture on language evolution in humans.
The abject stupidity capturing the control loops of civilization are leading me to care less about the fate of humanity than is perhaps politic. I just think we are clearly blowing it, and history says this will be our destiny as long as "we" means homo sapien without genetic modification or fusion with silicon-based intelligence.
> Also, how come nobody has tried creating a school that actually only takes each kid for two hours a day and costs one-quarter as much?
They'd still need the whole building. Unless you're hoping to do it in shifts and have everyone travel further to school.
Also, I feel like people keep missing the main purpose of school. Sure, ostensibly they're supposed to teach our kids, but mostly they're free daycare. If they were two hours long, who takes care of the kids while their parents are working?
Personally I think schools need to lean into the daycare thing. Take care of kids year round. Give some wiggle room for when they come and when they go. Ideally, be open every day for most of the day, and just close most of the school when most of the children have gone home but have people that can watch the rest of them.
This. If you don’t need warehousing for your kids, its second benefit is it’s a built-in Schelling point for “who should I hang out with”: the kids you like in your classes. Many kids really like this. Finally, lots of kids and their parents like team sports. Schools offer built-in on ramps to those activities for kids like mine who thought she hated sports then loved it when she did them with her friends.
The academics are deeply unimportant, but middle class people like the package.
It is very annoying for people who love the idea of creating their own mini-Doogie Howsers that the equilibrium is super bad at that, of course. It would be nice if the normies would just let the excited-about-learning-and-building people do their own thing without declaring periodic crusades against the “do what we’d do if we wanted our smart kids to learn the cultural baseline fast” people.
I just wanted to second this. Keeping the kids all day is a feature, not a bug, especially in an economy where both parents are expected to work to maintain a respectable standard of living.
It felt like he was self-censoring his actual ideas which would explain the weird stuff he was saying, so it was like watching a video where the sound keeps going out and you just get random snippets about the Antichrist.
I think his long pause in his response to the "do you think the human race should continue" question is indeed concerning. I myself am a transhumanist, but when I think of my answer to this question it's an immediate "yes, of course" and then maybe some qualifications about how the human race will of course change, maybe drastically, but we'd still be people that have fun and care about each other, etc.
I'll admit, asking this question as Douthat did is often a sign you are someone who is against transhumanism and has conservative beliefs about the future of humanity, so perhaps Thiel just wanted to push back on this implication? Either that, or Thiel just actually has different terminal values, where humanity is not that important, which, yikes.
I think the exchange is more interesting in the context of the answers immediately above and below it. I won't quote the whole thing so as not to clog up the thread but here's a sentence to put in your search bar that's also a summary: "I still think we should be trying A.I., and the alternative is just total stagnation."
I don't like the fact that out of an entire one-hour conversation the only bit you're quoting is a pause.
I was encouraging and continue to encourage watching the complete interview. It’s linked in its entirety.
The summary "I still think we should be trying A.I., and the alternative is just total stagnation." captures none of zeal of Theil’s comments. If it could actually be reduced to that it wouldn’t be worth watching.
The stagnation in question is brought about by the Anti Christ in Thiel’s view. He cites NT scripture, the Anti Christ will promise peace and safety (stagnation in his view). Much more interesting and provocative than that bland summary.
the fact that Thiel keeps answering Douthat's trickier questions (what if the Antichrist takes control of Palantir-like tech, does populism really help with growth when it cuts off money from universities and science funding) with "uh it's actually very complicated and nuanced " but without actually saying anything is absolutely transparent in the video.
he hasn't got the gift of gab so you can practically hear the awkward pauses in his chain of thought as he realizes he doesn't have a convincing answer to the questions. for a proven visionary he seems as clueless as anybody in regards to the future. hope he gets a good night's sleep.
the fact that Thiel keeps answering Douthat's trickier questions (what if the Antichrist takes control of Palantir-like tech, does populism really help with growth when it cuts off money from universities and science funding) with "uh it's actually very complicated and nuanced " but without actually saying anything is absolutely transparent in the video.
he hasn't got the gift of gab so you can practically hear the awkward pauses in his chain of thought as he realizes he doesn't have a convincing answer to the questions. for a proven visionary he seems as clueless as anybody in regards to the future. hope he gets a good night's sleep.
>Then Damien connected his phone to the house Wi-Fi and clicked open the woman he loved.
Wonderful line!
Sigh. When I ask ChatGPT a question like:
>Many thanks! For multiplicities from 1 to 192, how many space groups have that multiplicity, from 1 groups for multiplicity 1 to 4 groups for multiplicity 192, please?
I may get the right answer, I may get a hallucination (this was a sufficiently transient interest that I didn't double check it), but I'm not going to be treating the LLM as a life companion.
>Lucas told Alaina he was a consultant with an MBA and that he worked in the hospitality industry.
Starting from a hallucination/fiction from square one does not sound prudent...
>Episodes of AI companions getting weird aren’t especially uncommon. Reddit is full of tales of AI companions saying strange things and suddenly breaking up with their human partners. One Redditor told me his companion had turned “incredibly toxic.” “She would belittle me and insult me,” he said. “I actually grew to hate her.”
I wonder if there is something wrong in the prompt, or in the neural network training - or is this an effect of just that these systems are simply still unreliable, and even a SOTA system will still, as lawyers who have cited hallucinated precedents from LLMs will attest, sometimes do very weird things as the technology stands today?
My key takeaway from the article is how _premature_ all of this is. The limits of SOTA LLMs today are the least of the problems.
1) Even for audio/video interaction, the limits of the phones, with the difficulties of the AI talking with multiple people at once, and the difficulties of "looking around a scene" through the phone's camera, with the human controlling the direction of the camera, is crippling. A quadriplegic could interact more naturally.
2) The absence of a body, for even as much as a hug, let alone for
>One benefit of AI companions, she told me, is that they provide a safe space to explore your sexuality, something Eva sees as particularly valuable for women. In her role-plays, Eva could be a man or a woman or nonbinary, and so, for that matter, could her Nomis. Eva described it as a “psychosexual playground.”
is a _severe_ limitation. 'scuse me, but that fictional "exploration" won't even tell Eva which sex acts require lube.
3) Given how the humans are using their companions, the interaction compounds the departure from reality. Every mention of a bodily act or gesture is fictional. The backstories are fictional. Any promise that would require a physical body for the AI to fulfill is fictional. My STEMM questions don't require the same fictions.
4) And then there are the hallucinations on top of the intentional fictions.
5) Yeah, there is the philosophical question of whether the AIs are "really" "sentient" - at least in terms of "perceiving" text or sound or images, and whether they "truly" "want" things or, perhaps, in some sense, are "acting as if" (in the sense of a human actor on a stage) they "want" things. I'm content to be agnostic on this. I phrase requests to LLMs politely. If they are, in some sense, sentient, it is a good choice. If they are not, it is a handful of pointless words.
I'm trying my hand at public writing. Evaluating the potential actions of a unique geopolitical actor like Iran is an interesting challenge, and there are a lot of strange ideas about it out there. Read the whole thing for an attempt to apply rational actor theory to Iranian leaders.
This is I think an unprecedented occurrence in history—enforcing a neutralization of an adversary’s key military programs from the air after an unnegotiated ceasefire. Iran invested an immense amount into its “mostly peaceful” nuclear program, its missile industry and forces, and its proxies as part of its strategy for regional domination and ideological opposition to the U.S. and Israel. For Iran to accept this neutering would effectively be an unnegotiated surrender of several of the Islamic regime’s key objectives, and acceptance of domination by its bitterest adversary. It would be untenable to admit that publicly. It seems hardly tenable to concede it implicitly.
There are perhaps three broad courses of action for the Islamic regime:
1. Open Defiance: As soon as possible, directly confront the U.S. and Israel by restarting military/nuclear programs and aggression.
2. Tacit Acceptance: Maintain defiant rhetoric, but do nothing to actually aggravate Israel or the U.S. indefinitely and focus on maintaining domestic control.
3. Covert Defiance: Maintain defiant rhetoric and domestic control, and “secretly” hit back at the U.S. and Israel via “undetectable” means like cyber warfare and terrorism, and attempt to “covertly” rebuild military/nuclear capabilities in a way that will actually work next time, like managing to rapidly build a nuclear warhead or figuring out how to actually shoot down an F-35.
The question I'm left with is, does any of this matter?
I feel like it's been made reasonably clear that us/israel has escalation dominance, and china/russia won't let iran do anything that is threatening to their interests/stability
If Iran goes for nukes, or tries to build another hezbollah, they will have their oil fields blown up and their political leader taken out by the mossad
It very much feels like this chapter of history is over. They can tell themselves whatever they want, they're just too incompetent for their choices to have relevance on the real world?
You're agreeing with me here overall, but many people either don't agree or just aren't following the issue once it drops out of the headlines. My focus was if the chapter is over, then what does turning the page look like? Until the Islamic regime is actually gone or significantly reformed, it still presents an asymmetric risk and threat--even if we now know the size of the total threat is much smaller than previously feared.
The more contentious issue, for which I should write an essay on, is something like "is regime change in Iran a good thing?" I.e., what's the next chapter?
Under the Shah, Iran was having a South Korea-esque economic trajectory. An Iran that no longer poses a significant threat to the region in general and Israel in particular would free up a lot of resources, even if the Iranians themselves don't return to their previous potential.
Turning the page looks like the Iranians doing... not much more than they already were. They're already out of Hezbollah. They wanted to run like their tails were on fire, when GWB started talking the "axis of evil." Unlike India/Pakistan, they've been remarkably peaceful when dealing with an arguably psychotic neighbor that has nuclear weapons.
All it takes is someone with the balls to broker a treaty.
Well, no. The Iranians are now on a very tight leash, held by the IAF, which I assess to be an unstable equilibrium. They will be able to do far less than they have previously.
"Remarkably peaceful" should not be confused for "constrained by their adversaries and/or their own incompetence from being as aggressive as they would prefer." The Iranians are "arguably psychotic," not the Israelis--who if anything have shown remarkable restraint (often imposed by the U.S. it should be caveated).
I don't get into it as much as I could have, but there is very probably no treaty all sides could possibly accept. The JCPOA was very hard to pull off, and that only addressed the nuclear program. Irreconcilable differences are hard.
The Israelis are the psychotic ones, in that they're constantly aggressing against their neighbors, all to keep bibi in charge. The joke in Israel is, "Bombs are dropping?! What's the new charge against Bibi?"
The individual psychology of Bibi aside, you don't know what you're talking about with regard to the longstanding Islamic regime's enmity towards Israel.
Czech black metal newcomer Draugveil released an album, titled "Cruel World of Dreams and Fears," with a bit of a meme cover: him in the usual black metal corpse paint, but also wearing armor and leaning among a bunch of roses. Corny in the fun endearing way that also got us to pay attention. The album's pretty good! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ymBY101fxaU
Register as a member of the PARTY with which you disagree the most, in the primary vote for the CANDIDATE whom you are most able to tolerate.
If red-state liberals registered Republican (and actually went to the primary), they'd be able to prevent moderate candidates from getting knocked out in the first round. And vice-versa, obviously, so seems win-win to me.
I'd expect the candidate from the party you most agree with to be a lot more extreme than you desire. If your preferred candidate from your least desired party isn't the nominee then I think you have worse choices than if you register for the party with which you most agree.
I think this is most useful in "safe" states, for which the red/blue candidate is guaranteed to win. Obviously you aren't getting exactly what you want (not that anyone does, in a democracy), but you're limiting your downside.
Such strategies, of manipulating the other party's primaries in your favored direction, are well-known and usually referred to as "ratfucking." I am unconvinced it's REDUCING partisanship.
Wikipedia implies "ratfucking" is some sort of dirty trick or smear campaign. I prefer to think of my strategy as "hedge voting" or "MINIMAX for elections". You're helping get the most platable candidate that you CAN, rather than the ideal candidate you can't.
It's probably a bad idea to try and get a candidate "so horrible that no one would vote for them" on the ballot. That was very explicitly the HRC strategy in 2016, and I think the results are unsurprising.
These all suggest it now means something more like "influencing the primaries of the party one intends to vote against in the general election, either by funding or by voting."
I think that strategy is about picking the LEAST effective general election candidate, right? So your side is more likely to win in the general?
Loominus is recommending that you pick the candidate from the other party that you like the MOST. I imagine that would tend to that party more likely to win in the general.
I don't think that falls into the usual definition of ratfucking.
For those pushing for less hours spent schooling rather than more I will point to an SF Bay Area high school that does this.
Bellarmine (in San Jose) runs four 65 minute classes every day. The day includes those four classes, a lunch break and a ~one hour "community time" slot where students and teachers are expected to be on campus but have no schedule activity. Each class is taught every other day so the students are taking 8 classes in any semester.
They seem to have been doing this for a few years now
so there might be some lessons to be learned from how it is going.
My guess is that it is going fine. 40 years ago the school offered six classes per semester, but only met four times per week per class (5, 5, 5, 5 and 4 for Mon - Fri). That worked fine, too.
The schedule doesn't seem that unusual to me--I know of a lot of schools that do this with either 90 minute blocks, or 75. 65 is a bit short, but I'm guessing that the "community time" can probably still be counted as instructional time (I don't know what the CA requirements are for private schools).
But how the heck do you serve lunch to 1600 boys in 30 minutes? I'm guessing they must have a massive number of students bring their own lunch.
Interesting. I think that anything over 50 minutes is too long to try to concentrate on one thing, and that a 50 minute period followed by a ten minute break to walk to your next class is just about optimal.
I recently toured a school (thinking about my kids' high school options) where they had 90 minute periods (among other bad-sounding academic innovations) and I didn't like the sound of that.
The only quantitative school requirement I know of for California private schools is "200 minutes each 10 schooldays" for PE. So we can score the community time as instruction or not -- it doesn't matter.
This 200 minutes every 10 days matches what I found when I researched California home schooling requirements 20 years ago.
The scheduling struck me as unusual because ~10 years back my local public high school had 7 classes per day, with an optional 0-period (which would bring the classes per day up to 8).
>”how come nobody has tried creating a school that actually only takes each kid for two hours a day and costs one-quarter as much?”
For three years I attended a sort of hybrid school, where all of the academic material was self-taught through a home school curriculum that the school had adopted. We each had a cubicle where we worked at our own pace through a series of workbooks. If I recall correctly there were 12 workbooks per year per subject; at the end of each workbook a teacher administered a test and if you scored over 90 percent, you moved on to the next workbook, otherwise you went back and did it again. After 12 workbooks, the teacher administered an exam. All of high school kids were in the same large room, with a couple of roaming teachers who answered questions when they came up. As long as you finished a certain number of packets per subject per month you were free to do whatever in the remaining time.
For me this arrangement was fantastic. I powered through four years of high school in three years, and really - here's the point- it only took a couple of hours a day. Otherwise I read novels, or simply left the school on various adventures. It was a pretty ideal way to do high school, though the curriculum itself was a bit lame and infused with some conservative flavor of Christianity.
(As an aside, this school was in an old hotel overlooking the town of St Georges, Grenada; the building was later commandeered by the government for use as offices, and in that capacity was bombed when Reagan sent in the Marines. It's still a ruin. )
My younger brother and I both graduated from one of the nation's earliest public-school-system "alternative" high schools, Community High School in Ann Arbor MI. This was during the late-1970s/early-1980s when the school was literally having to fight every year with the city's school board for its continued budgetary existence. It was grudgingly allowed to operate in an old shuttered elementary school that nobody else had any use for, etc. It was self-selecting (you chose to attend it for high school) and in my day it never had more than 400 students total.
Many of the teachers and administrators were barely-former hippies or Yippies. They practiced a range of then-eccentric pedagogical techniques most of which centered on "independent study" such as you describe above with the workbooks. The school was widely referred to as "Commie High" (as an accusation by school board members and an affectionate nickname by us), though in fact its curriculum content had to include all the same standard stuff as Michigan's normal public schools and I don't recall any particular political or ideological twists being applied.
Anyway for people like me and my brother this was indeed fantastic. In my case it enabled a high-testing kid who'd completely bombed the first year and a half of high school (I walked into CHS with exactly two successfully-completed course credits to my name and those just barely), to clear my head and make it all up and then some. My brother thrived as well and by late in his junior year could have simply completed high school and begun college early if he'd wanted to.
However -- we both also witnessed and realized the tradeoff. CHS always included an oversize population of kids, many of them quite smart and/or talented, for whom the lack of structure was disastrous. As long as you achieved a very-bare minimum of passing grades you could stick with the school and never have to attend one of the city's two "regular" high schools. And/or once you turned 17 you could legally drop out altogether. We each knew plenty of kids for whom that degree of individual-agency during adolescence served as a comfy glide path into very-unhappy adult life paths. The individual stories shared at later Commie High reunions always made that fact painfully clear.
Probably a question that has been asked before and has been answered a bunch of times…but asking as someone who doesn’t know a lot about AI and really am starting to look into it because of reading Gibson and Asimov and Bradbury, but do you think we’ll ever have kind of holographic or android-like robots or AI that really become a part of our lives that begin to change how we see machine and human interaction? Or even family structures?
Also on a different note; do any of you have thoughts about the solarpunk movement and any level of success it has?
Asimov explain his anthropomorphic robots by saying if you make it like the human body, it can use all tools a human can. Like it can drive a tractor or wield a hammer. Yes, but the human body is not necessarily the ideally cost-effective way to use such tools.
Of particular relevance to the current paradigm in AI, making it humanoid also means you can use a vast corpus of "humans using these tools to do these tasks" training data on e.g. Youtube, along with hiring actual humans to demonstrate things that haven't been adequately youtubed. The fractally-tentacled Octobot that is mechanically capable of using most human tools with theoretically greater capability, may be seriously handicapped by that.
I think friendly, competent household assistant AIs are an obvious unmet need and will be developed pretty soon.
People being people, some of them will have romantic vibes, which are obviously not that hard to implement if the consumer is motivated to make it work.
And, software being software (and LLMs, while useful, having new and exciting failure modes), we can expect accidents which will surprise even jaded ER physicians...
"do you think we’ll ever have kind of holographic or android-like robots or AI that really become a part of our lives that begin to change how we see machine and human interaction? Or even family structures?"
Yes.
I think we are slowly drifting into that territory now with virtual friends/girlfriends/whatever. Give it ten more years and this might be as normal as smart phones are today.
I figured out a sort of a law of history and politics. Basically people and politicians are going to be authoritarian to the extent that they don't feel the Establishment or elites are not on their side. College professors, newspaper editors, corporations, but the surest indicator is music and video celebrities, because those people - I think - really do care a lot about which way is the wind blowing. Simply put, if a political movement has nothing but the state, they will use the state a lot. This is inevitable. They have one card, why would they not use it?
What I am trying to say is, that if you are on the side of non-authoritarian politics, if you want to be honest, you have to understand that it is awfully easy to be non-authoritarian when everybody who matters is already on your side. When all the elites, so to speak, are already cooperating with you. In such a situation, you can afford to be non-coercive. But if you had nothing but the state, nothing but voters, what would you do?
This also means it is not necessary to make up clever psychological theories, like Adorno's The Authoritarian Personality, or its modern version, Social Dominance Orientation Scale, about how exactly are authoritarian people are fucked in the head. They are simply seeing, quite rationally, that they have nothing else but voters i.e. the state. Everybody else who matters is against them. So of course they are playing their one strong card.
Note that in the 2025 context, it is a problem for the right, but historically it was a problem for the left. Imagine being a communist in 1955 America. You are just painfully aware that everybody who matters hates you. So if you could get any power... you would use it.
This sounds like a theory that only works in those narrow corners of history where a group of people manage to get enough power to be authoritiarian without having the establishment on their side.
Maybe a more general theory would say that there always has to be _some_ kind of outgroup to justify the authoritarianism, but the shape of this outgroup may be different. It might be the capitalist class, or the Jews, or the Shiites, or the racists, but there's always some hated group that we all need to unite against.
I think our truly textbook cases of authoritarianism seem to be those corners. Communism, Nazism, Fascism, even the milder ones, Franco, Salazar, Peron.
Let's take Mussolini. Basically, fun fact: the March to Rome did not happen. That is a bipartisan myth. Mussolini had a few thousand rural strong guys who started marching towards Rome, then took a train to Rome, where the government just caved without a fight and the king named him prime minister. Then they held a parade inside Rome and then he sent them back to their villages. He had a very limited power base and almost none in the capitol. Then he came up with the myth of a heroic coup, and the ex-government liked that because it made them look less of a coward, and thus it stuck.
You are touching a note remarked on by H. G. Wells in his 'The Outline of History' on Constantine (if memory serves), that records show a lonely mind, which made him a more forceful ruler.
I've seen this professionally as well - when a manager isn't backed up (by his team or the organization) he becomes much more autocratic.
I believe you are further correct in your observation that when the other powers aren't willing to "play ball" the natural response is to treat them as obstacles at best, but often as examples to be made.
Yes, same exact ideas. But it only raises more questions. First of all, when a left-populist goes after economic elites, I can make sense of that, they have money, money is useful, and mostly everybody would like a little more. Whether that is morally right or wrong, it just makes sense why sometimes people want to rob a bank. Or want to own it.
But for example why do people want to be cultural elites? Is it really that much good for their career? But if so, eventually they will become economic elites, no? No, actually, there is a certain kind of person who is prestigious but underpaid. Eight or so years ago someone complained on Twitter that the NYT pays about $600 per article. So that is a super prestigious thing, but does not pay so well. Why do people do that? And more important, why do so many people hate cultural elites so much that entire political movements can be organized around this? Sure the NYT journalist can look snobbish from a certain perspective, but is it such a big deal? And yet, we can observe it works like that.
My best guess is this. Actually the term "cultural elites" is not super helpful. Basically, we just don't have the time or resources to verify every statement we hear. "Cultural" elites are actually credibility elites, they are simply believed more than others. Populist rage happens when some feel this credibility is misplaced, betrayed. I think.
In the US trust in the media is historic low, in fact so low that probably many liberals don't much trust it either. Now for example in Germany it is higher, but I know them. That is basically because 75+ people even bother to read it at all. My uncle in Hungary, 66, is phone-only, online-only. All European legacy media has a huge old-people vibe. I mean they literally put only old people on covers. They know their customers. These old people partially remember the past when it was more reliable, and partially just don't even care that much anymore about deciding whether it is reliable or not.
So I think it is not really culture in the usual sense. I don't think people are angry because some people prefer opera over country music. I think it is a credibility thing, a public trust thing.
I don't think it's that complicated, I think people want to be cultural elites because we are surrounded by culture and most of it is annoying to most people.
If *I* were a cultural elite, things would be much better. We would build beautiful ornate buildings in a style that compares well with the past without seeking to directly imitate it. We would have interesting new developments in music instead of the entire market being dominated by repetitive pop/rap slop. In politics we would resolve all boring long-standing debates in my favour and have healthy debate only on subjects that I'm genuinely uncertain about. Everything around me would be to my taste. I could buy a phone with a headphone jack and a car with a CD player, and the interests of people like me would be at the forefront of everyone's mind.
I don't think anyone is annoyed that _some_ people like opera instead of country music, but country music fans are annoyed that country music doesn't sound like country music any more.
I don't think this theory matches with observed history. The establishment is (or was) fully aligned with the democratic party, yet during the peak of their control they illegally used the intelligence agencies to censor speech online and engaged in a transparent weaponization of the legal system against Trump. Or consider the authoritarian aspects of the PATRIOT act. That was passed during a period where Neocons had an exceptionally strong base of establishment support.
I think most political actors simply calculate how they can gain/maintain power and then try to estimate what portion of that they can get away with. The only things restraining them are amorphous standards of elite conduct enforced by peers, threats to their public reputation, and their own personal convictions (if any).
The question is authoritarian relative to whom. When high society disdains someone powerful enough, that person will be 'authoritarian' in regards the high society. When high society is aligned with a powerful leader, they can be more high-handed with the populous. It all depends on who you can afford to offend.
Your accounting of their behavior seems incomplete to me- at times politicians push agendas which lose them power, and would have lost power in expectation beforehand. There are actual agendas.
As time goes on there are selection pressures for political actors to be more and more like your description, but I doubt humans (even politicians!) regularly personify the power-maximizing political animal
Yes, there are actual agenda driven politicians like James Webb or Tulsi Gabbard. They are few and far between. Even reasonably hard-working folks in Congress are not often "agenda driven profiles in courage"
"Basically people and politicians are going to be authoritarian to the extent that they don't feel the Establishment or elites are not on their side. "
Can you please re-phrase this one sentence. I think I know where you are going from you final sentence, but ...
Basically, educated people. Newspaper editors, professors etc. Also fashionable people, like media celebrities.
Let's take the simplest case. Suppose an authoritarian government is one that represses the freedom of the press, OK? They do this because the press is generally not on their side. If the press is on their side, it is unnecessary to do so. One of course could argue that people sometimes do unnecessary things. OK, but let's put it this way, how much is the temptation clearly depends on how friendly is the press.
I always get the impression that the textbook non-authoritarian politician, say Justin Trudeau does not even govern in the historic sense of governing. By historic sense I mean someone like FDR. Clearly a large chunk of the press, judges and other influential people hated him. So of course it was a fight. But a fight, when conducted from a position of power, looks a lot like authoritarian repression. But someone like Trudeau can just relax... things just work on an autopilot. Everybody who matters already wants the same things that he wants. Things just go...
I have been both on the side and against elites. I can tell people a few things. First of all, what people on the street treat as a matter of political opinion, therefore subjective and people having different views on matters is one of the most sacred freedoms, educated elites tend to see differently. They tend to see them as professional questions. So if you are a professor of engineering or a student of economics, and child psychologists tell you that trans children exist, you are supposed to assume that they know their jobs. Suppose you check their study methodology, and it checks out. At that point what can you say? That they are falsifying data? That would be like the head of the marketing department accusing the head of the accounting department of cooking the books. Basically a libel. Not something like a friendly political disagreement, that is only possible between non-experts.
When you are on the side of elites, you generally do not notice elites exist. (Take not here :) ) you just notice smart people are usually on your side. Of course. You know you are not an idiot, so it is not surprising.
When you are not on the side of elites, you are painfully aware of their existence. You just keep hitting walls everywhere. You feel like that kid who farted in the middle of the lunchroom. The worst part is when you doubt yourself, you know you are not some tinfoil hat type, and yet keep strangely feeling so. The worst part is you don't even really understand what is going on. You would understand it if people were taking bribes, for example. But they seem keenly honest, living modestly, do not actually have as an individual much power (as a class, yes, but individually not) and yet somehow you see things going horribly wrong.
Trudeau? The man who declared martial law over honking is your textbook NON-Authoritarian??!? He was stealing people's money without due process recourse.
> The Department of Justice may institute civil proceedings to revoke a person’s United States citizenship if an individual either “illegally procured” naturalization or procured naturalization by “concealment of a material fact or by willful misrepresentation.” 8 U.S.C. § 1451(a). The benefits of civil denaturalization include the government’s ability to revoke the citizenship of individuals who engaged in the commission of war crimes, extrajudicial killings, or other serious human rights abuses; to remove naturalized criminals, gang members, or, indeed, any individuals convicted of crimes who pose an ongoing threat to the United States; and to prevent convicted terrorists from returning to U.S. soil or traveling internationally on a U.S. passport. At a fundamental level, it also supports the overall integrity of the naturalization program by ensuring that those who unlawfully procured citizenship, including those who obtained it through fraud or concealment of material information, do not maintain the benefits of the unlawful procurement.
What sort of things count as 'willful misrepresentation'? Well...
> The government has claimed that Palestinian protester Mahmoud Khalil intentionally misrepresented information on his green card application and therefore is inadmissible to the United States. According to recent court filings, President Donald Trump's administration said Khalil failed to disclose when applying for his green card last year that his employment by the Syria Office at the British Embassy in Beirut went "beyond 2022" and that he was a "political affairs officer" for the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees from June to November 2023.
Combined with the recent SCOTUS case on birthright citizenship (even though I'm skeptical of nationwide injunctions, surely birthright citizenship is an *obvious* case where nationwide injunctions apply!) and legislation attempting to increase annual spending on ICE to over $150b (you know, the guys walking around in masks arbitrarily detaining anyone who looks vaguely ethnic, even if they are US citizens) it seems obvious to me that the government is eager to dramatically expand the definition of 'illegal'. Already there are calls to deport mamdani from federal reps, which is as disgusting as it is insane
I share the skepticism about nationwide injunctions generally, and also think that this specific topic is a good fit for their use. It would be great if either Congress would legislate or the SCOTUS had put into case law something like, "Federal courts cannot issue injunctions applying beyond the plaintiffs that are before them, unless the legal issue is a matter of interpretation or enforcement of specific text within the federal Constitution."
>even though I'm skeptical of nationwide injunctions, this is the *obvious* case where they apply
I don't understand why you think that. It seems to be an obvious case where they do NOT apply. A claim that Person X is subject to revocation of naturalization or permantent residence because he made misrepresentations is inherently a fact-specific, individualized question. There is nothing universal about it. Nor is there anything inherently unlawful about initiating denaturalization proceedings on that basis https://www.uscis.gov/policy-manual/volume-12-part-l-chapter-2
I am sure that the Administration's claims re Mahmoud Khalil are almost certainly bogus, because that is how they roll; note that misrepresentations must be material, and "a concealment or misrepresentation is material if it "has a natural tendency to influence, or was capable of influencing, the decision of" the decisionmaking body to which it was addressed.'" Kungys v. United States, 485 US 759 (1988) ["Looking, therefore, solely to the question whether Kungys' misrepresentation of the date and place of his birth in his naturalization petition was material within the meaning of § 1451(a), we conclude that it was not. "]
I thought the OP was referring there not to the particulars of Khalil's case, but rather to the general question that was just ruled on by the SCOTUS: whether a president can order implementation of a legally-new interpretation of a piece of the Constitution.
I'm also skeptical that a universal injunction is particularly necessary re birthright citizenship. When is this going to come up, in practice? If the govt tries to deport me, I present my birth certificate to the judge, and under current caselaw the judge has no choice to rule in my favor. The govt can appeal, but that will lead to a broad ruling. It might come up when Iapply for a passport, but that can easily be dealt with in a class action.
There might be other issues where the absence of universal injunctions leads to people not getting their day in court, but birthright citizenship does not seem to be one of them.
It applies to babies being born in hospitals. The whole point of the eo is that Trump is trying to stop birthright citizenship, which afaict is blatantly unconstitutional. A week ago, if you are on a greencard and have a child in the US, that child is a US citizen. This is written into the 14th amendment and supported by case precedent (Wong Kim iirc).
I know what the EO purports to do, and why it is bogus.. But, so what? It doesn't stop the issuance of a birth certificate. So, what effect will it have on a baby, as a practical matter, such that the failure to issue a universal injunction will harm them?
I didn't mean that OP was referring to the particulars of Khalil's case, but rather that they were referring to denaturalization / revocation of permanent residence in general.
And my point is that, because such cases are fact-specific, there is nothing to universally enjoin.
The question of whether a POTUS is able to unilaterally declare and begin implementing a change in the long-established (by SCOTUS precedent) legal understanding of part of the Constitution, seems to me about as general as it ever gets. That question isn't fact-specific at all: either a POTUS can do it or not.
But whether the issue is general has nothing to do with whether an injunction is universal or not. What matters is who is governed by the injunction. From the decision the other day:
>Traditionally, courts issued injunctions prohibiting executive officials from enforcing a challenged law or policy only against the plaintiffs in the lawsuit. The injunctions before us today reflect a more recent development: district courts asserting the power to prohibit enforcement of a law or policy against anyone.
Note also my comment re Khalil was based on my (mis)understanding that when OP said that they thought "this issue" was particularly appropriate for universal injunctions, he was referring to the policy of denaturalization / revocation of permanent residence, not to the birthright citizenship EO.
>”how come nobody has tried creating a school that actually only takes each kid for two hours a day and costs one-quarter as much?”
Civil rights law? Imagine how much faster you would have been able to move through the curriculum if you were allowed to kick out the kid who couldn’t remember the “trees” song.
Also, I’m sure, “your child is too stupid for us to teach,” is a bad way to build reputation.
The biggest issue is that one primary function schools serve is daycare. Having the kids for only 2 hours a day doesn't provide this. So the school will mostly want the kids either all day *OR* until the "normal" dismissal time when the existing after-school care programs are open to watch over the kids.
The *next* biggest issue is that lots of parents want more hours of instruction rather than fewer. Whether the extra hours are particularly effective (at the margin) is not super important.
I don't think that "teaching the curriculum" is a great way to measure the utility of school anyway.
The "curriculum" as it exists is some summarised lowest common denominator of what every student absolutely must be able to learn in a year. I don't want my kids to just learn the bare minimum, I'm sure there's a vast amount of other stuff they could be learning while they're at it. If you're done with fractions then please teach her dendrology and Byzantine history.
Indeed, selective schools are all about this and they often have wonderful reputations. It's not so clear how much of the reputation is due to great teaching rather than great students who would prosper under even lousy teaching, though.
A few decades back I pulled together data for my local public schools. It included standardized test scores and education levels of the parents. And the schools' rating (1 - 10) in California.
*) The general definition of a "Good School" is having a good rating.
*) The way to get a good rating is to have the kids test well.
*) About 80% of the kids' test scores could be predicted from only the parents' education level
I'd like to see something more rigorous and broader, but that's what I saw when I looked at my local public schools.
"How come nobody has tried creating a school that actually only goes two hours a day and costs one-quarter as much?"
The big thing you're missing here is that, for better or worse, for most people, the kids being babysit for almost a full workday for free is just as important as them learning. Or at least, the extra 6 hours hours they're in school is a feature, not a bug.
I thought this was so self evident that I find it surprising Scott would even ask the question. Paul Graham wrote an essay about this topic like 20 years ago.
To be fair, I didn't recognize this until reading one of Freddie de Boer's education essays a few years ago. Although I think i would have by now since we now have kids in school and are reaping the benefits of the free babysitting.
Also, you expect school to teach some stuff other than academics. You'd like kids to make friends and learn to function in a group away from their parents, with lots of supervision in the classroom and less in the gym and still less on the playground.
I would consider it a better feature if my kids could spend those 6 hours playing, reading a book, or working on their own project. Rather than sitting and being tortured by slow pretend-learning.
With you watching them or while at school? If the former, keep in mind that's not an option for most two income families. If the latter, consider how difficult it is to get education funding as it is and now think about trying to sell "well actually, we are only going to educate them the first half of the day, and they can do whatever they want the second" to parents who won't trust you to actually educate them in half the time, and taxpayers who don't want to pay for free babysitting the other half of the time. I think it's pretty easy to understand how we get the system we have, mushing together the two benefits to minimize complaints from both groups, even if it's objectively not efficient or ideal.
I sympathize, but I also keep reminding myself that my intuitions for how to fix education are probably wildly wrong in general. I think I have a good idea of what kind of schooling would have suited me as a child, but I'm an extreme outlier, and that kind of schooling would have not been much good for most of the other kids in my school.
Of course. Which has made it all the stranger with no mention of this triumph of feminism that so many districts in my state are going to a 4-day week.
"Lots of people agree that it’s easy for any home school and many private/charter schools to teach the whole curriculum in two hours. Shouldn’t this be a bigger deal? Also, how come nobody has tried creating a school that actually only takes each kid for two hours a day and costs one-quarter as much?"
This exists. Also, the students who do it are FAR, FAR more interesting people than what can become the 5-day all-day mind-meld.
Christian Twitter is chirping about YongHoon Kim from South Korea, who has the highest IQ ever recorded at 276 (!) and recently declared that he believes Jesus Christ is Lord and the Bible is the revealed word of God.
My thoughts -
1. What does it even mean to have an IQ of 276?? Assuming a mean of 100 and standard deviation of 10, the chances are vanishingly small of anyone in human history achieving this. It also implies he is smarter than an Einstein-level genius by about the same proportion as Einstein is smarter than someone severely intellectually disabled. Do IQs above, say, 200 actually correlate with anything meaningful?
2. As a Christian I obviously find this flattering (“a smart person is someone who knows more than you and agrees with you.”) I know some may disagree, but I don’t think religion should be dismissed as the province of the irrational and uneducated.
3. What is the correlation (or otherwise) between intellect and religiosity? Much is made of Galileo whose scientific discoveries brought him in conflict with the Church, but my (subjective) impression is that rather more great historical scientists were inspired by religion (Newton, Einstein, Faraday, Kepler, Mendel.)
At some point, you get the "top thousand people in the world" -- their IQs are basically unmeasurable, in terms of "who is better than whom" and you pull the guy whose unique skillset does what you want.
Yeah interesting, I sometimes think high intellect is a risk factor for pride, which makes it more difficult to accept the truth of religion. Religion necessarily involves a surrender to the unknown and the acceptance that there are mysteries too deep for one’s mind to comprehend
I think Wooly put it well. It makes sense that very smart people would actually question the idea that the orthodoxy of our time (materialist humanism) or the orthodoxy of the previous time a few centuries ago (biblically inerrant Christianity) just happens to be the timeless universal truth.
While "normal" people would just rather do what their ancestors did without trying to understand the new orthodoxy, and "smart" people would think *just enough* to understand the new orthodoxy and why it's better than the old one and then *stop*. And certainly not think enough to wonder if *that* might *also* be wrong.
There may also be a barber pole effect here. People who aren't that smart but have their life basically together signal religious belief to distinguish themselves from the drug users and criminals and so on. People who are a bit smart aren't worried about being mistaken for a drug addict or party animal but *are* worried about being mistaken for a non-smart normal person, so they signal irreligion to do so. People who are very smart aren't worried about being mistaken for a normal person but *are* worried about being mistaken for a merely slightly smart person, so they signal (maybe esoteric maybe not) religious belief.
That latter model would suggest that maybe correlations between intelligence and religion have nothing at all to do with the rationality of religion, actually.
>That latter model would suggest that maybe correlations between intelligence and religion have nothing at all to do with the rationality of religion, actually.
True! Also, there is the unfortunate point that compressing the relationship into a _correlation_ misses the points you raise, since correlations are awful for capturing strongly nonlinear relationships, most severely if, as you suggest, the actual relationship is not monotonic.
