I started playing with AI-powered development. Installed VSCodium + Python + Continue extensions. Created a "hello world" project. Nice!
Then the AI billed me 44 cents for the help. That's... not a lot of money, but I kinda worry that if I keep doing this, the bills will grow. I know that I am working with a sci-fi level technology that many nerds would kill for ten years ago, but I am still a stingy Eastern European, and I keep thinking if I can get it cheaper. Am I making some obvious mistakes?
What seems obviously disproportional, is that in the chat mode, for $20 a month, I can keep talking as much as I want to. Ask the same question in the IDE, and it's $0.05-0.10 per question. So maybe I should talk to the web chat first, figure out what needs to be done, have the web chat prepare the task for me, and then copy the task to the IDE agent?
Also, the cost is "per token", so I wonder what it means in this context. Should I restart my chats regularly, because working in a chat with longer history is more expensive? I don't know how this works. Is it more expensive if I tell the agent to "do X in the program", and cheaper when I select the specific part of code where it should be done?
Like, at any specific moment, I have a chat open with a certain history, I have a project with a certain number of files, I have one file selected. Then I ask the agent to do something. I understand that if it needs to make a complex change in 20 files, it will be more expensive than making a simple change in one file. My question is, if it only requires a simple change in one file, like changing 10 lines, and the file happens to be open in the IDE, is the cost of this change fixed... or is it proportional to the length of current chat history, proportional to the total length of the file (even if most of it remains unchanged), or proportional to the total number of files in the project? If I need to make 5 changes, is it better to make 5 short requests, or 1 long request?
(The bright side is that I won't lose my programming skills so far, because I will always first spend a few seconds thinking whether I could write the code myself.)
EDIT:
Seems like paying is mostly proportional to how much text needs to be communicated to the server. So it is better to set up the project myself, split it into smaller clearly named files, and spend the credit on tasks. Instead of explaining verbally to the agent what needs to be done, it is better to add a TODO comment to the right place in the code. If the change only concerns one file, it is good to tell it to the agent explicitly.
"(...) most of the children in our survey said that they aren’t allowed to be out in public at all without an adult. Fewer than half of the 8- and 9-year-olds have gone down a grocery-store aisle alone; more than a quarter aren’t allowed to play unsupervised even in their own front yard."
Does anyone else think the GPT-5 presentation sucked both in style and substance? That the charts were hysterically bad? That Alt-man is potentially actually a complete fool?
Oh I’m certain he’s very, very smart. And IMO that’s a distinctly different quality from being wise. Also IMO you need both in great excess to successfully lead in high-stakes environments.
Went to check DSL (still occasionally hate-scroll there) for the first time in a bit and noticed it is down. Is that temporary, or did something more permanent happen?
I occasionally lurk there myself. I don't have the heart to call it hate-scrolling; perhaps more like misplaced nostalgia for a truly unique community taken over by a small group of particularly grouchy people. And even they occasionally cough up an interesting take.
EDIT: Removed idle speculation, since hey, it's back!
> ... I see people struggling to figure out the use cases for these.
That's where my question is coming from. I'm a software engineer and every team in my company is trying to figure out the roadmap for 2026, maybe 2027 in terms of features and capabilities.
A lot of it is focusing on AI so even infrastructure teams are thinking in terms of MCP servers or AI-based services that can eg. Read an incident postmortem and create alert that reduce mean time to detection, all automagically.
And for one, I'm not sure even frontier models are there yet, and two, we're thinking two years out based on the assumption that ai is cheaper than water in the water cooler. But what if we build all this stuff and the price switches to price per token and our automagic stuff suddenly becomes 10x-100x more expensive to run? Are we going to rehire all the engineers we just let go?
I expect the existence open models (mostly the latest Chinese ones) to keep the price of the closed models around where it is, ~one order of magnitude above the open ones.
My partner and I had planned to apply for the Asterisk AI blogging fellowship. He is a software engineer who is cautiously optimistic about GenAI while I am a sociolinguistics PhD concerned about the ideologies of language and knowledge perpetuated by LLMs and their marketing; our proposal was for an adversarial collaboration bridging our divergent perspectives. We notice the applications have now closed, but we were under the impression it was open until the 10th.
We are reaching out here to see if we can make something happen anyway, even if that is just asking for advice outside of the fellowship. Thank you!
On one side, we have models getting more efficient and cheaper to run and a massive build out of data center capacity which should drive costs down.
On the other hand, from my understanding, the current ai ecosystem subsists mainly on VC money.
Ideally, the cost would go down before VC money/interests runs out, ie. AI companies become profitable. This suggests a simple graph with two lines, one going up, one down, and crossing at some point in time.
But what do these lines are not straight? What if we hit a model efficiency wall that will take x years to solve? Or what if something happens and we see a drastic drop in VC funding? In each case the AI companies will be forced to increase pricing to match costs. If the price of chatgpt goes from $20/mo to $100/mo, how will that affect ai adoption?
Model Providers (OPENAI) -> Application Provider (ChaptGPT, or any other app that uses AI) -> Customers.
And will charge prices that make sense. Conversational AI is cool, But I am not sure how much value you get? But specific tools lie Cursor can charge much higher markups.
From the business side, as a buyer, it's not clear that frontier models make any economic sense currently, it's purely R&D.
Quick example from Microsoft's Azure AI foundry, using cost per million input tokens as a representation. (1)
GPT 4.5 is $75/million
o1 is $15/million
GPT 4.1 is $2/million
GPT 4.1 mini is $0.4/million
I can't think of many business problems that GPT 4.5 or o1 could solve that GPT 4.1 couldn't. Yeah, it's undoubtably better, it's just not ~40x the cost better.
At the same time, every AI lab could stop development tomorrow and we'd still be working for the next 20 years finding business use cases for the models that currently exist. Yeah, we need to figure out how to use GenAI for, like, reviewing resumes, that's a tough problem but an obvious one everyone wants to solve, we're going to be spending a ton on GenAI when we figure it out, and that's not dependent on future model improvements.
I dunno, everywhere I look I see people struggling to figure out the use cases for these. There's this back log of products, with no further model advancement required, that will transform the market over the next 20 years as soon as figure it out.
It's like the Internet, we know it will be transformative, we don't know if pets.com or Amazon will be the winner yet.
One can relatively simply adjust the compute cost by using smaller models. If the market will bear $x/month, then the market will get models for which running inference at scale costs below $x/month; and as the hardware gets more efficient in terms of $/compute, any task that's solvable by the current 2025 latest&greatest models will soon be solvable also for non-subsidized $20/month (or be run on users' devices).
Here's a question to enzymatic chemists. I recently learned about mechanochemistry. This is a way of inducing chemical reactions by mechanically smooshing two molecules together. It's widely used in industry. We didn't learn about this is college chemistry.
It immediately seemed to me that this must happen in enzymatic reactions. When I looked into it, though, the conventional consensus is that all enzymes use catalytic sites to lower activation energy. And indeed, essentially all enzymes have chemical active sites.
So, probably not?
Except, there is apparently a mystery in enzymatic chemistry in that the enzymes work much faster than we would calculate, based on lowering of activation energy. There is a "missing" factor. It's not satisfactorily explained.
As a biologist, it seems highly unlikely that Mother Nature would not have taken advantage of mechanical force in accelerating enzymatic reactions. Protein are very good at precise conformational changes, and many of them are mainly machines for changing chemical to mechanical energy and vice-versa... but this is outside my field so I'm just speculating here.
How well-accounted-for is the ATP budget of normal cell operation? If enzymes are routinely using mechanical energy to accelerate reactions, the chemical energy needed to generate that mechanical energy needs to come from somewhere.
Also, would we recognize structures within an enzyme for turning chemical energy into mechanical energy?
It doesn't look very efficient way of doing things. Similar is the electrostatic devices for fusion. They do produce neutrons but as the efficiency is very low, you can't use these devices to generate electricity.
I'm trying to track down an anecdote that I think might have been by Kurt Vonnegut, but I can't find any record of it anywhere.
The story goes something like this. There was a sign in a toilet that said "Please do not piss on the seat", and people generally didn't piss on the seat. Then someone replaced it with a sign that said "Please do not piss on the seat -- THE MGMT" and all of a sudden people were pissing on the seat out of spite.
It reminds me of a story told by G. Gordon Liddy, of how he allegedly preserved his virtue while in prison by gaining access to clerical supplies and forging an official memo denoting one of the toilet stalls as "VD ONLY". The other inmates avoided the stall, and after he used it freely, avoided him as well.
That sounds like Markoff Chaney's storyline from Illuminatus Trilogy. Chaney's hobby is maliciously replacing or inserting rules signs. His signs are specifically calculated to be plausible enough to be assumed legitimate and allowed to remain in place, but phrased in an infuriating way that causes chaos and undermines respect for authority.
One example I remember is Chaney replacing a sign in an upscale establishment that says "No Smoking --THE MGT" with a new one that says "No Smoking or Spitting --THE MGT". The establishment's posh customers find the suggestion that they need to be cautioned against spitting to be infuriating and the establishment's business falls off significantly.
Chaney's habit of specifically and consistently signing his rules "THE MGT" is significant as a sort of "technically correct is the best kind of correct" honesty. Chaney is a Little Person and is attributing his rules accurately to himself as "the midget" rather than dishonestly to "the management".
That must be exactly it, thank you. I'd misremembered some of the details but that's definitely the story.
I've never read the Illuminatus Trilogy, I've tried, but all the good bits that people tell me are hidden in there somewhere seem to be hidden in a lot of boring stuff.
The ire about Tea is that men are afraid women are dating a small number of hyper-attractive cads, a secret club of aristoi. Because 1) 5 ratings imply 50 dates because that is how e.g. rating restaurants works: few even bother to rate 2) only hyper-attractive cads would even try to pull shit like cheating on the GFs. Most men cannot even find someone to cheat with.
it's a more comprehensive fear that everything sprouts from, and it's something I wrestle with at times myself. Summing up:
The fear is women don't really like us, they only like the things we give them: attention, wealth, children, and status. The Tea app is how they really view us, and as women's lot in life improves, they want more to the point of choosing to be a fling for a chad than a wife to someone else.
if it were a story, the man is a vampire hunter who wants to save a pretty girl from Dracula, but she'd much rather Dracula save her from you.
its a very hard belief to deal with and incels deal with it by trying to be more like Dracula, only to fall in despair because they can never be. For me it's moot because i'm too weird, old and a bit crazy to date. So guys like me at my age wind up being there for our parents or family.
i'm worried because there are two kinds of misogyny: women are used to the kind which comes from men wanting them very much, but there is a worse kind which comes from not liking them at all, which can evolve from this.
not sure what the solution to that fear is. feel like society overcorrected from the manic pixie dream girl to the werewolf alpha but without much criticism of it.
"The Tea app is how they really view us, and as women's lot in life improves, they want more to the point of choosing to be a fling for a chad than a wife to someone else."
Many men would like that too, it is just that perceptions of attractiveness are not balanced, so they will never get it. For many, many men having a wife and being utterly monogamous is a huge compromise they take only because they cannot be the hyper-attractive chad.
"if it were a story, the man is a vampire hunter who wants to save a pretty girl from Dracula, but she'd much rather Dracula save her from you."
Kind of yes, but not because Dracula is evil, but because he is an aristocrat.
"For many, many men having a wife and being utterly monogamous is a huge compromise they take only because they cannot be the hyper-attractive chad."
That's a really, really dumb compromise to make. I cannot think of a better way to ruin your life than to marry someone you don't actually want to be married to.
If what you actually want is regular, varied sex, stop wasting time any money on dating and pursue a lucrative career. Then budget in as many escorts or brothel visits as you can afford[1].
If it's mostly about status instead, then ditch the brothel and just pursue a high-status career. Or work in your spare time to become a successful influencer or artist. Or go into politics.
One of the great things about the liberalization of Western society in the past 50 years or so is that people are not nearly as rigidly locked into the same life patterns and schema as they used to be. If the default, middle class office job, marriage and kids and white picket fence lifestyle doesn't work for you, you can just *go do something else.*
[1] and move to somewhere those are legal if you need to.
This is totally not how it works. Sex with prostitutes is very unsatisfying. If people just wanted pleasure, they would just masturbate. When having sex with someone, they want connection. Also the trophy, bragging rights, notches thing.
i don't think that belief endures: yeah animal spirits can cause it, but a lot of male fantasy is romantic in that they end up with one girl who is crazy about them. It's gotten worse recently though. But Keiichi and Belldandy are still a norm. Just the past would acknowledge the animal spirits but by doing so dispel them. Its fun to be fought over but in the end only one is for you. Being a manwhore is not always sonething guys like either
i don't know if aristocrats is the word. Bestial power, wealth, and vitality more. Navy Seals, but it'd be nice if he was a werewolf. or a werewolf FBI agent. Or amish werewolf. Working in a bookstore and thinking "hey, i should try and learn about romance to be aware of books for my female patrons" led to some pretty hilarious realizations.
I think the "alpha werewolf animal spirit" is a classic Manosphere fantasy that is more about their own desire for safety than about women.
No, imagine bunch of rich parents going on vacation and their 20 years old son throwing a big party in the big house. Every guy is rich, which means the following. Not having to work, they spend a lot of time socializing, partying so great social skills. Great clothes. They hire personal trainers and dieticians, so they are fit and athletic. As their rich male ancestors kept marrying pretty women, they inherited a handsome face. Like imagine young Bruce Wayne throwing a party.
They are not animalistic-powerful at all. They are simply just perfect in everything that is attractive.
I've very vaguely heard about this and I don't know what exactly was going on, but the idea was a site where you could talk about the guy you dated to find out if he was a creep/cheater/otherwise bad?
E.g. "I'm dating Joe/hang on, I'm dating Joe too!/Me as well!" and you all find out Joe has a string of women he casually dates while letting them think they're his sole girlfriend?
This isn't just the cream of the crop guys pulling stuff like this, a lot of low-class/low-value guys do it too. It's just that the low-value women dating them don't bother with websites like Tea, they get into hair-pulling fights with 'that bitch cheating with my man' outside the pub.
I’m not 100% sure what you’re getting at here… you’re saying only the “aristoi” will be the ones rated, so the rest of men are jealous of this and therefore are mad about Tea?
I think most men actually do date multiple girls in their lives, probably have one or two bad breakups from those (by nature of breakups), and are not looking forward to negative reviews they may receive, hence the ire…
Even worse, you may receive a *false* review, maybe even a false review from a person you *didn't* date (because how could the app verify that?).
A perfect tool for revenge or blackmail, if women will believe the reviews.
And a useless tool if women won't believe the reviews just because the guy says "oh, that's written by some crazy lady I didn't even date", because that's what all the worst guys will say.
"you’re saying only the “aristoi” will be the ones rated, so the rest of men are jealous of this and therefore are mad about Tea?"
Yes. 5000 people go to a restaurant per month, 1 bothers to rate them. If 1 person per three months would go to a restaurant, no one would develop a rating system, because it would stay empty. Rating systems imply large numbers, because few bother to rate. See also ratemyprofessor.
Look at the average city, how many restaurants, say 100? And everybody goes into one of that 100. So the whole thing feels like every woman wants to fuck the same 100 guys.
And the thing is, we sometimes guess this on our own. If you ever make a rich friend when you are young, you see it. Young rich men organize huge parties, invite their friends, their friends are rich, athletic, even handsome and have stellar social skills. Women flock to them absolutely. The "secret dating club" is real, and this just drives it home.
"Yes. 5000 people go to a restaurant per month, 1 bothers to rate them. If 1 person per three months would go to a restaurant, no one would develop a rating system, because it would stay empty. Rating systems imply large numbers, because few bother to rate."
This comparison ignores what I would assume to be some pretty crucial factors that differ between restaurants and relationships.
-First, it takes at most an hour or two to eat at a restaurant. Meanwhile dating and relationships last far longer. The ratio of "time and effort spend doing the thing" vs "time and effort spent leaving the review" is very different.
-Second, people tend to feel much more strongly (positively and negatively) about relationships. I've had good restaurant experiences, I've had bad restaurant experiences, but I've had very few in either category so moving as to feel worth leaving my thoughts on. Not so with relationships.
For both of these reasons I would expect the fraction of people leaving reviews in this case to be far higher. That being said, I would expect it to disproportionately skew towards negative reviews, both because the people who produce strong positive emotions with no downside will tend to *stay* in those relationships, and because spite seems like a pretty powerful motivator for things like this. So I would predict that who gets a lot of ratings to be somewhat skewed towards who gets a lot of dates, but also pretty heavily skewed towards who creates a lot of bad experiences. Which is the point.
First and least, I think this still holds for most hookups and booty calls. Pretty much the only context in which the first point wouldn't be true is if two strangers meet and fuck and part all in the space of an hour or two. And that certainly *happens.* But, like...surely you realize that those interactions are relatively rare, right? Even most of the people who go around having lots of casual sex are not seeking out brand new partners every time.[1]
But second (and far more importantly), why on Earth would this be a PROBLEM in those cases? Quite the contrary, for any man who likes casual hookups with strangers *and isn't a predator*, this should surely be a good thing.
Let's just go ahead and grant the premise that *by default* only a small fraction of women will review guys they have casual, short-term interactions with (dating, sex or both). In which of these circumstances do you think a woman is *more* likely to leave a review?
1. She meets a nice guy, has a pleasant time with him, and they part ways.
2. She meets a pushy manchild who doesn't want to take no for an answer, and she has to make up an excuse to get the hell out because she's worried for her safety.[2]
I would hope it's painfully obvious that more women will leave reviews in the second case. Both because anger is pretty motivating, and because lots of women feel a responsibility to their community to *warn others* about that sort of behavior.
On the flip side, if a guy is getting enough action--while leaving behind satisfied partners--to show up on such a site, I can't really imagine positive reviews will *matter* much to him. He's already getting lots of action: the limiting factor is more likely to be his schedule than his ability to get dates. But you know who's really, *really* harmed by getting reviewed on a site like that? All the creeps, assholes, douchbags and outright predators that keep moving on to new partners to outrun their reputations. The people leaving a trial of angry, scared and creeped-out women behind them. If women start warning each other, those assholes are going to have a *much harder time* getting close to anyone.[3]
And that should be great news for any guy who *isn't* one of Those Assholes. Like seriously, how is that not obvious? Like, even if some guy didn't care about women's safety for its own sake at all[4], he now has less competition for dates and that dating pool is going to get generally a lot friendlier. Pointing at footnote[2] again, concern for their safety has a *huge fucking influence* on women's dating behavior. Any man who doesn't know that has either dated very, very little or been very, very determined to learn nothing whatsoever about the opposite gender while he does. An environment in which women have to worry *less* about their safety is an environment in which they're *more* willing to take chances on going out with strange men, and thus an environment in which its easier *for men* to find women who're interested in them.
[1] TBH, I think if you wanted to make that point, "first dates with no follow up" would have a rather larger footprint. In fact, plenty of the meet-fuck-part interactions happen within the context of first dates, but also lots and lots of people go on first dates without having sex, especially if their partner doesn't turn out to be second-date material. Regardless, I still don't think it impacts the main point
[2]Anyone who's spent any amount of time in spaces where women talk candidly about their experiences is aware how *distressingly common* this second type of interaction is. In fact, even those who haven't spent any time in those spaces *should* be aware by now: there was, after all, a national movement no too long ago around women sharing exactly this sort of experience. But some people did seem determined to stick their fingers in their ears at around that time, so...
“But second (and far more importantly), why on Earth would this be a PROBLEM in those cases? Quite the contrary, for any man who likes casual hookups with strangers and isn't a predator, this should surely be a good thing.”
Likes does not imply CAN GET. The whole system drives home the painful message that other guys get 50 hookups while you get zero to one. It drives home the basic inequality of the whole dating scene.
Which we have suspected anyway. My basic feeling through college was that there are two dating scenes. One is random men approaching random women. This was the “official” one. The other which I have strongly suspected that there is a “secret club” of a small number of men and a large number of women, except one would not know who is the member. So you approach a random woman, you don’t know she is in the club, you already lost because you are not in the club.
The amount of nagging I get off websites to "just leave a review!" after I purchase something is annoying, and persistent nagging makes me want to leave a negative review, just because.
Depending what the actual purpose of Tea is, it could be (1) a warning system about bad dates or (2) it has now developed into a rating system.
I still don't quite get your point: only the best guys will get rated? Well, yeah? And so that means all these women are chasing the few great guys?
Men rate women too, and probably only want to date the best ones, which are not going to be the mass of the women available. Though men do seem to have looser standards about "look, she's got a pulse and more importantly a great rack, I'm not looking for forever, just for tonight" 😁
>I still don't quite get your point: only the best guys will get rated? Well, yeah? And so that means all these women are chasing the few great guys?
Not "great". Popular. The point is precisely that, *even by the standards of women themselves* the popular men are not necessarily any good at all. Only popular men get rated and only bad ones make the ratings useful
>Men rate women too, and probably only want to date the best ones, which are not going to be the mass of the women available.
There is no equivalent app for men as far as I know. I've read several times that alternatives get taken off the app store but can't verify it at all
> There is no equivalent app for men as far as I know.
Now that I imagined myself in the role of a user, a new puzzle appears: Why would I even *want* to rate my ex? What's in it for me? That seems like a critical question, because if no one will bother to write reviews, there will be no reviews to read even if users wanted to.
One plausible motivation is revenge. It was a bad breakup, now I want to hurt my ex in some way, and writing a negative review is an option. Notice that this does *not* incentivize me to tell the truth.
Another plausible motivation is bragging. The review is not about the woman per se, it's just to tell the other guys: "I fucked this woman". Again, not exactly an incentive to tell the truth.
Finally, suppose it was a friendly breakup, and my ex asked me to write something nice about her. Again, no incentive to tell the truth. Notice that the woman can also ask her male friends she *didn't* date to write something nice about her.
Seems like the application would rely on men being naturally honest (at least in the limited sense like journalists are honest) and writing reviews either because they can't resist talking about their adventures, or because of a felt obligation to reciprocate information. Dunno, maybe this could work? But I would still expect at least 10% reviews to be dishonest. Maybe the authors of the app wouldn't care, because it is profitable either way? That is, until the libel lawsuits start coming...
> Along with its security flaws, the content portrayed within TeaOnHer is troubling in itself. While the app requests IDs and selfies from its users to verify their identities — a process that is not automatic — users can access a “guest” view of the app without signing in.
>Immediately upon opening “guest” view, TechCrunch saw several images of the same naked woman, posted under different names in a form of spam. It is not clear if this woman consented to this photo being shared. Other posts share the photos and names of women, alongside comments calling them “easy,” or accusing them of spreading sexually transmitted infections.
i think he means that Tea is proving the red pill right; for a review system to work, it can't just be "rate a lot of guys but with only 1-2 reviews per guy." The most popular guys would dominate the listings and review counts, either with past dates or prospective future ones, indicating women really chase after the same guys.
The red pill being right is an extremely bad thing: tbh i'm a bit worried people don't get that it needs to be pushed back more because it influences a lot of things.
"i think he means that Tea is proving the red pill right"
The red pill is constantly proving itself "right," because all that it actually contains is a toxic mixture of projection, confirmation bias and self-fulfilling prophecy. If you repeatedly smack your head into a wall, your predictions of future head pain will have absolutely stunning accuracy, but that's a fact about society not a fact about you.
Men who regard dating as transactional and approach it with that mindset will make themselves much more likely to encounter women who view it the same, even if those women are a small subset of the population. A man whose only interest in a women is what he can get from her will "mysteriously" discover that all the women who give him the time of day are only interested in what they can get from him. Men who see human connections as a game or a competition to be won will score everything they see through the rules they made up for it, and miss everything that doesn't fit the framework.
There is, of course, a very simple, very effective, very long-standing solution available for men who actually *want* access to an efficient, transactional, stripped-down[1] version of dating. It's called "prostitution." But red-pillers generally seem to disdain it, and have long politically aligned themselves with forces that want it to be illegal--almost as if their motivations are different from what they say.
Ah, I think I understand your perspective. If one assumes that all women will use this app, then it becomes an "app to review men".
But if we go with (more realistic) assumption that 30% or maybe just 10% of women will know about this app... and 30% or maybe just 10% of them will actively use it... then it de facto becomes an app to review "men who have dozens or hundreds of partners", regardless of how it is advertised.
Though I miss the part why someone should be *afraid* of the app. Among the red-pilled guys, the existence of the few lucky men is not a secret, and the rest of men will simply stay in denial... after all, the app is not for them, so they won't be exposed to the data on a regular basis.
Sounds like something that could be tested empirically.
Makes photos of attractive men, let women rate them so that you find pairs or men that are equally attractive.
Now make an experiment where you let women choose between two fictional profiles. One has a photo and no reviews, another has a photo and twenty negative reviews. Which one would women choose?
Possible rationalization: Women may choose the guy with 20 reviews saying that the bad you know is better than the unknown, which is potentially worse. (Maybe the other guy is a serial killer, and none of his dates survived, which is why he has zero reviews.)
So another experiment would have one man with two positive reviews, and another man with twenty negative reviews.
Yeah, I think the fear is more "my crazy ex is going to go on this and badmouth me so that I haven't a chance to ever find another woman again, they all believe her and think I'm too horrible to date" rather than "curses, Chad strikes again, this is why I haven't had a date in six months!"
Hey, utilitarians! What do you think about the idea that it follows from your viewpoint that what is morally permissible must be sometimes reasoned back from what works predictably?
Like if Hamas would have achieved free Palestine with the Oct 7 terror attack, one could make a utilitarian case it was permissible. But they achieved nothing at all, only even worse things for Palestine, so it was not.
But when you adopt this line of thinking, there are some issues. Most people think harm by mistake and harm by evil intention are very different things, stupidity is not as bad as evil, but in this case it is not so. A stupid misprediction - like how Hamas did not consider that during WW2 terrorizing civilians achieved nothing - is basically the same as moral evil.
In fact you must adopt the position that stupidity can be worse than evil. Imagine long-term evil, like wanting that my dynasty should do well in 100 years and not having any moral qualms. Still understand that in the long run it is better to make allies by being fair than making enemies, understanding that harming people will make them want to harm my dynasty, generally understanding that truly long-term self-interest generally implies treating people decently and making them loyal that way, and so on. It can be easily less bad than large-scale mistakes / stupidity.
So you can easily end up with a virtue system where intelligence comes first, good intentions second, and that is simply not how morality as such is usually understood, it is a very "alien" morality.
This is not exactly a utilitarian perspective, though. It's something closer to 'manifest justification.'
A lot of ancient Greek myth and worldview is wrapped up in this mode of understanding. Essentially, the outcome determines the rightness of the action - not on the basis of justifying the means, but because of self-evident truth. Actaeon was turned into a stag by Artemis and torn apart by his hounds not because of his intention, but because of his action. Intention is entirely secondary to being, wanting to happening. This does not mean that the right path is always unknowable. In fact, the correct course of action (to the gods, in an ethic sense, etc.) is often laden with the burdens of context and necessity. Per Bernard Williams (on Oedipus): "we know that in the story of one’s life there is an authority exercised by what one has done, and not merely by what one has intentionally done." It's also the reason that Thucydides' account of the destruction of Melos is totally believable. Your example is very much like the arguments the Melian delegation put forward, and you can read up about what happened to them...
Utilitarianism seems to me at odds with agency, and a non-agent ethical view was not the attitude of the Greeks. So your question seems to lie outside the scope of utilitarian philosophy.
This strikes me as the worldview of people who were rather primitive and cruel, like "no matter not your fault, I will still punish you for it". Only someone with very low empathy would pull the Artemis thing.
I actually remember that I was getting these vibes when reading Islamic or Indian history and found them rather scary. Like you were not even trying to offend the king he was in bad mood so he interpreted it as offense and kills you.
This was in my childhood and I had a strong fear based feeling that the greatest part of our culture is that grew beyond wanton cruelty, we are cruel when it is justified.
On the plus side, people with such a worldview have a great sense of the tragic.
And that is good, because nature itself is of course cruel, and will punish you for things not your fault. A tragic worldview does understand nature. It is just that I think cultured people are much better than nature, or ought to be.
I mean they were like sacrificing ugly people (pharmakos), so really a cruel culture.
But how does utilitarianism is at odds with agency?
The ancient Greeks were far from primitive. They had a very sophisticated understanding of the human condition, to the extent that every Western moral philosophy (including Utilitarianism) can find its roots in Greek thought. They also had much higher levels of genius, on average, than any modern population.
The pharmakoi were generally not executed, but exiled. And you are misunderstanding or missing the ritualistic and religious reasons for those exiles. It's not enough to dismiss ancient Greek culture as "cruel" and suppose that you therefore can learn nothing of ethics from the very people who invented ethics in the first place.
Utilitarianism requires one to give up oneself as the foundation of a moral framework - to give thought to consequences for all. But not following one's own individual perspective results in a loss of moral agency. Bernard Williams put forth a problem where you have to kill one person to save twenty. In the absence of utilitarian thought, you would hesitate to kill the one, and therefore letting twenty people die is the correct choice. We cannot distance ourselves from our sentiments (per Hume), our emotions, which are the source of moral behaviour, and from which utilitarianism alienates us.
Without moral agency, the ability to act on one's own conscience, one is heteronomous - a subjective personality, and therefore not a full person. Applying a utilitarian perspective tasks us with considerations which affect our moral agency.
My impression is that we can be as atheist as we want to, our modern morality was still invented by Christianity and pre-Christian morality is very strange. For example, I remember reading Plato's Republic, and quite surprised that he considers it normal that the polis will have wars with other polises. So I see no effort put towards avoiding war via diplomacy, or the idea that war is a bad thing and should only be waged if it is both unavoidable and just.
Compare this with Christian Just War Theory, that includes elements that even if you are suffering injustice, if going war to fix it would result in more suffering, don't.
Also Athenian democracy had no concept of rights, they would vote to execute a general for losing a battle. Our concept of rights is Roman in origin.
What you say about agency is I would roughly agree with, but I am not sure agency is the right word: an agent can choose to be self-sacrificing. I have a differently worded, but similar view. Basically if every person has the same value, that includes you, so it allows some selfishness, not only in the sense of self-interest, but also it allows helping people you love more than random people.
A second part is, and that is what is strange abut u. is that they do not think enough about long-term outcomes, what if the kid you save from malaria in Malawi turns out to be Baby Hitler? Helping people you actually know reduces this chance.
Also the person you know best is you. If you are sure you would not abuse power, it is better if you get power than if someone else gets it. This allows even more selfishness.
When we take these into consideration, we get what I would call the basic intuitive morality most people run. It is okay to focus on your self-interest, you should also help others, but it should mostly be friends, or the local orphanage down the street, where you can pop in and check whether the money is well spent.
There is some level on which morality is about good intentions, and some level where it requires good judgment. For example, if a conspiracy nut thought that the President was a robot spy for evil aliens, he might try to kill the President. On his own worldview, this is fine - there's nothing morally wrong with destroying an evil robot, and it's praiseworthy to save your country from alien takeover. I think the best way to describe this is "this person might have in some sense had good intentions, but their judgment was so bad that they acted immorally, by committing murder".
I think the solution to this is that some combination of tradition, philosophers, other wise and respected people in society, and you-when-you're-thinking-most-clearly work to create moral rules, with strong effort to err on the side of caution. Then people try to use their judgment to interpret those moral rules as best they can. The moral rules are designed so that even if you have terrible judgment, you can't do too much harm. If someone has such beyond-terrible judgment that they can't even follow the moral rules correctly, then fine, they're not-guilty-by-reason-of-insanity and should probably be in a psych hospital or something.
I think of utilitarianism as a theory of what we're doing when we're making those moral rules, not as an alternative to making them.
Is there any meaningful distinction between rule utilitarianism and deontology, then?
Rule utilitarianism: obey these simple heuristics because we think if obeyed consistently they'll tend to result in something approximating the greatest good
Deontology: obey these simple heuristics, because you're obliged to
Virtue ethics: obey these simple heuristics, because they are virtuous and being virtuous is good
The simple heuristics might be exactly the same, only the justification has changed. And if you ask the deontologist or the virtue ethicist whether their rules, if obeyed consistently, will lead to the greatest good then they'll say yes.
So I'm not sure what anyone is arguing about any more. Let's come up with some reasonable heuristics followable by mortals that, if followed consistently, will lead to generally good outcomes, and call it a day.
I think some people, eg Derek Parfit, exactly thought that all three moral systems would converge.
But obviously, one difference might be which rules we follow, and what justifications we accept for following rules: utilitarians will look at a rule that seems to consistently generate bad outcomes and say, "we should get rid of this rule", but deontologists and virtue ethicists might not agree, *even if they agree on the consequences of the rule*.
This is great, and thank you, but somehow does not answer my concerns, likely because I did not word them clearly. I will try different.
When you talk about designing rules, you are not thinking about morality or ethics like how most people do. They play the "who is the asshole?" game. They are trying to categorize people as good people or bad people. I think it is because morality did not evolve out of a largely unselfish "what should I do?" question, but a largely selfish "how to detect people who are dangerous to me?" question. This is why people like "policing" others so much. Altruism is basically just being the person who is the least likely to be policed. Who makes a lot of allies through exceptionally good behaviour.
So what does then give us, if we think rule centric? Rule-followers are good people, rule-breakers are bad people? No, there are always exceptional situations where the rules do not apply. The ethical philosophy of your entire subculture came from recognizing that the usual rules won't work well for a superintelligent AI. We are not used to that kind of "what to do with infinite power and no intuitions?" thinking.
This all leads to confusing places. How long-term self-interest without moral qualms can result in good enough behaviour and outcomes, because making allies through good behaviour. This means the usual human approach to morality as judging character does not correlate much with utilitarian outcome-orientedness. But also if you use rule utilitarianism, even that does not work much for judging character, as rules can be gamed. You know how if a good measure becomes a target, it becomes a bad measure.
What I am trying to say this sort of thinking is very, very disconnected from what mostly other people do, like playing the who-is-the-asshole game.
Look at US politics right now, Reddit is all over the Epstein list. Utilitarians would focus on MediCare cuts or suchlike. But that is just not how most people approach morality. They don't care that much about someone they don't even know not getting insulin. Trying to prove that someone they really dislike is an evil pedo is far, far more interesting. Even though the total harm of that was likely less than all those people dying because of not getting insulin. Harm-calculus does not work well with the intuitive, instinctive "who is the asshole?" game. Someone who just raped one child is totally obviously an asshole, someone who changes super complicated rules about healthcare financing is not so obviously so.
This is how it usually works, seen this before. Look at everything Margaret Thatcher did and try some harm (and help) calculus. You will quickly find that cancelling milk for schoolchildren was probably not that important, even poor families can afford milk. Yet everybody remembers that, because that was just such an obviously asshole move. Terrible optics, basically.
Anyhow maybe what I am trying to say is if you want to sell utilitarianism, you have to somehow recast it in "who is the asshole?" terms. And this seems very hard, likely not possible.
It sounds like you've moved from a philosophical question to a PR question. I have no opinion on PR questions, don't consider myself an expert in how to give things good PR, and don't consider PR very hard when trying to figure out my own moral opinions.
I do think rule utilitarianism can easily say that certain rule-breakers are bad people, and condemn them for about the same reason that everyone else does.
I think it's just a fact of life that "who is the morally worse person" is a different question from "whose actions caused the most harm". A health bureaucrat who very slightly bungled COVID testing might have caused a thousand deaths, whereas even the worst serial killers only kill a few dozen people. I think it's still easy to say the serial killer is a more evil person (in the sense that I would be less interested in being his friend, and more interested in seeing him punished), and the health bureaucrat probably just made one mistake one time, or is bad at health bureaucracy but potentially still very nice, or maybe has minor vices like not putting enough care into his work (which are still less bad than serial killing).
I don't think this causes any paradoxes. If you are police, you should arrest the serial killer. If you are some sort of charitable foundation trying to figure out how to maximize lives saved, you should spend your money on improving health policy rather than on increasing serial killer detection rates. For any other person you might be, there's probably one or the other issue which it's your duty to focus on.
OK. While I have your attention - to me weirdest rationalist idea is that unreliable or made-up numbers are better than no numbers. Yes, it is related to the topic as utilitarianism usually requires made-up numbers. (Bayesianism, too.)
But reasoning with made up numbers makes it look like science. This gives readers a high confidence that it is surely true, and it might mislead them. Reasoning with words makes it clear it is just an opinion, so people do not trust it too much.
Sometimes I wonder whether number-lovers like you do not understand a very basic thing. Maybe if you work with numbers much, you are not too impressed by numbers, or science, or science looking things, because you know how often they are wrong. Lord Kelvin, certainly a great scientist, considered his highest achievement determining the Sun's age: thirty thousand years. You are maybe used to that kind of mistakes.
But a literary type, like me, sees a graph or numbers and immediately becomes utterly convinced that it must be 100% right. It looks to us like Einstein's awesome proof of E=mc2. Because we understand neither. Because our bias is that we heard of the huge achievements that were made that way, like this example. We did not hear much about the failures. (Like how Einstein's Entwurf, the first draft of general relativitiy, was entirely wrong and he regretted publishing it all his life. I just heard about this recently. I never assumed Einstein can make mistakes.)
So numbers for us are a dark art. Someone can up with a bunch of graphs completely made up, and then we believe it with 99% confidence. This maybe should not be done.
"imperfect information still beats zero information"
You can just have imperfect information in words, and that is better because words LOOK imperfect, words imply it is just an opinion, while numbers - to us - look perfect. You can just simply have an opinion if you lack reliable information. You can see I observed this, and observed that, and that is how I think they are logically related.
Utilitarianism, in fact, Bayesianism looks like a method to solve a problem entirely on your own. It is not necessary. You can just contribute ideas to the social hivemind, and the social hivemind will eventually figure it out.
This is what "common sense" means, sensus communis, the sense of the community. When people say playing with rattlesnakes is a not a good idea, and that is common sense, that simply means the social hivemind got a lot of anecdata level input about that, and came to a conclusion. This is not done alone.
To put things more formally, really I want a giant firewall between STEM vs. humanities, philosophy and even some of the social sciences. STEM is reliable, those are not, let's not make them look reliable by engaging in fake-STEM. Meaning if you ever Bayes outside STEM, you immediately broke that rule... because your input numbers are not as reliable as STEM types measuring the Earth-Sun distance. But it still looks too impressive, too convincing.
I love 1913 level sociology. You can write a whole book that is basically about telling stories, without a single piece of numerical evidence or even other kinds of evidence. Your only evidence is that you are honest and spent a lot of time studying that thing. The result is truly awesome, because you are allowed to think big and creative, there are basically no rules. For example Pareto's Mind and Society that gave us that stuff about foxes and lions. We generally know it is true (at least when properly explained), it requires no "science" to know that. https://archive.org/details/ParetoTheMindAndSocietyVol4TheGeneralFormOfSociety
One reason to do calculations with fake numbers is sensitivity analysis: you can try and figure out, not at much what THE ANSWER is, but what factors have the most influence on THE ANSWER--and if you have at least some idea of a plausible range of inputs, you can get a sense of a probability distribution for the range of what THE ANSWER might be, and how different judgements about the plausible range of inputs will affect that.
Now, a lot of people don't actually proceed in that spirit and do bad reasoning by taking a single point estimate and acting like it's more informative than it is, but that just means it's a technique that should be done with more care; not that it shouldn't be done at all.
>Lord Kelvin, certainly a great scientist, considered his highest achievement determining the Sun's age: thirty thousand years. You are maybe used to that kind of mistakes.
I got curious about this and looked up Lord Kelvin's estimate of the age of the sun. The figures I'm seeing are all over the map but are mostly on the order of tens of millions of years rather than tens of thousands. I'm guessing that this is an artifact of Kelvin actually calculating a very wide confidence interval based on a range of assumptions and modern commentators picking different point estimates for brevity.
What is consistent in accounts is that he calculated that *if* the driving mechanism of the Sun's heat were gravitational collapse, where it's shrinking due to gravity as it cools (less thermal pressure to resist gravity) and the process of shrinkage generates more heat, then the current size temperature would happen at about XX million years. That's correct as far as it goes and is a useful result for two reasons:
- Seperate evidence that the Sun is much older than XX million years implies that there must be some other mechanism besides gravitational collapse driving the Sun's temperature. Such evidence was found and we have since concluded that the Sun is heated by mechanisms that were completely unknown at the time of Kelvin's calculations.
- There are things in the sky that are still believed to be heated by mainly gravitational collapse energy, and I expect Kelvin's model would work at least as a "spherical horses in simple harmonic motion" first approximation for explaining these things. And as with the previous point, finding discrepancies between Kelvin's model's predictions and other signals of age would point us in the way of additional factors that improved models would need to include.
You seem to imply that Hamas made a "stupid misprediction," when it looks like they've achieved recognition for a Palestinian state from about a dozen countries after their attack which quite clearly wouldn't have done so in the counterfactual. I'd count that as wildly successful.
If you're calling people "stupid" for not having the goals you think they ought to have, I think the word ceases to mean anything more than "people I don't like," a lot like calling people sacrificing their lives to achieve some grand goal "cowards."
Filed under "Why I Am Not A Utilitarian". If the morality of an act depends on its consequences, and the consequences of an act cannot be predicted, then how is anyone supposed to make any kind of decision?
Far better to focus on developing some sort of set of reasonable moral heuristics applicable by mortals that, when followed consistently, lead to reasonably optimal outcomes, and if we occasionally miss out on some kind of really good net-positive atrocity then that's fine.
What do you mean, " the consequences of an act cannot be predicted"?
Of course they can be predicted. You predict them all the time. When you drive to work, you predict you will get to work, but you understand there is such non-zero chance you will end up in the Hospital or worse instead.
You estimate the chance is low enough to merit the action. Different actions might have a worse risk profile, so you would choose different things.
Of course, your judgement of the consequences might be off as well.
I think whether or not an action is morally good, should be judged in regards to what information is available at the time, and your ability to process it (this is a bit vague, and how you interpret this depends how theoretical/practical your considerations are).
It also matches my intuition that an action should not be judged only by whether or not you want to do good with the action, but also if you have properly thought out the consequences. If you manage a large institution, you have a duty to not just follow your heart, but also use your brain.
Yeah, this point of view seems totally internally consistent for utilitarianism so long as you hold the (IMO reasonable) view that assigning moral blame based on what consequences a decision maker could have reasonably predicted in advance will lead to better consequences than one in which we reward people based on how lucky they got after the fact.
So much talk about the wellbeing of the embryos and society and ethics.
I underwent several rounds of IVF earlier this year. It destroyed my body, my finances, my social life/hobbies, and my career. It's been three months since the last medical treatment and I'm still suffering severe mental and physical side effects. I lost my job and many of my relationships.
Most days I don't care if I live or die. I used to be a type-A overachiever. Now I barely have the energy to get out of bed.
Fertility clinic tells me to call my doctor, the doctor tells me to call the fertility clinic. I've given up asking for help. I don't have hopes or a personality anymore, I just feel like a corpse.
If you're someone who likes scientific literature, there's a small literature on IVF and PTSD (for example https://doi.org/10.1155/2015/646345). Repeated pregnancy loss (or other IVF stress) is an underrated way of getting ptsd/depression. really sorry to hear you're going through this
I did 8 cycles of it years ago. I found the drugs and procedures to be unpleasant but bearable. I did not have any of the awful symptoms you mention other than some moderate difficulty with sleeping, nowhere near as bad as your insomnia. But the stress of the whole thing was terrible. It didn't fucking work, either. ( I got pregnant on the 3rd round but miscarried early and then carried on for 5 more cycles.). Sorry you're going through such hell!. I ended up adopting a daughter from China, and now am at peace with how it all worked out. At first the idea of adopting seemed like settling for less, but now I don't feel the slightest bit of that.
As to whether IVF caused this--when I started this process I had pretty manageable anxiety and ADHD. For context, I used to joke I was the most neurotypical regular at Lighthaven events. I have never had depressive episodes like this before.
I have a "reproductive psychiatrist" which I now have to pay for out of pocket as well, in addition to my normal insurance and all IVF costs, while being unemployed. No magical solutions yet. $250-$500 per appointment, not including therapy or the cost of the actual meds. In January of this year, I had 15 years of savings that I thought would help me raise my children. Now it's August, there aren't even any children yet, and it's all gone.
If you don't mind my asking, are the physical and psychological symptoms similar to or worse than getting pregnant the normal way, and did anybody say that might be a risk?
I had an accidental pregnancy in my 20's that miscarried after about 6 weeks. I almost died/needed an amputation during that miscarriage, and that was absolutely nothing compared to these past months of IVF. After the emergency room miscarriage, I took two days off from work, did a few months of couples therapy to come to terms with my near-death experience, and moved on with my life unscathed. My pregnancy experience was pretty standard: I felt slightly nauseous and tired and dizzy, got a little fat, then was suddenly in the emergency room and it was over.
Absolutely NO ONE warned me about the IVF symptoms. The clinic said the process would take a few weeks and told me some very generic side effects from the hormones, like "mood swings" (what does that even mean?) or "mild nausea." They did NOT mention:
1) During the hormones, I literally could barely sleep for a whole month. I would wake up like a robot exactly four hours from the minute I fell asleep. By the end of the IVF cycles, I was so sleep deprived and wired that I felt like I was having an out-of-body experience in the Russian sleep experiment creepy pasta. Technically most of my side effects weren't a side effect of the hormones--just a side effect of not sleeping for a whole month. So I guess the clinic didn't feel the need to warn me about that.
2) While the drugs didn't have major side effects for me, the swelling of my ovaries impacted my sciatic nerve, so it was unbearably painful for me to stand for almost the entire process. It felt like standing on knives. The clinic said this wasn't technically a "side effect," it just meant that the hormones were working, because your ovaries are SUPPOSED to get bigger. My bad for choosing to put my sciatic nerve in such an inconvenient place I guess!
3) The clinic also cleverly avoided talking about the real side effects, which happen AFTER the hormones, when you're technically not their patient anymore. The IVF hormones are nothing compared to the withdrawal symptoms. That's when the life-draining brain fog and depression started.
People need to understand that this is for-profit healthcare. Fertility clinics know people are desperate and have endless ways to make you do what they want and not complain. If I was honest about all my symptoms, the clinic would have dropped me and I would have lost my chance at having kids, so I lied and told them I was fine. Later I spoke to a doula who works with IVF patients and she said none of my symptoms were unique, even if some were more common than others, so clearly other women are doing the same.
People need to realize when they fuck around with their hormones, they're playing roulette with their health. Hormones impact literally every system of your body and you don't know which ones are sensitive until one or more of them break. IVF is literally designed to push your body to the breaking point. And if it goes too far, you're already thousands of dollars in the hole and it's self-pay and non-refundable, so people keep their mouths shut.
TLDR; when clinics and medical journals talk about how low-risk and non-invasive these procedures are, don't believe them! There are a million methodological reasons why their data is crap and it's a for-profit game.
Leaving this here, I recently commented on the Joan of Arc review (excellent and recommended), but wanted to go into more length on some of the ideas it left me with.
To that end, I am publicly sharing my goals in order to keep me accountable. I have spoken to quite a few people in my life about this intellectual pursuit, and so far it has been received reasonably well, to my surprise.
TL;DR, rationalist-adjacent WEIRD person is increasingly convinced that certain aspects of reality are not explicable via purely physical explanations, and the refusal of modern authorities to accept this possibility is actively harmful to some extent. Further results pending.
Hello, I'd be pleased to perform an astrological divination--called horary--for you, for no other reason than to help you break out of the falsehood of atheism-materialism. There aren't many constraints (the question must be personally relevant to you; geopolitics is it's own branch of the art) nor does it require your birth date/etc (that's another branch).
Anyway, you could treat it like an experiment, either the prediction is correct or it isn't, and adjust your worldview (or not) accordingly.
Hello, I am not opposed at all! I am a frequent user of the I Ching, and consistently find it interesting.
While I have never regarded astrology in the same way, I see no reason to decline your invitation. Would you like me to provide a prompt or question to begin?
> rationalist-adjacent WEIRD person is increasingly convinced that certain aspects of reality are not explicable via purely physical explanations, and the refusal of modern authorities to accept this possibility is actively harmful to some extent.
No one rose to the bait at my assertion further down the thread that "the real irony of the contemporary rationalist enterprise is the cognitive dissonance of both believing that Truth is probabilistic and subject to updating, while buying into a rationalist reductionist view of the universe."
Had I been crazy enough to post this link ("Feeling the future: A meta-analysis of 90 experiments on the anomalous anticipation of random future events"), people would question the scientific rigor of those ninety studies and accuse the authors of credulousness. But shouldn't all good Bayesians embrace studies like this, update their priors, and accept the possibility that a reductionist just-so story might not explain reality?
I did peruse to find your comment, and I do see it's relevance.
I think I would disagree with the idea of rationalists thinking "Truth" is subject to updating. From an epistemological standpoint I would prefer the word "Belief" as beliefs are intrinsically subject to updating - but I do not know how many self-described rationalists would agree with this distinction.
Moreso, I am interested in the ideas of folks like George Mavrodes and Jean-Luc Marion. Their core claims are that, e.g. rational thought/reason is only one valid mode of knowledge. However, as you point out, this faculty is often in conflict with other faculties. Those other faculties may present data points that are incongruent with our rational faculty (e.g., experiences under the effects of psychedelics are not "reliable" in an empirical sense). However, it's hard to dispute that sense perception on psychedelics is not a source of data - that data, however, is highly incompatible with our rational faculties. When multiple disparate cultures claim to meet "machine elves" under the influence of certain drugs, I am liable to consider that a data point. However, the framework under which we should understand that data may be highly incompatible with a purely physicalist understanding as the exercise of understanding that data may be more akin to *interpretation* rather than analysis.
I'm not sure how well I am responding to your point, but I might make a small leap and suggest that we are both pointing towards a more "distributed" model of the world - system A describes system A and system B describes system B, but describing the union of the two systems has inherent difficulties that we are beginning to notice.
To be even more clear, I'd backfill my example and suggest system A is a purely physical science-based paradigm and system B is highly focused on phenomenology, or perhaps conceptual reality (like the "reality" of mathematical constructs?)
I agree that reality (not just certain aspects of it) is not explicable via purely physical explanations. I didn't mean to suggest that I disagreed with you. Bernardo Kastrup did an excellent takedown of materialist shibboleths in his book *Why Materialism is Baloney*, but his alternative theory that he calls analytic idealism failed to convince me. I would now call myself an agnostic when it comes to reality.
I wrote essay exploring what I think is the most plausible candidate for Freakonomics’ infamous Variable X - (I conclude it's coordinated ATM withdrawals (i.e. the subtle, almost embarrassingly analogue phenomenon of multiple terror suspects using the same cash machine in quick succession)).
If you’ve read Freakonomics, I’d be really grateful for your thoughts. Does the hypothesis hold water for you? Does it feel like the kind of banal-but-behaviourally-rich metric Levitt and Dubner would keep under wraps, or am I falling into a kind of pareidolia-of-the-footnote trap?
Also - meta question - do you think the authors were right to keep Variable X secret? Or does the gesture only function if the variable is actually kind of obvious (and therefore only symbolically secret)?
Mostly just hoping to be corrected in a way that’s more interesting than I am.
This is an operation the Brits ran, yeah? Then I'm going to assume "Variable X" is nothing more (or less) than "Special Branch gave us a list of likely naughty boys" and they used that to comb through transactions.
This bit had me laughing because (1) no, really? and (2) thirty years before this, the association would be an Irish, not a Muslim, name:
"Many of these clues were disclosed publicly - for example, whether a person had a Muslim-sounding name turned out to be one strong demographic predictor in the U.K. context".
I have to agree with Michael Watts, the criteria you describe them using sound quaint today:
Young men in the age range 26-35 who aren't married, aren't in steady careers, and don't own their own homes? Well gosh, welcome to the gig economy and the precariat!
Some of this sounds like "possibly drug mules/money mules/dodgy but criminal not terrorist", e.g. "Large Initial Deposits, Then Draining" and "Lack of Normal Income and Bills".
More of it ("Frequent Address Changes and P.O. Boxes") sounds like, well - have you ever had to deal with clients of social housing/social welfare? They very, *very* often only communicate by mobile phone, constantly change their numbers (so they can't be contacted by officials, thus giving them plausible deniability if matters ever come to court or legal action: 'hey you never contacted me about being in arrears of rent!' when you've sent out multiple letters and phone calls) and deliberately neglect to update details of changes of address, phone number, etc. Their view is they will contact you when they want something, you have no right to contact them because they owe you nothing (not even the courtesy of filling out forms correctly, much less honestly).
If "frequent changes of address" is an indicator of possible terrorism, there's an entire social housing list in my old job that is chock-full of possible terrorists, then!
I think "Variable X" is a red herring - of course potential terrorists are going to be very interested in what makes them and their activities stand out to the authorities, so of course it is in the interest of the authorities to mislead them about how they track suspects. Sending them on a wild goose chase about "one last metric, kept secret “in the interest of national security” and dubbed “Variable X” that has to do with data analysis and algorithms and Uncle Tom Cobley and all means they're not looking at the more likely, and more traditional, way: Special Branch/MI5 has informants snugly embedded at a high enough level to be useful telling all:
> The suspects also overwhelmingly did not purchase life insurance. For an ordinary 26-year-old man with a wife and kids, buying life insurance is prudent - it ensures the family’s financial security if he dies young.
I'm going to be really surprised if an ordinary 26-year-old English man has a wife and kids.
Not sure how it works in Britain, but for something like this in America, I'd guess any such secret variable to be a cover for illegal mass surveillance. (I.e., they say narrowed down the search using this Variable X when they really just brute-forced it by tapping three or four orders of magnitude more phones than would pass constitutional muster.)
Oh, yep. Before anyone clutches their pearls about "but surely high-ranking officials in a British government capacity would never, ever, tell porky pies to book authors in order to disseminate disinformation?", I may have one slightly used bridge, several previous owners, to sell you.
"We have this super high tech secret way of finding out what you're doing and you can't beat it" is exactly the kind of messaging they want to sell both the terrorists, and the public who demand Something Must Be Done, when in fact it's old-school spying, informants, illegal surveillance, entrapment then leaning on people, and the likes.
My uncertainty was not because of the possibility of the British government being averse to lying. :D It's that I'm not sure that "illegal surveillance" is a coherent concept there, the way it is in America, their version of the Bill of Rights being basically "You wretches detestable on land and sea: you who seek equality with lords are unworthy to live. Give this message to your colleagues: serfs you were, and serfs you are still; you will remain in bondage, not as before, but incomparably harsher. For as long as we live we will strive to suppress you, and your misery will be an example in the eyes of posterity. However, we will spare your lives if you remain faithful and loyal."