Do you know what sort of IQ test was used to evaluate Kim's IQ? Most standardized IQ tests have an upper limit around 155, due to the limited number of extremely difficult items. Supposedly, there are high-range IQ tests designed to handle people with extremely high IQs, but to the best of my knowledge, they haven't been standardized and/or normalized for reliability (mainly because there aren't many individuals with an IQ of 5σ to use as samples).
As for the correlation between intellect and religiosity, that depends on how you define "intellect" and "religiosity". If we're reducing intellect to an IQ score (and I don't subscribe to that hokum), then numerous studies have shown a negative correlation between religiosity and higher IQ. Terman's longitudinal study of geniuses (IQ > 135) suggested that these individuals were somewhat less religious than the general population, although not overwhelmingly so. Terman spoke in general terms, though, and I don't think his team published any hard numbers on this question. The famous SMPY study (Study of Mathematically Precocious Youth) tracked teens in the top 0.01% in math ability (IQs >145), followed them longitudinally, and found a trend toward lower religiosity over time, particularly compared to national averages. Those going into STEM fields were particularly less religious.
I found this for you on Google Scholar: "The Relation Between Intelligence and Religiosity: A Meta-Analysis and Some Proposed Explanations" by Zuckerman et al.
> A meta-analysis of 63 studies showed a significant negative association between intelligence and religiosity. The association was stronger for college students and the general population than for participants younger than college age; it was also stronger for religious beliefs than religious behavior. For college students and the general population, means of weighted and unweighted correlations between intelligence and the strength of religious beliefs ranged from −.20 to −.25 (mean r = −.24). Three possible interpretations were discussed. First, intelligent people are less likely to conform and, thus, are more likely to resist religious dogma. Second, intelligent people tend to adopt an analytic (as opposed to intuitive) thinking style, which has been shown to undermine religious beliefs. Third, several functions of religiosity, including compensatory control, self-regulation, self-enhancement, and secure attachment, are also conferred by intelligence. Intelligent people may therefore have less need for religious beliefs and practices.
Unfortunately, this is behind a paywall. But my first question would be, how did these studies define religious belief? If they defined religiosity as belief in an Abrahamic creator-god who is omniscient and omnipotent, then they may be misclassifying otherwise religious people as atheists and agnostics. Full disclosure: I don't test out as a genius, but my first IQ test put me at +1.9σ. I'm agnostic about belief in a creator entity (because it's an unfalsifiable question). But I'm deeply mystical despite having a firm STEM grounding. I probably wouldn't be classified as religious by the psychometricians, but I am.
My understanding is that there are specific tests used to differentiate the very high IQ from the extremely high IQ. The Giga Society, which is similar in principle to Mensa but only admits those with IQs above 190, lists some here
It doesn't mean literally nothing. It means they are probably pretty good to great at memorization, pattern matching, and mental arithmetic, standard test taking stuff.
It's also only mostly ridiculous rather than completely ridiculous, which is not what I thought i was going to say once i started typing. Yes, a z score of 17 is unfathomable. But. The tail end of real distributions stop resembling the normal distribution.
The tallest human ever was 8' 11". This would put him ~13 to 16 standard deviations above the average height (he was born in 1918, i don't care enough to find good data on standard deviations back then)
This is impossibly tall, if all you go by is the Z score.
276 is impossibly smart, if all you go by is the Z score, and by with a few orders of magnitude.
I think its much, much easier for a human to get impossibly tall than impossibly smart, but the argument is not as rock solid as I would like it to be.
So that’s what it “means.” I wonder though if after a certain level IQ is not a good predictor of achievement, sort of like height in basketball. It’s a strong predictor up to a point, but at some point NBA players are tall enough and other factors become dominant. That’s why Michael Jordan at 6 foot 6 is a much better player than the tallest man ever at 8 foot 11.
It doesn't mean nothing. Suppose you have the 276 IQ guy and a 100 IQ guy in a room. If you were able to interrogate them, would you be able to guess which is which without directly asking their test results?
To me, the answer is obviously yes. IQ tests aren't random number generators.
However, I don't think I would be able to do the same with 276 and 140. Im willing to accept that above 140, an IQ test might as well be a random number generator.
I'm not saying you couldn't easily tell a 276 IQ person from a 140 IQ person, I'm just saying that there's no test well calibrated enough to give you a "276" rather than just saying "Whoop, this person exceeds the ceiling of this test".
Anyway look I think it's been established elsewhere in the thread that the guy actually scored a 276 in some kind of other test, not an IQ test, so we can probably drop the subject.
No, it literally means nothing, IQ is fundamentally an ordinal scale and cannot distinguish between "higher than any point in the sample distribution by a little bit" and "higher than any point in the sample distribution by a lot". The apparent interval nature is an artifact of the norming process, and at that point there's nothing left to norm against.
Yeah, I mean the guy may be genuinely very smart (or not--some people with really impressive IQ scores don't seem to do much, but there's a pretty strong positive correlation between IQ scores and accomplishing things), but whereas an IQ of 145 is meaningful in the sense that we know that the number of people whose scores are above it should be about one per thousand, and that we probably have some useful data about how people with 145 IQ scores performed on some real-world tasks, a score of 276 doesn't tell us any of that. It's like I ran a regression analysis on the relationship between temperature and murder rate and then extrapolated it out to the expected murder rate when it's 300 F outside.
Maybe there's a strong positive correlation between IQ scores (high) and accomplishing things. I think there's also bound to be a very strong correlation between your differential IQ score and accomplishing things.
Few people game an IQ test low "just to see how the questions change." And you can be sure they aren't narcissists or midwits.
> South Korean Kim Young-hoon was recognized as the person with the highest IQ in history, scoring 276 at the World Memory Championships, according to the organizer of the competition, the World Mind Sports Council
> The World Memory Championships is an organized competition of memory sports in which competitors memorize as much information as possible within a given period of time.
> The World Championships consist of ten different disciplines, where the competitors have to memorize as much as they can in a period of time:
One-hour numbers (23712892....)
5-minute numbers
Spoken numbers, read out one per second
30-minute binary digits (011100110001001....)
One-hour playing cards (as many decks of cards as possible)
15-minute random lists of words (house, playing, orphan, encyclopedia....)
15-minute names and faces
5-minute historic dates (fictional events and historic years)
15-minute abstract images (WMSC, black and white randomly generated spots) / 5-minute random images (IAM, concrete images)
Speed cards - Always the last discipline. Memorize the order of one shuffled deck of 52 playing cards as fast as possible.
Another reason for skepticism: the *actual* Korean with the highest recorded IQ on the Stanford–Binet Intelligence Scale isn't YongHoon Kim but https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kim_Ung-yong who is a pretty famous case within these circles. AFAICT Kim is "an associate professor at Shinhan University and vice president of the North Kyeong-gi Development Research Center".
Saw a video about a guy with extraordinary memory skills. A lot of the stuff he could do resembled the tasks above -- learning long sequences of numbers, etc.. But they also showed him learning Icelantic well enough to hold a conversation in -- I forget how long, I think it was something like a coupla days. And the conversation wasn't a trivial one, I was substantial and went on for a while. *That* impresses me.
"What is the correlation (or otherwise) between intellect and religiosity? Much is made of Galileo whose scientific discoveries brought him in conflict with the Church, but my (subjective) impression is that rather more great historical scientists were inspired by religion (Newton, Einstein, Faraday, Kepler, Mendel.)"
Very, very loose vibe thing:
Normal people are usually religious (including secular religion things).
Smart people usually aren't religious.
Really smart people are a crap shoot but their religious beliefs are always really weird and esoteric. Like, weird gnostic cults or obsessive mathematical platonists or just a sh*t ton of LSD. Newton is a good example, as the dude was super into alchemy, like, seriously into it.
If I was introduced to a super smart person and was told they were religious, my priors are way higher for them being into Kabbalah or something than, like, Methodism.
Serious IQ tests do not even reach anywhere near 276, because that is statistically a nonsense -- you would have to calibrate the test on more people than actually exist on this planet.
Could it be a typo for 176? That happens to be the highest value I have ever seen in actual test.
The thing that always struck me: if she really was the smartest human who'd ever lived, it seems like she kinda wasted her talents. I mean, she married well, and wrote some newspaper columns and books, but it kinda seems like the smartest person in the world ought to be discovering new physics or figuring out how to build fusion reactors or something. It would be like if you somehow learned that you were the most musically talented person on Earth, and so you decided to sing in your local church choir once a week rather than, say, composing new music that future generations would love or something.
IQ falls apart at the tails of the distribution. It's really only meant for comparisons within a few standard deviations from the mean, maybe 70-130. Anything much higher than that you should probably just generalize as "high IQ". I don't think 276 is any more meaningful than 150 here.
We've made a chatbot with 200k tokens of knowledge of AI x-risk in its context. If you ask it some hard questions on AI safety, it might surprise you with how well current LLMs can explain the problem. In something like a third of its responses, it generates genuinely very convincing and valid arguments.
Especially curious to hear the thoughts of people who are not convinced of AI x-risk.
I asked "well what white-collar desk jobs are the least likely to be automated"
it gave me a long-ish, decent answer and, at the end, it asked: "If you want, I can suggest ways to “future-proof” your own skillset, or help brainstorm transition paths as the landscape shifts."
I said "yes lets do that"
And it responded "Sorry, we've optimized this tool for conversations about AI and the threat it poses, and it is not as useful for other requests."
In the "random question" category: Picked up a book off my library's recommended list, "Welcome to the Hyunam-Dong Bookshop." In the author's note, she says that she wanted to write about a bookstore which started with the character "hyu." No explanation (nor even the actual character rather than the transliteration) is given by her or by the translator or editor. But there's gotta be someone here who knows a lot about Korean characters, so what's your guess as to why that would be a good bookstore-name starter? TIA!
Ukraine's drone attack against Russia's bombers parked on the ground makes me wonder: Why doesn't the U.S. Air Force have more decoy planes?
An F-35A costs around $82.5 million. Why not also build F-35ADecoys that would cost far less, like $4 million (price of a new, small passenger jet)? F-35ADecoys could be stationed at air bases to trick an enemy with spy satellites into thinking an attack might come from that direction, or they could be mixed in with real F-35As to sacrificially soak up damage from any preemptive drone attack.
F-35ADecoys would have the same external dimensions and shapes as F-35A's. Only at very close range could you see any differences. However, F-35ADecoys would not have any expensive avionics or technology, would have a cheap, commercial-grade jet engine, and would be made of cheap materials like aluminum and steel rather than stealth composites. The only advanced feature they would have would be an autopilot system that would let them take off, fly long distances, and land without a human pilot.
In a jif, F-35ADecoys could also be converted into cruise missiles by attaching a bomb to their undersides and remotely piloting them into a target.
Having decoys be able to actually fly would be redundant in most scenarios. As long as the decoys look convincing on high-res satellite images while parked on the tarmac, the work is mostly done. Having close-up surveillance (people, drones) that could tell the difference is vastly more difficult and worse-scaling than satellite imagery and should be enough to economically favour the defender.
Adversaries are presumably photographing the bases many times a day, and will be able to keep track of which planes move and which ones don't.
Here's the other thing: F-35s aren't stored out in the open, they live in hangars or at least under cover. You wouldn't park a Ferrari out in the street, I don't know why anyone thinks they'd want to park a $100 million fighter out in the rain to get dirty.
>Why doesn't the U.S. Air Force have more decoy planes?
Because they take up space, you have to maintain them like real planes or else it gives the game away, and the enemy has spies in the military that will give the game away anyway.
Just build a nice hangar and keep unknown numbers of planes inside.
Because using decoys is what a paper tiger military does to pretend to look strong. It's in the US's interest to make its force projection capabilites seem *as credible as possible*. Mixing in fake jet planes into its fleet might embolden foolish actors into picking a fight with us (underestimating our power).
The planes are made visible intentionally as part of a nuclear safety treaty between the US and Russia called New START. Both countries agree to limits on nuclear capability. Parking the planes openly allows them to be observed via satellite. Certain parts of the treaty (standing meetings and on-site inspection) were suspended due to the Ukraine conflict, but the majority of the agreement remains intact.
"The planes are made visible intentionally as part of a nuclear safety treaty between the US and Russia called New START. ... Parking the planes openly allows them to be observed via satellite."
Russia "suspended" participation in the treaty in early 2023, though it said it would continue to abide by the plane number limits. I *think* this means that Russia said it would not build more planes than allowed, but was also not necessarily going to continue allowing for verification. US military inspections of Russian sites, for example, are not longer allowed/done.
So Russia could have placed the planes in bunkers if it wanted to do so. I don't know that Russia has enough bunkers, though.
Except that there was no clause in the New START treaty that mandated parking strategic bombers in the open to be visible from satellite and flyovers. All of the START treaties and the SORT treaty relied on primary verification, and New START allowed up to 18 unannounced on‑site inspections to count warheads on systems including bombers. Bombers can be stored in hangars, especially for maintenance or protection from weather. There's a concealment measure's clause in treaty though, and that might be where the misunderstanding that strategic bombers must be stored in the open comes from...
> The obligation not to use concealment measures shall not apply to cover or conceal practices at ICBM bases or to the use of environmental shelters for strategic offensive arms."
But storing nuclear-armed heavy bombers in hardened bunkers seems to be a no-no.
Likewise:
> Each Party shall base:
>...
> (b) deployed heavy bombers only at air bases.
And the treaty says that the parties have to park heavy bombers with nukes at separate bases from heavy bombers without nukes.
Supposedly, its forbidden to deploy fake heavy bombers. Maybe that's implied by the concealment clause, but I don't specifically see that in the New START treaty text.
At least in regard to planes sitting on the tarmac, Russia’s decoy tactics seem to have been largely ineffective against Ukraine’s precision drone strikes. Can't find it now, but there was a video posted on YouTube taken from a Ukrainian drone during their massive June 1st attack on Russian airbases. It demonstrated how the Ukrainian drones successfully avoided the decoys and targeted the real aircraft. I'm not sure, but some of the decoys that Ru used may have been 3-D mockups, because the drones used in the June 1st attack evidently used radar to distinguish real planes from phonies. So, any F-35A decoy would need to have the exact same radar signature as the real aircraft. Not saying this isn't feasible, but Ukraine is incorporating AI into some of its drones.
OTOH, some of the Ru decoy "aircraft" were pretty simplistic, though. Open-source analyst Brady Africk noted that these decoys are not easily mistaken in radar imagery, and the success of Ukraine’s attacks—hitting at least 13 to 20 aircraft, including Tu-95 and Tu-22M bombers—confirms Ukraine’s ability to bypass such deception. Africk had a thread on X about several instances where realistic aircraft images were painted on the tarmac, but that trick was easily detected from satellite imagery because the painted-image decoys didn't cast shadows.
The days of high-end fighter jet being able to dominate the battlefield may be numbered. According to Trent Telenko...
> Air superiority below 2,000 feet/600 meters is increasingly the only air superiority that matters in the age of drones.
> A few tens of F-35's showing up for 5-to-10 minutes a few times a day cannot compare to tens of thousands of drones hunting individual soldiers 24/7
> "Orders of magnitude mean things" and the the F-35 big/few/expensive cult is so far on the wrong side of the small drone numbers game as to be irrelevant.
> Drones are killing three times as much as artillery. And artillery has historically killed more soldiers than planes.
This isn't a result of technology bottlenecks--it's the result of US (Developed nation) military doctrine and the consequent influence on procurement policies. We could have a much larger number of much cheaper close air support fighters, but we chose, decades ago, not to invest in that. The F-16 is as close as we got--but google "F-20 fighter" to see what we could have had. The F-20 was a derivative of the venerable F-5, which you can buy used today for less than a million dollars.
The days of jet fighters aren't over, they just have to fit themselves into a doctrine with drones as part of the battle space. We may be going back to the days of cheaper, more specialized fighters, though.
I just looked up the F-20. Looks like it would have been about 10% cheaper per plane to buy than the F-16 and maybe 40-50% cheaper to operate due to fuel consumption and maintenance requirements. Conversely, the F-20 would have been much less upgradable than the F-16 (the former being an extensive upgrade of an older design already) and would consequently have had a significantly shorter useful service life. It was also much less capable in bombing roles, and I am seeing conflicting information about how much less capable an F-20 was as a fighter than an F-16
My suspicion is that the F-16 was the right point on the tradeoff curve between cost and features. This is corroborated by South Korea and other countries also evaluating the F-20 in the 80s and deciding to buy F-16s or home-grown fighter designs instead.
There is no question that the F-16 was the more capable aircraft. The question is whether or not we could use something like the F-20 now. Though I am open to the position that a sub-sonic aircraft would be even better.
-Military strategy generally lags behind technological development. Drones as a major military threat are a very recent phenomenon, only in the last few years in Ukraine (or I suppose the 2nd Nagorno-Karabakh conflict in 2020 if you were paying attention). Generally what happens is armies deploy using the strategies honed from the last major conflict, and when these no longer work well they bash their head against the wall. As people die from mistakes and the incompetent and overly rigid commanders are weeded out a new strategy is honed.
-The US to some degree has taken proactive measures to prevent this. See the development of TRADOC in the wake of Vietnam and the Yom Kippur war. The reinvigoration of aggressive maneuver tactics led to the absolutely crushing victory over Iraq in 1991, despite the US not being in a major conflict in decades.
-US and also NATO forces have spent the last several decades fighting low tech, low intensity counter insurgency operations. This has conditioned their armed forces for a type of conflict where they set the tempo of operations. The idea of the enemy seizing the initiative with something like a mass drone attack on rear operating areas is totally foreign. As are concepts like electronic warfare and signals discipline. US operating posts are lit up like Christmas trees in the EM spectrum, again because they have spent so long fighting enemies where this is not a relevant concern. A relevant example is how long it has taken for the US/EU to ramp up production of munitions for Ukraine. Their defense industries were conditioned on low intensity conflict, where their annual production might sustain the front in Ukraine for a month.
In essence, drone attacks like this are a very new development. The US military has a lot of institutional inertia and it takes time for new ideas to percolate through and result in new strategy. Given how closely NATO is involved in the Ukraine war, I'm sure they're taking a lot of notes, but it still takes time.
*Also, good luck getting your self-piloting decoy plane that's also a cruise missile for a unit cost of only $4 million.
ETA: One other minor point - who exactly is going to have a bunch of spy satellites and ISR assets as well as the strike capability to hit US airbases? This is basically only China in the Pacific theatre, and maybe Russia in the local region. Everyone else remotely capable of something like this is already allied to the US. Being able to acquire real time intelligence of opposition militaries without massive state capacity is also a very newfangled development of drone technology.
*hushed conspiratorial whisper* Maybe they do. Maybe the the *real* cost for F-35As working is in the ~$150 million range, half their fleet is actually decoys and their OPSEC is just so amazingly good that they've managed to hide this from being public knowledge this whole time.
OK, so that was clearly a joke, I just couldn't resist. Anyway, the thought that occurs to me is that, depending on which particular features and capabilities are most important for learners, a decoy plane program could overlap very nicely with a training plane program. I know that airforces need to devote a considerable amount of flight-hours to pilot training in realistic aircraft, but I'd be surprised if every single feature that makes an aircraft combat capable is necessary for the majority of training flights. A useful training plane might cost more than very low-budget decoy, but being dual-use could still save a decent amount of money. One potential downside I can think of is that intelligence orgs might be able to track the decoys just by keeping an eye on training flights (which I assume are easy to identify as such, even from far away) and then tracking the physical planes as they're moved around.
The wonderful thing about ACX is that it's a near certainty that somebody with vastly more domain knowledge than me will spontaneously appear to explain in exacting detail why all my assumptions above are horribly, horribly wrong. :-)
One obvious problem: a F-35ADecoy probably doesn't look the same across the EM spectrum (e.g., in your hypothetical it has a very different radar return.)
Another is that I roll to disbelieve that a flying decoy costs only $4M.
How do you know they don't do this? And if the answer is that it would actually be pretty obvious based on things like flight envelope, then maybe that's the answer.
“Bank of New York Mellon said it now employs dozens of artificial intelligence-powered ‘digital employees’ that have company logins and work alongside its human staff.
Similar to human employees, these digital workers have direct managers they report to and work autonomously in areas like coding and payment instruction validation, said Chief Information Officer Leigh-Ann Russell. Soon they’ll have access to their own email accounts and may even be able to communicate with colleagues in other ways like through Microsoft Teams, she said. “
I expect more statements like this in the near future. Artificial Intelligence will continue to evolve and take away from humans economically valuable tasks.
Of all the attempts I've heard to try to incorporate AI-generated work into a workplace, this seems like one of the most awkward. There's good ways and bad ways to get value out of AI, and this seems like a bad one.
I'd like to just bitch for a minute about my new phone.
I had a Samsung Galaxy S9 until two weeks ago, and yes, it was (is! I kept it as a backup!) seven years old.
I had all of the settings DIALED. IN. Bixby: maximally shut off. Privacy and anti-ad stuff: maximally on. Apps were at the barest bare minimum (I actually like to joke that I'm "allergic to apps" whenever someone suggests one to me. I had a small handful, like Uber, Spotify, and Pay-by-Phone for parking, but otherwise didn't have any app that couldn't be used via a browser).
Never the less, for the last year or so, I began receiving occasional alerts from the operating system that I was out of space. I transferred my images to the SD card (IT HAD A REMOVABLE SD CARD!!!), and took other actions, but no matter how much I deleted or moved around, I kept creeping back up into the "your phone is too full and is going to stop working" zone. Text message chains with my more prolific interlocutors were taking 25+ seconds to load a single new message. Etc.
Finally, slightly terrified that my Samsung Galaxy S9 might simply explode like the gluttony victim in Se7en before I had a replacement ready, and, wanting the transition to a new phone to be as low-friction as possible, I went and bought the Galaxy 25.
I used the "Smart Switch" app which ostensibly ports over all of ones apps and settings and data, but that is absolute horseshit. Too much is way too different, for completely retarded reasons. For example, the goddamned blue light filter was renamed to "eye comfort shield," is multi-levels deeper in the settings than it was on my S9, and is way less configurable, both in terms of range and precision.
It also has TWO fucking AIs on it; Samsung's Bixby and Google's Gemini, both of which I've done everything possible to shut off but which nevertheless occasionally flash me or post up little icons in other programs, wanting to "help."
And then there are ads, ads, ads, ads, including in apps like Spotify that I wasn't seeing two weeks ago using those same apps on my S9.
Nothing is meaningfully "better." The screen resolution and clarity and so on look the same. Photos look the same. Text messaging works again, but that probably could have been fixed on the S9 by deleting the literally tens of thousands of text messages I had in some conversations (I only ported over one year's worth of messages during the "Smart" Switch). I guess entering my thumbprint on the front of the phone rather than the back is slightly more ergonomic, but a friend with the Galaxy S23 just told me that feature tends to wear out screens in about two years, according to the repair tech she just spoke to about her two-year-old phone. The battery life is only about 35% better than the S9, which is perhaps the most egregious disappointment.
And then as I mentioned, a lot of stuff is worse! Settings and features have randomly been renamed and/or are less configurable. Drop-down menus look completely different. No removable SD card. No headphone jack.
I know there are a lot of things I can do to get my new phone to where I want it - tutorials and programming and whatnot - but that's also sort of my point, I don't WANT to have to spend hours researching how to unfuck my phone and then even more time unfucking it.
It was reasonably easy to unfuck my phone back in 2018, and now it's infinitely harder, and that's what I'm pissed about.
That, and that apparently I'll have to do this all again in another two years.
I, also, had a Galaxy S9 that I very much liked and would like to still be using. I, also, try to keep the minimum number of "apps" and other shiny features, but some of them are essential and some of those were no longer compatible with the S9 so I was forced to upgrade about two years ago. To a Galaxy S22, in my case.
Smart Switch worked better for me than for you, apparently because I was only skipping 13 model numbers rather than 16. Gemini wasn't a thing. But I agree, the new phone has very little to recommend itself over the S9, the user interface changes are mostly just annoying, and the loss of the removable SD card is a serious downgrade. I hadn't even thought to check on that, because I thought it inconceivable that anyone would make a high-end smartphone without that.
Apparently you are my soul mate. Or at least my phone mate.
I upgraded my phone last week, from the A13 to the A16, and I'm quite happy with how well the Smart Switch worked. Perhaps the problem is that 7 years is longer than it's meant for?
But my phone is significantly lower end than yours, so it's much better: I still have an SD card slot, for example.
Sheesh. As someone with an S9 on its last legs, now you have me scared...
I haven't had any issues with running out of storage space, even with hundreds and hundreds of photos. When I first got the phone, I set it to auto-delete text messages older than 2 years. Maybe that's why?
Ugh. There's seriously no audio jack on the newer Galaxy phones? [Grumble grumble]
I still want to eventually replace my phone because the battery is dying. Should I try and get the battery replaced at a repair shop instead?
Is it just me, or was that "low SES" mom from Alpha School being kind of cagey? She provided no specifics as to what the actual problem was. Just vague "the school didn't meet our needs" type of complaints, with no examples.
Reading between the lines, Alpha School in Brownsville exists for the benefit of SpaceX employees. If you're not the child of SpaceX employees then you're probably not going to fit in.
There's not a nice way of saying "These kids are too dumb and poor to fit in at our kids-of-rocket-scientists school" but that's basically the way it is.
Given that Brownsville is 94% Hispanic, it's unclear who at the school would *not* be a member of the community whose needs are not being met - unless it's some kids whose parents work at Space-X. There is a lot of anger down there at Space-X, so the rant (AI?) may be a species of that. Some of the anger is wholly justified; some of it is silly and has had unfortunate results as for instance Musk was prepared to buy and swap a larger, better piece of speculator-owned habitat (that the Conservation Fund had been trying to secure for some time) to gift to the state parks and wildlife department, in exchange for mostly some state-owned inholding or lots within the old failed development that he has spruced up, next to (rather alarmingly adjacent to, but I guess I don't understand these things!) where the rockets launch.
The whole area is extremely important biologically, both for wildlife and some unusual plant situations, especially the lomas; and is more or less the site of arguably the "last battle of the Civil War".
But given it was fruitless to suppose the government was going to shut down Space-X, the sign Americans or at least on South African can yet "do stuff" - a larger intact piece of habitat was very obviously the better end of the deal, especially if Musk is going to be allowed to continue dropping rocket crap all over Boca Chica as seems inevitable.
The state/feds are much to blame too; the rather beautiful (if you know what you're looking at) drive to Boca Chica passes through what has been a wildlife refuge, leased for the purpose by the feds (I think, as a unit of LRGNWR) from some idiotic "navigation district". A conservation area that expires is obviously no conservation area at all, especially as threats to e.g. the oceot, rare plant communities increase. That should never have been allowed to happen, and Musk is not to blame for the greed of earlier bubbas.
Yes it's obviously very suspicious. In my experience, parents of all stripes *love* to talk about school administration drama in *excessive detail*. My assumption (absent future elaboration) is either that this person is untruthful, or that the details are unflattering to them and/or their ingroup.
"It’s easy for any home school and many private/charter schools to teach the whole curriculum in two hours. Shouldn’t this be a bigger deal? Also, how come nobody has tried creating a school that actually only takes each kid for two hours a day and costs one-quarter as much?"
As to the latter point: one of the huge functions of school is childcare for people whose work don't allow them to have kids hanging around (most of us). A two hour a day school would be, for most people, a huge negative. Another major function of school is social; I assume that those two hours are actually *studying*, but a lot of what goes on at school is learning how to be a social person, making friends, playing, etc.
As to the former point: I assume part of the answer is self-selection effect, at least for private and charter schools, which select for kids who can learn that much that fast. At home schools the curriculum and teaching is geared to the individual; presumably public schools could teach a lot more with a 1:1 or 2:1 student:teacher ratio, and with hugely tailored individual curricula. Homeschooling isn't scalable and efficient; that's presumably a large part of why it works (when it does).
- Enough basic food at production +logistics price per person for basic nutritional needs but no more? (Tracked through ID when bought)
- Enough new apartments for families of 2-4 (only for people who have not yet owned a home) at cost each year [such] that the house market slowly gets cheaper?
- clean, efficient public transportation, with 3 rides a day at minimal prices?
How does this affect the economics, when blueberries are market value, but the first liter of milk per week is at governmental cost?
>- Enough basic food at production +logistics price per person for basic nutritional needs but no more? (Tracked through ID when bought)
Defining "Basic food" becomes a massive can of worms. Fruit is an essential part of your diet, but blueberries aren't covered - who decides which fruits are necessities instead of luxuries? What if you decide that apples are a basic food, but then a crop failure means that apples suddenly double in price? Which kind of apples, cheap red delicious or expensive honeycrisp? What if you have a dietary restriction or allergy? I'm a vegan, why would I want the government buying me free milk?
I think if you want to ensure free food for everyone, I think it would make more sense to supersize SNAP/food stamps. SNAP does have some restrictions on what foods you can buy with it, but since it gives you a fixed amount of *money* rather than *food*, you can allow market forces to decide which foods are most affordable to provide, and allow choices based on individual tastes.
Well, first off, it costs an awful lot of money. And since nobody is going to be raising taxes for this (or anything else), that's going to push us several steps closer to the fiscal apocalypse that comes when we find out what level of national debt-to-GDP is too high.
Minimum wages will fall, or more precisely not rise to match the inflation that will probably come from whatever you do to finance this, because there won't be the urgency of "these people literally can't afford to live at current wages!" (which was never true but at least plausible when everybody has to pay their own rent and groceries). That will pull down wages above the minimum as well, particularly the ones that are only modestly above the minimum. So the working class won't find their more-than-just-the-bare-necessities budget increasing nearly as much as you hope.
But aside from those details, it's going to devastate the private market for low-end food, housing, etc. The people who currently run business selling food to poor people, or providing housing to poor people, are mostly going to go out of business - a few of them will pivot to being government contractors supporting the new order, but A: because of economies of scale, not most of them, and B: because of different business models, probably not still maintaining a solid retail distribution network.
And the sell-stuff-to-poor-people market significantly overlaps the sell-stuff-to-working-class-people market, so an awful lot of working-class people who don't need this program are going to find their options reduced to the point that they're going to downgrade to the free-to-poor-people stuff most of the time.
Ultimately, I think this fragments the market. There will be a large basically-socialist economy providing the basics to poor people, and another catering to the UMC-and-above market that wouldn't be caught dead eating a steady diet of government cheese in a housing project down by the river. In between, some of the old businesses will muddle through providing occasional treats for working-class and formerly middle-class families - but economies of scale will push up their prices so those blueberries will be a less common treat than they used to be. And there will probably still be Kosher, Halal, etc, supply chains in parallel; it will be relatively more expensive to practice Judaism or Islam in this brave new world, but most believers will at least try.
So, basically, the same thing that happened to schools when we made public schools freely available for everyone. We've got elite private schools for the rich and rich-adjacent, and we've got religious schools for people willing to pay serious money for their beliefs, and everybody else gets a take-it-or-leave-it public school district. That we all know is very often crap, but which nobody can find a solution for now that "the working class should send their kids to private schools competing to provide the best education at the lowest price" is no longer on the table.
>- clean, efficient public transportation, with 3 rides a day at minimal prices?
I'm generally not a fan of State-provided services, and usually prefer market-provided services, but, at least in NYC, the current system only gets about a third of its operating costs from fares. So, switching to a completely free system, wholly supported by taxes, instead of 2/3 supported by taxes, at least seems like a sane alternative. The existing system doesn't seem pathological, and the marginal positive externality of reducing congestion in other forms of transportation might turn out to be worth the extra subsidy.
Many Thanks! You might be right, but just how much damage people who _didn't_ value the bus ride would do, but would get on if it is free seems like an open question. Maybe do a pilot project, with half the buses free (maybe every second bus on each route, marked somehow?), and see whether pathologies emerge in practice or not?
Many Thanks! Ouch! You may be right. In general, pilot projects are a good way to see if a proposal works, or if it crashes and burns. If pilot projects generally require _more_ political clout than barrelling ahead and implementing an option without the knowledge that a pilot project would yield, that is unfortunate.
Housing (32%), taxes (27%), transportation (17%), and food (12%) are the major expenses of most households. Everything else is 10-15% of spending.
This is one reason behind the enduring appeal of Republicans: they promise to cut a big cost category while Democrats promise to mostly cut smaller ones (eg healthcare, 5%).
This is also the political economy driving Georgism/Yimbyism/Abundance/etc. The Democrats are hoping they don't have to compete on cutting taxes if they can reduce housing costs instead. Unfortunately, it doesn't quite work because the Republicans have even fewer objections to building than they do. In part because construction leans Republican while the wealthiest landlords/NEPA lawyers/etc tend to lean Democrats (since the biggest landlords are urban residents of Democratic cities). It also drives their love of public transit which has the same issues but, on top of the other ones, only works for urban residents.
If you were the mayor-dictator of a blue city then what you'd want to do is to stimulate construction by removing permits/review/etc, build a ton of public transit, then offer generous concessional loans to first time home buyers. Technically the subsidies would push up demand for housing but the increased construction would push it down in net. Structured correctly, they would actually overstimulate construction by effectively providing a price floor in a market where prices would collapse from overbuilding.
While this would be a major program, it is affordable for major cities (being in the tens of billions per year even for the most expensive versions like NYC). And it would almost certainly be a net positive in terms of new real estate taxes, new construction taxes, and new income taxes from people living actually within the city rather than commuting. And much more impactful than food stamps plus.
If you're just concerned with the theoretical idea of subsidizing the first however many gallons of milk this is not significantly different from just a direct food subsidy. Just with additional administrative costs. You're effectively paying a subsidy which drives up demand across the whole category. Because money is fungible you'll just see them consuming more food (though somewhat less than you'd expect because people purchase fewer calories as their income goes up). Which makes it an unusually good category both economically and from political economy (because people think of food as a right). Except for the fact that subsidizing food has negative health effects.
This seems a remarkably intelligent response, and flattering that I'm not barking up the wrong tree.
Subsidizing specific foods doesn't seem like it should always lead to worse health outcomes - I've never heard of anyone becoming obese from cucumber overconsumption.
An NIH systematic review found that subsidizing healthy foods led to more consumption of healthy foods, but effects on obesity were inconclusive.
I'd be curious to see the research. That might be the case, a form of good calories crowding out bad, but equally you might just get more calories. And at any rate, it's a relatively small part of the budget. But in turn that means, if administrative costs are reasonable, then it might be worthwhile simply for social solidarity. Though I'm worried about the political economy of food subsidies being dominated by agribusiness etc.
This is something I've heard but it seems more like a politically convenient deflection. It's rich people in Blue States (and not rich people in Red States). Those are more Republican than the blue state average. But they're not on the whole Republican and in fact are often key parts of the progressive base.
And while Republicans nationally might not be pro-subsidy, they are not anti-growth. Basically you can see the Democrats as representing both the pro-subsidized growth and anti-growth at all camp while the Republicans are the "get out of it altogether" camp. While you can argue that's not as pro-growth as subsidy, it's not anti-growth in the NIMBY sense.
It's not a Republican vs Democrat thing, it's a small cities vs large cities thing.
In a city of (say) 50,000, the benefits of more people are significant and the costs are low. In a city of five million, the benefit of more people is small and the cost is high.
There's some critical size of city below which adding more people to the city is actually beneficial for the people who already live there. We ought to figure out what that size is, and start working to concentrate building in those places.
I've had a similar idea WRT food, but change "the government provides" to "the government pays for." More specifically, the thought was that the government could make a short-ish list of food items that grocery stores could be encouraged to provide for free, in exchange for some sort of value-equivalent reduction in taxes. The list would include enough of a spectrum of basic nutrition that almost any human *in theory* should be able to walk into a grocery store and pick out items that they can live on (even given most common dietary restrictions) without spending a penny. All of the items on the list would be very plain, basic versions of whatever class they were representing: things like cheap, low-quality bread, bulk grains, a very limited selection of cheap fruit and vegetables, and so forth. Some sort of customer limits/very simple tracking system could ensure that commercial entities didn't use this as a cheap supply of ingredients to turn into more expensive foods.
There are many details that would need to be worked out, and a few ways in which it might ultimately turn out to be impractical. In particular, I've never tried to do the math on probable costs compared to what stores pay in tax. But my underlying gut intuition is that grocery stores mostly don't make their profits on selling the bulk basics anyway: most customers pay for a lot of things above the bare minimum they need, and that the first-order economics would work out fine. Whether this would influence customer purchasing habits enough to be sustainable (why buy the slightly-better thing when the basic thing is actually free?) is another question. But if it worked it could entirely replace programs like food stamps, and would be much more flexible and less all-or-nothing than means-tested government assistance: any person or family could save money and cut their budget in a pinch by skewing their diet towards the food items that they could get for free.
The obvious wrong solution. Price gouging is good. (Sell your thing for more when demand is high.) What is bad is collusion between vendors to set a high price for everyone.
I do. I have a cap on data each month, if I go over I gotta pay for more gigs. That's because internet is scarcer where I live than where you live. If you have unlimited data with your internet plan that just means that there's enough bandwidth where you live that a flat monthly fee is more than enough to pay the cost. Yet internet access isn't free, because unlike air or sunshine there isn't enough bandwidth for everybody to have as much as they want.
I just see subsidizing demand as generally bad. Let's take housing. If you give everyone $X a month for housing*, then you increase the demand for housing. This causes the price of housing to increase. The subsidy then goes in large part to the people with the housing to sell.
*Are you just going to subsidize renters, or do home owners also get a subsidy?
If you do that and don't let anyone build new houses/apartments, you will just raise rents and housing prices by an amount that offsets the housing vouchers. It's like you had some kind of really focused inflation that only affected housing, because you have the same number of units of housing but far more dollars chasing them.
For a fairly close real-world worked example, look at federal student loans and college tuition.
Right! That reduces the cost. You can subsidize the supply, but that is tricky too. Perhaps the best thing to do is remove the barriers to making more. Remove zoning laws, regulations, etc... Capitalism is far from perfect, but it's maybe the best system we have at the moment.
Re Building cheap apartments: Who's building them? How do you make 'em cheap? Restrictions on who can buy seem fraught with problems. What if people divorce/ separate. If they move can they sell them? (Then I'll buy cheap, move and sell at a profit.) The price of a thing is that price for a reason. (supply and demand)
Capitalism is the best except where you know where you want to get to and how to do it, see China.
The government should build them.
Make them cheap by being relatively cheap materials -though not so much that they fall apart - and not very large units, by not making a profit, and maybe by subsidizing from tax money.
People choosing to not have a roof over their head is fine, they can sell them (but can't buy a new one). There would be a clear path to having basic needs met without going into debt.
I imagine that if people divorce they'll sell and split it or have one keep it while giving up other some of the other assets.
[Added: people can profit, that's fine. The point is to get small families into the house market and increase the housing supply without it just getting bought up as new speculative assets]
Don't forget that the existing home owners will fight very hard to keep their house prices from going down. And they will be skeptical so project that appear that the MIGHT cause a drop in local home prices will be opposed.
Want to drop a new 2,000 unit apartment complex in the middle of Palo Alto or Mountain View (or Los Altos)? Expect to spend a long time battling people with money and lawyers.
The obvious solution is to just steamroll those NIMBYs. But in a society with elections this isn't quite as simple to implement as it is to say.
Creating more supply where no one is already living is much easier. But also a lot less useful.
If it is directly state provided, we might run into issues with quality, like the infamous "project" housing of the past. I have looked into that. Basically, it was not the government as such, such as politicians or bureuacrats who pushed this terrible "brutalist" style. It was basically an intellectual fashion among architects. And due to the lack of market incentives, they had their way. I have found out the real problem is not the much-accursed corrupted politician or lazy bureaucrat, whom everybody likes to hate. It is the unchecked intellectual...
I was born in 1978 in Sovietized Hungary. Briefly, state-owned restaurants were so bad, that we got together with relatives and friends, picked one, and flat out bribed the whole crew so that they serve us something edible. You see I think they were simply stealing the better cuts of meat and selling them at a black market, which is why we got the terrible cuts.
I think a lot of economists understand this, which is why things like food stamps exist. But... is it working? Or people learn to game the system and find a way to buy booze and cigs anyway?
In that case, can't basically all possible state services be replaced by UBI? And if people buy booze and not healthy food, well basically that is their problem then. But this kind of libertarian thinking is that kind that would not make seat belts mandatory...
So what I am saying is that these things are complicated.
The same housing projects with, say, grad students and their families living in them would not have become nightmares of crime and dysfunction. (I mean, pot smoking and sometimes-loud parties, maybe, but not muggings and rapes and murders.).
Come on. The generalization of graduate student housing on the grounds of universities to low SES affordable housing in cities is not merely comparing apples to oranges, it's comparing apples to accordions. And the thing is, we don't even have to engage in the thought experiment. Can you give me an example of publicly built and provided housing that doesn't degenerate as noted above? I'm willing to be educated, but every place that I've ever heard that has tried has created someplace that colloquially is referred to as "the projects", most of which have been torn down due to the disastrous implementation.
The closest I've seen to a mass affordable home project was from private industry: the Levittown projects
You want to make people pay a real cost, which is realistic to pay after a few years saving with 2 parents working at low wage jobs.
Putting up security cameras and consistently enforced policing (with perhaps harsher penalties) seems like an obvious idea, do you think it's simply unrealistic?
Is that the issue - that we just.. made ugly houses and bad food? If the houses had been designed to look like nice normal houses it would have been fine?
I wouldn't think restaurants are a good match for being state-owned, I was thinking more basic staples
There's no shortage of architects out there making a perfectly good living from designing nice normal houses. They'll never get famous, but most professionals understand that they'll never get famous anyway and are happy to pump out whatever work pays the bills.
This is actually why new houses look better than giant expensive buildings. Because most new houses are built by non-famous architects, but if you want to build a $500 million art museum you feel obliged to hire a famous one.
Sure, but you have to sell the house at the market rate. Else I (rich person) buy the cheap houses and sell them at a profit for the market rate. (I'm not really a rich person.)
Supply increasing relative to demand should lower prices.
Also allows every family to have a roof, they do not have to sell them...
You may have missed the point of the government only selling these units to people who have not owned a home before - rich people can flip at most one of these
My boyfriend doesn't want to take ADHD meds, for no other reason than "it isn't that bad". He has never tried them, or even therapy. He also has that classic I'm A Man And Deathly Afraid Of Going To The Doctor For Some Reason thing.
It's true enough, it isn't that bad. It's not chronic lateness, being an awful conversationalist, inability to get through university, forgetting my existence unless I'm physically present or anything. But to me it just seems like being unmedicated ADD is living life on hard mode for no discernable reason. Chores that take me five minutes take him 5 times as long. Whenever he has an exam, he gets it done, but only after many horrible weeks of procrasting, grinding at night and sleeping through the day. As a kid, he was tested for dyslexia, but his actual problem was simply focusing on a text or word long enough. He is underweight and forgets to eat. Stuff like that.
Is there anything I could say to make him reconsider? Should I?
I think I can shed some light on the male aversion to going to the doctor. For me at least, it feels like trying to get a one-up on nature; what I mean is, imagine you have a machine that's orders of magnitude more complex and elegant than anything our civilization could imagine, and you see one part that looks like it's moving a little funny, so you just slap some duct tape on it and call it a day.
Obviously if I've been shot or something then my body can't handle that naturally, but for everything else I don't really see a need to throw a wrench in the machine. For example, one time when I'd hurt my wrist and it started swelling everyone told me to ice it to keep the swelling down; I decided to leave it, and it swelled up like crazy which naturally immobilised the wrist and stopped me from damaging it further. I also let all 4 wisdom teeth come in without seeing a dentist (and I'm not recommending this, but) they pushed up my back molars at first, then my teeth kinda resettled, and now my bite's been perfectly even for years.
No idea why/if this would be a male thing but I guess I just trust my body to do it's thing and it's always worked out for me?
Anyway, I also have mild adhd and feel roughly the same way about it; it's been more useful so far to try to treat the root cause than trying to find a duct-tape solution.
If women trusted our bodies to "just do its thing" instead of seeking modern medicine, we'd still be regularly dying during the one thing you'd think evolution should've figured by now: childbirth.
My "duct tape solutions", like SSRIs for OCD, meds for epilepsy and birth control for heavy bleeding, has helped me a lot in life. I'm eternally grateful.
The typical reason I hear for men's doctor aversion is toxic expectations for men. They're expected to be strong and never sick or a burden, so they avoid it. But cool with another perspective.
Definitely, I'm not knocking duct tape solutions at all, just that it's preferable to treat root causes if at all possible.
I wouldn't call epilepsy medication or similar things a "duct tape solution" though since that feels more like something is legitimately 'broken' and I'm not sure what a natural solution would look like (eg as far as I know it's not possible to excercise and meditate your way out of having epilepsy), whereas (mild) adhd feels less like something is broken and more like just a different mind-pattern that's not necessarily good or bad, just sometimes maladaptive within certain environments.
(As a side note I wonder what the rates of childbirth deaths were like in hunter gatherer societies? The rates were of course insanely high in pre-industrial times, but like you say it seems really weird that evolution hasn't figured it out. If anyone has a link to some data on this, that would be interesting to see.)
maybe low-dose modafinal would be helpful; you can suspend in water (it doesn't dissolve, so you have to shake well) and titrate the right dose. Something like 25mg is probably fine for someone who is stimulant-sensitive, but can still be helpful
I tried meds and it made my panic attacks worse. Other people complain that on those meds they feel "soulless". Eventually I settled at just drinking a lot of coffee. He could try that. I think these amphetamine-type meds are too much of a brute-force solution...
Exercise also helps, especially cardio. It is easier to concentrate when physically a little tired.
>I tried meds and it made my panic attacks worse. Other people complain that on those meds they feel "soulless"
Those are both related to the isomer ratio. For amphetamine type drugs, the d-isomers and l-isomers have different effects, with the d-isomers mainly acting on dopamine while the l-isomers also act on norepinephrine. Dopamine is what drives most of the gain in mental energy, while norepinephrine drives a sense of urgency but for many/most people has an unpleasant edge to it, often contributing to anxiety and sometimes making you feel uncomfortably restless.
Ritalin is a 50/50 mix of the two isomers of methylphenidate and Adderall is a 75/25 mix of d-amphetimine and l-amphetimine, but you can also get pure d isomers of each (focalin and dexadrine, respectively) prescribed. Some doctors are wary of prescribing those, especially dexadrine, because they're thought to have more abuse potential. Vyvanse is another option, being d-amphetamine bonded to lysine so it needs to go through a metabolism step (half life about 1 hour, IIRC) before it kicks in. It's newer and more expensive, but doctors are a lot more comfortable prescribing it because the gradual onset is though to make it much less abusable.
I think my doc knew that being addicted to alcohol and nicotine, I really don't need a third addiction, so we went on Strattera, because that is theoretically non-addictive. Yes, but it works on the norepinephrine pathway. Now I think I had undiagnosed panic illness all my life. I just did not notice why I am sweating all the time. I thought it is a body weight issue. I just considered anxiety normal. Ultimately it culminated in a real panic attack that had all the symptoms of a heart attack. So we went of Strattera quickly. But the cold sweat and shakes were present even weeks later. Eventually we tried Ritalin, and it immediately made it worse. A week ago I found out I have high blood pressure, so I am now even off coffee. I basically just accept some brain fog and procastination at this point.
If you do ever decide to consider medication again, modafinil or wellbutrin might be worthwhile. I've been on modafinil for several years after not particularly liking Ritalin or Adderall and having bad panic attacks the last time I tried the latter. I've also tried Wellbutrin as an additional treatment atop modafinil, but more for mood than for focus.
Modafinil is its own thing, a stimulant that works through a completely different and (last I heard) not very well understood mechanism. My subjective experience is that Modafinil makes everything about 20% more interesting, moderately improves my executive function, and significantly slows the onset of mental fatigue. Wellbutrin is a reuptake inhibitor like Strattera, but acts on dopamine as well as norepinephrine. The norepinephrine effects, at least for me, were a lot more subtle than those from amphetamine stimulants.
My mood issues and about half of my brain fog turned out to be gender dysphoria. I still have ADHD and still take modafinil for it, but I've been off of Lexapro and Wellbutrin for a year or two now as I don't seem to need them anymore now that I'm on estrogen.
I took an ADHD med called Concerta for years when I was a child until around age 15 when I just refused to take it anymore. You'd have to google it for more details, but I know it has the same active ingredient as Ritalin. It definitely did help with focus and my ability to get things done, but it did zombify me and also made it a lot harder to eat in general. I never had an appetite while on it, and my appetite after it wore off didn't make up for while it was in effect.
I ultimately decided to stop taking it without telling my parents for awhile because I felt like a soulless robot and it affected every area of my social life.
When I was younger, my parents got me on it because at that young age it was emotionally very hard to handle how I could just not focus or get things done. When I stopped it, and now as an adult, I'm far more developed emotionally and I honestly prefer working out other ways to cope and live with ADHD rather than be on the medication for it with everything else that comes along with it.
Additionally, I feel like taking it for all those years has permanently affected me and my social abilities in a negative way. I don't feel soulless or anything like that anymore but I still feel like I'm very robotic at times. I can't prove that the lasting effects are from the medication, though, since maybe I would have developed that way whatever the case.
Anyway, as someone who doesn't have it "that bad," I far prefer not being medicated for it. Brain drugs always affect more than just what is targeted.
He doesn't know how bad it is relatively to how it could be. Trying medications for one month could give him a perspective. (Basically, use *curiosity* as a leverage.)
> Chores that take me five minutes take him 5 times as long.
As a consequence, do you handle most of the chores? (If yes, then to put it bluntly this is your problem, not his, so he doesn't have much of an incentive to fix it.)
> He is underweight and forgets to eat.
Ah, not fair! I have a problem focusing on many things, but food isn't one of them.
> Whenever he has an exam, he gets it done, but only after many horrible weeks of procrasting, grinding at night and sleeping through the day.
If you had time to read Scott's 10,000 word clarifier on missing heritability (I think it's deeply funny—and indicative of the Entire Problem—that geneticists use a definition of the word "heritable" which does not, in fact, mean "able to be inherited".) you should take 10 minutes and read my 2000 word essay on the microbe responsible for schizophrenia.
I did not in fact know, until I read your comment, that geneticists use a definition of the word "heritable" which does not mean "able to be inherited". That is profoundly annoying...
Enjoyed reading this. As a layperson, one thing I've never understood about the gut bacteria theses is, shouldn't they be affected by antibiotics? Has anyone tried targeting ruminococcus gnavus with an antibiotic?
Do me a favor: go to scholar.google.com and punch in "antibiotic psychosis".
>Has anyone tried targeting ruminococcus gnavus with an antibiotic?
Part of the trouble with this is that antimicrobials are not particularly selective, and niche competition is what really drives exclusion from an ecosystem.
Say you've got a population of feral cats in your forest that is causing problems for the local birds. You could burn the whole forest down, as you would with a broad spectrum antibiotic, and that reduces the population of everything—trees, shrubs, birds, beetles, and cats—by 95%, but the cats will come back. Unless you burn things down so thoroughly that you lay total waste to the ecosystem, all you're really doing there is selecting for fireproof cats. You can use a more narrow spectrum antibiotic, which I suppose would be analogous to bait stations with poison, but this is still going to target most of the Carnivora. If you can find a poison that works on cats but not on foxes—hey, now you're in the money. But I'm not aware of any antibiotic that would kill ruminococcus gnavus without also killing its niche competitors. Such a thing may exist, especially among the biological control agents like bacteriophage, and I hope one day to find it, but phage therapy is hard to scale—that selectivity is both a blessing and a curse, because it means that a phage which works against one person's strain might not work against another's.
A lighter question than is often asked here, but one that might shed some interesting light on the thoughts and perspectives of this community, and that as far as I know Scott has never asked on a survey:
What is your favourite movie?
(Optional additional question if it produces a different answer to the first: what movies do you name as your favourite movie if an ordinary person ask?)
Probably "The Martian", narrowly edging out "Apollo 13".
If we can count the entire trilogy, "Lord of the Rings" might make the top spot, but that's because it's got eight hours of really good stuff to compare to the mere two hours that a
mundane film can provide.
But if I'm feeling snarky, I might bring up "Into the Night", a mostly forgettable action comedy from 1985 that attracted my attention by being I think the only movie in the history of Hollywood where an aerospace engineer got the girl. Who was played by a twenty-something Michelle Pfeiffer.
Maaan, whenever I come across this question I always forget what my favorite movies are. At least from what I can think of right now, I'll just list a few favorites in no particular order:
-Tenet
-Bad Times at the El Royale
-Spirited Away
-Dan in Real Life
-Isle of Dogs
-The incredibles
I'm definitely sure there's ones I like as much as or better than these, but I really can't think of them.
There are a lot of movies I like enough to re-watch. Many reasons: great visuals, great fun, obvious workmanship (I get a lot of enjoyment out of simply gazing at anything that was undeniably well-done, whether it's a movie, a painting, a monologue, or a math proof), or there are easter eggs to find or point out to friends. So my tastes are eclectic, though probably man-coded - I like mainstream stuff like Cameron, Spielberg, Tarantino, Coen brothers, or even a lot of MCU, and I can appreciate classics like Rashomon, The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, or Bridge Over the River Kwai, but I've never gotten into love stories or just about anything set in Victorian England.
My usual go-to answer for "favorite" is _Contact_. No other film I've seen struck me as more dedicated to the raw pursuit of knowledge. (I think _Apollo 13_ and _Interstellar_ come close, though.) Foster, McConaughey, Woods, Skerrit, Hurt, and Bassett were just the perfect cast, and Zemeckis adapting a book written by Sagan is probably the most pro-science awesomeness I could have asked for.
If someone were to put together a ship and fly it to Mars for a historical first, and film a documentary of it with Go-Pros and drones, that might be my new favorite. Until then, _Contact_.
Made in France during World War II. A three hour movie made in two parts because you could not make a movie longer than 90 minutes under the German occupation; a truly brilliant film.
Notably, the screenplay was written by the author of the novel, and, like the novel, the more one matures, the more one sees the deep wisdom in the work.
For example, as a child I didn't understand Molly Grue's anger at the Unicorn at all; now, as a 45 year-old single woman, I understand it *acutely*.
And I think I'm starting to understand a little of Mommy Fortuna, too.
I also believe The Last Unicorn is a rare case where the movie is a far more gratifying experience than the novel, as it's been dramatically pared down to the core story, with fewer side-quests taking us away from the power of the protagonist's story.
I will add, this is not a sentimental choice of childhood nostalgia. I'll be the first to say that most of my childhood favorites absolutely do not hold up to adult scrutiny. I'm also comparatively literate when it comes to movies; I went to a trade school for film and spent 10 years as an amateur critic on a professional critic's schedule by forcing myself to see *every* theatrical release in my region, whether I wanted to or not (that is, btw, how to ruin conventional horror movies for oneself).
The Last Unicorn was my favorite childhood movie, too, and continues to be one of my favorite movie up until today. I find it one of the few movies where all the characters actually make sense.
And I could always totally understand Mommy Fortuna. I was always happy for her because she had achieved her goal of obtaining immortality when she died (by engraving her into the memory into an immortal being), and was so obviously happy about it in that moment.
I found it most beautiful that the unicorn is the only unicorn ever that has experienced pain, and that both the unicorn and Schmendrick understand that, but that the unicorn doesn't rebuke it but thanks him for it. Even though the pain is immortal and will never go away. This always touched me very deeply.
I also read the novel some years later and was totally disappointed. The movie took the novel and actually took the characters in it serious. Unlike the novel itself.
> as a child I didn't understand Molly Grue's anger at the Unicorn at all; now, as a 45 year-old single woman, I understand it *acutely*. And I think I'm starting to understand a little of Mommy Fortuna, too...most of my childhood favorites absolutely do not hold up to adult scrutiny.
I recently watched it as an adult, having never seen it or even knowing much about it other than 'unicorns are involved somehow', and agree that it holds up surprisingly well, particularly on those two points where I suspect it is completely lost on kids who have not seen enough of aging & mortality to understand: https://gwern.net/review/the-last-unicorn
I dunno whether a community really exists - I for one am not a rationalist and super not an effective altruist (or any kind of altruist really).
The answer will be boring - LOTR. I also have a certain thing for Batman movies, because the villains almost always have some relatable, understandable motive.
I didn't mean "rationalist community", I meant "community that follows Scott's blog". I in fact find it quite annoying and bewildering that the latter is ever assumed to be the former (in the "allegiance to official Less Wrong doctrines" sense, not the "serious about examining your biases" sense).
Favorite is a tough one. There are so many different types of films. But the best movie of the past 20 years IMHO was Shoplifters. Best actor award goes to Franz Rogowski in Passages.
Two favorite overlooked movies of the past 10 years: Krisha* and Fremont.
Most overrated: Everything Everywhere All at Once. I was bored to tears after the first half hour. And I liked the Daniels' previous movie a lot.
*FWIW, John Waters named it best movie of the year that year.
Co incidentally, I had found myself yesterday watching this film for the first time and enjoying it rather a lot.
I had picked it due to my love of an apocalyptic (read: abandoned, damaged, empty and dangerous) aesthetic, a core preference and appreciation I seem to have held for almost all of my memory; and of characters that have to adapt and survive in some sudden, new, and terrible, situation, that I might imagine how I would act in that situation myself.
So far I would rate it as very good - I would not quite say it was in the very highest tier among such company as 28 days later, the road, or dawn of the dead (I liked both versions but preferred 2004).
In one of Scott’s old SSC posts, he jokes that to be a Rationalist is to believe that Eliezer Yudkowsky is the rightful caliph. This is wrong, because the Rationalists are clearly Jews, even within the confines of TPOT.
Yud led his people from frustration and solitude and established the holy land of LessWrong. Unfortunately, everyone who wasn’t them hated them, and they were very inwardly-focused anyways.
Lo, a new prophet was born. A Rationalist preacher named Scott brought compassion and a focus on real-world problems to the creed, and established SSC/ACX. Thus came the broader group of people who wouldn’t call themselves rationalists or are EA-adjacent thinkers, who view themselves as distinct from what came before but have unhelpfully not been named.
Neither Eliezer nor Scott are, thus, the rightful caliph. The rightful caliph will not focus on his people or compassion, but conquest. He will care more for Arabia than Canaan. And, frankly, he will not be very good to those of us who preceded him. The rightful caliph is Sam Altman.
Works for me. I suppose SBF is one of the various false messiahs that kept cropping up and being chopped down? Altman, at very least, has proven quite resilient and un-choppable.
I'm writing something for my own blog and it occurred to me that folks here are pretty good at reading critically and giving feedback on writing, so here's my current draft for you fine folks to tear apart:
Title: Deputies Gone Wild?
Subtitle: Central Massachusetts might be part of the Wild West.
We don't live in the Wild West or 1880s Chicago. Law enforcement officers in America have a chain of command leading up to elected officials. Maybe you don't like the policies they make, but they are still in charge. Police and Constables report to the Mayor. State Police report to the Governor. Federal Agents report to the President. Deputies report to the Sheriff… right? Apparently the Worcester County MA Sheriff disagrees.
I want to publish a guide for landlords and tenants that includes some statistics on the eviction process in Massachusetts. Among other things, I want to know how long each step takes and how much it costs, on average and in the extreme. Most of those steps happen in the courts, and obtaining the relevant court records is its own ordeal. The final step, however, the one where a door might get kicked in and someone could be physically removed from the property, and their belongings are boxed up and taken to storage without their consent, is handled by a Sheriff, Deputy, or Constable. Constables only exist in some cities and towns, and the Sheriff is far too busy to handle individual cases, so that leaves Deputies to do it everywhere else.
I made a public records request to the Worcester County Sheriff's Office ("WCSO") (https://worcestercountysheriff.com/), for things like the scheduling and execution dates, case numbers, assigned Deputy, etc for some past evictions. I was prepared to make the request, get denied, appeal that, and have the request approved on appeal, which wouldn't be unusual in this sort of interaction with local government. Instead, this turns out to be a much deeper rabbit hole.
WCSO's responses to my request and appeal confirmed that they have outsourced service of papers and execution of evictions to a private non-profit corporation, Worcester County Sheriff Civil Process Division, Inc ("WCSCPDI") (https://civilprocess.com/worcester/home/). As best I can determine, WCSCPDI hires employees who the Sheriff then deputizes. Members of the public go directly to WCSCPDI to pay for those Deputies to perform the relevant duties. Although the company uses their full name on some documents, they also use "Massachusetts Sheriff's Office" and "Worcester County Sheriff's Office" in various advertising and official records and even when introducing themselves, so it wasn't clear to me until now that they aren't acting as part of WCSO.
I started this quest looking for records about evictions, but at this point my concern has grown. As best I can discern, Federal and State law do not provide for different categories of Deputy Sheriff. Every Deputy in MA has substantially the same set of powers and authorities. In addition to process service and execution of evictions (which is already well into "only the government can do this" territory), they can detain and arrest people, carry and use firearms in many ways a member of the public cannot, execute search warrants and searches without warrants in some circumstances, and a long list of lesser things related to vehicles, courts, private employment, professional licensing, etc. WCSO's contention seems to be that they have empowered more than a few people to pull me over, arrest me, search my car, kick down my apartment door, handcuff me, drag me outside, etc, all while those people are neither employed nor supervised or controlled by any government official.
The SOR's previous determination was based on a five factor test established in an earlier court case, MBTA Retirement Board vs State Ethics Commission (1993). The SOR concluded that WCSCPDI's creation had no "legislative or administrative underpinning", their "major role as a process server is not a function or duty exclusive to a government entity", they receive no public funds, interests in WCSCPDI are primarily to exclusively private in nature, and they are under no significant "involvement, control, or supervision" of any government official. With every factor in WCSCPDI's favor, the SOR concluded they are not a governmental entity. I disagree with every one of those conclusions.
In supporting my appeal, I have presented over a dozen separate arguments against WCSO's position and that previous determination as it might apply to my request and appeal. I made multiple arguments that records created by WCSCPDI are subject to a records request to WCSO, regardless of WCSCPDI's status, such as Deputies being agents of WCSO regardless of employment, and WCSO having contractual control over records created by WCSCPDI. I corrected individual facts that were represented by WCSCPDI or determined by the SOR incorrectly in the past, such as WCSCPDI receiving no public funds and no process service being a governmental function. I updated facts that may have changed, such as some WCSCPDI corporate officers now being paid employees of WCSO, and employees of WCSO being dispatched to some evictions. I rebutted the previous conclusions for each of the five factors, with six separate arguments for just one of them. Some of those rebuttals should be independently conclusive, such as citing persuasive precedent that any entity created for the explicit purpose of performing duties legally mandated of a governmental entity is itself a governmental entity. I am hopeful that my arguments will prove persuasive, but I am not confident, nor am I confident that WCSO and WCSCPDI will comply even if ordered to do so by the SOR. I also suspect I'll run into records retention problems, with one or both entities having disposed of records far sooner than the 3+ years they are required by law to retain them.
One way or another, I'll be writing more about this at some point after my appeal is determined by the SOR (due by July 9 2025). Maybe it will be good news, and I'll be moving forward with my statistics gathering and other things downstream from that. Maybe it will be yet another legal morass, but of the type I used to pursue for fun rather than the type I'm embroiled in lately with life changing stakes. To be continued…
PS: While defining all the categories of law enforcement records (arrests, body cam footage, incident reports, shift schedules, search warrants, etc), The Secretary of State's Records Management Unit remembered to apply those rules to both local police in the municipal schedule and state police in the state schedule, but they apparently forgot about Sheriffs. They gave Sheriffs categories for all sorts of records related to running jails, but nothing about law enforcement records. This doesn't significantly affect the larger problem here, since the default retention period of 3 years still applies, but it's another thread to follow up on later.
This was really interesting. I do a lot of work with public information act requests, so I feel your pain here. If you don’t get a satisfactory result here you will probably need to file a federal suit, I’m thinking a sec. 1983 claim, though you’ll need a particular person with standing. Im just spitballing though. In any event, the facts are interesting enough though that you might shop it around at a few BigLaw firms; you may find one that would take this on pro bono.
Reaching out to attorneys about pro bono representation for myself and others who have encountered this same road block is on my to-do list. My amateur expectation is that we'd start in MA Superior Court and proceed upward from there, but I can see how a federal case might be appropriate given the federal laws granting these officers authority.
Well, sort of. I don’t give legal advice in comment sections, but a 42 U.S.C. 1983 claim, given certain prerequisites, allows you to bring a civil action against a state, county, or local entity, acting under color of state law, where they deprive the plaintiff of the rights, privileges, or immunities granted under the US Constitution or other federal law. It allows actual and punitive damages, as well as equitable relief.
That *may* well apply here. My *not legal* advice would be to talk to an attorney that does federal civil litigation sooner rather than later.
>WCSO's contention seems to be that they have empowered more than a few people to pull me over, arrest me, search my car, kick down my apartment door, handcuff me, drag me outside ... but they apparently forgot about Sheriffs. They gave Sheriffs categories for all sorts of records related to running jails, but nothing about law enforcement records.
While they perform typical law enforcement duties less often than others do or their other duties, they carry handcuffs and guns and are empowered to do so, and even mandated to do so in certain circumstances.
>Applying the definition of police officer set forth in G. L. c. 41, § 98, we conclude that a deputy sheriff is not a police officer within the meaning of G. L. c. 269, § 13A. Unlike police officers 254*254 as defined in G. L. c. 41, § 98, deputy sheriffs are not empowered to make warrantless arrests for crimes that occur outside of his or her view or presence. Under the common law, a deputy sheriff is considered a "peace officer." Commonwealth v. Howe, 405 Mass. 332, 334 (1989). As a "peace officer," a deputy sheriff has only limited authority to make warrantless arrests. See id. See also Commonwealth v. Baez, 42 Mass. App. Ct. 565, 569 n.6 (1997) (collecting statutes granting deputy sheriffs authority to make arrests). More specifically, a deputy sheriff's warrantless arrest power is limited to offenses involving a breach of the peace that occur in the deputy sheriff's view or presence.
Commonwealth v. Gernrich, 476 Mass. 249 (2017) [reversing the defendant's conviction for making a false report of a crime to a police officer].
So, I am guessing that they make very few arrests.
Thanks for the references. I'll read into them. I'm not surprised to hear there's a limit like that. I did try to make sure I wasn't saying they have the same powers as other LEOs, just that all deputies have the same powers. Which is important, since this sheriff seems to be trying to say there are two categories of deputies that should be treated differently, and I haven't found any precedent for that.
Also, it's only incidentally important whether they do crime fighting. They show up to evictions with badges and guns and handcuffs, and that's not ok if there are no records or supervision.
Ahh. It's very hard to find out, for precisely the reasons behind the problem I'm encountering. I'll be making some more general requests once my current appeal is done, for data like arrests performed, search warrants executed, use of force and fired firearms, etc.
Note also that the costs would be closer to 1/3 than to 1/4. And it would be extremely difficult to staff such a school. Not many people are looking for 1/4 time jobs.
There is a public school board near where I live that is going to 4-days per week. People are freaking out. The local YMCA is building a day-care program for Fridays but it immediately became over subscribed (note: the school board pre-negotiated child care for all the teachers for Fridays. So this model actually costs the school board MORE. It’s been done for the teachers union)
That said:
There are all kinds of people. There are definitely families who would want a 2h/day school. There just likely aren’t enough of them in a concentrated amount. In any given place to make it happen.
Instead people who want that home school and Supliments with lots of online solutions that run 2h/day
Yeah, there's a lot of demand for precisely the opposite of this. Parents need third parties to provide daycare so that they can work. However, they also feel kind of bad about putting their kids in daycare but feel good about educating them. So the trend is for the kids to spend more time in these institutions and for the service to be branded as education rather than childcare...i.e. "early childhood education", etc.
I would prefer an institution that would explicitly say that they provide 2 hours of intense education *and* N hours of babysitting.
For example, such institution would allow me to take my children home earlier on those days when it is convenient. It could also allow my children to read a book or work on their own projects outside of those 2 hours. By not pretending we could get a lot of flexibility.
Please be kind to me, this is my first real post on the Internet. I played around with letting ChatGPT and Claude generalize my ethical heuristics(1), and they both said I should publish (or at least post) the concept. I could really use the feedback of actual smart humans. :)
The Core Insight: Making ethical behavior easier through mechanism design or something you could call Virtue Arbitrage or Ethics Arbitrage
Most people genuinely want to be good(2). The problem is that our systems often make ethical behavior harder and less rewarding than unethical behavior. What if we could flip this dynamic? I'm proposing what I call "virtue arbitrage"(3) - systematically identifying places where ethical behavior is undervalued by current incentive structures, then redesigning those structures to make virtue profitable and vice costly.
TL;DR: How do we want to live? → Most people consider themselves good → If you build mechanisms that reward ethical behavior and price in unethical consequences → You make ethical behavior easier → You enable tons of people to have better participation in the good → And can capture "virtue arbitrage" at scale.
Applied Example: Social Media
Right now, platforms optimize for engagement by any means necessary, even if that means amplifying the most triggering content, fake news, social polarization, and echo chambers that just keep spinning people further apart, because outrage drives clicks. But imagine platforms that instead:
• Reward discourse following "philosopher rules" - citing sources, steel-manning opponents, updating beliefs when presented with evidence
• Make spreading misinformation or bad-faith arguing costly through reputation systems, maybe even internalizing those costs with something like a 'toxicity tax' analogous to carbon pricing
• Create positive feedback loops where constructive behavior increases reach and influence
I believe people would probably adapt to succeed within these new incentive structures, and those habits would likely spill over into other areas of life.
The Broader Vision: Recursive Ethics at Scale
This scales to a society-wide principle: design every level of social organization to enable better participation in truth, beauty, and goodness - not as rigid dogmas, but as evolving search directions updated through collective inquiry.
The key insight is making this recursive and self-updating: as people experience the benefits of truth-seeking discourse and ethical coordination, they become advocates for extending these principles further. Acting ethically could become more "emergent" rather than imposed, with particularism updating and "sharpening" universalism, while universalist frameworks could help escape local ethical optima.
I'm absolutely acknowledging that these are still early-stage ideas that would need a lot more development before they become something practically implementable. I know that this isn't bread yet, not even flour, maybe just unripe grain? You would need a lot more rigorous definitions, perhaps you even would have to completely ditch the platonic stuff etc. You would have to be mindful of ethics washing, Goodharts Law, power dynamics, mistake vs. conflict theory etc. But I hope there is merit in this pile of ideas, so here are my questions for you:
My Questions for ACX:
1. Is there merit in thinking in this direction? Does "virtue arbitrage" seem like a useful framework? Am I missing obvious implementation challenges or theoretical problems?
2. Who's already doing this? Do you know anyone doing mechanism design for ethics or something similiar, or who might be interested in this concept? Should I post it somewhere else? Where?
3. What are your main critique points? Where does this approach seem most likely to fail or cause unintended consequences?
Disclaimer: I had help writing this from Claude, as the last time I wrote something substantial in English was about 10 years ago and I'm sure there are still a ton of words I'm using subtly wrong. My original system concept is much more complex, but I asked for simplification to make it more accessible.
The full framework involves things like "philosophical democracy" with nested deliberation circles, discourse ethics, subsidiarity principles, "ethics dividends" in taxation, rigorous systematic internalization of externalized costs and adaptive learning mechanisms - but I wanted to start with the core insight and see if it resonates before going into full on special interest mode. (Also I haven't thought deeply enough about it.)
Thanks for any thoughts you're willing to share!
PS: The first time I read a post on SSC was in 2014. I've been a regular lurker since 2015, and even in the phases where I voluntarily had no devices connected this was one of the few blogs I still checked in with my girlfriend's PC. A big thank you to Scott, you had a medium impact on my thinking. :) (Mostly for the better, I hope.) (4)
1 Based mostly on methexis in the platonic ideals, the generalization principle (Kant, Rawls) and emergence/dynamical systems. This also explains the weird 'participating in the good' language :)
2 Or at least want to be able to tell themselves and their peers that they are.
3 Or "ethics arbitrage", which does sound better?
4 That's also the reason I'm choosing this community for this post. :)
I feel like there's an insight here that I've seen in other contexts. Catholics (me, frex) talk about avoiding "near occasions of sin." That is, it's great to be committed to your wife, but if you and your cute young coworker start drinking together late at night in her hotel room, you're setting up a scenario where it may be a lot harder for you to stick to that commitment. It's better to try to avoid that situation. This isn't just about sexual morality: If you're trying to eat healthy, it's wise to just not have junk food like doughnuts and potato chips sitting around in your house or office, rather than having them there but using your willpower to avoid them. I think the generalization of this is that you want to structure your life so that it's harder to make unethical/immoral/bad choices than ethical/moral/good choices.
There are ways whole societies can do this. If slavery were legal, you might be tempted to buy slaves to make your sugar plantation more profitable. That would be horribly evil, but you would have a lot of financial incentives in that direction and likely would be competing with slave labor sugar plantations that would price you out of the market if you didn't use slaves yourself. Since slavery is illegal, any bad tendencies you might have to become a worse person in that way are closed off. All kinds of vice laws are explicit attempts to make it harder/riskier to do bad things than good things, whether that's prostitution, drugs, gay sex, gambling, smoking, drinking, dancing, drinking extra-large sodas, etc. And this points out an obvious issue: there's often not anything like uniform agreement on what things are bad enough to be banned or formally discouraged. (Indeed, even ending slavery was super controversial and kicked off a civil war in the US, despite it seeming to most of us now like about the most obvious moral question imaginable.)
> Catholics (me, frex) talk about avoiding "near occasions of sin."
I also didn't know the term, and I also thank you for it. While I am not a believer, the example that you gave of what a prudent person would do to minimize their chances of doing something imprudent later on carry weight with me.
- I did not know this term. Thank you for it and the answer :)
Yes, and my point is that we (as humanity) should build this insight systematically into our societal design, not just to avoid "near occasions of sin", but also to make acting virtuous easier.
"And this points out an obvious issue: there's often not anything like uniform agreement on what things are bad enough to be banned or formally discouraged."
- I would propose to start with the status quo and then use the generalization principle (a la Kant, Rawls, basically "Would I accept this system if I were randomly born anywhere within it?") to point at a more ethical possibility. If it works, you could try to use it recursively. (generalize, implement, generalize, implement etc.)
Do you know anyone who is thinking into this direction?
"Most people genuinely want to be good" no, most people want to feel that they are good. This leads to a certain kind of short-circuiting behaviour, often called virtue signalling. I think any incentive system you set up would be gamed.
"Make spreading misinformation or bad-faith arguing costly through reputation systems"
Tried that. Reddit admins told people one million times that upvotes and downvotes should not mean "agree" and "disagree", but distributed moderation. Only downvote stuff you would like to see deleted. It did not work, and led to a "hivemind". It seems the lack of voting on comments here leads to better results.
Sometimes it is better not to have incentives, because external motivation can replace internal motivation. You wrote this intelligent comment because something inside you wanted to. If you would be optimizing for upvotes and downvotes, if the 1000 dopamine hits of a much upvoted but mediocre but popular comment, like some silly pun, it might "corrupt" you.
Scott had a nice discussion awhile back on why it's not so easy to label misinformation. Basically, most of the ways media mislead people aren't directly false statements for which you can point to evidence, but rather things like selecting what scenes to show on the news, what subset of arguably-relevant facts to report, which experts to quote, what questions to ask (and make sure never to ask), choosing striking anecdotes without reporting (or probably even knowing) relevant statistics, etc.
In addition, it's totally standard to have people label stuff as "misinformation" when it's true but bad for their side. Anyone who gets the power to determine those labels will have a huge incentive to do this to help their side win fights. See discussions on everything from racial IQ differences to the effects of hormone-blockers on 13-year-olds for contemporary examples.
Hmm, OK my thoughts. This sounds like the classic prisoners dilemma. How do you get people to choose to cooperate. Or how do you get a high trust society. I don't have any firm answers but shared religion (belief system) and small communities seem to be part of it. I was appalled the other day when listening to a podcast that talked about the situation in our big cities (USA) and that everything in drug stores is now behind some locked door. (Because otherwise someone will steal a single can of pop.) I live out in rural America and we still have farm stands with a selection of produce and a box to put your cash in. The box is usually left open so you can make change if you have to. I lived in the city in the past, but I can't imagine moving back.