After considering it, I'd guess their secret is their surveillance is being done by the US spy agencies, and that's embarrassing to admit.
As I think about this, I'm becoming more confused.
The stated problem is that we can see everything about everyone, and we want to determine prospectively whether any of those people ("everyone") are going to commit a crime in the future.
The stated difficulty is that any analysis we try to do picks up tens of thousands of times more future innocents than future terrorists, and we can't afford to investigate 500,000 innocent parties.
The claim under suspicion is that we've identified the perfect combination of variables that raises our statistical precision from 1:50,000 to 1:6, which we call "Variable X".
But if Variable X simply represents a full investigation of the original 500,000 false flags, we don't need it at all. We're not shy about admitting that we're willing to investigate everyone. The difficulty is that we can't do 500,000 investigations.
Saying that it's the US doing the investigations doesn't seem to help. They're not more capable of doing 500,000 investigations than Britain is. They do have avenues by which they could serendipitously turn up likely bombers in Britain - the most likely is that surveillance of a foreign group leads them to one or more persons located in Britain. But I don't see that Britain would be embarrassed to say "we got a tip from the Americans that Group X had operatives in London, and we've now rooted them out".
I disagree: I think the (US) government IS reticent to admit to such broad surveillance. It needn't be EVERYONE, just every Arab/Moslem, and then they'll likely kick off enough bad press to force them to do the kabuki theater of having their intelligence agency chiefs lie through some congressional hearings about civil rights violations. A waste of time that could easily be avoided by not publicizing their mass surveillance.
"After considering it, I'd guess their secret is their surveillance is being done by the US spy agencies, and that's embarrassing to admit."
That also is very likely, and yes very embarrassing: "after the Americans have finishing surveilling all our citizens without our knowledge or consent, they throw us a bone now and again about likely bombers".
Cynically speaking, Five Eyes means MI6 spies on on American citizens and tells Washington what they found out, the CIA spies on British citizens and tells London what they found out, the Canucks, Aussies, and Kiwis all get in on the act just to be safe, and everybody gets to solemnly swear that they never once spied on their own citizens because that would be illegal.
And sometimes they spy on the Russians and Chinese.
For this theory, I'd expect to see that the public variables explain about 0% of the selection of investigative targets (because the group of interest is too small to identify its members) and the secret variable explains the other ~100%.
A staple of spy movies like James Bond is two secret agents fighting to the death in the field. Since WWII, has there been a single documented case of this actually happening?
ChatGPT gave me an interesting response. This is what I asked it: "Are there any documented instances of secret agents fighting their opponents one-on-one?" If you define a "secret agent" as a covert operative, there have been some cases that might fit the bill.
My understanding is virtually every sneeze gets documented, but stays classified until it's deemed safe to release it. Might be too soon for a lot of Cold War stuff to be declassified though, especially since relations with Russia are still strained.
Does anybody here have experience with website/blog design and layout? I've interested in aesthetics, branding, the overall look and feel.
I started a new blog a while ago, as some of you know.* I want to figure out how I can theme/brand my Substack to have a more distinctive look without being garish. The overall vibe I'm going for is a blog that's smart and interested in the world without being too self-serious. More importantly, I want readers to come away with the feeling that they, too, can be smart and interested in the world without being too self-serious.
For any given article, I hope that it can be interesting enough for specialists of nearby fields to feel like I'm teaching something both interesting and valuable to them. So it's rigorous and it's not dumbed down, but it's also saying interesting things. While at the same time, being accessible for educated laymen (like my 20-year old self! Back when I was smart and knew like nothing). For example, I want my anthropics posts to be interesting and valuable to philosophers who don't think about anthropics while still being readable to everybody else; I want the Premium of Life post(s) to be interesting and insightful to economists who don't specialize in VSL estimation; I want the bee welfare post to be interesting to animal-welfare curious EAs who are not insect welfare researchers, etc.
Anyway, I'm curious how I can have a layout that conveys this! Note that I consider the default "substack look" to be decent, so the baseline to beat is nontrivial.
One thing I've had success with is firing off a vague prompt to Claude, ChatGPT, and Gemini -- something like "make a very aesthetically appealing and modern blog website" -- and just see what they come up with (in their code preview/canvas thing). You don't actually use their code of course but you can hunt down the color themes, aesthetic cues, and so on. You tend to get something that's right in the middle of the distribution of what you ask for, so if you ask for "modern tech startup website" you get that, if you ask for "respected academic publisher" you get that, etc. It's like 5 min to fire off a prompt and see if inspiration sticks so it's a very low cost way to get some ideas.
Something I have not tried, but might be worth trying, is to do something similar with image generation, e.g. "screenshot of a modern, thoughtful humanities blog" or whatever. No idea if that would be useful but again, ~2 minutes of time invested for maybe a stroke of inspiration!
I have some experience with layout design with my blog: (https://collisteru.net), which aims to convey a somewhat similar vibe.
I would advise the following:
- Consider color scheme carefully, as it sticks in many people's minds more than any other aspect of the layout. For many blogs I read, the *color scheme* operates as an important mental symbol of that blog.
- Consider fonts carefully
- Think about how the reader will navigate a single page, and from page to page
I love the Inkhaven idea and if I wasn't married I'd jump on it. Problem is if I did it now I'm not sure I would stay married. Not with the kind of household expenses we're facing.
Make an agreement with your spouse that on any day you don't publish a blog post, they'll make sure you promptly face some substantial consequence - maybe paying $100 or doing 5 hours of chores - such that on any day just writing a blog post would be the easier and more convenient option.
I've done the same sort of scheme with exercise; I paid my twin such-and-such if I didn't run so many miles a week, and it got me into the habit of more regular exercise when nothing else would.
https://substack.com/@sashachapin/note/c-125080719 did something similar, exactly to commit to a blogging challenge! The Communist Party of Canada ended up no richer. I don't have a blog, but this is in my toolbelt for the future.
Warning: I'm going to try to be philosophical here for a minute, and probably going to get it all wrong. And, as it will probably become clear, I'm religious myself.
I've long thought that there are (at least) three different things that can be meant by the word "truth". Truth can be (a) ephemeral, (b) rational, or (c) transcendant. What do I mean by each of these?
Ephemeral truths are what folks here would call Qualia. These are things that we experience directly through our senses and emotions. They are true at least *for us alone*--no one can tell me that I didn't taste something spicy. No one can controvert my sensory experience. In this, contradiction doesn't destroy ephemeral truth--they're proof against disproof. But I can't also necessarily convince someone else of this. But what was true in one second might not be true at another. Here, perception *is* reality. But only a limited slice of it. Emotional truths (e.g. "That made me mad") are a member of this category.
Rational truths are what most people here think of as Truth (with a capital T). These are statements that we can analyze with our intellects--logical extrapolations from repeated observations. Since our observations are finite and imperfect, so are the extrapolations. Future observations can overturn what we thought were settled truths about reality. Unlike sensory/ephemeral truth, each iteration of rational truth (in a particular area of application) *supersedes* or at least restricts the scope of the previously accepted "truth". Rational truths are much more durable than qualia, but rarely are rational truths emotionally salient. Sure, some weird people might get worked up about the nature of a particular mathematical proof, but usually that's because someone took a statement *personally*. Rational truths stand "outside" the person who discovered them (again unlike ephemeral ones) and can be demonstrated to other people. Scientific "truth" falls into this category.
The third kind of truth is one that I think most people here would have the most problem with. This is *transcendent* truth. Truth that cannot be accessed directly by unaided human cognition or sensory experience. These are underlying truths about reality itself, truths about the Divine. No force or circumstance on earth can alter transcendent truth--it is eternal, unchanging, and universal (even if our perception of it is limited and fragmentary). It comes by revelation, in accordance with our obedience to the eternal principles it is based on. And if we *cease* to obey, we cease to understand. One who has received truth cannot simply give it to another--the other must find it for themselves. The teacher can point the way, show the path by which another can gain the truth for themselves, but cannot simply impart the information. Transcendent truth requires a change of self, a becoming. And yes, this means stepping out into the unknown with faith (belief + action, repeated) as well as reason--it requires the whole person. Attaining transcendent truth in any measure requires both ephemeral sensory experiences as well as reason as well as faith that transcends reason, that says to the rational mind "I can't explain, but I know" and to the bubbling emotions "be calm and trust".
Unlike the other truths, transcendent truth changes lives from the inside out, in large part because we already had to change to receive it. Rational truth can conspire with ephemeral truth to whitewash our biases and desires--transcendent truth stands eternal and is often uncomfortable *for us*. It teaches us to have mercy on others who are at different points on the journey, while shining a clarifying light on our own attempts to justify our bad behavior and patterns.
Religious truth (the parts that are actually true, not accreted by human traditions) point toward transcendent truth. It is not the truth itself, just the sign posts along the pathway. But there are similar sign posts scattered throughout the history of human thought--they all point toward the same truth, just from different angles and starting points.
I never said that “belief” is a put down. Belief is a provisional state of knowledge pending further evidence. We can hold a greater or lower confidence in our beliefs, depending on the empirical inputs we permit to influence it. I believe that we agree on this.
Having said that, I can posit that there are no truths that have not been proven beyond doubt. Being empirically proven is a requirement for a proposition to be considered as true. Even mathematical derivation is insufficient otherwise.
No matter how true something feels to us or how strongly we believe it, it is not an objective truth. Therefore all truths that we can transcendental are in fact beliefs.
I think we'll have to agree to disagree that empirical proof is the prime requisite for actual truth. There are too many times where empirical "proof" has been overturned and too many things that we know but are unable to prove, often with more confidence than anything we *can* prove empirically. Empiricism works for a tiny subset of all truths. It's a useful tool, but only a tool.
And yes, you're very much *using* "belief" as a pity-label, ie "that's not true, that's *just* a belief". Same basic idea as the (flawed) claims that something is "just a theory" as an attempt to belittle it/make it seem less solid.
To be honest, I think that you made my point for me. Again, I want to emphasize that the word "beliefs”, as I use it, is not in any way pejorative. I use the word as a description of, let's call them, provisional truths. I use the word "theory" in its scientific meaning - a belief that has been robustly demonstrated to be at least a partially true explanation of a given set of phenomena.
When empricial proofs (without the scare quotes) are overturned we no longer believe that what they prurposted to descbe was, in fact, true. As for things that we know but cannot prove, well, that is in fact the definition of "belief."
To conclude, I can safely say that there are very, very few "truths" in the universe of any kind, and no transcendent truths at all.
> When empricial proofs (without the scare quotes) are overturned we no longer believe that what they prurposted to descbe was, in fact, true. As for things that we know but cannot prove, well, that is in fact the definition of "belief."
If Truth requires proof, that raises the epistemic (existential) problem of whether there can be any Truths without there being observers, because Truth would require a conscious entity to test it. Moreover, is a single conscious observer enough to confirm the proof? Or must other conscious entities be there to check the observer's proof? In which case, proof is reduced to a consensus issue among conscious entities, because not all conscious entities will necessarily agree with the proof.
> I can safely say that there are very, very few "truths" in the universe of any kind, and no transcendent truths at all.
For instance, say I experienced being taken up to heaven and I saw Yahweh sitting on His jeweled chariot-throne attended by his agent-angel Metatron and surrounded by the Chayot HaKodesh singing Hosannahs to His Presence, I would likely think I had experienced a transcendent Truth of the underlying nature of the universe (but I certainly wouldn't tell my psychiatrist). OTOH, if I started preaching my Transcendent vision of Truth to others, and they started to have the same ecstatic visions, we would now have multiple observers claiming to have observed the same thing. We would all be in epistemic agreement. Would this now qualify as empirical proof?
I think your usage of the word truth is different from what I think is the normal meaning.
From your last passage you seem to define truth as something that has been proven. I agree with you that very few things can be definitely proven. But, in the normal meaning of the word, statements can be true even if not proven to be so. Ofcourse, this means that for most things we don't really know with 100% certainty if something is true or not (but we can come close to certainty, for trivial knowledge, or with rigorous testing).
I think that you are exactly right that we don't really know with 100% certainty if something is true or not. This is the reason that when I hear about "Truth" I am usually skeptical, and that I consider transcendent truth to be personal. My definition of the word more or less follows Popper, whose, in my view, is the most convincing in the matter of what constintures knoledge.
Well, if you use a word differently than the usual meaning, you should be aware that this will cause confusion, do that with care - I will point out that your usage of the word truth in this thread seem to be the cause of a number of misunderstandings with several different posters.
From a cursory reading, I'm also skeptical that your definition agrees with Popper - though I admit I'm absolutely no expert.
I think the second category capital T truth is not really truth at all, rather, it is our beliefs about the third category - the underlying truth. You can come to those beliefs in different ways. One of those is science, another is religion, and a third is practical experience. The scientific method is different from other ways of obtaining beliefs in that it is rigorous and provides falsifyable statements. It has a track record of providing reliable information about the world. Clearly the scientific method is limited, and can't tell us anything about what we can't observe.
One can argue that there is fundamentally no such thing as scientific truth, as scientific theories are never assumed to be perfect truth, and there are always the possibility of further evidence falsifying a theory.
I think I'm willing to bend a little bit and talk about lowercase-t "truth" in this context--basically focusing on how people use the word "truth" in their daily lives rather than the full-rigor version. But yes, basically, I agree.
People definitely talk about scientific "facts" or "truths". But yes, I agree that most of what we're *trying* to do with science is get at a deeper layer. And I'm absolutely willing to stipulate that scientific endeavors are *extremely useful* within their sphere of applicability.
I also believe (for religious reasons among others) that there is only one capital-t, full-up Truth, of which everything we can know that is actually lowercase-t-"true" by any means is just a projection onto (metaphorical) lower-dimensional, bent space. Distortions and inconsistencies we see are reflections of the funhouse-mirror projection rather than the actual Truth.
I'm not religious, but I agree with you in principle that truth (with capital T) must exist, and is independent from our ability to observe or verify it. No religion is needed to come to that conclusion.
Since we are limited to our senses, there is no way that we could verify 100% what is true, which the scientific method as such acknowledges (but we can still become pretty sure). The only thing we can know for sure is your first category truth, or as Descartes famously said "cogito ergo sum".
The religious part was that Truth exists *and is unified*. That is, that there is only one, objective, universal, eternal Truth that encompasses all knowledge-of-things-as-they-really-are (another way to describe lowercase-t truths). Secular, religious, whatever, there is only one Truth and it exists outside of ourselves.
And, as a religious person, I'd say that there are things I *do* know 100%, even though I can't verify them empirically or prove them to other people via logical/empirical arguments. They form the second-level axioms on which everything else is built. If not thus, then the rest of reality makes no sense. Second-level because there's things at the root level like the principle of non-contradiction.
Truth and empirical verifiability are, in my mind, orthogonal. There are true statements that cannot be proven as such; there are things that can be proven that are not actually true in the capital-T sense--they're just artifacts of the projection of Truth onto our limited reality. Empirical verifiability is much more about *how easy it is to transmit* the knowledge, rather than whether it is actually true. If something can be independently verified by two different people (or even better universally by following a strict procedure), then it's very easy for that information to spread and be used by lots of people. It's easier to trust because you can outsource your confidence to something mechanical. You don't have to be a holy person to drive a car--it just works whether you have faith in it or not. But other things, especially interpersonal things...that's not the case. And those things are just as true. Just harder to spread.
I can't prove whether a law is just empirically. But some laws are just and others are not. I can't prove whether I love someone empirically. But I love some people and I don't love other people. Etc.
"there is only one Truth and it exists outside of ourselves."
This is the crux. Either there is some sort of absolute truth existing outside of ourselves, ie. God, or all truth is essentially subjective (ie. a function of the observer).
I have always divided the idea of truth into the measurable and the unmeasurable. Science is only able to approach the truth of phenomena which are measurable, and it is very good at that. And through repeatable experiments, truths about the measurable can be established (at least with respect to any individual observer).
But Science is of no use whatsoever for unmeasureable phenomena, such as love (or human nobility of spirit, the soul, altruism etc.) Love either exists and it is something transcendental and outside of ourselves (as you say), and is therefore a proof of God, or love is just a series of chemical reactions in our brain which is necessarily the case if there is no God (and in which case it also ceases to have any real meaning).
I have always imagined this as a sort of diagram of a triangle where the three points are Truth-God-Love. If any of these 3 concepts is not real, the other two also are not real. But if any one of the points is real, then the other two also must be.
> This is the crux. Either there is some sort of absolute truth existing outside of ourselves, ie. God, or all truth is essentially subjective (ie. a function of the observer).
That is a valid distinction, but I will point out that if all truth is subjective, then that in it self is an absolute underlying truth. Also, if all truth is subjective, that means everyone else than me is literally a figment of my imagination. If you feel the same way, then that is a contradiction, because if truth is originating in each subjective mind we can't be living in both truths simultaniously.
I disagree that god is necessary for there to be an external underlying truth (if that is what you mean by i.e. god).
>Love either exists and it is something transcendental and outside of ourselves (as you say), and is therefore a proof of God, or love is just a series of chemical reactions in our brain which is necessarily the case if there is no God (and in which case it also ceases to have any real meaning).
I disagree that love ceases to have meaning just because it originates in our mind. Nor is something less real because it originates in a mind. Our mind, including our feelings, also has consequences outside of ourselves.
I'd like to zoom in on the areas were we disagree, so I'll first say where I agree.
We are in agreement on that truth and empirical verifiability are orthogonal. I think when people disagree with this, they must have a different defininition or usage of the word truth. By truth I mean what is, not what is verifyable. It is possible and likely many things that are true, but can't be observed or verified. Rigorously, I think very little is actually verifyable (i.e. only internal experience, and only for the one experiencing it), but of course in practice I understand people, including myself use the word truth for things that are just close enough to the real thing.
I still can't quite catch why you assert that religious belief is necessary to believe in unified truth. I really can't see how truth can not be unified. As a thought experience, say that we all have our own reality spring from our own brain. Maybe my reality is secular, and yours has a god. Now those facts are still artifacts of a unified truth, that is that we have separate realities! More generally, I believe there is a set of things that is - i.e. those things are true.
When you say unified - do you mean something different than that? I could imagine unified means something like "everything was created by god", or everything is the "result of a mathematical equation". But is that really any more unified, than, say, a much more complex reality that is hard to describe and understand for a human?
Wheter you love someone is an ephemeral truth. You put it well in your original post when you say that this makes it true but not provable to an outsider, and you are correct that this is a different category of truth from the underlying truth we are talking about.
Whether a law is just is a whole other discussion - ethics. The short form is that I believe that ethics is fundamentally subjective, and a result of evolution in small groups. Therefore I reject universal ethical truths. (ofcourse we should still discuss and agree on whether a law is just in practice, I'm not a nihilist).
Ah. I see one source of potential confusion. I merely meant that *I arrived at the idea that there is only one Truth* (ie that truth cannot be segmented into "secular" and "religious" categories that could, in principle, conflict and still be meaningfully true) from a religious perspective, not that you have to be religious to see it that way.
When I stress unified, the big important thing is that, for me, the set of true statements is a subset of the set of non-conflicting statements. So if you say "X is True" and I say "X is not True" for the same X...at least one of us is wrong. If we all had perfect knowledge of things as they are (which we very much do not and cannot, in our current condition have), we'd all agree that either X is True, X is False, or X has no meaningful truth value (e.g. because it is a semantically-null statement).
This means that you can't segment truth into compartments that you can treat independently. I can't say "my religion preaches X but science says ~X, oh well, they're both true." I have to acknowledge the conflict and work to resolve it.
Beyond that, because I believe in unified Truth, I believe that there are a set of tools that work for uncovering the real truth (modulo the imperfections and finite nature of human existence, which get in the way of the pursuit of truth). I can't comfortably say "I use faith for religion but science for secular stuff". I am impelled to try to unify the fields--to find methods that work for both.
I don't believe I can reason my way to heaven/God--his nature is of a higher order than my reason. But I can use reason quite heavily to analyze *people's claims about heaven/God/the good*. And I can use the process of faith[1] to learn "secular" knowledge as well.
[1] Essentially: (1) hear, read, or think something that implies a test[2]. (2) believe in the possibility of it being true enough to start an experiment. May not be a fully empirical experiment! (3) Do the test. In most cases, this looks like *living the implied doctrine and paying attention to the outcomes* (externally observable or not). (4) evaluate. If it made things better (passed the test), it was true *at least at some level*. Continue down this loop, testing things further and further. Things that aren't capital-T True will stop at some point where the loop will abort because the test failed. Capital-T Truths are eternal and go well beyond any level I can reach in my lifetime.
This works for learning secular OR religious things, because all truth is Truth.
Kant talks about 'transcendent' truth as the structures necessary for perception. Causality, for instance, can never be observed (since it's meant to hold in all times and all places), but it's an essential structure of human thought that makes thinking about other things necessary. Same for space and time. This lines up with some of what you discuss ("truths about reality itself") but less so for others ("one must find it for themselves").
Might also check out Kierkegaard's 'knight of faith' idea. Your transcendent idea can be mapped to 'a personal relationship with God,' which was an interest of Kierkegaard's. Might be another interesting thing for you!
I think there are transcendent truths that don't neatly map into "a personal relationship with God". For example, it is true that my family loves me. I can't prove it in a rational way--they could be just clever sociopaths. It's not something I can experience in a sensory fashion. But it is true (as much as I struggle with it due to my own internal issues). My own existence as a separate thing, rather than the dream of a butterfly is another transcendent truth. It simply IS, rather than following from anything else.
But for many of the most salient TTs, the nature of one's relationship with the Divine is certainly a major factor in reaching them.
I don't know yours or Kierkegaard's thoughts well enough to make 1-1 maps. it's possible Kierkegaard's idea of 'relationship with god' would capture all of your shades as well. They're just directions you might find interesting given where you are.
I'm not sure what exactly this statement is doing.
Are you saying that this triple division is how people use the word "Truth" (so you're analyzing actual usage, and letting people know that many individuals use the word "Truth" to refer to their religious experiences)? Or are you proposing a novel definition of the word "Truth", and trying to help people understand how you want them to use the word?
I'm trying to categorize (or find a projection onto categories) different sub-meanings for the word "truth". That is, when people say "X is true", what do they mean? How can we group those meanings? Do those meanings all have the same properties? Effectively doing philosophical Principal Component Analysis.
This is one possible breakdown I've found, not the only one that exists. I'm sure there are an extremely large (if even finite) number of such breakdowns that make some sense.
By my definition here, transcendent truth, properly understood, is universal. There is only one reality, and transcendent truth is true across the entirety of reality.
That said, since we're limited, finite individuals and reality is very much less so, the transcendent truth we can actually grasp is more like a shard of a stained-glass window--just a fragment of a much bigger design. I would say that all proper transcendent truth *points towards the same things* and doesn't conflict with other transcendent truths *in that same sphere of applicability*. Any conflicts are from us trying to extrapolate the shard we have beyond where it applies.
I think that separation is normally done as: qualia, truth, intuition. All three are fallible, but qualia are so time-bound that they're essentially impossible to disprove.
If you're trying to say something about the "nature of reality", I think you're wrong, but if you're trying to talk about perceived reality you're correct. OTOH, I'm not, in Plato's sense, an Idealist. And parts of this are an argument that's been running since then without resolution, or even an agreed method of resolution.
It's a fine concept but IMO it circles back to the first definition of personal truth. Far too many utopians have asserted transcendent truth from personal revelation, and it's usually a net negative for society.
I'd say that anyone who asserts details about transcendent truth doesn't understand what that means. Personal revelation is just that--personal. It affects how I live. And I may be able to say "hey, I've found this cool thing. If you want to experience it, here's how I found it." I can't prove or disprove it. But I can point the way and let others find it (or not). But if the path doesn't work reliably, that asserted thing is unlikely to be transcendent truth of any kind.
How are you so certain there is only one reality? I see strong evidence to incline against that, given the principle of parsimony and how well our reality lines up with "efficient data storage."
Well, isn't that just a matter of categories? If there is more than one reality, surely those realities is still part of an overarching reality as well?
Also, can you expand on what you mean by several realities here?
The basic principles of efficient data storage line up quite neatly with quantum mechanics. Only instantiate what's needed -- so when someone's looking, you have an "actual state" and when they aren't, you leave it in a state of uncertainty, which you don't have to model.
Thanks. Is your suggestion that this is evidence for the world being a simulation? I don't know enough about quantum mechanics, (or efficient data storage) to assess this, perhaps you do? My first objection is that this may be only a superficial equality, and that details don't line up as neatly at all? As I understand it the uncertainty principle is a lot more complicated than a particle simply being in an (apparent?) state of uncertainty until observed. If the goal was efficient data storage, wouldn't we rather expect this to be simple?
I am not sure I agree with your definition. Factual truths are universal, meaning that they are the same for everyone, but what I find to be transcendent may be very different from what you would find to be. For example: Getting shot in the head will very likely kill you. This is a factual truth that is independent of your beliefs. However, the truth that you will go to heaven or hell depending on your beliefs or behavior is a claim to a transcendent truth, but it is far from universal, which is why we keep fighting wars about it.
That's *really* difficult. Some "factual truths" are in principle available for anyone to discover, but "When I was I high school I dissected a frog with two livers." is a true statement that nobody who didn't observe the event can verify. My assertion that my biology teacher looked at it and agreed is not a way for you to access or validate the statement.
OTOH, coming up with a "factual truth" that actually available for everyone to validate is difficult. Remember Helen Keller. But "factual truths" that are accessible to many people is trivial. Still, there are multiple examples of things that were witnessed by many independent people that aren't generally accepted as true. Certain events in the flying saucer database come to mind, but there are also multiple witnesses to some events reported in a religious context that aren't plausible fakery, but also aren't commonly accepted (particularly if you don't follow the religion of those that reported them).
A lot of what we think we see is actually model fitting. Which can put a "factual truth" is a dubious position. Other times a fact may claim to be "always true and accessible to anyone who looks", but in is too difficult or expensive for reasonable replication. (The results from things like the CERN collider fall into that category.)
Is the Higgs Boson a factual truth? I don't know anyone who's been able to test it, and I'm not sure I know anyone who could understand the publicly offered claims of proof.
The Higgs boson exists in theory, which means that available evidence agrees with the mathematical derivation of its existence. This means that its existence is a qualified belief. Absolute truths only exits when absolute proof is available. Everything else is a belief, with a higher or lower level of proof.
That's what we are told, but I don't understand the theory, I don't understand the evidence, and I also don't know anybody who does. So I'm taking people's word that it is a confirmation of the theory. There's LOTS of things like that. Some are scientific, some are legal, some are...well, in some other field. There are places that I understand in reasonable detail...but never all the way down. Yeah, I once wrote a compiler for a class, but I didn't understand the microcode behind the assembler, much less the integrated circuits. I observed patterns of reaction, and took on faith that the explanations I was given were approximately true...and experiment showed that they were at least sufficiently so...but that "sufficiently so" involved accepting a lot of hand-waving, where I expect the people teaching me didn't understand the underlying processes.
Factual truth? That's a lot rarer, and generally personal, and not something that everyone can validate. I once saw a case hardened steel file with a bent tang. I *believe* this is generally considered impossible, as case hardened steel breaks rather than bends, but I held it in my hands. But there's no way I could prove that to you.
Belief is reasonably cheap, and doesn't need to be intense. In lots of cases I believe something with low probability. (I.e. I'm willing to change my belief on reasonable evidence). But in my usage belief an truth are two different concepts. I may believe something is probably true, but that doesn't mean it is true. To me "true" is an absolute. One can estimate the probability of something being true, but whether it is true or not is an absolute...which can very rarely be determined. (I want to say "never be determined", but I'm not really sure that's true.) Granted, estimates are commonly used as if they reflected the actuality. But when one's discussing the nature of truth, that seems like a bad approach.
I'd say that one of the values of this set of definitions is that it says that fighting wars about transcendent truths is kinda missing the whole point. Trying to push someone who isn't ready into accepting a transcendent truth is oxymoronic--transcendent truths (by this definition) are entirely esoteric. They can only be reached by an individual changing themselves. External force just does not, and cannot work.
From my religious Christian perspective, God's design for humanity is that we grow to the point that we can accept the transcendent truths of His nature, by following commandments, repenting, having faith in his Son, etc. The commandments aren't arbitrary rules, they're sign posts as to what/who He is--"if you want to draw nearer to My nature, you should do this. Otherwise, you'll move further away from Me." And this can't happen by force, because no amount of external force/threats of punishment or even peer pressure can *really* change people's hearts and have it stick. Both of those threats may be true threats, but that's at the level of ephemeral and/or rational truth. Only the process of becoming capable accepting the transcendent truth can really change the heart in a lasting manner.
Are you using "Trancendental truth" as a synonym for "Trancendental belief"? It sure looks like it. In which case I don't think labeling it "truth" rather than "belief" makes anything clearer...and definitely not more honest.
Putting this in the open thread just to get a read of the room for anyone implementing LLM’s in large corporate environments: is anyone else shocked by how little innovation has been going on? I mean in terms of “okay, imagine you can’t just lazily plug this in without building the workflow around it.”
I’m trying to assess if this is a genuine skills gap because things I have heard others are holding back on, like conversational customer service, have been surprisingly amenable to techniques that to me have felt fairly obvious.
It's not a skills gap, it's a business gap. By which I mean, large profitable organizations have a hard time identifying good use cases for GenAI stuff and they don't have to implement it. The only people who in large organizations who will champion this are users in serious pain and it's hard to identify them, hard to understand their problem in the depth required, and then hard to identify if this is a problem that AI is actually good at solving.
For example, HR. Having AI agents read through resumes and doing initial screening makes sense from a high-level perspective and in reality it's an absolute mess. I think some mature AI system will eventually supplement current HR professionals (and it wouldn't surprise me if that leads to lots of people being laid off) but for right now...I'm pretty sympathetic to large corporations deciding that hiring is really important and really hard, their current system...works-ish, and they're just going to sit back and let the early adopters figure out the actual business case and then they'll buy it when it's mature. Hiring at, like, Exxon Mobil is not broken, at least by the standards of their peers, so just doing nothing right now is probably the smart move instead of experimenting with a bunch of half-baked solutions and running around like mad for a few years just to eventually adopt the mature solution from some vendor in 5 more years.
If you're working on this, as I am, then...man, I think it's way more about identifying the right problems than building cool systems. Like, what you really want is to identify key stakeholders having massive, ongoing problems that seems trivially fixable with a GenAI solution. Which sucks, because I much prefer doing cool technical stuff than, like, talking to people, eww, but...I could also build ten cool widgets and they'd be super cool and everyone would like them and no one would use them because they don't solve real problems.
Every position we post gets thousands of applicants. It's a week long process for me to get a list of 20 resumes to read and review manually, and there is no rhyme or reason as to the quality of resumes. I've seen resumes that are 10 pages long of poorly formatted copy + pasted slop that are likely gaming the TF-IDF algorithm by spamming (not merely matching) keywords. I interview candidates and it is clear many of them do not possess the skills claimed.
Most of my hires have come through network recommendations. At all experience levels, the quality of applicant is significantly higher than fishing through resumes. I never thought I would endorse systems based on nepotism, but they are outperforming the status quo.
When I was starting out, I used to think attending tech meetups looking for a job was a waste of time. Now that I've experienced the hiring process, talking to new developers at tech meetups sounds like a phenomenal idea.
And we are building an AI resume screening tool! It's a huge initiative, not just a couple of developers doing a POC. And the amount of whataboutism is insane. What if it doesn't read poorly formatted resumes well? Will font sizes break it? Can you follow a dozen business rules that contradict each other and have no weighting or priority against the raw resume <--> JD match?
And it is being developed custom! Lengthy development cycles full of hemming and hawing. I doubt it will ever see production. A functional business would have just grabbed any existing solution off the shelf and run it against a bunch of benchmark test cases.
Comment is long enough without speculating as to why, but in my experience hiring is completely broken. I actually don't think AI can solve the applicant quality problem, but it can drastically speed up the process and avoid many of the obvious failure modes described above.
I have finally found good use cases for AI that go beyond using Claude/ChatGPT directly in the chat window. This is mainly analyzing and expanding databases that are also used by customers. The content is relatively low-stakes, so the occasional error isn't a big deal.
Notably, these applications are all basically a patchwork of no-code-tools, Airtable, and Claude API calls, built around clearly delineated needs, and most of the shinier stuff I have seen has proven to be largely useless (Veo 3, for example)
Are there any actually usable customer services chatbots? I'm driven up the wall by one company (I won't name) that has lousy webpage for support, steers you as hard as it can to their chatbot, and the damn thing keeps telling me "this is easy to fix if you just log in to your account".
The problem I want to fix is - I can't log in to my account. I tell it that, and it tells me "log in to your account to fix this".
So what use is the damn thing to me? Unless the entire rationale here is to discourage customers from ringing up and trying to get their problems solved, I see no benefit to anyone apart from "we can now fire a few more cheap call centre workers by replacing them with this".
The gap between how AI people think large corporations work, and how they actually work is astonishingly large.
Most of the corporate world runs on excel. Most corporate knowledge exists in Outlook alone. Fax is still common. In ten years this will still be true.
Outside of individual ChatGPT use there won’t be much implementation of LLMs. New companies built on this technology will instead eventually replace them.
Don't know if my job qualifies as "corporate world" but yeah.
In descending order, the things we use most are:
Outlook (what is now branded as Microsoft 365 Copilot)
Excel
Management and support services portal to government department funding and data collection
Payroll software
Accounting software
Online banking
Word
All the blandishments goddamn Copilot tries on me every time I log in to (what used to be) Office 365 are useless, because I don't need it to write funny emails for me.
For conversational customer service, it's the dumb risk that someone tricks your bot into saying something embarrassing, and then tweets about it, and then you get a bad PR cycle.
It's a shame, because if we existed in a society of adult human beings then relatively simple chatbots could actually be incredibly useful to customers. Look, if I just promise to ask your chatbot questions about your products and services, and not try to trick it into saying Heil Hitler, can I please just talk to a bot for a moment instead of an Indian?
anything a chatbot can cover would generally be handled better by a well-written FAQ, and beyond that people will escalate to a real live person because chatbots can't make judgement calls or understand the product.
chatbots and indians are symptomatic of management who views customer service as an unskilled cost center to skimp on. The business case of AI is to replace people with an inferior product to save money.
As a customer I don't necessarily want to read a whole well-written FAQ, I just want to know whether the R-class Veeblespritzer comes with air conditioning or not.
Customer service agents don’t really have the ability to use judgement either. Even then, they have to follow guidelines to treat all customers consistently.
then people escalate it to the higher tier that can use judgement, especially if they are valuable or persistent customers.
but good customer service does use it. You can't script too tightly unless you are like modern businesspeople who script to discourage the things rather than solve them. But give a little autonomy in things you can, while keeping firm boundaries in what you can't can make a lot of problems go away.
They are incentivizing us to take advantage of it in our multi-billion dollar company but at this point, we are hard pressed to figure out how to take advantage of it for much more than reformatting data and such. My business is pretty unusual (semiconductor design and manufacturing) but I think the observation that there is a huge amount of effort that needs to go into proving that you can trust it for business decisions, may be true of most big businesses. Recently, I asked chatGPT (\reason) to help me prove that a theory I had about a particular device physics behavior, was valid. After 4 or 5 tries, it did. But then, whey I tried (with and without ChatGPT's help) to create a single prompt that would yield the eventual result, it proceeded to contradict its prior analysis in many different ways.
I don't have direct experience with this, but Ethan Mollick had a good post the other day that makes a compelling case that it will be a long time before enterprise applications make serious progress.
I think I’m going to shoot Scott an email as I’ve been meaning to do it for a while anyway. Unless someone takes my funding I might be one of the first here.
Mostly chat-with-your-data use cases, but these don't scale to have any significant impact. Most non-technical employees are just using ChatGPT on the side, or if you're lucky there is a company portal where they can give it private business data. Subjectively this feels like it takes the edge off of a lot of writing tasks, like for reports or powerpoints. Maybe 15% productivity boost?
For developers, it has the ability to unlock analytics on a lot of free text data. But large corporations are allergic to serious analytics anyway (because anything data-driven quickly finds itself at odds with authority's narratives), so again the impact is very limited. To be fair, analysts often make mistakes and leadership has learned not to rely on them beyond storytelling when the optics is favorable.
A lot of the use cases being kicked off for AI tools could have been done prior to LLMs with regular NLP/embedding frameworks. But I have never seen a simple, powerful, and cheap tools displace slow crappy and expensive legacy tools.
Given that the vast majority of teams in these companies were doing no impactful work whatsoever before AI, I am not shocked for there to be little innovation. AI tools getting better just makes it increasingly awkward to notice how much stagnation there is. But only children notice the emperor wears no clothes, and the market can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent. Etc etc.
Its exactly what I would expect. How electricity was added to drive-belt powered workshops is a historical example. Rather than add electric motors to the tools, they first tried using electricity to power the drive belts.
Okay I just took the time to read the comments rather than simply scanning.
I was picturing something like, I dunno a loom maybe, that was powered initially by a steam engine and then they hooked it up to an electric engine when one became available. I didn’t pick up on the part about multiple machines with individual belts attached to a single drive shaft.
My mistake. I understand what y’all were getting at now.
I understand that part but surely there were electric motors attached to the drive belts. In some applications driven by electric motors drive belts remain part of the scheme.
I’ve seen motors connected (by drive belts) to 20’ diameter flywheels to drive jaw crushers in iron ore processing plants for example.
I'm not entirely sure where your point of confusion is, but the way it worked is that, in the age of steam, there was a single large steam engine. This engine powered a single large driveshaft that ran through the entire factory. Individual tools were connected to this drive shaft through belts, so there would be many belts to many tools all driven off the same central drive shaft. The first uses of electric motors were to replace the steam engine with a single large electric motor but still drive the whole central drive shaft and all the belts, which was a poor use of the advantages that electricity and wires, and the miniaturaization ability of electric motors. It was not for quite some time (and mostly with entirely new factories), that they switched to wires bringing electricity to each tool which had it's own, appropriately sized, electric motor.
The point being: the first uses of electricity and motors were crude and not taking full advantage of the new technology, which required complete rethinking of how factories worked.
Okay I just took the time to read this rather than simply scanning.
I was picturing something like, I dunno a loom maybe, that was powered initially by a steam engine and then they hooked it up to an electric engine when one became available. I didn’t pick up on the part about multiple machines with individual belts attached to a single drive shaft.
My mistake. I understand what y’all were getting at now.
I'm not sure it was just inertia that delayed the shift from one engine or motor per shop to one or more motor per tool. Centralizing one big motor still has a few advantages, especially before we got good at making small motors that were efficient, reliable, and relatively cheap.
One of the big ones is intermittent demand. Some machines run continuously, but a lot are going to be bursty. You can handle bursty load by turning the motor on and off as needed, which is a lot easier to do with an electric motor than with a steam engine or waterwheel, but still isn't instant especially for large loads. Also, your motors are going to spend a lot of time idle if you turn them off between bursts. With a big centralized motor, the demand from every tool in your shop connected to it averages out, and you can use a flywheel or something between the motor and the driveshaft that stores up mechanical energy to average out demand over short amounts of time.
Whether or not that makes centralizing worthwhile depends on how expensive the motors are, whether there are inherent scale efficiencies besides load balancing and idle time, and how small you can reasonably make a motor. Nowadays, those questions are generally strongly in favor of many individual motors, but it probably wasn't as clear cut in the late 19th century.
I don’t think I’m confused really. My point was simply that after the invention of electric motors drive belts, are still often a part of mechanical tools.
Sure the design of shops changed in a dramatic way but drive belts themselves weren’t made obsolete.
Edit
“surely there were electric motors attached to the drive belts.”
was poorly phrased. I should have omitted the word ‘the’
I meant it to mean individual motors supplying power to individual machines.
The way I wrote it could be read as a single electric motor driving everything.
LLMs are pretty smart nowadays, but sometimes they still make really glaring mistakes.
For example, I asked Claude to identify a photo of a strange green-and-white striped plane. It initially claimed that it was Spirit Airlines, which is "famous for their yellow and black striped planes" (wrong in *two* different ways). When I pointed out that the stripes are green and white, it instead said it must be Frontier, which is obviously also wrong.
That sounds less like an LLM mistake and more like an image recognition mistake. I'm not sure exactly how they've made the multimodal models so, but it feels very hacked on top right now.
Nature just published a survey of physicists on what quantum mechanics says about reality. The Copenhagen interpretation still seems to reign supreme, but that may be because the "Copenhagen’s emergence as the default comes from historical accident, rather than its strengths," and critics say, "it allows physicists to sidestep deeper questions".
The answer to the question depends on how involved in the *foundations* of QM the respondent is. The more involved and the more likely the answer is some version of "not Copenhagen".
Max Tegmark talks about it somewhere. Since 1997, he has been conducting informal surveys at the kind of conference *he* goes to (strong selection). He reports that a majority of physicists at these conference would have said "Copenhagen" in 1997 but by 2010 there were *none*.
The top physicists are always asked the question and we can see the kind of answer they give. I'd say there are several levels. People like Tegmark, or David Deutsch, or Sean Caroll, fully embrace the Many-World Interpretation.
But many more people, like Stephen Hawking, Scott Aaronson, Lubos Motl, and so on, are more likely to give an answer like "yes the math clearly suggests MWI, but..." where the clause following the "but" is some variant of "it makes me uncomfortable so I don't believe it". (Not totally fair, Hawking would have said "... but we can't interact with the parallel worlds so don't worry about it.")
And then, there are all the other physicists, most of which accept Copenhagen simply because that's what they were taught. People who specifically research the foundations of QM are far more likely to reject Copenhagen, simply because the Copenhagen Interpretation is incompatible with realism, determinism, and most importantly locality. That it breaks locality (information must travel at infinite speed for Copenhagen to work) is a no-no for many of those physicists, as it is for me.
ETA and I believe Feynman did have a verifiable opinion on the topic. In one of his books (possibly surely you’re joking, but I’m not certain) I recall him expressing the opinion that, basically, ‘quantum foundations’ was a waste of time and you should minimize the time you spend thinking about it…and I’ve heard similar sentiments from several other people who I would consider ‘top physicists.’ Obviously that doesn’t mean they didn’t have a private opinion as to how to interpret the Schrödinger interpretation. I do, and it’s not Bohr’s interpretation, or Everett’s. But that private opinion is irrelevant since all the interpretations yield the same predictions for experiments, both actual and gedanken.
It's been a while since I read it, but there is a paper by Zeh about Feynman's belief (a report of what he said during a specific conference). But it never really convinced me. As I recall Feynman made comments somewhat critical of Everett's thesis as presented to him by Wheeler (Wheeler, certainly a top physicist, was at the conference and was also Everett's thesis adviser; at the time he was a believer in MWI). He (Feynman) was also critical of Copenhagen. So it seems Feynman was critical of all interpretations. It is known that he had hoped that his integrals would close that subject but realized later that they could not.
As to your remark that interpretations are irrelevant because they yield the same predictions, I disagree. First, Copenhagen don't even have the same number of axioms. The two interpretations are not equivalent. (Newtonian Mechanics as is and Newtonian mechanics with invisible angels instead of forces both make the same predictions but are not equivalent.) Second, there is the problem of locality. Copenhagen is incompatible with it, which makes it incompatible with e.g. Relativity. (Saying "yes but you can't use it to send information faster than light" is not an argument; the interpretation necessitates that information is sent faster than light even if *I* can't do it.)
In the end, the fundamental question is what we want physics to be. For me, its primary role is to provide explanations. Predictions are important, but only as a way to validate theories, not as their ultimate goal. I'm glad when predictions work, but that's not enough for a theory to be truly satisfying; I also want it to make sense, to offer a coherent and meaningful explanation. From that perspective, Copenhagen and the Many-Worlds Interpretation (MWI) are clearly not the same kind of explanation, so I think it's entirely relevant, and important, to discuss and compare them.
I don’t want to debate interpretations but will comment that while all versions of Copenhagen have a speed of light problem, so do all versions of MWI. That’s because quantum mechanics is not a relativistically correct theory - you need Lorentz invariant quantum field theory for that. Quantum mechanics emerges as the low energy limit, but once you take said limit you’ve lost the information about the speed of light bound. And you can cook up situations where the Schrödinger equation predicts superluminal communication, and the MWI won’t save you (but going back to the parent QFT will).
And again, ‘Copenhagen’ isn’t a single thing, and nor is ‘MWI.’
The problem with Copenhagen has nothing to do with the fact that Schrödinger is not covariant under Lorentz transformations. The problem arises even before any dynamics is defined or used. The very description of a system as a linear combination of vectors in Hilbert space is the cause of the problem. QFT changes nothing to this, as a Fock space is just an extension (direct sum blahblah) of a Hilbert space.
The problem in the Copenhagen Interpretation is that in an entangled state such as |00>+|11> the mere observation (measure) of the first particle *causes* the collapse of the second.
This doesn't happen in MWI because the measure of the first particle only gives you information, namely in which of two worlds (planes of existence, branches, etc.) the observer resides. (Or, if you prefer, which observer of two makes the observation.)
I knew what you meant. But the ‘superluminal communication’ problem still shows up under every version of ‘MWI’ once you move from the two particle to the many particle problem. Not even with measurements, just under unitary time evolution with a regular many particle Hamiltonian. ‘MWI’ just kicks that particular can down the road a little.
ETA: I suppose I might as well put my cards on the table regarding my private interpretation. I solve the measurement problem by saying there is no collapse, because the measurement apparatus is itself quantum, and the process of measurement is itself just entanglement of the system with the measurement apparatus. (Stinespring dilation). This is neither Copenhagen nor regular MWI (at least as propounded by Everett or Tegmark). And while it’s ’the Story I tell myself’, unless and until there is some sharp distinction in predictions I consider it pretty much irrelevant if it matches the story my interlocutors tell themselves or not.
Don’t want to engage with the object level question, but if you think Max Tegmark and Sean Carroll are top physicists you are severely miscalibrated. Am a professional physicist. Would not consider Tegmark a ‘top physicist’. Carroll, definitely not. Motl, also definitely not. And Aaronson isn’t a physicist at all, though he is in a field that is physics adjacent, and is plausibly a top person therein.
Most of the top people don’t have blogs though. Aaronson is the exception (but is not a physicist).
Oh, you're absolutely right! Some of the people I mentioned are not top physicists (others are, e.g. Deutsch and Hawking), I mentioned them because their opinions are known and verifiable. In the past I tried to figure out what Feynman or Weinberg believed, but I could never find anything conclusive. Deutsch mentions somewhere that Schrödinger gave a speech in 1952 in Dublin that showed he believed (before anybody else, even Everett) that his equation should "be taken seriously", but I could not confirm that either.
One problem with the OP question is that both ‘Copenhagen interpretation’ and ‘MWI’ could mean a range of different things, and without further specification of which Copenhagen interpretation or MWI you have in mind the question is ill posed. And probably every physicist believes something slightly different and no one believes exactly what either Bohr or Everett believed.
People are perfectly happy to accept Maxwell's laws as the explanation of electromagnetism. If you dig even moderately deeply into the question 'what is a magnet' you quickly realise that we don't really know. The standard model says that 'magnetic monopoles' should exist, but we've never seen one and know nothing about them.
Maybe if Schrödinger hadn't started talking about the cat, this interpretation business wouldn't be such a big deal. The quantum world is fundamentally different to the physical world that we inhabit with our senses - maybe any attempt to explain one in terms of the other is doomed to failure?
Except that explaining quantum mechanics in terms of the normal physical world is exceedingly simple, from a data compression perspective. Sure does look like God is cheating to save memory/processing.
The big problem with quantum mechanics is not that the quantum world behaves in a way that's very different to the macroscopic world. The big problem is that the behaviour of the quantum world _appears to depend_ on what's going on in the macroscopic world (ie a quantum system "knows" whether or not it's being observed), so we can't properly separate the two.
Many Worlds type interpretations neatly avoid this problem in a way that seems to make sense in toy examples, but I've yet to see anyone carefully extend the mathematics beyond toy examples to check whether it still makes sense.
Strictly speaking, theory says that if there are ANY magnetic monopoles, then things MUST be quantized. And we actually DID find a magnetic monopole! But just one, and so everyone assumes it must have been a measurement error. But from the point of view of "validating the entire edifice of quantum mechanics"... mission accomplished?
TFA argues that the dollar will likely lose it's status as an international reserve currency, and that this will eventually result in substantial inflation (for people in the US).
-Does this argument seem at all reasonable?
-Has anyone thought about how to hedge against that outcome as a small investor?
Trump's been trying his hardest, but it's still too early to tell whether he'll succeed. The biggest problem is that there aren't any plausible alternatives to the dollar right now. It will take time for plausible contenders to emerge.
FWIW, the dollar is massively down this year though, and that could very well be stoking inflation even beyond Trump's massive tariffs. Incidentally, tariffs usually *strengthen* the currency, making the dollar's crash all the more striking.
It's not actually inflation, in that the value of money is decreasing. Rather individual goods are more expensive depending on how much the tariff on each good is.
But the main point is - replace the dollar with what? Something physical like gold has a lot of issues for regular transactions, and you can't print more which is a big letdown. That leaves fiat currency or crypto, which is inherently worthless without force backing it. The biggest economic force by a huge margin is the US; right back to where we started. BRICS has talked about an alternate currency but nothing has come of it and probably won't.
I'll try avoid duplication of what others have already said:
For those who like Suzannah Clarke, Lud-in-the-Mist by Hope Mirlees has similar vibes and is really good
Haruki Murakami isn't for everyone, but I really like his weird uncanny stuff, especially Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World and it's sort-of sequel/alternate version The City and its Uncertain Walls, Windup Bird Chronicles, Kafka on the Shore, After Dark.
Benjamin Labatut I'm not sure even counts as fiction; he does... lightly fictionalized Lovecraftian retellings of the history of science? I really like it.
I loved Richard Price's Clockers, the basis for the movie by Spike Lee. Price was a writer for the TV show the Wire, and if you enjoyed that show I think you'd like this book.
Umberto Eco, especially Name of the Rose (what if Sherlock Holmes was a 14th century Franciscan solving a series of weird murders in a creep Abbey against a backdrop of the general nuttiness of 14th C Italy) and Foucault's Pendulum (bored intellectuals accidentally construct a conspiracy theory so good it manifest itself into exist, regret consequences).
The City of Brass trilogy by SA Chakraborty was pretty good: something a little George RR Martin-y about the conflict between different factions all of whom have at least one sympathetic character; not quite as good as asoiaf but on the other hand, she finished hers.
Speaking of unfinished series: The Steerswoman by Rosemary Kirstein. Basically, a book whose main theme is, science and observation and sharing information are good and powerful.
Someone mentioned Mason & Dixon; not quite as good but another historical epic of his is Against the Day, a zany combo of western, boys adventure, and a bunch of other late 19th century genres mashed together in the run-up to WWI.
I really liked Salvage the Bones by Jesmyn Ward but I don't think I can do a good job of explaining way.
Guy Gavriel Kay, especially the Sarantium Series and Last Light of the Sun.
To.begin at the beginning...the first proper book I ever read..read Lewis Carrol. If you have, read Jeff Noon's cyberpunk take,.Electric Alice.
Read Welles..and if you have , Read Christopher Priest's sequels, and Olaf Stapledon.
Read Tolkien. If you have, read Michael Moorcock for the alternative approach to fantasy..ironic, not earnest, urban, not rural, chaos versus order etc.
Once you've Read Moorcock, read Mervyn Peake's Gormenghast to see where he was cribbing from.
Read Terry Pratchett. If you have, read James Branch Cabell, fantasy with a Wildean wit.
Read Dune, but no more sequels beyond the fifth.
Read Unsong, if you have, read Illuminatus the original cosmic conspiracy caper.
Read Douglas Adams,
... if you have, read Kurt Vonnegut the original sci fi tragic comedy master.
Read Borges, if you have, read Stanislaw Lem's Cyberiad, a collection of thought provoking fables set in a all-robot universe.
Read British slipstream, JG Ballard, Angela Carter, M. John Harrison, Will Self and Russell Hoban. I'm particularly find of his Ridley Walker, which is set in a post apocalyptic version of the area up in.
Riddley Walker's Weerd Spellin trick is copied by Ian M Banks Feersum Endjin. His books are a lot of fun so long as you've got an engineering brain.
Michael Crichton is known mostly for Jurassic Park, and to a lesser extent, Westworld, but I recall Sphere being the most mindfuck-y of them all. IMO, his best work. (The movie got surprisingly close to the book ending IIRC. Nevertheless, read the book.)
Terry Pratchett, "Night Watch" and "Thud!". "Night Watch" might well be his best book, but also a really sad one (it's his take on "A Tale of Two Cities").
Here are a few amazing books that somehow didn't make it into anyone else's list:
1. Bulgakov, "The Master and Margarita". This has my vote for the best Russian novel of the 20th century, and possibly of all times.
2. Strugatsky brothers' "Lame Fate" (https://www.amazon.com/Lame-Fate-Swans-Rediscovered-Classics/dp/1641600713 , an atrocious translation). IMHO this is their best novel. The main character is a Soviet writer who subsists on hack jobs while secretly writing a book he doesn't expect to ever see the light. Suddenly, he himself seems to become a character of a story, full of events that seem supernatural or miraculous, even though, technically, nothing impossible ever happens in the entire book. (Note: if you decide to read this, "The Master and Margarita" is the prerequisite.)
3. Mark Helprin, "Winter's Tale".
Absolutely beautiful writing. Magical realism, miracles galore. Very much about New York. (Avoid the movie based on this book. It's neither faithful to the book nor good.)
I gave away a few copies of the book also, and I actually once met someone who'd heard of it before.
I find it really strange how invisible it is, given how awesome it is.
Helprin himself thought his politics was the reason for this book's relative obscurity (and, judging by how fast Wikipedia editors deleted the mention of this claim, calling it "right-wing propaganda", he was at least partially right).
For me the politics pales into insignificance beside the luminous imagery.
It's a very singular book - I suspect many people simply don't know how they are supposed to feel about it. There isn't a very convenient way to categorise it.
From the Wikipedia description it doesn’t seem like something I would normally pick up but the buying and giving away multiple times is about as high praise as book can receive.
I read a truckload of Russian literature in my life, and it's my personal opinion that you did not miss all that much. I think you made a good choice - "The Master and Margarita" is not only a good read but also an important read. (I do love the second book I mentioned, but I can't vouch for the translation, which seems clunky.)
It's my personal opinion that Russian prose is overrated. But 20th and 21st century Russian poetry, lately mostly in the form of songs, is vastly underrated. It's a completely different world, and people who don't speak Russian have no idea what they are missing.
Moonfleet, by J Meade Faulkner. About a boy who unknowingly finds a clue to a concealed treasure, and his adventures once he learns the real purpose of the paper scrap with its strange biblical quotes. Beautifully plotted and well thought out. The characters' motivations fit together as neatly as the cog wheels in a Swiss watch.
The Historian, by Elizabeth Kostova. A scholar hunts for a powerful but elusive vampire. Although it was a fun read, in plot terms it was very much better to travel in hope than to arrive. Putting it another way, the finale was a big anti-climax. Besides anything else, it would have been a cinche for an equally gripping sequel, but I guess Kostova was just sick of writing about vampires!
Lorna Doone, by R D Blackmore. I re-read this last year, and congratulated myself on having been able to follow the baffling Devon dialect of some of the characters the first time I read it as a teenager, and I'm _from_ Devon! :-)
Ken Follet's Kingsbridge series, "The Pillars of the Earth", "World Without End", and "A Column of Fire": https://www.panmacmillan.com/series/the-kingsbridge-novels/10264101 Looking at that page, "The Evening and the Morning" looks worth a read. I may go off and order that on Amazon now!
Rendezvous with Rama, by A C Clarke. (Not so keen on the Rama sequels he wrote with Gentry Lee). I gather this novel is due to be filmed (at last!) by Denis Villeneuve once he has finished his current film project "Dune: Messiah".
Ringworld, by Larry Niven. Although the scale of the ring structure seems ludicrously large, and it would need constant and intensive maintenance to avoid it collapsing in on itself, the book was enjoyable.
Oh yes, that was excellent. I knew there was another SF author I meant to mention! He wrote several other novels, including Rocheworld and Return to Rocheworld.
I think in any objective sense The Count of Monte Cristo has to be the greatest novel ever written. Dumas isn't short of other home runs, either.
Personal favorites are The Man Who Was Thursday, Snow Crash (I didn't really like anything else Stephenson wrote, though I enjoyed the YT easter egg in Diamond Age, an otherwise fairly sloppy novel to my mind), Gil Blas, Chandler's Marlowe novels bar the last one which is sadly sub-par, and last but by no means least, Gene Wolfe's Book of the New Sun. (I personally disliked Urth.)
Non-novel writings and writers who deserve a mention all the same include Borges, Chesterton's essays and Father Brown stories, Sherlock Holmes of course (the novels are consistently worse than the short stories), Fritz Leiber's Swords stories (the shorts again beating the novels by some distance), Howard's Conan stories, Brantôme's memoirs, Froissart's chronicle of the Hundred Years' War, and the various works of Capt. R. F. Burton, none of which can accurately be described as a novel.
if i had to choose a single favorite book/series, I would have to go with storm light archive (brandon sanderson), but that may be due to recency bias. I close second is probably "the name of the wind".
Some runner-ups would be dresden-files, old mans war (book1 only), The Blade Itself (obviously), Enders Game (Also book1 only), the expanse, murderbot diaries.
Hyperion and its sequel by Dan Simmons, and also Ilium by the same author. House of Leaves. Cloud Atlas.
Count of Monte Cristo is a classic for a reason. Les Miserables is shockingly good even if you have no interest in musicals.
If you like Detective/spy fiction, I am Pilgrim is the best if both worlds. If you like hardboiled stuff Laird Barron writes these really good ones about an ex mobster from Alaska who moves to the East Coast.
If you want a great dark fantasy/eldritch horror adjacent model the Fisherman gives a take on cosmic horror unlike anything else. If you've never read Stephen King, I think It is better than the Stand, but that's contraversial, probably Salems Lot is better than both. Speaking of Stephen King, there's no reason to read The Gunslinger saga past Wizard and the Glass.
Pride and Prejudice is actually a nice light read I come back to every now and then. Tale of Two Cities has, I think, the best first chapter of any "great" novel I've ever read (I really need to give Dickens another shot).
Last but not least, I think readers of this blog will probably appreciate Soon I Will be Invincible and You by Austin Grossman.
The Hobbit, the Silmarillion, and Lord of the Rings, by J.R.R. Tolkien
The Hitch-Hiker's Guide series and the Dirk Gently series, by Douglas Adams
Snow Crash and Diamond Age, by Neal Stephenson
The Noumena series (Axiom's End, Truth of the Divine, and Apostles of Mercy), by Lindsay Ellis
The Discworld series, by Terry Pratchett. Soul Music, Hogfather, and Small Gods are my favorite individual books in the series. Honorable mention to Jingo and The Last Continent.
Starship Troopers, The Door into Summer, and Time Enough for Love, by Robert Heinlein
The Foundation series, by Isaac Asimov
The Worldwar series, by Harry Turtledove
The Colossus series, by D.F. Jones
Dune, by Frank Herbert
The Case of Charles Dexter Ward, by H.P. Lovecraft
I had a really good impression of Brandon Sanderson's "The Way Of Kings" but every subsequent book in the Stromlight series has been worse than the one before and I'm afraid to reread it, lest my enjoyment prove to be an artifact of my past mindstate.
"Dune Messiah" struck me more than any of the other Dune books. Dune 1 annoyed me because of the weakness of the villains (so many villains, so little competence), but the weakness of the villains is much more integral to the premise of Messiah.
The first three books in A Song of Ice and Fire are quite strong, and make a fine albeit non-standard stopping point for the series.
Ender's Game was the first book I read in one sitting.
The first four Dune books are quite interesting, and it's one of the few series where the hero of one book is the villain of the next. Book five really started feeling like the series was spinning its wheels, and after book six Frank Herbert died and his son took over the franchise.
Have you read Sanderson's Mistborn trilogy? IMO it's more thematically and tonally consistent than Stormlight, probably because all three books were written before the first one was published. And it has a very satisfying finale, unlike the pseudo-cliffhanger of Stormlight 5.
I read it after The Way Of Kings, and didn't like it as much. I would disagree with tonal consistency; the first book and the second book are very different scenarios. (It's worth mentioning all three combined are about as long as The Way Of Kings by itself.)
1. Scott Alexander's UNSONG is currently my favorite novel. On my first reading, I thought it was pretty good. Coming back to it years later, now prepared for the awkward pacing, it was suddenly my favorite novel. I've since read it a third time.
4. The Lord of the Rings by J.R.R. Tolkien has long been a favorite.
5. Twenty years ago, my most favorite novel was The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoevsky. But I'm no longer a Christian and doubt I'd like it as much if I read it again.
6. For children's literature, The Chronicles of Narnia by C.S. Lewis still takes the cake.
7. For very young children (3-5yo), which I will mention since Scott and a fair number of readers have young kids these days, the Elephant & Piggie collection by Mo Willems is a household favorite.
Why does AD&D exist? No, not the table top RPG. The insurance product, Accidental Death & Dismemberment.
I've gotten a good offer for a lot of coverage and it's cheap because it so rarely pays out. I've been feeling a little underinsured so I'm looking. But as a concept, why would it matter if I die from cancer versus from being run over by a bus? Why does this risk category exist?
My assumption (not based on evidence or anything, just conjecture) is that historically other insurance products, like term or whole life insurance or disability insurance, were too susceptible to fraud, which forced insurance companies to either (a) pay out bogus claims or (b) spend a lot of work rooting out the fraud. In either case this would drive up premiums. AD&D on the other hand is quite objective and easy to verify, so the risk of fraud is low, and so the premiums can also be low. There's no quibbling over (for example) whether the policyholder really _needed_ their left hand to hold a job — it's just, send us a picture of your stump and we'll send you a check. It's so cheap it's even offered for free with some other products like credit cards!
Ill take a stab. There is a category of well off head of household sole earner who with a cancer like death could get their affairs in order and ensure their family is provided for (not necessarily breaking bad style, but it counts!). Sudden death would pose a problem so thats what they insure.
You can still die suddenly of natural causes though -- heart attack, stroke, brain hemorrhage etc. Either you drop dead on the spot, or you spend a few hours/days/weeks in ICU without the capacity to get your affairs in order.
These sorts of deaths must surely account for a fair fraction of deaths of working age adults.
Thats right. Maybe it applies to a group of ppl that are confident in their own health and arent concerned with deaths like that. Whether or not thats rational, we see cases of healthy ppl having that drive their insurance decisions in other contexts.
I'm required to hold a life insurance policy as long as I have a mortgage, it wouldn't be fair for the bank to lose out in the event of my death. At least the accidental death policy doesn't benefit the named party, and that sounds too restrictive to benefit a bereaved family. Perhaps these are offered to fulfil a legal requirement?
It's just a way to only pay for one piece of general life insurance. Shopping a la carte for personal insurance you might say, which is why it's cheap. If you have general life insurance then there is no particular reason to also get AD&D.
Some employers provide it as a free employment benefit because the marginal cost to the employer is quite small, like adding dental coverage to an existing health insurance package. Even some medium-sized staffed nonprofits, such as the one that I run, do that. For our younger single staffers the AD&D provided by us is usually their first piece of personal life insurance coverage.
I’d be willing to organize in Bozeman if there’d be any interest. I figure maybe with all the students here there might be a couple ACXers hanging around?
If somebody sets up a fall meet-up somewhere in MT I’d be down (I don’t think there’s been one in MT before. I considered setting up one in the Billings area but didn’t think demand would be high enough.)
Hopefully Scott writes about the recent New Yorker article, claiming that some small fraction of longterm schizophrenics may actually be suffering from an auto-immune disease and are being essentially cured by antibiotics. Seems like it's very in his wheelhouse as far as subject matter
While schizophrenia is thought of as an illness, I've often wondered if delusions, hallucinations, and mental disorganization are just the state the mind regresses to if any one of many big systemic things is wrong -- sort of like the physical exhaustion that accompanies most serious illnesses attacking the parts of the body other than the brain.
Well, we do have a word for when systemic illness causes mental status changes in a short timeframe, and it’s called delirium, and it happens all the time to old people. It would be odd if schizophrenia was similar when it mostly shows up in healthy 20 year olds
Actually schizophrenic shows up at all ages, but it's true that its *first* appearance is most often in people aged around 20. (Many of those people go on to be sporadically psychotic for the rest of their lives,) But delusions and hallucinations are not nearly as distinctive for schizophrenia as people imagine.There are a lot of circumstances in which they are common,
To me, the negative symptoms of schizophrenia are the most interesting and overlooked. While delusions aren’t uncommon, the specific negativism is more unique. I don’t even think depression or fatigue are really all that similar! There’s something more significant going on in the brain to cause that. What do you think?
To me, most of the negative symptoms of schizophrenia seem less interesting because less alien. Last week I was sick for a couple days -- had malaise, some GI symptoms, a headache, a low fever and grogginess. Slept on an off all day. In the intervals when I was awake think I probably met criteria for every single negative schizophrenic symptom: a volitional, anhedonia, emotional flatness, etc.
Do you feel like the way you and I feel lethargic when sick parallels the negative symptoms of schizophrenia? I haven’t seen a ton of it, but what I’ve seen strikes me as deeply distinctive— as though it arises from a completely different process
It seems like people who are very tired, hungry, upset, etc., tend to have disordered thinking pretty often, but I don't think they often have auditory hallucinations. Or maybe they do and this is just one of those weird things where I've never experienced it so I think it doesn't happen....
I think the thing that has to be damaged or challenged has to be the brain itself, not the whole person, so being tired, hungry, etc woul dnot count Decades ago I had a brief experience of being delusional when I had not slept for 50 hours or so, and that's not uncommon for subjects in studies of sleep deprivation. Have also read that delusions are not uncommon in normal sane adults after surgery and in various other situations.
I am a little bit confused about the financials of Lighthaven. Wasn't it in deep trouble, a few months ago, and had to hold a big fundraiser? And I thought I heard they were booked a long time in advance? But now you can rent the rooms at cost for a month?
I guess it's unclear if this is at cost *to Lighthaven* or at cost to Inkhaven-as-a-Lighthaven-customer.
We are booked out most of the year, but November ended up being pretty open, and so a good time to run a program like this! In-general the end of the year is a lot less busy than the rest of the year (partially for Bay Area weather reasons, partially because it's holiday season and people don't tend to run events during those months as much).
We will likely have like one weekend event running in-parallel to Inkhaven (we should have enough rooms to fit everyone at the same time, but it depends a bit on how many residents we end up accepting).
> I guess it's unclear if this is at cost *to Lighthaven* or at cost to Inkhaven-as-a-Lighthaven-customer.
It's less than just the mortgage payment of the place divided by the number of rooms (not counting any staff required to maintain the venue, or any supplies or utilities), so in almost any sense it's below cost, though we can offset it a bit by having maybe one substantial conference happening on one weekend in parallel to Inkhaven.
The big conferences (LessOnline, Manifest) are in late May/early June, quite crowded, and housing sells out fast.
MATS (an AI alignment coding boot camp) takes over Lighthaven for about 5 months of the year, in two ~2.5 month chunks (Jan - mid March, and mid June - August).
In terms of the rest of this year after MATS is over, there's: Endless September (anybody can book a room to stay at Lighthaven during the month of September, just to hang out, even though there are no big events booked); the Progress Studies conference for one weekend in October; and Bay Area Solstice the first weekend in December.
The Lightcone team is directly organizing Inkhaven. According to them, the planned ~30 person headcount is small enough that they could still book larger events at Lighthaven at the same time.
I don't know how much Lighthaven actually spends. However, on their website https://lighthaven.space they quote a price of $100 - $250 per person per day, which translates to between $3k and $7.5k per person for the whole month. So the price for Inkhaven ($2k - $4.7k per person) seems pretty reasonable to me.
I wrote a substack post on Sam Kriss and the question of truth in essays, and since it involved rationalism, Caliph Yudkowsky and our noble host here, I thought some AC10 readers might find it of interest:
Every time I encounter Sam Kriss' writing, I find myself loathing him more. Funnily enough, the original piece was the first thing of his I've read that *didn't* make me feel that way: the beginning was quite good, and the silly story about the heretics was at least decent. But then he had to double down on his essential Sam-Krissness with that response (which I admittedly could not even make it all the way through). I struggle to articulate what exactly I find so obnoxious about his writing--arrogance is part of it, but doesn't come close to describing all of it--but this particular essay could literally just have been replaced by a Tweet that said "come on guys, obvious joke is obvious" and the world would have been much improved thereby.
I read your essay, thought the first half about lying was very good and was thinking I fully agreed with you, then read the second half and thought it was terrible.
To elaborate: I agree that Kriss is being really annoying, assholish even, by doing the continued sarcasm thing even after being asked in good faith if he was being sarcastic. You argued that very well. I get that he thinks it's his style, and that he shouldn't have to change for people not part of his audience, but at this point his "style" is just being pointlessly obnoxious for no reason. (If he really insisted on "staying in character" he could have easily put the Clung thing in the paragraph with all the absurd claims, which would have made it very clear and not broken character. As it is his main purpose seems to have been to laugh at those who tried to engage him good faith, which is one of the most disgusting things to ever do).
But his criticisms of rationalists, in my opinion, on the whole spot on. And you switch from a nuanced well-argued take on fiction and disclaimers to...this:
"I won’t claim that HPMoR (as it is abridged) is perfect by any means, nor the Greatest Book Ever Written; but to make a more apt comparison, I will claim that it is much, much better written and thought-out than any of the seven Harry Potter novels by J. K. Rowling, "
Yeah...if I hadn't just read the first half of your essay, I'd feel comfortable concluding that everything you say on anything else can be safely ignored. This is a Yudlowskian level of arrogance. Hell, even *he* probably, and Scott definitely, wouldn't make a claim this obnoxious, this off the wall, without spending like, at least a paragraph or two *arguing* for it. I'm just...almost speechless. This is the exact sort of attitude that creates the "overwhelmingly negative" response to rationalists you mention at the start.
Then, I think you massively overstate Kriss's claim about utilitarianism. I read him as pointing out the problems with it that make it *not the unquestionably obvious moral theory*, that's it. That, as he says, you'd expect actual thinking people who aren't being greatly swayed by groupthink to have vastly more intellectual diversity on such a philosophically difficult topic. Not that it's obviously false.
And then, I think you misunderstand his point about "plain facts". He's saying that, the world isn't just a collection of sterile facts to discover, it's much more philosophically complicated. I don't think he's saying facts don't exist, or whatever it is you're saying.
And I also thought his point about rationalists reinventing religious ideas gets way too little attention. So much of the discourse around AI and singularity is so heavily religious in form and inspiration, it's kind of amazing they're somehow blind to it.
It's arrogant to think that the Harry Potter novels are bad? Why on Earth? Have you read them? They're fairly original and imaginative, but also just absolutely lousy with plot holes, inconsistencies, cliches, insufferable characters and poor pacing.
Obviously some people care more about those things than others and the books well-loved by many people regardless. Almost as if personal taste is subjective. But then, how is someone having different taste arrogant?
> It's arrogant to think that the Harry Potter novels are bad?
I mean, yeah, pretty much. I haven't read them, but anything that has been read and enjoyed by that many people must be good in *some* way. They're not the greatest works of literature in the English language, nor were they intended to be, they're children's books, and as far as children's books go they are great.
Wow. "I haven't read them, but you--who have read them--are definitely arrogant for thinking they're bad" is...certainly an opinion you can have.
There is a reason that English maintains "good" and "popular" as distinct words with distinct meanings. Of course popular things can be bad. I do not for one single, solitary instant believe that you genuinely hold that *every* popular thing of any sort is actually good (or even, that no popular thing anywhere is bad).
"they're children's books, and as far as children's books go they are great. "
Again, offering this opinion on *books you have not read* is about the most laughably intellectually empty thing you could possibly do.
I've read all seven Harry Potter books, as an adult. #1 and #2 were kind of meh. but I recognized them as something I would almost certainly have enjoyed as a child. And since they are explicitly children's books, that makes them *good*, not meh. #3-#6, I actually enjoyed reading by adult standards. They inherited some mediocre worldbuilding from the first two (seriously, Quiddich?), but the characters and the stories were interesting and the writing was at least adequate. #7 kind of fell apart in Rowling's attempt to get everyone to their designated Happy Ending, but that's still a pretty good run.
HPMoR, as far as I can tell, is made out of 99.44% pure cringe. For a little while I kept at it on the grounds that the general idea was interesting and surely the author would grow into it. But no. I did not finish, and from what I have read elsewhere I do not regret that decision.
I would be embarrassed to be seen reading HPMoR, in a way that I would not for the actual children's books that started it.
I consider "did I enjoy reading it" and "is it good" to be rather different questions, though I might struggle to articulate the difference. But if you've ever--for example--watched a notoriously terrible movie and enjoyed watching it *as* a terrible movie you can probably recognize that there is a difference.
Regardless, I read the first two Harry Potter books when I was 14ish, and my opinion was basically "that's IT?" That's what people are so excited about? I didn't hate them, but I'd read both many better books in general, and better YA books specifically and didn't see anything special about them. I declined to read the rest of the series for quite some time[1]. I read the remainder when I was well into adulthood, and while I enjoyed them well enough, it was also impossible not to notice all the really glaring flaws. I don't mean choices the author made I disagreed with. I mean places where she was just clearly *not paying attention*. Where she wrote in a glaring but easily-fixable problem and just (apparently) didn't notice. Or worse, where she *eventually* noticed, and "fixed" it in the stupidest way possible[2]. But they were a nice, easy read that kept the pages turning, so it was quite possible to enjoy them anyway. Meanwhile, whatever her issues with plotting and story structure, Rowling certainly did quite a unique and multifarious job with her world-building. So while I have a pretty damn low opinion of their quality, the weighting that goes into that judgement is subjective enough that I would be quite silly in insisting everyone else must share it.
I do, however, find it pretty amusing how many people who clearly don't much enjoy them stretch to insist that no they're good actually, because "they're for children[3]." As if children are incapable of having individual taste or standards, and media written for younger readers can't be good in its own right. Of course, not everyone can be in the target audience for every piece of media. But if you don't actually like a genre, reading something from it and then opining "well, it didn't actually resonate with me in any meaningful way, but I'm certain *if it had* I would have thought it was good" seems like quite the unnecessary act of rhetorical contortionism. There's plenty of media aimed at younger audiences that I will quite happily *actually hold up as just plain good media.* But I hope if I ever become so vapid as to insist that something I don't actually care for is nevertheless good "as children's media," I really hope that the high wears off quickly and that I never try that particular drug again.
"I would be embarrassed to be seen reading HPMoR, in a way that I would not for the actual children's books that started it."
Personally, I would be far, FAR more embarrassed to admit I chose my reading material based on how I thought other people would judge me for it, instead of just reading whatever I wanted like a fucking adult. But to each their own, I guess.
[1] I think, in hindsight, partly just out of reflexive contrarianism, which was sort of silly.
[2] I can only assume that by this point, Rowling had so much clout that her editor was basically a rubber-stamp.
[3] Which is already a tell in itself. There's a reason that both sellers and critics of literature draw a distinction between "Children's books" and "YA books." The gap between the latter category and "adult" fiction is much, much smaller than the gap between it and the former category.
OK, if you're interested in argument from personal experience then let me put it this way. I've actually read part of the first Harry Potter book, and I've read part of the first part of Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality.
One of these partial reads made me think "hmm, okay, this is kindof a fun story, I'd probably have enjoyed this when I was younger" and one of them filled me with a profound sense of second-hand embarrassment on behalf of the author who would expose his own serious intellectual and personality flaws in such an insufferable self-insert character. Would you like to guess which is which?
I notice that only one of us is being consistent here. Having read only small fragments of each text, you judge one of them to be basically OK and the other to be unbearably cringe-worthy. Now *I* don't see anything wrong with that judgement: each person has their own tastes. But when you maintain that it's wrong or arrogant to judge a popular or successful work harshly and then IMMEDIATELY go on to do just that, it really just sounds like you're flinging poop and hoping some of it will stick.
Or did you not notice that HPMOR is also quite popular and successful? Of course, it's very difficult to get in estimate of how popular[1] because online fan-fiction doesn't leave any of the same footprints lets print media count readership. But I gather a fic being well-known at all outside of the fan-fiction community (of which I'm not a member) is highly unusual, as is a fic garnering significant readership who weren't fans of the original work. About the only other example I can think of is Master of the Universe, and arguably it needed to *stop* being fanfiction[2] and go mainstream to get the same sort of recognition. Which is a perfect time to point out that your original standard *also* precludes harsh judgement of both Twilight and the 50 Shades series.
In case my main point got lost in there, let me say it quite clearly: QUALITY IS SUBJECTIVE. It's so, so, SO subjective. There are just *so many* personal, non-transferable details that go into judging a work. So when Kriss says "HPMOR is terrible" *he is not wrong.* When Frug responds "HMPOR is considerably better-written than the original Harry Potter series," that's *also not wrong.* When you say "from the minuscule amount I read, Harry Potter seemed fine and HPMOR seemed insufferable," you may be kind of silly for jumping in with opinions of works you know nearly nothing about, but you're *still not wrong.* I gather this is sometimes really hard for STEM people (of which I am one), because being able to quickly and confidently say "no, that's wrong" is a pretty vital skill in math, science and engineering. But nevertheless, nobody offering their opinions on the quality of Rowling's or Yudkowsky's fiction is right OR wrong. They're largely not making the kind of statement that CAN be right or wrong.
Which in turn means that you ARE wrong when you go around insisting that people's tastes are somehow invalid because something, something, money and popularity.
[1] Nevermind the question of "how successful" which would be impossibly subjective even when comparing commercialized media of the same type. And trying to define a workable standard of "success" that lets you compare free, serialized, online fanfiction to printed novels is certainly a fool's errand. Which suggests at least a 50% chance that some fool is going to jump into my replies attempting to do just that.
[2] For legal reasons, this is a joke. There is definitely no fanfiction by the name of Master of the Universe, and if there was it would definitely, definitely have no relationship whatsoever to either 50 Shades of Grey or the Twilight saga.
Thanks for engaging. I suspect we'll largely just end up agreeing to disagree, but by way of appreciating your engagement, let me say a bit in response:
On HPMoR: de gustibus non disputandum est, always, and that may be what's going on here; but I don't think that "better than Rowling" is an impossible standard and I think it clears it. (I didn't say he was better than Tolkein or Le Guin or anything!) I get that you think that makes me dismissable, but I don't think it's prima facie unreasonable, unless you think in general that fanfiction is lesser than original fiction, which I don't. (It probably also has to do not only with my evaluation of HPMoR but also my sense of Rowling.) I think his characters are more interesting, his worldbuilding more interesting, his plots more compelling. But, as I said, de gustibus non disputandum est. I mostly threw that in on the off chance anyone who hadn't read HPMoR came across my essay, to sort of counterbalance what Kriss said and leave them, hopefully, with a neutral impression, so they could judge for themselves. But again, I just don't see that saying that one book is better written and more interesting than another is all that shocking *whichever* way you frame it. (Also, it's certainly not *arrogance* on my part since I had absolutely nothing to do with it save being a reader of it; maybe it would be arrogance for Yudkowsky to say it, but I'm just a reader with an opinion.)
On utilitarianism, however, I respectfully suggest that you're misreading Kriss's essay, Here's what he says about utilitarianism, that it's "plainly hideous: lifeless, brutal, reducing us all to preference maximisers, arrogant beyond belief, and utterly opposed to every principle of life and dignity". That goes a *lot* farther than saying it's not obviously true; it's basically saying it's obviously *false*. So on that I will stand by what I said.
On plain facts: you may be right that I misunderstood it. But as far as I can tell it is what I called it, a deepity: that is, a statement poised between something obviously true and banal and something that would be shockingly interesting if true but isn't. You restated the first part, which if that's what he meant then he's right but not particularly interesting or novel (or opposed to the rationalists, at least of Mr. Alexander is taken as representative). But I think the point of it, like all deepities, is a sort of motte-and-bailey approach: make a shocking claim and then retreat to something more sensible when pressed. Again, maybe I'm misreading him; but I don't think he gives enough context to say, which I think backs up the deepity reading (if you give little context, you preserve both interpretations, which is the idea of a deepity).
Finally, as to religious inventions of rationalists: I really don't know enough to comment. I don't think that I know much about the rationalists qua rationalists. I have read a great deal of Scott Alexander's work, a decent amount of Yudkowsky's, and all of Ozy Brennan's that I can get my hands on (I don't even know if Ozy counts as a rationalist or not), and some of a few others, but I don't feel like I know much about the rationalists as a movement or a community or whatever it is. And I don't feel I need to! I think Alexander & Brennan are great essayists and that Yudkowsky & Alexander are great fiction writers (sorry), and that's really the extent of my interest in the matter. (I will admit I was piggybacking off the interest in rationalism around these parts to see if I could get some readers, but that was mostly on a "hey I bet some of these folks would be interested" basis rather than a "I am talking about that aspect of it".) So I dunno. Do they invent religions? I have no idea. Maybe Kriss is right, maybe not. My main sense is that (as I said in the essay) most people who say things about rationalists *either* pro or con seem to be wildly distorting things; but again, my basis for making that judgment is slight and I'm just not THAT interested in it.
I hope some of that may be interesting. Again, thank you for reading & engaging.
> unless you think in general that fanfiction is lesser than original fiction, which I don't.
While I don’t think fanfiction is inherently lesser than original fiction, I thought HPMoR had many of the hallmarks that people make fun of in fanfiction, and by the end of its writing we were many years past the ‘peak’ of those hallmarks being noted and mocked. And that much of the readership discussing it appeared unfamiliar with fanfic in general, and with HP fanfic in particular, and so took many things as being fresher than someone else might have perceived them.
I particularly recall assuming, as he entered the final run of actually finishing the thing, that he was writing in a deliberately overblown pastiche of fanfic. He paused and said that he was waiting for enough comments before posting the next chapter. He asked people to guess how our genius character would solve an apparently impossible problem, and then when many people guessed it and others suggested a cooler solution, he rewrote it with the cooler solution. There were detailed descriptions of how cool our cool characters cool outfits were. There were cerulean orbs.
And hey, de gustibus. I’m guessing the people who write cerulean orbs in fanfic think that that is what good writing looks like.
From subsequent discussion, I think it wasn’t intended as a pastiche of overblown fanfic, but was instead a sincere example of the genre. I don’t consider that good writing. By contrast, Rowling typically tends to the understatement. If you are someone who finds cerulean orbs to be good writing, then I’m sure extensive understatement looks like worse writing.
And while Rowling does have a couple of careless errors that I wish an editor had caught, generally her books are plotted like detective novels. There is a ‘solution’ which can be figured out, and which inevitably follows and fits all the pieces. She wouldn’t rewrite how a problem is solved based on her audience thinking it is cooler, because it would be part of the whole and changing that wouldn’t work. That’s *why* people find the careless errors so frustrating. (I do not include here the mathematics of her worldbuilding, which simply doesn’t work because she was focused on writing satire of British society rather than trying to build a coherent alternative fantasy world)
If there were cerulean orbs in HPMoR I've forgotten them.
I will admit that I *don't* read much other fanfiction (nothing against it in principle, and I know of one other piece I rate highly, but I just haven't encountered much of it), so any parallels to it escaped me. I thought the "final exam" bit (coming across it years later) was cute, but not a big deal either way.
AFAICT, people really dislike three things about HPMoR: the culture that has grown up around it, its main character's status as a Mary Sue, and its didacticism. The first two don't bother me because, re the first, I don't interact with the culture, I just read the book; and in regards to the second, I don't care that the main character is or is not like Yudkowsky or what his psychology is, and as a literary device if you're willing to read a book about a superman (and hey, either way we're reading ones about wizards, right?) then it's very well done. The didacticism I admit is a flaw, but, first, it's one that's easy to ignore; second, it's one that is heaviest in the beginning and fades over time; third, it works well as plot/world-building in a "clash of cultures" sort of way (why *does* the wizard bank just *stick gold in a locked room*? What *does* it mean in a quantum world that you can only transform an 'entire' object? etc,), and finally, when considered as a children's book—I actually read it aloud to my kid—it can (in my case did) get the kid interested in science, which is a good thing and worth a bit of didacticism.
In contrast, here are some things I think are better about HPMoR:
• Draco. Instead of a blind bully, he has a real viewpoint, and is an interesting character. Harry's friendship with him is a great part of the book.
• Voldemort. Rowling's Voldemort made Dr. Doom look sophisticated and possessed of complex goals. HPMoR's reimagining of Voldemort was fabulous, into a genuinely terrifying and *interesting* antagonist. (And the retconning of the cannon Voldemort as <<a disposable villain persona I invented for practice, making him as dumb as possible ("death eaters"!), and found to my horror that he *won*>> was brilliant.)
• All the other characters were better too, except for Ron Weasley, who was simply ignored.
• And yeah, I include Harry. The fact that he may or may not resemble Yudkowsky's image of himself is neither here nor there: it was an interesting portrait of a young superman—like what Orson Scott Card did in Ender's Shadow, but better. People don't notice enough how often he fucks up. Rowling's Potter is central and important for Reasons; with HPMoR's Potter at least has a reason for being the hero, namely his powers & intelligence—there was a legitimate story-central explanation for his powers by the end which made it all make sense.
• The world-building. Rowling's was terrible; HPMoR cleverly invented things to make much of it work (and the few exceptions it just mocked).
• The plotting. I thought that HPMoR's plot was remarkably propulsive; I thought Rowling's plots were fine.
So yeah, better characters, better plot & better world-building: better books. (I haven't done a strict comparison but I suspect the quality of the prose is a wash—we're not talking Nabokov in either case.) Obviously Rowling has her strong points too (she invented the world to begin with), but I think HPMoR is better.
I think if HPMoR had stuck with being as didactic as it was trying to be in the beginning, I would cut it more of a break for just being a tract: tracts don’t have to have other merits, because they exist to tell you that their view is the right one and everyone else is stupid and evil. Just as I don’t care that Rowling’s worldbuilding doesn’t work as an individual fantasy world, because it does work as satire of British society.
But at some point, it just became a long, overblown fanfic that was trying to be a super-cool fanfic of both Harry Potter and Ender’s Game. The stuff in it that is just like everything people mock in fanfic in general is typical of juvenalia. The EY psychology aspect of it makes me sad, and not for the ‘super genius’ element exactly.
I don’t know that there’s much point in discussing characterisation when we disagree so profoundly, but Rowling wrote a variety of charcters who each felt like different people with different, recognisable voices, who felt like different people I know in the real world, who all reacted to things and to each other in ways that I have experienced people reacting to things, and whose motivations made sense to me. This was not my experience with HPMoR.
I looked at the essay, and then I read you going back and forth with Kriss in the comments. It looked a lot like when I first saw someone getting trolled on usenet nearly 30 years ago. The victim of the trolling is posting one after another high-effort response, convinced that if only they can clearly explain their position the troll will understand, there will be a meeting of minds, and everyone will be better off. Meanwhile the troll posts brief, low effort responses designed for no other purpose than to get their victim to waste their time continuing to respond, because they find sincerity hilarious.
Yeah, I can see why it looks like trolling. Based on a private interaction that I had with him later (which I wish had been public but which he said in confidence so I don't feel I can decently elaborate) I don't think he *was* trolling; I think something else was going on. But you're certainly. right that I was trying hard to be serious & explanatory in a straightforward way in response to someone who was playing a different game. And yeah, it probably looks funny from the outside. But I think that sincere engagement is an important value, and am willing, I guess, to hold to it even in the face of looking silly.
I am not quite sure what you mean. Maybe I'm misreading you, but I think you're saying that I missed the joke and you are smug because you saw it? Which, well, maybe. (Or maybe I saw it and just thought it wasn't funny.)
But assuming I'm reading you right, and that I really did miss the joke, I think I would reply with the following story (which I thought was from Gene Wolfe but I can't find it now so I am paraphrasing and maybe misremembering the source): When Thomas Aquinas was in seminary his fellows used to like to play jokes on him. One time they told him there was a pig flying outside the window. Aquinas rushed to the window to see, and they all laughed at him. Aquinas replied, "I would sooner believe a pig could fly than a Dominican would lie."
This casts your personal behaviour in an odd light, are you always thinking "well I could murder/rape/torture/defraud this person if I wanted to, maybe I will if I feel like it, maybe I won't, it depends" because not being a murderer because you cannot behave otherwise is nothing to be proud of?
If it is a constant struggle for you not to commit murder, then yes, be proud of overcoming that! But in general people are going to be somewhat leery of "sorry, just wrestling with my overwhelming impulse to bash your brains in, give me a second" rather than "why on earth would I want to murder anyone? I'm not a murderer!" as someone sitting beside them in the bus.
This is giving me that particular brand of smug satisfaction that comes from seeing someone you already disliked behaving badly. Which maybe isn't that healthy. But I appreciate the level-headed analysis.
I'm suspicious of predictions about the coming of AGI which are based on the, often impressive, performance of current chatbots? Why? Because that performances is always evaluated against specific tasks. Not all thinking is like that and I suspect that quite a bit of creative thinking isn't like that at all. Rather, it starts with an open-ended exploration.
I have a longish post in which I report the process I went through a couple of years ago to produce an interpretation of Spielberg's "Jaws" using Girard's ideas about mimetic desire and sacrifice. The process started when I watched the film on Netflix without any intention writing about it. I watch a lot of streaming video and never write about most of it. Once I'd seen the film I checked its Wikipedia entry, something I do quite often as a way of 'calibrating' my own impressions. The entry was extensive, and included a comparison with the three sequels, which is said were inferior.
So, out of curiosity, I set out to watch them I found the 3rd and 4th sequels unwatchable, but enjoyed the 2nd. Yes, it was inferior. But why? Too diffuse. Watched the original again. Noticed that it fell into two parts, the first 3/5 taking place in the village and involving lots of players. The last 2/5 took place at sea and involved three men and the shark. I then asked ever more specific questions about that last part until finally it hit me: "Sacrifice! Girard!" Only then did I decided to write a post.
Then I began a much more focused and specific process to gather evidence for my post. I read about Girard (my library, alas, is in storage), interviews with him, some of his articles, I consulted with a grad school buddy who'd studied with Girard, made lots of nots and drafts, etc.
My overall suspicion is the SOA chatbots can do that second process fairly well, but that first exploratory process, that requires agency, autonomy, and curiosity. Chatbots don't have those characteristics and we're all but clueless on how to create them that way. But most post isn't about that part of the argument. It's just a description of my thought process. Here's the link: Intellectual creativity, humans-in-the-loop, and AI: Part 2, Interpreting Jaws https://new-savanna.blogspot.com/2025/08/intellectual-creativity-humans-in-loop.html
I did some AI awareness work with university professors over the past few years - these are (mostly) smart people.
I work in a language with a few hundred thousand native speakers, not English. Three years ago, they told me that the grammar of the AI was so poor it would never pass as an undergrad. Two years ago, the same people told me that the grammar was too good, and they would never mistake the AI writing for that of an undergrad. The same people, a year apart - they saw no contradictions in their opinions, and remained convinced that there was some essential difference between writing produced by an LLM and human writing. They were sufficiently attached to the prior that any actual evidence was automatically discounted. In fact, you ask the AI to write with, say, CEFR level B1, it emulates a teenager perfectly.
In the same way, people say the AI can't generate insights. In a strict sense this is true: all it generates is streams of text. We have to evaluate it and decide if there is meaning or originality there. As another example, a colleague teaching entrepreneurship told me that the AI couldn't come up with a product idea. I asked Claude for ten ideas, localised to my city (there was a stadium in view from the office window, and I included the local team in the prompt) -- I chose what was in my opinion the best idea, asked the LLM to elaborate, fed in some assignment type questions, and within 15 minutes I had a business plan it would have taken an undergrad a month to produce.
The LLM produces text; we find meaning. If your prompt is not producing a meaningful output, you need to refine the prompt, not claim the technology can't do what you want.
But not every interesting thing can be elicited by a prompt, which is the point of my article. Anything that you know how to prompt, that's the easy stuff. Product ideas, localized to your city, with the local team in the prompt, that's fairly specific. You've done half the work.
I go back and forth on the plausibility of AGI, which I guess means I should write about it to force myself to think it through.
I think in the near term it will mostly be additive. I can imagine the current vibe coding turns into more tightly scoped approaches that allows the average user to program their Echo device and lots of new AI-enabled devices that come on the market.
That's how web and previously client-server apps wormed their way into the enterprise. Departments had specific needs that were not big enough to elevate to corporate IT.
Tracker ecosystem keeps a lot of obscure, but still not-entirely-out-of-copyright media alive, catalogued, quality controlled, and available, but common software stacks are very hacky and don't scale (10k active torrents can already be a problem). Most of that ecosystem is very xkcd 2347 too (god bless Arvid Norberg).
I don't think there are any unsolvable technical problems other than the requirement for development time and attention. However, the private tracker ecosystem is quite long in the tooth now, some examples off the top of my head:
1. BitTorrent V2 solved a bunch of problems with the protocol itself, but five years after there is still practically zero adoption among private trackers.
2. There is very little ipv6 support on private trackers, despite improved connectivity that ipv6 offers.
3. There is a spec for NAT hole punching, but no way to test it, and real world support seems to be spotty.
4. More generally there are (were?) no serious diagnostic tools, despite connectivity being quite finicky and easy to get wrong. I built https://torrentdyne.com , but got a bit burned out and can't afford to dedicate enough hours to it.
5. Content is split between private trackers, and to my knowledge no major client makes it easy to share a file between trackers. There are tools like cross-seed, but that's very clunky compared to what could be.
6. Scalability is a challenge. All major clients struggle to utilise the amount of storage and bandwidth available nowadays.
It could be a nice side activity for a nonprofit, but I guess there's a combination of the field being niche and large orgs worrying about being on the wrong side of copyright activists.
Thanks for sharing these! I'll give these and the btv2 blog post a read.
I was under the impression that the torrent ecosystem is alive and well. Haven't really touched torrents except the occasional Linux iso download in years. Also didn't know there's a median preservation thing going on with torrents.
My substack about agency is going to include an autobiographical series, part my own attempt to get better at writing, part accountability, part therapy I suppose. It's got a trigger warning, I'm not sure it's super valuable reading, but I'm putting myself out there:
I consider these beliefs absolute and don't think it possible that I ever stop believing in them (unless I get mad or otherwise mentally impaired). Despite this high bar, it seems like this set of beliefs is more or less complete, i.e. it's enough to form a relatively full picture of the world.
I'd be interested in feedback of two types: 1. Are these beliefs actually as fundamental as I think? 2. Are there any other beliefs that don't directly follow from what I described, that I should still hold as absolute truths?
Thank you. I enjoyed this and subscribed to your Substack, which is a rare action for me. I also majored in math, which probably is not casually independent of liking this article.
With regard to your #4, I prefer the framing in terms of pleasure being good. It's true, as you mention at the end of that section, that naive attempts to maximize pleasure will have poor second-order effects, but I think that's also true of naive attempts to minimize suffering, and even more so?
I agree with you that maximizing pleasure (everything else being equal) is almost certainly desirable. However, while I'm 100% sure that the same thing is true about minimizing suffering, I'm only like 95% sure about pleasure. Mostly because I'm thinking that maybe the positive goals should be framed differently, like maybe other goals like knowledge-seeking are more important and there's some irreconcilable contradiction between them and pleasure-seeking. That's why I decided to be conservative and only write about minimizing suffering.
Physical world is explainable. Consciousness almost certainly is explainable as well since it interacts with the physical world. Ethics is not something that "exists" in the same way as the world exists, it's more of an abstract category, and as such can be unexplainable.
Any species smarter than humans will also be able to comprehend the world. It just so happened the humans were the first species to develop a powerful enough language and mathematics to describe the necessary concepts. Otherwise it's a bit like Church–Turing thesis: once you have Turing machine, you can implement any computations. We were the first species to develop this complexity.
Why? And to whom? You can't claim that it's divine mercy.
>Otherwise it's a bit like Church–Turing thesis: once you have Turing machine, you can implement any computations. We were the first species to develop this complexity.
Did you get to that from David Deutsch? Because we don't know that Turing [computation is necessarily adequate], and we don't know of any other universal thingy.
Deutsch also gives the example of number systems. There are ways of writing numerals that don't allow you to write arbitrarily large numerals, and ways that do. So the ways that do are universal ... in a sense. They don't require actual infinities , like a UTM. On the other hand, the argument only demonstrates universality in a limited sense: a number system that can write any integer , cannot necessarily write fractions or complex numbers, or whatever. So what is the ultimately universal system? No one knows. Integers have been extended to real numbers, surreal numbers, and so on. No one knows where the outer limit is.
Similar considerations apply to universal languages. Languages allow the formation of an infinite number of sentences based on a finite vocabulary and set of syntactical rules, but it doesn't follow that they can express anything that could be conceived by anybody. If you feel your language does not allow you to. express a your thoughts , then you can extend your language...as far as your thought. But extensibility doesn't give you the ability to express "everything" either.
If your language can’t express a concept that you also can't even conceive, how would you know?
Deutsch toys with the idea that DNA is also universal, but it is not at all clear whether DNA as we know it can build any living organism, or what life in the most generic sense is. Deutsch seems to think that digitality and error correction, both of which DNA has, are necessary components of universality. This is, as ever based, on analogy with the UTM, the universal digital computer , but it seems plausible that digitality and error correction are necessary components of digital computation, not universality. And necessity is not sufficiency.
So there are two problems: some of his candidates for universality aren't even infinite, ... and where they are, that isn't universal enough. An infinite line is infinite in only one dimension.
We have a number of theorems about the limitations to how the numbers can be extended. Like if you want it to be a field, you can't go past complex numbers. If you want field + completeness + complete ordering, it could only be real numbers.
With languages likewise, different languages seem to have almost exactly the same expressive power modulo vocabulary.
>In other words you can say "induction works for model building".
Model building is abduction, not induction.
If you are making the claim that the world is *entirely* comprehensible to humans, then it is not enough to be able to build *some* models, ... You need to build all the models , corresponding exactly to the the laws of nature.
>This removes the "for whom".
Obviously not. Most humans are unable to come up with relativity themselves. So the smartest humans could have some limit as well.
Mathematics is correct about what? We know that there a lot of consistent structure s that weren't physical, which is why we need empiricism. We don't know that mathematics has an period claim to be able to describe everything...the supplier for "language of nature" claim is its track record. We also know that you have to pick one of consistency and completeness..is your correct maths inconsistent or incomplete?
I phrased it badly. This particular belief is about it being consistent. There's no sense in picking an inconsistent theory since it would be completely useless. On the other hand, I don't see any problem with a mathematical theory being incomplete.
Because I believe that there's a "common denominator" that is a subset of all serious mathematical theories and can't possibly be inconsistent. Furthermore this "common denominator" is strong enough for all practical questions.
Calculus and other math fields can be reformulated in constructive math retaining most of their power. It's usually not done because a) physicists don't really care about mathematical logic, b) it's a bit more awkward than traditional axiomatics.
Mathematics depend entirely on the axioms you choose for it. Choose different axioms, and you get different mathematics. If you choose your axioms prudently, you can get useful tools that help with innumerable real-world problems, but in the end, it's still a model of reality, not reality itself. For example, mathematics allow easily for tachyons, particles that are faster than light and cannot cross the threshold to below c just like ordinary particles can't go above c, but it's unclear whether tachyons are a real, observable thing or only a mathematical artifact.
"Mathematics and logic are correct", then, is fundamentally a trivial observation - trivial at the highest level and useful, but there is no guarantee that our current mathematics will serve us until the ends of science. Perhaps one day we might discover entirely new mathematics that are even more useful, with which you can tackle the unsolved mathematical problems of today or those we don't even know about yet.
>"If you choose your axioms prudently, you can get useful tools that help with innumerable real-world problems, but in the end, it's still a model of reality, not reality itself."
If you choose your axioms even more prudently, the real-world problems they help with could themselves be numerable. /s
Regarding the thachyons — I don't see any problem with them. It's a feature of the model that we are using that is completely independent from our observations, so it's ok remain agnostic regarding their existence.
Then I don't see what you mean. If you believe that axioms are fundamentally true and do not require further proof, then yes, sure, that's pretty much the definition of an axiom. Again, trivial. You do write, however, that "Mathematics is the basic language of the world.", which I understand to be a statement about physical reality, not the limited world of mathematics as derived from some set of axioms.
My first belief is just that constructive mathematics (approximately Peano arithmetic plus set theory limited to countable sets) is consistent. It's a purely abstract statement that doesn't say anything about the real world.
I further believe (as part of belief 2), that real world can be described by mathematical models (within this mathematical theory or a stronger one).
Some of the possible models include tachyons and some don't. It is possible that at some point we'll figure out that only theories with or theories without tachyons are consistent with observations. Alternatively it's possible that tachyons will remain an optional feature of the models.
"Math is consistent and can be used to describe reality" is an implicit assumption of the describe-the-world-at-a-fundamental-level project we call physics.
Typically, physicists do not worry a lot about "but what if it turns out that every theory capable of describing integer multiplication is inconsistent?" It would be like worrying about the structural integrity of the bedrock on which you build your sandcastle.
Moreover, when they write "let the center of mass be $p \in mathbb{R}^3$" in classical mechanics, this should not be read as "I strongly assert that the number of distinct points is space which p could take is equal to the cardinality of the real numbers", but mostly "I want to use techniques from analysis like differentiation and taking square roots, and real numbers are a model which is good enough for that". I mean, for every physics simulation, you replace "real number" with "floating point number", which despite pascal calling its floats "real" are as dissimilar as two kinds of numbers can be, and numerical issues aside this works fine.
> The world is explainable and simpler explanations are more likely to be true.
Personally, when trying to explain the world, my aim is not to find The Truth (TM), but to find models which might be eventually falsified, but describe reality well enough in the meantime. The history of physics, slightly idealized, is people preferring the simplest viable model, which then gets falsified. The standard model of particle physics is not simpler than classical mechanics! It is neater in some vague way, and it explains a lot more observations, but not simpler.
The reason to select for simplicity is not because we expect that the fundamental model of reality should fit on a beer mat (personally, I expect that it will be beautiful in some way, but not that it will have a tiny Kolmogorov complexity), it is a simple survival strategy given that the number of available models increase exponentially with their complexity.
If a theoretical physicist traveled back in time to Newton and tried to convince him and his colleagues that the standard models of particle physics and cosmology are much better than his theory of gravity, she would fail, even aside from the fact that nobody would understand the math. The modern models would have little advantage in explaining what the experimentalists in Newton's age can measure, and a gigantic complexity penalty. There are multiple Kuhnian paradigm shifts between her and Newton, and you can't bridge that kind of inferrential distance in one step.
Her best bet would be to bring an experimentalist and a historian of science along who will try to rebuild key experiments which established and shattered paradigms to speedrun the scientific community, but even that would be more of a project of a century than a year.
>The reason to select for simplicity is not because we expect that the fundamental model of reality should fit on a beer mat (personally, I expect that it will be beautiful in some way, but not that it will have a tiny Kolmogorov complexity), it is a simple survival strategy given that the number of available models increase exponentially with their complexity
Theres an argument that simpler actually more likely, but it doesn't predict any level of simplicity.
I write about this in the article. There's a balance between predictive power, measured as cross-entropy and complexity measured as Kolmogorov complexity.
As I write in my post, I strongly believe only in constructive math, which I can't imagine being incorrect. This seemingly is a problem for stuff like calculus, but AFAIK, there are slightly awkward ways to introduce most features of calculus in a constructive way, so it's not really a problem.
> to find models which might be eventually falsified, but describe reality well enough in the meantime.
This is more or less what I describe in the post.
I do believe though that the world that we live in should have close to minimal Kolmogorov complexity according to some computation system. Otherwise, as you say there's exponentially many alternatives.
I weakly believe that on its most basic level the sum of all reality is something like a Universal Turing machine, in which our particular slice of the world is repeated an infinite number of times with some variations, including the variations of the underlying physics laws.
What is true is that many processes are chaotic: they are very sensitive to the border conditions to make precise predictions impossible. But this in itself can be part of the model and doesn't invalidate it.
For our world to have irreducible complexity something weird should happen: like imagine we can run any experiments that are physically possible, but we still can't find a theory of everything that would be consistent with all of the observations? Like, the observations can't be matched to any computable function... I don't think this is possible.
Doesn't the C in ZFC stand for "Axiom of Choice"? Sorry to only give feedback you didn't ask for!
Okay let me try to give feedback relating to (1):
I think your third point, "My Feelings are Real" is actually even more fundamental than anything else. Like, all the other beliefs are beliefs _about_ an external world, or about something else, but your experience of qualia just _is_. You could try to disentangle this by rephrasing to something like: I believe my memories of having had past qualia are real; but personally I don't at all feel fundamentally sure about this. I can check a memory by recalling it, and while I can be fundamentally certain that I am having the experience of remembering right now, I can't at all feel certain that it corresponds to a previous instance of actual experience. So the current moment of experience fundamentally just "is", in such a fundamental way that I don't even know if it can be even called a belief.
Regarding your point about the reality of memories, I don't think I would necessarily say that I believe that. As you say, for all we know, memories might be generated during the process of remembering them (I think at least sometimes it actually happens that way). That's why I'm talking about the reality of "thoughts and feelings", which would include the feeling of remembering something.
I agree with you that it's possible to consider belief 3 as more fundamental than belief 2 and belief 1 (though I think Math would still be valid even if nothing existed). As I wrote in the post, I see belief 3 as more of a definition of what "real" is, than a statement of something being real. I think the only reason why I put it after the belief 2 is because I wanted to show that the belief that you are real implies the reality of the world and other people, and for that I needed to already have stated belief 2.
Maybe I would refer to it as "perceptions", more than thoughts and feelings. Most of the time, thoughts and feelings are remembered (especially thoughts too complex to fit in working memory, or long chains of reasoning), so at the fundamental place I would put "current perception", which can be sights, sounds, physical sensations, as well as the perception of a current thought.
I haven't considered that precise interplay between perception (3) and basic induction (2), to infer the existence of the world and other beings. Solipsism has always been pretty disturbing to me.
I think using induction to infer the existence of the world is a pretty important part of my beliefs. Technically you could be a Boltzmann brain just imagining things, but if it were the case, it would be so incredibly unlikely that you imagine such a consistent world, that seemingly operated independently from you.
Hm I'm not sure that is the correct way to get around the Boltzmann brain problem: the number of observers having coherent observations also vastly outnumber the real people who lived. But also I see your point, the number of incoherent observers are presumably way larger. Scott Aaronson had some ideas for resolving the issue better, but I don't remember the details.
Suppose our universe is infinite (this simplifies the mental model). Let's consider two ways to generate the subjective experiences of Throw Fence:
1. Via an evolutionary process that converges towards intelligence.
2. Via a random permutation of atoms that just randomly appear together via a quantum process or just happened to smash together in the interstellar space.
I'm quite sure that the way 1 is far, far more probable and hence common, just by virtue of it being a convergent self-reinforcing process.
I for one am looking forward to the moment that the liberal investigative journalists rip the mask off the mastermind behind Epstein, expecting to finally have the scandal that will bring down Trump, and it turns out to be *gasp* Obama
Zooming out, I think the biggest error was by Pam Bondi, and incentives explain a lot of it.
Bondi was not nearly as well known in the MAGA media ecosystem as Bongino and Patel, so she saw this as a way to burnish her street cred. First she did that phase 1 release that turned out to be an empty gesture. Then she went on Fox News and made the gaffe about having the files on her desk for review.
Unlike previous Attorneys General, Pam Bondi was a very frequent guest on Fox News and other media outlets. She wants to be a star and flew too close to the sun.
I keep running into things saying or implying that he had an actual business supplying billionaires with underage girls. That seems hugely implausible to me. There can't have been that much money in it. In some countries it's probably quite easy for someone to request and get a very young prostitute, and even in New York seems like a few thoousand would get you the teen plus discretion. Those sums would surely be nothing to Epstein, even if he had a stable of 50 kids. Wasn't his supplying his buddies with underage girls just a sort of favor, sort of like handing them some cocaine or having bunches of it available in golden bowls or whatever?
There is an alternative business strategy you're ignoring. It wasn't blackmail. It was "Hey, come to my party on the island, and we'll talk business while my underage girls pamper you." Some people do business over drinks. Some people do business over drinks and dinner. Epstein took it a step further.