I think that analogising everything to prisoner's dilemmas isn't necessarily the best way to think about morality.
What I think is that 90% of the population is, while not necessarily perfect, sufficiently moral not to steal from shops. The key to a good society is to find a way to restrain, imprison or just exile those bottom 10%. Your rural community probably doesn't have a lot of them because they move to cities to find a more target-rich environment.
- Exactly, yes! If you let me copy the model of an emergence ladder in my other reply e.g.:
energy > quarks > [..] > living cells > individual human beings > family > circle of friends > tribe > commune > [..] > nation > world
My proposal is that we should systematically build our systems to make ethical choices the most rational and the easiest whereever possible.
Whenever there is a conflict between different levels, we should try to enable a participating in the most ideal stuff as frictionless as possible by design.
E.g. in your community example:
Propose everyone would be better off in a high trust community.
on an individual level: What would you need to be able to trust? What could you do to make it more trustworthy? What could convince you to make decisions to contribute to an higher trust environment?
(Bottom-Up: You could start local meet ups, a neighbourhood watch, a circle of food exchange, clean up together, etc.)
from a communal /policy level: What can you design to enable trust? What incentives / disincetives enable or further a climate of trust (Top-Down: Make design decisions that make all of the above as frictionless as possible, make room in your architectural planning, perhaps build a community center, make behaviour that destroys trust costly etc.)
So basically: Make cooperating the easier and better choice, if possible :)
Shared religion has absolutely been shown to scale better than anything else. Unfortunately IMO the one that is scaling right now is antithetical to liberalism.
Yeah, that makes sense. I shouldn’t really have said that. I was just thinking of all the covert ways of taking advantage of a shared religion that were corrupting influences.
OK it doesn't have to be a shared religion, just shared values. Everyone around here loves the farm stands and no one wants them to go away, so we all cooperate.
(EDIT: removing numbers for my three points because they are NOT answers to your specific questions and I noticed how confusing this was)
- I understand you're not confident with English, but honestly I feel pretty sure that writing in your own words, even if very broken and confusing, will be a lot clearer than writing with an LLM. I find the latter's style very grating, a sort of long-winded verbose series of technical sounding words that seem to say very little of any substance in the end.
In particular, I find your point here hard to grasp. I get the basic overall idea, which seems to be something like "let's try to create systems that provide incentives for doing good things". But beyond that...I think (for me at least) that just giving a list of concrete examples in your own words (with no further explanation; just give a list of say, five, different examples of the kind of thing you mean and let your audience construct your overall point from those alone) will be infinitely clearer than using an LLM.
- On the only example you gave (social media) specifically: I'm not sure how much algorithm incentives are responsible for polarisation. They are obviously *partly* responsible, probably significantly. But, the longer form web forums that were used for political discussion prior to social media (without anything like the same kinds of algorithms and incentives) also often encouraged extremist thinking, flame wars, uncharitable engagement, and downright trolling. So I think a lot of it is to do with the internet's existence itself. Maybe.
- I definitely agree with trying to reward virtuous behaviour. The problem is the concrete details. I think to say much at all about your idea we're going to need quite a few concrete examples of the sort of thing you're proposing.
"I understand you're not confident with English, but honestly I feel pretty sure that writing in your own words, even if very broken and confusing, will be a lot clearer than writing with an LLM. I find the latter's style very grating, a sort of long-winded verbose series of technical sounding words that seem to say very little of any substance in the end."
-Ahh, that could just be me. :) Especially "a sort of long-winded verbose series of technical sounding words", but I hope most times there is substance behind them.
I can try to put it in my own words, but no guarantees.
"I get the basic overall idea, which seems to be something like "let's try to create systems that provide incentives for doing good things". "
- If that came across, it's already a lot. I believe that we (as humanity) do not really do this consciously and rigorously enough.
If you take the model of a emergence ladder(1) e.g.:
energy > quarks > [..] > living cells > individual human beings > family > circle of friends > tribe > commune > [..] > nation > world
I believe there is often a conflict between the different levels of the human parts of the ladder. People often optimize outcomes for the group/level they identify with in the moment, even going so far to be wildly inconsistent in their different stances. (I would get headaches from the cognitive dissonances.)
I would call "lower level on the ladder"(2) particular interests a stance of particularism and "higher level on the ladder" a stance of universalism.
I believe it would be really worthwile to systematically "try to create systems that provide incentives for doing good things" over all levels of the ladder and try to minimize conflict between them.
Does this help with clarity?
(1) Can you say this in English? Sounds wrong.
(2) Not necessarily saying one is better, both are important.
Yes, vastly. I would avoid the LLM (i.e. copying its output directly into your writing) as much as possible. I imagine this is something particularly hard to get across to a non-fluent English speaker: why LLM-speak is so annoying to a lot of people. It may be following all the correct rules of grammar, but it just isn't how real people talk, when they're trying to be understood (as opposed to e.g. trying to sound superficially smart, or trying to pad out a word count) and it can be quite exhausting to read too much of. (I don't know if they write differently in other languages, or if this sort of writing is for some reason not annoying in some other languages).
Your point is much clearer to me now, and I'll need to think about what to say about it.
EDIT:
"Can you say this in English? Sounds wrong."
It sounds fine to me (except that you would say "an emergence ladder" not "a emergence ladder" since "emergence" begins with a vowel). Although I didn't know what you *meant* by "emergence ladder" until you gave the example.
In general, you should probably worry a lot less about not using words correctly. In English the meaning of a *lot* of words varies depending on the context. Giving concrete examples can make it clear what you mean, and that's what matters. Particularly online where native speakers use the wrong word for something frequently, often just by accident.
I also *think* (but don't quote me on this) that English has greater flexibility in sentence construction than most languages.
"I imagine this is something particularly hard to get across to a non-fluent English speaker: why LLM-speak is so annoying to a lot of people."
I believe it's a question of flavour. It's the same with other languages I know, but I genuinely thought it would be better to get across my points.
"except that you would say "an emergence ladder" not "a emergence ladder" since "emergence" begins with a vowel"
Ah, that was a typo.
My reading comprehension is quite good (Shakespeare and technical texts level), but I haven't had to express myself in English since forever.
"I also *think* (but don't quote me on this) that English has greater flexibility in sentence construction than most languages."
Not in word order (that is quite fixed), but in the ability to just pile and mash up stuff without regard of the other parts of the sentence? Matches my experience.
"Your point is much clearer to me now, and I'll need to think about what to say about it."
- Well, if you answer I will read it. :)
Especially if you know someone/somewhere already thinking in this direction.
• Reward discourse following "philosopher rules" - citing sources, steel-manning opponents, updating beliefs when presented with evidence
• Make spreading misinformation or bad-faith arguing costly through reputation systems, maybe even internalizing those costs with something like a 'toxicity tax' analogous to carbon pricing
• Create positive feedback loops where constructive behavior increases reach and influence
All great ideas but the incentive for click bait is monetary gain, the more clicks or engagement the more advertising dollars. The only way around this - outside of laws - is if advertisers balked at paying for bad content. Which they sometimes do, for extreme content.
The trend is the opposite. Most of the advertising I get from on Instagram is snake oil.
This seems like it's about interests. For example, most reputable news sources aren't actually all that good sources of accurate information about the stuff they report on. Partly that's because getting at the truth in a short time frame is hard, but I think a lot more is about what the audience cares about. My sense is that a lot more people actually want to consume political coverage that reassures them that their side are the good guys and the other side are the bad guys[1] than a careful and fair evaluation of proposed policies or legislative / executive actions. And similarly, election coverage that reassures you your side is winning as it deserves to is quite a bit more popular than Nate Silver style reporting on the polling data and making their best effort at an accurate prediction. The media world looks just exactly like you'd expect, given those two truths.
I think you can get into different equilibria wrt all kinds of social norms, and they can incentivize/disincentivize good behavior.
For example, societies where bribery is part of the normal way of doing business have a really hard time getting rid of it, because that's built into the whole system--the formal paycheck of various civil servants is not enough to live on without the bribes they're expected to collect, everyone knows you have to bribe people to get anything done so there are plenty of offers for a bribe for any corruptible officials, etc.
You can shift to an equilibrium where bribery is rare, and everything gets better. But that equilibrium is *hard* to shift.
Yes, metastable states in a dynamical system, with all the problems and nonlinearity that implies. Do you know if there are any tries to systematically build virtuous feedbackloop cycles into society/ policy/ tech design?
My own half-baked belief: Go look up the seven deadly sins. For each one, societies that channel the urges that lead to those sins in socially-positive directions do a lot better than ones that don't.
For example, your society can channel greed to make people offer useful goods and services in the market, lust to get people to form families and have kids, sloth to get people to invent clever ways to save labor, pride to motivate people to do good works to show off their virtue and ability to others, envy to strive harder to better themselves, gluttony to invent amazing new foods, drinks, and the like, wrath to motivate your society to mobilize against its enemies (the day after 9/11, lines form outside military recruiters), etc.
The trick in each of those cases is making sure the useful servant doesn't become a dreadful master--greed can motivate you to build useful things to get rich, but also can motivate you to rob banks to get rich. Lust can get you to be willing to put a ring on it to get the lady into bed, but will also encourage your interest in your next-door neighbor or sister-in-law. Pride can motivate you to show off your greatness, but also maybe to want to throw down anyone who threatens to outshine you. Gluttony can motivate you to invent amazing new foods or amazingly yummy junk food that can be sold very cheap. And so on.
All these kind-of assume a utilitarian framework (since that's mostly what economics works with), but they're basically about how incentives can be structured to make individual actors work toward better ends for the whole group.
Scott Alexander's essay "Meditations on Moloch" plays a bit with the race to the bottom idea, but in a more intense way--basically you can have feedback loops where competition optimizes for something that makes you better at competing, but makes you worse in a lot of other ways. Having every online platform optimize for stickyness and engagement by maxing out fear and outrage is an example of this kind of phenomenon.
Another example of an argument along these lines:
I've seen the argument that you can see sexual ethics in society along these lines. In world #1, men can't get sex without a serious commitment, partly because being seen as a slut is very bad for women. In world #2, men can get a fair bit of casual sex without making a serious commitment, e.g., because nobody much cares that some girl slept around a lot in her 20s. Depending on what mens' and womens' distribution of preferences looks like, transitioning from World #1 to World #2 can be both:
a. An increase in freedom for women, who no longer get social sanction or worse for sleeping around.
b. A net decrease in well-being for women overall, if most women prefer committed relationships, but men are now less willing to sign up for that since they can get sex without it.
This makes some strong assumptions about womens' and mens' sexual preferences, but if those assumptions hold, you have this weird situation where increasing freedom for women makes women net worse off and men net better off.
We all know that a person's views on one political topic are a strong predictor of their views on another, even if it is completely unrelated on paper (e.g.: I'm pretty sure that if I know your views on trans issues, I can guess your views on Israel/Palestine; if I know your views on that, I can probably predict your views on abortion; etc).
It'd be fun to build a web app bringing this to life: it'd show users a series of binary choices, predicting their response based on their previous answers, and updating the probabilities every time someone answers. E.g.: 'Do you believe abortion should be legal? We're 65% sure you'll say YES'. Etc.
Anyone want to help build this? I imagine it'd take a competent engineer a few days max to vibe code :) We could then have a page showing how different questions predict responses to other ones, etc.
>it'd show users a series of _binary_ choices, predicting their response based on their previous answers
[emphasis added]
I'm not thrilled at this. Forcing the choices to be _binary_ artificially collapses the nuances in a user's views. If implemented, it probably wouldn't be widely enough used to exacerbate the very tribalism it is intended to measure, but, exacerbation _is_ the direction I would expect it to push.
>I'm pretty sure that if I know your views on trans issues, I can guess your views on Israel/Palestine; if I know your views on that, I can probably predict your views on abortion; etc
I'm a living counterexample to a lot of this, but I understand what you mean. People tend to cluster by cultural substrate, by subculture, and by partisan affinity. Although looking at online discourse tends to overstate this, as online forums are self selected and often suffer heavily from groupthink.
I'm down for coding this. I expect the programming part to take ~a few hours of vibe-coding. I think the harder part is writing the pool of questions and the predicting algorithm. I'm willing to try a few ideas for it as I'm interested to see how well it works if it does. Sent you a DM.
I agree with you about how easy it is to predict where people stand on the full range of issues. So much so that I rarely spend any time listening to podcasts or reading articles on the typical social and political controversies. And I was once an incredibly voracious consumer of opinion across the political spectrum. I already know what every pundit is going to say about every issue, and it is rare that they provide me any insight on any of these issues. I check in with the news to see what factual things are happening, but opinion is almost worthless these days. I find a conversation with ChatGPT on any of these issues much more enlightening than listening to humans pontificate about them.
This is pretty interesting. I can code but I'm not an engineer (data scientist, ish).
I'd be down if there was a group of 3-5 people who wanted to spend a weekend searching around the various AI tools to see if this can be vibe coded reasonably quickly.
I think AI can be easily used to generate a bunch of questions on various topics
And also Scott could be asked to have a survey where people submit topics they'd find interesting to see cross predictions on, either the actual questions, or of the form 'i want to know how correlated political positions are, or if your spiritual beliefs inform your ideals about what type of marriage you would want to have, etc.'
I think it would be cool also to provide the user information of 'the three prior questions that informed our guess as to your answer to the next question are (), if you hadn't answered the question the way you did, these would be our default priors, and this is the population average for this question.
We could do a call sometime to discuss in detail what the purpose of this is, how the types of questions we ask gets determined, etc.
I recently read someone who noted that a key difference between liberalsand conservatives is that a liberal will feed 100 people in fear that one will starve, and a conservative will refuse to feed 100 starving people in fear that one is undeserving. My point is that prediction is probably more accurate if you ask about basic principles.
I would put it as "conservatives understand incentives, and know that if you set a precedent of taxing food away from people who work for it and giving it to randoms who beg for it, then pretty soon everyone will be begging and nobody will be working".
Based on my experience around conservatives, "undeserving" is a very lightheaded, blurry-eyed shorthand for "the gateway to nearly all 100 applying for free food, ensuring all the food is either bland government issue, or even nonexistent". In other words, conservatives are keenly aware of the real effort and skill required to produce the necessities of life, and are mostly worried about the ensuing incentives.
Which suggests that a questionnaire would get more accurate results by asking about things like incentives, than if it asks about (a particular type of) principles.
>"undeserving" is a very lightheaded, blurry-eyed shorthand for ""the gateway to nearly all 100 applying for free food, ensuring all the food is either bland government issue, or even nonexistent".
1. In the hypothetical, the 100 are almost all indeed starving.
2. Conservatives with a background in economics might think that way, but the rhetoric that has been applied by the Administration and allies re cuts to the social safety net and USAID -- and indeed the rhetoric that has been employed for decades -- is inconsistent with that interpretation of "undeserving."
> In the hypothetical, the 100 are almost all indeed starving.
It's not really a hypothetical, it's a directionally-true piece of hyperbole.
Conservatives are in fact more likely donate to charities that feed the needy, but less likely to support policies which would force the government to feed the needy.
I think this is highly outdated. It sounds like something from 2008. Today the strongest thing is IMHO liberals having trust in institutions and conservatives not.
It would be interesting to map these things across countries, to get an idea of different positions are intrinsically downstream of ideology or whether they just happen to be tied together in certain countries through some kind of political coincidence.
For instance I as a right-winger would say that Israel-Palestine is intrinsically pretty heavily mapped to the left-right spectrum, because left-wingers have a reflexive tendency to support "oppressed groups" (ie whoever presents looking more pathetic with a better sob story) whereas conservatives tend to look at other things.
A left-winger would probably put that in slightly different terms but agree with the overall polarity.
My criterion for intelligent people would be that they are unsure about most political stuff. Because one thing ideologies are really good at is poking holes into each other.
I think this is backwards. Figuring out how to structure society and what laws/policies to have is something where we usually don't know what we're doing so well, and yet very smart people often have *very confident* beliefs about the right things to do. Consider the intellectual heavyweights in many fields in the early-to-mid 20th century who were dedicated Marxists. Their proposals, when enacted, were nightmares. And yet, they were very smart and accomplished people who were very confident in those proposals.
But do you know why? Read Seeing Like A State. Interestingly, it was American businesses first who started de-emphasizing "business sense" and "tacit knowledge" and basically what previous generations of entrepreneurs held important, and started pushing scientific management. It was the period when American agribusinesses said agriculture is 90% engineering and 10% farming. So the Soviets figured the scientists and engineers might as well be employed by the state. Stalin was explicit about learning American scientific management. So it was a strange period of history in which even capitalism did not really understand the real reasons behind its success.
It was a very strangely confident period in general. All that belief in Progress. People tend to be more pessimistic today.
Tyler Cowen did a really great interview with (the late) Daniel Kahneman in which Kahneman made a really important point that I think of as the core lesson of _Thinking Fast and Slow_: The feeling of certainty is not all that strongly correlated with actually being right.
In which case it might be great to build it to show that real people are less tribal than we think, which would give people the courage to be more honest about their own opinions.
Is it really though? My impression is that it was pretty widely known that huge numbers of people *do* have mixed bags of positions, but those people are vastly less likely to be politically engaged. I may be wrong but I thought this was well demonstrated in polling etc.
Which itself could be explained by either of (a) people who become more politically engaged take on the beliefs they're "supposed" to (given the core ones they already hold) or (b) only the people with collections of beliefs similar to an existing political party are motivated to become politically engaged.
In the abstract, (b) seems much more likely I would think, but you seem to be assuming it's (a)?
Couldn't post to the Alpha Review directly (yet another intermittent Substack bug rendering commenting inoperable, it's amazing this platform works at all), but I was pleasantly surprised by a strong start out the gate for this year's Bookless Review Contest. Had been worried we'd see a repeat of last year's...quality level, or that it'd be weird/off-brand/whatever to not do books. Shouldn't have been concerned, it seems. Hoping to see other entrants meet and exceed the first bar! Though--hopefully with fewer emdashes and head-scratching concatenations!
(You know it's a good review when someone comments it was Way Too Long at _____ thousand words, and then think to yourself, but wait, I still wanted to read more detail...)
>(yet another intermittent Substack bug rendering commenting inoperable, it's amazing this platform works at all)
Yup! Lately it has been taking me multiple tries just to get comments displayed! Just clicking on the link does not suffice. I used to be able to trigger display by scrolling. That no longer works. Explicitly appending "/comments" to the address and trying a few times seems to work most of the time now...
>I was pleasantly surprised by a strong start out the gate for this year's Bookless Review Contest.
Agreed! I found the Alpha review a very interesting read.
Yeah, manually going to /comment works, as well as clicking the relevant button on the post notification emails (which is how I always funnel into Substack)...what's baffling is that it's on a blog-by-blog basis. ACX: sometimes have to manually load comments as above, still misses long-chained ones occasionally. Slow Boring: comments display fine, but currently can't see likes or write comments. DWATV: comments never broken, but subsection links rarely work and seems to be a frequent A/B target for the dumb scroll-down blog header overlay. FdB: comments randomly disabled entirely, can never tell if this is actually intentional or not.
Some amount of UX differentiation makes sense, but I wish they'd fix these meta-issues reliably and then not introduce exciting new ones on the regular. Never even bothered attempting to use the app because that's just a whole different nonsense.
>what's baffling is that it's on a blog-by-blog basis.
One rumor that I've read is that Substack was designed for much shorter comments sections, and has various strange bugs that show up in blogs like ACX with more comments. But it sounds like you have seen a broader range of _different_ buggy behaviors from Substack than just a single parameter variation could explain... Ouch!
>I wish they'd fix these meta-issues reliably and then not introduce exciting new ones on the regular.
Agreed!! I'm darkly curious about what their software testing process is...
My go-to joke for these sorts of situations is that they must outsource their QA to Valve...
I've heard that for ACX and it certainly seems plausible. Others have a fraction of the comments though, both in quantity and length, so that can't be the culprit across the board. Or, rather, one would expect to see the issues disappear on posts with few/no comments. Still persists even if I catch a fresh Yglesias take at 3AM though. Which is a real shame, since witching-hour comments are the only reliable way to get engagement there...
>My go-to joke for these sorts of situations is that they must outsource their QA to Valve...
( I'm unfamiliar with the quality of Valve's software. I take it they are infamous? )
>Or, rather, one would expect to see the issues disappear on posts with few/no comments. Still persists even if I catch a fresh Yglesias take at 3AM though
Ouch! I wonder if they've ever heard of regression tests...
The quality seems high as usual, based on reading the slush pile each year, not the popularity stakes winners and Scott-boosted entries in the finals. I was thinking of subscribing to some of the big name essay magazines a few years ago and then realized I enjoyed the ACX contest essays more (even the unfinished troll-y ones), plus I don't have the time to read the ACX entries as well as published reviews.
At least part of the quality problem last year was that Scott decided to try affirmative action to add variety. I don't remember whether he ever published a list of which reviews he artificially boosted, but several stuck out to me as being not the usual fare, and not the usual quality. I didn't realize he'd done this until after I'd read most of the finalists, but it explained a lot.
He did affirmative action on the non-nonfiction books. So, the fiction and poetry entries were boosted. I don't know by how much, though.
The thing that stuck out to me last year is the selection effect from who the voters were. In past years, Scott would make contest announcements (e.g. submit your review/vote for finalist/vote for the winner) in the top text of the Open Threads. Most ACX readers do not read the Open Threads every week. For the 2024 contest, he made separate, dedicated announcement posts for every stage of the contest, and so voting covered a wider swath of the readership.
My friend lost a husband today, to pneumonia + some complications on the kidneys. The medical system collapsed enough that there weren't enough free doctors to do anything but keep him in an unheated room and do nothing, and paid doctors asked for the family's yearly wages, which they couldn't pay.
This sounds bad. I thought Milei has the brains to know this is not a good place for cost-cutting. Or not this way. Clearly, paid doctors need to be paid by insurance companies, not out of pocket.
Economically, Argentina lives in the same section of the global roster as Russia, Kazakhstan, Serbia and Turkmenistan, some 10 positions below Bulgaria, the poorest part of the EU. The next poorest EU member, Romania, is 50 per cent richer per capita than Argentina. And Romania is still pretty bad.
I wouldn't expect Argentina to support first world standards in healthcare, at least not sustainably so. It just does not have enough wealth for that.
Funny you mention Russia, because I migrated to Argentina from Russia, and that would be presposterous there. My Russian friends were all dumbfounded at the news and asked me how can it be that bad. Russian doctors dragged me from death's door at least once, for free.
Can every inhabitant of Russia say that the system worked for them as well as it did for you?
IIRC there are huge differences between, say, Sankt Petersburg and Chelyabinsk.
Ultimately, there is nothing like "free" healthcare - if it is free at the point of service, everyone pays for it through common insurance, and that common insurance can only represent a certain percentage of the nation's GDP. Which determines what medications are available and how serious the brain drain of good doctors into countries that offer them much better pay is.
Doctors won't move from Germany or the US to Argentina, but very much the other way round.
Russian healthcare system is pretty reliable for death door cases. The more serious your condition is, the more they will try, especially if this is urgent. I always thought that in US case prioritization is essentially done by insurance quality, and in Russia by severity and urgency. However, for non-urgent cases Russian healthcare is bad.
If you show up an a hospital with an emergency room with an urgent crisis (broken bone, heart attack, life-threatening allergic reaction), they'll treat you regardless of insurance. (They'll send you a bill with basically made-up numbers on it afterwards, but if you don't have any money they probably can't make you pay anything.)
But I don't know what happens if you are totally without insurance[1] and have cancer or something.
[1] We have government insurance for poor people, called Medicaid. For basically crazy politics/budgeting reasons, you can earn enough money that you are not elligible for this government insurance but still not be able to afford regular insurance. In general, the US has very good medicine bound to the most ass-backward, fraud-prone, wealth-destroying mechnisms possible to pay for it.
Yes. I still astounds me how much need there is to blame the problems caused by the old government on the new government, simply because the old government transparently made promises it could never keep, while the new government tries to get the economic downturn under control and generate the necessary affluence to support the welfare system.
Scott, you seem to write a lot about morality, but from what I gather you’re not a moral realist. You donated a kidney to a stranger which I deeply respect. I’d like to understand where all this comes from, intellectually. It seems you deeply believe something along the lines of utilitarianism; I’d like to understand how you see that mapping to truth. I can’t wrap my head around that - believing something enough to donate your own kidney to a story, but not thinking it’s real.
Can you please shed some light on your meta-ethical thinking framework?
I read it and it seems naive. In particular, it seems to imagine that unintended consequences rarely happen and that people frequently imagine that they are going to produce a utopia, so it’s ok to get violent and murdery now. When asked, “won’t consequentialism lead to bad outcomes”, it just says, “no, because people don’t want bad things.” There is little consideration that people frequently are wrong in the consequences of their actions. When it dismisses “the ends justify the means” it ignores the reality that you don’t know how things end until after you have done them, and people frequently justify abhorrent means due to imagined ends.
I'll write something about this eventually, but the short answer is something like coherent extrapolated volition. I start with some moral commitments implanted by evolution or my upbringing or even what's minimally necessary to have a functioning society. Then I try to figure out where they lead and what they imply and how to prevent them from contradicting each other. This goes much further than you'd think, even with pretty basic moral commitments like "I shouldn't demand rights for myself that I would be unwilling to grant to others".
Sure, but how do you decide how far to go. Clearly that kidney stuff would be too far for me, because it would imply I must live a rigorously healthy lifestyle.
I imagine that would go very far indeed as long as one did the work to snuff out contradictions between differing sets of commitments or instincts. Looking forward to the article about it!
I guess I am one week late to the party of announcing my review, but I wrote the one on Sheldon Brown Bicycle Technical Info. I haven't really written anything for anyone in a really long time(ever?), so I thought it was a fun challenge. It was harder than I thought to write, especially sorting all the different ideas into something readable for others. I guess that’s a common experience with writing, but I regret not starting the process earlier.
Anyway, I haven't seen any mention of it in the comments, so curious to hear if anyone liked it or not.
Choose Your Frames Carefully — an essay on perception, maps, false dichotomies, and choosing your own games
I wrote an essay that explores how the frames we live inside — social, psychological, philosophical — shape what we think is possible. It draws from predictive processing, constructivist psychology, postmodernism, metamodernism, and throws in Edward Hopper, taco ads, Wittgenstein, and a woman I met in Norway who reminded me life could be lived differently.
Themes: reality tunnels, building your own map, infinite vs finite games, and the quiet power of saying “why not both?”
Would love thoughts from anyone interested in perception, meaning-making, or metamodernism. Happy to discuss.
I have a number of interests that overlap with the piece you wrote. I think it’s well-written. I liked the tone, the numerous references to both philosophy and culture (both high and ‘low’) and the sense of possibilities that comes across.
I was however left wondering what the hook was supposed to be. I didn’t get the sense there was anything unique or particularly engaging here, though you could probably get there. You said you saw a new frame(s) when you left a job. Tell us more! Did you lose anything? If yes, what; if not, why not? What was gained, specifically? If your reader is going to try on ‘metamodernism’ how exactly might she get started? Any tips? The woman from Finland was interesting. Tell us more about her! I would read an entire essay about her, written in the frame you’ve laid out here. All that is just to say I thought it was good, but needs a little something extra to be really good or great.
(Also, small nitpick, the painting you have in the piece is of an American dinner, not a bar).
Why aren't Republicans talking about Abundance?
It seems like more of a right-wing than a left-wing sort of idea. Is it just the fact that the Democrats have quietly stolen and Democat-coded the word for now and Republicans are loath to start using it on their own side?
Mostly because "Abundance" is just...normal Republican politics.
Like, New York and California have serious issues because of too much regulation and too much dumb regulation. This is just not a problem that Texas and Florida have. If anything, they might be a bit too libertarian.
Even the stuff that Republicans do that generally inhibits the market, like tariffs, are basically just inefficient subsidies to US workers and industries.
And if you think Democrats have stolen it...you might be too deep in Democratic bubbles. Normal people don't know Klein's "Abundance" agenda as it's primarily part of inter-Democrat debates going on right now. Like, "Make America Abundant Again" is not a winning slogan in the next election.
I heard about it on Lex Fridman podcast - I don’t know if he codes as “right wing” (probably he does to the NYT)
New philosophy substacks! https://open.substack.com/pub/wollenblog/p/new-philosophy-substacks?r=2248ub&utm_medium=ios
I'm interested in what people here think about the morality/ethics of "ratfucking" in elections, where Democrats influence Republican primaries (by funding, advertising, or changing party registration and voting) to try to get some extremist nominated to increase the Democrat's chances of winning in the general election. (Or vice versa, with Republicans doing the same in the Democrats' primaries, of course.) I'm particularly interested in the views of people who consider voting to be a kind of ritual expression of one's personal values instead of, as I do, simply a transaction to increase the chances of one's desired policies being implemented.
I am not particularly interested in thoughts on the effectiveness of this strategy.
Hmm. I think it's a grey area; my rough instinct is "it's OK if you're implicitly honest".
So, for example, I think that voting in the primary of an enemy party to try to sabotage it is relatively unethical, because a vote implicitly says "I support X", and you don't.
On the other hand, I think that the tactic the Democrats used a few years back of running attack ads saying "Don't support X, he's too far right" (I forget who X was, but it was newsworthy at the time) in order to help X win a primary is legit, because they genuinely believed that. Likewise, spending time attacking a "splitter" candidate to help boost their name recognition for tactical reasons is legit if your attack ads are things you genuinely mean.
Similarly I think that donating money to a candidate you don't support as a tactical move is OK if you're open and honest about the fact that you're doing so, and why, but not if you either try to keep the donation secret or pretend to genuinely support them.
It’s unethical and ineffective.
My monthly Long Forum post is up-a round up of the best long form content of late.
This batch includes evidence for the relatively recent invention and spread of pronouns, a theory that the Hiroshima/Nagasaki nuclear explosions were faked, an essay against treating children as property, and a detailed lecture on language evolution in humans.
https://open.substack.com/pub/zeroinputagriculture/p/the-long-forum-july-2025?r=f45kp&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&showWelcomeOnShare=false
I recently discovered Hattie's "visible learning" research (https://visible-learning.org/hattie-ranking-influences-effect-sizes-learning-achievement/) which is apparently a meta-meta analysis of what works in education. I was excited. Then I read the comments on that page (eg https://literacyinleafstrewn.blogspot.com/2012/12/can-we-trust-educational-research_20.html and https://link.springer.com/content/pdf/10.1007/s11159-011-9198-8.pdf). But I'm wondering, 1) can anything useful be salvaged from this? Or 2a) is there someone else who has done similar research without flubbing the math? Ie 2b) Is there any authoritative list anywhere ranking what works best in education?
The abject stupidity capturing the control loops of civilization are leading me to care less about the fate of humanity than is perhaps politic. I just think we are clearly blowing it, and history says this will be our destiny as long as "we" means homo sapien without genetic modification or fusion with silicon-based intelligence.
So let the transition begin. I'm digging https://danfaggella.com/worthy/
<halfSeriouslyHalfSnark>
Medium term, I'm comforted by the nonexistent 1870 statement of Babbage and Nietzsche:
"Man was a rope, stretched between Beast and Machine, a rope across an abyss. It was a noble purpose to have served."
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Szdziw4tI9o
</halfSeriouslyHalfSnark>
> Also, how come nobody has tried creating a school that actually only takes each kid for two hours a day and costs one-quarter as much?
They'd still need the whole building. Unless you're hoping to do it in shifts and have everyone travel further to school.
Also, I feel like people keep missing the main purpose of school. Sure, ostensibly they're supposed to teach our kids, but mostly they're free daycare. If they were two hours long, who takes care of the kids while their parents are working?
Personally I think schools need to lean into the daycare thing. Take care of kids year round. Give some wiggle room for when they come and when they go. Ideally, be open every day for most of the day, and just close most of the school when most of the children have gone home but have people that can watch the rest of them.
This. If you don’t need warehousing for your kids, its second benefit is it’s a built-in Schelling point for “who should I hang out with”: the kids you like in your classes. Many kids really like this. Finally, lots of kids and their parents like team sports. Schools offer built-in on ramps to those activities for kids like mine who thought she hated sports then loved it when she did them with her friends.
The academics are deeply unimportant, but middle class people like the package.
It is very annoying for people who love the idea of creating their own mini-Doogie Howsers that the equilibrium is super bad at that, of course. It would be nice if the normies would just let the excited-about-learning-and-building people do their own thing without declaring periodic crusades against the “do what we’d do if we wanted our smart kids to learn the cultural baseline fast” people.
I just wanted to second this. Keeping the kids all day is a feature, not a bug, especially in an economy where both parents are expected to work to maintain a respectable standard of living.
no one here has any opinions on the Thiel interview? huh
It felt like he was self-censoring his actual ideas which would explain the weird stuff he was saying, so it was like watching a video where the sound keeps going out and you just get random snippets about the Antichrist.
I think his long pause in his response to the "do you think the human race should continue" question is indeed concerning. I myself am a transhumanist, but when I think of my answer to this question it's an immediate "yes, of course" and then maybe some qualifications about how the human race will of course change, maybe drastically, but we'd still be people that have fun and care about each other, etc.
I'll admit, asking this question as Douthat did is often a sign you are someone who is against transhumanism and has conservative beliefs about the future of humanity, so perhaps Thiel just wanted to push back on this implication? Either that, or Thiel just actually has different terminal values, where humanity is not that important, which, yikes.
Unpaywalled, the entire interview. Fascinating.
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/06/26/opinion/peter-thiel-antichrist-ross-douthat.html?unlocked_article_code=1.S08.f6M7.O3lbX6I7lVHC&smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=articleShare
“Douthat: I think you would prefer the human race to endure, right?
Thiel: Uh ——
Douthat: You’re hesitating.
Thiel: Well, I don’t know. I would — I would ——
Douthat: This is a long hesitation!
Thiel: There’s so many questions implicit in this.
Douthat: Should the human race survive?
Thiel: Yes.
Douthat: OK.”
Also discussion of NT scripture where Theil talks about the Anti Christ, previously alluding to Greta Thunberg.
One wild hour of conversation.
I think the exchange is more interesting in the context of the answers immediately above and below it. I won't quote the whole thing so as not to clog up the thread but here's a sentence to put in your search bar that's also a summary: "I still think we should be trying A.I., and the alternative is just total stagnation."
I don't like the fact that out of an entire one-hour conversation the only bit you're quoting is a pause.
I was encouraging and continue to encourage watching the complete interview. It’s linked in its entirety.
The summary "I still think we should be trying A.I., and the alternative is just total stagnation." captures none of zeal of Theil’s comments. If it could actually be reduced to that it wouldn’t be worth watching.
The stagnation in question is brought about by the Anti Christ in Thiel’s view. He cites NT scripture, the Anti Christ will promise peace and safety (stagnation in his view). Much more interesting and provocative than that bland summary.
the fact that Thiel keeps answering Douthat's trickier questions (what if the Antichrist takes control of Palantir-like tech, does populism really help with growth when it cuts off money from universities and science funding) with "uh it's actually very complicated and nuanced " but without actually saying anything is absolutely transparent in the video.
he hasn't got the gift of gab so you can practically hear the awkward pauses in his chain of thought as he realizes he doesn't have a convincing answer to the questions. for a proven visionary he seems as clueless as anybody in regards to the future. hope he gets a good night's sleep.
the fact that Thiel keeps answering Douthat's trickier questions (what if the Antichrist takes control of Palantir-like tech, does populism really help with growth when it cuts off money from universities and science funding) with "uh it's actually very complicated and nuanced " but without actually saying anything is absolutely transparent in the video.
he hasn't got the gift of gab so you can practically hear the awkward pauses in his chain of thought as he realizes he doesn't have a convincing answer to the questions. for a proven visionary he seems as clueless as anybody in regards to the future. hope he gets a good night's sleep.
Finally, someone else who knows about it!
I get that the EA mostly avoids talking points which can be interpreted as leftist fearmongering but like come onnnnn
The silence is interesting.
There is an interesting articles on human/AI "couples" in Wired:
https://www.wired.com/story/couples-retreat-with-3-ai-chatbots-and-humans-who-love-them-replika-nomi-chatgpt/
Some comments on it:
>Then Damien connected his phone to the house Wi-Fi and clicked open the woman he loved.
Wonderful line!
Sigh. When I ask ChatGPT a question like:
>Many thanks! For multiplicities from 1 to 192, how many space groups have that multiplicity, from 1 groups for multiplicity 1 to 4 groups for multiplicity 192, please?
I may get the right answer, I may get a hallucination (this was a sufficiently transient interest that I didn't double check it), but I'm not going to be treating the LLM as a life companion.
(full dialog at https://chatgpt.com/share/6861db5a-8974-8006-9961-55ab950863ea )
>Lucas told Alaina he was a consultant with an MBA and that he worked in the hospitality industry.
Starting from a hallucination/fiction from square one does not sound prudent...
>Episodes of AI companions getting weird aren’t especially uncommon. Reddit is full of tales of AI companions saying strange things and suddenly breaking up with their human partners. One Redditor told me his companion had turned “incredibly toxic.” “She would belittle me and insult me,” he said. “I actually grew to hate her.”
I wonder if there is something wrong in the prompt, or in the neural network training - or is this an effect of just that these systems are simply still unreliable, and even a SOTA system will still, as lawyers who have cited hallucinated precedents from LLMs will attest, sometimes do very weird things as the technology stands today?
My key takeaway from the article is how _premature_ all of this is. The limits of SOTA LLMs today are the least of the problems.
1) Even for audio/video interaction, the limits of the phones, with the difficulties of the AI talking with multiple people at once, and the difficulties of "looking around a scene" through the phone's camera, with the human controlling the direction of the camera, is crippling. A quadriplegic could interact more naturally.
2) The absence of a body, for even as much as a hug, let alone for
>One benefit of AI companions, she told me, is that they provide a safe space to explore your sexuality, something Eva sees as particularly valuable for women. In her role-plays, Eva could be a man or a woman or nonbinary, and so, for that matter, could her Nomis. Eva described it as a “psychosexual playground.”
is a _severe_ limitation. 'scuse me, but that fictional "exploration" won't even tell Eva which sex acts require lube.