I no longer remember the name of the book that told the following story or who they were, but back in the 70s some luxury car dealers in LA hired a handsome surfer dude (who was over 18 and looked young) to enroll in Beverly Hills High School. Back then the checks were less stringent. So for his "senior" year he chatted up all the pretty girls he encountered. The car dealers would buy premium tickets to concerts and events were celebrities would be. The surfer dude would say, "hey I got some tickets to a concert with backstage passes." And then after, attending the concert, "Hey, I know some cool guys throwing a party, and I hear <insert name of famous 70s actor here> will be there." Pretty soon, the rockers and famous actors, new the parties organized by the car dealers would have a bunch of beautiful high school chicks there. The car dealers started getting orders for high-end cars from their guests. Their business boomed. Until the surfer dude's false credentials caught up with him. He gave up the car dealers. I don't think anyone was prosecuted, though. This was the 70s when interage sex was less frowned upon. So, I think that's what Epstein was doing (besides abusing the underage girls).
He doesnt supply prostitutes, he supplied sex willing girls (not necessarily underage) who dont appear to be prostitutes (maybe they were a bit, theres some grey areas but the crucial point is they didn't appear that way to his clients). His clients are willing to spend so much more money for that much more attractive product. (They just cant think of it as paying for the girls)
I know someone personally who has a similar deal but he hasnt learned how to scale it or get access to billionaire clients. Its a remarkable thing to witness
Yeah but Epstein was worth half a billion dollars. He got rich as a financial advisor to the super-rich. The amount he could make supplying people with attractive underage girls who are not prostitutes is trivial compared to the amount he could make in any number of other ways, unless perhaps he had a huge operation with hundreds of thousands of these girls all over the world, and tens of thousands of employees to find the girls, house them somewhere, make sure they didn't fun away, accompany them on flights around the world to some rich pigass. Otherwise charging Bezos or somebody $10,000 to fuck a teen is in the same category as holding a bakesale for somebody of Epstein's wealth. Probably the easiest way for him to get richer would have been to just keep on being a financial advisor, but he was well-connected and would have had all kinds of opportunities to invest in things, etc.
I think the most economical solution to the question is (1) Epstein himself did have an interest in young girls (if we take 18 as age of majority/consent, then he seems to have liked girls under 18 as much or more than girls 18 or older), going off descriptions of him behaving inappropriately with the students at the private school where he taught (and first made the connections with rich parents who could help him in the later financial career) (2) he wasn't a billionaire himself, he got rich being an advisor for one particular guy, made the most out of the connections there to the other very rich people, and started making himself useful for them (3) being involved in the social scene in the circles of the rich and influential was how he kept up that network, so throwing the kinds of parties that "everyone who is anyone will be attending" meant that he had a constant stream of people willing to show up, even if they were not in fact dear, close, friends of his (4) part of that was having attractive young women in the mix to mingle and be sociable and be hostesses, even if they were not explicitly there to provide sex (5) the sex provision was a side line and here now we are going off allegations by those who said they worked in that way for him, and even there there is a lot of gray areas - are girls (and their boyfriends) who persuade other girls to show up to Epstein parties because they'll be paid well just for being 'nice' (including providing sex) to rich old(er) guys prostitutes or not? If they're spending the money on drugs and fun, and would otherwise be calling themselves sugar babies had the term been more prevalent then?
I'm not saying Epstein didn't do anything criminal or nasty, but I'm saying that "everyone who went to one of his parties knew it was cover for a brothel and the girls were there to provide sex as working prostitutes" is not the whole truth either.
But he was offering something much more valuable than just money to these people. It's not like anyone else was able to provide this service at this quality. This gives him a lot of leverage over a lot of rich people, and if they ever turn on him, he can blackmail them.
You think "party with lots of attractive young women with an affinity for rich older men" is something Jeffrey Epstein had a monopoly on? Some personal mojo that let him and only him arrange such a thing?
I mean, to take the most currently famous Epstein associate, Donald J. Trump *literally owned the Miss Teen USA pageant*, with on-demand access to the dressing rooms of teenaged hotties, and enormous power over their professional futures. Whatever he wanted along those lines, he didn't need Epstein to provide for him.
And the blackmail part doesn't work nearly as well as you think it does, either.
So many questions that aren't being asked regarding Epstein and Trump:
1. We already knew that Virginia Giuffree (16yo) worked as a spa attendant at Mar-a-Lago, before Epstein hired her away (Trump says he "stole" her). Being that it would encourage the media feeding frenzy and make the media want to dig deeper, why did Trump bring this up again in front of the WH press corps yesterday?
2. Giuffre, in her testimony, denied that she ever saw Trump at the various Epstein residences (including the private island he owned, Little Saint James Island, in the US Virgin Islands). And Trump said he broke off his friendship with Epstein in 2000 because he "stole" (hired) Giuffre and at least one other spa worker from Mar-a-Lago. Yet, Trump's chummy "wonderful secret" letter was sent to Epstein in 2003, and Epstein remained on the Mar-a-Lago membership list until Epstein's first brush with the law in 2007. Do we have any videos or photos of Trump and Epstein together after the year 2000?
And who was that other spa worker that Epstein "stole"? Would she be willing to testify now that she's an adult?
3. Around that same time, we had Haley Robson, a student from Royal Palm Beach High School, recruiting girls for Epstein, some as young as fourteen. "Detailed Palm Beach County police logs from 2005 and 2006 include multiple interviews with girls who said they were recruited for Epstein by Haley Robson, a high school student at the time. According to a 2006 Palm Beach Police probable cause affidavit for Epstein, Robson admitted to detectives she acted as one of his recruiters, although she was never arrested or charged in connection to him... They were told upfront that they would have to be topless. Some encounters involved sex with him and another woman in his harem."
The girls' names have been kept confidential because they were minors. But did the police ever interview the parents?
Moreover, Epstein was flying the girls down to the Virgin Islands. Entry to the USVI requires a passport. At least some of these parents must have been signing the paperwork to apply for passports for their daughters. Weren't they suspicious about why their daughters were flying down to the Virgin Islands? Did they have to give excuses to get their daughters out of school? Is there any evidence that Epstein or Maxwell paid off the parents?
4. Giuffre and Robson both attended Royal Palm Beach High School, and their years there overlapped. Some news media implied they were part of the same social circle. Robson is still around. Has anyone asked her what she knew of Giuffre, Epstein, and Trump?
5. What happened to the underage girls found living on Epstein's island after he presumably committed suicide in 2019? The Epstein victim compensation fund (funded by the Epstein estate?) has given out over a $100 million to those victims. But although unconfirmed, they seem to have been required to sign NDAs to get the compensation. If this is true, the media needs to confirm this.
So, Epstein continued to traffic in underage girls after his 2007 conviction. How were they being recruited? Who was recruiting them? (It seems likely the Maxwell and Epstein would have been using underage girls to recruit other underage girls, but we know of no one else involved after Robson gave her deposition to the Palm Beach Police.)
And no one in the USVI law enforcement had any suspicions about what was going on at Little Saint James Island—REALLY?—even though it was commonly referred to by the locals as Pedo Island. Were any of these girls reported as missing persons by their parents?
You guys are so close! The block is the same as for Scott - the disbelief that people can truly be evil and enjoy the suffering of others. The more people, the more suffering, the better.
Of course only a small minority of people, sadistic psychopaths, have this psychological property. But the proportion is higher among billionaires, politicians, media magnates. Epstein’s guys.
You’re exactly right that Epstein can’t have just been providing girls for these men to hit on and sleep with. It doesn’t make sense. There must have been something darker, more illegal involved, for intelligence agencies to use as blackmail. But what?
Certainly many of these girls were young. How young? 18? 14? Surely not 12 or younger??
What were they allowed to do with these girls? Did they indulge in kinks? Abuse?
Did they torture them?
Kill them?
There’s no way. Someone would have blown the whistle. Surely they couldn’t get away with it.
Well, unless they had protection from extremely powerful people. People like the President of the USA, senators, billionaires, directors of intelligence agencies, owners of international media companies.
Then anyone who threatened to blow the whistle could be quietly disappeared. People who tried to look into it could be fired, sued, arrested, their families threatened, smeared in the press, dismissed as conspiracy theorists.
Andrew Breitbart. Mysteriously died after exposing Anthony Weiner as a pedophile and posting a tweet making the same accusation of John Podesta. Coroner who examined his body also mysteriously died. Second coroner ruled it heart failure.
Julian Assange. Jailed for helping Chelsea Manning access sensitive files, wound up spending longer in prison then she did. Ended up arrested shortly after the WikiLeaks Pizzagate files, which triggered widespread Internet speculation that John Podesta (and by extension the Clintons) were involved in a pedophilic conspiracy.
Seth Rich - rumored to be the source of the WikiLeaks Podesta emails. Mysteriously gunned down on a city street. Ruled armed robbery, but nothing was taken.
Weird, right? Probably nothing there. Just a wild conspiracy.
But there’s undeniably a spiritual sickness in the world today that disproportionately affects children. Fertility rate is down across all Western countries. Mental health issues are up, way up. Child sex abuse at horrific scale was perpetrated by Pakistani immigrants to the UK, for decades, and the government and media actively covered it up. Not to criticise the majority of transgender people here, who are usually just trying to get on with their lives, but the ideology of the movement is frankly insane and one possible explanation is that it’s a covert way of normalising pedophilia. Drag queen story hour. Teachers now talk about sex to children. “Minor attracted person” is now the nice way of saying pedophile. Good data is hard to come by (perhaps because it’s actively suppressed) but a shockingly high percentage of trans people in prison are there for sex crimes against children.
Wars? The war in Palestine has overwhelmingly innocent children as victims. The war in Ukraine raises many questions. What is in these Ukrainian biolabs, that supposedly exist and are doing research, but are also a conspiracy theory and no one talks about them? Why does Putin warn about them and why has he been abducting Ukrainian children and taking them to Russia? Does he believe he is protecting them? From what?
…
But anyway, don’t worry, there’s no way any of this has any merit. The world media, US, UK, Israeli governments, Hollywood, all controlled by blackmail of pedophiles? That’s fucking crazy. That’s beyond evil.
My model is that the super rich were paying him mgmt fees to get access to his harem. They didnt care about his financial savvy. His clients valued access to that harem in the millions, which seems a totally reasonable valuation for a billionaire to give to that sort of thing.
How about the alternate theory that he threw really good parties that were fun to go to, with lots of willing girls there who despite being young and very pretty were really into middle-aged men, and this helped him continue making contacts that were useful for keeping his business of managing wealth for rich folks. He was the kind of guy who would always show you a good time, who would give you a ride on his private jet just because you needed one, etc. And this was a good way of maintaining the relationships that kept him in business and made him rich.
The underage hookers were a *business expense*. Just one he also enjoyed as a hobby.
Yeah, but this is complicated by the fact that there are plenty of young, attractive women ready to sleep with rich/famous people for free, and are not prostitutes. Even Epstein used the cover of "modelling careers" and introductions to the right circles as bait, not "come work as an escort at my sex parties".
And it's hard for rich people to differentiate between "is this hot young woman making herself agreeable to me a prostitute provided by the party host, or just someone who attends these parties hoping to hook a rich boyfriend?"
I think there's two things being conflated here: the parties he threw as part of being in the swim of the social scene, and then the private island and the alleged client list for underage girls where everyone knew it was for sex. The latter is what all the allegations and criminal activity is about, and where the demands for the list of names and dates etc. is coming from.
This theory that some people have that Epstein was running some kind of organized business providing underage girls to millionaires makes about as much sense as the idea that Scott, to supplement his income, is growing a shit ton of weed in his basement. And that he's got a bunch of weed subscribers to each of whom he guarantees a monthly baggie of their favorite variety -- Spice of Life, Stinky Heaven, whatever.
See the things wrong with that? (1) Doesn't seem like Scott needs to supplement his income. (2) If he did, he could do more of what's working for him already -- see more psychiatric patients, or do more writing. And increasing his income in either of those ways would be better paying and pleasanter than crapping around with a basement full of weed plants, LED lights and misters. And of course psychiatry and writing are way, WAY safer than a business that involves keeping records of customer's names along with their favorite variety, amount wanted per month, how much they have paid, etc.
Plus the customers would be idiots to get their weed in a way that involves records of that kind.
OK, same goes for sourcing underage girls, if you're a billionaire.
Plus, you are not offering a service that is hard to find elsewhere. Women are for rent all over the damn planet. If you want a teen you just get some acquaintance who has contacts in the underworld to put out the word about what you want (without mentioning your name, of course} and how much you are offering. Won't be long before the kid's dropped off for you in some discreet way, and there are no records of the transaction. Or you just fly in your private jet to Thailand (? -- or someplace poor where the government give zero fucks), talk to the contact one of your acquaintances has put you in touch with, & hand over a sum of money that's small by US standards.
I dont think you are understanding 2 points I am trying to make. My points may be wrong but you arent engaging them.
1. There is no other source of income. No one values his finance expertise. They let him manage their money for access to the ancillary benefits.
2. Value of sex willing non prostitute is >>>> prostitute. The only trick is by its very definition you cant buy it directly. But if you can figure out a business model to sell it, you get very rich. Much richer than a good pimp. He figured it out.
The non prostitute part is really important. i dont think his clients generally thought of themselves as buying girls. They knew he threw the best parties. When they went to those parties, they met the coolest hottest girls that were totally into them. They wanted as many of those party invites as possible. Epstein knew what the business model was. The clients did not.
Also as i said at the beginning I dont think much of this involved anyone underage. So the clients werent doing anything illegal
Yeah, I agree with this. I think that there's been some sort of memetic mutation from "list of guests on Epstein's private island (where they could fuck minors if they liked)" to "list of clients Epstein was supplying with underage sex slaves or some shit". People are now howling for the latter which was never actually asserted to exist.
Hell, as far as your ordering young + discretion, I'm pretty sure there's a supply chain for that in the Beltway exclusively for the use of the members of Congress. The guys who are supposed to be judging Epstein for that kind of shit are almost certainly doing it themselves in some non-negligible proportion.
The most likely thing you get from investigating Epstein is a list of people he was known to associate with and maybe people who went to some of his parties. This looks bad for those people, but isn't enough to prove any kind of crime--if you show I was at a party that also had some underaged prostitutes, but can't prove I did anything with them, you're not going to get a conviction.
"The Mark Foley scandal, which broke in late September 2006, centers on soliciting emails and sexually suggestive instant messages sent by Mark Foley, a Republican congressman from Florida, to teenaged boys who had formerly served as congressional pages."
And of course there was Bill and Monica. No need for external providers if you want some Congressional action!
There *are* a lot of false conspiracy theories surrounding Epstein. E.g it's extremely unlikely that he was murdered or worked for intelligence. But the fact that Trump did a sudden 180 on an issue he'd been pushing for years is a very notable story, even when the underlying claims about Epstein are largely nonsense. And there are some things which are true, like that Trump was a long-time close friend of Epstein. Make of that what you will.
I mean, it's *possible* he was murdered. Prison guards are famously corrupt and indifferent and inept, so it's possible he was murdered because someone paid off the guards, or because the guards were outraged about the pedo island claims and decided to kill him. But also it's possible he just committed suicide and the guards who were supposed to prevent that sort of thing were busy playing poker or catching a nap right then, so didn't notice.
Life isn't an action movie, so indifference seems like a pretty good bet. (And Epstein had a lot of incentive to kill himself--he could expect nothing more for the rest of his life than sitting in locked prison cells and/or being abused by other inmates or guards.) But it's not like it would be a total shock if it turned out someone had him killed, either.
Meh, the 180 was obvious and nigh-inevitable. That Epstein was working for "intelligence", or was a criminal mastermind running a private honey trap, was always a conspiracy theory. But it was a type of conspiracy theory that was going to be highly attractive to Donald J. Trump. It is absolutely no surprise at all that Donald Trump 2024 was going to be all "when I get back into the White House, I'm going to open the Epstein files and bring down all the Liberal Elite". He never had to worry about bringing down *himself*, because he's the one person he knows didn't sleep with one of Epstein's underage hotties.
It's also no surprise that he (and his minions) continued this take into 2025, rather than shutting their mouths and doing due diligence by actually reading all the Epstein files before making grant promises.
Which leaves us with "what does Donald Trump do when he finds out he can't deliver on one of his promises?", and the answer to that one cannot involve anything that might be read as Donald Trump admitting he was wrong about anything. So here we are.
The only thing surprising is that a few specks of dirt are actually sticking to the teflon this time. But not enough to matter.
> Lots of current/former Mossad leaders were at Ghislaine Maxwell's father's funeral
The father who also died in mysterious circumstances somewhere in the middle of the Atlantic in the middle of the night and showed up floating naked off Spain? Yep, that one.
I only vaguely remember the Robert Maxwell death thing, it was something that people made jokes about in the early 90s. I do remember that in Tomorrow Never Dies, when James Bond defeats the media baron villain in his stealth ship and M quickly dictates a press release to Moneypenny saying that he mysteriously vanished from his luxury yacht, that's a reference to Maxwell's death.
I don't like eating vegetables. I still try, but I'm probably taking nowhere near the ideal amount.
Is there an easier way to get the health benefits? Are stuff like vitamins and vegetable drinks actually good for you?
Also, where do you all get your health-related advice? I feel skeptical for most things on TV, Google search gives me some combination of ads, random blogs, professional advices that contradict each other.
For fat soluble vitamins, you're better off consuming them in fat. This shouldn't be too controversial. That said, if you drink the cooking water, you aren't losing much in terms of vitamins, aside from denaturing...
If you situation makes this option accessible, consider getting an all-in-one complete food. Commercial brands include Huel and Soylent. I also used a DIY soylent (non-capital s) recipe for easy food while I was living along in college (although, the recipe I picked was complex enough that even a four day batch wasn't much of a time save; it's possible to scale up production to a few weeks at a time if you invest in the infrastructure a little). Check out the subreddit r/diysoylent for the main community.
On the other hand, I enjoy the taste of vegetables. Apart from steaming/frying brocolli etc., one of my favourite foods is roast vegetable soup. Put some root vegetables and some onions in an oven for 40min with olive oil, then blend with stock. Oh, that reminds me, roasted eggplants marinated with soy and honey and a bit of apple vinegar are heavenly. I'm getting hungry just writing about it.
You're probably fine. Health research is garbage and no one knows how to be healthy outside of not getting really sick. Just don't eat too much and don't get scurvy, the rest is overblown.
Do you like fruit? If so you can probably get most of the same benefits eating a good variety of fruits. The fruit vegetable distinction, culinarily speaking, is somewhat arbitrary and both are a great source of micro-nutrients and fiber. How about whole grain foods? Great source of soluble and insoluble fiber depending on the grain and preparation.
If you "don't like eating vegetables" -- is the problem the ones you've been eating? How many beets do you eat? Carrots? Are there a few vegetables you do like? (Onions? Garlic?). Swiss Chard? Spinach? If you are saying "I don't like eating vegetables" -- have you tried celeriac? How about turnips? Do you like pumpkin pie?
Vitamins and Turmeric supplements and all are actually good for you. Vegetable drinks are equivalent to fruit drinks -- you're getting a lot of sugar, and not doing much to "dilute" it. Probably better if you consume carrot juice as "shots in chicken broth" rather than by itself.
You should include why you don't like eating them. For the taste or texture, are you worried about what it signals to the people around you, do they cost too much compared to other foods, are they inconvenient to prepare?
Why not create a data point of one, and study yourself? You will need to record metrics like how you feel, hair quality, weight and energy levels, and other things using blood tests. What metrics, how often - ask your doctor. They won't want yiur insurance to pay for it though.
I have become expert in making tasty salads and dressings. I mainly eat salads and Mediterranean and Indian food. I try to use quinoa instead of processed grains like rice. I use Ragi instead of wheat since all wheat has been processed in recent decades. I taught myself all this
I'd focus on trying to cook things you enjoy. Think new spices, textures, and not just flavors.
Smoothies by Rhonda Patrick (PhD in a biology area) on FoundMyFitness youtube channel are very good. Do look up one of her smoothie recipes for ideas. A Vitamix blender pulverizes greens.
Other than eating healthy, I try to focus on sleep and exercise (yoga, walk, weights). Everything is impacted by nutrition. I'd call the diet I eat vegetarian with eggs and a whole foods diet. One healthy item glaringly missing is fish but I grew up vegetarian and even eating eggs was a challenge.
If you eat a variety of meats including liver than you have a superior source of vitamins and minerals compared to plants. You can get enough fiber from oatmeal.
If this were the case, we wouldn't have seen an antioxidant-mediated protective effect from smoking and NOX air pollution during covid19. (Otherwise known as Pittsburgh: a case study).
Veggies are definitely an excellent source of a bunch of stuff, but putting them all in one bag feels like disservice. E.g: some people will happily munch on raw celery and carrot sticks, others will find this repellent and conclude they hate vegetables. But you have options that might not be apparent to you: oven roasted bell peppers + dried tomatoes + garlic + eggplant kept in olive oil will make a great topping to add to sandwiches and burgers; add a few bits of butternut or other sweet squash to your roasted potatoes, add a few bits of cauliflower to mash, get some eggplant dips, drink a glass of gaspacho... You can get a bunch of the good stuff that way, but you might need to ask around / read a bunch of recipe books to get ideas.
Vitamin supplements tend to be useful in case of real deficit in one thing or other. anything else is kind of up in the air, for what I know. And for dietary news, just use o3 :)
I don't trust AI that much yet. It lies sounding confident. How do you trust its nutrition advice? I don't have graduate level knowledge in nutrition to know which are good studies in the field. It's a field full of contradictions anyway.
Nutrition might be the one field where I think that the hallucinated LLM lies are not any worse than the field itself. Once you get beyond the _extremely_ basic "eat a wide variety of foods, don't eat too many calories, try to have a decent amount of fruits and vegetables, not too much sugar", everything else is poorly supported hogwash.
That's not to say I would personally use an LLM for this, just to say that there _are_ no good sources for anything that goes beyond the "common sense" advice.
Dr. Jason Fung says people are confused about the data on this.
I'm trying to decide whether to eat fat-free yoghurt or regular yoghurt. And whether to avoid egg yellow. And what he says on salt is if you minimize processed food, that's going to reduce salt intake automatically and he says that's the way to think.
Not answering your question, but: are you eating vegetables cooked and flavoured well? Have you experimented with ways of preparing them, e.g. heavy on soy sauce, roasted until soft, raw? Vegetables is a broad category and there are many ways to prepare them, so I'm sceptical you couldn't find a subset you enjoy.
tritto to this. Broccoli cut into small floret, tossed with sesame oil, and roasted ~425F is pretty good. Blanching vegetables is often much, much better than boiled (which makes me want to gag); toss with a little truffle-infused olive oil.
Rather than trying to both figure out **what you like** and at the same time **how to cook it properly**, maybe try ordering vegetables at higher-end restaurants. Once you appreciate some ways that they CAN be prepared, it gives you a much better target in mind when you try to cook them.
Seconding this. I mostly didn't like the cooked veggies of my childhood. And even as an adult, it took me 10-15 years to really figure out that "grilled" veggies is the way to go. And it took me *another* few years to figure out that my standard (european-type) electric oven has a grill function, that is actually very decent. I grill my veggies for 5-8 minutes - it's both the fastest and by far tastiest way of eating veggies in any way. Season with some oil, salt, pepper, chilli afterwards. Add some feta cheese or meats in the oven for extra deliciousness.
It has become my personal "fast food" at home.. which is ironic, because it is also the most healthy food I eat.
Similar here. I don't understand why the cooks in my childhood, or even my mother now, are so obsessed with vegetables cooked so long that they no longer have any taste left.
Tomatoes and cucumbers and ice lettuce are nice to eat raw.
Most of the remaining vegetables are nice to eat after cooking them briefly in rice cooker. Add oil, salt, pepper, other spices. Eat with meat, cheese, yogurt, or hummus.
I'm pretty sure that overcooked vegetables are a result of Victorian era scientism. Medical men in the Victorian era tended to be obsessed with the digestibility of food because that was a subject on which they had a lot of good scientific information. Thoroughly cooked vegetables break down faster in the stomach and that seemed a self-evidently good thing and so medical men derided the English habit of serving half-cooked vegetables and insisted that vegetables should be thoroughly cooked.
There was a bit of a reversal by the mid-twentieth century when the medical types became preoccupied by vitamins and became interested in the fact that heat tended to break down (and/or activate enzymes that broke down) ascorbic acid and thiamine.
An office mate of mine used to take inulin supplements. Cheap, colorful, crunchy pills the size of my thumb that purportedly help with your fiber needs.
I've tried before to articulate some of the main issues I have with rationalism. (E.g. https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/open-thread-305/comment/44751417). I think I obscured them a bit by also ranting about how obnoxious I find Yudkowsky's writing style. So I'll put that objection aside (I stand by it, but it's become clear that many people just don't see it, which I find baffling but I'll have to just accept). The other thing that happened was that some people kept telling me I was wrong when I accused rationalists of doing x, or demanding evidence that rationalists did x, which I thought was a bit of a distraction even though I invited it by arguing along the lines of "x is bad, rationalism does x, therefore rationalism is bad".
So here, I'm going to be clear that my argument is not that the following things are bad, rationalists do them, therefore rationalists are bad. It is, rather: insofar as rationalists do the following things, they are bad. If they in fact never do these things, then great, I'm wrong and there's nothing wrong with rationalism (well, not on these topics). And if they sometimes don't do them, then in the contexts and to the extent that they don't, they're fine in those contexts and to that extent.
(...deep breath)
There are a lot of things that could be objected to in rationalism, but I'm focusing on things to do with fundamental truth. This is PART I of my critique.
***
The first thing rationalism seems to often do (again if you think some don't then I'm not objecting to them) is approach fundamental questions about reality *not* by reasoning from first principles, but by sort of tentatively assuming a metaphysical framework and then reasoning from within that. So instead of starting from the Cartesian position of radical doubt and seeing what if anything you can come to certainty of, *or* simply taking some initial premises on dogma or faith and accepting that that's unavoidable, they instead seem to do something like: "let's assume materialist empiricism and start from there, then see what we can do with that, including reflecting on the paradoxes and problems with materialism and empiricism". But these are huge, huge assumptions to even *start with*. They involve assuming that there is an external world to us, that we perceive it accurately, that it has a regularity and that its future will resemble its past. Among many other things.
Making an assumption of such a framework, even if you then go on to examine the problems with it (and I'm not sure how often that's done anyway) isn't any more rational than starting with a basic Christian assumption, or a basic Hindu assumption, and then addressing objections to this framework from within the framework itself. A medieval European scholar could reason thus: "let's assume the obvious position, the basic Christian framework, and see if we can address the objections to Christianity within that framework" (many Christians in fact still do this, it's called "presuppositional apologetics"). An Indian in Gupta times could reason thus "let's assume the obvious position, the basic Hindu framework, and see if we can address the objections to Hinduism within that framework" (realistically it would be something more specific than "Hindu" because Hinduism is several different things). And a pop intellectual in the modern US can reason thus: "let's assume the obvious position, the basic materialist/empiricist/humanist framework, and see if we can address the objections to materialism/etc within that framework" (again I'm not really sure I've even seen much of the last part being seriously attempted by rationalists, but I may have just missed it; I'll assume that the small amount of it I've seen has in fact been done a lot, for the sake of argument).
Now, all these three approaches do exactly the same thing: assume the "obvious position" which is really just "the intellectual orthodoxy of our time". (Notice how the last of the three is a clunky three-part description; that's a clue it's the current orthodoxy, lacking a succinct term that isn't very positively biased, like "the scientific worldview"; the same would have been true for the Hindu and Catholic Christian forms at their times). Now the problem is that if you assume a philosophical worldview and reason *from* instead of *towards* it, you have basically crippled your ability to actually question it, or to even properly comprehend the objections to it. You may think you're assuming very little; actually you're assuming an entire dogmatic framework and your "reasoning" will be extremely limited and superficial from then on. How can the Christian take seriously the objections to Christianity when he has already decided to take its foundational claims as assumptions? By his own stipulation, he has declared the dogmas of Christianity *more basic* than the tools of reasoning itself (i.e. he hasn't actually assumed that "arguments of a certain form are always valid" the way he has assumed "the Christian framework"). So if an argument (of a form that would usually be recognised as valid) is presented against the Christian framework, he will sooner take it as proving that arguments of such form must not always be valid, than that the Christian framework is unjustified. Ditto for the Hindu and the rationalist.
Relatedly but additionally, it's important to notice that assuming such frameworks may feel like assuming very little; this is an illusion. The rationalist thinks he's only assuming some really basic premises about the external world and the laws of induction--in fact he's assuming that several absolutely foundational millenia-old philosophical problems are just "somehow solved, we'll figure out how later". And he's also implicitly assuming all of the innumerable further metaphysical, epistemological etc claims that are implied by the assumptions he's explicitly making. If he tried to reason from first principles, he'd realise all of this implicit metaphysical baggage that comes from even the smallest assumption; skipping that approach obscures almost all of it.
And furthermore, the rationalist should be able to see very clearly the pitfalls of this approach when *others* do it. The Christian also thinks he's making some very basic assumptions--that God exists, that He is somehow three persons, and so on. The rationalist will immediately see how many extremely broad metaphysical and epistemological claims are implied by these assumptions, how much unimaginable philosophical baggage has just been taken as given without any positive argument for it at all. When he does the same himself, especially when he's surrounded by a group of people who share the same premises and thus don't challenge them, he's blind to it.
Great points here. This is the conclusion that convinced me rationality, and more broadly physicalism as a metaphysics, was at least worth questioning. And eventually I decided it was almost certainly false.
My first-order gripe with the current rationalists (Yudkowsky et. al.) is that they hijacked the term rationalism to describe themselves. Granted, calling themselves less-wrongers is awkward, but they're misrepresenting themselves in the greater context of philosophical and scientific thought. The historical rationalists, like Descartes, Spinoza, and Leibniz, believed that Knowledge comes primarily from reason and a priori deduction. While the contemporary rats believe the mind is an imperfect reasoning machine based on an organic substrate shaped by evolution (and they most discount environmental influences on cognition). And they *claim* to rely on a hodgepodge of Bayesian "reasoning", probability theory, and normative decision theory built upon a particular view (and I think a biased view) of cognitive science.
My second-order gripe is their heavy reliance on Bayesian reasoning when Bayesianism has the seeds of its own failure modes baked into it.
My third-order gripe is their general inability to understand why other intellectuals may not buy into their program. Thus, labeling themselves rationalists becomes a type of virtue signaling. But the real irony of the contemporary rationalist enterprise the cognitive dissonance of both believing that Truth is probabilistic and subject to updating, while buying into a rationalist reductionist view of the universe. It's analogous to a physicist claiming to believe the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics but also insisting there's an underlying Bohm-de Broglie pilot wave mechanism determining the outcome of an observation.
>My second-order gripe is their heavy reliance on Bayesian reasoning when Bayesianism has the seeds of its own failure modes baked into it.
In what way?
>cognitive dissonance of both believing that Truth is probabilistic and subject to updating, while buying into a rationalist reductionist view of the universe.
What's the dissonance? You've got an epistemic claim, and an ontological claim there. If it you believe that the universe is ontoligically well.defined with no quantum.fuzziness, it can still be reasonable to belief that probabilistic reasoning and incremental updating are the best ways of working with the limitations of the human mind.
OK, I'm back. Regarding my cognitive dissonance snark...
Listen, we all start out with commitments to certain ontological beliefs. My problem with the Yudkowskian Rationalists is that they don't examine their ontological commitments. They build a scaffolding of reason, supposedly based on the empirical probes of reality, but they never question whether their understanding of reality is faulty. Ascend (@ascend675430) said it best above: "The first thing rationalism seems to often do (again if you think some don't then I'm not objecting to them) is approach fundamental questions about reality not by reasoning from first principles, but by sort of tentatively assuming a metaphysical framework and then reasoning from within that." Rationalists go on and on about how they're updating their priors in the face of new evidence, but if we confront them with doubts about the materialist assumptions that support the scaffolding of their reason, they call it philosophy and wave it aside.
Like Andrew Curral, here...
> Sorry, the first criticism you can think of of rationalism is that rationalists assume an external world exists? Err... why pick on rationalists here? Basically everyone but the most abstruse philosophers do that.
And Peter Defeel, here...
> What are the disadvantages to assuming an external world exists? If academic philosophy thinks this is worth debating at all, it’s time to ignore it. Even more.
The cognitive dissonance of Yudkowskian thinking is to never question their ontological priors.
I’m forced to reply with my iPhone right now – so my apologies if spellchecker adds confusion and my responses are a bit short.
In regards to Bayesian failure modes, two problems I see with Bayesian inference are…
1. The assumption is that the prior studies used to derive the posterior distribution are clean. A lot of crap gets through the peer review – or pure non-review – process. If poorly designed studies, p-hacked studies, or outright fraudulent studies contaminate the priors, the posterior is useless.
That’s not to say that Bayesian meta studies can’t be cleaned of data contamination, but I doubt if most Meta study authors take the time to verify the validity of the priors. Garbage in. Garbage out.
2. Selection bias in prior studies can yield a biased result. I’m thinking of the infamous Cochrane review of masks, whose primary author is a extreme critic of masking, and they went out of the way to select studies that supported their bias, and they distorted the results of studies that contradicted their bias. Yet the Cochrane review never retracted this Meta study.
And let’s not forget the first use of Bayesian statistics proved the existence of God based on the assumption that the miracles described in the Bible or real observations.
I’ll respond to the cognitive dissonance claim later this evening.
I tend to use the term "Yudkowsians", since it's clearer and doesn't import the halo-bagage that "rationalist" does. (Plus it's a great way to contrast Yudkowsky style rationalism to the Scott Alexander camp and the like)
I don't know if they persist as different camps, but the main "breaks" I see between Yudkowsky's writings and Scott's are:
- EY coined "politics is the mind killer" and SA specifically addresses contemporary politics
- EY thought arguing about God was important; SA doesn't really bother (most of the time!) (I admit that this is also part of a broader culture shift)
- EY has an extremely high P(doom). SA has a much lower (but still very scary) one
- Oldschool LessWrong writings from EY took psychological studies at face value. One of the major themes in SA's writing is about trusting scientific studies and worrying about the replication crisis, even kind of worrying about science generally (see "The Control Group is Out of Control")
- EY is more willing to reason from first principles and take contrary positions. SA is more wary of Chesterton's Fence
Goodness, Scott and Yudkowsky belong to different rationalist camps? Dare I ask how they differ? No, don't answer. My eyes would either glaze over and roll back in my sockets, or I'd run away screaming from my laptop.
Pragmatically, "materialist empiricism" is a world view which gets you from a medieval tech level to having nukes and supercomputers. Its agnostic version (which asserts not so much that the material world is all that exists, but only that you can learn stuff about the material world from observing it, divorced from any woo) is the common base for pretty much all frameworks which get you from plows to integrated circuits.
Iranian or North Korean nuclear technicians might be very religious or die-hard communists. US chip designers might be woke or MAGA. It does not matter, in their day job, materialist empiricism is the name of the game.
The world could be different. Perhaps the most impressive achievement of science and mathematics was that they had figured that the length of the diagonal in a unit square is roughly 3/2 and inventing an octagonal proto-wheel, while the faith of the Great Ayatollah allowed him to destroy cities with a prayer or turn the desert into paradise with a thought. In such a world, it seems unlikely that Eliezer would write sequences explaining cognitive biases. Arguably, the empiricism comes before the materialism, and a rationalist who realized that the paradigm with which one can change the world on its most fundamental level is Shia Islam would likely convert to some form of it, likely the minimum viable reality-affecting version.
The strong atheist version of materialist empiricism is simply the minimum viable theory to explain what we understand of the world. Rats want their beliefs to pay rent in anticipated evidence. Anything beyond that, such as believing in God or 256 sterile fundamental particles which do not interact with the observable matter in the universe just makes the theory longer without making it explain more observations.
It seems like you're arguing for a pragmatist theory of truth: truth is whatever helps us achieve our goals.
This does seem to be an aspect of what rationalists think they're doing ("rationalists should win"), and could be a coherent approach to take, but I don't think it's taken coherently or consistently at all. It would mean that "have true beliefs" is meaningless as anything additional to "have effective beliefs", it would mean that a religion is true (literally) whenever it has good consequences for society, it would mean that there's no such thing as a useful lie, since anything useful is by definition true, and it would mean if rationalism had a bad effect on society that would *make* it false.
If you bite these bullets, I agree that could work as an approach. If you don't want to, you're going to need a more standard theory of truth by which "x produced nukes" doesn't mean x is true.
YudkowskIan's tend to believe in both epistemic (truth seeking) and instrumental (usefulness seeking) rationality ..And want to believe they are the same thing, with no tension between them.
pragmatically those nukes and computers can make us extinct, so i'm not sure why one is that better than another according to rationalist long-termers.
a lot of this relies more on how much faith you have in humanity non-pragmatically ironically.
Could you point me to the sequence where EY says so?
I think of Eliezer (and Scott) mostly as communicators. A lot of the ideas in both the sequences and on SSC/ACX are not original, and even their original ideas are not entirely original (because nothing ever is).
Nothing would stop me, in principle, from reading all the journal articles and books Eliezer cited in the sequences and just read them and think really hard about them. Nor would anyone stop me from reading all the books which Scott has reviewed and think very hard and long about them, or discuss their contents with some random smart people. Or I could reject them picking subjects and find my own interesting articles in an ocean of scholarship.
That would be fine. There is nothing in the rat creed that the sequences are the only path to salvation.
Personally, I am both lazy and also not the kind of deep thinker they are. Reading an ACX book review thus has much higher ROI for me than reading through the book without deeply engaging with the matter would.
Calling Eliezer an "auto-didact fanfic author" is certainly technically correct. This is a criticism which can equally be leveled at Scott Alexander: from a credentialism point of view, we might barely let him speak about psychiatric matters (but we should really prefer to listen to someone who has published about the specific topic at hand in a reputable journal, and tenure). But letting him write about face masks or Aborigine mating patterns is so far outside his certified area of expertise that it is little different from having that autodidact write about Bayes theorem or having a sex worker write about fetishes. Preposterous!
I for one believe that credentials are highly overrated. They certainly work to ensure a basic level of competence, if you ask a distinguished professor of entomology how many legs ants typically have, their answer is likely to be correct. (Unless it is about face masks.)
Scott is a great example that (very smart) people can understand the world for themselves in a lot of areas without hiding behind a lack of credentials in whatever field they want to study. As far as I am concerned, the same is true for EY and a lot of the LW regular writers.
The foremost experts in most fields are not blogging, because blog posts will at best be neutral to advancing your career. In most cases, they will also not be very engaging writers. So there is a niche for autodidacts who can get really close to the frontier of knowledge and write popular blog articles about it.
> Calling Eliezer an "auto-didact fanfic author" is certainly technically correct. This is a criticism which can equally be leveled at Scott Alexander: from a credentialism point of view, we might barely let him speak about psychiatric matters (but we should really prefer to listen to someone who has published about the specific topic at hand in a reputable journal, and tenure). But letting him write about face masks or Aborigine mating patterns is so far outside his certified area of expertise that it is little different from having that autodidact write about Bayes theorem or having a sex worker write about fetishes. Preposterous!
I think this is an interesting question, why is Scott so much better at writing on subjects outside his field of expertise than Eleizer? The answer, I think, is that Scott is an expert in _something_, he went to the trouble of going to university and diving deeply into one thing for years, meaning that he understands how deeply human knowledge actually goes. When he visits another field, he understands that he's only scratching the surface on a subject that would take lifetimes to master.
Eleizer, on the other hand, is an expert in nothing, he's never actually dived deeply into any subject in particular so he has a surface-level understanding of a whole bunch of things and assumes that's all their is. He gives the impression of someone who has read, like, one book on every subject, and decided the whole subject is too trivial to be worthy of further exploration. He read one book on quantum mechanics and decided that the Many Worlds Interpretation is obviously right and everyone else is stupid. He read one book on ethics and decided that utilitarianism is obviously right and everyone else is stupid.
I've always said that if you want to be a generalist, you should start by being a specialist, and this is why -- unless you specialise in _something_ you'll never really get a proper appreciation of how deep every subject really goes.
W. V. O. Quine (following Neurath) said we must repair & reconstruct our boat (scientific understanding) while it is at sea, rather than beginning from nothing. https://iep.utm.edu/quine-sc/ In this respect, you are accusing rationalism of following his advice. I recall that Robin Hanson (who actually has a masters in the philosophy of science, having previously been a physicist) used the metaphor of having many individually weak thin thread supporting one's beliefs, in contrast to Bryan Caplan's attempt to establish iron chains of confident beliefs he could reason from, but unfortunately I can't find the post where he used those metaphors now.
To take your first objection, I think you sorta kinda do have to assume there's a "there" out there, else the "tools of reasoning" aren't any use at all. Since, if we have no idea if reality is external to us and our sense-organ reports are any kind of accurate to fact, or if there is even such a thing as 'reality' at all objective or otherwise, then we can't even reason about that since we can't even trust that the tools are indeed "this is a hammer" when in fact it's a sponge made out of chocolate.
If I start from a "Cartesian position of radical doubt", there's nothing to stop me coming to the conclusion that I doubt Descartes even existed at all.
This isn't to say I accept the (what you describe as) rationalist assumption of materialist empiricism, but before we can even begin to discuss "is A or B or maybe even W more correct?"., we have to agree on some ground rules. If I assume the sun will rise in the morning because laws of nature, and you assume the sun can dance the libertango with Orion because there are no laws, there is no nature, stuff just happens!, how on earth can we begin to even approach "what is real, what is true?"
"how obnoxious I find Yudkowsky's writing style. So I'll put that objection aside (I stand by it, but it's become clear that many people just don't see it, which I find baffling but I'll have to just accept)"
Depends what the piece of writing is. Some of the little anecdotes in the Sequences* are actually funny, especially when the obvious authorial self-insert of the Wise Old Sage** is lecturing the class of budding Super Sekrit Wisdom Initiates about tips'n'tricks to be hyper-successful in solving complex problems in five seconds flat by thinking (1) really hard (2) really quick. Just so long as you don't take it seriously as any kind of recommendation about "let's emulate the alchemists to foster future generations of smart, rational people" training.
The "Three Worlds Collide" story is good, much to my surprise. I do want to slap our future descendants around a bit, but that's because they're so drippy. However, that's because I'm one of the unregenerate from the bad old days before everyone became instantly enlightened, and now "rape" apparently means "if you flirt with someone you better follow through or else they can take you up on that offer of free sex, because if you're flirting with someone it is understood by all parties that you are offering free sex".
HPMOR makes me want to commit bloody murder. I hate and loathe Harry Three-Names with a burning passion that would make the most fanatical Inquisitors out of the deepest fever dreams of the Black Legend go "hold on there a minute", and there are some out there who agree with me! As many as several! I've seen them!
* No, of course I haven't read them in order, or much at all, but I have followed the links to "this is what we're talking about when we're talking about X, Y or Z".
** Being fair, this is done in a tongue-in-cheek, nod and a wink, style where we know what's going on, he knows we know, and everyone is in on the joke so he's not taking himself 100% seriously. 70-85% maybe, depending on the little snippet, but not all the way.
Sorry, the first criticism you can think of of rationalism is that rationalists assume an external world exists? Err... why pick on rationalists here? Basically everyone but the most abstruse philosophers do that.
First, not my first criticism but one of the most foundational, and one the clearest examples of where largely refusing to engage with and situate yourself within academic philosophy will lead to bad places.
And second, no I don't think most actual philosophers assume an external world the way rationalists do. They generally either (a) regard it as an unsolved problem, with the implicit understanding that the coherence of a large amount of what work they have done is conditional on certain unproven truth claims, (b) have an argument from first principles that they defend (if rationalists have done this I haven't seen it; I don't know if most of them defend Moore's argument or Nozick's or Armstrong's or if most of them even know or care who these people are; if I *did* know that, it would be vastly easier to engage with them), or (c) take it as a foundational dogma that ultimately can't be justified, and acknowledge that).
Basically, I think most philosophers have VASTLY more intellectual humility than Yudkowsky and his followers, though I'm sure there are a few exceptions.
> First, not my first criticism but one of the most foundational, and one the clearest examples of where largely refusing to engage with and situate yourself within academic philosophy will lead to bad places.
What are the disadvantages to assuming an external world exists? If academic philosophy thinks this is worth debating at all, it’s time to ignore it. Even more.
Conceptually, I think the risk is something like anthropomorphisation of reality - my observations are "real" (they exist independent to any observer? What could that mean?)
I'm not laughing at you, I'm just very amused by the notion of a philosopher getting up from his desk after writing a long piece about how there is no evidence for an external world, then going to have his lunch because his stomach is rumbling and he's hungry and his wife bought that nice fresh loaf of crusty bread and some good ham this morning so he'll make a cheese and ham sandwich with that sharp Cheddar in the fridge 😀
External reality may be an unsolved problem, but they're still living in it the same way as us rubes.
And I'm not laughing at you, but I'm amused at the number of people who think experiencing something means they understand it (it reminds of the woke discourse on how being black makes you an expert on the sociology of racism, actually).
More relevantly, the archetypal philosopher will write along the lines of "Suppose I say 'I know for certain that I am [eating a ham and cheese sandwich], it is absolutely certain that I am...[y]ou are wrong, you do not know that you are [eating the sandwich], it is not absolutely certain that you are...[y]ou do not know for certain that you are not dreaming...'" (reworking G.E Moore in "Certainty" here), so I think you're presuming a bit to suggest they haven't noticed this...
This is a weird example because for if the philosopher who is asking if you are dreaming is true, he does not exist: he is part of the dream the dreamer created.
to ask the dreamer means you must both have shared experiences and a mutual reality that exists independent of you both. A lot of radical skepticism removes yoir ability to ask a question in the first place if true.
If external reality is not actually true then either:
1) I’m living in my own reality, ie solipsism. In which case I might as well treat the world as if I’m playing GTA. Y’all don’t exist and morality is pointless
.
2) I’m a mind in some mysterious world where there are other minds that are in the same mysterious world which isn’t real but seems the same to all the minds. In this world if i’m eating a ham sandwich and the other minds agree that i’m eating a ham sandwich then i’m probably safe to assume that i’m eating a ham sandwich.
And it actually doesnt matter of that ham sandwich exists or not, its dealing with my hunger.
There’s a intermediate third option, a copy on write option, where if the physical body (which seems to be mysteriously attached to my mind ) kills the body of the mind Bob, Bobs reality changes so that he’s still alive in his reality but not mine. Something like a quantum change, although of course that’s not how quantum branches work. That’s not very distinct from 1) as Bob is unharmed so I can also do what I want.
That philosophers gain anything moral from this seems absurd, it’s mostly word play.
In fact morality can only exist in this real world, or a word assumed to be real.
What if we're living in a simulation? The external reality isn't there, but our individual subroutines are interacting as if it were. I'm not claiming that I believe this, but it offers up an alternative to the either/or dilemma you raised.
Likewise, Bernardo Kastrup has offered up an inventive riff on panpsychism, where Reality is mental, not physical. The universe exists within a universal consciousness, a.k.a the “mind-at-large”, and is not independently outside us. Our "individual" minds are the result universal-level Dissociative Identity Disorder, where the universal consciousness generates individual perspectives that are partially separated from the whole, but they fall back to the whole when we die. I'm unconvinced by his arguments, but I'm also unconvinced that reality will ever be captured by materialist explanations.
Oh, I'm not saying they haven't noticed it. But they still go and eat the sandwich as if it's really there and they're really eating and hunger is a real thing and not eating will have real consequences in a real world.
Which is not to condemn them, for all we have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God, even if we believe as perfectly as is possible for us.
And let's look at postmodernism, for a particularly striking example. People love to dunk on postmodernists, rationalists especially. It seems so obvious how incoherent their philosophy is, right? Every truth is relative, but *that* truth is somehow objective? Resist totalising discourses and metanarratives, but do so from within the totalising metanarrative of structural oppression and identity politics? Everything can be deconstructed, well then deconstruct the gun I'm pointing at your head, punk! And so on, and so on.
Wrong. They're not incoherent at all, not within their own framework. "Yes", they'll say, "the truth that every truth is relative is itself relative. So what? If you claim that this admission implies something about our philosophy, well that claim is also relative." It never ends, you won't trap them. They'll admit that every deconstruction can itself be deconstructed (though this admission can also be deconstructed). But they'll continue deconstructing from a very explicit Marxist or feminist perspective. And if you tell them that's a metanarrative they'll sort of agree, but keep doing it. After all, all perspectives are valid so no one can tell them what perspectives they're allowed to write from. Telling them they have to avoid metanarratives because they criticise metanarratives? What an oppressive metanarrative! Telling them they can't condemn other people's metanarratives if they're going to use one themselves? Another oppressive metanarrative! And as for the gun, they'll happily deconstruct your statement that you have a gun pointed at their head. "No," you say, "deconstruct the actual gun". And they'll proceed to further deconstruct the statement "deconstruct the actual gun". And so on in perpetuity. You'll never prove they're inconsistent, as long as they're speaking from *within their own framework*. And if you somehow *do*, so what? The idea that inconsistency is bad is just another metanarrative.
If you want to defeat this circular insanity, the *only* way is to deny them the right to take their own framework as a starting point. "No," you say, "I'll not accept your philosophy unless you argue it from first principles". And they can splutter all they like about how they've never seen such an oppressive metanarrative in their life, but you will remain unmoved. "No, prove it to me, or I don't accept it". And there'll be nothing they can do. Unless they agree to reason from first principles, they will be entirely unable to make you accept any of their claims. Which means that in the most basic objective sense of there being another existent being who refuses to accept their philosophy, the philosophy remains unproven.
It's the same with the Christian, the same with the Hindu, and the same with the rationalist. Whether it's the One Triune God, the transmigration of the soul in Samsara, or the mechanistic external world, the foundations of reality, and knowledge of reality, are not something you can shortcut. Not something you can just assume, or "start with", are a certain way. Not even if it's the orthodoxy of your culture and time.
And note that although rationalists are appealing to the intellectual orthodoxy of the modern West, empirical materialism, by reasoning in the presumptive way described above they are behaving much less rigorously than the average intellectual who shares that orthodoxy. Most scientists will acknowledge they take materialism as a kind of dogmatic foundation for the purpose of doing science, and leave the proper justification for it to the philosophers. Most philosophers will engage with the objections to empiricism in a foundational way that attempts to argue from either first principles or from (actually) very minimal premises. (And they will accept the limitations of the worldview, e.g. by adopting coherentism or contextualism, when they don't.) Similarly, most Christian thinkers have taken the Aquinas approach that God's existence and nature can be proven from first principles. Both such attempts (Christian and scientific) to justify the foundations of knowledge and reality have been widely acknowledged to have great limitations, but at least they were attempted and the acknlowledgement was made. This can't be said for the approach above.
In "When Recursive Justification Hits Bottom", which is linked and discussed at length in the thread linked at the beginning, Yudkowsky says of "using my current brain" (i.e. the metaphysical and epistemological starting points I discussed above) to reflect on those starting points, "[w]hat else could I possibly use?" I hope my answer in this essay is clear now. You could attempt to reason from the very foundations of deductive logic and Cartesian doubt, but don't expect this to be easy. Or you could simply accept that the foundations of your worldview are not justified, that they are taken as starting dogmas and your philosophy is no more rational than any other built on different starting dogmas, but don't expect this to be satisfying to your pride.
Or, of course, you could write some blog posts declaring that it's actually easy and satisfying, all you need to do is "forget about the problem of philosophical justifications, and ask yourself whether it's really truly true" (same post). But don't expect this to be taken seriously.
(Further parts to this critique coming either immediately, at a later time, or not at all, depending on my time and the response to this one.)
"If you want to defeat this circular insanity, the *only* way is to deny them the right to take their own framework as a starting point. "No," you say, "I'll not accept your philosophy unless you argue it from first principles". And they can splutter all they like about how they've never seen such an oppressive metanarrative in their life, but you will remain unmoved. "
Another attack is to substitute your own metanarrative. Postmodernism is optimized to attack modernism and Pinker-style meritocratic liberalism that worries about oppression, but a white nationalist or 4channer who just goes "yeah, and sexism and racism are *good things*--that's *my* metanarrative" can't really be refuted either. "No, I'm oppressed, and if I'm not, it's good that I'll be able to oppress you. Vae victis."
I wonder if this is a factor behind the recent rise of the far right--if there's no objective truth, you can just pick the one that makes you look good, and lots of white guys decided the pyramid of intersectionality can be turned upside down.
My personal impression is that Yud's concerns were different than academic philosophers. Academics are mostly interested in things like "how can I put epistemology on an IRON CLAD FOUNDATION with exactly 100% certainty" just for the warm glow of knowing things with 100% certainty. Yud was interested in "I want to win (at defeating AGI), Reductive Materialism seems like the most productive framework, let's go with Reductive Materialism".
Like, this was the point of the Ultimate Newcomb's Problem [0]. Is there a causally-legible, IRON CLAD reason why you should one-box? Well, no. Not really. But would you rather your arguments be IRON CLAD? or would you rather *win*.
I do not need firm first principles to reject the postmodernists. I can just notice that the most impressive outcome their proponents get is tenure, which is hardly unique to them, while proponents of other world models also achieve things like moon landings beside.
Now you can claim that empiricism is my solid first principle (in which case rationality would have a rather solid first principle!), but I think it is equally valid to just see it as an innate preference shaped through evolution, just like a goat might prefer drinking fresh water to drinking salt water.
It is less 'I reject them because I believe they are wrong' and more 'I reject them because their theories do not even make worthwhile predictions about the world'.
They did a nice job taking over academia and putting their ideas into every young person. So it was effective at obtaining mind share, if not at building a thriving society.
Is this a bit like interjecting into a discussion about chess strategy and saying "I don't like chess, just slap him across the face if you want to see who is stronger"
Human reason, in one sphere of its cognition, is called upon to consider questions, which it cannot decline, as they are presented by its own nature, but which it cannot answer, as they transcend every faculty of the mind. It falls into this difficulty without any fault of its own. It begins with principles, which cannot be dispensed with in the field of experience, and the truth and sufficiency of which are, at the same time, insured by experience. With these principles it rises, in obedience to the laws of its own nature, to ever higher and more remote conditions. But it quickly discovers that, in this way, its labours must remain ever incomplete, because new questions never cease to present themselves; and thus it finds itself compelled to have recourse to principles which transcend the region of experience, while they are regarded by common sense without distrust. It thus falls into confusion and contradictions, from which it conjectures the presence of latent errors, which, however, it is unable to discover, because the principles it employs, transcending the limits of experience, cannot be tested by that criterion. The arena of these endless contests is called Metaphysic.
I think it was Yudkowsky who pointed out that someone could rely on reversed induction, so that if something has never been true in the past it is bound to be true now, and applying that to reversed induction itself would just cause it to be accepted because it kept failing. So you can never get anywhere from there, and if you choose priors of 0 or 1, no evidence can make you change your mind https://www.readthesequences.com/Zero-And-One-Are-Not-Probabilities Nor did he expect to convince an "ideal philosophy student of perfect emptiness" https://www.readthesequences.com/Search?q=%22philosophy+student+of+perfect+emptiness%22&action=search He could instead reason with an actual philosophy like Quine, who I mentioned in another comment here.
I think it's the Modus Morons idea from Susan Haack (1976), applied to induction.
Also, honestly:
"(No, this is *not* the "tu quoque!" moral equivalent of starting out by assigning probability 1 that Christ died for your sins.)"
Well, that clears it up. Silly me for thinking you need an actual argument. "You need to have faith, but this faith isn't at all like other kinds of faith, because it isn't!"
I continue to be bewildered at his popularity around here.
What are the first principles? You appeal to them, but don't describe them. So, for example, in your view of how to proceed, what is the first principle from which you are starting and from which you derive the next step?
"First principles" is a great term, but it also is a metaphysical framework. "You could attempt to reason from the very foundations of deductive logic and Cartesian doubt" - and where does deductive logic and Cartesian doubt get their standpoints? What are their roots? What are the assumptions they, too, start off with? Doubt in what? If you are doubting something, there has to be something there to doubt. If it "doubt in everything", then that doubt itself must be doubted, and all the way down, the same as the post-modernists you decry (and aren't we on post-post-modernism now? I can never keep the layers straight).
It helps, but can you expand on Cartesian doubt? I just read something in Oleg's post about " Following Descartes and Locke, the absolute basic things about the existence of which we can be sure are our own thoughts and feelings" and it immediately struck me that there's a layer of doubt even below that, call it Buddhist doubt, about maya and illusion and the non-existence of the self. We can't be sure of our own thoughts and feelings because even the "I" is an illusion. So that step of the ladder is broken off at the very start.
I'd say Cartesian doubt is about taking the radical starting point of not assuming anything, then seeing if you can come to anything at all from there. It's the approach Descarte claimed to be taking, but it doesn't have to refer to the exact literal arguments that he used. Most obviously, he solved the whole problem with an appeal to an ontological argument for God's existence (different to Anselm's more well known one, but of a similar structure), which most modern philosophers obviously (being mostly atheists) don't think makes any sense. They'd probably also reject his cogito as stated: "I am" implies the whole metaphysical baggage of a self, as you say. "Thought exists" would be a better candidate for the absolutely undeniable.
"Thought exists" would be a better candidate for the absolutely undeniable."
But then we get into "what is thought?" I am thinking, but am I just thinking I'm thinking? How do I know if you're thinking? How do we both agree on what thinking is or is not? Do we mean "thought as a process run on an organic brain" or do we mean "thought is an objectively existing thing of some sort"?
The relevant question today is "Does/can AI think?" and there's debate around that.
I think (ha!) we have to start off with some accepted but unproven standards before we can even begin to do anything, because if we radically doubt everything, we can continue on doubting forever (if thought is something that happens e.g. electrical signals in an organic substrate, then what says that this thought is any more reliable as a description of reality than the illusions sent by the electrical signals of the organs of vision to the brain centre that processes sight?)
The conclusions of thought, e.g. mechanisms such as deductive reasoning, can be as wrong and subjective as "you're not really seeing the colour red, just the signal from the processing of wavelengths of light all bouncing around the messy meat lump in your skull, and there is no 'red' in reality".
What makes your preferred starting point, "the very foundations of deductive [l]ogic and Cartesian doubt", not just another metaphysical framework, just another place to start from? And where do you get to from it?
Even deductive logic is questionable, as Descarte himself noted. Honestly I'm lowering the bar beneath where it really should be, although deductive logic IS unique in that it is literally impossible to think outside of, unlike the other assumptions.
"Cartesian doubt" is not a starting point, it's the name for when you accept no starting point.
Your last sentence, that is the question isn't it? Not very far in most cases, because fundamental truth (what we call "philosophy") is *hard*. I'm sure there are some self-described rationalists who admit this and admit that most of what we know isn't really justified and that wisdom consists in realising how ignorant you are. This essay isn't directed at them.
So what is your point? That we can know nothing, we cannot even know that we know nothing, there is nowhere on which to stand, we are all plummeting into a bottomless void, all supposed knowledge is but the ignorance of Wile E. Coyote three feet past the edge of the precipice, even our knowledge of our ignorance is but further ignorance, and so on forever? It reminds me of Eliezer's description of the Ashamnu ritual (https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/DoLQN5ryZ9XkZjq5h/tsuyoku-naritai-i-want-to-become-stronger) of reciting one's faults, and feeling repentance for them, but with no plan to ever do better, and it's against the rules to claim to actually have done better.
As Deiseach points out, the sceptical philosopher still has lunch.
ETA: Deductive logic first began to be properly formulated in the 19th century. On the scale of that achievement, Aristotle and the mediaevals barely count.
I thought I stated my point fairly clealy in the OP. Yes, we could accept we know nothing and we're on the precipice etc. Or we could take foundational beliefs as dogmas and acknowledge thst they're dogmas, themselves unjustifiable and ultimately quite arbitrary. Or we could defend a particular argument for the justification of the foundations. If the rationalists did the latter, it would look like saying "this is our argument for the external world etc; if this argument were to be refuted, we'd have to rethink everything", not dancing around and dodging the question except to sometimes vaguely "justify" with an appeal to the very premises that need to be justified.
And you're mixing up actual deductive logic (that you can't think a literal contradiction etc) with when it got named and formalised.
>Or we could defend a particular argument for the justification of the foundations.
That's putting in a foundation under your foundation, and open to exactly the same demand. At some point one gets up and have lunch, ignoring the people sitting on the sidelines with their endless whines of "but why?", because no answer can satisfy them. It's not up to the people you're criticising to tear everything down and start over, it's up to people such as yourself to do the starting over and build something worth the attention of the people they are trying to reach.
On the other hand, we rarely mention degrees of certainty, an example of the general rule that whatever exotic systems of logic we may invent, at the meta-level and in everyday life we always revert to plain old classical logic.
Just learned that Cremieux has a post explaining in great detail how if someone wanted to save on GLP-1 drugs they would be able to source the peptides and prepare injectable solutions safely.
Yes, this seems to be roughly what Scott linked in his Ozempycalypse article. A good search term is "lyophilized semaglutide".
FWIW, I have now paid some 200$ to some Chinese vendor which may or may not ship, may or may not get intercepted by customs and may or may not turn out to be baking soda (or botox for all I know), and once I know more (in two weeks or so) I was planning to write an LW article on it.
the hardest will be quality control / checking on sourced peptide purity, isn't it? in my experience, you often need to repurify sourced compounds and not take specifications to face value. So if you have access to an HPLC / GC setup and a column for chromatographic purification + a bunch of solvent + a fume hood, completely possible.
I think for 95% of the rationalists, repurification is a terrible idea.
This is a compound which you inject (because the oral dose would be prohibitively expensive). I have a strong bias for stuff I inject to be sterile.
I think I can use sterile syringes, needles, bacteriostatic water and a sterile vial of lyophilized peptide to reconstitute a solution which will hopefully be sterile.
I do not think I can reliably run chromatographic purification at home and end up with a solution which is both sterile and also safe to inject (i.e., not 80% ethanol). Nor do I want to play in my kitchenette with the kind of solvents for which I would need a fume hood (e.g. Diethyl ether).
The standard dosage instructions do not depend on the body mass, which I take as a clear sign that they are more meant on a 50% precision level than on a 5% precision level.
I think I will probably pay a lab to test the actual concentration in the solution I prepared for the first vial within a 10% error (i.e. "sema 1mg/ml, other peptides 0.2mg/ml). If there are significant contributions of stuff which is not sema, or if it turns out that the amount of sema per vial is grossly misstated, then I will throw out the vials and go to the next vendor. (Or if it so happens that cremieux has sourced from the same vendor as I have and also posted an analysis, I will just believe theirs if it looks fine.)
I think that mass spectroscopy should be good enough to get this analysis, I am willing to believe that anything with the right atomic mass is the good stuff, but I am also willing to trust the recommendations of experts here.
Hard agree on the "bad idea for 95%". But injectable chemistry is definitely something that should not be done without verification either, and I speak from experience when I say fine chemistry retailers - even reputable ones - are not models of consistency (and china / india tend not to be paragons of good manufacturing practices).
Best bet I see would be group buys (a la Dallas Buyers Club) from very reputable outfits (sigma-ald., or most probably WuXi) that also provide whole batch analyses and protocols? These do not provide for small orders, but a big enough club could get the best of both worlds?
He recommends sending one vial in your batch to a particular lab he names for testing. Many have done that now with peptides from various sources, so there is a shared knowledge base of which sources send peptides that are consistently found to be high purity
Just shared a new essay: The Key to Love is Understanding
This one’s a bit of a divergence from the usual SSC-adjacent epistemic deep dives—it’s about love, but not in the abstract or game-theoretic sense. More like: how do we actually come to understand another person, and why might that be the central act of love? It’s an attempt to think clearly about something that resists clean modelling, messy, emotional, full of perceptual nuance. This was inspired by the famous Nietzsche quote placing conversation as the most important part of marriage + my take on why friends to lovers arcs are the best.
It’s earnest, but hopefully not saccharine. If you’ve ever wanted a LessWrong-adjacent take on love that still believes in magic, this might be up your alley :)
I agree it was earnest, very well-phrased, and not saccharine. Thanks for writing! I think where I differ, or perhaps extend, is that I take an expansive view of conversation. The whole of everything that is communicated (verbal or nonverbal)—in fact, any influence on each other— is part of the long conversation
What is your opinion on the breakup, then? I'm hearing a lot of songs about "we're just strangers now, we're not even friends anymore" about relationships that ended.
So what happens when you do come to know that other person, and then you decide, or they decide, or you both decide "okay, we've come to the end of the road"? Friends to lovers sounds great, but what happens when it's friends to lovers to strangers?
Is it because they don't start out as friends, so once desire has burned itself out there's nothing remaining to maintain a relationship, even if it's a different one to the romantic relationship? Can the romance burn up the friendship so that it's impossible to remain friends, or so that what you liked as a friend is now outweighed by the faults as a lover?
> Can the romance burn up the friendship so that it's impossible to remain friends, or so that what you liked as a friend is now outweighed by the faults as a lover?
Not the OP at all, but just imagine being with somebody, truly knowing them deeply, and then rejecting them after years or decades - wouldn't most people feel bad about being so known, judged, and rejected?
And certainly it also depends greatly on the participants' emotional makeups and conflict resolution styles - after all, even after decades of marriage, their are both bitter divorces and mutually amicable divorces.
I think breakups are a fascinating area that's largely still driven by intuition and tacit social skills, and this is a shame, because the difference between a good and a bad breakup is absolutely immense in human cost, and it would benefit everyone if people gave thought to it or tried to do better.
So to that end, I will present my "Better Breakups: theory and practice" mini practicum here.
So what's the potential spread, what value can you drive by being personally better at initiating breakups?
Literally, a bad breakup can be suicidal, and a good breakup can end with awesome break-up sex and both of you staying friends and being open to seeing each other again. Quite a chasm between those two endpoints, so maybe it’s worth it to think and exert a little effort in this area, both as individuals and societally!
I personally favor an "economics" interpretation, in keeping with the overly rational turbo-nerd spirit of the ACX commentariat.
One of the interesting corollaries of the concept of sexual market value (“SMV”) and the framing of dating as a market, is that any two people are A) trying to optimize their bid / ask spread, and B) are literally just marginally together.
Any two people who are together are just barely together, and anytime you are with somebody, they have significant costs and downsides that are just marginally outweighed by their upsides.
If this is true, the real trick to a good breakup is increasing your own marginal costs in important-but-not-immoral areas to your soon-to-be-ex partner. As in, don't cheat, don't finally unleash years of pent up sentiment on your mother in law, find a mutually irreconciliable difference and highlight it.
I mean, you probably KNOW the things your partner hates about you, because people aren’t shy about complaining or nagging. But we’re not looking for behaviors here - this isn’t some milquetoast “start leaving the dishes in the sink because they hate that, and they’ll eventually be happy to break up” BS - we’re looking for fundamental and unchangable traits.
We don’t want to make both our lives miserable and drag things out here, we want to break up cleanly and quickly, and with feelings as good as we can manage on both sides, so you can both move on with your lives.
So again, back to those immutable characteristics that are downsides to YOU, what are YOUR immutable downsides to your partner? This is what you need to know / figure out. I think it’s probably not that hard with a bit of introspection and honesty. And if it IS hard, ask close friends who know you both, they’ll know for sure.
Now you use the intersection or conjunction of your downsides and their downsides to find (or make) some irreconcilable difference that can’t be overcome with talking or compromise or whatever.
Now in terms of the actual impact, and the big spread between potential outcomes, I think the key insight to successful breakup theory is that the emotional distress is at least partially optional - you can ameliorate this greatly for both sides with good practices. Unfortunately the strongest lever is "choose an emotionally stable and non-neurotic partner from the outset," but since this is largely rare / impossible, you just have to do the best you can.
How you bring it up and frame it is basically everything - the gestalt you’re shooting for is “my god, this is such a tragedy, because you’re such a great person in nearly every way, and I’m just impossibly attracted to you, but this difference is just irreconcilable.”
People almost never remember what you said, or the specifics and details of how you treated them in the years together - but they ALWAYS remember how you made them *feel.*
I have a whole post about this, but I know this is already sounding pretty psychopathic and weird to probably 90%+ of the audience here (most of whom will be older and/or married, and so will not have had to think or deal with this issue for a long time), so I'll leave it at that.
I just wanted to put it out there, because the value to the 10% it's relevant to might actually be meaninfully high enough to drive some positive impact for somebody out there. If you're one of those, feel free to DM me on Substack and I'll send a link.
"I have a whole post about this, but I know this is already sounding pretty psychopathic and weird"
No, I wouldn't say that, but it does sound dishonest - and mean. "“my god, this is such a tragedy, because you’re such a great person in nearly every way, and I’m just impossibly attracted to you, but this difference is just irreconcilable.” is a lie, because you are no longer attracted to them, you don't want to be with them anymore, and you're just looking for an excuse to break up that doesn't leave you sounding like the bad guy.
The "irreconcilable difference" was okay so long as you wanted to stay in the relationship, and the other problem is that pitching is as "I'm still attracted to you, you're still great, it's just this one thing" then the other person may offer to work on the one thing - let's go to couples counselling, therapy, I'll get a better job, we can move, etc.
That just drags it out and makes it more painful. Be honest, even if it's "I'm not feeling it anymore" or "I don't see this as being long term". "Baby you're fantastic but I just can't stick around because I'm a no-good hound dog" and then six weeks later they find out you're in a new relationship and haven't changed a thing about being a hound dog, despite that being the ostensible reason for breaking up - that you're not fit for a relationship until you work on overcoming the hound dogness? - yeah, that's going to leave a very bad taste in the mouth. At the very least, they'll feel like they've been played for a fool.
I think the "love is understanding" model only works for some people. Other people may prioritize sex, money, adventure, etc.
So one reason for breakup, despite understanding your partner well, could be that your partner wants something else... and finds more of it elsewhere.
Or maybe you realize that it is not enough for you to understand your partner, but you also need your partner to understand you... but your partner is not interested in this kind of exploration.
Another reason could be deception. You thought you understood your partner well, but one day you find out that it was only a nice facade created to fool you.
Or maybe it is you who keeps a small secret, and either the secret grows, or keeping the secret becomes emotionally unbearable.
So, whats 'good communication', anyway? And how do you go about learning it? In the context of close personal relationships, everybody says its 'key', but to me it seems like most people are decent at it at best.
For example, many choices and judgements are guided by feelings, and then the reasoning, the part thats communicated, seems to be 'discovered' afterwards. This is especially bad if you're hungry/tired/stressed/distracted. Would be nice if people could just say(communicate!): "this is my mood now, just for your information", but thats not how things work. How to approach this? Is the best way just to get good at recognising other peoples moods, and give them som slack? Say I wanted to train hard so I myself was never hangry (only hungry) again, could I do this?
I suspect the phrase "good communication" is mostly intended to correct for the typical-mind fallacy. I.e. people often just assume that others can read their minds, my desires are obvious, these boundaries are self-evident, etc. But actually, it's not obvious at all. So it's often better to pedantically, explicitly, meticulously describe what you want from your spouse/friend/etc and to set personal boundaries. For things that might seem very mundane and basic. Like "please don't eat my fries again" or "yelling at my driving makes me spazz out".
For context, once in a blue moon, I used to read an advice column in the newspaper, which solicited relationship questions from readers and dispensed specific advice. My impression was that a lot of the advice came down to setting boundaries, and acknowledging locus of control.
It's not entirely clear to me if this is what you're asking about, though.
One of the most important pieces is understanding that people are normally often having conversations at two different levels at the same time.
Saying "this is my mood, FYI", is... not really cognizant of how the other person feels, or addressing what might be some of their second-level concerns.
Saying, "I really care about how you feel, but because I'm tired right now, I won't be able to listen intently. I'm happy to listen anyway if you're okay with me being zoned out, or happy to talk tomorrow if you need my undivided attention"... that really, REALLY goes a long way. Although if you can't see why, I can elaborate.
Also learn to say, "are you looking for sympathy, or solutions? Either way, you get a hug..." can be pretty powerful.
And learning to tell which of those things YOU currently want is pretty important, too.
This is the best reply here. Communication is a bit of a misnomer in that it sounds like "information transmission"... but it's not about information transmission, it's more about noticing when the other person might be thinking/feeling something
I think a good chunk of what we call "good communication" really comes down to (or at least begins with) self-control. Being hungry, being tired, being frustrated with X or Y or Z is an emotional state, and to an extent emotions kind of are what they are. We can't expect ourselves or our partners to just push a button on the spine somewhere and just "turn off" feeling sad, angry, or whatever. However, we can and should have expectations that emotions are expressed in a *healthy* way. If my spouse does something that angers or hurts me, and I punch a hole in the wall, it doesn't matter if *later on* I can I can unpack how that thing they did was just like a thing my father used to do and it triggered this strong emotional reaction from me and x and y and z... I'm still a person who failed to control that anger in the moment. "First, he explodes with rage he can't control, then later he unpacks that rage and figures out where it came from, and can clearly explain his emotional responses" might accurately convey information later, but overall it's still a shitty communication style.
In that vein, I don't think a person would train themselves to "not be hangry," so much as training themselves to (a) recognize that they are upset, (b) identify that maybe it's that they're just hungry, and (c) take a breath, hold back from snapping at someone or otherwise doing something impulsive with that upset feeling, and instead try to eat a granola bar or something (or at least exercise some patience if food is not readily available). That enables you to be a "good communicator" - if the person you are with notices something is off, when that long awkward silence is pierced by the inevitable "are you okay," you're in a position to calmly answer "yeah I'm just a little hungry and I think it's making me grumpy" rather than pop off an inappropriate behavior. Or, even better, you can *tell* that you're getting hungry or grumpy or whatever and gently communicate it to them beforehand - but, either way, as I see it, it really begins with self control.
Interval fasting does a good job of teaching you how to never be "hangry" again. Your body learns that "living on fat" is the standard mode, and occasionally says "Hey, bro, feed me?" but you can just ignore that.
Let's assume we are talking about close relationships only. Communication, like the rest of your interactions, is going in a tacit ledger of who is most invested. Good communication, in my experience, is being aware of this, and take care to invest in a mindful way. Your example with the moods: you do communicate these, if only through nonverbal cues, and someone making an investment to communicate with you will pick up on it. someone not investing in communication will not -e.g: someone just stating stuff / filling the space-.
This theory of the tacit ledger is actually salient in my thinking these days about one critical aspect of conversation in a couple: persuasion. Your spouse is the one you most likely will need to persuade on a number of things over time (where to go to dinner, whether to have kids, where to live, how to spend your money, political povs, etc), but as with any human abilities, there will be differences in individual powers of persuasion: did one of you do debate for fun? did one of you have a much better memory for on the spot examples? Was one of you just a bit more introverted, or needs more time to format arguments? Then you will definitely "overinvest" in this ledger in some ways, the best persuader leaving the room vindicated often but the other party feels put upon and still is not convinced. So take care to recognize this imbalance in a relationship and purposefully rein in the competitive arguing.
In all interactions repeated over time, balance the ledger according to what relationship you want.
<: Would be nice if people could just say "this is my mood now, just for your information", but thats not how things work
You can do that! It's fine. I do it a lot. "If you talk to me while I'm trying to squeeze into this parking space I'm going to be cranky, I can't help it. Just don't talk." "Wait to tell me about your trip til we sit down and have some wine. I'm too frazzled right now to appreciate it." "This is a good time to brainstorm if you want to do it because I'm feeling relaxed and optimistic."
I agree here, I also do this sometimes, and it works well. I was probably too vague, my point is that it doesn't *always* work like that, and it does require a good dose of feeling-mood-communication awareness. Is that awareness trainable?
<it does require a good dose of feeling-mood-communication awareness. Is that awareness trainable?
I don't see why it wouldn't be. I know that years ago I didn't very often give people these little bulletins on my state of mind, and now I do, so it's at least possible for it to change. Seems to me like it would help to form a habit of asking yourself "what do I *really* feel like doing right now?." And if you realize you just want to listen to some music or talk about trivial stuff, not discuss politics, then you can consider just saying that. Or you can say a weaker version, like "I'm kind of stressed and this politics conversation isn't exactly hitting the spot for me, but if you really need to get this stuff off your chest I'll do my best to participate."
You could even do little things to remind yourself to ask notice how you're really feeling -- have little alerts at random intervals with an emoji that you'd know is the reminder.
Nonstandard subnational flag emoji! (Well, subnational flag emoji that are not recommended for general Interchange, as they say.) Some computer systems support some. For instance, if your system is like mine, this will display the flag of New Mexico: 🏴
(Apologies to the Unicode Consortium for using one of these in general interchange, I suppose. :P )
I'm really curious about these. Like, what systems support them and which ones do they support? What components are responsible for this? Is there any way I can enumerate which ones my computer supports? How widespread is this? (Do you see the New Mexican flag?) Is any of this documented anywhere??
For the unfamiliar (most of you I'm guessing), Unicode has a mechanism for national flags, and then later they added a separate mechanism for subnational flags, but they decreed that the only subnational flags that are recommended for general interchange are those of England, Scotland, and Wales, I think because they realized things would get out of hand otherwise. So for other subnational flags, even though it's clear how they *would* work (hence how I was able to generate the New Mexico flag above; that part's well-documented), they're essentially nonstandard and definitely not universally supported (plenty of people I've tried sending them to have said, yup, that's a question mark flag on my system).
The ones I tried on my computer that seem to work are:
1. US states and DC (not US territories, because Unicode treats those like national flags and they're actually standard!)
2. Candian provinces and territories
3. Mexican states and Mexican federal district
4. Northern Ireland (which, y'know, officially doesn't have a flag, but my computer displays the Ulster Banner anyway)
Other countries I've tried subdivisions of have yielded no results. I'm using Linux Mint 21.3 with MATE 1.26.0; a friend of mine who is using Pop! OS with GNOME (so, yeah, two systems that are both Ubuntu-based) says his appears to support the same ones.
Does anyone know anything about this?? It's the sort of question I don't really know where to ask about (and where I have tried has yielded nothing), so why not, I figured I'll try here.
And uh if people want more explanation as to how exactly these work and how to make them, I can explain that, but I figured that that sort of technical detail I should probably omit at first.
Just fyi, with Chrome on Windows (probably THE most common desktop system), you don't get even the standard national flags, just an ugly rendering of the two-letter ISO code; you can get an extension which fixes it though, and it should be trivially reusable to allow subnational flags as well, as long as you have a font which all the flags you want.
Huh. I'm running Chrome on Windows 11, and although I don't see the New Mexico flag (which I had to look up), I do see a little black flag. Maybe it's a generic flag, I don't know.
On my Android 13 (ColorOS 13) all are displayed as grey flags with nothing but a blue question mark in them, except for 🏴 England 🏴 Scotland
Ooh, that's a useful page, thanks! I hadn't previously encountered that while searching for information. I wonder if all the sequences listed there are supported at least somewhere? If so they don't say where. Of the ones there, it is indeed the case that my computer only supports the ones I mentioned above.
Well, Androud seems not to care about this - lots of flags for oversea territorries and colonies of the US and the UK and French Oversea Departments in my built-in emoji set (besides England, Scotland and Wales). However, US State Flags seem not to work - I'm shown a white flag with a question mark.
However, my most pressing question: Why did the Great Britain part of the UK get their own flags, but not Northern Ireland?
> lots of flags for oversea territorries and colonies of the US and the UK and French Oversea Departments in my built-in emoji set (besides England, Scotland and Wales)
This is because the territories / colonies / overseas departments are actually treated by Unicode as national flags, and are considered standard (RGI), unlike the US state flags! Yeah the whole system's kind of bolted-together.
I too am getting all black flags. As for Norn Iron, oh boy. Sit back for a history lesson.
So, the current Union Jack flag is an amalgam of (some) traditional flags/emblems associated with the separate countries of Scotland (cross of St Andrew, diagonal white cross on a blue background), England (cross of St George, ordinary red cross on a white background) and Ireland (cross of St Patrick, diagonal red cross on a white background). Wales gets no look in, but does have the very cool national flag with the red dragon.
England, Scotland, Ireland (and to a lesser extent Wales) were all separate countries; the union of the separate kingdoms of Scotland and England happened under James VI (of Scotland) and I (of England) when he was the only viable heir after the death of Elizabeth I (he was already king of Scotland, and on her death became king of England). This was formalised by the Act of Union 1707 which made Scotland and England (Wales was lumped in as functionally part of England anyway by this time) one entity called Great Britain.
Ireland was still notionally a separate kingdom, and besides us wilful and ungrateful Paddies were always rebelling and rejecting the rightful authority of the monarch. We got our own Act of Union in 1801 after the bunch of ingrates in the Irish parliament turned their coats and sold their country (literally, getting a pay-off in some cases) and voted to amalgamate with Great Britain, thus forming the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland (you can tell what version of history I learned in school, can't you? 😁)
This historic occasion called for a snazzy new flag, hence the Union Jack:
Now! Come with me forward one hundred and twenty years to the partition of Ireland! Since three-quarters of the country was now a separate entity, this divided up the country into Northern Ireland (which stayed in the United Kingdom) and Southern Ireland.
This created the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, and also meant the feckin' Brits didn't have to change their flag, as by hanging on to the Six Counties they could still lay claim to the cross of St Patrick (pause here to spit on the ground in derision).
But! Norn Iron had its own teeny-weeny little problem! While about one-half of the population (figures are very fuzzy from here on) had no problems at all with the Union Jack as their flag, the other half had plenty, as they wanted to be part of the Irish Free State/later Republic of Ireland.
Aside from *that*, on the Union Jack loving side, the cross of St Patrick was a bit iffy. Slightly associated with all them Papists down south. And why shouldn't the North have its own (version of a) national flag like the other countries in the union?
Here's where we start wading into heraldry, (pseudo-) history, and competing claims over who precisely are the aboriginal population of the country or parts of it. Too complicated to get into, so very briefly:
(1) there's a version of flags for the four provinces of Ireland, the one for Ulster uses the coat of arms of the Earls of Ulster, which is a red cross on a yellow background, combined with the Red Hand of Ulster.
(2) a sort of official flag granted after partition, which uses the cross of St George heraldry (red cross on a white background, see the subtle distinction from the cross of St Patrick? to emphasise the true Protestant Loyalist patriotism?) and also combined with the Red Hand of Ulster on a six-pointed star (representing the six counties of Ulster which remained in the United Kingdom), surmounted by a crown (just to make sure we all know what the ruling authority is here):
"The Ulster Banner (also unofficially known as the Ulster Flag or Flag of Northern Ireland) is a heraldic banner taken from the former coat of arms of Northern Ireland, consisting of a red cross on a white field, upon which is a crowned six-pointed star with a red hand in the centre. It was the flag of the former Government of Northern Ireland and common flag of Northern Ireland from 1953 until that government was abolished in 1973 with the passing of the Northern Ireland Constitution Act 1973."
The Red Hand part is tricky, because if it's associated with the O'Neills, well there's a famous O'Neill chieftain who rebelled against Elizabeth I, so it's not a signifier of untrammelled and unbroken loyalty to crown and monarch:
So that brings us to the lovely sectarian rows over whose flag where, and indeed whose flag? and thus the entire Flags and Emblems Act of 1954 to try and calm things down (which it did a very little but these kinds of symbols are very potent; to quote the late Seamus Heaney, "phrases make history here"):
And indeed I get a bit irritated myself at seeing the Irish harp on British coats of arms, because most of the country is no longer in their possession so you'd think the feckin' hoors would be gracious about it but no, the Brits never give up whatever they laid claim to before, why would they start now? (Just imagine if they were still using some North American symbol from pre-Revolutionary times on royal and official seals). That's why the current usage for the Republic is the Uncrowned Harp:
> And indeed I get a bit irritated myself at seeing the Irish harp on British coats of arms, because most of the country is no longer in their possession so you'd think the feckin' hoors would be gracious about it but no, the Brits never give up whatever they laid claim to before, why would they start now?
Do you think it would be fair if the UK stopped using the Irish harp on their arms if in exchange the Republic of Ireland would stop calling itself the Republic of Ireland and instead go for something more reasonable like, say, The Republic of The Southern Four Fifths Of Ireland?
"The only official flag for Northern Ireland is the Union Flag, the flag of the United Kingdom; there is no official local flag that represents only Northern Ireland.[1][2][3] The flying of various flags in Northern Ireland is a significant sectarian issue, with different communities identifying with different flags.[4]
The Ulster Banner was used by the Northern Irish government from 1953 until the government and parliament were abolished in 1973. Since then, it has had no official status."
Intriguing - I assumed the Ulster banner without shield in the center was the official flag due to its use as emblem for Northern Ireland in sports contexts. Thanks for sharing!
The ideas in there have been in circulation since around 2010 and it opens with vague scare phrases like "algorithmic tyranny". Did you find anything of value there?
It's interesting because I never said anything to that effect. I've been extremely aware of social feed algorithms and I'm just surprised because everything that's said in this article has been gone over a thousand times. If you want to, a better resource would be anything posted by the EFF because using opaque phrases like "algorithmic tyranny" is actually the opposite of being clear.
Edit: thinking more on this, the reason why the opaque phrases made me react and question is because there was a lot of that kind of stuff floating around 2010s and while it persuaded me, it did nothing for the general public who couldn't give a rats ass about aesthetic phrases like "algorithmic tyranny". Schneier's clear and simple "Data & Goliath" came too late to affect the discourse. I can't remember off the top of my head but people working against surveillance leaning in the 4th amendment have had more impact by getting eg. cities to curb public police surveillance by focusing on local policy.
I started playing with AI-powered development. Installed VSCodium + Python + Continue extensions. Created a "hello world" project. Nice!
Then the AI billed me 44 cents for the help. That's... not a lot of money, but I kinda worry that if I keep doing this, the bills will grow. I know that I am working with a sci-fi level technology that many nerds would kill for ten years ago, but I am still a stingy Eastern European, and I keep thinking if I can get it cheaper. Am I making some obvious mistakes?
What seems obviously disproportional, is that in the chat mode, for $20 a month, I can keep talking as much as I want to. Ask the same question in the IDE, and it's $0.05-0.10 per question. So maybe I should talk to the web chat first, figure out what needs to be done, have the web chat prepare the task for me, and then copy the task to the IDE agent?
Also, the cost is "per token", so I wonder what it means in this context. Should I restart my chats regularly, because working in a chat with longer history is more expensive? I don't know how this works. Is it more expensive if I tell the agent to "do X in the program", and cheaper when I select the specific part of code where it should be done?
Like, at any specific moment, I have a chat open with a certain history, I have a project with a certain number of files, I have one file selected. Then I ask the agent to do something. I understand that if it needs to make a complex change in 20 files, it will be more expensive than making a simple change in one file. My question is, if it only requires a simple change in one file, like changing 10 lines, and the file happens to be open in the IDE, is the cost of this change fixed... or is it proportional to the length of current chat history, proportional to the total length of the file (even if most of it remains unchanged), or proportional to the total number of files in the project? If I need to make 5 changes, is it better to make 5 short requests, or 1 long request?
(The bright side is that I won't lose my programming skills so far, because I will always first spend a few seconds thinking whether I could write the code myself.)
EDIT:
Seems like paying is mostly proportional to how much text needs to be communicated to the server. So it is better to set up the project myself, split it into smaller clearly named files, and spend the credit on tasks. Instead of explaining verbally to the agent what needs to be done, it is better to add a TODO comment to the right place in the code. If the change only concerns one file, it is good to tell it to the agent explicitly.
"(...) most of the children in our survey said that they aren’t allowed to be out in public at all without an adult. Fewer than half of the 8- and 9-year-olds have gone down a grocery-store aisle alone; more than a quarter aren’t allowed to play unsupervised even in their own front yard."
This is profoundly sad, isn't it?
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2025/08/kids-smartphones-play-freedom/683742/
Doing otherwise risks the government arresting the parents for child endangerment and putting the kids into some hellhole.
Does anyone else think the GPT-5 presentation sucked both in style and substance? That the charts were hysterically bad? That Alt-man is potentially actually a complete fool?
Yes, the charts were bad. No, Altman is smarter than you think.
Oh I’m certain he’s very, very smart. And IMO that’s a distinctly different quality from being wise. Also IMO you need both in great excess to successfully lead in high-stakes environments.
Went to check DSL (still occasionally hate-scroll there) for the first time in a bit and noticed it is down. Is that temporary, or did something more permanent happen?
I occasionally lurk there myself. I don't have the heart to call it hate-scrolling; perhaps more like misplaced nostalgia for a truly unique community taken over by a small group of particularly grouchy people. And even they occasionally cough up an interesting take.
EDIT: Removed idle speculation, since hey, it's back!
isitdownrightnow.com returns "It is not just you. The server is not responding..."
archive.org has a snapshot from 15 july, but I know it was up and running much more recently than that.
Thanks. Wasn’t sure if there was an announcement in one of the hidden threads (not a paid sub, so I can read those)
> ... I see people struggling to figure out the use cases for these.
That's where my question is coming from. I'm a software engineer and every team in my company is trying to figure out the roadmap for 2026, maybe 2027 in terms of features and capabilities.
A lot of it is focusing on AI so even infrastructure teams are thinking in terms of MCP servers or AI-based services that can eg. Read an incident postmortem and create alert that reduce mean time to detection, all automagically.
And for one, I'm not sure even frontier models are there yet, and two, we're thinking two years out based on the assumption that ai is cheaper than water in the water cooler. But what if we build all this stuff and the price switches to price per token and our automagic stuff suddenly becomes 10x-100x more expensive to run? Are we going to rehire all the engineers we just let go?
I expect the existence open models (mostly the latest Chinese ones) to keep the price of the closed models around where it is, ~one order of magnitude above the open ones.
My partner and I had planned to apply for the Asterisk AI blogging fellowship. He is a software engineer who is cautiously optimistic about GenAI while I am a sociolinguistics PhD concerned about the ideologies of language and knowledge perpetuated by LLMs and their marketing; our proposal was for an adversarial collaboration bridging our divergent perspectives. We notice the applications have now closed, but we were under the impression it was open until the 10th.
We are reaching out here to see if we can make something happen anyway, even if that is just asking for advice outside of the fellowship. Thank you!
I think many of you would enjoy reading Ross Douthat’s newsletter essay exploring and expanding on the recent Joan of Arc review.
Unpaywalled ‘gift’ article
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/08/05/opinion/joan-arc-miracles-god.html?unlocked_article_code=1.cE8.OfBp.NKWWnfx1m2uV&smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=articleShare
What are your predictions for AI cost and price?
On one side, we have models getting more efficient and cheaper to run and a massive build out of data center capacity which should drive costs down.
On the other hand, from my understanding, the current ai ecosystem subsists mainly on VC money.
Ideally, the cost would go down before VC money/interests runs out, ie. AI companies become profitable. This suggests a simple graph with two lines, one going up, one down, and crossing at some point in time.
But what do these lines are not straight? What if we hit a model efficiency wall that will take x years to solve? Or what if something happens and we see a drastic drop in VC funding? In each case the AI companies will be forced to increase pricing to match costs. If the price of chatgpt goes from $20/mo to $100/mo, how will that affect ai adoption?
Really interesting question!
So improvements can come from 3 different sources:
1) HW. HW gets better, cost per token goes down.
2) Algorithms. More efficient Algorithm that aim to reduce price. We could see that with Deepseek.
3) Scale. When you have lots of use, the training costs per token goes down.
So I think in the end price per token makes more sense than price per month.
We will have some value chain in the industry.
Something like:
Equipment Providers (Like NVIDIA) -> Cloud Providers (AWS) &
Model Providers (OPENAI) -> Application Provider (ChaptGPT, or any other app that uses AI) -> Customers.
And will charge prices that make sense. Conversational AI is cool, But I am not sure how much value you get? But specific tools lie Cursor can charge much higher markups.
From the business side, as a buyer, it's not clear that frontier models make any economic sense currently, it's purely R&D.
Quick example from Microsoft's Azure AI foundry, using cost per million input tokens as a representation. (1)
GPT 4.5 is $75/million
o1 is $15/million
GPT 4.1 is $2/million
GPT 4.1 mini is $0.4/million
I can't think of many business problems that GPT 4.5 or o1 could solve that GPT 4.1 couldn't. Yeah, it's undoubtably better, it's just not ~40x the cost better.
At the same time, every AI lab could stop development tomorrow and we'd still be working for the next 20 years finding business use cases for the models that currently exist. Yeah, we need to figure out how to use GenAI for, like, reviewing resumes, that's a tough problem but an obvious one everyone wants to solve, we're going to be spending a ton on GenAI when we figure it out, and that's not dependent on future model improvements.
I dunno, everywhere I look I see people struggling to figure out the use cases for these. There's this back log of products, with no further model advancement required, that will transform the market over the next 20 years as soon as figure it out.
It's like the Internet, we know it will be transformative, we don't know if pets.com or Amazon will be the winner yet.
(1) https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/pricing/details/cognitive-services/openai-service/
One can relatively simply adjust the compute cost by using smaller models. If the market will bear $x/month, then the market will get models for which running inference at scale costs below $x/month; and as the hardware gets more efficient in terms of $/compute, any task that's solvable by the current 2025 latest&greatest models will soon be solvable also for non-subsidized $20/month (or be run on users' devices).
Here's a question to enzymatic chemists. I recently learned about mechanochemistry. This is a way of inducing chemical reactions by mechanically smooshing two molecules together. It's widely used in industry. We didn't learn about this is college chemistry.
It immediately seemed to me that this must happen in enzymatic reactions. When I looked into it, though, the conventional consensus is that all enzymes use catalytic sites to lower activation energy. And indeed, essentially all enzymes have chemical active sites.
So, probably not?
Except, there is apparently a mystery in enzymatic chemistry in that the enzymes work much faster than we would calculate, based on lowering of activation energy. There is a "missing" factor. It's not satisfactorily explained.
As a biologist, it seems highly unlikely that Mother Nature would not have taken advantage of mechanical force in accelerating enzymatic reactions. Protein are very good at precise conformational changes, and many of them are mainly machines for changing chemical to mechanical energy and vice-versa... but this is outside my field so I'm just speculating here.
How well-accounted-for is the ATP budget of normal cell operation? If enzymes are routinely using mechanical energy to accelerate reactions, the chemical energy needed to generate that mechanical energy needs to come from somewhere.
Also, would we recognize structures within an enzyme for turning chemical energy into mechanical energy?
It doesn't look very efficient way of doing things. Similar is the electrostatic devices for fusion. They do produce neutrons but as the efficiency is very low, you can't use these devices to generate electricity.
I'm trying to track down an anecdote that I think might have been by Kurt Vonnegut, but I can't find any record of it anywhere.
The story goes something like this. There was a sign in a toilet that said "Please do not piss on the seat", and people generally didn't piss on the seat. Then someone replaced it with a sign that said "Please do not piss on the seat -- THE MGMT" and all of a sudden people were pissing on the seat out of spite.
It reminds me of a story told by G. Gordon Liddy, of how he allegedly preserved his virtue while in prison by gaining access to clerical supplies and forging an official memo denoting one of the toilet stalls as "VD ONLY". The other inmates avoided the stall, and after he used it freely, avoided him as well.
That sounds like Markoff Chaney's storyline from Illuminatus Trilogy. Chaney's hobby is maliciously replacing or inserting rules signs. His signs are specifically calculated to be plausible enough to be assumed legitimate and allowed to remain in place, but phrased in an infuriating way that causes chaos and undermines respect for authority.
One example I remember is Chaney replacing a sign in an upscale establishment that says "No Smoking --THE MGT" with a new one that says "No Smoking or Spitting --THE MGT". The establishment's posh customers find the suggestion that they need to be cautioned against spitting to be infuriating and the establishment's business falls off significantly.
Chaney's habit of specifically and consistently signing his rules "THE MGT" is significant as a sort of "technically correct is the best kind of correct" honesty. Chaney is a Little Person and is attributing his rules accurately to himself as "the midget" rather than dishonestly to "the management".
That must be exactly it, thank you. I'd misremembered some of the details but that's definitely the story.
I've never read the Illuminatus Trilogy, I've tried, but all the good bits that people tell me are hidden in there somewhere seem to be hidden in a lot of boring stuff.
The ire about Tea is that men are afraid women are dating a small number of hyper-attractive cads, a secret club of aristoi. Because 1) 5 ratings imply 50 dates because that is how e.g. rating restaurants works: few even bother to rate 2) only hyper-attractive cads would even try to pull shit like cheating on the GFs. Most men cannot even find someone to cheat with.
it's a more comprehensive fear that everything sprouts from, and it's something I wrestle with at times myself. Summing up:
The fear is women don't really like us, they only like the things we give them: attention, wealth, children, and status. The Tea app is how they really view us, and as women's lot in life improves, they want more to the point of choosing to be a fling for a chad than a wife to someone else.
if it were a story, the man is a vampire hunter who wants to save a pretty girl from Dracula, but she'd much rather Dracula save her from you.
its a very hard belief to deal with and incels deal with it by trying to be more like Dracula, only to fall in despair because they can never be. For me it's moot because i'm too weird, old and a bit crazy to date. So guys like me at my age wind up being there for our parents or family.
i'm worried because there are two kinds of misogyny: women are used to the kind which comes from men wanting them very much, but there is a worse kind which comes from not liking them at all, which can evolve from this.
not sure what the solution to that fear is. feel like society overcorrected from the manic pixie dream girl to the werewolf alpha but without much criticism of it.
"The Tea app is how they really view us, and as women's lot in life improves, they want more to the point of choosing to be a fling for a chad than a wife to someone else."
Many men would like that too, it is just that perceptions of attractiveness are not balanced, so they will never get it. For many, many men having a wife and being utterly monogamous is a huge compromise they take only because they cannot be the hyper-attractive chad.
"if it were a story, the man is a vampire hunter who wants to save a pretty girl from Dracula, but she'd much rather Dracula save her from you."
Kind of yes, but not because Dracula is evil, but because he is an aristocrat.
"For many, many men having a wife and being utterly monogamous is a huge compromise they take only because they cannot be the hyper-attractive chad."
That's a really, really dumb compromise to make. I cannot think of a better way to ruin your life than to marry someone you don't actually want to be married to.
If what you actually want is regular, varied sex, stop wasting time any money on dating and pursue a lucrative career. Then budget in as many escorts or brothel visits as you can afford[1].
If it's mostly about status instead, then ditch the brothel and just pursue a high-status career. Or work in your spare time to become a successful influencer or artist. Or go into politics.
One of the great things about the liberalization of Western society in the past 50 years or so is that people are not nearly as rigidly locked into the same life patterns and schema as they used to be. If the default, middle class office job, marriage and kids and white picket fence lifestyle doesn't work for you, you can just *go do something else.*
[1] and move to somewhere those are legal if you need to.
This is totally not how it works. Sex with prostitutes is very unsatisfying. If people just wanted pleasure, they would just masturbate. When having sex with someone, they want connection. Also the trophy, bragging rights, notches thing.
i don't think that belief endures: yeah animal spirits can cause it, but a lot of male fantasy is romantic in that they end up with one girl who is crazy about them. It's gotten worse recently though. But Keiichi and Belldandy are still a norm. Just the past would acknowledge the animal spirits but by doing so dispel them. Its fun to be fought over but in the end only one is for you. Being a manwhore is not always sonething guys like either
i don't know if aristocrats is the word. Bestial power, wealth, and vitality more. Navy Seals, but it'd be nice if he was a werewolf. or a werewolf FBI agent. Or amish werewolf. Working in a bookstore and thinking "hey, i should try and learn about romance to be aware of books for my female patrons" led to some pretty hilarious realizations.
I think the "alpha werewolf animal spirit" is a classic Manosphere fantasy that is more about their own desire for safety than about women.
No, imagine bunch of rich parents going on vacation and their 20 years old son throwing a big party in the big house. Every guy is rich, which means the following. Not having to work, they spend a lot of time socializing, partying so great social skills. Great clothes. They hire personal trainers and dieticians, so they are fit and athletic. As their rich male ancestors kept marrying pretty women, they inherited a handsome face. Like imagine young Bruce Wayne throwing a party.
They are not animalistic-powerful at all. They are simply just perfect in everything that is attractive.
THIS is what so many women want to get in on.
I've very vaguely heard about this and I don't know what exactly was going on, but the idea was a site where you could talk about the guy you dated to find out if he was a creep/cheater/otherwise bad?
E.g. "I'm dating Joe/hang on, I'm dating Joe too!/Me as well!" and you all find out Joe has a string of women he casually dates while letting them think they're his sole girlfriend?
This isn't just the cream of the crop guys pulling stuff like this, a lot of low-class/low-value guys do it too. It's just that the low-value women dating them don't bother with websites like Tea, they get into hair-pulling fights with 'that bitch cheating with my man' outside the pub.
https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/open-thread-393/comment/142671013
I’m not 100% sure what you’re getting at here… you’re saying only the “aristoi” will be the ones rated, so the rest of men are jealous of this and therefore are mad about Tea?
I think most men actually do date multiple girls in their lives, probably have one or two bad breakups from those (by nature of breakups), and are not looking forward to negative reviews they may receive, hence the ire…
Even worse, you may receive a *false* review, maybe even a false review from a person you *didn't* date (because how could the app verify that?).
A perfect tool for revenge or blackmail, if women will believe the reviews.
And a useless tool if women won't believe the reviews just because the guy says "oh, that's written by some crazy lady I didn't even date", because that's what all the worst guys will say.
"you’re saying only the “aristoi” will be the ones rated, so the rest of men are jealous of this and therefore are mad about Tea?"
Yes. 5000 people go to a restaurant per month, 1 bothers to rate them. If 1 person per three months would go to a restaurant, no one would develop a rating system, because it would stay empty. Rating systems imply large numbers, because few bother to rate. See also ratemyprofessor.
Look at the average city, how many restaurants, say 100? And everybody goes into one of that 100. So the whole thing feels like every woman wants to fuck the same 100 guys.
And the thing is, we sometimes guess this on our own. If you ever make a rich friend when you are young, you see it. Young rich men organize huge parties, invite their friends, their friends are rich, athletic, even handsome and have stellar social skills. Women flock to them absolutely. The "secret dating club" is real, and this just drives it home.
"Yes. 5000 people go to a restaurant per month, 1 bothers to rate them. If 1 person per three months would go to a restaurant, no one would develop a rating system, because it would stay empty. Rating systems imply large numbers, because few bother to rate."
This comparison ignores what I would assume to be some pretty crucial factors that differ between restaurants and relationships.
-First, it takes at most an hour or two to eat at a restaurant. Meanwhile dating and relationships last far longer. The ratio of "time and effort spend doing the thing" vs "time and effort spent leaving the review" is very different.
-Second, people tend to feel much more strongly (positively and negatively) about relationships. I've had good restaurant experiences, I've had bad restaurant experiences, but I've had very few in either category so moving as to feel worth leaving my thoughts on. Not so with relationships.
For both of these reasons I would expect the fraction of people leaving reviews in this case to be far higher. That being said, I would expect it to disproportionately skew towards negative reviews, both because the people who produce strong positive emotions with no downside will tend to *stay* in those relationships, and because spite seems like a pretty powerful motivator for things like this. So I would predict that who gets a lot of ratings to be somewhat skewed towards who gets a lot of dates, but also pretty heavily skewed towards who creates a lot of bad experiences. Which is the point.
I accept the second. The first not so much - fast hookups exist… booty calls…
First and least, I think this still holds for most hookups and booty calls. Pretty much the only context in which the first point wouldn't be true is if two strangers meet and fuck and part all in the space of an hour or two. And that certainly *happens.* But, like...surely you realize that those interactions are relatively rare, right? Even most of the people who go around having lots of casual sex are not seeking out brand new partners every time.[1]
But second (and far more importantly), why on Earth would this be a PROBLEM in those cases? Quite the contrary, for any man who likes casual hookups with strangers *and isn't a predator*, this should surely be a good thing.
Let's just go ahead and grant the premise that *by default* only a small fraction of women will review guys they have casual, short-term interactions with (dating, sex or both). In which of these circumstances do you think a woman is *more* likely to leave a review?
1. She meets a nice guy, has a pleasant time with him, and they part ways.
2. She meets a pushy manchild who doesn't want to take no for an answer, and she has to make up an excuse to get the hell out because she's worried for her safety.[2]
I would hope it's painfully obvious that more women will leave reviews in the second case. Both because anger is pretty motivating, and because lots of women feel a responsibility to their community to *warn others* about that sort of behavior.
On the flip side, if a guy is getting enough action--while leaving behind satisfied partners--to show up on such a site, I can't really imagine positive reviews will *matter* much to him. He's already getting lots of action: the limiting factor is more likely to be his schedule than his ability to get dates. But you know who's really, *really* harmed by getting reviewed on a site like that? All the creeps, assholes, douchbags and outright predators that keep moving on to new partners to outrun their reputations. The people leaving a trial of angry, scared and creeped-out women behind them. If women start warning each other, those assholes are going to have a *much harder time* getting close to anyone.[3]
And that should be great news for any guy who *isn't* one of Those Assholes. Like seriously, how is that not obvious? Like, even if some guy didn't care about women's safety for its own sake at all[4], he now has less competition for dates and that dating pool is going to get generally a lot friendlier. Pointing at footnote[2] again, concern for their safety has a *huge fucking influence* on women's dating behavior. Any man who doesn't know that has either dated very, very little or been very, very determined to learn nothing whatsoever about the opposite gender while he does. An environment in which women have to worry *less* about their safety is an environment in which they're *more* willing to take chances on going out with strange men, and thus an environment in which its easier *for men* to find women who're interested in them.
[1] TBH, I think if you wanted to make that point, "first dates with no follow up" would have a rather larger footprint. In fact, plenty of the meet-fuck-part interactions happen within the context of first dates, but also lots and lots of people go on first dates without having sex, especially if their partner doesn't turn out to be second-date material. Regardless, I still don't think it impacts the main point
[2]Anyone who's spent any amount of time in spaces where women talk candidly about their experiences is aware how *distressingly common* this second type of interaction is. In fact, even those who haven't spent any time in those spaces *should* be aware by now: there was, after all, a national movement no too long ago around women sharing exactly this sort of experience. But some people did seem determined to stick their fingers in their ears at around that time, so...
[3] As always, there's an XCKD for it: https://xkcd.com/796/
[4] Which, TBF, would make his claim to not being One of Those Assholes extremely dubious.
“But second (and far more importantly), why on Earth would this be a PROBLEM in those cases? Quite the contrary, for any man who likes casual hookups with strangers and isn't a predator, this should surely be a good thing.”
Likes does not imply CAN GET. The whole system drives home the painful message that other guys get 50 hookups while you get zero to one. It drives home the basic inequality of the whole dating scene.
Which we have suspected anyway. My basic feeling through college was that there are two dating scenes. One is random men approaching random women. This was the “official” one. The other which I have strongly suspected that there is a “secret club” of a small number of men and a large number of women, except one would not know who is the member. So you approach a random woman, you don’t know she is in the club, you already lost because you are not in the club.
> First, it takes at most an hour or two to eat at a restaurant. Meanwhile dating and relationships last far longer.
Uhm, maybe the application is made primarily for those for whom this does not apply?
The number of women to whom it does not (ever) apply is almost certainly pretty tiny. See my above comment to Ogre.
The amount of nagging I get off websites to "just leave a review!" after I purchase something is annoying, and persistent nagging makes me want to leave a negative review, just because.
Depending what the actual purpose of Tea is, it could be (1) a warning system about bad dates or (2) it has now developed into a rating system.
I still don't quite get your point: only the best guys will get rated? Well, yeah? And so that means all these women are chasing the few great guys?
Men rate women too, and probably only want to date the best ones, which are not going to be the mass of the women available. Though men do seem to have looser standards about "look, she's got a pulse and more importantly a great rack, I'm not looking for forever, just for tonight" 😁
>I still don't quite get your point: only the best guys will get rated? Well, yeah? And so that means all these women are chasing the few great guys?
Not "great". Popular. The point is precisely that, *even by the standards of women themselves* the popular men are not necessarily any good at all. Only popular men get rated and only bad ones make the ratings useful
>Men rate women too, and probably only want to date the best ones, which are not going to be the mass of the women available.
There is no equivalent app for men as far as I know. I've read several times that alternatives get taken off the app store but can't verify it at all
> There is no equivalent app for men as far as I know.
Now that I imagined myself in the role of a user, a new puzzle appears: Why would I even *want* to rate my ex? What's in it for me? That seems like a critical question, because if no one will bother to write reviews, there will be no reviews to read even if users wanted to.
One plausible motivation is revenge. It was a bad breakup, now I want to hurt my ex in some way, and writing a negative review is an option. Notice that this does *not* incentivize me to tell the truth.
Another plausible motivation is bragging. The review is not about the woman per se, it's just to tell the other guys: "I fucked this woman". Again, not exactly an incentive to tell the truth.
Finally, suppose it was a friendly breakup, and my ex asked me to write something nice about her. Again, no incentive to tell the truth. Notice that the woman can also ask her male friends she *didn't* date to write something nice about her.