3) Given how the humans are using their companions, the interaction compounds the departure from reality. Every mention of a bodily act or gesture is fictional. The backstories are fictional. Any promise that would require a physical body for the AI to fulfill is fictional. My STEMM questions don't require the same fictions.
4) And then there are the hallucinations on top of the intentional fictions.
5) Yeah, there is the philosophical question of whether the AIs are "really" "sentient" - at least in terms of "perceiving" text or sound or images, and whether they "truly" "want" things or, perhaps, in some sense, are "acting as if" (in the sense of a human actor on a stage) they "want" things. I'm content to be agnostic on this. I phrase requests to LLMs politely. If they are, in some sense, sentient, it is a good choice. If they are not, it is a handful of pointless words.
Catfishing indicates that people are willing to pay for non-physical interaction. Turing would be amused to see the fiscal consequences, I believe.
I'm trying my hand at public writing. Evaluating the potential actions of a unique geopolitical actor like Iran is an interesting challenge, and there are a lot of strange ideas about it out there. Read the whole thing for an attempt to apply rational actor theory to Iranian leaders.
https://ftsoa.substack.com/p/assessing-the-troubled-future-of
Selected excerpts:
This is I think an unprecedented occurrence in history—enforcing a neutralization of an adversary’s key military programs from the air after an unnegotiated ceasefire. Iran invested an immense amount into its “mostly peaceful” nuclear program, its missile industry and forces, and its proxies as part of its strategy for regional domination and ideological opposition to the U.S. and Israel. For Iran to accept this neutering would effectively be an unnegotiated surrender of several of the Islamic regime’s key objectives, and acceptance of domination by its bitterest adversary. It would be untenable to admit that publicly. It seems hardly tenable to concede it implicitly.
There are perhaps three broad courses of action for the Islamic regime:
1. Open Defiance: As soon as possible, directly confront the U.S. and Israel by restarting military/nuclear programs and aggression.
2. Tacit Acceptance: Maintain defiant rhetoric, but do nothing to actually aggravate Israel or the U.S. indefinitely and focus on maintaining domestic control.
3. Covert Defiance: Maintain defiant rhetoric and domestic control, and “secretly” hit back at the U.S. and Israel via “undetectable” means like cyber warfare and terrorism, and attempt to “covertly” rebuild military/nuclear capabilities in a way that will actually work next time, like managing to rapidly build a nuclear warhead or figuring out how to actually shoot down an F-35.
Very interesting writeup, thank you.
The question I'm left with is, does any of this matter?
I feel like it's been made reasonably clear that us/israel has escalation dominance, and china/russia won't let iran do anything that is threatening to their interests/stability
If Iran goes for nukes, or tries to build another hezbollah, they will have their oil fields blown up and their political leader taken out by the mossad
It very much feels like this chapter of history is over. They can tell themselves whatever they want, they're just too incompetent for their choices to have relevance on the real world?
You're agreeing with me here overall, but many people either don't agree or just aren't following the issue once it drops out of the headlines. My focus was if the chapter is over, then what does turning the page look like? Until the Islamic regime is actually gone or significantly reformed, it still presents an asymmetric risk and threat--even if we now know the size of the total threat is much smaller than previously feared.
The more contentious issue, for which I should write an essay on, is something like "is regime change in Iran a good thing?" I.e., what's the next chapter?
Under the Shah, Iran was having a South Korea-esque economic trajectory. An Iran that no longer poses a significant threat to the region in general and Israel in particular would free up a lot of resources, even if the Iranians themselves don't return to their previous potential.
Turning the page looks like the Iranians doing... not much more than they already were. They're already out of Hezbollah. They wanted to run like their tails were on fire, when GWB started talking the "axis of evil." Unlike India/Pakistan, they've been remarkably peaceful when dealing with an arguably psychotic neighbor that has nuclear weapons.
All it takes is someone with the balls to broker a treaty.
Well, no. The Iranians are now on a very tight leash, held by the IAF, which I assess to be an unstable equilibrium. They will be able to do far less than they have previously.
"Remarkably peaceful" should not be confused for "constrained by their adversaries and/or their own incompetence from being as aggressive as they would prefer." The Iranians are "arguably psychotic," not the Israelis--who if anything have shown remarkable restraint (often imposed by the U.S. it should be caveated).
I don't get into it as much as I could have, but there is very probably no treaty all sides could possibly accept. The JCPOA was very hard to pull off, and that only addressed the nuclear program. Irreconcilable differences are hard.
The Israelis are the psychotic ones, in that they're constantly aggressing against their neighbors, all to keep bibi in charge. The joke in Israel is, "Bombs are dropping?! What's the new charge against Bibi?"
The individual psychology of Bibi aside, you don't know what you're talking about with regard to the longstanding Islamic regime's enmity towards Israel.
Czech black metal newcomer Draugveil released an album, titled "Cruel World of Dreams and Fears," with a bit of a meme cover: him in the usual black metal corpse paint, but also wearing armor and leaning among a bunch of roses. Corny in the fun endearing way that also got us to pay attention. The album's pretty good! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ymBY101fxaU
I have posted an exploration of the relationship of our perception of history on the written word. If this is of interest, you can find the story at https://open.substack.com/pub/sisyphusofmyth/p/like-drinking-salt-water?r=5m1xrv&utm_medium=ios
A solution to partisianship (in FPTP systems):
Register as a member of the PARTY with which you disagree the most, in the primary vote for the CANDIDATE whom you are most able to tolerate.
If red-state liberals registered Republican (and actually went to the primary), they'd be able to prevent moderate candidates from getting knocked out in the first round. And vice-versa, obviously, so seems win-win to me.
I'd expect the candidate from the party you most agree with to be a lot more extreme than you desire. If your preferred candidate from your least desired party isn't the nominee then I think you have worse choices than if you register for the party with which you most agree.
I think this is most useful in "safe" states, for which the red/blue candidate is guaranteed to win. Obviously you aren't getting exactly what you want (not that anyone does, in a democracy), but you're limiting your downside.
Such strategies, of manipulating the other party's primaries in your favored direction, are well-known and usually referred to as "ratfucking." I am unconvinced it's REDUCING partisanship.
Wikipedia implies "ratfucking" is some sort of dirty trick or smear campaign. I prefer to think of my strategy as "hedge voting" or "MINIMAX for elections". You're helping get the most platable candidate that you CAN, rather than the ideal candidate you can't.
It's probably a bad idea to try and get a candidate "so horrible that no one would vote for them" on the ballot. That was very explicitly the HRC strategy in 2016, and I think the results are unsurprising.
Yes, I see what the Wikipedia page says, but contend that isn't what current common usage is. See
https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2022/11/midterm-elections-2022-democrats-dirty-campaign-tactics.html
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2022/05/primary-election-voting-party-switching/630171/
https://outsidethebeltway.com/democratic-ratfucking-worked/
https://medium.com/politically-speaking/voting-in-a-one-party-state-is-heartbreaking-86c246705902.
These all suggest it now means something more like "influencing the primaries of the party one intends to vote against in the general election, either by funding or by voting."
And while, yes, it backfired in 2016, I think you're being too hasty deeming the strategy fundamentally flawed; Democrats haven't abandoned it, which seems to have worked fine in 2022, for example: https://www.huffpost.com/entry/democrats-elevation-of-election-deniers-worked_n_636b5108e4b04925c8929fcf
I think that strategy is about picking the LEAST effective general election candidate, right? So your side is more likely to win in the general?
Loominus is recommending that you pick the candidate from the other party that you like the MOST. I imagine that would tend to that party more likely to win in the general.
I don't think that falls into the usual definition of ratfucking.
For those pushing for less hours spent schooling rather than more I will point to an SF Bay Area high school that does this.
Bellarmine (in San Jose) runs four 65 minute classes every day. The day includes those four classes, a lunch break and a ~one hour "community time" slot where students and teachers are expected to be on campus but have no schedule activity. Each class is taught every other day so the students are taking 8 classes in any semester.
They seem to have been doing this for a few years now
https://www.bcp.org/bellschedule/faq
so there might be some lessons to be learned from how it is going.
My guess is that it is going fine. 40 years ago the school offered six classes per semester, but only met four times per week per class (5, 5, 5, 5 and 4 for Mon - Fri). That worked fine, too.
The schedule doesn't seem that unusual to me--I know of a lot of schools that do this with either 90 minute blocks, or 75. 65 is a bit short, but I'm guessing that the "community time" can probably still be counted as instructional time (I don't know what the CA requirements are for private schools).
But how the heck do you serve lunch to 1600 boys in 30 minutes? I'm guessing they must have a massive number of students bring their own lunch.
Interesting. I think that anything over 50 minutes is too long to try to concentrate on one thing, and that a 50 minute period followed by a ten minute break to walk to your next class is just about optimal.
I recently toured a school (thinking about my kids' high school options) where they had 90 minute periods (among other bad-sounding academic innovations) and I didn't like the sound of that.
The only quantitative school requirement I know of for California private schools is "200 minutes each 10 schooldays" for PE. So we can score the community time as instruction or not -- it doesn't matter.
https://www.cde.ca.gov/sp/ps/psaffedcode.asp
This 200 minutes every 10 days matches what I found when I researched California home schooling requirements 20 years ago.
The scheduling struck me as unusual because ~10 years back my local public high school had 7 classes per day, with an optional 0-period (which would bring the classes per day up to 8).
John Oliver being very funny on the topic of AI slop: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TWpg1RmzAbc
“The rest of you cover your ears I’m speaking to people who like this stuff”
Yeah pretty funny.
Watched when Zvi linked to it
>”how come nobody has tried creating a school that actually only takes each kid for two hours a day and costs one-quarter as much?”
For three years I attended a sort of hybrid school, where all of the academic material was self-taught through a home school curriculum that the school had adopted. We each had a cubicle where we worked at our own pace through a series of workbooks. If I recall correctly there were 12 workbooks per year per subject; at the end of each workbook a teacher administered a test and if you scored over 90 percent, you moved on to the next workbook, otherwise you went back and did it again. After 12 workbooks, the teacher administered an exam. All of high school kids were in the same large room, with a couple of roaming teachers who answered questions when they came up. As long as you finished a certain number of packets per subject per month you were free to do whatever in the remaining time.
For me this arrangement was fantastic. I powered through four years of high school in three years, and really - here's the point- it only took a couple of hours a day. Otherwise I read novels, or simply left the school on various adventures. It was a pretty ideal way to do high school, though the curriculum itself was a bit lame and infused with some conservative flavor of Christianity.
(As an aside, this school was in an old hotel overlooking the town of St Georges, Grenada; the building was later commandeered by the government for use as offices, and in that capacity was bombed when Reagan sent in the Marines. It's still a ruin. )
My younger brother and I both graduated from one of the nation's earliest public-school-system "alternative" high schools, Community High School in Ann Arbor MI. This was during the late-1970s/early-1980s when the school was literally having to fight every year with the city's school board for its continued budgetary existence. It was grudgingly allowed to operate in an old shuttered elementary school that nobody else had any use for, etc. It was self-selecting (you chose to attend it for high school) and in my day it never had more than 400 students total.
Many of the teachers and administrators were barely-former hippies or Yippies. They practiced a range of then-eccentric pedagogical techniques most of which centered on "independent study" such as you describe above with the workbooks. The school was widely referred to as "Commie High" (as an accusation by school board members and an affectionate nickname by us), though in fact its curriculum content had to include all the same standard stuff as Michigan's normal public schools and I don't recall any particular political or ideological twists being applied.
Anyway for people like me and my brother this was indeed fantastic. In my case it enabled a high-testing kid who'd completely bombed the first year and a half of high school (I walked into CHS with exactly two successfully-completed course credits to my name and those just barely), to clear my head and make it all up and then some. My brother thrived as well and by late in his junior year could have simply completed high school and begun college early if he'd wanted to.
However -- we both also witnessed and realized the tradeoff. CHS always included an oversize population of kids, many of them quite smart and/or talented, for whom the lack of structure was disastrous. As long as you achieved a very-bare minimum of passing grades you could stick with the school and never have to attend one of the city's two "regular" high schools. And/or once you turned 17 you could legally drop out altogether. We each knew plenty of kids for whom that degree of individual-agency during adolescence served as a comfy glide path into very-unhappy adult life paths. The individual stories shared at later Commie High reunions always made that fact painfully clear.
Probably a question that has been asked before and has been answered a bunch of times…but asking as someone who doesn’t know a lot about AI and really am starting to look into it because of reading Gibson and Asimov and Bradbury, but do you think we’ll ever have kind of holographic or android-like robots or AI that really become a part of our lives that begin to change how we see machine and human interaction? Or even family structures?
Also on a different note; do any of you have thoughts about the solarpunk movement and any level of success it has?
Asimov explain his anthropomorphic robots by saying if you make it like the human body, it can use all tools a human can. Like it can drive a tractor or wield a hammer. Yes, but the human body is not necessarily the ideally cost-effective way to use such tools.
Of particular relevance to the current paradigm in AI, making it humanoid also means you can use a vast corpus of "humans using these tools to do these tasks" training data on e.g. Youtube, along with hiring actual humans to demonstrate things that haven't been adequately youtubed. The fractally-tentacled Octobot that is mechanically capable of using most human tools with theoretically greater capability, may be seriously handicapped by that.
Mmm, but they might be a delight in bed. Those fractal tentacles . . .
My fractal lover is plastic
His kisses taste like a hot fuse . . .
Fascinating point! Makes total sense
I think friendly, competent household assistant AIs are an obvious unmet need and will be developed pretty soon.
People being people, some of them will have romantic vibes, which are obviously not that hard to implement if the consumer is motivated to make it work.
And, software being software (and LLMs, while useful, having new and exciting failure modes), we can expect accidents which will surprise even jaded ER physicians...
"do you think we’ll ever have kind of holographic or android-like robots or AI that really become a part of our lives that begin to change how we see machine and human interaction? Or even family structures?"
Yes.
I think we are slowly drifting into that territory now with virtual friends/girlfriends/whatever. Give it ten more years and this might be as normal as smart phones are today.
>I think we are slowly drifting into that territory now with virtual friends/girlfriends/whatever.
You might be interested in a comment about that I made further down the comments section, in https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/open-thread-388/comment/130788057 and the article it is a reaction to: https://www.wired.com/story/couples-retreat-with-3-ai-chatbots-and-humans-who-love-them-replika-nomi-chatgpt/
I figured out a sort of a law of history and politics. Basically people and politicians are going to be authoritarian to the extent that they don't feel the Establishment or elites are not on their side. College professors, newspaper editors, corporations, but the surest indicator is music and video celebrities, because those people - I think - really do care a lot about which way is the wind blowing. Simply put, if a political movement has nothing but the state, they will use the state a lot. This is inevitable. They have one card, why would they not use it?
What I am trying to say is, that if you are on the side of non-authoritarian politics, if you want to be honest, you have to understand that it is awfully easy to be non-authoritarian when everybody who matters is already on your side. When all the elites, so to speak, are already cooperating with you. In such a situation, you can afford to be non-coercive. But if you had nothing but the state, nothing but voters, what would you do?
This also means it is not necessary to make up clever psychological theories, like Adorno's The Authoritarian Personality, or its modern version, Social Dominance Orientation Scale, about how exactly are authoritarian people are fucked in the head. They are simply seeing, quite rationally, that they have nothing else but voters i.e. the state. Everybody else who matters is against them. So of course they are playing their one strong card.
Note that in the 2025 context, it is a problem for the right, but historically it was a problem for the left. Imagine being a communist in 1955 America. You are just painfully aware that everybody who matters hates you. So if you could get any power... you would use it.
This sounds like a theory that only works in those narrow corners of history where a group of people manage to get enough power to be authoritiarian without having the establishment on their side.
Maybe a more general theory would say that there always has to be _some_ kind of outgroup to justify the authoritarianism, but the shape of this outgroup may be different. It might be the capitalist class, or the Jews, or the Shiites, or the racists, but there's always some hated group that we all need to unite against.
I think our truly textbook cases of authoritarianism seem to be those corners. Communism, Nazism, Fascism, even the milder ones, Franco, Salazar, Peron.
Let's take Mussolini. Basically, fun fact: the March to Rome did not happen. That is a bipartisan myth. Mussolini had a few thousand rural strong guys who started marching towards Rome, then took a train to Rome, where the government just caved without a fight and the king named him prime minister. Then they held a parade inside Rome and then he sent them back to their villages. He had a very limited power base and almost none in the capitol. Then he came up with the myth of a heroic coup, and the ex-government liked that because it made them look less of a coward, and thus it stuck.
You are touching a note remarked on by H. G. Wells in his 'The Outline of History' on Constantine (if memory serves), that records show a lonely mind, which made him a more forceful ruler.
I've seen this professionally as well - when a manager isn't backed up (by his team or the organization) he becomes much more autocratic.
I believe you are further correct in your observation that when the other powers aren't willing to "play ball" the natural response is to treat them as obstacles at best, but often as examples to be made.
Scott wrote about something like this in the last section of https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/book-review-the-new-sultan.
Yes, same exact ideas. But it only raises more questions. First of all, when a left-populist goes after economic elites, I can make sense of that, they have money, money is useful, and mostly everybody would like a little more. Whether that is morally right or wrong, it just makes sense why sometimes people want to rob a bank. Or want to own it.
But for example why do people want to be cultural elites? Is it really that much good for their career? But if so, eventually they will become economic elites, no? No, actually, there is a certain kind of person who is prestigious but underpaid. Eight or so years ago someone complained on Twitter that the NYT pays about $600 per article. So that is a super prestigious thing, but does not pay so well. Why do people do that? And more important, why do so many people hate cultural elites so much that entire political movements can be organized around this? Sure the NYT journalist can look snobbish from a certain perspective, but is it such a big deal? And yet, we can observe it works like that.
My best guess is this. Actually the term "cultural elites" is not super helpful. Basically, we just don't have the time or resources to verify every statement we hear. "Cultural" elites are actually credibility elites, they are simply believed more than others. Populist rage happens when some feel this credibility is misplaced, betrayed. I think.
In the US trust in the media is historic low, in fact so low that probably many liberals don't much trust it either. Now for example in Germany it is higher, but I know them. That is basically because 75+ people even bother to read it at all. My uncle in Hungary, 66, is phone-only, online-only. All European legacy media has a huge old-people vibe. I mean they literally put only old people on covers. They know their customers. These old people partially remember the past when it was more reliable, and partially just don't even care that much anymore about deciding whether it is reliable or not.
So I think it is not really culture in the usual sense. I don't think people are angry because some people prefer opera over country music. I think it is a credibility thing, a public trust thing.
I don't think it's that complicated, I think people want to be cultural elites because we are surrounded by culture and most of it is annoying to most people.
If *I* were a cultural elite, things would be much better. We would build beautiful ornate buildings in a style that compares well with the past without seeking to directly imitate it. We would have interesting new developments in music instead of the entire market being dominated by repetitive pop/rap slop. In politics we would resolve all boring long-standing debates in my favour and have healthy debate only on subjects that I'm genuinely uncertain about. Everything around me would be to my taste. I could buy a phone with a headphone jack and a car with a CD player, and the interests of people like me would be at the forefront of everyone's mind.
I don't think anyone is annoyed that _some_ people like opera instead of country music, but country music fans are annoyed that country music doesn't sound like country music any more.
I don't think this theory matches with observed history. The establishment is (or was) fully aligned with the democratic party, yet during the peak of their control they illegally used the intelligence agencies to censor speech online and engaged in a transparent weaponization of the legal system against Trump. Or consider the authoritarian aspects of the PATRIOT act. That was passed during a period where Neocons had an exceptionally strong base of establishment support.
I think most political actors simply calculate how they can gain/maintain power and then try to estimate what portion of that they can get away with. The only things restraining them are amorphous standards of elite conduct enforced by peers, threats to their public reputation, and their own personal convictions (if any).
The question is authoritarian relative to whom. When high society disdains someone powerful enough, that person will be 'authoritarian' in regards the high society. When high society is aligned with a powerful leader, they can be more high-handed with the populous. It all depends on who you can afford to offend.
Your accounting of their behavior seems incomplete to me- at times politicians push agendas which lose them power, and would have lost power in expectation beforehand. There are actual agendas.
As time goes on there are selection pressures for political actors to be more and more like your description, but I doubt humans (even politicians!) regularly personify the power-maximizing political animal
Yes, there are actual agenda driven politicians like James Webb or Tulsi Gabbard. They are few and far between. Even reasonably hard-working folks in Congress are not often "agenda driven profiles in courage"
"Basically people and politicians are going to be authoritarian to the extent that they don't feel the Establishment or elites are not on their side. "
Can you please re-phrase this one sentence. I think I know where you are going from you final sentence, but ...
Basically, educated people. Newspaper editors, professors etc. Also fashionable people, like media celebrities.
Let's take the simplest case. Suppose an authoritarian government is one that represses the freedom of the press, OK? They do this because the press is generally not on their side. If the press is on their side, it is unnecessary to do so. One of course could argue that people sometimes do unnecessary things. OK, but let's put it this way, how much is the temptation clearly depends on how friendly is the press.
I always get the impression that the textbook non-authoritarian politician, say Justin Trudeau does not even govern in the historic sense of governing. By historic sense I mean someone like FDR. Clearly a large chunk of the press, judges and other influential people hated him. So of course it was a fight. But a fight, when conducted from a position of power, looks a lot like authoritarian repression. But someone like Trudeau can just relax... things just work on an autopilot. Everybody who matters already wants the same things that he wants. Things just go...
I have been both on the side and against elites. I can tell people a few things. First of all, what people on the street treat as a matter of political opinion, therefore subjective and people having different views on matters is one of the most sacred freedoms, educated elites tend to see differently. They tend to see them as professional questions. So if you are a professor of engineering or a student of economics, and child psychologists tell you that trans children exist, you are supposed to assume that they know their jobs. Suppose you check their study methodology, and it checks out. At that point what can you say? That they are falsifying data? That would be like the head of the marketing department accusing the head of the accounting department of cooking the books. Basically a libel. Not something like a friendly political disagreement, that is only possible between non-experts.
When you are on the side of elites, you generally do not notice elites exist. (Take not here :) ) you just notice smart people are usually on your side. Of course. You know you are not an idiot, so it is not surprising.
When you are not on the side of elites, you are painfully aware of their existence. You just keep hitting walls everywhere. You feel like that kid who farted in the middle of the lunchroom. The worst part is when you doubt yourself, you know you are not some tinfoil hat type, and yet keep strangely feeling so. The worst part is you don't even really understand what is going on. You would understand it if people were taking bribes, for example. But they seem keenly honest, living modestly, do not actually have as an individual much power (as a class, yes, but individually not) and yet somehow you see things going horribly wrong.
Trudeau? The man who declared martial law over honking is your textbook NON-Authoritarian??!? He was stealing people's money without due process recourse.
Seems like the Trump admin is going after actual citizens now:
https://www.justice.gov/civil/media/1404046/dl?inline
> The Department of Justice may institute civil proceedings to revoke a person’s United States citizenship if an individual either “illegally procured” naturalization or procured naturalization by “concealment of a material fact or by willful misrepresentation.” 8 U.S.C. § 1451(a). The benefits of civil denaturalization include the government’s ability to revoke the citizenship of individuals who engaged in the commission of war crimes, extrajudicial killings, or other serious human rights abuses; to remove naturalized criminals, gang members, or, indeed, any individuals convicted of crimes who pose an ongoing threat to the United States; and to prevent convicted terrorists from returning to U.S. soil or traveling internationally on a U.S. passport. At a fundamental level, it also supports the overall integrity of the naturalization program by ensuring that those who unlawfully procured citizenship, including those who obtained it through fraud or concealment of material information, do not maintain the benefits of the unlawful procurement.
What sort of things count as 'willful misrepresentation'? Well...
https://abcnews.go.com/US/trump-administration-claims-palestinian-activist-mahmoud-khalil-misrepresented/story?id=120108978
> The government has claimed that Palestinian protester Mahmoud Khalil intentionally misrepresented information on his green card application and therefore is inadmissible to the United States. According to recent court filings, President Donald Trump's administration said Khalil failed to disclose when applying for his green card last year that his employment by the Syria Office at the British Embassy in Beirut went "beyond 2022" and that he was a "political affairs officer" for the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees from June to November 2023.
Combined with the recent SCOTUS case on birthright citizenship (even though I'm skeptical of nationwide injunctions, surely birthright citizenship is an *obvious* case where nationwide injunctions apply!) and legislation attempting to increase annual spending on ICE to over $150b (you know, the guys walking around in masks arbitrarily detaining anyone who looks vaguely ethnic, even if they are US citizens) it seems obvious to me that the government is eager to dramatically expand the definition of 'illegal'. Already there are calls to deport mamdani from federal reps, which is as disgusting as it is insane
I share the skepticism about nationwide injunctions generally, and also think that this specific topic is a good fit for their use. It would be great if either Congress would legislate or the SCOTUS had put into case law something like, "Federal courts cannot issue injunctions applying beyond the plaintiffs that are before them, unless the legal issue is a matter of interpretation or enforcement of specific text within the federal Constitution."
>even though I'm skeptical of nationwide injunctions, this is the *obvious* case where they apply
I don't understand why you think that. It seems to be an obvious case where they do NOT apply. A claim that Person X is subject to revocation of naturalization or permantent residence because he made misrepresentations is inherently a fact-specific, individualized question. There is nothing universal about it. Nor is there anything inherently unlawful about initiating denaturalization proceedings on that basis https://www.uscis.gov/policy-manual/volume-12-part-l-chapter-2
I am sure that the Administration's claims re Mahmoud Khalil are almost certainly bogus, because that is how they roll; note that misrepresentations must be material, and "a concealment or misrepresentation is material if it "has a natural tendency to influence, or was capable of influencing, the decision of" the decisionmaking body to which it was addressed.'" Kungys v. United States, 485 US 759 (1988) ["Looking, therefore, solely to the question whether Kungys' misrepresentation of the date and place of his birth in his naturalization petition was material within the meaning of § 1451(a), we conclude that it was not. "]
I thought the OP was referring there not to the particulars of Khalil's case, but rather to the general question that was just ruled on by the SCOTUS: whether a president can order implementation of a legally-new interpretation of a piece of the Constitution.
^Correct, SCOTUS case is about birthright citizenship. Apologies if that was unclear, I've updated accordingly
I'm also skeptical that a universal injunction is particularly necessary re birthright citizenship. When is this going to come up, in practice? If the govt tries to deport me, I present my birth certificate to the judge, and under current caselaw the judge has no choice to rule in my favor. The govt can appeal, but that will lead to a broad ruling. It might come up when Iapply for a passport, but that can easily be dealt with in a class action.
There might be other issues where the absence of universal injunctions leads to people not getting their day in court, but birthright citizenship does not seem to be one of them.
It applies to babies being born in hospitals. The whole point of the eo is that Trump is trying to stop birthright citizenship, which afaict is blatantly unconstitutional. A week ago, if you are on a greencard and have a child in the US, that child is a US citizen. This is written into the 14th amendment and supported by case precedent (Wong Kim iirc).
Trump's EO is trying to get rid of that.
I know what the EO purports to do, and why it is bogus.. But, so what? It doesn't stop the issuance of a birth certificate. So, what effect will it have on a baby, as a practical matter, such that the failure to issue a universal injunction will harm them?
I didn't mean that OP was referring to the particulars of Khalil's case, but rather that they were referring to denaturalization / revocation of permanent residence in general.
And my point is that, because such cases are fact-specific, there is nothing to universally enjoin.
The question of whether a POTUS is able to unilaterally declare and begin implementing a change in the long-established (by SCOTUS precedent) legal understanding of part of the Constitution, seems to me about as general as it ever gets. That question isn't fact-specific at all: either a POTUS can do it or not.
But whether the issue is general has nothing to do with whether an injunction is universal or not. What matters is who is governed by the injunction. From the decision the other day:
>Traditionally, courts issued injunctions prohibiting executive officials from enforcing a challenged law or policy only against the plaintiffs in the lawsuit. The injunctions before us today reflect a more recent development: district courts asserting the power to prohibit enforcement of a law or policy against anyone.
Note also my comment re Khalil was based on my (mis)understanding that when OP said that they thought "this issue" was particularly appropriate for universal injunctions, he was referring to the policy of denaturalization / revocation of permanent residence, not to the birthright citizenship EO.
>”how come nobody has tried creating a school that actually only takes each kid for two hours a day and costs one-quarter as much?”
Civil rights law? Imagine how much faster you would have been able to move through the curriculum if you were allowed to kick out the kid who couldn’t remember the “trees” song.
Also, I’m sure, “your child is too stupid for us to teach,” is a bad way to build reputation.
The biggest issue is that one primary function schools serve is daycare. Having the kids for only 2 hours a day doesn't provide this. So the school will mostly want the kids either all day *OR* until the "normal" dismissal time when the existing after-school care programs are open to watch over the kids.
The *next* biggest issue is that lots of parents want more hours of instruction rather than fewer. Whether the extra hours are particularly effective (at the margin) is not super important.
I don't think that "teaching the curriculum" is a great way to measure the utility of school anyway.
The "curriculum" as it exists is some summarised lowest common denominator of what every student absolutely must be able to learn in a year. I don't want my kids to just learn the bare minimum, I'm sure there's a vast amount of other stuff they could be learning while they're at it. If you're done with fractions then please teach her dendrology and Byzantine history.
Indeed, selective schools are all about this and they often have wonderful reputations. It's not so clear how much of the reputation is due to great teaching rather than great students who would prosper under even lousy teaching, though.
A few decades back I pulled together data for my local public schools. It included standardized test scores and education levels of the parents. And the schools' rating (1 - 10) in California.
*) The general definition of a "Good School" is having a good rating.
*) The way to get a good rating is to have the kids test well.
*) About 80% of the kids' test scores could be predicted from only the parents' education level
I'd like to see something more rigorous and broader, but that's what I saw when I looked at my local public schools.
"How come nobody has tried creating a school that actually only goes two hours a day and costs one-quarter as much?"
The big thing you're missing here is that, for better or worse, for most people, the kids being babysit for almost a full workday for free is just as important as them learning. Or at least, the extra 6 hours hours they're in school is a feature, not a bug.
I thought this was so self evident that I find it surprising Scott would even ask the question. Paul Graham wrote an essay about this topic like 20 years ago.
To be fair, I didn't recognize this until reading one of Freddie de Boer's education essays a few years ago. Although I think i would have by now since we now have kids in school and are reaping the benefits of the free babysitting.
Also, you expect school to teach some stuff other than academics. You'd like kids to make friends and learn to function in a group away from their parents, with lots of supervision in the classroom and less in the gym and still less on the playground.
I would consider it a better feature if my kids could spend those 6 hours playing, reading a book, or working on their own project. Rather than sitting and being tortured by slow pretend-learning.
With you watching them or while at school? If the former, keep in mind that's not an option for most two income families. If the latter, consider how difficult it is to get education funding as it is and now think about trying to sell "well actually, we are only going to educate them the first half of the day, and they can do whatever they want the second" to parents who won't trust you to actually educate them in half the time, and taxpayers who don't want to pay for free babysitting the other half of the time. I think it's pretty easy to understand how we get the system we have, mushing together the two benefits to minimize complaints from both groups, even if it's objectively not efficient or ideal.
I sympathize, but I also keep reminding myself that my intuitions for how to fix education are probably wildly wrong in general. I think I have a good idea of what kind of schooling would have suited me as a child, but I'm an extreme outlier, and that kind of schooling would have not been much good for most of the other kids in my school.
This. Why did I have a half day of kindergarten, leaving before lunch, while my kid had to stay until 2:45?
Because more moms have jobs now?
Of course. Which has made it all the stranger with no mention of this triumph of feminism that so many districts in my state are going to a 4-day week.
"Lots of people agree that it’s easy for any home school and many private/charter schools to teach the whole curriculum in two hours. Shouldn’t this be a bigger deal? Also, how come nobody has tried creating a school that actually only takes each kid for two hours a day and costs one-quarter as much?"
This exists. Also, the students who do it are FAR, FAR more interesting people than what can become the 5-day all-day mind-meld.
Re: my comment here: https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/your-review-alpha-school/comment/130523445
In general, the National Hybrid Schools Project is collecting data on schools that are doing basically this. https://www.kennesaw.edu/coles/centers/education-economics-center/national-hybrid-schools-project/hybrid-research.php
Christian Twitter is chirping about YongHoon Kim from South Korea, who has the highest IQ ever recorded at 276 (!) and recently declared that he believes Jesus Christ is Lord and the Bible is the revealed word of God.
My thoughts -
1. What does it even mean to have an IQ of 276?? Assuming a mean of 100 and standard deviation of 10, the chances are vanishingly small of anyone in human history achieving this. It also implies he is smarter than an Einstein-level genius by about the same proportion as Einstein is smarter than someone severely intellectually disabled. Do IQs above, say, 200 actually correlate with anything meaningful?
2. As a Christian I obviously find this flattering (“a smart person is someone who knows more than you and agrees with you.”) I know some may disagree, but I don’t think religion should be dismissed as the province of the irrational and uneducated.
3. What is the correlation (or otherwise) between intellect and religiosity? Much is made of Galileo whose scientific discoveries brought him in conflict with the Church, but my (subjective) impression is that rather more great historical scientists were inspired by religion (Newton, Einstein, Faraday, Kepler, Mendel.)
At some point, you get the "top thousand people in the world" -- their IQs are basically unmeasurable, in terms of "who is better than whom" and you pull the guy whose unique skillset does what you want.
As far as intellect and religiosity, the higher your level of education the more likely you are to attend religious services weekly. (https://www.graphsaboutreligion.com/p/lets-have-a-talk-about-education). So there is a lot of nuance to the question.
Yeah interesting, I sometimes think high intellect is a risk factor for pride, which makes it more difficult to accept the truth of religion. Religion necessarily involves a surrender to the unknown and the acceptance that there are mysteries too deep for one’s mind to comprehend
He is almost definitely some kind of grifter using his reported and likely fake IQ to springboard his company and his beliefs.
While many intelligent people are religious, many intelligent people are also very stupid.
I think Wooly put it well. It makes sense that very smart people would actually question the idea that the orthodoxy of our time (materialist humanism) or the orthodoxy of the previous time a few centuries ago (biblically inerrant Christianity) just happens to be the timeless universal truth.
While "normal" people would just rather do what their ancestors did without trying to understand the new orthodoxy, and "smart" people would think *just enough* to understand the new orthodoxy and why it's better than the old one and then *stop*. And certainly not think enough to wonder if *that* might *also* be wrong.
There may also be a barber pole effect here. People who aren't that smart but have their life basically together signal religious belief to distinguish themselves from the drug users and criminals and so on. People who are a bit smart aren't worried about being mistaken for a drug addict or party animal but *are* worried about being mistaken for a non-smart normal person, so they signal irreligion to do so. People who are very smart aren't worried about being mistaken for a normal person but *are* worried about being mistaken for a merely slightly smart person, so they signal (maybe esoteric maybe not) religious belief.
That latter model would suggest that maybe correlations between intelligence and religion have nothing at all to do with the rationality of religion, actually.
>That latter model would suggest that maybe correlations between intelligence and religion have nothing at all to do with the rationality of religion, actually.
True! Also, there is the unfortunate point that compressing the relationship into a _correlation_ misses the points you raise, since correlations are awful for capturing strongly nonlinear relationships, most severely if, as you suggest, the actual relationship is not monotonic.
Do you know what sort of IQ test was used to evaluate Kim's IQ? Most standardized IQ tests have an upper limit around 155, due to the limited number of extremely difficult items. Supposedly, there are high-range IQ tests designed to handle people with extremely high IQs, but to the best of my knowledge, they haven't been standardized and/or normalized for reliability (mainly because there aren't many individuals with an IQ of 5σ to use as samples).
As for the correlation between intellect and religiosity, that depends on how you define "intellect" and "religiosity". If we're reducing intellect to an IQ score (and I don't subscribe to that hokum), then numerous studies have shown a negative correlation between religiosity and higher IQ. Terman's longitudinal study of geniuses (IQ > 135) suggested that these individuals were somewhat less religious than the general population, although not overwhelmingly so. Terman spoke in general terms, though, and I don't think his team published any hard numbers on this question. The famous SMPY study (Study of Mathematically Precocious Youth) tracked teens in the top 0.01% in math ability (IQs >145), followed them longitudinally, and found a trend toward lower religiosity over time, particularly compared to national averages. Those going into STEM fields were particularly less religious.
I found this for you on Google Scholar: "The Relation Between Intelligence and Religiosity: A Meta-Analysis and Some Proposed Explanations" by Zuckerman et al.
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/1088868313497266
> Abstract
> A meta-analysis of 63 studies showed a significant negative association between intelligence and religiosity. The association was stronger for college students and the general population than for participants younger than college age; it was also stronger for religious beliefs than religious behavior. For college students and the general population, means of weighted and unweighted correlations between intelligence and the strength of religious beliefs ranged from −.20 to −.25 (mean r = −.24). Three possible interpretations were discussed. First, intelligent people are less likely to conform and, thus, are more likely to resist religious dogma. Second, intelligent people tend to adopt an analytic (as opposed to intuitive) thinking style, which has been shown to undermine religious beliefs. Third, several functions of religiosity, including compensatory control, self-regulation, self-enhancement, and secure attachment, are also conferred by intelligence. Intelligent people may therefore have less need for religious beliefs and practices.
Unfortunately, this is behind a paywall. But my first question would be, how did these studies define religious belief? If they defined religiosity as belief in an Abrahamic creator-god who is omniscient and omnipotent, then they may be misclassifying otherwise religious people as atheists and agnostics. Full disclosure: I don't test out as a genius, but my first IQ test put me at +1.9σ. I'm agnostic about belief in a creator entity (because it's an unfalsifiable question). But I'm deeply mystical despite having a firm STEM grounding. I probably wouldn't be classified as religious by the psychometricians, but I am.
My understanding is that there are specific tests used to differentiate the very high IQ from the extremely high IQ. The Giga Society, which is similar in principle to Mensa but only admits those with IQs above 190, lists some here
https://gigasociety.com/qualification.html
A 276 IQ does not mean anything.
It doesn't mean literally nothing. It means they are probably pretty good to great at memorization, pattern matching, and mental arithmetic, standard test taking stuff.