Seems like the application would rely on men being naturally honest (at least in the limited sense like journalists are honest) and writing reviews either because they can't resist talking about their adventures, or because of a felt obligation to reciprocate information. Dunno, maybe this could work? But I would still expect at least 10% reviews to be dishonest. Maybe the authors of the app wouldn't care, because it is profitable either way? That is, until the libel lawsuits start coming...
> Along with its security flaws, the content portrayed within TeaOnHer is troubling in itself. While the app requests IDs and selfies from its users to verify their identities — a process that is not automatic — users can access a “guest” view of the app without signing in.
>Immediately upon opening “guest” view, TechCrunch saw several images of the same naked woman, posted under different names in a form of spam. It is not clear if this woman consented to this photo being shared. Other posts share the photos and names of women, alongside comments calling them “easy,” or accusing them of spreading sexually transmitted infections.
https://techcrunch.com/2025/08/06/a-rival-tea-app-for-men-is-leaking-its-users-personal-data-and-drivers-licenses/
Yes, everything I read about similar websites and apps for men says that generally the men post revenge porn.
i think he means that Tea is proving the red pill right; for a review system to work, it can't just be "rate a lot of guys but with only 1-2 reviews per guy." The most popular guys would dominate the listings and review counts, either with past dates or prospective future ones, indicating women really chase after the same guys.
The red pill being right is an extremely bad thing: tbh i'm a bit worried people don't get that it needs to be pushed back more because it influences a lot of things.
"i think he means that Tea is proving the red pill right"
The red pill is constantly proving itself "right," because all that it actually contains is a toxic mixture of projection, confirmation bias and self-fulfilling prophecy. If you repeatedly smack your head into a wall, your predictions of future head pain will have absolutely stunning accuracy, but that's a fact about society not a fact about you.
Men who regard dating as transactional and approach it with that mindset will make themselves much more likely to encounter women who view it the same, even if those women are a small subset of the population. A man whose only interest in a women is what he can get from her will "mysteriously" discover that all the women who give him the time of day are only interested in what they can get from him. Men who see human connections as a game or a competition to be won will score everything they see through the rules they made up for it, and miss everything that doesn't fit the framework.
There is, of course, a very simple, very effective, very long-standing solution available for men who actually *want* access to an efficient, transactional, stripped-down[1] version of dating. It's called "prostitution." But red-pillers generally seem to disdain it, and have long politically aligned themselves with forces that want it to be illegal--almost as if their motivations are different from what they say.
[1] pun absolutely intended
Ah, I think I understand your perspective. If one assumes that all women will use this app, then it becomes an "app to review men".
But if we go with (more realistic) assumption that 30% or maybe just 10% of women will know about this app... and 30% or maybe just 10% of them will actively use it... then it de facto becomes an app to review "men who have dozens or hundreds of partners", regardless of how it is advertised.
Though I miss the part why someone should be *afraid* of the app. Among the red-pilled guys, the existence of the few lucky men is not a secret, and the rest of men will simply stay in denial... after all, the app is not for them, so they won't be exposed to the data on a regular basis.
The only thing worse than being talked about on Tea about is not being talked about on Tea.
Sounds like something that could be tested empirically.
Makes photos of attractive men, let women rate them so that you find pairs or men that are equally attractive.
Now make an experiment where you let women choose between two fictional profiles. One has a photo and no reviews, another has a photo and twenty negative reviews. Which one would women choose?
Possible rationalization: Women may choose the guy with 20 reviews saying that the bad you know is better than the unknown, which is potentially worse. (Maybe the other guy is a serial killer, and none of his dates survived, which is why he has zero reviews.)
So another experiment would have one man with two positive reviews, and another man with twenty negative reviews.
Uhhhh…
Yeah, I think the fear is more "my crazy ex is going to go on this and badmouth me so that I haven't a chance to ever find another woman again, they all believe her and think I'm too horrible to date" rather than "curses, Chad strikes again, this is why I haven't had a date in six months!"
Hey, utilitarians! What do you think about the idea that it follows from your viewpoint that what is morally permissible must be sometimes reasoned back from what works predictably?
Like if Hamas would have achieved free Palestine with the Oct 7 terror attack, one could make a utilitarian case it was permissible. But they achieved nothing at all, only even worse things for Palestine, so it was not.
But when you adopt this line of thinking, there are some issues. Most people think harm by mistake and harm by evil intention are very different things, stupidity is not as bad as evil, but in this case it is not so. A stupid misprediction - like how Hamas did not consider that during WW2 terrorizing civilians achieved nothing - is basically the same as moral evil.
In fact you must adopt the position that stupidity can be worse than evil. Imagine long-term evil, like wanting that my dynasty should do well in 100 years and not having any moral qualms. Still understand that in the long run it is better to make allies by being fair than making enemies, understanding that harming people will make them want to harm my dynasty, generally understanding that truly long-term self-interest generally implies treating people decently and making them loyal that way, and so on. It can be easily less bad than large-scale mistakes / stupidity.
So you can easily end up with a virtue system where intelligence comes first, good intentions second, and that is simply not how morality as such is usually understood, it is a very "alien" morality.
This is not exactly a utilitarian perspective, though. It's something closer to 'manifest justification.'
A lot of ancient Greek myth and worldview is wrapped up in this mode of understanding. Essentially, the outcome determines the rightness of the action - not on the basis of justifying the means, but because of self-evident truth. Actaeon was turned into a stag by Artemis and torn apart by his hounds not because of his intention, but because of his action. Intention is entirely secondary to being, wanting to happening. This does not mean that the right path is always unknowable. In fact, the correct course of action (to the gods, in an ethic sense, etc.) is often laden with the burdens of context and necessity. Per Bernard Williams (on Oedipus): "we know that in the story of one’s life there is an authority exercised by what one has done, and not merely by what one has intentionally done." It's also the reason that Thucydides' account of the destruction of Melos is totally believable. Your example is very much like the arguments the Melian delegation put forward, and you can read up about what happened to them...
Utilitarianism seems to me at odds with agency, and a non-agent ethical view was not the attitude of the Greeks. So your question seems to lie outside the scope of utilitarian philosophy.
This strikes me as the worldview of people who were rather primitive and cruel, like "no matter not your fault, I will still punish you for it". Only someone with very low empathy would pull the Artemis thing.
I actually remember that I was getting these vibes when reading Islamic or Indian history and found them rather scary. Like you were not even trying to offend the king he was in bad mood so he interpreted it as offense and kills you.
This was in my childhood and I had a strong fear based feeling that the greatest part of our culture is that grew beyond wanton cruelty, we are cruel when it is justified.
On the plus side, people with such a worldview have a great sense of the tragic.
And that is good, because nature itself is of course cruel, and will punish you for things not your fault. A tragic worldview does understand nature. It is just that I think cultured people are much better than nature, or ought to be.
I mean they were like sacrificing ugly people (pharmakos), so really a cruel culture.
But how does utilitarianism is at odds with agency?
The ancient Greeks were far from primitive. They had a very sophisticated understanding of the human condition, to the extent that every Western moral philosophy (including Utilitarianism) can find its roots in Greek thought. They also had much higher levels of genius, on average, than any modern population.
The pharmakoi were generally not executed, but exiled. And you are misunderstanding or missing the ritualistic and religious reasons for those exiles. It's not enough to dismiss ancient Greek culture as "cruel" and suppose that you therefore can learn nothing of ethics from the very people who invented ethics in the first place.
Utilitarianism requires one to give up oneself as the foundation of a moral framework - to give thought to consequences for all. But not following one's own individual perspective results in a loss of moral agency. Bernard Williams put forth a problem where you have to kill one person to save twenty. In the absence of utilitarian thought, you would hesitate to kill the one, and therefore letting twenty people die is the correct choice. We cannot distance ourselves from our sentiments (per Hume), our emotions, which are the source of moral behaviour, and from which utilitarianism alienates us.
Without moral agency, the ability to act on one's own conscience, one is heteronomous - a subjective personality, and therefore not a full person. Applying a utilitarian perspective tasks us with considerations which affect our moral agency.
My impression is that we can be as atheist as we want to, our modern morality was still invented by Christianity and pre-Christian morality is very strange. For example, I remember reading Plato's Republic, and quite surprised that he considers it normal that the polis will have wars with other polises. So I see no effort put towards avoiding war via diplomacy, or the idea that war is a bad thing and should only be waged if it is both unavoidable and just.
Compare this with Christian Just War Theory, that includes elements that even if you are suffering injustice, if going war to fix it would result in more suffering, don't.
Also Athenian democracy had no concept of rights, they would vote to execute a general for losing a battle. Our concept of rights is Roman in origin.
What you say about agency is I would roughly agree with, but I am not sure agency is the right word: an agent can choose to be self-sacrificing. I have a differently worded, but similar view. Basically if every person has the same value, that includes you, so it allows some selfishness, not only in the sense of self-interest, but also it allows helping people you love more than random people.
A second part is, and that is what is strange abut u. is that they do not think enough about long-term outcomes, what if the kid you save from malaria in Malawi turns out to be Baby Hitler? Helping people you actually know reduces this chance.
Also the person you know best is you. If you are sure you would not abuse power, it is better if you get power than if someone else gets it. This allows even more selfishness.
When we take these into consideration, we get what I would call the basic intuitive morality most people run. It is okay to focus on your self-interest, you should also help others, but it should mostly be friends, or the local orphanage down the street, where you can pop in and check whether the money is well spent.
See Wikipedia discussion of rule utilitarianism, two-level utilitarianism, etc. See also my https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/08/28/contra-askell-on-moral-offsets/
There is some level on which morality is about good intentions, and some level where it requires good judgment. For example, if a conspiracy nut thought that the President was a robot spy for evil aliens, he might try to kill the President. On his own worldview, this is fine - there's nothing morally wrong with destroying an evil robot, and it's praiseworthy to save your country from alien takeover. I think the best way to describe this is "this person might have in some sense had good intentions, but their judgment was so bad that they acted immorally, by committing murder".
I think the solution to this is that some combination of tradition, philosophers, other wise and respected people in society, and you-when-you're-thinking-most-clearly work to create moral rules, with strong effort to err on the side of caution. Then people try to use their judgment to interpret those moral rules as best they can. The moral rules are designed so that even if you have terrible judgment, you can't do too much harm. If someone has such beyond-terrible judgment that they can't even follow the moral rules correctly, then fine, they're not-guilty-by-reason-of-insanity and should probably be in a psych hospital or something.
I think of utilitarianism as a theory of what we're doing when we're making those moral rules, not as an alternative to making them.
Is there any meaningful distinction between rule utilitarianism and deontology, then?
Rule utilitarianism: obey these simple heuristics because we think if obeyed consistently they'll tend to result in something approximating the greatest good
Deontology: obey these simple heuristics, because you're obliged to
Virtue ethics: obey these simple heuristics, because they are virtuous and being virtuous is good
The simple heuristics might be exactly the same, only the justification has changed. And if you ask the deontologist or the virtue ethicist whether their rules, if obeyed consistently, will lead to the greatest good then they'll say yes.
So I'm not sure what anyone is arguing about any more. Let's come up with some reasonable heuristics followable by mortals that, if followed consistently, will lead to generally good outcomes, and call it a day.
I think some people, eg Derek Parfit, exactly thought that all three moral systems would converge.
But obviously, one difference might be which rules we follow, and what justifications we accept for following rules: utilitarians will look at a rule that seems to consistently generate bad outcomes and say, "we should get rid of this rule", but deontologists and virtue ethicists might not agree, *even if they agree on the consequences of the rule*.
This is great, and thank you, but somehow does not answer my concerns, likely because I did not word them clearly. I will try different.
When you talk about designing rules, you are not thinking about morality or ethics like how most people do. They play the "who is the asshole?" game. They are trying to categorize people as good people or bad people. I think it is because morality did not evolve out of a largely unselfish "what should I do?" question, but a largely selfish "how to detect people who are dangerous to me?" question. This is why people like "policing" others so much. Altruism is basically just being the person who is the least likely to be policed. Who makes a lot of allies through exceptionally good behaviour.
So what does then give us, if we think rule centric? Rule-followers are good people, rule-breakers are bad people? No, there are always exceptional situations where the rules do not apply. The ethical philosophy of your entire subculture came from recognizing that the usual rules won't work well for a superintelligent AI. We are not used to that kind of "what to do with infinite power and no intuitions?" thinking.
This all leads to confusing places. How long-term self-interest without moral qualms can result in good enough behaviour and outcomes, because making allies through good behaviour. This means the usual human approach to morality as judging character does not correlate much with utilitarian outcome-orientedness. But also if you use rule utilitarianism, even that does not work much for judging character, as rules can be gamed. You know how if a good measure becomes a target, it becomes a bad measure.
What I am trying to say this sort of thinking is very, very disconnected from what mostly other people do, like playing the who-is-the-asshole game.
Look at US politics right now, Reddit is all over the Epstein list. Utilitarians would focus on MediCare cuts or suchlike. But that is just not how most people approach morality. They don't care that much about someone they don't even know not getting insulin. Trying to prove that someone they really dislike is an evil pedo is far, far more interesting. Even though the total harm of that was likely less than all those people dying because of not getting insulin. Harm-calculus does not work well with the intuitive, instinctive "who is the asshole?" game. Someone who just raped one child is totally obviously an asshole, someone who changes super complicated rules about healthcare financing is not so obviously so.
This is how it usually works, seen this before. Look at everything Margaret Thatcher did and try some harm (and help) calculus. You will quickly find that cancelling milk for schoolchildren was probably not that important, even poor families can afford milk. Yet everybody remembers that, because that was just such an obviously asshole move. Terrible optics, basically.
Anyhow maybe what I am trying to say is if you want to sell utilitarianism, you have to somehow recast it in "who is the asshole?" terms. And this seems very hard, likely not possible.
It sounds like you've moved from a philosophical question to a PR question. I have no opinion on PR questions, don't consider myself an expert in how to give things good PR, and don't consider PR very hard when trying to figure out my own moral opinions.
I do think rule utilitarianism can easily say that certain rule-breakers are bad people, and condemn them for about the same reason that everyone else does.
I think it's just a fact of life that "who is the morally worse person" is a different question from "whose actions caused the most harm". A health bureaucrat who very slightly bungled COVID testing might have caused a thousand deaths, whereas even the worst serial killers only kill a few dozen people. I think it's still easy to say the serial killer is a more evil person (in the sense that I would be less interested in being his friend, and more interested in seeing him punished), and the health bureaucrat probably just made one mistake one time, or is bad at health bureaucracy but potentially still very nice, or maybe has minor vices like not putting enough care into his work (which are still less bad than serial killing).
I don't think this causes any paradoxes. If you are police, you should arrest the serial killer. If you are some sort of charitable foundation trying to figure out how to maximize lives saved, you should spend your money on improving health policy rather than on increasing serial killer detection rates. For any other person you might be, there's probably one or the other issue which it's your duty to focus on.
OK. While I have your attention - to me weirdest rationalist idea is that unreliable or made-up numbers are better than no numbers. Yes, it is related to the topic as utilitarianism usually requires made-up numbers. (Bayesianism, too.)
But reasoning with made up numbers makes it look like science. This gives readers a high confidence that it is surely true, and it might mislead them. Reasoning with words makes it clear it is just an opinion, so people do not trust it too much.
Sometimes I wonder whether number-lovers like you do not understand a very basic thing. Maybe if you work with numbers much, you are not too impressed by numbers, or science, or science looking things, because you know how often they are wrong. Lord Kelvin, certainly a great scientist, considered his highest achievement determining the Sun's age: thirty thousand years. You are maybe used to that kind of mistakes.
But a literary type, like me, sees a graph or numbers and immediately becomes utterly convinced that it must be 100% right. It looks to us like Einstein's awesome proof of E=mc2. Because we understand neither. Because our bias is that we heard of the huge achievements that were made that way, like this example. We did not hear much about the failures. (Like how Einstein's Entwurf, the first draft of general relativitiy, was entirely wrong and he regretted publishing it all his life. I just heard about this recently. I never assumed Einstein can make mistakes.)
So numbers for us are a dark art. Someone can up with a bunch of graphs completely made up, and then we believe it with 99% confidence. This maybe should not be done.
https://slatestarcodex.com/2013/05/02/if-its-worth-doing-its-worth-doing-with-made-up-statistics/
"imperfect information still beats zero information"
You can just have imperfect information in words, and that is better because words LOOK imperfect, words imply it is just an opinion, while numbers - to us - look perfect. You can just simply have an opinion if you lack reliable information. You can see I observed this, and observed that, and that is how I think they are logically related.
Utilitarianism, in fact, Bayesianism looks like a method to solve a problem entirely on your own. It is not necessary. You can just contribute ideas to the social hivemind, and the social hivemind will eventually figure it out.
This is what "common sense" means, sensus communis, the sense of the community. When people say playing with rattlesnakes is a not a good idea, and that is common sense, that simply means the social hivemind got a lot of anecdata level input about that, and came to a conclusion. This is not done alone.
To put things more formally, really I want a giant firewall between STEM vs. humanities, philosophy and even some of the social sciences. STEM is reliable, those are not, let's not make them look reliable by engaging in fake-STEM. Meaning if you ever Bayes outside STEM, you immediately broke that rule... because your input numbers are not as reliable as STEM types measuring the Earth-Sun distance. But it still looks too impressive, too convincing.
I love 1913 level sociology. You can write a whole book that is basically about telling stories, without a single piece of numerical evidence or even other kinds of evidence. Your only evidence is that you are honest and spent a lot of time studying that thing. The result is truly awesome, because you are allowed to think big and creative, there are basically no rules. For example Pareto's Mind and Society that gave us that stuff about foxes and lions. We generally know it is true (at least when properly explained), it requires no "science" to know that. https://archive.org/details/ParetoTheMindAndSocietyVol4TheGeneralFormOfSociety
One reason to do calculations with fake numbers is sensitivity analysis: you can try and figure out, not at much what THE ANSWER is, but what factors have the most influence on THE ANSWER--and if you have at least some idea of a plausible range of inputs, you can get a sense of a probability distribution for the range of what THE ANSWER might be, and how different judgements about the plausible range of inputs will affect that.
Now, a lot of people don't actually proceed in that spirit and do bad reasoning by taking a single point estimate and acting like it's more informative than it is, but that just means it's a technique that should be done with more care; not that it shouldn't be done at all.
>Lord Kelvin, certainly a great scientist, considered his highest achievement determining the Sun's age: thirty thousand years. You are maybe used to that kind of mistakes.
I got curious about this and looked up Lord Kelvin's estimate of the age of the sun. The figures I'm seeing are all over the map but are mostly on the order of tens of millions of years rather than tens of thousands. I'm guessing that this is an artifact of Kelvin actually calculating a very wide confidence interval based on a range of assumptions and modern commentators picking different point estimates for brevity.
What is consistent in accounts is that he calculated that *if* the driving mechanism of the Sun's heat were gravitational collapse, where it's shrinking due to gravity as it cools (less thermal pressure to resist gravity) and the process of shrinkage generates more heat, then the current size temperature would happen at about XX million years. That's correct as far as it goes and is a useful result for two reasons:
- Seperate evidence that the Sun is much older than XX million years implies that there must be some other mechanism besides gravitational collapse driving the Sun's temperature. Such evidence was found and we have since concluded that the Sun is heated by mechanisms that were completely unknown at the time of Kelvin's calculations.
- There are things in the sky that are still believed to be heated by mainly gravitational collapse energy, and I expect Kelvin's model would work at least as a "spherical horses in simple harmonic motion" first approximation for explaining these things. And as with the previous point, finding discrepancies between Kelvin's model's predictions and other signals of age would point us in the way of additional factors that improved models would need to include.
That the road to Hell is paved with good intentions is a common enough saying that I don't think it's THAT alien a morality.
You seem to imply that Hamas made a "stupid misprediction," when it looks like they've achieved recognition for a Palestinian state from about a dozen countries after their attack which quite clearly wouldn't have done so in the counterfactual. I'd count that as wildly successful.
For the Hamas, yes, it was successful. Not so much for Palestinians.
If you're calling people "stupid" for not having the goals you think they ought to have, I think the word ceases to mean anything more than "people I don't like," a lot like calling people sacrificing their lives to achieve some grand goal "cowards."
I didn't call them stupid. I pointed out they succeeded. I think their goal wasn't to help Palestinians, and indeed they haven't.
They are not stupid at all, just willing to sacrifice the lives of others for their own goals.
Filed under "Why I Am Not A Utilitarian". If the morality of an act depends on its consequences, and the consequences of an act cannot be predicted, then how is anyone supposed to make any kind of decision?
Far better to focus on developing some sort of set of reasonable moral heuristics applicable by mortals that, when followed consistently, lead to reasonably optimal outcomes, and if we occasionally miss out on some kind of really good net-positive atrocity then that's fine.
What do you mean, " the consequences of an act cannot be predicted"?
Of course they can be predicted. You predict them all the time. When you drive to work, you predict you will get to work, but you understand there is such non-zero chance you will end up in the Hospital or worse instead.
You estimate the chance is low enough to merit the action. Different actions might have a worse risk profile, so you would choose different things.
Of course, your judgement of the consequences might be off as well.
I think whether or not an action is morally good, should be judged in regards to what information is available at the time, and your ability to process it (this is a bit vague, and how you interpret this depends how theoretical/practical your considerations are).
It also matches my intuition that an action should not be judged only by whether or not you want to do good with the action, but also if you have properly thought out the consequences. If you manage a large institution, you have a duty to not just follow your heart, but also use your brain.
Yeah, this point of view seems totally internally consistent for utilitarianism so long as you hold the (IMO reasonable) view that assigning moral blame based on what consequences a decision maker could have reasonably predicted in advance will lead to better consequences than one in which we reward people based on how lucky they got after the fact.
Re: polygenetic embryo selection
So much talk about the wellbeing of the embryos and society and ethics.
I underwent several rounds of IVF earlier this year. It destroyed my body, my finances, my social life/hobbies, and my career. It's been three months since the last medical treatment and I'm still suffering severe mental and physical side effects. I lost my job and many of my relationships.
Most days I don't care if I live or die. I used to be a type-A overachiever. Now I barely have the energy to get out of bed.
Fertility clinic tells me to call my doctor, the doctor tells me to call the fertility clinic. I've given up asking for help. I don't have hopes or a personality anymore, I just feel like a corpse.
also, another comment to add -- if you have the means, try a counsellor specializing in fertility trauma: https://www.apa.org/monitor/2017/07-08/trauma-infertility
If you're someone who likes scientific literature, there's a small literature on IVF and PTSD (for example https://doi.org/10.1155/2015/646345). Repeated pregnancy loss (or other IVF stress) is an underrated way of getting ptsd/depression. really sorry to hear you're going through this
I did 8 cycles of it years ago. I found the drugs and procedures to be unpleasant but bearable. I did not have any of the awful symptoms you mention other than some moderate difficulty with sleeping, nowhere near as bad as your insomnia. But the stress of the whole thing was terrible. It didn't fucking work, either. ( I got pregnant on the 3rd round but miscarried early and then carried on for 5 more cycles.). Sorry you're going through such hell!. I ended up adopting a daughter from China, and now am at peace with how it all worked out. At first the idea of adopting seemed like settling for less, but now I don't feel the slightest bit of that.
Ouch, have you considered a pscychiatrist? And do you think IVF itself is responsible for your condition? I didn't think it was that harsh.
As to whether IVF caused this--when I started this process I had pretty manageable anxiety and ADHD. For context, I used to joke I was the most neurotypical regular at Lighthaven events. I have never had depressive episodes like this before.
Thanks for answering. I hope it's not too trite to say I hope you get better.
I have a "reproductive psychiatrist" which I now have to pay for out of pocket as well, in addition to my normal insurance and all IVF costs, while being unemployed. No magical solutions yet. $250-$500 per appointment, not including therapy or the cost of the actual meds. In January of this year, I had 15 years of savings that I thought would help me raise my children. Now it's August, there aren't even any children yet, and it's all gone.
If you don't mind my asking, are the physical and psychological symptoms similar to or worse than getting pregnant the normal way, and did anybody say that might be a risk?
I had an accidental pregnancy in my 20's that miscarried after about 6 weeks. I almost died/needed an amputation during that miscarriage, and that was absolutely nothing compared to these past months of IVF. After the emergency room miscarriage, I took two days off from work, did a few months of couples therapy to come to terms with my near-death experience, and moved on with my life unscathed. My pregnancy experience was pretty standard: I felt slightly nauseous and tired and dizzy, got a little fat, then was suddenly in the emergency room and it was over.
Absolutely NO ONE warned me about the IVF symptoms. The clinic said the process would take a few weeks and told me some very generic side effects from the hormones, like "mood swings" (what does that even mean?) or "mild nausea." They did NOT mention:
1) During the hormones, I literally could barely sleep for a whole month. I would wake up like a robot exactly four hours from the minute I fell asleep. By the end of the IVF cycles, I was so sleep deprived and wired that I felt like I was having an out-of-body experience in the Russian sleep experiment creepy pasta. Technically most of my side effects weren't a side effect of the hormones--just a side effect of not sleeping for a whole month. So I guess the clinic didn't feel the need to warn me about that.
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2) While the drugs didn't have major side effects for me, the swelling of my ovaries impacted my sciatic nerve, so it was unbearably painful for me to stand for almost the entire process. It felt like standing on knives. The clinic said this wasn't technically a "side effect," it just meant that the hormones were working, because your ovaries are SUPPOSED to get bigger. My bad for choosing to put my sciatic nerve in such an inconvenient place I guess!
3) The clinic also cleverly avoided talking about the real side effects, which happen AFTER the hormones, when you're technically not their patient anymore. The IVF hormones are nothing compared to the withdrawal symptoms. That's when the life-draining brain fog and depression started.
People need to understand that this is for-profit healthcare. Fertility clinics know people are desperate and have endless ways to make you do what they want and not complain. If I was honest about all my symptoms, the clinic would have dropped me and I would have lost my chance at having kids, so I lied and told them I was fine. Later I spoke to a doula who works with IVF patients and she said none of my symptoms were unique, even if some were more common than others, so clearly other women are doing the same.
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People need to realize when they fuck around with their hormones, they're playing roulette with their health. Hormones impact literally every system of your body and you don't know which ones are sensitive until one or more of them break. IVF is literally designed to push your body to the breaking point. And if it goes too far, you're already thousands of dollars in the hole and it's self-pay and non-refundable, so people keep their mouths shut.
TLDR; when clinics and medical journals talk about how low-risk and non-invasive these procedures are, don't believe them! There are a million methodological reasons why their data is crap and it's a for-profit game.
https://shponsevonshpoon.substack.com/p/my-commitment-to-anti-physicalism
Leaving this here, I recently commented on the Joan of Arc review (excellent and recommended), but wanted to go into more length on some of the ideas it left me with.
To that end, I am publicly sharing my goals in order to keep me accountable. I have spoken to quite a few people in my life about this intellectual pursuit, and so far it has been received reasonably well, to my surprise.
TL;DR, rationalist-adjacent WEIRD person is increasingly convinced that certain aspects of reality are not explicable via purely physical explanations, and the refusal of modern authorities to accept this possibility is actively harmful to some extent. Further results pending.
Hello, I'd be pleased to perform an astrological divination--called horary--for you, for no other reason than to help you break out of the falsehood of atheism-materialism. There aren't many constraints (the question must be personally relevant to you; geopolitics is it's own branch of the art) nor does it require your birth date/etc (that's another branch).
Anyway, you could treat it like an experiment, either the prediction is correct or it isn't, and adjust your worldview (or not) accordingly.
Hello, I am not opposed at all! I am a frequent user of the I Ching, and consistently find it interesting.
While I have never regarded astrology in the same way, I see no reason to decline your invitation. Would you like me to provide a prompt or question to begin?
Well, since you already practice explicit divination, I'll leave it to your preferred oracle to answer any questions you might have about the future.
Are you talking about yourself, or someone else?
> rationalist-adjacent WEIRD person is increasingly convinced that certain aspects of reality are not explicable via purely physical explanations, and the refusal of modern authorities to accept this possibility is actively harmful to some extent.
No one rose to the bait at my assertion further down the thread that "the real irony of the contemporary rationalist enterprise is the cognitive dissonance of both believing that Truth is probabilistic and subject to updating, while buying into a rationalist reductionist view of the universe."
Had I been crazy enough to post this link ("Feeling the future: A meta-analysis of 90 experiments on the anomalous anticipation of random future events"), people would question the scientific rigor of those ninety studies and accuse the authors of credulousness. But shouldn't all good Bayesians embrace studies like this, update their priors, and accept the possibility that a reductionist just-so story might not explain reality?
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4706048/
Yes, the person in question is I.
I did peruse to find your comment, and I do see it's relevance.
I think I would disagree with the idea of rationalists thinking "Truth" is subject to updating. From an epistemological standpoint I would prefer the word "Belief" as beliefs are intrinsically subject to updating - but I do not know how many self-described rationalists would agree with this distinction.
Moreso, I am interested in the ideas of folks like George Mavrodes and Jean-Luc Marion. Their core claims are that, e.g. rational thought/reason is only one valid mode of knowledge. However, as you point out, this faculty is often in conflict with other faculties. Those other faculties may present data points that are incongruent with our rational faculty (e.g., experiences under the effects of psychedelics are not "reliable" in an empirical sense). However, it's hard to dispute that sense perception on psychedelics is not a source of data - that data, however, is highly incompatible with our rational faculties. When multiple disparate cultures claim to meet "machine elves" under the influence of certain drugs, I am liable to consider that a data point. However, the framework under which we should understand that data may be highly incompatible with a purely physicalist understanding as the exercise of understanding that data may be more akin to *interpretation* rather than analysis.
I'm not sure how well I am responding to your point, but I might make a small leap and suggest that we are both pointing towards a more "distributed" model of the world - system A describes system A and system B describes system B, but describing the union of the two systems has inherent difficulties that we are beginning to notice.
To be even more clear, I'd backfill my example and suggest system A is a purely physical science-based paradigm and system B is highly focused on phenomenology, or perhaps conceptual reality (like the "reality" of mathematical constructs?)
I agree that reality (not just certain aspects of it) is not explicable via purely physical explanations. I didn't mean to suggest that I disagreed with you. Bernardo Kastrup did an excellent takedown of materialist shibboleths in his book *Why Materialism is Baloney*, but his alternative theory that he calls analytic idealism failed to convince me. I would now call myself an agnostic when it comes to reality.
I will add it to my list! It keeps growing, David Bentley Hart is right ahead of him.
One of my first encounters with Scott's writing remains one of my favourites:
https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/04/28/the-control-group-is-out-of-control/
which, not coincidentally, discusses precisely the study you linked here.
What about an AI turing test but for text instead of images?
I'm in favor!
I wrote essay exploring what I think is the most plausible candidate for Freakonomics’ infamous Variable X - (I conclude it's coordinated ATM withdrawals (i.e. the subtle, almost embarrassingly analogue phenomenon of multiple terror suspects using the same cash machine in quick succession)).
https://substack.com/home/post/p-170129758
If you’ve read Freakonomics, I’d be really grateful for your thoughts. Does the hypothesis hold water for you? Does it feel like the kind of banal-but-behaviourally-rich metric Levitt and Dubner would keep under wraps, or am I falling into a kind of pareidolia-of-the-footnote trap?
Also - meta question - do you think the authors were right to keep Variable X secret? Or does the gesture only function if the variable is actually kind of obvious (and therefore only symbolically secret)?
Mostly just hoping to be corrected in a way that’s more interesting than I am.
This is an operation the Brits ran, yeah? Then I'm going to assume "Variable X" is nothing more (or less) than "Special Branch gave us a list of likely naughty boys" and they used that to comb through transactions.
This bit had me laughing because (1) no, really? and (2) thirty years before this, the association would be an Irish, not a Muslim, name:
"Many of these clues were disclosed publicly - for example, whether a person had a Muslim-sounding name turned out to be one strong demographic predictor in the U.K. context".
I have to agree with Michael Watts, the criteria you describe them using sound quaint today:
Young men in the age range 26-35 who aren't married, aren't in steady careers, and don't own their own homes? Well gosh, welcome to the gig economy and the precariat!
Some of this sounds like "possibly drug mules/money mules/dodgy but criminal not terrorist", e.g. "Large Initial Deposits, Then Draining" and "Lack of Normal Income and Bills".
More of it ("Frequent Address Changes and P.O. Boxes") sounds like, well - have you ever had to deal with clients of social housing/social welfare? They very, *very* often only communicate by mobile phone, constantly change their numbers (so they can't be contacted by officials, thus giving them plausible deniability if matters ever come to court or legal action: 'hey you never contacted me about being in arrears of rent!' when you've sent out multiple letters and phone calls) and deliberately neglect to update details of changes of address, phone number, etc. Their view is they will contact you when they want something, you have no right to contact them because they owe you nothing (not even the courtesy of filling out forms correctly, much less honestly).
If "frequent changes of address" is an indicator of possible terrorism, there's an entire social housing list in my old job that is chock-full of possible terrorists, then!
I think "Variable X" is a red herring - of course potential terrorists are going to be very interested in what makes them and their activities stand out to the authorities, so of course it is in the interest of the authorities to mislead them about how they track suspects. Sending them on a wild goose chase about "one last metric, kept secret “in the interest of national security” and dubbed “Variable X” that has to do with data analysis and algorithms and Uncle Tom Cobley and all means they're not looking at the more likely, and more traditional, way: Special Branch/MI5 has informants snugly embedded at a high enough level to be useful telling all:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freddie_Scappaticci
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Denis_Donaldson
> The suspects also overwhelmingly did not purchase life insurance. For an ordinary 26-year-old man with a wife and kids, buying life insurance is prudent - it ensures the family’s financial security if he dies young.
I'm going to be really surprised if an ordinary 26-year-old English man has a wife and kids.
Not sure how it works in Britain, but for something like this in America, I'd guess any such secret variable to be a cover for illegal mass surveillance. (I.e., they say narrowed down the search using this Variable X when they really just brute-forced it by tapping three or four orders of magnitude more phones than would pass constitutional muster.)
Oh, yep. Before anyone clutches their pearls about "but surely high-ranking officials in a British government capacity would never, ever, tell porky pies to book authors in order to disseminate disinformation?", I may have one slightly used bridge, several previous owners, to sell you.
"We have this super high tech secret way of finding out what you're doing and you can't beat it" is exactly the kind of messaging they want to sell both the terrorists, and the public who demand Something Must Be Done, when in fact it's old-school spying, informants, illegal surveillance, entrapment then leaning on people, and the likes.
My uncertainty was not because of the possibility of the British government being averse to lying. :D It's that I'm not sure that "illegal surveillance" is a coherent concept there, the way it is in America, their version of the Bill of Rights being basically "You wretches detestable on land and sea: you who seek equality with lords are unworthy to live. Give this message to your colleagues: serfs you were, and serfs you are still; you will remain in bondage, not as before, but incomparably harsher. For as long as we live we will strive to suppress you, and your misery will be an example in the eyes of posterity. However, we will spare your lives if you remain faithful and loyal."
After considering it, I'd guess their secret is their surveillance is being done by the US spy agencies, and that's embarrassing to admit.
As I think about this, I'm becoming more confused.
The stated problem is that we can see everything about everyone, and we want to determine prospectively whether any of those people ("everyone") are going to commit a crime in the future.
The stated difficulty is that any analysis we try to do picks up tens of thousands of times more future innocents than future terrorists, and we can't afford to investigate 500,000 innocent parties.
The claim under suspicion is that we've identified the perfect combination of variables that raises our statistical precision from 1:50,000 to 1:6, which we call "Variable X".
But if Variable X simply represents a full investigation of the original 500,000 false flags, we don't need it at all. We're not shy about admitting that we're willing to investigate everyone. The difficulty is that we can't do 500,000 investigations.
Saying that it's the US doing the investigations doesn't seem to help. They're not more capable of doing 500,000 investigations than Britain is. They do have avenues by which they could serendipitously turn up likely bombers in Britain - the most likely is that surveillance of a foreign group leads them to one or more persons located in Britain. But I don't see that Britain would be embarrassed to say "we got a tip from the Americans that Group X had operatives in London, and we've now rooted them out".
I disagree: I think the (US) government IS reticent to admit to such broad surveillance. It needn't be EVERYONE, just every Arab/Moslem, and then they'll likely kick off enough bad press to force them to do the kabuki theater of having their intelligence agency chiefs lie through some congressional hearings about civil rights violations. A waste of time that could easily be avoided by not publicizing their mass surveillance.
"After considering it, I'd guess their secret is their surveillance is being done by the US spy agencies, and that's embarrassing to admit."
That also is very likely, and yes very embarrassing: "after the Americans have finishing surveilling all our citizens without our knowledge or consent, they throw us a bone now and again about likely bombers".
Cynically speaking, Five Eyes means MI6 spies on on American citizens and tells Washington what they found out, the CIA spies on British citizens and tells London what they found out, the Canucks, Aussies, and Kiwis all get in on the act just to be safe, and everybody gets to solemnly swear that they never once spied on their own citizens because that would be illegal.
And sometimes they spy on the Russians and Chinese.
For this theory, I'd expect to see that the public variables explain about 0% of the selection of investigative targets (because the group of interest is too small to identify its members) and the secret variable explains the other ~100%.
Is that true of Variable X?
What is Variable X? Paging Professor Utonium:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VJbQDO_7emw
A staple of spy movies like James Bond is two secret agents fighting to the death in the field. Since WWII, has there been a single documented case of this actually happening?
ChatGPT gave me an interesting response. This is what I asked it: "Are there any documented instances of secret agents fighting their opponents one-on-one?" If you define a "secret agent" as a covert operative, there have been some cases that might fit the bill.
Are there actual Spy vs. Spy encounters documented in WWII?
If it were documented wouldn’t they be pretty lousy ‘secret’ agents?
My understanding is virtually every sneeze gets documented, but stays classified until it's deemed safe to release it. Might be too soon for a lot of Cold War stuff to be declassified though, especially since relations with Russia are still strained.
"Writehaven" is overloaded, that's what they called the app they made for LessOnline (before they knew they'd be doing Inkhaven, I think)
Does anybody here have experience with website/blog design and layout? I've interested in aesthetics, branding, the overall look and feel.
I started a new blog a while ago, as some of you know.* I want to figure out how I can theme/brand my Substack to have a more distinctive look without being garish. The overall vibe I'm going for is a blog that's smart and interested in the world without being too self-serious. More importantly, I want readers to come away with the feeling that they, too, can be smart and interested in the world without being too self-serious.
For any given article, I hope that it can be interesting enough for specialists of nearby fields to feel like I'm teaching something both interesting and valuable to them. So it's rigorous and it's not dumbed down, but it's also saying interesting things. While at the same time, being accessible for educated laymen (like my 20-year old self! Back when I was smart and knew like nothing). For example, I want my anthropics posts to be interesting and valuable to philosophers who don't think about anthropics while still being readable to everybody else; I want the Premium of Life post(s) to be interesting and insightful to economists who don't specialize in VSL estimation; I want the bee welfare post to be interesting to animal-welfare curious EAs who are not insect welfare researchers, etc.
Anyway, I'm curious how I can have a layout that conveys this! Note that I consider the default "substack look" to be decent, so the baseline to beat is nontrivial.
* (linch.substack.com, can't resist shilling)
One thing I've had success with is firing off a vague prompt to Claude, ChatGPT, and Gemini -- something like "make a very aesthetically appealing and modern blog website" -- and just see what they come up with (in their code preview/canvas thing). You don't actually use their code of course but you can hunt down the color themes, aesthetic cues, and so on. You tend to get something that's right in the middle of the distribution of what you ask for, so if you ask for "modern tech startup website" you get that, if you ask for "respected academic publisher" you get that, etc. It's like 5 min to fire off a prompt and see if inspiration sticks so it's a very low cost way to get some ideas.
Something I have not tried, but might be worth trying, is to do something similar with image generation, e.g. "screenshot of a modern, thoughtful humanities blog" or whatever. No idea if that would be useful but again, ~2 minutes of time invested for maybe a stroke of inspiration!
I have some experience with layout design with my blog: (https://collisteru.net), which aims to convey a somewhat similar vibe.
I would advise the following:
- Consider color scheme carefully, as it sticks in many people's minds more than any other aspect of the layout. For many blogs I read, the *color scheme* operates as an important mental symbol of that blog.
- Consider fonts carefully
- Think about how the reader will navigate a single page, and from page to page
I love the Inkhaven idea and if I wasn't married I'd jump on it. Problem is if I did it now I'm not sure I would stay married. Not with the kind of household expenses we're facing.
I need to create my own Inkhaven at home.
Make an agreement with your spouse that on any day you don't publish a blog post, they'll make sure you promptly face some substantial consequence - maybe paying $100 or doing 5 hours of chores - such that on any day just writing a blog post would be the easier and more convenient option.
I've done the same sort of scheme with exercise; I paid my twin such-and-such if I didn't run so many miles a week, and it got me into the habit of more regular exercise when nothing else would.
I appreciate the tip. Thanks!
https://substack.com/@sashachapin/note/c-125080719 did something similar, exactly to commit to a blogging challenge! The Communist Party of Canada ended up no richer. I don't have a blog, but this is in my toolbelt for the future.
Warning: I'm going to try to be philosophical here for a minute, and probably going to get it all wrong. And, as it will probably become clear, I'm religious myself.
I've long thought that there are (at least) three different things that can be meant by the word "truth". Truth can be (a) ephemeral, (b) rational, or (c) transcendant. What do I mean by each of these?
Ephemeral truths are what folks here would call Qualia. These are things that we experience directly through our senses and emotions. They are true at least *for us alone*--no one can tell me that I didn't taste something spicy. No one can controvert my sensory experience. In this, contradiction doesn't destroy ephemeral truth--they're proof against disproof. But I can't also necessarily convince someone else of this. But what was true in one second might not be true at another. Here, perception *is* reality. But only a limited slice of it. Emotional truths (e.g. "That made me mad") are a member of this category.
Rational truths are what most people here think of as Truth (with a capital T). These are statements that we can analyze with our intellects--logical extrapolations from repeated observations. Since our observations are finite and imperfect, so are the extrapolations. Future observations can overturn what we thought were settled truths about reality. Unlike sensory/ephemeral truth, each iteration of rational truth (in a particular area of application) *supersedes* or at least restricts the scope of the previously accepted "truth". Rational truths are much more durable than qualia, but rarely are rational truths emotionally salient. Sure, some weird people might get worked up about the nature of a particular mathematical proof, but usually that's because someone took a statement *personally*. Rational truths stand "outside" the person who discovered them (again unlike ephemeral ones) and can be demonstrated to other people. Scientific "truth" falls into this category.
The third kind of truth is one that I think most people here would have the most problem with. This is *transcendent* truth. Truth that cannot be accessed directly by unaided human cognition or sensory experience. These are underlying truths about reality itself, truths about the Divine. No force or circumstance on earth can alter transcendent truth--it is eternal, unchanging, and universal (even if our perception of it is limited and fragmentary). It comes by revelation, in accordance with our obedience to the eternal principles it is based on. And if we *cease* to obey, we cease to understand. One who has received truth cannot simply give it to another--the other must find it for themselves. The teacher can point the way, show the path by which another can gain the truth for themselves, but cannot simply impart the information. Transcendent truth requires a change of self, a becoming. And yes, this means stepping out into the unknown with faith (belief + action, repeated) as well as reason--it requires the whole person. Attaining transcendent truth in any measure requires both ephemeral sensory experiences as well as reason as well as faith that transcends reason, that says to the rational mind "I can't explain, but I know" and to the bubbling emotions "be calm and trust".
Unlike the other truths, transcendent truth changes lives from the inside out, in large part because we already had to change to receive it. Rational truth can conspire with ephemeral truth to whitewash our biases and desires--transcendent truth stands eternal and is often uncomfortable *for us*. It teaches us to have mercy on others who are at different points on the journey, while shining a clarifying light on our own attempts to justify our bad behavior and patterns.
Religious truth (the parts that are actually true, not accreted by human traditions) point toward transcendent truth. It is not the truth itself, just the sign posts along the pathway. But there are similar sign posts scattered throughout the history of human thought--they all point toward the same truth, just from different angles and starting points.
I never said that “belief” is a put down. Belief is a provisional state of knowledge pending further evidence. We can hold a greater or lower confidence in our beliefs, depending on the empirical inputs we permit to influence it. I believe that we agree on this.
Having said that, I can posit that there are no truths that have not been proven beyond doubt. Being empirically proven is a requirement for a proposition to be considered as true. Even mathematical derivation is insufficient otherwise.
No matter how true something feels to us or how strongly we believe it, it is not an objective truth. Therefore all truths that we can transcendental are in fact beliefs.
I think we'll have to agree to disagree that empirical proof is the prime requisite for actual truth. There are too many times where empirical "proof" has been overturned and too many things that we know but are unable to prove, often with more confidence than anything we *can* prove empirically. Empiricism works for a tiny subset of all truths. It's a useful tool, but only a tool.
And yes, you're very much *using* "belief" as a pity-label, ie "that's not true, that's *just* a belief". Same basic idea as the (flawed) claims that something is "just a theory" as an attempt to belittle it/make it seem less solid.
To be honest, I think that you made my point for me. Again, I want to emphasize that the word "beliefs”, as I use it, is not in any way pejorative. I use the word as a description of, let's call them, provisional truths. I use the word "theory" in its scientific meaning - a belief that has been robustly demonstrated to be at least a partially true explanation of a given set of phenomena.
When empricial proofs (without the scare quotes) are overturned we no longer believe that what they prurposted to descbe was, in fact, true. As for things that we know but cannot prove, well, that is in fact the definition of "belief."
To conclude, I can safely say that there are very, very few "truths" in the universe of any kind, and no transcendent truths at all.
> When empricial proofs (without the scare quotes) are overturned we no longer believe that what they prurposted to descbe was, in fact, true. As for things that we know but cannot prove, well, that is in fact the definition of "belief."
If Truth requires proof, that raises the epistemic (existential) problem of whether there can be any Truths without there being observers, because Truth would require a conscious entity to test it. Moreover, is a single conscious observer enough to confirm the proof? Or must other conscious entities be there to check the observer's proof? In which case, proof is reduced to a consensus issue among conscious entities, because not all conscious entities will necessarily agree with the proof.
> I can safely say that there are very, very few "truths" in the universe of any kind, and no transcendent truths at all.
For instance, say I experienced being taken up to heaven and I saw Yahweh sitting on His jeweled chariot-throne attended by his agent-angel Metatron and surrounded by the Chayot HaKodesh singing Hosannahs to His Presence, I would likely think I had experienced a transcendent Truth of the underlying nature of the universe (but I certainly wouldn't tell my psychiatrist). OTOH, if I started preaching my Transcendent vision of Truth to others, and they started to have the same ecstatic visions, we would now have multiple observers claiming to have observed the same thing. We would all be in epistemic agreement. Would this now qualify as empirical proof?
I think your usage of the word truth is different from what I think is the normal meaning.
From your last passage you seem to define truth as something that has been proven. I agree with you that very few things can be definitely proven. But, in the normal meaning of the word, statements can be true even if not proven to be so. Ofcourse, this means that for most things we don't really know with 100% certainty if something is true or not (but we can come close to certainty, for trivial knowledge, or with rigorous testing).
I think that you are exactly right that we don't really know with 100% certainty if something is true or not. This is the reason that when I hear about "Truth" I am usually skeptical, and that I consider transcendent truth to be personal. My definition of the word more or less follows Popper, whose, in my view, is the most convincing in the matter of what constintures knoledge.
Well, if you use a word differently than the usual meaning, you should be aware that this will cause confusion, do that with care - I will point out that your usage of the word truth in this thread seem to be the cause of a number of misunderstandings with several different posters.
From a cursory reading, I'm also skeptical that your definition agrees with Popper - though I admit I'm absolutely no expert.
I think the second category capital T truth is not really truth at all, rather, it is our beliefs about the third category - the underlying truth. You can come to those beliefs in different ways. One of those is science, another is religion, and a third is practical experience. The scientific method is different from other ways of obtaining beliefs in that it is rigorous and provides falsifyable statements. It has a track record of providing reliable information about the world. Clearly the scientific method is limited, and can't tell us anything about what we can't observe.
One can argue that there is fundamentally no such thing as scientific truth, as scientific theories are never assumed to be perfect truth, and there are always the possibility of further evidence falsifying a theory.
I think I'm willing to bend a little bit and talk about lowercase-t "truth" in this context--basically focusing on how people use the word "truth" in their daily lives rather than the full-rigor version. But yes, basically, I agree.
People definitely talk about scientific "facts" or "truths". But yes, I agree that most of what we're *trying* to do with science is get at a deeper layer. And I'm absolutely willing to stipulate that scientific endeavors are *extremely useful* within their sphere of applicability.
I also believe (for religious reasons among others) that there is only one capital-t, full-up Truth, of which everything we can know that is actually lowercase-t-"true" by any means is just a projection onto (metaphorical) lower-dimensional, bent space. Distortions and inconsistencies we see are reflections of the funhouse-mirror projection rather than the actual Truth.
I'm not religious, but I agree with you in principle that truth (with capital T) must exist, and is independent from our ability to observe or verify it. No religion is needed to come to that conclusion.
Since we are limited to our senses, there is no way that we could verify 100% what is true, which the scientific method as such acknowledges (but we can still become pretty sure). The only thing we can know for sure is your first category truth, or as Descartes famously said "cogito ergo sum".
The religious part was that Truth exists *and is unified*. That is, that there is only one, objective, universal, eternal Truth that encompasses all knowledge-of-things-as-they-really-are (another way to describe lowercase-t truths). Secular, religious, whatever, there is only one Truth and it exists outside of ourselves.
And, as a religious person, I'd say that there are things I *do* know 100%, even though I can't verify them empirically or prove them to other people via logical/empirical arguments. They form the second-level axioms on which everything else is built. If not thus, then the rest of reality makes no sense. Second-level because there's things at the root level like the principle of non-contradiction.
Truth and empirical verifiability are, in my mind, orthogonal. There are true statements that cannot be proven as such; there are things that can be proven that are not actually true in the capital-T sense--they're just artifacts of the projection of Truth onto our limited reality. Empirical verifiability is much more about *how easy it is to transmit* the knowledge, rather than whether it is actually true. If something can be independently verified by two different people (or even better universally by following a strict procedure), then it's very easy for that information to spread and be used by lots of people. It's easier to trust because you can outsource your confidence to something mechanical. You don't have to be a holy person to drive a car--it just works whether you have faith in it or not. But other things, especially interpersonal things...that's not the case. And those things are just as true. Just harder to spread.
I can't prove whether a law is just empirically. But some laws are just and others are not. I can't prove whether I love someone empirically. But I love some people and I don't love other people. Etc.
"there is only one Truth and it exists outside of ourselves."
This is the crux. Either there is some sort of absolute truth existing outside of ourselves, ie. God, or all truth is essentially subjective (ie. a function of the observer).
I have always divided the idea of truth into the measurable and the unmeasurable. Science is only able to approach the truth of phenomena which are measurable, and it is very good at that. And through repeatable experiments, truths about the measurable can be established (at least with respect to any individual observer).
But Science is of no use whatsoever for unmeasureable phenomena, such as love (or human nobility of spirit, the soul, altruism etc.) Love either exists and it is something transcendental and outside of ourselves (as you say), and is therefore a proof of God, or love is just a series of chemical reactions in our brain which is necessarily the case if there is no God (and in which case it also ceases to have any real meaning).
I have always imagined this as a sort of diagram of a triangle where the three points are Truth-God-Love. If any of these 3 concepts is not real, the other two also are not real. But if any one of the points is real, then the other two also must be.
> This is the crux. Either there is some sort of absolute truth existing outside of ourselves, ie. God, or all truth is essentially subjective (ie. a function of the observer).
That is a valid distinction, but I will point out that if all truth is subjective, then that in it self is an absolute underlying truth. Also, if all truth is subjective, that means everyone else than me is literally a figment of my imagination. If you feel the same way, then that is a contradiction, because if truth is originating in each subjective mind we can't be living in both truths simultaniously.
I disagree that god is necessary for there to be an external underlying truth (if that is what you mean by i.e. god).
>Love either exists and it is something transcendental and outside of ourselves (as you say), and is therefore a proof of God, or love is just a series of chemical reactions in our brain which is necessarily the case if there is no God (and in which case it also ceases to have any real meaning).
I disagree that love ceases to have meaning just because it originates in our mind. Nor is something less real because it originates in a mind. Our mind, including our feelings, also has consequences outside of ourselves.
I'd like to zoom in on the areas were we disagree, so I'll first say where I agree.
We are in agreement on that truth and empirical verifiability are orthogonal. I think when people disagree with this, they must have a different defininition or usage of the word truth. By truth I mean what is, not what is verifyable. It is possible and likely many things that are true, but can't be observed or verified. Rigorously, I think very little is actually verifyable (i.e. only internal experience, and only for the one experiencing it), but of course in practice I understand people, including myself use the word truth for things that are just close enough to the real thing.
I still can't quite catch why you assert that religious belief is necessary to believe in unified truth. I really can't see how truth can not be unified. As a thought experience, say that we all have our own reality spring from our own brain. Maybe my reality is secular, and yours has a god. Now those facts are still artifacts of a unified truth, that is that we have separate realities! More generally, I believe there is a set of things that is - i.e. those things are true.
When you say unified - do you mean something different than that? I could imagine unified means something like "everything was created by god", or everything is the "result of a mathematical equation". But is that really any more unified, than, say, a much more complex reality that is hard to describe and understand for a human?
Wheter you love someone is an ephemeral truth. You put it well in your original post when you say that this makes it true but not provable to an outsider, and you are correct that this is a different category of truth from the underlying truth we are talking about.
Whether a law is just is a whole other discussion - ethics. The short form is that I believe that ethics is fundamentally subjective, and a result of evolution in small groups. Therefore I reject universal ethical truths. (ofcourse we should still discuss and agree on whether a law is just in practice, I'm not a nihilist).
Ah. I see one source of potential confusion. I merely meant that *I arrived at the idea that there is only one Truth* (ie that truth cannot be segmented into "secular" and "religious" categories that could, in principle, conflict and still be meaningfully true) from a religious perspective, not that you have to be religious to see it that way.
When I stress unified, the big important thing is that, for me, the set of true statements is a subset of the set of non-conflicting statements. So if you say "X is True" and I say "X is not True" for the same X...at least one of us is wrong. If we all had perfect knowledge of things as they are (which we very much do not and cannot, in our current condition have), we'd all agree that either X is True, X is False, or X has no meaningful truth value (e.g. because it is a semantically-null statement).
This means that you can't segment truth into compartments that you can treat independently. I can't say "my religion preaches X but science says ~X, oh well, they're both true." I have to acknowledge the conflict and work to resolve it.
Beyond that, because I believe in unified Truth, I believe that there are a set of tools that work for uncovering the real truth (modulo the imperfections and finite nature of human existence, which get in the way of the pursuit of truth). I can't comfortably say "I use faith for religion but science for secular stuff". I am impelled to try to unify the fields--to find methods that work for both.
I don't believe I can reason my way to heaven/God--his nature is of a higher order than my reason. But I can use reason quite heavily to analyze *people's claims about heaven/God/the good*. And I can use the process of faith[1] to learn "secular" knowledge as well.
[1] Essentially: (1) hear, read, or think something that implies a test[2]. (2) believe in the possibility of it being true enough to start an experiment. May not be a fully empirical experiment! (3) Do the test. In most cases, this looks like *living the implied doctrine and paying attention to the outcomes* (externally observable or not). (4) evaluate. If it made things better (passed the test), it was true *at least at some level*. Continue down this loop, testing things further and further. Things that aren't capital-T True will stop at some point where the loop will abort because the test failed. Capital-T Truths are eternal and go well beyond any level I can reach in my lifetime.
This works for learning secular OR religious things, because all truth is Truth.
Kant talks about 'transcendent' truth as the structures necessary for perception. Causality, for instance, can never be observed (since it's meant to hold in all times and all places), but it's an essential structure of human thought that makes thinking about other things necessary. Same for space and time. This lines up with some of what you discuss ("truths about reality itself") but less so for others ("one must find it for themselves").
Might also check out Kierkegaard's 'knight of faith' idea. Your transcendent idea can be mapped to 'a personal relationship with God,' which was an interest of Kierkegaard's. Might be another interesting thing for you!
I think there are transcendent truths that don't neatly map into "a personal relationship with God". For example, it is true that my family loves me. I can't prove it in a rational way--they could be just clever sociopaths. It's not something I can experience in a sensory fashion. But it is true (as much as I struggle with it due to my own internal issues). My own existence as a separate thing, rather than the dream of a butterfly is another transcendent truth. It simply IS, rather than following from anything else.
But for many of the most salient TTs, the nature of one's relationship with the Divine is certainly a major factor in reaching them.
I don't know yours or Kierkegaard's thoughts well enough to make 1-1 maps. it's possible Kierkegaard's idea of 'relationship with god' would capture all of your shades as well. They're just directions you might find interesting given where you are.
Thanks!
Well said.
I'm not sure what exactly this statement is doing.
Are you saying that this triple division is how people use the word "Truth" (so you're analyzing actual usage, and letting people know that many individuals use the word "Truth" to refer to their religious experiences)? Or are you proposing a novel definition of the word "Truth", and trying to help people understand how you want them to use the word?
I'm trying to categorize (or find a projection onto categories) different sub-meanings for the word "truth". That is, when people say "X is true", what do they mean? How can we group those meanings? Do those meanings all have the same properties? Effectively doing philosophical Principal Component Analysis.
This is one possible breakdown I've found, not the only one that exists. I'm sure there are an extremely large (if even finite) number of such breakdowns that make some sense.
> That is, when people say "X is true", what do they mean?
It means that person believes that particular statement is reflective of reality. I really think you're overcomplicating this.
Transcendent truth is also a very personal matter. What is true for one person may not be for another. I am working on a novel about just that.
By my definition here, transcendent truth, properly understood, is universal. There is only one reality, and transcendent truth is true across the entirety of reality.
That said, since we're limited, finite individuals and reality is very much less so, the transcendent truth we can actually grasp is more like a shard of a stained-glass window--just a fragment of a much bigger design. I would say that all proper transcendent truth *points towards the same things* and doesn't conflict with other transcendent truths *in that same sphere of applicability*. Any conflicts are from us trying to extrapolate the shard we have beyond where it applies.
I think that separation is normally done as: qualia, truth, intuition. All three are fallible, but qualia are so time-bound that they're essentially impossible to disprove.
If you're trying to say something about the "nature of reality", I think you're wrong, but if you're trying to talk about perceived reality you're correct. OTOH, I'm not, in Plato's sense, an Idealist. And parts of this are an argument that's been running since then without resolution, or even an agreed method of resolution.
It's a fine concept but IMO it circles back to the first definition of personal truth. Far too many utopians have asserted transcendent truth from personal revelation, and it's usually a net negative for society.
I'd say that anyone who asserts details about transcendent truth doesn't understand what that means. Personal revelation is just that--personal. It affects how I live. And I may be able to say "hey, I've found this cool thing. If you want to experience it, here's how I found it." I can't prove or disprove it. But I can point the way and let others find it (or not). But if the path doesn't work reliably, that asserted thing is unlikely to be transcendent truth of any kind.
How are you so certain there is only one reality? I see strong evidence to incline against that, given the principle of parsimony and how well our reality lines up with "efficient data storage."
Well, isn't that just a matter of categories? If there is more than one reality, surely those realities is still part of an overarching reality as well?
Also, can you expand on what you mean by several realities here?
The basic principles of efficient data storage line up quite neatly with quantum mechanics. Only instantiate what's needed -- so when someone's looking, you have an "actual state" and when they aren't, you leave it in a state of uncertainty, which you don't have to model.
Fwiw, famously it actually requires exponentially many resources to simulate quantum mechanics classically; this is the basis of quantum speedup.
Basically, not only do you need to model the state of uncertainty, it requires more resources than you'd naively think it would take to do so.
Thanks. Is your suggestion that this is evidence for the world being a simulation? I don't know enough about quantum mechanics, (or efficient data storage) to assess this, perhaps you do? My first objection is that this may be only a superficial equality, and that details don't line up as neatly at all? As I understand it the uncertainty principle is a lot more complicated than a particle simply being in an (apparent?) state of uncertainty until observed. If the goal was efficient data storage, wouldn't we rather expect this to be simple?
I am not sure I agree with your definition. Factual truths are universal, meaning that they are the same for everyone, but what I find to be transcendent may be very different from what you would find to be. For example: Getting shot in the head will very likely kill you. This is a factual truth that is independent of your beliefs. However, the truth that you will go to heaven or hell depending on your beliefs or behavior is a claim to a transcendent truth, but it is far from universal, which is why we keep fighting wars about it.
That's *really* difficult. Some "factual truths" are in principle available for anyone to discover, but "When I was I high school I dissected a frog with two livers." is a true statement that nobody who didn't observe the event can verify. My assertion that my biology teacher looked at it and agreed is not a way for you to access or validate the statement.
OTOH, coming up with a "factual truth" that actually available for everyone to validate is difficult. Remember Helen Keller. But "factual truths" that are accessible to many people is trivial. Still, there are multiple examples of things that were witnessed by many independent people that aren't generally accepted as true. Certain events in the flying saucer database come to mind, but there are also multiple witnesses to some events reported in a religious context that aren't plausible fakery, but also aren't commonly accepted (particularly if you don't follow the religion of those that reported them).
A lot of what we think we see is actually model fitting. Which can put a "factual truth" is a dubious position. Other times a fact may claim to be "always true and accessible to anyone who looks", but in is too difficult or expensive for reasonable replication. (The results from things like the CERN collider fall into that category.)
Is the Higgs Boson a factual truth? I don't know anyone who's been able to test it, and I'm not sure I know anyone who could understand the publicly offered claims of proof.
And the closer you look the worse it gets.
The Higgs boson exists in theory, which means that available evidence agrees with the mathematical derivation of its existence. This means that its existence is a qualified belief. Absolute truths only exits when absolute proof is available. Everything else is a belief, with a higher or lower level of proof.
That's what we are told, but I don't understand the theory, I don't understand the evidence, and I also don't know anybody who does. So I'm taking people's word that it is a confirmation of the theory. There's LOTS of things like that. Some are scientific, some are legal, some are...well, in some other field. There are places that I understand in reasonable detail...but never all the way down. Yeah, I once wrote a compiler for a class, but I didn't understand the microcode behind the assembler, much less the integrated circuits. I observed patterns of reaction, and took on faith that the explanations I was given were approximately true...and experiment showed that they were at least sufficiently so...but that "sufficiently so" involved accepting a lot of hand-waving, where I expect the people teaching me didn't understand the underlying processes.
Factual truth? That's a lot rarer, and generally personal, and not something that everyone can validate. I once saw a case hardened steel file with a bent tang. I *believe* this is generally considered impossible, as case hardened steel breaks rather than bends, but I held it in my hands. But there's no way I could prove that to you.
Belief is reasonably cheap, and doesn't need to be intense. In lots of cases I believe something with low probability. (I.e. I'm willing to change my belief on reasonable evidence). But in my usage belief an truth are two different concepts. I may believe something is probably true, but that doesn't mean it is true. To me "true" is an absolute. One can estimate the probability of something being true, but whether it is true or not is an absolute...which can very rarely be determined. (I want to say "never be determined", but I'm not really sure that's true.) Granted, estimates are commonly used as if they reflected the actuality. But when one's discussing the nature of truth, that seems like a bad approach.
I'd say that one of the values of this set of definitions is that it says that fighting wars about transcendent truths is kinda missing the whole point. Trying to push someone who isn't ready into accepting a transcendent truth is oxymoronic--transcendent truths (by this definition) are entirely esoteric. They can only be reached by an individual changing themselves. External force just does not, and cannot work.
From my religious Christian perspective, God's design for humanity is that we grow to the point that we can accept the transcendent truths of His nature, by following commandments, repenting, having faith in his Son, etc. The commandments aren't arbitrary rules, they're sign posts as to what/who He is--"if you want to draw nearer to My nature, you should do this. Otherwise, you'll move further away from Me." And this can't happen by force, because no amount of external force/threats of punishment or even peer pressure can *really* change people's hearts and have it stick. Both of those threats may be true threats, but that's at the level of ephemeral and/or rational truth. Only the process of becoming capable accepting the transcendent truth can really change the heart in a lasting manner.
I think that you just made my point for me. Transcendental truths are truths we cannot verify empirically, and therefore they must be individual.
Are you using "Trancendental truth" as a synonym for "Trancendental belief"? It sure looks like it. In which case I don't think labeling it "truth" rather than "belief" makes anything clearer...and definitely not more honest.
Putting this in the open thread just to get a read of the room for anyone implementing LLM’s in large corporate environments: is anyone else shocked by how little innovation has been going on? I mean in terms of “okay, imagine you can’t just lazily plug this in without building the workflow around it.”
I’m trying to assess if this is a genuine skills gap because things I have heard others are holding back on, like conversational customer service, have been surprisingly amenable to techniques that to me have felt fairly obvious.
It's not a skills gap, it's a business gap. By which I mean, large profitable organizations have a hard time identifying good use cases for GenAI stuff and they don't have to implement it. The only people who in large organizations who will champion this are users in serious pain and it's hard to identify them, hard to understand their problem in the depth required, and then hard to identify if this is a problem that AI is actually good at solving.
For example, HR. Having AI agents read through resumes and doing initial screening makes sense from a high-level perspective and in reality it's an absolute mess. I think some mature AI system will eventually supplement current HR professionals (and it wouldn't surprise me if that leads to lots of people being laid off) but for right now...I'm pretty sympathetic to large corporations deciding that hiring is really important and really hard, their current system...works-ish, and they're just going to sit back and let the early adopters figure out the actual business case and then they'll buy it when it's mature. Hiring at, like, Exxon Mobil is not broken, at least by the standards of their peers, so just doing nothing right now is probably the smart move instead of experimenting with a bunch of half-baked solutions and running around like mad for a few years just to eventually adopt the mature solution from some vendor in 5 more years.
If you're working on this, as I am, then...man, I think it's way more about identifying the right problems than building cool systems. Like, what you really want is to identify key stakeholders having massive, ongoing problems that seems trivially fixable with a GenAI solution. Which sucks, because I much prefer doing cool technical stuff than, like, talking to people, eww, but...I could also build ten cool widgets and they'd be super cool and everyone would like them and no one would use them because they don't solve real problems.
Every position we post gets thousands of applicants. It's a week long process for me to get a list of 20 resumes to read and review manually, and there is no rhyme or reason as to the quality of resumes. I've seen resumes that are 10 pages long of poorly formatted copy + pasted slop that are likely gaming the TF-IDF algorithm by spamming (not merely matching) keywords. I interview candidates and it is clear many of them do not possess the skills claimed.
Most of my hires have come through network recommendations. At all experience levels, the quality of applicant is significantly higher than fishing through resumes. I never thought I would endorse systems based on nepotism, but they are outperforming the status quo.
When I was starting out, I used to think attending tech meetups looking for a job was a waste of time. Now that I've experienced the hiring process, talking to new developers at tech meetups sounds like a phenomenal idea.
And we are building an AI resume screening tool! It's a huge initiative, not just a couple of developers doing a POC. And the amount of whataboutism is insane. What if it doesn't read poorly formatted resumes well? Will font sizes break it? Can you follow a dozen business rules that contradict each other and have no weighting or priority against the raw resume <--> JD match?
And it is being developed custom! Lengthy development cycles full of hemming and hawing. I doubt it will ever see production. A functional business would have just grabbed any existing solution off the shelf and run it against a bunch of benchmark test cases.
Comment is long enough without speculating as to why, but in my experience hiring is completely broken. I actually don't think AI can solve the applicant quality problem, but it can drastically speed up the process and avoid many of the obvious failure modes described above.
Agreed.
I have finally found good use cases for AI that go beyond using Claude/ChatGPT directly in the chat window. This is mainly analyzing and expanding databases that are also used by customers. The content is relatively low-stakes, so the occasional error isn't a big deal.
Notably, these applications are all basically a patchwork of no-code-tools, Airtable, and Claude API calls, built around clearly delineated needs, and most of the shinier stuff I have seen has proven to be largely useless (Veo 3, for example)
Are there any actually usable customer services chatbots? I'm driven up the wall by one company (I won't name) that has lousy webpage for support, steers you as hard as it can to their chatbot, and the damn thing keeps telling me "this is easy to fix if you just log in to your account".
The problem I want to fix is - I can't log in to my account. I tell it that, and it tells me "log in to your account to fix this".
So what use is the damn thing to me? Unless the entire rationale here is to discourage customers from ringing up and trying to get their problems solved, I see no benefit to anyone apart from "we can now fire a few more cheap call centre workers by replacing them with this".
No idea, I haven’t had good experiences with customer service chatbots either.
Agreed you need to have the right problem.
The gap between how AI people think large corporations work, and how they actually work is astonishingly large.
Most of the corporate world runs on excel. Most corporate knowledge exists in Outlook alone. Fax is still common. In ten years this will still be true.
Outside of individual ChatGPT use there won’t be much implementation of LLMs. New companies built on this technology will instead eventually replace them.
Don't know if my job qualifies as "corporate world" but yeah.
In descending order, the things we use most are:
Outlook (what is now branded as Microsoft 365 Copilot)
Excel
Management and support services portal to government department funding and data collection
Payroll software
Accounting software
Online banking
Word
All the blandishments goddamn Copilot tries on me every time I log in to (what used to be) Office 365 are useless, because I don't need it to write funny emails for me.
So true. So, so incredibly true. Having worked in corporate for even just a year, it's insane how wrong people outside of the corporate world get it.
For conversational customer service, it's the dumb risk that someone tricks your bot into saying something embarrassing, and then tweets about it, and then you get a bad PR cycle.
It's a shame, because if we existed in a society of adult human beings then relatively simple chatbots could actually be incredibly useful to customers. Look, if I just promise to ask your chatbot questions about your products and services, and not try to trick it into saying Heil Hitler, can I please just talk to a bot for a moment instead of an Indian?
no, chatbots are useless.
anything a chatbot can cover would generally be handled better by a well-written FAQ, and beyond that people will escalate to a real live person because chatbots can't make judgement calls or understand the product.
chatbots and indians are symptomatic of management who views customer service as an unskilled cost center to skimp on. The business case of AI is to replace people with an inferior product to save money.
As a customer I don't necessarily want to read a whole well-written FAQ, I just want to know whether the R-class Veeblespritzer comes with air conditioning or not.
that's what the product page is for. The problem is they cheap out on that or aren't good at it.
a chatbot can be worse because if s, r, x, and v share the same documentation and it is written poorly enough the chatbot will be wrong.
I can’t tell you what it is now, but there really is just one dumb trick to make this work.
i don't think there is.
no matter how well you process tokens, it can't replace understanding them and possessing judgement.
Customer service agents don’t really have the ability to use judgement either. Even then, they have to follow guidelines to treat all customers consistently.
then people escalate it to the higher tier that can use judgement, especially if they are valuable or persistent customers.
but good customer service does use it. You can't script too tightly unless you are like modern businesspeople who script to discourage the things rather than solve them. But give a little autonomy in things you can, while keeping firm boundaries in what you can't can make a lot of problems go away.
Has it been tested against a legion of bored 4channers?
My best idea would be to put in a second language model to spot-check anything written by the first and block it if it could be embarrassing.
It’s dumber than you can possibly imagine.
They are incentivizing us to take advantage of it in our multi-billion dollar company but at this point, we are hard pressed to figure out how to take advantage of it for much more than reformatting data and such. My business is pretty unusual (semiconductor design and manufacturing) but I think the observation that there is a huge amount of effort that needs to go into proving that you can trust it for business decisions, may be true of most big businesses. Recently, I asked chatGPT (\reason) to help me prove that a theory I had about a particular device physics behavior, was valid. After 4 or 5 tries, it did. But then, whey I tried (with and without ChatGPT's help) to create a single prompt that would yield the eventual result, it proceeded to contradict its prior analysis in many different ways.
I’m thinking the interface use cases are the most powerful as long as you do a few things to keep it in tight guardrails
I don't have direct experience with this, but Ethan Mollick had a good post the other day that makes a compelling case that it will be a long time before enterprise applications make serious progress.
https://www.oneusefulthing.org/p/the-bitter-lesson-versus-the-garbage
I think I’m going to shoot Scott an email as I’ve been meaning to do it for a while anyway. Unless someone takes my funding I might be one of the first here.
Mostly chat-with-your-data use cases, but these don't scale to have any significant impact. Most non-technical employees are just using ChatGPT on the side, or if you're lucky there is a company portal where they can give it private business data. Subjectively this feels like it takes the edge off of a lot of writing tasks, like for reports or powerpoints. Maybe 15% productivity boost?
For developers, it has the ability to unlock analytics on a lot of free text data. But large corporations are allergic to serious analytics anyway (because anything data-driven quickly finds itself at odds with authority's narratives), so again the impact is very limited. To be fair, analysts often make mistakes and leadership has learned not to rely on them beyond storytelling when the optics is favorable.
A lot of the use cases being kicked off for AI tools could have been done prior to LLMs with regular NLP/embedding frameworks. But I have never seen a simple, powerful, and cheap tools displace slow crappy and expensive legacy tools.
Given that the vast majority of teams in these companies were doing no impactful work whatsoever before AI, I am not shocked for there to be little innovation. AI tools getting better just makes it increasingly awkward to notice how much stagnation there is. But only children notice the emperor wears no clothes, and the market can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent. Etc etc.
My feeling is that the adoption will be slow but powerful. Need time for winners to sort from losers.
Its exactly what I would expect. How electricity was added to drive-belt powered workshops is a historical example. Rather than add electric motors to the tools, they first tried using electricity to power the drive belts.
Huh? What powered the drive belts if not motors?
Before they were powered by electricity, they were powered by steam.
Okay I just took the time to read the comments rather than simply scanning.
I was picturing something like, I dunno a loom maybe, that was powered initially by a steam engine and then they hooked it up to an electric engine when one became available. I didn’t pick up on the part about multiple machines with individual belts attached to a single drive shaft.
My mistake. I understand what y’all were getting at now.
And before steam, they were powered by waterwheels, windmills, or draft animals harnessed to turn a wheel.
I understand that part but surely there were electric motors attached to the drive belts. In some applications driven by electric motors drive belts remain part of the scheme.
I’ve seen motors connected (by drive belts) to 20’ diameter flywheels to drive jaw crushers in iron ore processing plants for example.
I'm not entirely sure where your point of confusion is, but the way it worked is that, in the age of steam, there was a single large steam engine. This engine powered a single large driveshaft that ran through the entire factory. Individual tools were connected to this drive shaft through belts, so there would be many belts to many tools all driven off the same central drive shaft. The first uses of electric motors were to replace the steam engine with a single large electric motor but still drive the whole central drive shaft and all the belts, which was a poor use of the advantages that electricity and wires, and the miniaturaization ability of electric motors. It was not for quite some time (and mostly with entirely new factories), that they switched to wires bringing electricity to each tool which had it's own, appropriately sized, electric motor.
The point being: the first uses of electricity and motors were crude and not taking full advantage of the new technology, which required complete rethinking of how factories worked.
Okay I just took the time to read this rather than simply scanning.
I was picturing something like, I dunno a loom maybe, that was powered initially by a steam engine and then they hooked it up to an electric engine when one became available. I didn’t pick up on the part about multiple machines with individual belts attached to a single drive shaft.
My mistake. I understand what y’all were getting at now.
I'm not sure it was just inertia that delayed the shift from one engine or motor per shop to one or more motor per tool. Centralizing one big motor still has a few advantages, especially before we got good at making small motors that were efficient, reliable, and relatively cheap.
One of the big ones is intermittent demand. Some machines run continuously, but a lot are going to be bursty. You can handle bursty load by turning the motor on and off as needed, which is a lot easier to do with an electric motor than with a steam engine or waterwheel, but still isn't instant especially for large loads. Also, your motors are going to spend a lot of time idle if you turn them off between bursts. With a big centralized motor, the demand from every tool in your shop connected to it averages out, and you can use a flywheel or something between the motor and the driveshaft that stores up mechanical energy to average out demand over short amounts of time.
Whether or not that makes centralizing worthwhile depends on how expensive the motors are, whether there are inherent scale efficiencies besides load balancing and idle time, and how small you can reasonably make a motor. Nowadays, those questions are generally strongly in favor of many individual motors, but it probably wasn't as clear cut in the late 19th century.
I don’t think I’m confused really. My point was simply that after the invention of electric motors drive belts, are still often a part of mechanical tools.
Sure the design of shops changed in a dramatic way but drive belts themselves weren’t made obsolete.
Edit
“surely there were electric motors attached to the drive belts.”
was poorly phrased. I should have omitted the word ‘the’
I meant it to mean individual motors supplying power to individual machines.
The way I wrote it could be read as a single electric motor driving everything.
LLMs are pretty smart nowadays, but sometimes they still make really glaring mistakes.
For example, I asked Claude to identify a photo of a strange green-and-white striped plane. It initially claimed that it was Spirit Airlines, which is "famous for their yellow and black striped planes" (wrong in *two* different ways). When I pointed out that the stripes are green and white, it instead said it must be Frontier, which is obviously also wrong.
Condor?
That sounds less like an LLM mistake and more like an image recognition mistake. I'm not sure exactly how they've made the multimodal models so, but it feels very hacked on top right now.
Nature just published a survey of physicists on what quantum mechanics says about reality. The Copenhagen interpretation still seems to reign supreme, but that may be because the "Copenhagen’s emergence as the default comes from historical accident, rather than its strengths," and critics say, "it allows physicists to sidestep deeper questions".
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-025-02342-y
The answer to the question depends on how involved in the *foundations* of QM the respondent is. The more involved and the more likely the answer is some version of "not Copenhagen".
Max Tegmark talks about it somewhere. Since 1997, he has been conducting informal surveys at the kind of conference *he* goes to (strong selection). He reports that a majority of physicists at these conference would have said "Copenhagen" in 1997 but by 2010 there were *none*.
The top physicists are always asked the question and we can see the kind of answer they give. I'd say there are several levels. People like Tegmark, or David Deutsch, or Sean Caroll, fully embrace the Many-World Interpretation.
But many more people, like Stephen Hawking, Scott Aaronson, Lubos Motl, and so on, are more likely to give an answer like "yes the math clearly suggests MWI, but..." where the clause following the "but" is some variant of "it makes me uncomfortable so I don't believe it". (Not totally fair, Hawking would have said "... but we can't interact with the parallel worlds so don't worry about it.")
And then, there are all the other physicists, most of which accept Copenhagen simply because that's what they were taught. People who specifically research the foundations of QM are far more likely to reject Copenhagen, simply because the Copenhagen Interpretation is incompatible with realism, determinism, and most importantly locality. That it breaks locality (information must travel at infinite speed for Copenhagen to work) is a no-no for many of those physicists, as it is for me.
ETA and I believe Feynman did have a verifiable opinion on the topic. In one of his books (possibly surely you’re joking, but I’m not certain) I recall him expressing the opinion that, basically, ‘quantum foundations’ was a waste of time and you should minimize the time you spend thinking about it…and I’ve heard similar sentiments from several other people who I would consider ‘top physicists.’ Obviously that doesn’t mean they didn’t have a private opinion as to how to interpret the Schrödinger interpretation. I do, and it’s not Bohr’s interpretation, or Everett’s. But that private opinion is irrelevant since all the interpretations yield the same predictions for experiments, both actual and gedanken.
It's been a while since I read it, but there is a paper by Zeh about Feynman's belief (a report of what he said during a specific conference). But it never really convinced me. As I recall Feynman made comments somewhat critical of Everett's thesis as presented to him by Wheeler (Wheeler, certainly a top physicist, was at the conference and was also Everett's thesis adviser; at the time he was a believer in MWI). He (Feynman) was also critical of Copenhagen. So it seems Feynman was critical of all interpretations. It is known that he had hoped that his integrals would close that subject but realized later that they could not.
As to your remark that interpretations are irrelevant because they yield the same predictions, I disagree. First, Copenhagen don't even have the same number of axioms. The two interpretations are not equivalent. (Newtonian Mechanics as is and Newtonian mechanics with invisible angels instead of forces both make the same predictions but are not equivalent.) Second, there is the problem of locality. Copenhagen is incompatible with it, which makes it incompatible with e.g. Relativity. (Saying "yes but you can't use it to send information faster than light" is not an argument; the interpretation necessitates that information is sent faster than light even if *I* can't do it.)
In the end, the fundamental question is what we want physics to be. For me, its primary role is to provide explanations. Predictions are important, but only as a way to validate theories, not as their ultimate goal. I'm glad when predictions work, but that's not enough for a theory to be truly satisfying; I also want it to make sense, to offer a coherent and meaningful explanation. From that perspective, Copenhagen and the Many-Worlds Interpretation (MWI) are clearly not the same kind of explanation, so I think it's entirely relevant, and important, to discuss and compare them.
I don’t want to debate interpretations but will comment that while all versions of Copenhagen have a speed of light problem, so do all versions of MWI. That’s because quantum mechanics is not a relativistically correct theory - you need Lorentz invariant quantum field theory for that. Quantum mechanics emerges as the low energy limit, but once you take said limit you’ve lost the information about the speed of light bound. And you can cook up situations where the Schrödinger equation predicts superluminal communication, and the MWI won’t save you (but going back to the parent QFT will).
And again, ‘Copenhagen’ isn’t a single thing, and nor is ‘MWI.’
I'll continue to not debate then, lol.
The problem with Copenhagen has nothing to do with the fact that Schrödinger is not covariant under Lorentz transformations. The problem arises even before any dynamics is defined or used. The very description of a system as a linear combination of vectors in Hilbert space is the cause of the problem. QFT changes nothing to this, as a Fock space is just an extension (direct sum blahblah) of a Hilbert space.
The problem in the Copenhagen Interpretation is that in an entangled state such as |00>+|11> the mere observation (measure) of the first particle *causes* the collapse of the second.
This doesn't happen in MWI because the measure of the first particle only gives you information, namely in which of two worlds (planes of existence, branches, etc.) the observer resides. (Or, if you prefer, which observer of two makes the observation.)
I knew what you meant. But the ‘superluminal communication’ problem still shows up under every version of ‘MWI’ once you move from the two particle to the many particle problem. Not even with measurements, just under unitary time evolution with a regular many particle Hamiltonian. ‘MWI’ just kicks that particular can down the road a little.
ETA: I suppose I might as well put my cards on the table regarding my private interpretation. I solve the measurement problem by saying there is no collapse, because the measurement apparatus is itself quantum, and the process of measurement is itself just entanglement of the system with the measurement apparatus. (Stinespring dilation). This is neither Copenhagen nor regular MWI (at least as propounded by Everett or Tegmark). And while it’s ’the Story I tell myself’, unless and until there is some sharp distinction in predictions I consider it pretty much irrelevant if it matches the story my interlocutors tell themselves or not.
Don’t want to engage with the object level question, but if you think Max Tegmark and Sean Carroll are top physicists you are severely miscalibrated. Am a professional physicist. Would not consider Tegmark a ‘top physicist’. Carroll, definitely not. Motl, also definitely not. And Aaronson isn’t a physicist at all, though he is in a field that is physics adjacent, and is plausibly a top person therein.
Most of the top people don’t have blogs though. Aaronson is the exception (but is not a physicist).
Oh, you're absolutely right! Some of the people I mentioned are not top physicists (others are, e.g. Deutsch and Hawking), I mentioned them because their opinions are known and verifiable. In the past I tried to figure out what Feynman or Weinberg believed, but I could never find anything conclusive. Deutsch mentions somewhere that Schrödinger gave a speech in 1952 in Dublin that showed he believed (before anybody else, even Everett) that his equation should "be taken seriously", but I could not confirm that either.
One problem with the OP question is that both ‘Copenhagen interpretation’ and ‘MWI’ could mean a range of different things, and without further specification of which Copenhagen interpretation or MWI you have in mind the question is ill posed. And probably every physicist believes something slightly different and no one believes exactly what either Bohr or Everett believed.
People are perfectly happy to accept Maxwell's laws as the explanation of electromagnetism. If you dig even moderately deeply into the question 'what is a magnet' you quickly realise that we don't really know. The standard model says that 'magnetic monopoles' should exist, but we've never seen one and know nothing about them.
Maybe if Schrödinger hadn't started talking about the cat, this interpretation business wouldn't be such a big deal. The quantum world is fundamentally different to the physical world that we inhabit with our senses - maybe any attempt to explain one in terms of the other is doomed to failure?
Except that explaining quantum mechanics in terms of the normal physical world is exceedingly simple, from a data compression perspective. Sure does look like God is cheating to save memory/processing.
The big problem with quantum mechanics is not that the quantum world behaves in a way that's very different to the macroscopic world. The big problem is that the behaviour of the quantum world _appears to depend_ on what's going on in the macroscopic world (ie a quantum system "knows" whether or not it's being observed), so we can't properly separate the two.
Many Worlds type interpretations neatly avoid this problem in a way that seems to make sense in toy examples, but I've yet to see anyone carefully extend the mathematics beyond toy examples to check whether it still makes sense.
Decoherence is an interaction between a microscop ic system and macroscopic world.
Strictly speaking, theory says that if there are ANY magnetic monopoles, then things MUST be quantized. And we actually DID find a magnetic monopole! But just one, and so everyone assumes it must have been a measurement error. But from the point of view of "validating the entire edifice of quantum mechanics"... mission accomplished?
What do you think about this?
https://mathmeetsmoney.substack.com/p/the-dollar-is-dead
TFA argues that the dollar will likely lose it's status as an international reserve currency, and that this will eventually result in substantial inflation (for people in the US).
-Does this argument seem at all reasonable?
-Has anyone thought about how to hedge against that outcome as a small investor?
Trump's been trying his hardest, but it's still too early to tell whether he'll succeed. The biggest problem is that there aren't any plausible alternatives to the dollar right now. It will take time for plausible contenders to emerge.
FWIW, the dollar is massively down this year though, and that could very well be stoking inflation even beyond Trump's massive tariffs. Incidentally, tariffs usually *strengthen* the currency, making the dollar's crash all the more striking.
It's not actually inflation, in that the value of money is decreasing. Rather individual goods are more expensive depending on how much the tariff on each good is.
But the main point is - replace the dollar with what? Something physical like gold has a lot of issues for regular transactions, and you can't print more which is a big letdown. That leaves fiat currency or crypto, which is inherently worthless without force backing it. The biggest economic force by a huge margin is the US; right back to where we started. BRICS has talked about an alternate currency but nothing has come of it and probably won't.
What are some people's favorite fiction novels? My favorite is The Glass Bead Game by Hermann Hesse.
Some others are:
Smith of Wootton Major & Children of Húrin, both by JRR Tolkien
Ubik by PDK
Childhood's End by Arthur C. Clarke
The Inkheart series by Cornelia Funke (I read as a child but have been rereading recently with my wife, still very enjoyable!)
Steel Ball Run by Hirohiko Araki (may even trump The Glass Bead Game)
-
My mind has now blanked on every other fiction book I've read
I'll try avoid duplication of what others have already said:
For those who like Suzannah Clarke, Lud-in-the-Mist by Hope Mirlees has similar vibes and is really good
Haruki Murakami isn't for everyone, but I really like his weird uncanny stuff, especially Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World and it's sort-of sequel/alternate version The City and its Uncertain Walls, Windup Bird Chronicles, Kafka on the Shore, After Dark.
Benjamin Labatut I'm not sure even counts as fiction; he does... lightly fictionalized Lovecraftian retellings of the history of science? I really like it.
I loved Richard Price's Clockers, the basis for the movie by Spike Lee. Price was a writer for the TV show the Wire, and if you enjoyed that show I think you'd like this book.
Umberto Eco, especially Name of the Rose (what if Sherlock Holmes was a 14th century Franciscan solving a series of weird murders in a creep Abbey against a backdrop of the general nuttiness of 14th C Italy) and Foucault's Pendulum (bored intellectuals accidentally construct a conspiracy theory so good it manifest itself into exist, regret consequences).
The City of Brass trilogy by SA Chakraborty was pretty good: something a little George RR Martin-y about the conflict between different factions all of whom have at least one sympathetic character; not quite as good as asoiaf but on the other hand, she finished hers.
Speaking of unfinished series: The Steerswoman by Rosemary Kirstein. Basically, a book whose main theme is, science and observation and sharing information are good and powerful.
Someone mentioned Mason & Dixon; not quite as good but another historical epic of his is Against the Day, a zany combo of western, boys adventure, and a bunch of other late 19th century genres mashed together in the run-up to WWI.
I really liked Salvage the Bones by Jesmyn Ward but I don't think I can do a good job of explaining way.
Guy Gavriel Kay, especially the Sarantium Series and Last Light of the Sun.
John Le Carre.
To.begin at the beginning...the first proper book I ever read..read Lewis Carrol. If you have, read Jeff Noon's cyberpunk take,.Electric Alice.
Read Welles..and if you have , Read Christopher Priest's sequels, and Olaf Stapledon.
Read Tolkien. If you have, read Michael Moorcock for the alternative approach to fantasy..ironic, not earnest, urban, not rural, chaos versus order etc.
Once you've Read Moorcock, read Mervyn Peake's Gormenghast to see where he was cribbing from.
Read Terry Pratchett. If you have, read James Branch Cabell, fantasy with a Wildean wit.
Read Dune, but no more sequels beyond the fifth.
Read Unsong, if you have, read Illuminatus the original cosmic conspiracy caper.
Read Douglas Adams,
... if you have, read Kurt Vonnegut the original sci fi tragic comedy master.
Read Borges, if you have, read Stanislaw Lem's Cyberiad, a collection of thought provoking fables set in a all-robot universe.
Read British slipstream, JG Ballard, Angela Carter, M. John Harrison, Will Self and Russell Hoban. I'm particularly find of his Ridley Walker, which is set in a post apocalyptic version of the area up in.
Riddley Walker's Weerd Spellin trick is copied by Ian M Banks Feersum Endjin. His books are a lot of fun so long as you've got an engineering brain.
Michael Crichton is known mostly for Jurassic Park, and to a lesser extent, Westworld, but I recall Sphere being the most mindfuck-y of them all. IMO, his best work. (The movie got surprisingly close to the book ending IIRC. Nevertheless, read the book.)
More of my favorite books nobody here mentioned:
Terry Pratchett, "Night Watch" and "Thud!". "Night Watch" might well be his best book, but also a really sad one (it's his take on "A Tale of Two Cities").
Susanna Clarke's "Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell". It's gloriously insane. I can't find my favorite passage online, but there are some other good quotes at https://www.goodreads.com/author/quotes/8842.Susanna_Clarke .
I love when these favorite books threads pop up. I’ve picked up on so many excellent reads from these discussions. So many books, so little time!
Here are a few amazing books that somehow didn't make it into anyone else's list:
1. Bulgakov, "The Master and Margarita". This has my vote for the best Russian novel of the 20th century, and possibly of all times.
2. Strugatsky brothers' "Lame Fate" (https://www.amazon.com/Lame-Fate-Swans-Rediscovered-Classics/dp/1641600713 , an atrocious translation). IMHO this is their best novel. The main character is a Soviet writer who subsists on hack jobs while secretly writing a book he doesn't expect to ever see the light. Suddenly, he himself seems to become a character of a story, full of events that seem supernatural or miraculous, even though, technically, nothing impossible ever happens in the entire book. (Note: if you decide to read this, "The Master and Margarita" is the prerequisite.)
3. Mark Helprin, "Winter's Tale".
Absolutely beautiful writing. Magical realism, miracles galore. Very much about New York. (Avoid the movie based on this book. It's neither faithful to the book nor good.)
Helprin's A Winter's Tale is a minor miracle of a book. I have bought and given away many copies of this book, but rarely see it mentioned.
I gave away a few copies of the book also, and I actually once met someone who'd heard of it before.
I find it really strange how invisible it is, given how awesome it is.
Helprin himself thought his politics was the reason for this book's relative obscurity (and, judging by how fast Wikipedia editors deleted the mention of this claim, calling it "right-wing propaganda", he was at least partially right).
Yeah, well they managed to ban Enid Blyton, too.
For me the politics pales into insignificance beside the luminous imagery.
It's a very singular book - I suspect many people simply don't know how they are supposed to feel about it. There isn't a very convenient way to categorise it.
From the Wikipedia description it doesn’t seem like something I would normally pick up but the buying and giving away multiple times is about as high praise as book can receive.
Just nabbed a copy.
It's more of an experience, than a philosophy. :-)
>Bulgakov, "The Master and Margarita". This has my vote for the best Russian novel of the 20th century, and possibly of all times.
Good, it's the only Russian novel.I've read!
I read a truckload of Russian literature in my life, and it's my personal opinion that you did not miss all that much. I think you made a good choice - "The Master and Margarita" is not only a good read but also an important read. (I do love the second book I mentioned, but I can't vouch for the translation, which seems clunky.)
It's my personal opinion that Russian prose is overrated. But 20th and 21st century Russian poetry, lately mostly in the form of songs, is vastly underrated. It's a completely different world, and people who don't speak Russian have no idea what they are missing.
Life and Fate--Vassily Grossman --ww2
Stalingrad--also Grossman
Children of Men by PD James. Fine dystopia with contemporary realization.
Moonfleet, by J Meade Faulkner. About a boy who unknowingly finds a clue to a concealed treasure, and his adventures once he learns the real purpose of the paper scrap with its strange biblical quotes. Beautifully plotted and well thought out. The characters' motivations fit together as neatly as the cog wheels in a Swiss watch.
The Historian, by Elizabeth Kostova. A scholar hunts for a powerful but elusive vampire. Although it was a fun read, in plot terms it was very much better to travel in hope than to arrive. Putting it another way, the finale was a big anti-climax. Besides anything else, it would have been a cinche for an equally gripping sequel, but I guess Kostova was just sick of writing about vampires!
Lorna Doone, by R D Blackmore. I re-read this last year, and congratulated myself on having been able to follow the baffling Devon dialect of some of the characters the first time I read it as a teenager, and I'm _from_ Devon! :-)
Ken Follet's Kingsbridge series, "The Pillars of the Earth", "World Without End", and "A Column of Fire": https://www.panmacmillan.com/series/the-kingsbridge-novels/10264101 Looking at that page, "The Evening and the Morning" looks worth a read. I may go off and order that on Amazon now!
Rendezvous with Rama, by A C Clarke. (Not so keen on the Rama sequels he wrote with Gentry Lee). I gather this novel is due to be filmed (at last!) by Denis Villeneuve once he has finished his current film project "Dune: Messiah".
Ringworld, by Larry Niven. Although the scale of the ring structure seems ludicrously large, and it would need constant and intensive maintenance to avoid it collapsing in on itself, the book was enjoyable.
Dragon's Egg by Robert Forward is good if you wish Ringworld was harder SF, its about life forming on a neutron star.
Oh yes, that was excellent. I knew there was another SF author I meant to mention! He wrote several other novels, including Rocheworld and Return to Rocheworld.
I think in any objective sense The Count of Monte Cristo has to be the greatest novel ever written. Dumas isn't short of other home runs, either.
Personal favorites are The Man Who Was Thursday, Snow Crash (I didn't really like anything else Stephenson wrote, though I enjoyed the YT easter egg in Diamond Age, an otherwise fairly sloppy novel to my mind), Gil Blas, Chandler's Marlowe novels bar the last one which is sadly sub-par, and last but by no means least, Gene Wolfe's Book of the New Sun. (I personally disliked Urth.)
Non-novel writings and writers who deserve a mention all the same include Borges, Chesterton's essays and Father Brown stories, Sherlock Holmes of course (the novels are consistently worse than the short stories), Fritz Leiber's Swords stories (the shorts again beating the novels by some distance), Howard's Conan stories, Brantôme's memoirs, Froissart's chronicle of the Hundred Years' War, and the various works of Capt. R. F. Burton, none of which can accurately be described as a novel.
if i had to choose a single favorite book/series, I would have to go with storm light archive (brandon sanderson), but that may be due to recency bias. I close second is probably "the name of the wind".
Some runner-ups would be dresden-files, old mans war (book1 only), The Blade Itself (obviously), Enders Game (Also book1 only), the expanse, murderbot diaries.
Hyperion and its sequel by Dan Simmons, and also Ilium by the same author. House of Leaves. Cloud Atlas.
Count of Monte Cristo is a classic for a reason. Les Miserables is shockingly good even if you have no interest in musicals.
If you like Detective/spy fiction, I am Pilgrim is the best if both worlds. If you like hardboiled stuff Laird Barron writes these really good ones about an ex mobster from Alaska who moves to the East Coast.
If you want a great dark fantasy/eldritch horror adjacent model the Fisherman gives a take on cosmic horror unlike anything else. If you've never read Stephen King, I think It is better than the Stand, but that's contraversial, probably Salems Lot is better than both. Speaking of Stephen King, there's no reason to read The Gunslinger saga past Wizard and the Glass.
Pride and Prejudice is actually a nice light read I come back to every now and then. Tale of Two Cities has, I think, the best first chapter of any "great" novel I've ever read (I really need to give Dickens another shot).
Last but not least, I think readers of this blog will probably appreciate Soon I Will be Invincible and You by Austin Grossman.
The Hobbit, the Silmarillion, and Lord of the Rings, by J.R.R. Tolkien
The Hitch-Hiker's Guide series and the Dirk Gently series, by Douglas Adams
Snow Crash and Diamond Age, by Neal Stephenson
The Noumena series (Axiom's End, Truth of the Divine, and Apostles of Mercy), by Lindsay Ellis
The Discworld series, by Terry Pratchett. Soul Music, Hogfather, and Small Gods are my favorite individual books in the series. Honorable mention to Jingo and The Last Continent.
Starship Troopers, The Door into Summer, and Time Enough for Love, by Robert Heinlein
The Foundation series, by Isaac Asimov
The Worldwar series, by Harry Turtledove
The Colossus series, by D.F. Jones
Dune, by Frank Herbert
The Case of Charles Dexter Ward, by H.P. Lovecraft
The Vlad Taltos series, by Steven Brust
The Vorkosigan saga, by Lois Bujold
The Dresden Files series, by Jim Butcher
A Song of Ice and Fire, by George R.R. Martin
I read Time Enough for Love as a kid, and I think it shaped my life in a minor way.
It certainly encouraged me to consider self reliance seriously.
And despite the current disquiet about it, it was very sex-positive for it's era.
If you like Snow Crash, Bruce Sterling's Islands in the Net is pretty good too.
i feel Gordon Dickson's Childe Cycle is a bit better than Foundation, books like The Final Encyclopedia.
if you like comic fantasy, Alan Dean Foster's Spellsinger is pretty fun.
I had a really good impression of Brandon Sanderson's "The Way Of Kings" but every subsequent book in the Stromlight series has been worse than the one before and I'm afraid to reread it, lest my enjoyment prove to be an artifact of my past mindstate.
"Dune Messiah" struck me more than any of the other Dune books. Dune 1 annoyed me because of the weakness of the villains (so many villains, so little competence), but the weakness of the villains is much more integral to the premise of Messiah.
The first three books in A Song of Ice and Fire are quite strong, and make a fine albeit non-standard stopping point for the series.
Ender's Game was the first book I read in one sitting.
I'll get to reading the Dune series eventually, it's been on my list for years.
I also very much enjoyed Ender's Game and all the sequels that follow Ender.
The first four Dune books are quite interesting, and it's one of the few series where the hero of one book is the villain of the next. Book five really started feeling like the series was spinning its wheels, and after book six Frank Herbert died and his son took over the franchise.
Have you read Sanderson's Mistborn trilogy? IMO it's more thematically and tonally consistent than Stormlight, probably because all three books were written before the first one was published. And it has a very satisfying finale, unlike the pseudo-cliffhanger of Stormlight 5.
I read it after The Way Of Kings, and didn't like it as much. I would disagree with tonal consistency; the first book and the second book are very different scenarios. (It's worth mentioning all three combined are about as long as The Way Of Kings by itself.)
1. Scott Alexander's UNSONG is currently my favorite novel. On my first reading, I thought it was pretty good. Coming back to it years later, now prepared for the awkward pacing, it was suddenly my favorite novel. I've since read it a third time.
https://unsongbook.com/
2. His housemate Alicorn's fanfic Luminosity, and its sequel Radiance, are my second favorite fiction. I've read them three times.
https://luminous.elcenia.com/
3. Alicorn's original fiction Elcenia is also a favorite.
https://elcenia.com/
4. The Lord of the Rings by J.R.R. Tolkien has long been a favorite.
5. Twenty years ago, my most favorite novel was The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoevsky. But I'm no longer a Christian and doubt I'd like it as much if I read it again.
6. For children's literature, The Chronicles of Narnia by C.S. Lewis still takes the cake.
7. For very young children (3-5yo), which I will mention since Scott and a fair number of readers have young kids these days, the Elephant & Piggie collection by Mo Willems is a household favorite.
One Hundred Years of Solitude
Out of Africa
All the King's Men
Why does AD&D exist? No, not the table top RPG. The insurance product, Accidental Death & Dismemberment.
I've gotten a good offer for a lot of coverage and it's cheap because it so rarely pays out. I've been feeling a little underinsured so I'm looking. But as a concept, why would it matter if I die from cancer versus from being run over by a bus? Why does this risk category exist?
My assumption (not based on evidence or anything, just conjecture) is that historically other insurance products, like term or whole life insurance or disability insurance, were too susceptible to fraud, which forced insurance companies to either (a) pay out bogus claims or (b) spend a lot of work rooting out the fraud. In either case this would drive up premiums. AD&D on the other hand is quite objective and easy to verify, so the risk of fraud is low, and so the premiums can also be low. There's no quibbling over (for example) whether the policyholder really _needed_ their left hand to hold a job — it's just, send us a picture of your stump and we'll send you a check. It's so cheap it's even offered for free with some other products like credit cards!
Ill take a stab. There is a category of well off head of household sole earner who with a cancer like death could get their affairs in order and ensure their family is provided for (not necessarily breaking bad style, but it counts!). Sudden death would pose a problem so thats what they insure.
You can still die suddenly of natural causes though -- heart attack, stroke, brain hemorrhage etc. Either you drop dead on the spot, or you spend a few hours/days/weeks in ICU without the capacity to get your affairs in order.
These sorts of deaths must surely account for a fair fraction of deaths of working age adults.
Thats right. Maybe it applies to a group of ppl that are confident in their own health and arent concerned with deaths like that. Whether or not thats rational, we see cases of healthy ppl having that drive their insurance decisions in other contexts.
I'm required to hold a life insurance policy as long as I have a mortgage, it wouldn't be fair for the bank to lose out in the event of my death. At least the accidental death policy doesn't benefit the named party, and that sounds too restrictive to benefit a bereaved family. Perhaps these are offered to fulfil a legal requirement?
It's just a way to only pay for one piece of general life insurance. Shopping a la carte for personal insurance you might say, which is why it's cheap. If you have general life insurance then there is no particular reason to also get AD&D.
Some employers provide it as a free employment benefit because the marginal cost to the employer is quite small, like adding dental coverage to an existing health insurance package. Even some medium-sized staffed nonprofits, such as the one that I run, do that. For our younger single staffers the AD&D provided by us is usually their first piece of personal life insurance coverage.
Most weird insurance products exist because they earn money. More money than other insurance products.
any Montana-based ACX readers who would be interested in a meetup?
I’d be willing to organize in Bozeman if there’d be any interest. I figure maybe with all the students here there might be a couple ACXers hanging around?
I think Bozeman would probably be the place to do one if there were to be a meet-up in MT!
If somebody sets up a fall meet-up somewhere in MT I’d be down (I don’t think there’s been one in MT before. I considered setting up one in the Billings area but didn’t think demand would be high enough.)
Hopefully Scott writes about the recent New Yorker article, claiming that some small fraction of longterm schizophrenics may actually be suffering from an auto-immune disease and are being essentially cured by antibiotics. Seems like it's very in his wheelhouse as far as subject matter
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2025/07/28/mary-had-schizophrenia-then-suddenly-she-didnt
While schizophrenia is thought of as an illness, I've often wondered if delusions, hallucinations, and mental disorganization are just the state the mind regresses to if any one of many big systemic things is wrong -- sort of like the physical exhaustion that accompanies most serious illnesses attacking the parts of the body other than the brain.
Well, we do have a word for when systemic illness causes mental status changes in a short timeframe, and it’s called delirium, and it happens all the time to old people. It would be odd if schizophrenia was similar when it mostly shows up in healthy 20 year olds
Actually schizophrenic shows up at all ages, but it's true that its *first* appearance is most often in people aged around 20. (Many of those people go on to be sporadically psychotic for the rest of their lives,) But delusions and hallucinations are not nearly as distinctive for schizophrenia as people imagine.There are a lot of circumstances in which they are common,
To me, the negative symptoms of schizophrenia are the most interesting and overlooked. While delusions aren’t uncommon, the specific negativism is more unique. I don’t even think depression or fatigue are really all that similar! There’s something more significant going on in the brain to cause that. What do you think?
To me, most of the negative symptoms of schizophrenia seem less interesting because less alien. Last week I was sick for a couple days -- had malaise, some GI symptoms, a headache, a low fever and grogginess. Slept on an off all day. In the intervals when I was awake think I probably met criteria for every single negative schizophrenic symptom: a volitional, anhedonia, emotional flatness, etc.
Do you feel like the way you and I feel lethargic when sick parallels the negative symptoms of schizophrenia? I haven’t seen a ton of it, but what I’ve seen strikes me as deeply distinctive— as though it arises from a completely different process
It seems like people who are very tired, hungry, upset, etc., tend to have disordered thinking pretty often, but I don't think they often have auditory hallucinations. Or maybe they do and this is just one of those weird things where I've never experienced it so I think it doesn't happen....
I think the thing that has to be damaged or challenged has to be the brain itself, not the whole person, so being tired, hungry, etc woul dnot count Decades ago I had a brief experience of being delusional when I had not slept for 50 hours or so, and that's not uncommon for subjects in studies of sleep deprivation. Have also read that delusions are not uncommon in normal sane adults after surgery and in various other situations.
Just looked it up: they do! See "Hypnagogia."
Scott's talked about the debate of schizophrenia caused by gut microbe here https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/open-thread-390
I wonder how related the two theories are.
The Lighthaven setup could easily be turned into a reality TV blogging show with the theee advisors as judges (I’m only half joking here)
Reminds me of Monty Python's sketch about writing novels as a televised sport: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ogPZ5CY9KoM
I am a little bit confused about the financials of Lighthaven. Wasn't it in deep trouble, a few months ago, and had to hold a big fundraiser? And I thought I heard they were booked a long time in advance? But now you can rent the rooms at cost for a month?
I guess it's unclear if this is at cost *to Lighthaven* or at cost to Inkhaven-as-a-Lighthaven-customer.
We are booked out most of the year, but November ended up being pretty open, and so a good time to run a program like this! In-general the end of the year is a lot less busy than the rest of the year (partially for Bay Area weather reasons, partially because it's holiday season and people don't tend to run events during those months as much).
We will likely have like one weekend event running in-parallel to Inkhaven (we should have enough rooms to fit everyone at the same time, but it depends a bit on how many residents we end up accepting).
> I guess it's unclear if this is at cost *to Lighthaven* or at cost to Inkhaven-as-a-Lighthaven-customer.
It's less than just the mortgage payment of the place divided by the number of rooms (not counting any staff required to maintain the venue, or any supplies or utilities), so in almost any sense it's below cost, though we can offset it a bit by having maybe one substantial conference happening on one weekend in parallel to Inkhaven.
Thanks for the reply! I am glad to hear that things are sane, and I hope you are doing well!
Tl;dr November is the off-season.
The big conferences (LessOnline, Manifest) are in late May/early June, quite crowded, and housing sells out fast.
MATS (an AI alignment coding boot camp) takes over Lighthaven for about 5 months of the year, in two ~2.5 month chunks (Jan - mid March, and mid June - August).
In terms of the rest of this year after MATS is over, there's: Endless September (anybody can book a room to stay at Lighthaven during the month of September, just to hang out, even though there are no big events booked); the Progress Studies conference for one weekend in October; and Bay Area Solstice the first weekend in December.
The Lightcone team is directly organizing Inkhaven. According to them, the planned ~30 person headcount is small enough that they could still book larger events at Lighthaven at the same time.
There is a big event booked, https://metagame.games !
Ooh, that looks cool!
Thanks for the explanation! : )
I don't know how much Lighthaven actually spends. However, on their website https://lighthaven.space they quote a price of $100 - $250 per person per day, which translates to between $3k and $7.5k per person for the whole month. So the price for Inkhaven ($2k - $4.7k per person) seems pretty reasonable to me.