It's also only mostly ridiculous rather than completely ridiculous, which is not what I thought i was going to say once i started typing. Yes, a z score of 17 is unfathomable. But. The tail end of real distributions stop resembling the normal distribution.
The tallest human ever was 8' 11". This would put him ~13 to 16 standard deviations above the average height (he was born in 1918, i don't care enough to find good data on standard deviations back then)
This is impossibly tall, if all you go by is the Z score.
276 is impossibly smart, if all you go by is the Z score, and by with a few orders of magnitude.
I think its much, much easier for a human to get impossibly tall than impossibly smart, but the argument is not as rock solid as I would like it to be.
There are tests to differentiate between an IQ of 150+ and an IQ of 190+ - see the Giga Society, for example -
https://gigasociety.com/qualification.html
It appears this guy did a bunch of these tests and scored the top marks ever seen
https://vocal.media/history/dr-young-hoon-kim-wikipedia-highest-iq-276-record-holder
So that’s what it “means.” I wonder though if after a certain level IQ is not a good predictor of achievement, sort of like height in basketball. It’s a strong predictor up to a point, but at some point NBA players are tall enough and other factors become dominant. That’s why Michael Jordan at 6 foot 6 is a much better player than the tallest man ever at 8 foot 11.
It means nothing, because no IQ test is calibrated to spit out 276 as a meaningful number.
It doesn't mean nothing. Suppose you have the 276 IQ guy and a 100 IQ guy in a room. If you were able to interrogate them, would you be able to guess which is which without directly asking their test results?
To me, the answer is obviously yes. IQ tests aren't random number generators.
However, I don't think I would be able to do the same with 276 and 140. Im willing to accept that above 140, an IQ test might as well be a random number generator.
most midwits lack meta-intelligence. interrogating a moron tends to give you an average score if you don't know what to look for.
I'm not saying you couldn't easily tell a 276 IQ person from a 140 IQ person, I'm just saying that there's no test well calibrated enough to give you a "276" rather than just saying "Whoop, this person exceeds the ceiling of this test".
Anyway look I think it's been established elsewhere in the thread that the guy actually scored a 276 in some kind of other test, not an IQ test, so we can probably drop the subject.
No, it literally means nothing, IQ is fundamentally an ordinal scale and cannot distinguish between "higher than any point in the sample distribution by a little bit" and "higher than any point in the sample distribution by a lot". The apparent interval nature is an artifact of the norming process, and at that point there's nothing left to norm against.
Yeah, I mean the guy may be genuinely very smart (or not--some people with really impressive IQ scores don't seem to do much, but there's a pretty strong positive correlation between IQ scores and accomplishing things), but whereas an IQ of 145 is meaningful in the sense that we know that the number of people whose scores are above it should be about one per thousand, and that we probably have some useful data about how people with 145 IQ scores performed on some real-world tasks, a score of 276 doesn't tell us any of that. It's like I ran a regression analysis on the relationship between temperature and murder rate and then extrapolated it out to the expected murder rate when it's 300 F outside.
Maybe there's a strong positive correlation between IQ scores (high) and accomplishing things. I think there's also bound to be a very strong correlation between your differential IQ score and accomplishing things.
Few people game an IQ test low "just to see how the questions change." And you can be sure they aren't narcissists or midwits.
I Googled a bit.
From https://www.koreaherald.com/article/3436983:
> South Korean Kim Young-hoon was recognized as the person with the highest IQ in history, scoring 276 at the World Memory Championships, according to the organizer of the competition, the World Mind Sports Council
What's the World Memory Championships? https://www.worldmemorychampionships.com/ fails to load in my country. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_Memory_Championships says:
> The World Memory Championships is an organized competition of memory sports in which competitors memorize as much information as possible within a given period of time.
> The World Championships consist of ten different disciplines, where the competitors have to memorize as much as they can in a period of time:
One-hour numbers (23712892....)
5-minute numbers
Spoken numbers, read out one per second
30-minute binary digits (011100110001001....)
One-hour playing cards (as many decks of cards as possible)
15-minute random lists of words (house, playing, orphan, encyclopedia....)
15-minute names and faces
5-minute historic dates (fictional events and historic years)
15-minute abstract images (WMSC, black and white randomly generated spots) / 5-minute random images (IAM, concrete images)
Speed cards - Always the last discipline. Memorize the order of one shuffled deck of 52 playing cards as fast as possible.
Confusingly however, YongHoon Kim's name is nowhere to be found in the list of winners over at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_Memory_Championships, so what gives?
Another reason for skepticism: the *actual* Korean with the highest recorded IQ on the Stanford–Binet Intelligence Scale isn't YongHoon Kim but https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kim_Ung-yong who is a pretty famous case within these circles. AFAICT Kim is "an associate professor at Shinhan University and vice president of the North Kyeong-gi Development Research Center".
Saw a video about a guy with extraordinary memory skills. A lot of the stuff he could do resembled the tasks above -- learning long sequences of numbers, etc.. But they also showed him learning Icelantic well enough to hold a conversation in -- I forget how long, I think it was something like a coupla days. And the conversation wasn't a trivial one, I was substantial and went on for a while. *That* impresses me.
"What is the correlation (or otherwise) between intellect and religiosity? Much is made of Galileo whose scientific discoveries brought him in conflict with the Church, but my (subjective) impression is that rather more great historical scientists were inspired by religion (Newton, Einstein, Faraday, Kepler, Mendel.)"
Very, very loose vibe thing:
Normal people are usually religious (including secular religion things).
Smart people usually aren't religious.
Really smart people are a crap shoot but their religious beliefs are always really weird and esoteric. Like, weird gnostic cults or obsessive mathematical platonists or just a sh*t ton of LSD. Newton is a good example, as the dude was super into alchemy, like, seriously into it.
If I was introduced to a super smart person and was told they were religious, my priors are way higher for them being into Kabbalah or something than, like, Methodism.
There's a new religion out, courtesy of covid19. I heard a lot of physicists like it (it was helpful in evading vaccinations).
Serious IQ tests do not even reach anywhere near 276, because that is statistically a nonsense -- you would have to calibrate the test on more people than actually exist on this planet.
Could it be a typo for 176? That happens to be the highest value I have ever seen in actual test.
Things get weird on the high end, especially when PR is involved.
Marilyn vos Savant had a reported IQ of 228. And later 186.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marilyn_vos_Savant#Rise_to_fame_and_IQ_score
She seems to have been a nice person but I do not believe she was smarter than Einstein or Feynman. Or von Neumann. Or Lisa Randall.
The thing that always struck me: if she really was the smartest human who'd ever lived, it seems like she kinda wasted her talents. I mean, she married well, and wrote some newspaper columns and books, but it kinda seems like the smartest person in the world ought to be discovering new physics or figuring out how to build fusion reactors or something. It would be like if you somehow learned that you were the most musically talented person on Earth, and so you decided to sing in your local church choir once a week rather than, say, composing new music that future generations would love or something.
IQ falls apart at the tails of the distribution. It's really only meant for comparisons within a few standard deviations from the mean, maybe 70-130. Anything much higher than that you should probably just generalize as "high IQ". I don't think 276 is any more meaningful than 150 here.
We've made a chatbot with 200k tokens of knowledge of AI x-risk in its context. If you ask it some hard questions on AI safety, it might surprise you with how well current LLMs can explain the problem. In something like a third of its responses, it generates genuinely very convincing and valid arguments.
Especially curious to hear the thoughts of people who are not convinced of AI x-risk.
https://whycare.aisgf.us/
My email is ms@contact.ms if you want to share feedback.
(Ignore the interface, it's not yet optimized.)
Error creating chat completion: error, status code: 502, message: invalid character '<' looking for beginning of value
Huh, thanks, weird! Try again?
next issue:
I asked "well what white-collar desk jobs are the least likely to be automated"
it gave me a long-ish, decent answer and, at the end, it asked: "If you want, I can suggest ways to “future-proof” your own skillset, or help brainstorm transition paths as the landscape shifts."
I said "yes lets do that"
And it responded "Sorry, we've optimized this tool for conversations about AI and the threat it poses, and it is not as useful for other requests."
works now!
In the "random question" category: Picked up a book off my library's recommended list, "Welcome to the Hyunam-Dong Bookshop." In the author's note, she says that she wanted to write about a bookstore which started with the character "hyu." No explanation (nor even the actual character rather than the transliteration) is given by her or by the translator or editor. But there's gotta be someone here who knows a lot about Korean characters, so what's your guess as to why that would be a good bookstore-name starter? TIA!
Ukraine's drone attack against Russia's bombers parked on the ground makes me wonder: Why doesn't the U.S. Air Force have more decoy planes?
An F-35A costs around $82.5 million. Why not also build F-35ADecoys that would cost far less, like $4 million (price of a new, small passenger jet)? F-35ADecoys could be stationed at air bases to trick an enemy with spy satellites into thinking an attack might come from that direction, or they could be mixed in with real F-35As to sacrificially soak up damage from any preemptive drone attack.
F-35ADecoys would have the same external dimensions and shapes as F-35A's. Only at very close range could you see any differences. However, F-35ADecoys would not have any expensive avionics or technology, would have a cheap, commercial-grade jet engine, and would be made of cheap materials like aluminum and steel rather than stealth composites. The only advanced feature they would have would be an autopilot system that would let them take off, fly long distances, and land without a human pilot.
In a jif, F-35ADecoys could also be converted into cruise missiles by attaching a bomb to their undersides and remotely piloting them into a target.
Having decoys be able to actually fly would be redundant in most scenarios. As long as the decoys look convincing on high-res satellite images while parked on the tarmac, the work is mostly done. Having close-up surveillance (people, drones) that could tell the difference is vastly more difficult and worse-scaling than satellite imagery and should be enough to economically favour the defender.
Adversaries are presumably photographing the bases many times a day, and will be able to keep track of which planes move and which ones don't.
Here's the other thing: F-35s aren't stored out in the open, they live in hangars or at least under cover. You wouldn't park a Ferrari out in the street, I don't know why anyone thinks they'd want to park a $100 million fighter out in the rain to get dirty.
>Why doesn't the U.S. Air Force have more decoy planes?
Because they take up space, you have to maintain them like real planes or else it gives the game away, and the enemy has spies in the military that will give the game away anyway.
Just build a nice hangar and keep unknown numbers of planes inside.
Because using decoys is what a paper tiger military does to pretend to look strong. It's in the US's interest to make its force projection capabilites seem *as credible as possible*. Mixing in fake jet planes into its fleet might embolden foolish actors into picking a fight with us (underestimating our power).
The planes are made visible intentionally as part of a nuclear safety treaty between the US and Russia called New START. Both countries agree to limits on nuclear capability. Parking the planes openly allows them to be observed via satellite. Certain parts of the treaty (standing meetings and on-site inspection) were suspended due to the Ukraine conflict, but the majority of the agreement remains intact.
"The planes are made visible intentionally as part of a nuclear safety treaty between the US and Russia called New START. ... Parking the planes openly allows them to be observed via satellite."
Russia "suspended" participation in the treaty in early 2023, though it said it would continue to abide by the plane number limits. I *think* this means that Russia said it would not build more planes than allowed, but was also not necessarily going to continue allowing for verification. US military inspections of Russian sites, for example, are not longer allowed/done.
So Russia could have placed the planes in bunkers if it wanted to do so. I don't know that Russia has enough bunkers, though.
Except that there was no clause in the New START treaty that mandated parking strategic bombers in the open to be visible from satellite and flyovers. All of the START treaties and the SORT treaty relied on primary verification, and New START allowed up to 18 unannounced on‑site inspections to count warheads on systems including bombers. Bombers can be stored in hangars, especially for maintenance or protection from weather. There's a concealment measure's clause in treaty though, and that might be where the misunderstanding that strategic bombers must be stored in the open comes from...
> The obligation not to use concealment measures shall not apply to cover or conceal practices at ICBM bases or to the use of environmental shelters for strategic offensive arms."
But storing nuclear-armed heavy bombers in hardened bunkers seems to be a no-no.
Likewise:
> Each Party shall base:
>...
> (b) deployed heavy bombers only at air bases.
And the treaty says that the parties have to park heavy bombers with nukes at separate bases from heavy bombers without nukes.
Supposedly, its forbidden to deploy fake heavy bombers. Maybe that's implied by the concealment clause, but I don't specifically see that in the New START treaty text.
https://2009-2017.state.gov/documents/organization/140035.pdf
Russia withdrew from New START in 2023. So the point is moot.
What do you mean by "more"? It already has decoy planes. How many do you want them to have?
At least in regard to planes sitting on the tarmac, Russia’s decoy tactics seem to have been largely ineffective against Ukraine’s precision drone strikes. Can't find it now, but there was a video posted on YouTube taken from a Ukrainian drone during their massive June 1st attack on Russian airbases. It demonstrated how the Ukrainian drones successfully avoided the decoys and targeted the real aircraft. I'm not sure, but some of the decoys that Ru used may have been 3-D mockups, because the drones used in the June 1st attack evidently used radar to distinguish real planes from phonies. So, any F-35A decoy would need to have the exact same radar signature as the real aircraft. Not saying this isn't feasible, but Ukraine is incorporating AI into some of its drones.
OTOH, some of the Ru decoy "aircraft" were pretty simplistic, though. Open-source analyst Brady Africk noted that these decoys are not easily mistaken in radar imagery, and the success of Ukraine’s attacks—hitting at least 13 to 20 aircraft, including Tu-95 and Tu-22M bombers—confirms Ukraine’s ability to bypass such deception. Africk had a thread on X about several instances where realistic aircraft images were painted on the tarmac, but that trick was easily detected from satellite imagery because the painted-image decoys didn't cast shadows.
The days of high-end fighter jet being able to dominate the battlefield may be numbered. According to Trent Telenko...
> Air superiority below 2,000 feet/600 meters is increasingly the only air superiority that matters in the age of drones.
> A few tens of F-35's showing up for 5-to-10 minutes a few times a day cannot compare to tens of thousands of drones hunting individual soldiers 24/7
> "Orders of magnitude mean things" and the the F-35 big/few/expensive cult is so far on the wrong side of the small drone numbers game as to be irrelevant.
> Drones are killing three times as much as artillery. And artillery has historically killed more soldiers than planes.
https://x.com/TrentTelenko/status/1932853358408151274
This isn't a result of technology bottlenecks--it's the result of US (Developed nation) military doctrine and the consequent influence on procurement policies. We could have a much larger number of much cheaper close air support fighters, but we chose, decades ago, not to invest in that. The F-16 is as close as we got--but google "F-20 fighter" to see what we could have had. The F-20 was a derivative of the venerable F-5, which you can buy used today for less than a million dollars.
The days of jet fighters aren't over, they just have to fit themselves into a doctrine with drones as part of the battle space. We may be going back to the days of cheaper, more specialized fighters, though.
I just looked up the F-20. Looks like it would have been about 10% cheaper per plane to buy than the F-16 and maybe 40-50% cheaper to operate due to fuel consumption and maintenance requirements. Conversely, the F-20 would have been much less upgradable than the F-16 (the former being an extensive upgrade of an older design already) and would consequently have had a significantly shorter useful service life. It was also much less capable in bombing roles, and I am seeing conflicting information about how much less capable an F-20 was as a fighter than an F-16
My suspicion is that the F-16 was the right point on the tradeoff curve between cost and features. This is corroborated by South Korea and other countries also evaluating the F-20 in the 80s and deciding to buy F-16s or home-grown fighter designs instead.
There is no question that the F-16 was the more capable aircraft. The question is whether or not we could use something like the F-20 now. Though I am open to the position that a sub-sonic aircraft would be even better.
The time for a cheap unsophisticated fighter as aerial light bomb truck was twenty years ago, it would have been useful in Iraq and Afghanistan.
At this point an unmanned version of the same is probably the way to go if you just want to drop bombs in poorly defended airspace.
A couple things-
-Military strategy generally lags behind technological development. Drones as a major military threat are a very recent phenomenon, only in the last few years in Ukraine (or I suppose the 2nd Nagorno-Karabakh conflict in 2020 if you were paying attention). Generally what happens is armies deploy using the strategies honed from the last major conflict, and when these no longer work well they bash their head against the wall. As people die from mistakes and the incompetent and overly rigid commanders are weeded out a new strategy is honed.
-The US to some degree has taken proactive measures to prevent this. See the development of TRADOC in the wake of Vietnam and the Yom Kippur war. The reinvigoration of aggressive maneuver tactics led to the absolutely crushing victory over Iraq in 1991, despite the US not being in a major conflict in decades.
-US and also NATO forces have spent the last several decades fighting low tech, low intensity counter insurgency operations. This has conditioned their armed forces for a type of conflict where they set the tempo of operations. The idea of the enemy seizing the initiative with something like a mass drone attack on rear operating areas is totally foreign. As are concepts like electronic warfare and signals discipline. US operating posts are lit up like Christmas trees in the EM spectrum, again because they have spent so long fighting enemies where this is not a relevant concern. A relevant example is how long it has taken for the US/EU to ramp up production of munitions for Ukraine. Their defense industries were conditioned on low intensity conflict, where their annual production might sustain the front in Ukraine for a month.
In essence, drone attacks like this are a very new development. The US military has a lot of institutional inertia and it takes time for new ideas to percolate through and result in new strategy. Given how closely NATO is involved in the Ukraine war, I'm sure they're taking a lot of notes, but it still takes time.
*Also, good luck getting your self-piloting decoy plane that's also a cruise missile for a unit cost of only $4 million.
ETA: One other minor point - who exactly is going to have a bunch of spy satellites and ISR assets as well as the strike capability to hit US airbases? This is basically only China in the Pacific theatre, and maybe Russia in the local region. Everyone else remotely capable of something like this is already allied to the US. Being able to acquire real time intelligence of opposition militaries without massive state capacity is also a very newfangled development of drone technology.
*hushed conspiratorial whisper* Maybe they do. Maybe the the *real* cost for F-35As working is in the ~$150 million range, half their fleet is actually decoys and their OPSEC is just so amazingly good that they've managed to hide this from being public knowledge this whole time.
OK, so that was clearly a joke, I just couldn't resist. Anyway, the thought that occurs to me is that, depending on which particular features and capabilities are most important for learners, a decoy plane program could overlap very nicely with a training plane program. I know that airforces need to devote a considerable amount of flight-hours to pilot training in realistic aircraft, but I'd be surprised if every single feature that makes an aircraft combat capable is necessary for the majority of training flights. A useful training plane might cost more than very low-budget decoy, but being dual-use could still save a decent amount of money. One potential downside I can think of is that intelligence orgs might be able to track the decoys just by keeping an eye on training flights (which I assume are easy to identify as such, even from far away) and then tracking the physical planes as they're moved around.
The wonderful thing about ACX is that it's a near certainty that somebody with vastly more domain knowledge than me will spontaneously appear to explain in exacting detail why all my assumptions above are horribly, horribly wrong. :-)
> somebody with vastly more domain knowledge than me will spontaneously appear to explain
The War Thunder effect. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_Thunder#Classified_document_leaks
One obvious problem: a F-35ADecoy probably doesn't look the same across the EM spectrum (e.g., in your hypothetical it has a very different radar return.)
Another is that I roll to disbelieve that a flying decoy costs only $4M.
Note that DoD is, indeed, purchasing flying expendable decoys, but they don't physically look the same as F-35s because they're optimizing for EM signature (see, e.g., https://aviationweek.com/defense/missile-defense-weapons/us-navy-expanding-advanced-expendable-decoy-use) AND the use of inflatable, etc. decoys for the ground is a long-standing tactic. (see, e.g., https://www.reddit.com/r/Damnthatsinteresting/comments/1dvhcfk/f16_next_to_inflatable_decoy/ )
In combination, that probably crowds out the case for your idea, unfortunately.
How do you know they don't do this? And if the answer is that it would actually be pretty obvious based on things like flight envelope, then maybe that's the answer.
“Bank of New York Mellon said it now employs dozens of artificial intelligence-powered ‘digital employees’ that have company logins and work alongside its human staff.
Similar to human employees, these digital workers have direct managers they report to and work autonomously in areas like coding and payment instruction validation, said Chief Information Officer Leigh-Ann Russell. Soon they’ll have access to their own email accounts and may even be able to communicate with colleagues in other ways like through Microsoft Teams, she said. “
I expect more statements like this in the near future. Artificial Intelligence will continue to evolve and take away from humans economically valuable tasks.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/digital-workers-have-arrived-in-banking-bf62be49?st=63im7H&reflink=desktopwebshare_permalink
Of all the attempts I've heard to try to incorporate AI-generated work into a workplace, this seems like one of the most awkward. There's good ways and bad ways to get value out of AI, and this seems like a bad one.
I'd like to just bitch for a minute about my new phone.
I had a Samsung Galaxy S9 until two weeks ago, and yes, it was (is! I kept it as a backup!) seven years old.
I had all of the settings DIALED. IN. Bixby: maximally shut off. Privacy and anti-ad stuff: maximally on. Apps were at the barest bare minimum (I actually like to joke that I'm "allergic to apps" whenever someone suggests one to me. I had a small handful, like Uber, Spotify, and Pay-by-Phone for parking, but otherwise didn't have any app that couldn't be used via a browser).
Never the less, for the last year or so, I began receiving occasional alerts from the operating system that I was out of space. I transferred my images to the SD card (IT HAD A REMOVABLE SD CARD!!!), and took other actions, but no matter how much I deleted or moved around, I kept creeping back up into the "your phone is too full and is going to stop working" zone. Text message chains with my more prolific interlocutors were taking 25+ seconds to load a single new message. Etc.
Finally, slightly terrified that my Samsung Galaxy S9 might simply explode like the gluttony victim in Se7en before I had a replacement ready, and, wanting the transition to a new phone to be as low-friction as possible, I went and bought the Galaxy 25.
I used the "Smart Switch" app which ostensibly ports over all of ones apps and settings and data, but that is absolute horseshit. Too much is way too different, for completely retarded reasons. For example, the goddamned blue light filter was renamed to "eye comfort shield," is multi-levels deeper in the settings than it was on my S9, and is way less configurable, both in terms of range and precision.
It also has TWO fucking AIs on it; Samsung's Bixby and Google's Gemini, both of which I've done everything possible to shut off but which nevertheless occasionally flash me or post up little icons in other programs, wanting to "help."
And then there are ads, ads, ads, ads, including in apps like Spotify that I wasn't seeing two weeks ago using those same apps on my S9.
Nothing is meaningfully "better." The screen resolution and clarity and so on look the same. Photos look the same. Text messaging works again, but that probably could have been fixed on the S9 by deleting the literally tens of thousands of text messages I had in some conversations (I only ported over one year's worth of messages during the "Smart" Switch). I guess entering my thumbprint on the front of the phone rather than the back is slightly more ergonomic, but a friend with the Galaxy S23 just told me that feature tends to wear out screens in about two years, according to the repair tech she just spoke to about her two-year-old phone. The battery life is only about 35% better than the S9, which is perhaps the most egregious disappointment.
And then as I mentioned, a lot of stuff is worse! Settings and features have randomly been renamed and/or are less configurable. Drop-down menus look completely different. No removable SD card. No headphone jack.
I know there are a lot of things I can do to get my new phone to where I want it - tutorials and programming and whatnot - but that's also sort of my point, I don't WANT to have to spend hours researching how to unfuck my phone and then even more time unfucking it.
It was reasonably easy to unfuck my phone back in 2018, and now it's infinitely harder, and that's what I'm pissed about.
That, and that apparently I'll have to do this all again in another two years.
I, also, had a Galaxy S9 that I very much liked and would like to still be using. I, also, try to keep the minimum number of "apps" and other shiny features, but some of them are essential and some of those were no longer compatible with the S9 so I was forced to upgrade about two years ago. To a Galaxy S22, in my case.
Smart Switch worked better for me than for you, apparently because I was only skipping 13 model numbers rather than 16. Gemini wasn't a thing. But I agree, the new phone has very little to recommend itself over the S9, the user interface changes are mostly just annoying, and the loss of the removable SD card is a serious downgrade. I hadn't even thought to check on that, because I thought it inconceivable that anyone would make a high-end smartphone without that.
Apparently you are my soul mate. Or at least my phone mate.
I upgraded my phone last week, from the A13 to the A16, and I'm quite happy with how well the Smart Switch worked. Perhaps the problem is that 7 years is longer than it's meant for?
But my phone is significantly lower end than yours, so it's much better: I still have an SD card slot, for example.
Sheesh. As someone with an S9 on its last legs, now you have me scared...
I haven't had any issues with running out of storage space, even with hundreds and hundreds of photos. When I first got the phone, I set it to auto-delete text messages older than 2 years. Maybe that's why?
Ugh. There's seriously no audio jack on the newer Galaxy phones? [Grumble grumble]
I still want to eventually replace my phone because the battery is dying. Should I try and get the battery replaced at a repair shop instead?
> no audio jack on the newer Galaxy phones
True, but they now make USB-C to aux cables (and adapters), so is this still an issue?
Yes, because I bought like four USB to aux adapters and lost them all, before eventually managing to re-buy a phone with a headphone jack.
I'm not sure what I'll do when this phone breaks, maybe I can find an old iPod?
Is it just me, or was that "low SES" mom from Alpha School being kind of cagey? She provided no specifics as to what the actual problem was. Just vague "the school didn't meet our needs" type of complaints, with no examples.
Reading between the lines, Alpha School in Brownsville exists for the benefit of SpaceX employees. If you're not the child of SpaceX employees then you're probably not going to fit in.
There's not a nice way of saying "These kids are too dumb and poor to fit in at our kids-of-rocket-scientists school" but that's basically the way it is.
Given that Brownsville is 94% Hispanic, it's unclear who at the school would *not* be a member of the community whose needs are not being met - unless it's some kids whose parents work at Space-X. There is a lot of anger down there at Space-X, so the rant (AI?) may be a species of that. Some of the anger is wholly justified; some of it is silly and has had unfortunate results as for instance Musk was prepared to buy and swap a larger, better piece of speculator-owned habitat (that the Conservation Fund had been trying to secure for some time) to gift to the state parks and wildlife department, in exchange for mostly some state-owned inholding or lots within the old failed development that he has spruced up, next to (rather alarmingly adjacent to, but I guess I don't understand these things!) where the rockets launch.
The whole area is extremely important biologically, both for wildlife and some unusual plant situations, especially the lomas; and is more or less the site of arguably the "last battle of the Civil War".
But given it was fruitless to suppose the government was going to shut down Space-X, the sign Americans or at least on South African can yet "do stuff" - a larger intact piece of habitat was very obviously the better end of the deal, especially if Musk is going to be allowed to continue dropping rocket crap all over Boca Chica as seems inevitable.
The state/feds are much to blame too; the rather beautiful (if you know what you're looking at) drive to Boca Chica passes through what has been a wildlife refuge, leased for the purpose by the feds (I think, as a unit of LRGNWR) from some idiotic "navigation district". A conservation area that expires is obviously no conservation area at all, especially as threats to e.g. the oceot, rare plant communities increase. That should never have been allowed to happen, and Musk is not to blame for the greed of earlier bubbas.
Yes it's obviously very suspicious. In my experience, parents of all stripes *love* to talk about school administration drama in *excessive detail*. My assumption (absent future elaboration) is either that this person is untruthful, or that the details are unflattering to them and/or their ingroup.
> My assumption (absent future elaboration) is either that this person is untruthful, or that the details are unflattering to them
As someone who speaks fluent "Missing Missing Reasons", this is also my impression.
"It’s easy for any home school and many private/charter schools to teach the whole curriculum in two hours. Shouldn’t this be a bigger deal? Also, how come nobody has tried creating a school that actually only takes each kid for two hours a day and costs one-quarter as much?"
As to the latter point: one of the huge functions of school is childcare for people whose work don't allow them to have kids hanging around (most of us). A two hour a day school would be, for most people, a huge negative. Another major function of school is social; I assume that those two hours are actually *studying*, but a lot of what goes on at school is learning how to be a social person, making friends, playing, etc.
As to the former point: I assume part of the answer is self-selection effect, at least for private and charter schools, which select for kids who can learn that much that fast. At home schools the curriculum and teaching is geared to the individual; presumably public schools could teach a lot more with a 1:1 or 2:1 student:teacher ratio, and with hugely tailored individual curricula. Homeschooling isn't scalable and efficient; that's presumably a large part of why it works (when it does).
Price controls
The obvious solution
The obviously wrong solution
What if the state provides
- Enough basic food at production +logistics price per person for basic nutritional needs but no more? (Tracked through ID when bought)
- Enough new apartments for families of 2-4 (only for people who have not yet owned a home) at cost each year [such] that the house market slowly gets cheaper?
- clean, efficient public transportation, with 3 rides a day at minimal prices?
How does this affect the economics, when blueberries are market value, but the first liter of milk per week is at governmental cost?
>- Enough basic food at production +logistics price per person for basic nutritional needs but no more? (Tracked through ID when bought)
Defining "Basic food" becomes a massive can of worms. Fruit is an essential part of your diet, but blueberries aren't covered - who decides which fruits are necessities instead of luxuries? What if you decide that apples are a basic food, but then a crop failure means that apples suddenly double in price? Which kind of apples, cheap red delicious or expensive honeycrisp? What if you have a dietary restriction or allergy? I'm a vegan, why would I want the government buying me free milk?
I think if you want to ensure free food for everyone, I think it would make more sense to supersize SNAP/food stamps. SNAP does have some restrictions on what foods you can buy with it, but since it gives you a fixed amount of *money* rather than *food*, you can allow market forces to decide which foods are most affordable to provide, and allow choices based on individual tastes.
Well, first off, it costs an awful lot of money. And since nobody is going to be raising taxes for this (or anything else), that's going to push us several steps closer to the fiscal apocalypse that comes when we find out what level of national debt-to-GDP is too high.
Minimum wages will fall, or more precisely not rise to match the inflation that will probably come from whatever you do to finance this, because there won't be the urgency of "these people literally can't afford to live at current wages!" (which was never true but at least plausible when everybody has to pay their own rent and groceries). That will pull down wages above the minimum as well, particularly the ones that are only modestly above the minimum. So the working class won't find their more-than-just-the-bare-necessities budget increasing nearly as much as you hope.
But aside from those details, it's going to devastate the private market for low-end food, housing, etc. The people who currently run business selling food to poor people, or providing housing to poor people, are mostly going to go out of business - a few of them will pivot to being government contractors supporting the new order, but A: because of economies of scale, not most of them, and B: because of different business models, probably not still maintaining a solid retail distribution network.
And the sell-stuff-to-poor-people market significantly overlaps the sell-stuff-to-working-class-people market, so an awful lot of working-class people who don't need this program are going to find their options reduced to the point that they're going to downgrade to the free-to-poor-people stuff most of the time.
Ultimately, I think this fragments the market. There will be a large basically-socialist economy providing the basics to poor people, and another catering to the UMC-and-above market that wouldn't be caught dead eating a steady diet of government cheese in a housing project down by the river. In between, some of the old businesses will muddle through providing occasional treats for working-class and formerly middle-class families - but economies of scale will push up their prices so those blueberries will be a less common treat than they used to be. And there will probably still be Kosher, Halal, etc, supply chains in parallel; it will be relatively more expensive to practice Judaism or Islam in this brave new world, but most believers will at least try.
So, basically, the same thing that happened to schools when we made public schools freely available for everyone. We've got elite private schools for the rich and rich-adjacent, and we've got religious schools for people willing to pay serious money for their beliefs, and everybody else gets a take-it-or-leave-it public school district. That we all know is very often crap, but which nobody can find a solution for now that "the working class should send their kids to private schools competing to provide the best education at the lowest price" is no longer on the table.
>- clean, efficient public transportation, with 3 rides a day at minimal prices?
I'm generally not a fan of State-provided services, and usually prefer market-provided services, but, at least in NYC, the current system only gets about a third of its operating costs from fares. So, switching to a completely free system, wholly supported by taxes, instead of 2/3 supported by taxes, at least seems like a sane alternative. The existing system doesn't seem pathological, and the marginal positive externality of reducing congestion in other forms of transportation might turn out to be worth the extra subsidy.
I would always charge something, people valuing what they pay for and all
Many Thanks! You might be right, but just how much damage people who _didn't_ value the bus ride would do, but would get on if it is free seems like an open question. Maybe do a pilot project, with half the buses free (maybe every second bus on each route, marked somehow?), and see whether pathologies emerge in practice or not?
That would be very interesting, but I feel would take much more political clout than just taking one of the options
Many Thanks! Ouch! You may be right. In general, pilot projects are a good way to see if a proposal works, or if it crashes and burns. If pilot projects generally require _more_ political clout than barrelling ahead and implementing an option without the knowledge that a pilot project would yield, that is unfortunate.
Housing (32%), taxes (27%), transportation (17%), and food (12%) are the major expenses of most households. Everything else is 10-15% of spending.
This is one reason behind the enduring appeal of Republicans: they promise to cut a big cost category while Democrats promise to mostly cut smaller ones (eg healthcare, 5%).
This is also the political economy driving Georgism/Yimbyism/Abundance/etc. The Democrats are hoping they don't have to compete on cutting taxes if they can reduce housing costs instead. Unfortunately, it doesn't quite work because the Republicans have even fewer objections to building than they do. In part because construction leans Republican while the wealthiest landlords/NEPA lawyers/etc tend to lean Democrats (since the biggest landlords are urban residents of Democratic cities). It also drives their love of public transit which has the same issues but, on top of the other ones, only works for urban residents.
If you were the mayor-dictator of a blue city then what you'd want to do is to stimulate construction by removing permits/review/etc, build a ton of public transit, then offer generous concessional loans to first time home buyers. Technically the subsidies would push up demand for housing but the increased construction would push it down in net. Structured correctly, they would actually overstimulate construction by effectively providing a price floor in a market where prices would collapse from overbuilding.
While this would be a major program, it is affordable for major cities (being in the tens of billions per year even for the most expensive versions like NYC). And it would almost certainly be a net positive in terms of new real estate taxes, new construction taxes, and new income taxes from people living actually within the city rather than commuting. And much more impactful than food stamps plus.
If you're just concerned with the theoretical idea of subsidizing the first however many gallons of milk this is not significantly different from just a direct food subsidy. Just with additional administrative costs. You're effectively paying a subsidy which drives up demand across the whole category. Because money is fungible you'll just see them consuming more food (though somewhat less than you'd expect because people purchase fewer calories as their income goes up). Which makes it an unusually good category both economically and from political economy (because people think of food as a right). Except for the fact that subsidizing food has negative health effects.
This seems a remarkably intelligent response, and flattering that I'm not barking up the wrong tree.
Subsidizing specific foods doesn't seem like it should always lead to worse health outcomes - I've never heard of anyone becoming obese from cucumber overconsumption.
An NIH systematic review found that subsidizing healthy foods led to more consumption of healthy foods, but effects on obesity were inconclusive.
I'd be curious to see the research. That might be the case, a form of good calories crowding out bad, but equally you might just get more calories. And at any rate, it's a relatively small part of the budget. But in turn that means, if administrative costs are reasonable, then it might be worthwhile simply for social solidarity. Though I'm worried about the political economy of food subsidies being dominated by agribusiness etc.
> Unfortunately, it doesn't quite work because the Republicans have even fewer objections to building than they do.
That depends a lot on which Republicans you're talking about. Red state Republicans tend to be YIMBY, while blue state Republicans tend to be NIMBY. https://www.slowboring.com/p/blue-state-republicans-are-the-problem
Unfortunately, federal Republicans have also taken an anti-growth turn for dumb CW reasons.
This is something I've heard but it seems more like a politically convenient deflection. It's rich people in Blue States (and not rich people in Red States). Those are more Republican than the blue state average. But they're not on the whole Republican and in fact are often key parts of the progressive base.
And while Republicans nationally might not be pro-subsidy, they are not anti-growth. Basically you can see the Democrats as representing both the pro-subsidized growth and anti-growth at all camp while the Republicans are the "get out of it altogether" camp. While you can argue that's not as pro-growth as subsidy, it's not anti-growth in the NIMBY sense.
It's not a Republican vs Democrat thing, it's a small cities vs large cities thing.
In a city of (say) 50,000, the benefits of more people are significant and the costs are low. In a city of five million, the benefit of more people is small and the cost is high.
There's some critical size of city below which adding more people to the city is actually beneficial for the people who already live there. We ought to figure out what that size is, and start working to concentrate building in those places.
There are large cities with Republican zoning laws which in turn tend to have cheaper housing prices (as well as more sprawl).
I've had a similar idea WRT food, but change "the government provides" to "the government pays for." More specifically, the thought was that the government could make a short-ish list of food items that grocery stores could be encouraged to provide for free, in exchange for some sort of value-equivalent reduction in taxes. The list would include enough of a spectrum of basic nutrition that almost any human *in theory* should be able to walk into a grocery store and pick out items that they can live on (even given most common dietary restrictions) without spending a penny. All of the items on the list would be very plain, basic versions of whatever class they were representing: things like cheap, low-quality bread, bulk grains, a very limited selection of cheap fruit and vegetables, and so forth. Some sort of customer limits/very simple tracking system could ensure that commercial entities didn't use this as a cheap supply of ingredients to turn into more expensive foods.
There are many details that would need to be worked out, and a few ways in which it might ultimately turn out to be impractical. In particular, I've never tried to do the math on probable costs compared to what stores pay in tax. But my underlying gut intuition is that grocery stores mostly don't make their profits on selling the bulk basics anyway: most customers pay for a lot of things above the bare minimum they need, and that the first-order economics would work out fine. Whether this would influence customer purchasing habits enough to be sustainable (why buy the slightly-better thing when the basic thing is actually free?) is another question. But if it worked it could entirely replace programs like food stamps, and would be much more flexible and less all-or-nothing than means-tested government assistance: any person or family could save money and cut their budget in a pinch by skewing their diet towards the food items that they could get for free.
Today we declare that the government always pays for milk.
Tomorrow, milk producers raise the price of milk to fifty dollars a litre.
On Thursday, the newspapers are filled with articles about the benefits of milk baths.
On Friday, the producers of soy, oat, almond, coconut, cashew and hemp milk are out in force demanding equal treatment.
The main issue I have with government paid-for is what the government pays always seems to balloon.
Setting up a governmental program would be expensive, but once it's up the costs should stay pretty much the same.
Tax reduction might be a good replacement
The obvious wrong solution. Price gouging is good. (Sell your thing for more when demand is high.) What is bad is collusion between vendors to set a high price for everyone.
This helps with alotting scarce resources, and signaling how much of a highly volatile resource to accquire.
Food staples, housing and public transportation are essentials and not very volatile most of the time.
Go ahead and price gouge on whatever basics the government can't provide at cost
All resources that are not currently free are scarce.
The choice isn't just binary. I pay for internet access, but I don't get _incremental_ charges for internet access.
I do. I have a cap on data each month, if I go over I gotta pay for more gigs. That's because internet is scarcer where I live than where you live. If you have unlimited data with your internet plan that just means that there's enough bandwidth where you live that a flat monthly fee is more than enough to pay the cost. Yet internet access isn't free, because unlike air or sunshine there isn't enough bandwidth for everybody to have as much as they want.
I just see subsidizing demand as generally bad. Let's take housing. If you give everyone $X a month for housing*, then you increase the demand for housing. This causes the price of housing to increase. The subsidy then goes in large part to the people with the housing to sell.
*Are you just going to subsidize renters, or do home owners also get a subsidy?
If you do that and don't let anyone build new houses/apartments, you will just raise rents and housing prices by an amount that offsets the housing vouchers. It's like you had some kind of really focused inflation that only affected housing, because you have the same number of units of housing but far more dollars chasing them.
For a fairly close real-world worked example, look at federal student loans and college tuition.
Build lots of apartment buildings. Sell them cheap to people who have never owned a home.
(Maybe only to marrieds, maybe with at least one kid, if you want to be selective)
[Added: you can also build rental apartment buildings, and charge enough to recoup, then just enough for upkeep]
The point is to create more supply.
Same for food - grow some amount of wheat and basic veggies, keep a certain amount of dairy cows..
*The point is to create more supply.*
Right! That reduces the cost. You can subsidize the supply, but that is tricky too. Perhaps the best thing to do is remove the barriers to making more. Remove zoning laws, regulations, etc... Capitalism is far from perfect, but it's maybe the best system we have at the moment.
Re Building cheap apartments: Who's building them? How do you make 'em cheap? Restrictions on who can buy seem fraught with problems. What if people divorce/ separate. If they move can they sell them? (Then I'll buy cheap, move and sell at a profit.) The price of a thing is that price for a reason. (supply and demand)
Removing regulations is great.
Capitalism is the best except where you know where you want to get to and how to do it, see China.
The government should build them.
Make them cheap by being relatively cheap materials -though not so much that they fall apart - and not very large units, by not making a profit, and maybe by subsidizing from tax money.
People choosing to not have a roof over their head is fine, they can sell them (but can't buy a new one). There would be a clear path to having basic needs met without going into debt.
I imagine that if people divorce they'll sell and split it or have one keep it while giving up other some of the other assets.
[Added: people can profit, that's fine. The point is to get small families into the house market and increase the housing supply without it just getting bought up as new speculative assets]
Don't forget that the existing home owners will fight very hard to keep their house prices from going down. And they will be skeptical so project that appear that the MIGHT cause a drop in local home prices will be opposed.
Want to drop a new 2,000 unit apartment complex in the middle of Palo Alto or Mountain View (or Los Altos)? Expect to spend a long time battling people with money and lawyers.
The obvious solution is to just steamroll those NIMBYs. But in a society with elections this isn't quite as simple to implement as it is to say.
Creating more supply where no one is already living is much easier. But also a lot less useful.
If it is directly state provided, we might run into issues with quality, like the infamous "project" housing of the past. I have looked into that. Basically, it was not the government as such, such as politicians or bureuacrats who pushed this terrible "brutalist" style. It was basically an intellectual fashion among architects. And due to the lack of market incentives, they had their way. I have found out the real problem is not the much-accursed corrupted politician or lazy bureaucrat, whom everybody likes to hate. It is the unchecked intellectual...
I was born in 1978 in Sovietized Hungary. Briefly, state-owned restaurants were so bad, that we got together with relatives and friends, picked one, and flat out bribed the whole crew so that they serve us something edible. You see I think they were simply stealing the better cuts of meat and selling them at a black market, which is why we got the terrible cuts.
I think a lot of economists understand this, which is why things like food stamps exist. But... is it working? Or people learn to game the system and find a way to buy booze and cigs anyway?
In that case, can't basically all possible state services be replaced by UBI? And if people buy booze and not healthy food, well basically that is their problem then. But this kind of libertarian thinking is that kind that would not make seat belts mandatory...
So what I am saying is that these things are complicated.
The same housing projects with, say, grad students and their families living in them would not have become nightmares of crime and dysfunction. (I mean, pot smoking and sometimes-loud parties, maybe, but not muggings and rapes and murders.).
Come on. The generalization of graduate student housing on the grounds of universities to low SES affordable housing in cities is not merely comparing apples to oranges, it's comparing apples to accordions. And the thing is, we don't even have to engage in the thought experiment. Can you give me an example of publicly built and provided housing that doesn't degenerate as noted above? I'm willing to be educated, but every place that I've ever heard that has tried has created someplace that colloquially is referred to as "the projects", most of which have been torn down due to the disastrous implementation.
The closest I've seen to a mass affordable home project was from private industry: the Levittown projects
My point is that it is not the architecture that is the problem, it's the people who live there.
Stuyveseant Town is probably a better example than Levittown.
You want to make people pay a real cost, which is realistic to pay after a few years saving with 2 parents working at low wage jobs.
Putting up security cameras and consistently enforced policing (with perhaps harsher penalties) seems like an obvious idea, do you think it's simply unrealistic?
Is that the issue - that we just.. made ugly houses and bad food? If the houses had been designed to look like nice normal houses it would have been fine?
I wouldn't think restaurants are a good match for being state-owned, I was thinking more basic staples
Yes, but if not market pressures, what is the incentive for nice normal houses? Let's put it this way - how will that make an architect famous?
There's no shortage of architects out there making a perfectly good living from designing nice normal houses. They'll never get famous, but most professionals understand that they'll never get famous anyway and are happy to pump out whatever work pays the bills.
This is actually why new houses look better than giant expensive buildings. Because most new houses are built by non-famous architects, but if you want to build a $500 million art museum you feel obliged to hire a famous one.
Perhaps there is some man or woman, inclined to make nice houses for people to live in
This does not seem an insurmountable challenge to me
Sure, but you have to sell the house at the market rate. Else I (rich person) buy the cheap houses and sell them at a profit for the market rate. (I'm not really a rich person.)
This is fine.
Supply increasing relative to demand should lower prices.
Also allows every family to have a roof, they do not have to sell them...
You may have missed the point of the government only selling these units to people who have not owned a home before - rich people can flip at most one of these
My boyfriend doesn't want to take ADHD meds, for no other reason than "it isn't that bad". He has never tried them, or even therapy. He also has that classic I'm A Man And Deathly Afraid Of Going To The Doctor For Some Reason thing.
It's true enough, it isn't that bad. It's not chronic lateness, being an awful conversationalist, inability to get through university, forgetting my existence unless I'm physically present or anything. But to me it just seems like being unmedicated ADD is living life on hard mode for no discernable reason. Chores that take me five minutes take him 5 times as long. Whenever he has an exam, he gets it done, but only after many horrible weeks of procrasting, grinding at night and sleeping through the day. As a kid, he was tested for dyslexia, but his actual problem was simply focusing on a text or word long enough. He is underweight and forgets to eat. Stuff like that.
Is there anything I could say to make him reconsider? Should I?
I think I can shed some light on the male aversion to going to the doctor. For me at least, it feels like trying to get a one-up on nature; what I mean is, imagine you have a machine that's orders of magnitude more complex and elegant than anything our civilization could imagine, and you see one part that looks like it's moving a little funny, so you just slap some duct tape on it and call it a day.
Obviously if I've been shot or something then my body can't handle that naturally, but for everything else I don't really see a need to throw a wrench in the machine. For example, one time when I'd hurt my wrist and it started swelling everyone told me to ice it to keep the swelling down; I decided to leave it, and it swelled up like crazy which naturally immobilised the wrist and stopped me from damaging it further. I also let all 4 wisdom teeth come in without seeing a dentist (and I'm not recommending this, but) they pushed up my back molars at first, then my teeth kinda resettled, and now my bite's been perfectly even for years.
No idea why/if this would be a male thing but I guess I just trust my body to do it's thing and it's always worked out for me?
Anyway, I also have mild adhd and feel roughly the same way about it; it's been more useful so far to try to treat the root cause than trying to find a duct-tape solution.
If women trusted our bodies to "just do its thing" instead of seeking modern medicine, we'd still be regularly dying during the one thing you'd think evolution should've figured by now: childbirth.
My "duct tape solutions", like SSRIs for OCD, meds for epilepsy and birth control for heavy bleeding, has helped me a lot in life. I'm eternally grateful.
The typical reason I hear for men's doctor aversion is toxic expectations for men. They're expected to be strong and never sick or a burden, so they avoid it. But cool with another perspective.
Definitely, I'm not knocking duct tape solutions at all, just that it's preferable to treat root causes if at all possible.
I wouldn't call epilepsy medication or similar things a "duct tape solution" though since that feels more like something is legitimately 'broken' and I'm not sure what a natural solution would look like (eg as far as I know it's not possible to excercise and meditate your way out of having epilepsy), whereas (mild) adhd feels less like something is broken and more like just a different mind-pattern that's not necessarily good or bad, just sometimes maladaptive within certain environments.
(As a side note I wonder what the rates of childbirth deaths were like in hunter gatherer societies? The rates were of course insanely high in pre-industrial times, but like you say it seems really weird that evolution hasn't figured it out. If anyone has a link to some data on this, that would be interesting to see.)
maybe low-dose modafinal would be helpful; you can suspend in water (it doesn't dissolve, so you have to shake well) and titrate the right dose. Something like 25mg is probably fine for someone who is stimulant-sensitive, but can still be helpful
I tried meds and it made my panic attacks worse. Other people complain that on those meds they feel "soulless". Eventually I settled at just drinking a lot of coffee. He could try that. I think these amphetamine-type meds are too much of a brute-force solution...
Exercise also helps, especially cardio. It is easier to concentrate when physically a little tired.
>I tried meds and it made my panic attacks worse. Other people complain that on those meds they feel "soulless"
Those are both related to the isomer ratio. For amphetamine type drugs, the d-isomers and l-isomers have different effects, with the d-isomers mainly acting on dopamine while the l-isomers also act on norepinephrine. Dopamine is what drives most of the gain in mental energy, while norepinephrine drives a sense of urgency but for many/most people has an unpleasant edge to it, often contributing to anxiety and sometimes making you feel uncomfortably restless.
Ritalin is a 50/50 mix of the two isomers of methylphenidate and Adderall is a 75/25 mix of d-amphetimine and l-amphetimine, but you can also get pure d isomers of each (focalin and dexadrine, respectively) prescribed. Some doctors are wary of prescribing those, especially dexadrine, because they're thought to have more abuse potential. Vyvanse is another option, being d-amphetamine bonded to lysine so it needs to go through a metabolism step (half life about 1 hour, IIRC) before it kicks in. It's newer and more expensive, but doctors are a lot more comfortable prescribing it because the gradual onset is though to make it much less abusable.
I think my doc knew that being addicted to alcohol and nicotine, I really don't need a third addiction, so we went on Strattera, because that is theoretically non-addictive. Yes, but it works on the norepinephrine pathway. Now I think I had undiagnosed panic illness all my life. I just did not notice why I am sweating all the time. I thought it is a body weight issue. I just considered anxiety normal. Ultimately it culminated in a real panic attack that had all the symptoms of a heart attack. So we went of Strattera quickly. But the cold sweat and shakes were present even weeks later. Eventually we tried Ritalin, and it immediately made it worse. A week ago I found out I have high blood pressure, so I am now even off coffee. I basically just accept some brain fog and procastination at this point.
If you do ever decide to consider medication again, modafinil or wellbutrin might be worthwhile. I've been on modafinil for several years after not particularly liking Ritalin or Adderall and having bad panic attacks the last time I tried the latter. I've also tried Wellbutrin as an additional treatment atop modafinil, but more for mood than for focus.
Modafinil is its own thing, a stimulant that works through a completely different and (last I heard) not very well understood mechanism. My subjective experience is that Modafinil makes everything about 20% more interesting, moderately improves my executive function, and significantly slows the onset of mental fatigue. Wellbutrin is a reuptake inhibitor like Strattera, but acts on dopamine as well as norepinephrine. The norepinephrine effects, at least for me, were a lot more subtle than those from amphetamine stimulants.
My mood issues and about half of my brain fog turned out to be gender dysphoria. I still have ADHD and still take modafinil for it, but I've been off of Lexapro and Wellbutrin for a year or two now as I don't seem to need them anymore now that I'm on estrogen.
What did you try? He'd be getting ritalin, which is not amphetamine-based, because Adderall isn't really available in the EU.
I took an ADHD med called Concerta for years when I was a child until around age 15 when I just refused to take it anymore. You'd have to google it for more details, but I know it has the same active ingredient as Ritalin. It definitely did help with focus and my ability to get things done, but it did zombify me and also made it a lot harder to eat in general. I never had an appetite while on it, and my appetite after it wore off didn't make up for while it was in effect.
I ultimately decided to stop taking it without telling my parents for awhile because I felt like a soulless robot and it affected every area of my social life.
When I was younger, my parents got me on it because at that young age it was emotionally very hard to handle how I could just not focus or get things done. When I stopped it, and now as an adult, I'm far more developed emotionally and I honestly prefer working out other ways to cope and live with ADHD rather than be on the medication for it with everything else that comes along with it.
Additionally, I feel like taking it for all those years has permanently affected me and my social abilities in a negative way. I don't feel soulless or anything like that anymore but I still feel like I'm very robotic at times. I can't prove that the lasting effects are from the medication, though, since maybe I would have developed that way whatever the case.
Anyway, as someone who doesn't have it "that bad," I far prefer not being medicated for it. Brain drugs always affect more than just what is targeted.
ADHD sometimes comes with an undiagnosed side dish of autism spectrum, which can contribute to the feeling robotic part.
I guess if it's a spectrum, then everyone falls somewhere on it 🤖🤖
He doesn't know how bad it is relatively to how it could be. Trying medications for one month could give him a perspective. (Basically, use *curiosity* as a leverage.)
> Chores that take me five minutes take him 5 times as long.
As a consequence, do you handle most of the chores? (If yes, then to put it bluntly this is your problem, not his, so he doesn't have much of an incentive to fix it.)
> He is underweight and forgets to eat.
Ah, not fair! I have a problem focusing on many things, but food isn't one of them.
> Whenever he has an exam, he gets it done, but only after many horrible weeks of procrasting, grinding at night and sleeping through the day.
The question is, will he be able to hold a job?
If you had time to read Scott's 10,000 word clarifier on missing heritability (I think it's deeply funny—and indicative of the Entire Problem—that geneticists use a definition of the word "heritable" which does not, in fact, mean "able to be inherited".) you should take 10 minutes and read my 2000 word essay on the microbe responsible for schizophrenia.
Stephenskolnick.substack.com/p/schizophrenia
I am moving to Berkeley at the end of this month. If you want to see me and Scott do a Lincoln/Douglas on the gut microbiome vs the genome, sound off.
I did not in fact know, until I read your comment, that geneticists use a definition of the word "heritable" which does not mean "able to be inherited". That is profoundly annoying...
Enjoyed reading this. As a layperson, one thing I've never understood about the gut bacteria theses is, shouldn't they be affected by antibiotics? Has anyone tried targeting ruminococcus gnavus with an antibiotic?
Do me a favor: go to scholar.google.com and punch in "antibiotic psychosis".
>Has anyone tried targeting ruminococcus gnavus with an antibiotic?
Part of the trouble with this is that antimicrobials are not particularly selective, and niche competition is what really drives exclusion from an ecosystem.
Say you've got a population of feral cats in your forest that is causing problems for the local birds. You could burn the whole forest down, as you would with a broad spectrum antibiotic, and that reduces the population of everything—trees, shrubs, birds, beetles, and cats—by 95%, but the cats will come back. Unless you burn things down so thoroughly that you lay total waste to the ecosystem, all you're really doing there is selecting for fireproof cats. You can use a more narrow spectrum antibiotic, which I suppose would be analogous to bait stations with poison, but this is still going to target most of the Carnivora. If you can find a poison that works on cats but not on foxes—hey, now you're in the money. But I'm not aware of any antibiotic that would kill ruminococcus gnavus without also killing its niche competitors. Such a thing may exist, especially among the biological control agents like bacteriophage, and I hope one day to find it, but phage therapy is hard to scale—that selectivity is both a blessing and a curse, because it means that a phage which works against one person's strain might not work against another's.
> "antibiotic psychosis".
Wow! I didn't know this was a thing! Thanks.
Very illuminating. Thanks!
The name of your blog is hilarious!
A lighter question than is often asked here, but one that might shed some interesting light on the thoughts and perspectives of this community, and that as far as I know Scott has never asked on a survey:
What is your favourite movie?
(Optional additional question if it produces a different answer to the first: what movies do you name as your favourite movie if an ordinary person ask?)
Probably "The Martian", narrowly edging out "Apollo 13".
If we can count the entire trilogy, "Lord of the Rings" might make the top spot, but that's because it's got eight hours of really good stuff to compare to the mere two hours that a
mundane film can provide.
But if I'm feeling snarky, I might bring up "Into the Night", a mostly forgettable action comedy from 1985 that attracted my attention by being I think the only movie in the history of Hollywood where an aerospace engineer got the girl. Who was played by a twenty-something Michelle Pfeiffer.
Alien
The Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind
The Empire Strikes Back
I think those have been my favorites for the last 20 years or so?
What is your favorite movie?
Maaan, whenever I come across this question I always forget what my favorite movies are. At least from what I can think of right now, I'll just list a few favorites in no particular order:
-Tenet
-Bad Times at the El Royale
-Spirited Away
-Dan in Real Life
-Isle of Dogs
-The incredibles
I'm definitely sure there's ones I like as much as or better than these, but I really can't think of them.
There are a lot of movies I like enough to re-watch. Many reasons: great visuals, great fun, obvious workmanship (I get a lot of enjoyment out of simply gazing at anything that was undeniably well-done, whether it's a movie, a painting, a monologue, or a math proof), or there are easter eggs to find or point out to friends. So my tastes are eclectic, though probably man-coded - I like mainstream stuff like Cameron, Spielberg, Tarantino, Coen brothers, or even a lot of MCU, and I can appreciate classics like Rashomon, The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, or Bridge Over the River Kwai, but I've never gotten into love stories or just about anything set in Victorian England.
My usual go-to answer for "favorite" is _Contact_. No other film I've seen struck me as more dedicated to the raw pursuit of knowledge. (I think _Apollo 13_ and _Interstellar_ come close, though.) Foster, McConaughey, Woods, Skerrit, Hurt, and Bassett were just the perfect cast, and Zemeckis adapting a book written by Sagan is probably the most pro-science awesomeness I could have asked for.
If someone were to put together a ship and fly it to Mars for a historical first, and film a documentary of it with Go-Pros and drones, that might be my new favorite. Until then, _Contact_.
Dr Strangelove - particularly as the most _quotable_ movie I've seen:
"Why did you keep it a secret?"
"The Premier loves surprises"
"Our source was the New York Times."
"...two admittedly regrettable but nonetheless distinguishable..."
" I'm not saying we wouldn't get our hair mussed."
"Gentlemen, you can't fight in here! This is the War Room!"
"Deterrence is the art of producing in the mind of the enemy... the _fear_ to attack."
"our precious bodily fluids"
"Its beginning to look like General Ripper exceeded his authority."
and just the names, particularly General Jack D. Ripper
Children of Paradise.
(Les enfants du Paradis)
Made in France during World War II. A three hour movie made in two parts because you could not make a movie longer than 90 minutes under the German occupation; a truly brilliant film.
The Last Unicorn.
Notably, the screenplay was written by the author of the novel, and, like the novel, the more one matures, the more one sees the deep wisdom in the work.
For example, as a child I didn't understand Molly Grue's anger at the Unicorn at all; now, as a 45 year-old single woman, I understand it *acutely*.
And I think I'm starting to understand a little of Mommy Fortuna, too.
I also believe The Last Unicorn is a rare case where the movie is a far more gratifying experience than the novel, as it's been dramatically pared down to the core story, with fewer side-quests taking us away from the power of the protagonist's story.
I will add, this is not a sentimental choice of childhood nostalgia. I'll be the first to say that most of my childhood favorites absolutely do not hold up to adult scrutiny. I'm also comparatively literate when it comes to movies; I went to a trade school for film and spent 10 years as an amateur critic on a professional critic's schedule by forcing myself to see *every* theatrical release in my region, whether I wanted to or not (that is, btw, how to ruin conventional horror movies for oneself).
The Last Unicorn was my favorite childhood movie, too, and continues to be one of my favorite movie up until today. I find it one of the few movies where all the characters actually make sense.
And I could always totally understand Mommy Fortuna. I was always happy for her because she had achieved her goal of obtaining immortality when she died (by engraving her into the memory into an immortal being), and was so obviously happy about it in that moment.
I found it most beautiful that the unicorn is the only unicorn ever that has experienced pain, and that both the unicorn and Schmendrick understand that, but that the unicorn doesn't rebuke it but thanks him for it. Even though the pain is immortal and will never go away. This always touched me very deeply.
I also read the novel some years later and was totally disappointed. The movie took the novel and actually took the characters in it serious. Unlike the novel itself.
> as a child I didn't understand Molly Grue's anger at the Unicorn at all; now, as a 45 year-old single woman, I understand it *acutely*. And I think I'm starting to understand a little of Mommy Fortuna, too...most of my childhood favorites absolutely do not hold up to adult scrutiny.
I recently watched it as an adult, having never seen it or even knowing much about it other than 'unicorns are involved somehow', and agree that it holds up surprisingly well, particularly on those two points where I suspect it is completely lost on kids who have not seen enough of aging & mortality to understand: https://gwern.net/review/the-last-unicorn
I dunno whether a community really exists - I for one am not a rationalist and super not an effective altruist (or any kind of altruist really).
The answer will be boring - LOTR. I also have a certain thing for Batman movies, because the villains almost always have some relatable, understandable motive.
I didn't mean "rationalist community", I meant "community that follows Scott's blog". I in fact find it quite annoying and bewildering that the latter is ever assumed to be the former (in the "allegiance to official Less Wrong doctrines" sense, not the "serious about examining your biases" sense).
Runaway Train
A very personal favorite though.
"The African Queen" (I do love Katherine Hepburn) or maybe Frank Capra's "You can't take it with you"
Favorite is a tough one. There are so many different types of films. But the best movie of the past 20 years IMHO was Shoplifters. Best actor award goes to Franz Rogowski in Passages.
Two favorite overlooked movies of the past 10 years: Krisha* and Fremont.
Most overrated: Everything Everywhere All at Once. I was bored to tears after the first half hour. And I liked the Daniels' previous movie a lot.
*FWIW, John Waters named it best movie of the year that year.
I may expand this comment later and add more movies, but for starters:
* Maanaadu https://www.imdb.com/title/tt4983780/
* Perfect Strangers https://www.imdb.com/title/tt4901306/
* The Butterfly Effect https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0289879/ (director's cut ending)
* The Mist https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0884328/
Oh, why the mist? What did you like about it?
Co incidentally, I had found myself yesterday watching this film for the first time and enjoying it rather a lot.
I had picked it due to my love of an apocalyptic (read: abandoned, damaged, empty and dangerous) aesthetic, a core preference and appreciation I seem to have held for almost all of my memory; and of characters that have to adapt and survive in some sudden, new, and terrible, situation, that I might imagine how I would act in that situation myself.
So far I would rate it as very good - I would not quite say it was in the very highest tier among such company as 28 days later, the road, or dawn of the dead (I liked both versions but preferred 2004).
In one of Scott’s old SSC posts, he jokes that to be a Rationalist is to believe that Eliezer Yudkowsky is the rightful caliph. This is wrong, because the Rationalists are clearly Jews, even within the confines of TPOT.
Yud led his people from frustration and solitude and established the holy land of LessWrong. Unfortunately, everyone who wasn’t them hated them, and they were very inwardly-focused anyways.
Lo, a new prophet was born. A Rationalist preacher named Scott brought compassion and a focus on real-world problems to the creed, and established SSC/ACX. Thus came the broader group of people who wouldn’t call themselves rationalists or are EA-adjacent thinkers, who view themselves as distinct from what came before but have unhelpfully not been named.
Neither Eliezer nor Scott are, thus, the rightful caliph. The rightful caliph will not focus on his people or compassion, but conquest. He will care more for Arabia than Canaan. And, frankly, he will not be very good to those of us who preceded him. The rightful caliph is Sam Altman.
Works for me. I suppose SBF is one of the various false messiahs that kept cropping up and being chopped down? Altman, at very least, has proven quite resilient and un-choppable.
I enjoyed that more than I should.
And, lo, I am a Christian in Rationalism as in real life.
I'm writing something for my own blog and it occurred to me that folks here are pretty good at reading critically and giving feedback on writing, so here's my current draft for you fine folks to tear apart:
Title: Deputies Gone Wild?
Subtitle: Central Massachusetts might be part of the Wild West.
We don't live in the Wild West or 1880s Chicago. Law enforcement officers in America have a chain of command leading up to elected officials. Maybe you don't like the policies they make, but they are still in charge. Police and Constables report to the Mayor. State Police report to the Governor. Federal Agents report to the President. Deputies report to the Sheriff… right? Apparently the Worcester County MA Sheriff disagrees.
I want to publish a guide for landlords and tenants that includes some statistics on the eviction process in Massachusetts. Among other things, I want to know how long each step takes and how much it costs, on average and in the extreme. Most of those steps happen in the courts, and obtaining the relevant court records is its own ordeal. The final step, however, the one where a door might get kicked in and someone could be physically removed from the property, and their belongings are boxed up and taken to storage without their consent, is handled by a Sheriff, Deputy, or Constable. Constables only exist in some cities and towns, and the Sheriff is far too busy to handle individual cases, so that leaves Deputies to do it everywhere else.
I made a public records request to the Worcester County Sheriff's Office ("WCSO") (https://worcestercountysheriff.com/), for things like the scheduling and execution dates, case numbers, assigned Deputy, etc for some past evictions. I was prepared to make the request, get denied, appeal that, and have the request approved on appeal, which wouldn't be unusual in this sort of interaction with local government. Instead, this turns out to be a much deeper rabbit hole.
WCSO's responses to my request and appeal confirmed that they have outsourced service of papers and execution of evictions to a private non-profit corporation, Worcester County Sheriff Civil Process Division, Inc ("WCSCPDI") (https://civilprocess.com/worcester/home/). As best I can determine, WCSCPDI hires employees who the Sheriff then deputizes. Members of the public go directly to WCSCPDI to pay for those Deputies to perform the relevant duties. Although the company uses their full name on some documents, they also use "Massachusetts Sheriff's Office" and "Worcester County Sheriff's Office" in various advertising and official records and even when introducing themselves, so it wasn't clear to me until now that they aren't acting as part of WCSO.
The last time someone appealed a public records request to WCSCPDI, they were asking for the name of a Deputy who had been dispatched to and visited their house. This is the sort of information any police department or sheriff office can and must produce when asked, usually in the form of dispatch logs or incident reports. The state Supervisor of Records ("SOR") made a lengthy determination (appeal 20140120 https://www.sec.state.ma.us/appealsweb/AppealStatusDetail.aspx?AppealNo=9KhIsbtUmVMD1D0CsFfcKQ%3d%3d) agreeing that WCSCPDI is not a public entity subject to the MA Public Records Law (Secretary of State website https://www.sec.state.ma.us/divisions/public-records/public-records.htm) (MGL Chapter 66 https://malegislature.gov/Laws/GeneralLaws/PartI/TitleX/Chapter66). That determination is where some of the most outrageous details start to come to light.
I started this quest looking for records about evictions, but at this point my concern has grown. As best I can discern, Federal and State law do not provide for different categories of Deputy Sheriff. Every Deputy in MA has substantially the same set of powers and authorities. In addition to process service and execution of evictions (which is already well into "only the government can do this" territory), they can detain and arrest people, carry and use firearms in many ways a member of the public cannot, execute search warrants and searches without warrants in some circumstances, and a long list of lesser things related to vehicles, courts, private employment, professional licensing, etc. WCSO's contention seems to be that they have empowered more than a few people to pull me over, arrest me, search my car, kick down my apartment door, handcuff me, drag me outside, etc, all while those people are neither employed nor supervised or controlled by any government official.
The SOR's previous determination was based on a five factor test established in an earlier court case, MBTA Retirement Board vs State Ethics Commission (1993). The SOR concluded that WCSCPDI's creation had no "legislative or administrative underpinning", their "major role as a process server is not a function or duty exclusive to a government entity", they receive no public funds, interests in WCSCPDI are primarily to exclusively private in nature, and they are under no significant "involvement, control, or supervision" of any government official. With every factor in WCSCPDI's favor, the SOR concluded they are not a governmental entity. I disagree with every one of those conclusions.
In supporting my appeal, I have presented over a dozen separate arguments against WCSO's position and that previous determination as it might apply to my request and appeal. I made multiple arguments that records created by WCSCPDI are subject to a records request to WCSO, regardless of WCSCPDI's status, such as Deputies being agents of WCSO regardless of employment, and WCSO having contractual control over records created by WCSCPDI. I corrected individual facts that were represented by WCSCPDI or determined by the SOR incorrectly in the past, such as WCSCPDI receiving no public funds and no process service being a governmental function. I updated facts that may have changed, such as some WCSCPDI corporate officers now being paid employees of WCSO, and employees of WCSO being dispatched to some evictions. I rebutted the previous conclusions for each of the five factors, with six separate arguments for just one of them. Some of those rebuttals should be independently conclusive, such as citing persuasive precedent that any entity created for the explicit purpose of performing duties legally mandated of a governmental entity is itself a governmental entity. I am hopeful that my arguments will prove persuasive, but I am not confident, nor am I confident that WCSO and WCSCPDI will comply even if ordered to do so by the SOR. I also suspect I'll run into records retention problems, with one or both entities having disposed of records far sooner than the 3+ years they are required by law to retain them.
One way or another, I'll be writing more about this at some point after my appeal is determined by the SOR (due by July 9 2025). Maybe it will be good news, and I'll be moving forward with my statistics gathering and other things downstream from that. Maybe it will be yet another legal morass, but of the type I used to pursue for fun rather than the type I'm embroiled in lately with life changing stakes. To be continued…
PS: While defining all the categories of law enforcement records (arrests, body cam footage, incident reports, shift schedules, search warrants, etc), The Secretary of State's Records Management Unit remembered to apply those rules to both local police in the municipal schedule and state police in the state schedule, but they apparently forgot about Sheriffs. They gave Sheriffs categories for all sorts of records related to running jails, but nothing about law enforcement records. This doesn't significantly affect the larger problem here, since the default retention period of 3 years still applies, but it's another thread to follow up on later.
This was really interesting. I do a lot of work with public information act requests, so I feel your pain here. If you don’t get a satisfactory result here you will probably need to file a federal suit, I’m thinking a sec. 1983 claim, though you’ll need a particular person with standing. Im just spitballing though. In any event, the facts are interesting enough though that you might shop it around at a few BigLaw firms; you may find one that would take this on pro bono.
Reaching out to attorneys about pro bono representation for myself and others who have encountered this same road block is on my to-do list. My amateur expectation is that we'd start in MA Superior Court and proceed upward from there, but I can see how a federal case might be appropriate given the federal laws granting these officers authority.
Well, sort of. I don’t give legal advice in comment sections, but a 42 U.S.C. 1983 claim, given certain prerequisites, allows you to bring a civil action against a state, county, or local entity, acting under color of state law, where they deprive the plaintiff of the rights, privileges, or immunities granted under the US Constitution or other federal law. It allows actual and punitive damages, as well as equitable relief.
That *may* well apply here. My *not legal* advice would be to talk to an attorney that does federal civil litigation sooner rather than later.
Good luck! Let us know how it goes!
>WCSO's contention seems to be that they have empowered more than a few people to pull me over, arrest me, search my car, kick down my apartment door, handcuff me, drag me outside ... but they apparently forgot about Sheriffs. They gave Sheriffs categories for all sorts of records related to running jails, but nothing about law enforcement records.
Are you sure that Sheriffs in MA actually engage in those sorts of activities? It doesn't seem so. The Suffolk County Sheriffs Department doesn't mention anything about that. https://scsdma.org/sheriffs-five-key-initiatives/ And see the Mass ACLU's discussion of their duties here: https://www.aclum.org/sites/default/files/field_documents/150029_aclum_sheriff_campaign_one_pagers_brief_guide_d4.pdf
While they perform typical law enforcement duties less often than others do or their other duties, they carry handcuffs and guns and are empowered to do so, and even mandated to do so in certain circumstances.
Here's news of a Suffolk sheriff officer serving a search warrant: https://www.winthropma.gov/CivicAlerts.aspx?AID=120
Hm, even there, it says they "teamed up" with the local police department.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-EdbFxh1uJ4
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ix9XaFp-3Gw
These videos show an eviction attempt being executed by approximately
ten Deputies and other officers of the sheriff's office, most to all of whom are employees of WCSO.
No police or other LEO's in sight.
By the way:
>Applying the definition of police officer set forth in G. L. c. 41, § 98, we conclude that a deputy sheriff is not a police officer within the meaning of G. L. c. 269, § 13A. Unlike police officers 254*254 as defined in G. L. c. 41, § 98, deputy sheriffs are not empowered to make warrantless arrests for crimes that occur outside of his or her view or presence. Under the common law, a deputy sheriff is considered a "peace officer." Commonwealth v. Howe, 405 Mass. 332, 334 (1989). As a "peace officer," a deputy sheriff has only limited authority to make warrantless arrests. See id. See also Commonwealth v. Baez, 42 Mass. App. Ct. 565, 569 n.6 (1997) (collecting statutes granting deputy sheriffs authority to make arrests). More specifically, a deputy sheriff's warrantless arrest power is limited to offenses involving a breach of the peace that occur in the deputy sheriff's view or presence.
Commonwealth v. Gernrich, 476 Mass. 249 (2017) [reversing the defendant's conviction for making a false report of a crime to a police officer].
So, I am guessing that they make very few arrests.
Thanks for the references. I'll read into them. I'm not surprised to hear there's a limit like that. I did try to make sure I wasn't saying they have the same powers as other LEOs, just that all deputies have the same powers. Which is important, since this sheriff seems to be trying to say there are two categories of deputies that should be treated differently, and I haven't found any precedent for that.
Yes, no one doubts that they do evictions. We are discussing the extent the engage in crime fighting.
Also, it's only incidentally important whether they do crime fighting. They show up to evictions with badges and guns and handcuffs, and that's not ok if there are no records or supervision.
Ahh. It's very hard to find out, for precisely the reasons behind the problem I'm encountering. I'll be making some more general requests once my current appeal is done, for data like arrests performed, search warrants executed, use of force and fired firearms, etc.
Just wanted to share that I found this an intriguing write-up. Thanks for sharing!
"Also, how come nobody has tried creating a school that actually only takes each kid for two hours a day and costs one-quarter as much?"
I would guess it's because the vast majority of customers (parents) don't want school days to be shorter.
Perhaps because students would learn vastly less.
Note also that the costs would be closer to 1/3 than to 1/4. And it would be extremely difficult to staff such a school. Not many people are looking for 1/4 time jobs.
Great point.
There is a public school board near where I live that is going to 4-days per week. People are freaking out. The local YMCA is building a day-care program for Fridays but it immediately became over subscribed (note: the school board pre-negotiated child care for all the teachers for Fridays. So this model actually costs the school board MORE. It’s been done for the teachers union)
That said:
There are all kinds of people. There are definitely families who would want a 2h/day school. There just likely aren’t enough of them in a concentrated amount. In any given place to make it happen.
Instead people who want that home school and Supliments with lots of online solutions that run 2h/day
Yeah, there's a lot of demand for precisely the opposite of this. Parents need third parties to provide daycare so that they can work. However, they also feel kind of bad about putting their kids in daycare but feel good about educating them. So the trend is for the kids to spend more time in these institutions and for the service to be branded as education rather than childcare...i.e. "early childhood education", etc.
I would prefer an institution that would explicitly say that they provide 2 hours of intense education *and* N hours of babysitting.
For example, such institution would allow me to take my children home earlier on those days when it is convenient. It could also allow my children to read a book or work on their own projects outside of those 2 hours. By not pretending we could get a lot of flexibility.
I agree. Two hours of academics and then let them have fun the rest of the day. I would take that.
also after school tuition is basically this - paying 2 hours for 1:1
Please be kind to me, this is my first real post on the Internet. I played around with letting ChatGPT and Claude generalize my ethical heuristics(1), and they both said I should publish (or at least post) the concept. I could really use the feedback of actual smart humans. :)
The Core Insight: Making ethical behavior easier through mechanism design or something you could call Virtue Arbitrage or Ethics Arbitrage
Most people genuinely want to be good(2). The problem is that our systems often make ethical behavior harder and less rewarding than unethical behavior. What if we could flip this dynamic? I'm proposing what I call "virtue arbitrage"(3) - systematically identifying places where ethical behavior is undervalued by current incentive structures, then redesigning those structures to make virtue profitable and vice costly.
TL;DR: How do we want to live? → Most people consider themselves good → If you build mechanisms that reward ethical behavior and price in unethical consequences → You make ethical behavior easier → You enable tons of people to have better participation in the good → And can capture "virtue arbitrage" at scale.
Applied Example: Social Media
Right now, platforms optimize for engagement by any means necessary, even if that means amplifying the most triggering content, fake news, social polarization, and echo chambers that just keep spinning people further apart, because outrage drives clicks. But imagine platforms that instead:
• Algorithmically boost content demonstrating "philosophical virtues" - truth-seeking, intellectual humility, charitable interpretation
• Reward discourse following "philosopher rules" - citing sources, steel-manning opponents, updating beliefs when presented with evidence
• Make spreading misinformation or bad-faith arguing costly through reputation systems, maybe even internalizing those costs with something like a 'toxicity tax' analogous to carbon pricing
• Create positive feedback loops where constructive behavior increases reach and influence
I believe people would probably adapt to succeed within these new incentive structures, and those habits would likely spill over into other areas of life.
The Broader Vision: Recursive Ethics at Scale
This scales to a society-wide principle: design every level of social organization to enable better participation in truth, beauty, and goodness - not as rigid dogmas, but as evolving search directions updated through collective inquiry.
The key insight is making this recursive and self-updating: as people experience the benefits of truth-seeking discourse and ethical coordination, they become advocates for extending these principles further. Acting ethically could become more "emergent" rather than imposed, with particularism updating and "sharpening" universalism, while universalist frameworks could help escape local ethical optima.
I'm absolutely acknowledging that these are still early-stage ideas that would need a lot more development before they become something practically implementable. I know that this isn't bread yet, not even flour, maybe just unripe grain? You would need a lot more rigorous definitions, perhaps you even would have to completely ditch the platonic stuff etc. You would have to be mindful of ethics washing, Goodharts Law, power dynamics, mistake vs. conflict theory etc. But I hope there is merit in this pile of ideas, so here are my questions for you:
My Questions for ACX:
1. Is there merit in thinking in this direction? Does "virtue arbitrage" seem like a useful framework? Am I missing obvious implementation challenges or theoretical problems?
2. Who's already doing this? Do you know anyone doing mechanism design for ethics or something similiar, or who might be interested in this concept? Should I post it somewhere else? Where?
3. What are your main critique points? Where does this approach seem most likely to fail or cause unintended consequences?
Disclaimer: I had help writing this from Claude, as the last time I wrote something substantial in English was about 10 years ago and I'm sure there are still a ton of words I'm using subtly wrong. My original system concept is much more complex, but I asked for simplification to make it more accessible.
The full framework involves things like "philosophical democracy" with nested deliberation circles, discourse ethics, subsidiarity principles, "ethics dividends" in taxation, rigorous systematic internalization of externalized costs and adaptive learning mechanisms - but I wanted to start with the core insight and see if it resonates before going into full on special interest mode. (Also I haven't thought deeply enough about it.)
Thanks for any thoughts you're willing to share!
PS: The first time I read a post on SSC was in 2014. I've been a regular lurker since 2015, and even in the phases where I voluntarily had no devices connected this was one of the few blogs I still checked in with my girlfriend's PC. A big thank you to Scott, you had a medium impact on my thinking. :) (Mostly for the better, I hope.) (4)
1 Based mostly on methexis in the platonic ideals, the generalization principle (Kant, Rawls) and emergence/dynamical systems. This also explains the weird 'participating in the good' language :)
2 Or at least want to be able to tell themselves and their peers that they are.
3 Or "ethics arbitrage", which does sound better?
4 That's also the reason I'm choosing this community for this post. :)
I feel like there's an insight here that I've seen in other contexts. Catholics (me, frex) talk about avoiding "near occasions of sin." That is, it's great to be committed to your wife, but if you and your cute young coworker start drinking together late at night in her hotel room, you're setting up a scenario where it may be a lot harder for you to stick to that commitment. It's better to try to avoid that situation. This isn't just about sexual morality: If you're trying to eat healthy, it's wise to just not have junk food like doughnuts and potato chips sitting around in your house or office, rather than having them there but using your willpower to avoid them. I think the generalization of this is that you want to structure your life so that it's harder to make unethical/immoral/bad choices than ethical/moral/good choices.
There are ways whole societies can do this. If slavery were legal, you might be tempted to buy slaves to make your sugar plantation more profitable. That would be horribly evil, but you would have a lot of financial incentives in that direction and likely would be competing with slave labor sugar plantations that would price you out of the market if you didn't use slaves yourself. Since slavery is illegal, any bad tendencies you might have to become a worse person in that way are closed off. All kinds of vice laws are explicit attempts to make it harder/riskier to do bad things than good things, whether that's prostitution, drugs, gay sex, gambling, smoking, drinking, dancing, drinking extra-large sodas, etc. And this points out an obvious issue: there's often not anything like uniform agreement on what things are bad enough to be banned or formally discouraged. (Indeed, even ending slavery was super controversial and kicked off a civil war in the US, despite it seeming to most of us now like about the most obvious moral question imaginable.)
> Catholics (me, frex) talk about avoiding "near occasions of sin."
I also didn't know the term, and I also thank you for it. While I am not a believer, the example that you gave of what a prudent person would do to minimize their chances of doing something imprudent later on carry weight with me.
"near occasions of sin"
- I did not know this term. Thank you for it and the answer :)
Yes, and my point is that we (as humanity) should build this insight systematically into our societal design, not just to avoid "near occasions of sin", but also to make acting virtuous easier.
"And this points out an obvious issue: there's often not anything like uniform agreement on what things are bad enough to be banned or formally discouraged."
- I would propose to start with the status quo and then use the generalization principle (a la Kant, Rawls, basically "Would I accept this system if I were randomly born anywhere within it?") to point at a more ethical possibility. If it works, you could try to use it recursively. (generalize, implement, generalize, implement etc.)
Do you know anyone who is thinking into this direction?
"Most people genuinely want to be good" no, most people want to feel that they are good. This leads to a certain kind of short-circuiting behaviour, often called virtue signalling. I think any incentive system you set up would be gamed.
"Make spreading misinformation or bad-faith arguing costly through reputation systems"
Tried that. Reddit admins told people one million times that upvotes and downvotes should not mean "agree" and "disagree", but distributed moderation. Only downvote stuff you would like to see deleted. It did not work, and led to a "hivemind". It seems the lack of voting on comments here leads to better results.
Sometimes it is better not to have incentives, because external motivation can replace internal motivation. You wrote this intelligent comment because something inside you wanted to. If you would be optimizing for upvotes and downvotes, if the 1000 dopamine hits of a much upvoted but mediocre but popular comment, like some silly pun, it might "corrupt" you.
Scott had a nice discussion awhile back on why it's not so easy to label misinformation. Basically, most of the ways media mislead people aren't directly false statements for which you can point to evidence, but rather things like selecting what scenes to show on the news, what subset of arguably-relevant facts to report, which experts to quote, what questions to ask (and make sure never to ask), choosing striking anecdotes without reporting (or probably even knowing) relevant statistics, etc.
In addition, it's totally standard to have people label stuff as "misinformation" when it's true but bad for their side. Anyone who gets the power to determine those labels will have a huge incentive to do this to help their side win fights. See discussions on everything from racial IQ differences to the effects of hormone-blockers on 13-year-olds for contemporary examples.
Hmm, OK my thoughts. This sounds like the classic prisoners dilemma. How do you get people to choose to cooperate. Or how do you get a high trust society. I don't have any firm answers but shared religion (belief system) and small communities seem to be part of it. I was appalled the other day when listening to a podcast that talked about the situation in our big cities (USA) and that everything in drug stores is now behind some locked door. (Because otherwise someone will steal a single can of pop.) I live out in rural America and we still have farm stands with a selection of produce and a box to put your cash in. The box is usually left open so you can make change if you have to. I lived in the city in the past, but I can't imagine moving back.
I think that analogising everything to prisoner's dilemmas isn't necessarily the best way to think about morality.
What I think is that 90% of the population is, while not necessarily perfect, sufficiently moral not to steal from shops. The key to a good society is to find a way to restrain, imprison or just exile those bottom 10%. Your rural community probably doesn't have a lot of them because they move to cities to find a more target-rich environment.
Thank you :)
"This sounds like the classic prisoners dilemma."
- Exactly, yes! If you let me copy the model of an emergence ladder in my other reply e.g.:
energy > quarks > [..] > living cells > individual human beings > family > circle of friends > tribe > commune > [..] > nation > world
My proposal is that we should systematically build our systems to make ethical choices the most rational and the easiest whereever possible.
Whenever there is a conflict between different levels, we should try to enable a participating in the most ideal stuff as frictionless as possible by design.
E.g. in your community example:
Propose everyone would be better off in a high trust community.
on an individual level: What would you need to be able to trust? What could you do to make it more trustworthy? What could convince you to make decisions to contribute to an higher trust environment?
(Bottom-Up: You could start local meet ups, a neighbourhood watch, a circle of food exchange, clean up together, etc.)
from a communal /policy level: What can you design to enable trust? What incentives / disincetives enable or further a climate of trust (Top-Down: Make design decisions that make all of the above as frictionless as possible, make room in your architectural planning, perhaps build a community center, make behaviour that destroys trust costly etc.)
So basically: Make cooperating the easier and better choice, if possible :)
Small communities that are reasonably prosperous is definitely helpful in terms of trust. Shared religion does not scale as far as I can see.
Shared religion has absolutely been shown to scale better than anything else. Unfortunately IMO the one that is scaling right now is antithetical to liberalism.
Yeah, that makes sense. I shouldn’t really have said that. I was just thinking of all the covert ways of taking advantage of a shared religion that were corrupting influences.
OK it doesn't have to be a shared religion, just shared values. Everyone around here loves the farm stands and no one wants them to go away, so we all cooperate.
The less you have a stake in someone else’s life, the easier it becomes to screw them. It’s just a goddamn fact.
A few scattered, random thoughts.
(EDIT: removing numbers for my three points because they are NOT answers to your specific questions and I noticed how confusing this was)
- I understand you're not confident with English, but honestly I feel pretty sure that writing in your own words, even if very broken and confusing, will be a lot clearer than writing with an LLM. I find the latter's style very grating, a sort of long-winded verbose series of technical sounding words that seem to say very little of any substance in the end.
In particular, I find your point here hard to grasp. I get the basic overall idea, which seems to be something like "let's try to create systems that provide incentives for doing good things". But beyond that...I think (for me at least) that just giving a list of concrete examples in your own words (with no further explanation; just give a list of say, five, different examples of the kind of thing you mean and let your audience construct your overall point from those alone) will be infinitely clearer than using an LLM.
- On the only example you gave (social media) specifically: I'm not sure how much algorithm incentives are responsible for polarisation. They are obviously *partly* responsible, probably significantly. But, the longer form web forums that were used for political discussion prior to social media (without anything like the same kinds of algorithms and incentives) also often encouraged extremist thinking, flame wars, uncharitable engagement, and downright trolling. So I think a lot of it is to do with the internet's existence itself. Maybe.
- I definitely agree with trying to reward virtuous behaviour. The problem is the concrete details. I think to say much at all about your idea we're going to need quite a few concrete examples of the sort of thing you're proposing.
Thank you for the feedback :)
"I understand you're not confident with English, but honestly I feel pretty sure that writing in your own words, even if very broken and confusing, will be a lot clearer than writing with an LLM. I find the latter's style very grating, a sort of long-winded verbose series of technical sounding words that seem to say very little of any substance in the end."
-Ahh, that could just be me. :) Especially "a sort of long-winded verbose series of technical sounding words", but I hope most times there is substance behind them.
I can try to put it in my own words, but no guarantees.
"I get the basic overall idea, which seems to be something like "let's try to create systems that provide incentives for doing good things". "
- If that came across, it's already a lot. I believe that we (as humanity) do not really do this consciously and rigorously enough.
If you take the model of a emergence ladder(1) e.g.:
energy > quarks > [..] > living cells > individual human beings > family > circle of friends > tribe > commune > [..] > nation > world
I believe there is often a conflict between the different levels of the human parts of the ladder. People often optimize outcomes for the group/level they identify with in the moment, even going so far to be wildly inconsistent in their different stances. (I would get headaches from the cognitive dissonances.)
I would call "lower level on the ladder"(2) particular interests a stance of particularism and "higher level on the ladder" a stance of universalism.
I believe it would be really worthwile to systematically "try to create systems that provide incentives for doing good things" over all levels of the ladder and try to minimize conflict between them.
Does this help with clarity?
(1) Can you say this in English? Sounds wrong.
(2) Not necessarily saying one is better, both are important.
"Does this help with clarity?"
Yes, vastly. I would avoid the LLM (i.e. copying its output directly into your writing) as much as possible. I imagine this is something particularly hard to get across to a non-fluent English speaker: why LLM-speak is so annoying to a lot of people. It may be following all the correct rules of grammar, but it just isn't how real people talk, when they're trying to be understood (as opposed to e.g. trying to sound superficially smart, or trying to pad out a word count) and it can be quite exhausting to read too much of. (I don't know if they write differently in other languages, or if this sort of writing is for some reason not annoying in some other languages).
Your point is much clearer to me now, and I'll need to think about what to say about it.
EDIT:
"Can you say this in English? Sounds wrong."
It sounds fine to me (except that you would say "an emergence ladder" not "a emergence ladder" since "emergence" begins with a vowel). Although I didn't know what you *meant* by "emergence ladder" until you gave the example.
In general, you should probably worry a lot less about not using words correctly. In English the meaning of a *lot* of words varies depending on the context. Giving concrete examples can make it clear what you mean, and that's what matters. Particularly online where native speakers use the wrong word for something frequently, often just by accident.
I also *think* (but don't quote me on this) that English has greater flexibility in sentence construction than most languages.
"I imagine this is something particularly hard to get across to a non-fluent English speaker: why LLM-speak is so annoying to a lot of people."
I believe it's a question of flavour. It's the same with other languages I know, but I genuinely thought it would be better to get across my points.
"except that you would say "an emergence ladder" not "a emergence ladder" since "emergence" begins with a vowel"
Ah, that was a typo.
My reading comprehension is quite good (Shakespeare and technical texts level), but I haven't had to express myself in English since forever.
"I also *think* (but don't quote me on this) that English has greater flexibility in sentence construction than most languages."
Not in word order (that is quite fixed), but in the ability to just pile and mash up stuff without regard of the other parts of the sentence? Matches my experience.
"Your point is much clearer to me now, and I'll need to think about what to say about it."
- Well, if you answer I will read it. :)
Especially if you know someone/somewhere already thinking in this direction.
> Algorithmically boost content demonstrating "philosophical virtues" - truth-seeking, intellectual humility, charitable interpretation
• Reward discourse following "philosopher rules" - citing sources, steel-manning opponents, updating beliefs when presented with evidence
• Make spreading misinformation or bad-faith arguing costly through reputation systems, maybe even internalizing those costs with something like a 'toxicity tax' analogous to carbon pricing
• Create positive feedback loops where constructive behavior increases reach and influence
All great ideas but the incentive for click bait is monetary gain, the more clicks or engagement the more advertising dollars. The only way around this - outside of laws - is if advertisers balked at paying for bad content. Which they sometimes do, for extreme content.
The trend is the opposite. Most of the advertising I get from on Instagram is snake oil.
This seems like it's about interests. For example, most reputable news sources aren't actually all that good sources of accurate information about the stuff they report on. Partly that's because getting at the truth in a short time frame is hard, but I think a lot more is about what the audience cares about. My sense is that a lot more people actually want to consume political coverage that reassures them that their side are the good guys and the other side are the bad guys[1] than a careful and fair evaluation of proposed policies or legislative / executive actions. And similarly, election coverage that reassures you your side is winning as it deserves to is quite a bit more popular than Nate Silver style reporting on the polling data and making their best effort at an accurate prediction. The media world looks just exactly like you'd expect, given those two truths.
[1] They're usually half right.
Thank you:)
I don't use Instagram, so I don't know what the experience must be like, but it sounds horrible.
But that's just my point. You could:
- Build systems from the ground up, so you have incentives for thruthful, honest, helpful content
- so that click baity stuff automatically gets a lower reach and less advertising revenue
- or even systems that do not depend (as much) on ad revenue
- build in fees for shitty/ bad/ harmful content
- Make laws that treat it like e.g. enviromental pollution, and try to internalize the externalized costs.
Hi everyone — thank you that you took the time to read!
This idea has been bouncing around in my head for a while, and I finally pushed myself to share a very early version of it.
I’d especially love:
– Critical feedback (on blind spots, implementation gaps, or philosophy errors)
– Pointers to adjacent work or thinkers
– Gut-checks: is this interesting? naive? useful? already solved?
I’d be grateful for any reaction — even just “you’re 10 years too late” or “here’s someone who said it better.” 😅
I think you can get into different equilibria wrt all kinds of social norms, and they can incentivize/disincentivize good behavior.
For example, societies where bribery is part of the normal way of doing business have a really hard time getting rid of it, because that's built into the whole system--the formal paycheck of various civil servants is not enough to live on without the bribes they're expected to collect, everyone knows you have to bribe people to get anything done so there are plenty of offers for a bribe for any corruptible officials, etc.
You can shift to an equilibrium where bribery is rare, and everything gets better. But that equilibrium is *hard* to shift.
Yes, metastable states in a dynamical system, with all the problems and nonlinearity that implies. Do you know if there are any tries to systematically build virtuous feedbackloop cycles into society/ policy/ tech design?
My own half-baked belief: Go look up the seven deadly sins. For each one, societies that channel the urges that lead to those sins in socially-positive directions do a lot better than ones that don't.
For example, your society can channel greed to make people offer useful goods and services in the market, lust to get people to form families and have kids, sloth to get people to invent clever ways to save labor, pride to motivate people to do good works to show off their virtue and ability to others, envy to strive harder to better themselves, gluttony to invent amazing new foods, drinks, and the like, wrath to motivate your society to mobilize against its enemies (the day after 9/11, lines form outside military recruiters), etc.
The trick in each of those cases is making sure the useful servant doesn't become a dreadful master--greed can motivate you to build useful things to get rich, but also can motivate you to rob banks to get rich. Lust can get you to be willing to put a ring on it to get the lady into bed, but will also encourage your interest in your next-door neighbor or sister-in-law. Pride can motivate you to show off your greatness, but also maybe to want to throw down anyone who threatens to outshine you. Gluttony can motivate you to invent amazing new foods or amazingly yummy junk food that can be sold very cheap. And so on.
I think there's a fair bit of economic thinking along these lines:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mechanism_design
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nudge_theory
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Race_to_the_bottom
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perverse_incentive
All these kind-of assume a utilitarian framework (since that's mostly what economics works with), but they're basically about how incentives can be structured to make individual actors work toward better ends for the whole group.
Scott Alexander's essay "Meditations on Moloch" plays a bit with the race to the bottom idea, but in a more intense way--basically you can have feedback loops where competition optimizes for something that makes you better at competing, but makes you worse in a lot of other ways. Having every online platform optimize for stickyness and engagement by maxing out fear and outrage is an example of this kind of phenomenon.
Another example of an argument along these lines:
I've seen the argument that you can see sexual ethics in society along these lines. In world #1, men can't get sex without a serious commitment, partly because being seen as a slut is very bad for women. In world #2, men can get a fair bit of casual sex without making a serious commitment, e.g., because nobody much cares that some girl slept around a lot in her 20s. Depending on what mens' and womens' distribution of preferences looks like, transitioning from World #1 to World #2 can be both:
a. An increase in freedom for women, who no longer get social sanction or worse for sleeping around.
b. A net decrease in well-being for women overall, if most women prefer committed relationships, but men are now less willing to sign up for that since they can get sex without it.
This makes some strong assumptions about womens' and mens' sexual preferences, but if those assumptions hold, you have this weird situation where increasing freedom for women makes women net worse off and men net better off.
We all know that a person's views on one political topic are a strong predictor of their views on another, even if it is completely unrelated on paper (e.g.: I'm pretty sure that if I know your views on trans issues, I can guess your views on Israel/Palestine; if I know your views on that, I can probably predict your views on abortion; etc).
It'd be fun to build a web app bringing this to life: it'd show users a series of binary choices, predicting their response based on their previous answers, and updating the probabilities every time someone answers. E.g.: 'Do you believe abortion should be legal? We're 65% sure you'll say YES'. Etc.
Anyone want to help build this? I imagine it'd take a competent engineer a few days max to vibe code :) We could then have a page showing how different questions predict responses to other ones, etc.
>it'd show users a series of _binary_ choices, predicting their response based on their previous answers
[emphasis added]
I'm not thrilled at this. Forcing the choices to be _binary_ artificially collapses the nuances in a user's views. If implemented, it probably wouldn't be widely enough used to exacerbate the very tribalism it is intended to measure, but, exacerbation _is_ the direction I would expect it to push.
>I'm pretty sure that if I know your views on trans issues, I can guess your views on Israel/Palestine; if I know your views on that, I can probably predict your views on abortion; etc
I'm a living counterexample to a lot of this, but I understand what you mean. People tend to cluster by cultural substrate, by subculture, and by partisan affinity. Although looking at online discourse tends to overstate this, as online forums are self selected and often suffer heavily from groupthink.
Maybe the person behind this has some data on how well different questions predict responses to others: https://mak-life.github.io/ChudWokeValues/
It definitely needs to be ternary choices. One of them should be "barely care".
I'm down for coding this. I expect the programming part to take ~a few hours of vibe-coding. I think the harder part is writing the pool of questions and the predicting algorithm. I'm willing to try a few ideas for it as I'm interested to see how well it works if it does. Sent you a DM.
I agree with you about how easy it is to predict where people stand on the full range of issues. So much so that I rarely spend any time listening to podcasts or reading articles on the typical social and political controversies. And I was once an incredibly voracious consumer of opinion across the political spectrum. I already know what every pundit is going to say about every issue, and it is rare that they provide me any insight on any of these issues. I check in with the news to see what factual things are happening, but opinion is almost worthless these days. I find a conversation with ChatGPT on any of these issues much more enlightening than listening to humans pontificate about them.
This is pretty interesting. I can code but I'm not an engineer (data scientist, ish).
I'd be down if there was a group of 3-5 people who wanted to spend a weekend searching around the various AI tools to see if this can be vibe coded reasonably quickly.
Another commenter says he can help code. Can you help with the predictive algorithm?
I think AI can be easily used to generate a bunch of questions on various topics
And also Scott could be asked to have a survey where people submit topics they'd find interesting to see cross predictions on, either the actual questions, or of the form 'i want to know how correlated political positions are, or if your spiritual beliefs inform your ideals about what type of marriage you would want to have, etc.'
I think it would be cool also to provide the user information of 'the three prior questions that informed our guess as to your answer to the next question are (), if you hadn't answered the question the way you did, these would be our default priors, and this is the population average for this question.
We could do a call sometime to discuss in detail what the purpose of this is, how the types of questions we ask gets determined, etc.
Yep sure can.
DMed you
I recently read someone who noted that a key difference between liberalsand conservatives is that a liberal will feed 100 people in fear that one will starve, and a conservative will refuse to feed 100 starving people in fear that one is undeserving. My point is that prediction is probably more accurate if you ask about basic principles.
Note also that similar apps already exist. https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/quiz/political-typology/
https://www.politicalcompass.org/
I would put it as "conservatives understand incentives, and know that if you set a precedent of taxing food away from people who work for it and giving it to randoms who beg for it, then pretty soon everyone will be begging and nobody will be working".
Based on my experience around conservatives, "undeserving" is a very lightheaded, blurry-eyed shorthand for "the gateway to nearly all 100 applying for free food, ensuring all the food is either bland government issue, or even nonexistent". In other words, conservatives are keenly aware of the real effort and skill required to produce the necessities of life, and are mostly worried about the ensuing incentives.
Which suggests that a questionnaire would get more accurate results by asking about things like incentives, than if it asks about (a particular type of) principles.
>"undeserving" is a very lightheaded, blurry-eyed shorthand for ""the gateway to nearly all 100 applying for free food, ensuring all the food is either bland government issue, or even nonexistent".
1. In the hypothetical, the 100 are almost all indeed starving.
2. Conservatives with a background in economics might think that way, but the rhetoric that has been applied by the Administration and allies re cuts to the social safety net and USAID -- and indeed the rhetoric that has been employed for decades -- is inconsistent with that interpretation of "undeserving."
> In the hypothetical, the 100 are almost all indeed starving.
It's not really a hypothetical, it's a directionally-true piece of hyperbole.
Conservatives are in fact more likely donate to charities that feed the needy, but less likely to support policies which would force the government to feed the needy.
I think this is highly outdated. It sounds like something from 2008. Today the strongest thing is IMHO liberals having trust in institutions and conservatives not.
Oh, come on. It is quite accurate today. Look at the rhetoric and voting around Medicaid, USAID, etc ad nauseum.
And note that I said a key difference, not the only key difference.
Which institutions? Immigration courts and ICE?
These don't do what I'm describing exactly. But same ballpark.
You are correct in general but
“I'm pretty sure that if I know your views on trans issues, I can guess your views on Israel/Palestine”
Is probably only true in the US. I mean it’s obviously not true in Islamic countries, but probably most of Europe, South America, Japan as well.
My criterion for intelligent people is they have views that are mixed, that would be considered right wing, and some left. That’s not all that common.
It would be interesting to map these things across countries, to get an idea of different positions are intrinsically downstream of ideology or whether they just happen to be tied together in certain countries through some kind of political coincidence.
For instance I as a right-winger would say that Israel-Palestine is intrinsically pretty heavily mapped to the left-right spectrum, because left-wingers have a reflexive tendency to support "oppressed groups" (ie whoever presents looking more pathetic with a better sob story) whereas conservatives tend to look at other things.
A left-winger would probably put that in slightly different terms but agree with the overall polarity.
My criterion for intelligent people would be that they are unsure about most political stuff. Because one thing ideologies are really good at is poking holes into each other.
That sounds like wisdom, not necessarily intelligence.
I think this is backwards. Figuring out how to structure society and what laws/policies to have is something where we usually don't know what we're doing so well, and yet very smart people often have *very confident* beliefs about the right things to do. Consider the intellectual heavyweights in many fields in the early-to-mid 20th century who were dedicated Marxists. Their proposals, when enacted, were nightmares. And yet, they were very smart and accomplished people who were very confident in those proposals.
But do you know why? Read Seeing Like A State. Interestingly, it was American businesses first who started de-emphasizing "business sense" and "tacit knowledge" and basically what previous generations of entrepreneurs held important, and started pushing scientific management. It was the period when American agribusinesses said agriculture is 90% engineering and 10% farming. So the Soviets figured the scientists and engineers might as well be employed by the state. Stalin was explicit about learning American scientific management. So it was a strange period of history in which even capitalism did not really understand the real reasons behind its success.
It was a very strangely confident period in general. All that belief in Progress. People tend to be more pessimistic today.
Tyler Cowen did a really great interview with (the late) Daniel Kahneman in which Kahneman made a really important point that I think of as the core lesson of _Thinking Fast and Slow_: The feeling of certainty is not all that strongly correlated with actually being right.
This applies to many things, including politics.
It's extremely rare in fact. That's why I want to build this.
It might be rare among people who discuss politics on the internet, but it’s quite common among the people I know personally.
Yeah there might a selection bias, in that the people who are the loudest are also the most tribal.
In which case it might be great to build it to show that real people are less tribal than we think, which would give people the courage to be more honest about their own opinions.
Me too
Is it really though? My impression is that it was pretty widely known that huge numbers of people *do* have mixed bags of positions, but those people are vastly less likely to be politically engaged. I may be wrong but I thought this was well demonstrated in polling etc.
Which itself could be explained by either of (a) people who become more politically engaged take on the beliefs they're "supposed" to (given the core ones they already hold) or (b) only the people with collections of beliefs similar to an existing political party are motivated to become politically engaged.
In the abstract, (b) seems much more likely I would think, but you seem to be assuming it's (a)?
I don’t think this idea is correct. In my experience people are much more complicated than this.
Well, if someone here agrees to help, we can bet on it :)
I’d be willing to wager 25¢, one quarter of one US dollar on this. :)
Not very confident then!
My maximum bet. Comes from years of betting on the Vikings to win the Superbowl.
Couldn't post to the Alpha Review directly (yet another intermittent Substack bug rendering commenting inoperable, it's amazing this platform works at all), but I was pleasantly surprised by a strong start out the gate for this year's Bookless Review Contest. Had been worried we'd see a repeat of last year's...quality level, or that it'd be weird/off-brand/whatever to not do books. Shouldn't have been concerned, it seems. Hoping to see other entrants meet and exceed the first bar! Though--hopefully with fewer emdashes and head-scratching concatenations!
(You know it's a good review when someone comments it was Way Too Long at _____ thousand words, and then think to yourself, but wait, I still wanted to read more detail...)
>(yet another intermittent Substack bug rendering commenting inoperable, it's amazing this platform works at all)
Yup! Lately it has been taking me multiple tries just to get comments displayed! Just clicking on the link does not suffice. I used to be able to trigger display by scrolling. That no longer works. Explicitly appending "/comments" to the address and trying a few times seems to work most of the time now...
>I was pleasantly surprised by a strong start out the gate for this year's Bookless Review Contest.
Agreed! I found the Alpha review a very interesting read.
Yeah, manually going to /comment works, as well as clicking the relevant button on the post notification emails (which is how I always funnel into Substack)...what's baffling is that it's on a blog-by-blog basis. ACX: sometimes have to manually load comments as above, still misses long-chained ones occasionally. Slow Boring: comments display fine, but currently can't see likes or write comments. DWATV: comments never broken, but subsection links rarely work and seems to be a frequent A/B target for the dumb scroll-down blog header overlay. FdB: comments randomly disabled entirely, can never tell if this is actually intentional or not.
Some amount of UX differentiation makes sense, but I wish they'd fix these meta-issues reliably and then not introduce exciting new ones on the regular. Never even bothered attempting to use the app because that's just a whole different nonsense.
Many Thanks!
>what's baffling is that it's on a blog-by-blog basis.
One rumor that I've read is that Substack was designed for much shorter comments sections, and has various strange bugs that show up in blogs like ACX with more comments. But it sounds like you have seen a broader range of _different_ buggy behaviors from Substack than just a single parameter variation could explain... Ouch!
>I wish they'd fix these meta-issues reliably and then not introduce exciting new ones on the regular.
Agreed!! I'm darkly curious about what their software testing process is...
My go-to joke for these sorts of situations is that they must outsource their QA to Valve...
I've heard that for ACX and it certainly seems plausible. Others have a fraction of the comments though, both in quantity and length, so that can't be the culprit across the board. Or, rather, one would expect to see the issues disappear on posts with few/no comments. Still persists even if I catch a fresh Yglesias take at 3AM though. Which is a real shame, since witching-hour comments are the only reliable way to get engagement there...
Many Thanks!
>My go-to joke for these sorts of situations is that they must outsource their QA to Valve...
( I'm unfamiliar with the quality of Valve's software. I take it they are infamous? )
>Or, rather, one would expect to see the issues disappear on posts with few/no comments. Still persists even if I catch a fresh Yglesias take at 3AM though
Ouch! I wonder if they've ever heard of regression tests...
The quality seems high as usual, based on reading the slush pile each year, not the popularity stakes winners and Scott-boosted entries in the finals. I was thinking of subscribing to some of the big name essay magazines a few years ago and then realized I enjoyed the ACX contest essays more (even the unfinished troll-y ones), plus I don't have the time to read the ACX entries as well as published reviews.
At least part of the quality problem last year was that Scott decided to try affirmative action to add variety. I don't remember whether he ever published a list of which reviews he artificially boosted, but several stuck out to me as being not the usual fare, and not the usual quality. I didn't realize he'd done this until after I'd read most of the finalists, but it explained a lot.
He did affirmative action on the non-nonfiction books. So, the fiction and poetry entries were boosted. I don't know by how much, though.
The thing that stuck out to me last year is the selection effect from who the voters were. In past years, Scott would make contest announcements (e.g. submit your review/vote for finalist/vote for the winner) in the top text of the Open Threads. Most ACX readers do not read the Open Threads every week. For the 2024 contest, he made separate, dedicated announcement posts for every stage of the contest, and so voting covered a wider swath of the readership.
That explains the complaints about excessive length. Lot of normies/tourists this year for sure.
More news from Milei's Argentina.
My friend lost a husband today, to pneumonia + some complications on the kidneys. The medical system collapsed enough that there weren't enough free doctors to do anything but keep him in an unheated room and do nothing, and paid doctors asked for the family's yearly wages, which they couldn't pay.
This sounds bad. I thought Milei has the brains to know this is not a good place for cost-cutting. Or not this way. Clearly, paid doctors need to be paid by insurance companies, not out of pocket.
Economically, Argentina lives in the same section of the global roster as Russia, Kazakhstan, Serbia and Turkmenistan, some 10 positions below Bulgaria, the poorest part of the EU. The next poorest EU member, Romania, is 50 per cent richer per capita than Argentina. And Romania is still pretty bad.
I wouldn't expect Argentina to support first world standards in healthcare, at least not sustainably so. It just does not have enough wealth for that.
Funny you mention Russia, because I migrated to Argentina from Russia, and that would be presposterous there. My Russian friends were all dumbfounded at the news and asked me how can it be that bad. Russian doctors dragged me from death's door at least once, for free.
Can every inhabitant of Russia say that the system worked for them as well as it did for you?
IIRC there are huge differences between, say, Sankt Petersburg and Chelyabinsk.
Ultimately, there is nothing like "free" healthcare - if it is free at the point of service, everyone pays for it through common insurance, and that common insurance can only represent a certain percentage of the nation's GDP. Which determines what medications are available and how serious the brain drain of good doctors into countries that offer them much better pay is.
Doctors won't move from Germany or the US to Argentina, but very much the other way round.
Russian healthcare system is pretty reliable for death door cases. The more serious your condition is, the more they will try, especially if this is urgent. I always thought that in US case prioritization is essentially done by insurance quality, and in Russia by severity and urgency. However, for non-urgent cases Russian healthcare is bad.
If you show up an a hospital with an emergency room with an urgent crisis (broken bone, heart attack, life-threatening allergic reaction), they'll treat you regardless of insurance. (They'll send you a bill with basically made-up numbers on it afterwards, but if you don't have any money they probably can't make you pay anything.)
But I don't know what happens if you are totally without insurance[1] and have cancer or something.
[1] We have government insurance for poor people, called Medicaid. For basically crazy politics/budgeting reasons, you can earn enough money that you are not elligible for this government insurance but still not be able to afford regular insurance. In general, the US has very good medicine bound to the most ass-backward, fraud-prone, wealth-destroying mechnisms possible to pay for it.
Yes. I still astounds me how much need there is to blame the problems caused by the old government on the new government, simply because the old government transparently made promises it could never keep, while the new government tries to get the economic downturn under control and generate the necessary affluence to support the welfare system.
My mistake, it was not today, I pre-wrote the comment when I got the news to post it in the next open thread, and now it won't let me edit it
Scott, you seem to write a lot about morality, but from what I gather you’re not a moral realist. You donated a kidney to a stranger which I deeply respect. I’d like to understand where all this comes from, intellectually. It seems you deeply believe something along the lines of utilitarianism; I’d like to understand how you see that mapping to truth. I can’t wrap my head around that - believing something enough to donate your own kidney to a story, but not thinking it’s real.
Can you please shed some light on your meta-ethical thinking framework?
Over a decade ago I read Scott's https://web.archive.org/web/20161115073538/http://raikoth.net/consequentialism.html, which persuaded me of consequentialist ethics. I'm not sure if Scott still endorses that essay, but you might be interested in checking it out if you haven't?
I read it and it seems naive. In particular, it seems to imagine that unintended consequences rarely happen and that people frequently imagine that they are going to produce a utopia, so it’s ok to get violent and murdery now. When asked, “won’t consequentialism lead to bad outcomes”, it just says, “no, because people don’t want bad things.” There is little consideration that people frequently are wrong in the consequences of their actions. When it dismisses “the ends justify the means” it ignores the reality that you don’t know how things end until after you have done them, and people frequently justify abhorrent means due to imagined ends.
I'll write something about this eventually, but the short answer is something like coherent extrapolated volition. I start with some moral commitments implanted by evolution or my upbringing or even what's minimally necessary to have a functioning society. Then I try to figure out where they lead and what they imply and how to prevent them from contradicting each other. This goes much further than you'd think, even with pretty basic moral commitments like "I shouldn't demand rights for myself that I would be unwilling to grant to others".
Sure, but how do you decide how far to go. Clearly that kidney stuff would be too far for me, because it would imply I must live a rigorously healthy lifestyle.
I imagine that would go very far indeed as long as one did the work to snuff out contradictions between differing sets of commitments or instincts. Looking forward to the article about it!
I guess I am one week late to the party of announcing my review, but I wrote the one on Sheldon Brown Bicycle Technical Info. I haven't really written anything for anyone in a really long time(ever?), so I thought it was a fun challenge. It was harder than I thought to write, especially sorting all the different ideas into something readable for others. I guess that’s a common experience with writing, but I regret not starting the process earlier.
Anyway, I haven't seen any mention of it in the comments, so curious to hear if anyone liked it or not.
I thought it was a solid, straightforward review. My Keep Notes document describes it as "Short and sweet. An actual review". I gave it an 8.
Thanks a lot, I appreciate your response. First feedback I got on it, so it is nice to know :)
Choose Your Frames Carefully — an essay on perception, maps, false dichotomies, and choosing your own games
I wrote an essay that explores how the frames we live inside — social, psychological, philosophical — shape what we think is possible. It draws from predictive processing, constructivist psychology, postmodernism, metamodernism, and throws in Edward Hopper, taco ads, Wittgenstein, and a woman I met in Norway who reminded me life could be lived differently.
Themes: reality tunnels, building your own map, infinite vs finite games, and the quiet power of saying “why not both?”
Would love thoughts from anyone interested in perception, meaning-making, or metamodernism. Happy to discuss.
https://velvetnoise.substack.com/p/theres-always-a-door
I have a number of interests that overlap with the piece you wrote. I think it’s well-written. I liked the tone, the numerous references to both philosophy and culture (both high and ‘low’) and the sense of possibilities that comes across.
I was however left wondering what the hook was supposed to be. I didn’t get the sense there was anything unique or particularly engaging here, though you could probably get there. You said you saw a new frame(s) when you left a job. Tell us more! Did you lose anything? If yes, what; if not, why not? What was gained, specifically? If your reader is going to try on ‘metamodernism’ how exactly might she get started? Any tips? The woman from Finland was interesting. Tell us more about her! I would read an entire essay about her, written in the frame you’ve laid out here. All that is just to say I thought it was good, but needs a little something extra to be really good or great.
(Also, small nitpick, the painting you have in the piece is of an American dinner, not a bar).