I wrote a substack post on Sam Kriss and the question of truth in essays, and since it involved rationalism, Caliph Yudkowsky and our noble host here, I thought some AC10 readers might find it of interest:
https://stephenfrug.substack.com/p/contra-kriss-on-the-value-of-truth
Every time I encounter Sam Kriss' writing, I find myself loathing him more. Funnily enough, the original piece was the first thing of his I've read that *didn't* make me feel that way: the beginning was quite good, and the silly story about the heretics was at least decent. But then he had to double down on his essential Sam-Krissness with that response (which I admittedly could not even make it all the way through). I struggle to articulate what exactly I find so obnoxious about his writing--arrogance is part of it, but doesn't come close to describing all of it--but this particular essay could literally just have been replaced by a Tweet that said "come on guys, obvious joke is obvious" and the world would have been much improved thereby.
I like Kriss's writing more than you do, I think, but as to his reply essay, I agree entirely.
I read your essay, thought the first half about lying was very good and was thinking I fully agreed with you, then read the second half and thought it was terrible.
To elaborate: I agree that Kriss is being really annoying, assholish even, by doing the continued sarcasm thing even after being asked in good faith if he was being sarcastic. You argued that very well. I get that he thinks it's his style, and that he shouldn't have to change for people not part of his audience, but at this point his "style" is just being pointlessly obnoxious for no reason. (If he really insisted on "staying in character" he could have easily put the Clung thing in the paragraph with all the absurd claims, which would have made it very clear and not broken character. As it is his main purpose seems to have been to laugh at those who tried to engage him good faith, which is one of the most disgusting things to ever do).
But his criticisms of rationalists, in my opinion, on the whole spot on. And you switch from a nuanced well-argued take on fiction and disclaimers to...this:
"I won’t claim that HPMoR (as it is abridged) is perfect by any means, nor the Greatest Book Ever Written; but to make a more apt comparison, I will claim that it is much, much better written and thought-out than any of the seven Harry Potter novels by J. K. Rowling, "
Yeah...if I hadn't just read the first half of your essay, I'd feel comfortable concluding that everything you say on anything else can be safely ignored. This is a Yudlowskian level of arrogance. Hell, even *he* probably, and Scott definitely, wouldn't make a claim this obnoxious, this off the wall, without spending like, at least a paragraph or two *arguing* for it. I'm just...almost speechless. This is the exact sort of attitude that creates the "overwhelmingly negative" response to rationalists you mention at the start.
Then, I think you massively overstate Kriss's claim about utilitarianism. I read him as pointing out the problems with it that make it *not the unquestionably obvious moral theory*, that's it. That, as he says, you'd expect actual thinking people who aren't being greatly swayed by groupthink to have vastly more intellectual diversity on such a philosophically difficult topic. Not that it's obviously false.
And then, I think you misunderstand his point about "plain facts". He's saying that, the world isn't just a collection of sterile facts to discover, it's much more philosophically complicated. I don't think he's saying facts don't exist, or whatever it is you're saying.
And I also thought his point about rationalists reinventing religious ideas gets way too little attention. So much of the discourse around AI and singularity is so heavily religious in form and inspiration, it's kind of amazing they're somehow blind to it.
Anyway, I think your first half was really good.
"This is a Yudlowskian level of arrogance."
It's arrogant to think that the Harry Potter novels are bad? Why on Earth? Have you read them? They're fairly original and imaginative, but also just absolutely lousy with plot holes, inconsistencies, cliches, insufferable characters and poor pacing.
Obviously some people care more about those things than others and the books well-loved by many people regardless. Almost as if personal taste is subjective. But then, how is someone having different taste arrogant?
> It's arrogant to think that the Harry Potter novels are bad?
I mean, yeah, pretty much. I haven't read them, but anything that has been read and enjoyed by that many people must be good in *some* way. They're not the greatest works of literature in the English language, nor were they intended to be, they're children's books, and as far as children's books go they are great.
Wow. "I haven't read them, but you--who have read them--are definitely arrogant for thinking they're bad" is...certainly an opinion you can have.
There is a reason that English maintains "good" and "popular" as distinct words with distinct meanings. Of course popular things can be bad. I do not for one single, solitary instant believe that you genuinely hold that *every* popular thing of any sort is actually good (or even, that no popular thing anywhere is bad).
"they're children's books, and as far as children's books go they are great. "
Again, offering this opinion on *books you have not read* is about the most laughably intellectually empty thing you could possibly do.
I've read all seven Harry Potter books, as an adult. #1 and #2 were kind of meh. but I recognized them as something I would almost certainly have enjoyed as a child. And since they are explicitly children's books, that makes them *good*, not meh. #3-#6, I actually enjoyed reading by adult standards. They inherited some mediocre worldbuilding from the first two (seriously, Quiddich?), but the characters and the stories were interesting and the writing was at least adequate. #7 kind of fell apart in Rowling's attempt to get everyone to their designated Happy Ending, but that's still a pretty good run.
HPMoR, as far as I can tell, is made out of 99.44% pure cringe. For a little while I kept at it on the grounds that the general idea was interesting and surely the author would grow into it. But no. I did not finish, and from what I have read elsewhere I do not regret that decision.
I would be embarrassed to be seen reading HPMoR, in a way that I would not for the actual children's books that started it.
I consider "did I enjoy reading it" and "is it good" to be rather different questions, though I might struggle to articulate the difference. But if you've ever--for example--watched a notoriously terrible movie and enjoyed watching it *as* a terrible movie you can probably recognize that there is a difference.
Regardless, I read the first two Harry Potter books when I was 14ish, and my opinion was basically "that's IT?" That's what people are so excited about? I didn't hate them, but I'd read both many better books in general, and better YA books specifically and didn't see anything special about them. I declined to read the rest of the series for quite some time[1]. I read the remainder when I was well into adulthood, and while I enjoyed them well enough, it was also impossible not to notice all the really glaring flaws. I don't mean choices the author made I disagreed with. I mean places where she was just clearly *not paying attention*. Where she wrote in a glaring but easily-fixable problem and just (apparently) didn't notice. Or worse, where she *eventually* noticed, and "fixed" it in the stupidest way possible[2]. But they were a nice, easy read that kept the pages turning, so it was quite possible to enjoy them anyway. Meanwhile, whatever her issues with plotting and story structure, Rowling certainly did quite a unique and multifarious job with her world-building. So while I have a pretty damn low opinion of their quality, the weighting that goes into that judgement is subjective enough that I would be quite silly in insisting everyone else must share it.
I do, however, find it pretty amusing how many people who clearly don't much enjoy them stretch to insist that no they're good actually, because "they're for children[3]." As if children are incapable of having individual taste or standards, and media written for younger readers can't be good in its own right. Of course, not everyone can be in the target audience for every piece of media. But if you don't actually like a genre, reading something from it and then opining "well, it didn't actually resonate with me in any meaningful way, but I'm certain *if it had* I would have thought it was good" seems like quite the unnecessary act of rhetorical contortionism. There's plenty of media aimed at younger audiences that I will quite happily *actually hold up as just plain good media.* But I hope if I ever become so vapid as to insist that something I don't actually care for is nevertheless good "as children's media," I really hope that the high wears off quickly and that I never try that particular drug again.
"I would be embarrassed to be seen reading HPMoR, in a way that I would not for the actual children's books that started it."
Personally, I would be far, FAR more embarrassed to admit I chose my reading material based on how I thought other people would judge me for it, instead of just reading whatever I wanted like a fucking adult. But to each their own, I guess.
[1] I think, in hindsight, partly just out of reflexive contrarianism, which was sort of silly.
[2] I can only assume that by this point, Rowling had so much clout that her editor was basically a rubber-stamp.
[3] Which is already a tell in itself. There's a reason that both sellers and critics of literature draw a distinction between "Children's books" and "YA books." The gap between the latter category and "adult" fiction is much, much smaller than the gap between it and the former category.
OK, if you're interested in argument from personal experience then let me put it this way. I've actually read part of the first Harry Potter book, and I've read part of the first part of Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality.
One of these partial reads made me think "hmm, okay, this is kindof a fun story, I'd probably have enjoyed this when I was younger" and one of them filled me with a profound sense of second-hand embarrassment on behalf of the author who would expose his own serious intellectual and personality flaws in such an insufferable self-insert character. Would you like to guess which is which?
I notice that only one of us is being consistent here. Having read only small fragments of each text, you judge one of them to be basically OK and the other to be unbearably cringe-worthy. Now *I* don't see anything wrong with that judgement: each person has their own tastes. But when you maintain that it's wrong or arrogant to judge a popular or successful work harshly and then IMMEDIATELY go on to do just that, it really just sounds like you're flinging poop and hoping some of it will stick.
Or did you not notice that HPMOR is also quite popular and successful? Of course, it's very difficult to get in estimate of how popular[1] because online fan-fiction doesn't leave any of the same footprints lets print media count readership. But I gather a fic being well-known at all outside of the fan-fiction community (of which I'm not a member) is highly unusual, as is a fic garnering significant readership who weren't fans of the original work. About the only other example I can think of is Master of the Universe, and arguably it needed to *stop* being fanfiction[2] and go mainstream to get the same sort of recognition. Which is a perfect time to point out that your original standard *also* precludes harsh judgement of both Twilight and the 50 Shades series.
In case my main point got lost in there, let me say it quite clearly: QUALITY IS SUBJECTIVE. It's so, so, SO subjective. There are just *so many* personal, non-transferable details that go into judging a work. So when Kriss says "HPMOR is terrible" *he is not wrong.* When Frug responds "HMPOR is considerably better-written than the original Harry Potter series," that's *also not wrong.* When you say "from the minuscule amount I read, Harry Potter seemed fine and HPMOR seemed insufferable," you may be kind of silly for jumping in with opinions of works you know nearly nothing about, but you're *still not wrong.* I gather this is sometimes really hard for STEM people (of which I am one), because being able to quickly and confidently say "no, that's wrong" is a pretty vital skill in math, science and engineering. But nevertheless, nobody offering their opinions on the quality of Rowling's or Yudkowsky's fiction is right OR wrong. They're largely not making the kind of statement that CAN be right or wrong.
Which in turn means that you ARE wrong when you go around insisting that people's tastes are somehow invalid because something, something, money and popularity.
[1] Nevermind the question of "how successful" which would be impossibly subjective even when comparing commercialized media of the same type. And trying to define a workable standard of "success" that lets you compare free, serialized, online fanfiction to printed novels is certainly a fool's errand. Which suggests at least a 50% chance that some fool is going to jump into my replies attempting to do just that.
[2] For legal reasons, this is a joke. There is definitely no fanfiction by the name of Master of the Universe, and if there was it would definitely, definitely have no relationship whatsoever to either 50 Shades of Grey or the Twilight saga.
Thanks for engaging. I suspect we'll largely just end up agreeing to disagree, but by way of appreciating your engagement, let me say a bit in response:
On HPMoR: de gustibus non disputandum est, always, and that may be what's going on here; but I don't think that "better than Rowling" is an impossible standard and I think it clears it. (I didn't say he was better than Tolkein or Le Guin or anything!) I get that you think that makes me dismissable, but I don't think it's prima facie unreasonable, unless you think in general that fanfiction is lesser than original fiction, which I don't. (It probably also has to do not only with my evaluation of HPMoR but also my sense of Rowling.) I think his characters are more interesting, his worldbuilding more interesting, his plots more compelling. But, as I said, de gustibus non disputandum est. I mostly threw that in on the off chance anyone who hadn't read HPMoR came across my essay, to sort of counterbalance what Kriss said and leave them, hopefully, with a neutral impression, so they could judge for themselves. But again, I just don't see that saying that one book is better written and more interesting than another is all that shocking *whichever* way you frame it. (Also, it's certainly not *arrogance* on my part since I had absolutely nothing to do with it save being a reader of it; maybe it would be arrogance for Yudkowsky to say it, but I'm just a reader with an opinion.)
On utilitarianism, however, I respectfully suggest that you're misreading Kriss's essay, Here's what he says about utilitarianism, that it's "plainly hideous: lifeless, brutal, reducing us all to preference maximisers, arrogant beyond belief, and utterly opposed to every principle of life and dignity". That goes a *lot* farther than saying it's not obviously true; it's basically saying it's obviously *false*. So on that I will stand by what I said.
On plain facts: you may be right that I misunderstood it. But as far as I can tell it is what I called it, a deepity: that is, a statement poised between something obviously true and banal and something that would be shockingly interesting if true but isn't. You restated the first part, which if that's what he meant then he's right but not particularly interesting or novel (or opposed to the rationalists, at least of Mr. Alexander is taken as representative). But I think the point of it, like all deepities, is a sort of motte-and-bailey approach: make a shocking claim and then retreat to something more sensible when pressed. Again, maybe I'm misreading him; but I don't think he gives enough context to say, which I think backs up the deepity reading (if you give little context, you preserve both interpretations, which is the idea of a deepity).
Finally, as to religious inventions of rationalists: I really don't know enough to comment. I don't think that I know much about the rationalists qua rationalists. I have read a great deal of Scott Alexander's work, a decent amount of Yudkowsky's, and all of Ozy Brennan's that I can get my hands on (I don't even know if Ozy counts as a rationalist or not), and some of a few others, but I don't feel like I know much about the rationalists as a movement or a community or whatever it is. And I don't feel I need to! I think Alexander & Brennan are great essayists and that Yudkowsky & Alexander are great fiction writers (sorry), and that's really the extent of my interest in the matter. (I will admit I was piggybacking off the interest in rationalism around these parts to see if I could get some readers, but that was mostly on a "hey I bet some of these folks would be interested" basis rather than a "I am talking about that aspect of it".) So I dunno. Do they invent religions? I have no idea. Maybe Kriss is right, maybe not. My main sense is that (as I said in the essay) most people who say things about rationalists *either* pro or con seem to be wildly distorting things; but again, my basis for making that judgment is slight and I'm just not THAT interested in it.
I hope some of that may be interesting. Again, thank you for reading & engaging.
> unless you think in general that fanfiction is lesser than original fiction, which I don't.
While I don’t think fanfiction is inherently lesser than original fiction, I thought HPMoR had many of the hallmarks that people make fun of in fanfiction, and by the end of its writing we were many years past the ‘peak’ of those hallmarks being noted and mocked. And that much of the readership discussing it appeared unfamiliar with fanfic in general, and with HP fanfic in particular, and so took many things as being fresher than someone else might have perceived them.
I particularly recall assuming, as he entered the final run of actually finishing the thing, that he was writing in a deliberately overblown pastiche of fanfic. He paused and said that he was waiting for enough comments before posting the next chapter. He asked people to guess how our genius character would solve an apparently impossible problem, and then when many people guessed it and others suggested a cooler solution, he rewrote it with the cooler solution. There were detailed descriptions of how cool our cool characters cool outfits were. There were cerulean orbs.
And hey, de gustibus. I’m guessing the people who write cerulean orbs in fanfic think that that is what good writing looks like.
From subsequent discussion, I think it wasn’t intended as a pastiche of overblown fanfic, but was instead a sincere example of the genre. I don’t consider that good writing. By contrast, Rowling typically tends to the understatement. If you are someone who finds cerulean orbs to be good writing, then I’m sure extensive understatement looks like worse writing.
And while Rowling does have a couple of careless errors that I wish an editor had caught, generally her books are plotted like detective novels. There is a ‘solution’ which can be figured out, and which inevitably follows and fits all the pieces. She wouldn’t rewrite how a problem is solved based on her audience thinking it is cooler, because it would be part of the whole and changing that wouldn’t work. That’s *why* people find the careless errors so frustrating. (I do not include here the mathematics of her worldbuilding, which simply doesn’t work because she was focused on writing satire of British society rather than trying to build a coherent alternative fantasy world)
If there were cerulean orbs in HPMoR I've forgotten them.
I will admit that I *don't* read much other fanfiction (nothing against it in principle, and I know of one other piece I rate highly, but I just haven't encountered much of it), so any parallels to it escaped me. I thought the "final exam" bit (coming across it years later) was cute, but not a big deal either way.
AFAICT, people really dislike three things about HPMoR: the culture that has grown up around it, its main character's status as a Mary Sue, and its didacticism. The first two don't bother me because, re the first, I don't interact with the culture, I just read the book; and in regards to the second, I don't care that the main character is or is not like Yudkowsky or what his psychology is, and as a literary device if you're willing to read a book about a superman (and hey, either way we're reading ones about wizards, right?) then it's very well done. The didacticism I admit is a flaw, but, first, it's one that's easy to ignore; second, it's one that is heaviest in the beginning and fades over time; third, it works well as plot/world-building in a "clash of cultures" sort of way (why *does* the wizard bank just *stick gold in a locked room*? What *does* it mean in a quantum world that you can only transform an 'entire' object? etc,), and finally, when considered as a children's book—I actually read it aloud to my kid—it can (in my case did) get the kid interested in science, which is a good thing and worth a bit of didacticism.
In contrast, here are some things I think are better about HPMoR:
• Draco. Instead of a blind bully, he has a real viewpoint, and is an interesting character. Harry's friendship with him is a great part of the book.
• Voldemort. Rowling's Voldemort made Dr. Doom look sophisticated and possessed of complex goals. HPMoR's reimagining of Voldemort was fabulous, into a genuinely terrifying and *interesting* antagonist. (And the retconning of the cannon Voldemort as <<a disposable villain persona I invented for practice, making him as dumb as possible ("death eaters"!), and found to my horror that he *won*>> was brilliant.)
• All the other characters were better too, except for Ron Weasley, who was simply ignored.
• And yeah, I include Harry. The fact that he may or may not resemble Yudkowsky's image of himself is neither here nor there: it was an interesting portrait of a young superman—like what Orson Scott Card did in Ender's Shadow, but better. People don't notice enough how often he fucks up. Rowling's Potter is central and important for Reasons; with HPMoR's Potter at least has a reason for being the hero, namely his powers & intelligence—there was a legitimate story-central explanation for his powers by the end which made it all make sense.
• The world-building. Rowling's was terrible; HPMoR cleverly invented things to make much of it work (and the few exceptions it just mocked).
• The plotting. I thought that HPMoR's plot was remarkably propulsive; I thought Rowling's plots were fine.
So yeah, better characters, better plot & better world-building: better books. (I haven't done a strict comparison but I suspect the quality of the prose is a wash—we're not talking Nabokov in either case.) Obviously Rowling has her strong points too (she invented the world to begin with), but I think HPMoR is better.
But, as I said, de gustibus non disputandum est.
I think if HPMoR had stuck with being as didactic as it was trying to be in the beginning, I would cut it more of a break for just being a tract: tracts don’t have to have other merits, because they exist to tell you that their view is the right one and everyone else is stupid and evil. Just as I don’t care that Rowling’s worldbuilding doesn’t work as an individual fantasy world, because it does work as satire of British society.
But at some point, it just became a long, overblown fanfic that was trying to be a super-cool fanfic of both Harry Potter and Ender’s Game. The stuff in it that is just like everything people mock in fanfic in general is typical of juvenalia. The EY psychology aspect of it makes me sad, and not for the ‘super genius’ element exactly.
I don’t know that there’s much point in discussing characterisation when we disagree so profoundly, but Rowling wrote a variety of charcters who each felt like different people with different, recognisable voices, who felt like different people I know in the real world, who all reacted to things and to each other in ways that I have experienced people reacting to things, and whose motivations made sense to me. This was not my experience with HPMoR.
I agree that our experiences are probably too different to bridge, certainly in this discussion format. So I'll leave it there.
I looked at the essay, and then I read you going back and forth with Kriss in the comments. It looked a lot like when I first saw someone getting trolled on usenet nearly 30 years ago. The victim of the trolling is posting one after another high-effort response, convinced that if only they can clearly explain their position the troll will understand, there will be a meeting of minds, and everyone will be better off. Meanwhile the troll posts brief, low effort responses designed for no other purpose than to get their victim to waste their time continuing to respond, because they find sincerity hilarious.
Yeah, I can see why it looks like trolling. Based on a private interaction that I had with him later (which I wish had been public but which he said in confidence so I don't feel I can decently elaborate) I don't think he *was* trolling; I think something else was going on. But you're certainly. right that I was trying hard to be serious & explanatory in a straightforward way in response to someone who was playing a different game. And yeah, it probably looks funny from the outside. But I think that sincere engagement is an important value, and am willing, I guess, to hold to it even in the face of looking silly.
If it helps any, I can’t but view this comment as masterful trolling. Long game, at least in troll time, won!
Honestly not my intention.
This is giving me that particular brand of smug satisfaction that comes from being able to spot a joke.
I am not quite sure what you mean. Maybe I'm misreading you, but I think you're saying that I missed the joke and you are smug because you saw it? Which, well, maybe. (Or maybe I saw it and just thought it wasn't funny.)
But assuming I'm reading you right, and that I really did miss the joke, I think I would reply with the following story (which I thought was from Gene Wolfe but I can't find it now so I am paraphrasing and maybe misremembering the source): When Thomas Aquinas was in seminary his fellows used to like to play jokes on him. One time they told him there was a pig flying outside the window. Aquinas rushed to the window to see, and they all laughed at him. Aquinas replied, "I would sooner believe a pig could fly than a Dominican would lie."
What an odd story. Telling the truth because you *cannot* otherwise is nothing to be proud of.
This casts your personal behaviour in an odd light, are you always thinking "well I could murder/rape/torture/defraud this person if I wanted to, maybe I will if I feel like it, maybe I won't, it depends" because not being a murderer because you cannot behave otherwise is nothing to be proud of?
If it is a constant struggle for you not to commit murder, then yes, be proud of overcoming that! But in general people are going to be somewhat leery of "sorry, just wrestling with my overwhelming impulse to bash your brains in, give me a second" rather than "why on earth would I want to murder anyone? I'm not a murderer!" as someone sitting beside them in the bus.
It's not always the best thing to tell the truth, so he compulsive truth telling isn't good consequensualist ethics as well as being a virtue.
This is giving me that particular brand of smug satisfaction that comes from seeing someone you already disliked behaving badly. Which maybe isn't that healthy. But I appreciate the level-headed analysis.
Thanks!
I'm suspicious of predictions about the coming of AGI which are based on the, often impressive, performance of current chatbots? Why? Because that performances is always evaluated against specific tasks. Not all thinking is like that and I suspect that quite a bit of creative thinking isn't like that at all. Rather, it starts with an open-ended exploration.
I have a longish post in which I report the process I went through a couple of years ago to produce an interpretation of Spielberg's "Jaws" using Girard's ideas about mimetic desire and sacrifice. The process started when I watched the film on Netflix without any intention writing about it. I watch a lot of streaming video and never write about most of it. Once I'd seen the film I checked its Wikipedia entry, something I do quite often as a way of 'calibrating' my own impressions. The entry was extensive, and included a comparison with the three sequels, which is said were inferior.
So, out of curiosity, I set out to watch them I found the 3rd and 4th sequels unwatchable, but enjoyed the 2nd. Yes, it was inferior. But why? Too diffuse. Watched the original again. Noticed that it fell into two parts, the first 3/5 taking place in the village and involving lots of players. The last 2/5 took place at sea and involved three men and the shark. I then asked ever more specific questions about that last part until finally it hit me: "Sacrifice! Girard!" Only then did I decided to write a post.
Then I began a much more focused and specific process to gather evidence for my post. I read about Girard (my library, alas, is in storage), interviews with him, some of his articles, I consulted with a grad school buddy who'd studied with Girard, made lots of nots and drafts, etc.
My overall suspicion is the SOA chatbots can do that second process fairly well, but that first exploratory process, that requires agency, autonomy, and curiosity. Chatbots don't have those characteristics and we're all but clueless on how to create them that way. But most post isn't about that part of the argument. It's just a description of my thought process. Here's the link: Intellectual creativity, humans-in-the-loop, and AI: Part 2, Interpreting Jaws https://new-savanna.blogspot.com/2025/08/intellectual-creativity-humans-in-loop.html
I did some AI awareness work with university professors over the past few years - these are (mostly) smart people.
I work in a language with a few hundred thousand native speakers, not English. Three years ago, they told me that the grammar of the AI was so poor it would never pass as an undergrad. Two years ago, the same people told me that the grammar was too good, and they would never mistake the AI writing for that of an undergrad. The same people, a year apart - they saw no contradictions in their opinions, and remained convinced that there was some essential difference between writing produced by an LLM and human writing. They were sufficiently attached to the prior that any actual evidence was automatically discounted. In fact, you ask the AI to write with, say, CEFR level B1, it emulates a teenager perfectly.
In the same way, people say the AI can't generate insights. In a strict sense this is true: all it generates is streams of text. We have to evaluate it and decide if there is meaning or originality there. As another example, a colleague teaching entrepreneurship told me that the AI couldn't come up with a product idea. I asked Claude for ten ideas, localised to my city (there was a stadium in view from the office window, and I included the local team in the prompt) -- I chose what was in my opinion the best idea, asked the LLM to elaborate, fed in some assignment type questions, and within 15 minutes I had a business plan it would have taken an undergrad a month to produce.
The LLM produces text; we find meaning. If your prompt is not producing a meaningful output, you need to refine the prompt, not claim the technology can't do what you want.
But not every interesting thing can be elicited by a prompt, which is the point of my article. Anything that you know how to prompt, that's the easy stuff. Product ideas, localized to your city, with the local team in the prompt, that's fairly specific. You've done half the work.
I go back and forth on the plausibility of AGI, which I guess means I should write about it to force myself to think it through.
I think in the near term it will mostly be additive. I can imagine the current vibe coding turns into more tightly scoped approaches that allows the average user to program their Echo device and lots of new AI-enabled devices that come on the market.
That's how web and previously client-server apps wormed their way into the enterprise. Departments had specific needs that were not big enough to elevate to corporate IT.
We need better bittorrent infrastructure.
Tracker ecosystem keeps a lot of obscure, but still not-entirely-out-of-copyright media alive, catalogued, quality controlled, and available, but common software stacks are very hacky and don't scale (10k active torrents can already be a problem). Most of that ecosystem is very xkcd 2347 too (god bless Arvid Norberg).
Tell more? Is this written up anywhere?
What are the problem areas? What are the bottlenecks? Are we talking organizational problems or technical ones?
I haven't seen much written about that, maybe those slides and a poster by Justin Mckinney and Mark Simon Haydn?
1) https://amiaconference.net/wp-content/uploads/2016/01/Haydn-and-Mckinney.pdf
2) https://www.amiaconference.net/wp-content/uploads/2014/01/AMIA_Poster_Zoink_It_Mckinney_Haydn.pdf
I don't think there are any unsolvable technical problems other than the requirement for development time and attention. However, the private tracker ecosystem is quite long in the tooth now, some examples off the top of my head:
1. BitTorrent V2 solved a bunch of problems with the protocol itself, but five years after there is still practically zero adoption among private trackers.
2. There is very little ipv6 support on private trackers, despite improved connectivity that ipv6 offers.
3. There is a spec for NAT hole punching, but no way to test it, and real world support seems to be spotty.
4. More generally there are (were?) no serious diagnostic tools, despite connectivity being quite finicky and easy to get wrong. I built https://torrentdyne.com , but got a bit burned out and can't afford to dedicate enough hours to it.
5. Content is split between private trackers, and to my knowledge no major client makes it easy to share a file between trackers. There are tools like cross-seed, but that's very clunky compared to what could be.
6. Scalability is a challenge. All major clients struggle to utilise the amount of storage and bandwidth available nowadays.
It could be a nice side activity for a nonprofit, but I guess there's a combination of the field being niche and large orgs worrying about being on the wrong side of copyright activists.
Thanks for sharing these! I'll give these and the btv2 blog post a read.
I was under the impression that the torrent ecosystem is alive and well. Haven't really touched torrents except the occasional Linux iso download in years. Also didn't know there's a median preservation thing going on with torrents.
For those who don’t follow xkcd: https://m.xkcd.com/2347/
German police expands use of Palantir surveillance software. This future is here!
https://www.dw.com/en/german-police-expands-use-of-palantir-surveillance-software/a-73497117
Plantir’s Gotham predictive policing disturbingly recalls the ‘Minority Report’ ‘precogs’.
The next version will be called the Torment Nexus
"MoreWrite"
A much better name.
My substack about agency is going to include an autobiographical series, part my own attempt to get better at writing, part accountability, part therapy I suppose. It's got a trigger warning, I'm not sure it's super valuable reading, but I'm putting myself out there:
https://onlyluck.substack.com/p/lost-agency-1-better-and-worse-ways
I wrote an article to summarize my fundamental beliefs: https://eterevsky.substack.com/p/what-i-believe.
I consider these beliefs absolute and don't think it possible that I ever stop believing in them (unless I get mad or otherwise mentally impaired). Despite this high bar, it seems like this set of beliefs is more or less complete, i.e. it's enough to form a relatively full picture of the world.
I'd be interested in feedback of two types: 1. Are these beliefs actually as fundamental as I think? 2. Are there any other beliefs that don't directly follow from what I described, that I should still hold as absolute truths?
Thank you. I enjoyed this and subscribed to your Substack, which is a rare action for me. I also majored in math, which probably is not casually independent of liking this article.
With regard to your #4, I prefer the framing in terms of pleasure being good. It's true, as you mention at the end of that section, that naive attempts to maximize pleasure will have poor second-order effects, but I think that's also true of naive attempts to minimize suffering, and even more so?
Keep writing.
Thank you for the kind words.
I agree with you that maximizing pleasure (everything else being equal) is almost certainly desirable. However, while I'm 100% sure that the same thing is true about minimizing suffering, I'm only like 95% sure about pleasure. Mostly because I'm thinking that maybe the positive goals should be framed differently, like maybe other goals like knowledge-seeking are more important and there's some irreconcilable contradiction between them and pleasure-seeking. That's why I decided to be conservative and only write about minimizing suffering.
The World is Explainable
The physical world only? What about consciousness, ethics, etc.
The world isn't comprehensible to most species. Why would human have just the right amount of intelligence?
Physical world is explainable. Consciousness almost certainly is explainable as well since it interacts with the physical world. Ethics is not something that "exists" in the same way as the world exists, it's more of an abstract category, and as such can be unexplainable.
Any species smarter than humans will also be able to comprehend the world. It just so happened the humans were the first species to develop a powerful enough language and mathematics to describe the necessary concepts. Otherwise it's a bit like Church–Turing thesis: once you have Turing machine, you can implement any computations. We were the first species to develop this complexity.
>Physical world is explainable
Why? And to whom? You can't claim that it's divine mercy.
>Otherwise it's a bit like Church–Turing thesis: once you have Turing machine, you can implement any computations. We were the first species to develop this complexity.
Did you get to that from David Deutsch? Because we don't know that Turing [computation is necessarily adequate], and we don't know of any other universal thingy.
Deutsch also gives the example of number systems. There are ways of writing numerals that don't allow you to write arbitrarily large numerals, and ways that do. So the ways that do are universal ... in a sense. They don't require actual infinities , like a UTM. On the other hand, the argument only demonstrates universality in a limited sense: a number system that can write any integer , cannot necessarily write fractions or complex numbers, or whatever. So what is the ultimately universal system? No one knows. Integers have been extended to real numbers, surreal numbers, and so on. No one knows where the outer limit is.
Similar considerations apply to universal languages. Languages allow the formation of an infinite number of sentences based on a finite vocabulary and set of syntactical rules, but it doesn't follow that they can express anything that could be conceived by anybody. If you feel your language does not allow you to. express a your thoughts , then you can extend your language...as far as your thought. But extensibility doesn't give you the ability to express "everything" either.
If your language can’t express a concept that you also can't even conceive, how would you know?
Deutsch toys with the idea that DNA is also universal, but it is not at all clear whether DNA as we know it can build any living organism, or what life in the most generic sense is. Deutsch seems to think that digitality and error correction, both of which DNA has, are necessary components of universality. This is, as ever based, on analogy with the UTM, the universal digital computer , but it seems plausible that digitality and error correction are necessary components of digital computation, not universality. And necessity is not sufficiency.
So there are two problems: some of his candidates for universality aren't even infinite, ... and where they are, that isn't universal enough. An infinite line is infinite in only one dimension.
We have a number of theorems about the limitations to how the numbers can be extended. Like if you want it to be a field, you can't go past complex numbers. If you want field + completeness + complete ordering, it could only be real numbers.
With languages likewise, different languages seem to have almost exactly the same expressive power modulo vocabulary.
>> Physical world is explainable
> Why? And to whom? You can't claim that it's divine mercy
I expand what I specifically mean in the article. In other words you can say "induction works for model building". This removes the "for whom".
And "why"? Because all my experience is like that and it's difficult for me to imagine a coherent world where it wouldn't be true.
> Did you get to that from David Deutsch?
Absolutely not. I mostly disagree with Deutsch.
> we don't know that Turing can duration per we is adequate
Sorry, I can't parse this.
>In other words you can say "induction works for model building".
Model building is abduction, not induction.
If you are making the claim that the world is *entirely* comprehensible to humans, then it is not enough to be able to build *some* models, ... You need to build all the models , corresponding exactly to the the laws of nature.
>This removes the "for whom".
Obviously not. Most humans are unable to come up with relativity themselves. So the smartest humans could have some limit as well.
Mathematics is Correct.
Mathematics is correct about what? We know that there a lot of consistent structure s that weren't physical, which is why we need empiricism. We don't know that mathematics has an period claim to be able to describe everything...the supplier for "language of nature" claim is its track record. We also know that you have to pick one of consistency and completeness..is your correct maths inconsistent or incomplete?
I phrased it badly. This particular belief is about it being consistent. There's no sense in picking an inconsistent theory since it would be completely useless. On the other hand, I don't see any problem with a mathematical theory being incomplete.
If all you need is consistency, why not juggle multiple f oms of maths., Instead of picking the one true one?
Because I believe that there's a "common denominator" that is a subset of all serious mathematical theories and can't possibly be inconsistent. Furthermore this "common denominator" is strong enough for all practical questions.
The physics is wrong, because its not using the constructive subset.
Calculus and other math fields can be reformulated in constructive math retaining most of their power. It's usually not done because a) physicists don't really care about mathematical logic, b) it's a bit more awkward than traditional axiomatics.
Mathematics depend entirely on the axioms you choose for it. Choose different axioms, and you get different mathematics. If you choose your axioms prudently, you can get useful tools that help with innumerable real-world problems, but in the end, it's still a model of reality, not reality itself. For example, mathematics allow easily for tachyons, particles that are faster than light and cannot cross the threshold to below c just like ordinary particles can't go above c, but it's unclear whether tachyons are a real, observable thing or only a mathematical artifact.
"Mathematics and logic are correct", then, is fundamentally a trivial observation - trivial at the highest level and useful, but there is no guarantee that our current mathematics will serve us until the ends of science. Perhaps one day we might discover entirely new mathematics that are even more useful, with which you can tackle the unsolved mathematical problems of today or those we don't even know about yet.
>"If you choose your axioms prudently, you can get useful tools that help with innumerable real-world problems, but in the end, it's still a model of reality, not reality itself."
If you choose your axioms even more prudently, the real-world problems they help with could themselves be numerable. /s
As it happens, if you choose your axioms extremely /im/prudently, your real-world problems may likewise become very finite, very fast.
As it happens, I specify in the article, which particular mathematical theory I include as my "core belief": https://eterevsky.substack.com/i/169941646/mathematics-is-correct
Regarding the thachyons — I don't see any problem with them. It's a feature of the model that we are using that is completely independent from our observations, so it's ok remain agnostic regarding their existence.
Then I don't see what you mean. If you believe that axioms are fundamentally true and do not require further proof, then yes, sure, that's pretty much the definition of an axiom. Again, trivial. You do write, however, that "Mathematics is the basic language of the world.", which I understand to be a statement about physical reality, not the limited world of mathematics as derived from some set of axioms.
My first belief is just that constructive mathematics (approximately Peano arithmetic plus set theory limited to countable sets) is consistent. It's a purely abstract statement that doesn't say anything about the real world.
I further believe (as part of belief 2), that real world can be described by mathematical models (within this mathematical theory or a stronger one).
Some of the possible models include tachyons and some don't. It is possible that at some point we'll figure out that only theories with or theories without tachyons are consistent with observations. Alternatively it's possible that tachyons will remain an optional feature of the models.
> Mathematics and logic are correct.
"Math is consistent and can be used to describe reality" is an implicit assumption of the describe-the-world-at-a-fundamental-level project we call physics.
Typically, physicists do not worry a lot about "but what if it turns out that every theory capable of describing integer multiplication is inconsistent?" It would be like worrying about the structural integrity of the bedrock on which you build your sandcastle.
Moreover, when they write "let the center of mass be $p \in mathbb{R}^3$" in classical mechanics, this should not be read as "I strongly assert that the number of distinct points is space which p could take is equal to the cardinality of the real numbers", but mostly "I want to use techniques from analysis like differentiation and taking square roots, and real numbers are a model which is good enough for that". I mean, for every physics simulation, you replace "real number" with "floating point number", which despite pascal calling its floats "real" are as dissimilar as two kinds of numbers can be, and numerical issues aside this works fine.
> The world is explainable and simpler explanations are more likely to be true.
Personally, when trying to explain the world, my aim is not to find The Truth (TM), but to find models which might be eventually falsified, but describe reality well enough in the meantime. The history of physics, slightly idealized, is people preferring the simplest viable model, which then gets falsified. The standard model of particle physics is not simpler than classical mechanics! It is neater in some vague way, and it explains a lot more observations, but not simpler.
The reason to select for simplicity is not because we expect that the fundamental model of reality should fit on a beer mat (personally, I expect that it will be beautiful in some way, but not that it will have a tiny Kolmogorov complexity), it is a simple survival strategy given that the number of available models increase exponentially with their complexity.
If a theoretical physicist traveled back in time to Newton and tried to convince him and his colleagues that the standard models of particle physics and cosmology are much better than his theory of gravity, she would fail, even aside from the fact that nobody would understand the math. The modern models would have little advantage in explaining what the experimentalists in Newton's age can measure, and a gigantic complexity penalty. There are multiple Kuhnian paradigm shifts between her and Newton, and you can't bridge that kind of inferrential distance in one step.
Her best bet would be to bring an experimentalist and a historian of science along who will try to rebuild key experiments which established and shattered paradigms to speedrun the scientific community, but even that would be more of a project of a century than a year.
>The reason to select for simplicity is not because we expect that the fundamental model of reality should fit on a beer mat (personally, I expect that it will be beautiful in some way, but not that it will have a tiny Kolmogorov complexity), it is a simple survival strategy given that the number of available models increase exponentially with their complexity
Theres an argument that simpler actually more likely, but it doesn't predict any level of simplicity.
I write about this in the article. There's a balance between predictive power, measured as cross-entropy and complexity measured as Kolmogorov complexity.
As I write in my post, I strongly believe only in constructive math, which I can't imagine being incorrect. This seemingly is a problem for stuff like calculus, but AFAIK, there are slightly awkward ways to introduce most features of calculus in a constructive way, so it's not really a problem.
> to find models which might be eventually falsified, but describe reality well enough in the meantime.
This is more or less what I describe in the post.
I do believe though that the world that we live in should have close to minimal Kolmogorov complexity according to some computation system. Otherwise, as you say there's exponentially many alternatives.
I weakly believe that on its most basic level the sum of all reality is something like a Universal Turing machine, in which our particular slice of the world is repeated an infinite number of times with some variations, including the variations of the underlying physics laws.
> The world is explainable and simpler explanations are more likely to be true.
Here lies your error. Irreducible complexity is everywhere. Simple, explainable systems are the exception, not the rule.
Irreducible randomness -- maybe. Irreducible complexity -- I don't think so.
What is true is that many processes are chaotic: they are very sensitive to the border conditions to make precise predictions impossible. But this in itself can be part of the model and doesn't invalidate it.
For our world to have irreducible complexity something weird should happen: like imagine we can run any experiments that are physically possible, but we still can't find a theory of everything that would be consistent with all of the observations? Like, the observations can't be matched to any computable function... I don't think this is possible.
We *don't* actually have a theory of everything!
Doesn't the C in ZFC stand for "Axiom of Choice"? Sorry to only give feedback you didn't ask for!
Okay let me try to give feedback relating to (1):
I think your third point, "My Feelings are Real" is actually even more fundamental than anything else. Like, all the other beliefs are beliefs _about_ an external world, or about something else, but your experience of qualia just _is_. You could try to disentangle this by rephrasing to something like: I believe my memories of having had past qualia are real; but personally I don't at all feel fundamentally sure about this. I can check a memory by recalling it, and while I can be fundamentally certain that I am having the experience of remembering right now, I can't at all feel certain that it corresponds to a previous instance of actual experience. So the current moment of experience fundamentally just "is", in such a fundamental way that I don't even know if it can be even called a belief.
Thanks for the correction!
Regarding your point about the reality of memories, I don't think I would necessarily say that I believe that. As you say, for all we know, memories might be generated during the process of remembering them (I think at least sometimes it actually happens that way). That's why I'm talking about the reality of "thoughts and feelings", which would include the feeling of remembering something.
I agree with you that it's possible to consider belief 3 as more fundamental than belief 2 and belief 1 (though I think Math would still be valid even if nothing existed). As I wrote in the post, I see belief 3 as more of a definition of what "real" is, than a statement of something being real. I think the only reason why I put it after the belief 2 is because I wanted to show that the belief that you are real implies the reality of the world and other people, and for that I needed to already have stated belief 2.
Maybe I would refer to it as "perceptions", more than thoughts and feelings. Most of the time, thoughts and feelings are remembered (especially thoughts too complex to fit in working memory, or long chains of reasoning), so at the fundamental place I would put "current perception", which can be sights, sounds, physical sensations, as well as the perception of a current thought.
I haven't considered that precise interplay between perception (3) and basic induction (2), to infer the existence of the world and other beings. Solipsism has always been pretty disturbing to me.
Right, "perceptions" is another good word for it.
I think using induction to infer the existence of the world is a pretty important part of my beliefs. Technically you could be a Boltzmann brain just imagining things, but if it were the case, it would be so incredibly unlikely that you imagine such a consistent world, that seemingly operated independently from you.
Hm I'm not sure that is the correct way to get around the Boltzmann brain problem: the number of observers having coherent observations also vastly outnumber the real people who lived. But also I see your point, the number of incoherent observers are presumably way larger. Scott Aaronson had some ideas for resolving the issue better, but I don't remember the details.
Suppose our universe is infinite (this simplifies the mental model). Let's consider two ways to generate the subjective experiences of Throw Fence:
1. Via an evolutionary process that converges towards intelligence.
2. Via a random permutation of atoms that just randomly appear together via a quantum process or just happened to smash together in the interstellar space.
I'm quite sure that the way 1 is far, far more probable and hence common, just by virtue of it being a convergent self-reinforcing process.
I write some thoughts on the matter in my previous blog: https://eterevsky.substack.com/p/georgetown-indiana-and-the-infinity
I meet some college buddies every fews weeks for a meet-up. Not that often as it’s in London. Most of these guys are centre left.
Last time I was there, in May, in mentioning Epstein at all was dismissed as a “conspiracy theory”.
I’ll be reporting back in a hours on whether things have changed.
Edit:
Things have changed.
I for one am looking forward to the moment that the liberal investigative journalists rip the mask off the mastermind behind Epstein, expecting to finally have the scandal that will bring down Trump, and it turns out to be *gasp* Obama
"And we would have gotten away with it, it not for you meddling kids."
Scooby Doo saves America! Yeah the films about this era will have to be animated as most of Hollywood will be in prison
Naw, it's probably Yudkowsky. Or John Oliver. Or maybe the Pope?
Special guest star Jonathan Winters.
Zooming out, I think the biggest error was by Pam Bondi, and incentives explain a lot of it.
Bondi was not nearly as well known in the MAGA media ecosystem as Bongino and Patel, so she saw this as a way to burnish her street cred. First she did that phase 1 release that turned out to be an empty gesture. Then she went on Fox News and made the gaffe about having the files on her desk for review.
Unlike previous Attorneys General, Pam Bondi was a very frequent guest on Fox News and other media outlets. She wants to be a star and flew too close to the sun.
I think she will be fired by the end of the year.
I keep running into things saying or implying that he had an actual business supplying billionaires with underage girls. That seems hugely implausible to me. There can't have been that much money in it. In some countries it's probably quite easy for someone to request and get a very young prostitute, and even in New York seems like a few thoousand would get you the teen plus discretion. Those sums would surely be nothing to Epstein, even if he had a stable of 50 kids. Wasn't his supplying his buddies with underage girls just a sort of favor, sort of like handing them some cocaine or having bunches of it available in golden bowls or whatever?
There is an alternative business strategy you're ignoring. It wasn't blackmail. It was "Hey, come to my party on the island, and we'll talk business while my underage girls pamper you." Some people do business over drinks. Some people do business over drinks and dinner. Epstein took it a step further.
I no longer remember the name of the book that told the following story or who they were, but back in the 70s some luxury car dealers in LA hired a handsome surfer dude (who was over 18 and looked young) to enroll in Beverly Hills High School. Back then the checks were less stringent. So for his "senior" year he chatted up all the pretty girls he encountered. The car dealers would buy premium tickets to concerts and events were celebrities would be. The surfer dude would say, "hey I got some tickets to a concert with backstage passes." And then after, attending the concert, "Hey, I know some cool guys throwing a party, and I hear <insert name of famous 70s actor here> will be there." Pretty soon, the rockers and famous actors, new the parties organized by the car dealers would have a bunch of beautiful high school chicks there. The car dealers started getting orders for high-end cars from their guests. Their business boomed. Until the surfer dude's false credentials caught up with him. He gave up the car dealers. I don't think anyone was prosecuted, though. This was the 70s when interage sex was less frowned upon. So, I think that's what Epstein was doing (besides abusing the underage girls).
He doesnt supply prostitutes, he supplied sex willing girls (not necessarily underage) who dont appear to be prostitutes (maybe they were a bit, theres some grey areas but the crucial point is they didn't appear that way to his clients). His clients are willing to spend so much more money for that much more attractive product. (They just cant think of it as paying for the girls)
I know someone personally who has a similar deal but he hasnt learned how to scale it or get access to billionaire clients. Its a remarkable thing to witness
Yeah but Epstein was worth half a billion dollars. He got rich as a financial advisor to the super-rich. The amount he could make supplying people with attractive underage girls who are not prostitutes is trivial compared to the amount he could make in any number of other ways, unless perhaps he had a huge operation with hundreds of thousands of these girls all over the world, and tens of thousands of employees to find the girls, house them somewhere, make sure they didn't fun away, accompany them on flights around the world to some rich pigass. Otherwise charging Bezos or somebody $10,000 to fuck a teen is in the same category as holding a bakesale for somebody of Epstein's wealth. Probably the easiest way for him to get richer would have been to just keep on being a financial advisor, but he was well-connected and would have had all kinds of opportunities to invest in things, etc.
I think the most economical solution to the question is (1) Epstein himself did have an interest in young girls (if we take 18 as age of majority/consent, then he seems to have liked girls under 18 as much or more than girls 18 or older), going off descriptions of him behaving inappropriately with the students at the private school where he taught (and first made the connections with rich parents who could help him in the later financial career) (2) he wasn't a billionaire himself, he got rich being an advisor for one particular guy, made the most out of the connections there to the other very rich people, and started making himself useful for them (3) being involved in the social scene in the circles of the rich and influential was how he kept up that network, so throwing the kinds of parties that "everyone who is anyone will be attending" meant that he had a constant stream of people willing to show up, even if they were not in fact dear, close, friends of his (4) part of that was having attractive young women in the mix to mingle and be sociable and be hostesses, even if they were not explicitly there to provide sex (5) the sex provision was a side line and here now we are going off allegations by those who said they worked in that way for him, and even there there is a lot of gray areas - are girls (and their boyfriends) who persuade other girls to show up to Epstein parties because they'll be paid well just for being 'nice' (including providing sex) to rich old(er) guys prostitutes or not? If they're spending the money on drugs and fun, and would otherwise be calling themselves sugar babies had the term been more prevalent then?
I'm not saying Epstein didn't do anything criminal or nasty, but I'm saying that "everyone who went to one of his parties knew it was cover for a brothel and the girls were there to provide sex as working prostitutes" is not the whole truth either.
But he was offering something much more valuable than just money to these people. It's not like anyone else was able to provide this service at this quality. This gives him a lot of leverage over a lot of rich people, and if they ever turn on him, he can blackmail them.
You think "party with lots of attractive young women with an affinity for rich older men" is something Jeffrey Epstein had a monopoly on? Some personal mojo that let him and only him arrange such a thing?
I mean, to take the most currently famous Epstein associate, Donald J. Trump *literally owned the Miss Teen USA pageant*, with on-demand access to the dressing rooms of teenaged hotties, and enormous power over their professional futures. Whatever he wanted along those lines, he didn't need Epstein to provide for him.
And the blackmail part doesn't work nearly as well as you think it does, either.
So many questions that aren't being asked regarding Epstein and Trump:
1. We already knew that Virginia Giuffree (16yo) worked as a spa attendant at Mar-a-Lago, before Epstein hired her away (Trump says he "stole" her). Being that it would encourage the media feeding frenzy and make the media want to dig deeper, why did Trump bring this up again in front of the WH press corps yesterday?
https://x.com/i/status/1950271044805152998
2. Giuffre, in her testimony, denied that she ever saw Trump at the various Epstein residences (including the private island he owned, Little Saint James Island, in the US Virgin Islands). And Trump said he broke off his friendship with Epstein in 2000 because he "stole" (hired) Giuffre and at least one other spa worker from Mar-a-Lago. Yet, Trump's chummy "wonderful secret" letter was sent to Epstein in 2003, and Epstein remained on the Mar-a-Lago membership list until Epstein's first brush with the law in 2007. Do we have any videos or photos of Trump and Epstein together after the year 2000?
And who was that other spa worker that Epstein "stole"? Would she be willing to testify now that she's an adult?
3. Around that same time, we had Haley Robson, a student from Royal Palm Beach High School, recruiting girls for Epstein, some as young as fourteen. "Detailed Palm Beach County police logs from 2005 and 2006 include multiple interviews with girls who said they were recruited for Epstein by Haley Robson, a high school student at the time. According to a 2006 Palm Beach Police probable cause affidavit for Epstein, Robson admitted to detectives she acted as one of his recruiters, although she was never arrested or charged in connection to him... They were told upfront that they would have to be topless. Some encounters involved sex with him and another woman in his harem."
The girls' names have been kept confidential because they were minors. But did the police ever interview the parents?
Moreover, Epstein was flying the girls down to the Virgin Islands. Entry to the USVI requires a passport. At least some of these parents must have been signing the paperwork to apply for passports for their daughters. Weren't they suspicious about why their daughters were flying down to the Virgin Islands? Did they have to give excuses to get their daughters out of school? Is there any evidence that Epstein or Maxwell paid off the parents?
https://enewspaper.nydailynews.com/.../article_share.aspx...
4. Giuffre and Robson both attended Royal Palm Beach High School, and their years there overlapped. Some news media implied they were part of the same social circle. Robson is still around. Has anyone asked her what she knew of Giuffre, Epstein, and Trump?
5. What happened to the underage girls found living on Epstein's island after he presumably committed suicide in 2019? The Epstein victim compensation fund (funded by the Epstein estate?) has given out over a $100 million to those victims. But although unconfirmed, they seem to have been required to sign NDAs to get the compensation. If this is true, the media needs to confirm this.
So, Epstein continued to traffic in underage girls after his 2007 conviction. How were they being recruited? Who was recruiting them? (It seems likely the Maxwell and Epstein would have been using underage girls to recruit other underage girls, but we know of no one else involved after Robson gave her deposition to the Palm Beach Police.)
And no one in the USVI law enforcement had any suspicions about what was going on at Little Saint James Island—REALLY?—even though it was commonly referred to by the locals as Pedo Island. Were any of these girls reported as missing persons by their parents?
WTF!
You guys are so close! The block is the same as for Scott - the disbelief that people can truly be evil and enjoy the suffering of others. The more people, the more suffering, the better.
Of course only a small minority of people, sadistic psychopaths, have this psychological property. But the proportion is higher among billionaires, politicians, media magnates. Epstein’s guys.
You’re exactly right that Epstein can’t have just been providing girls for these men to hit on and sleep with. It doesn’t make sense. There must have been something darker, more illegal involved, for intelligence agencies to use as blackmail. But what?
Certainly many of these girls were young. How young? 18? 14? Surely not 12 or younger??
What were they allowed to do with these girls? Did they indulge in kinks? Abuse?
Did they torture them?
Kill them?
There’s no way. Someone would have blown the whistle. Surely they couldn’t get away with it.
Well, unless they had protection from extremely powerful people. People like the President of the USA, senators, billionaires, directors of intelligence agencies, owners of international media companies.
Then anyone who threatened to blow the whistle could be quietly disappeared. People who tried to look into it could be fired, sued, arrested, their families threatened, smeared in the press, dismissed as conspiracy theorists.
Andrew Breitbart. Mysteriously died after exposing Anthony Weiner as a pedophile and posting a tweet making the same accusation of John Podesta. Coroner who examined his body also mysteriously died. Second coroner ruled it heart failure.
Julian Assange. Jailed for helping Chelsea Manning access sensitive files, wound up spending longer in prison then she did. Ended up arrested shortly after the WikiLeaks Pizzagate files, which triggered widespread Internet speculation that John Podesta (and by extension the Clintons) were involved in a pedophilic conspiracy.
Seth Rich - rumored to be the source of the WikiLeaks Podesta emails. Mysteriously gunned down on a city street. Ruled armed robbery, but nothing was taken.
Weird, right? Probably nothing there. Just a wild conspiracy.
But there’s undeniably a spiritual sickness in the world today that disproportionately affects children. Fertility rate is down across all Western countries. Mental health issues are up, way up. Child sex abuse at horrific scale was perpetrated by Pakistani immigrants to the UK, for decades, and the government and media actively covered it up. Not to criticise the majority of transgender people here, who are usually just trying to get on with their lives, but the ideology of the movement is frankly insane and one possible explanation is that it’s a covert way of normalising pedophilia. Drag queen story hour. Teachers now talk about sex to children. “Minor attracted person” is now the nice way of saying pedophile. Good data is hard to come by (perhaps because it’s actively suppressed) but a shockingly high percentage of trans people in prison are there for sex crimes against children.
Wars? The war in Palestine has overwhelmingly innocent children as victims. The war in Ukraine raises many questions. What is in these Ukrainian biolabs, that supposedly exist and are doing research, but are also a conspiracy theory and no one talks about them? Why does Putin warn about them and why has he been abducting Ukrainian children and taking them to Russia? Does he believe he is protecting them? From what?
…
But anyway, don’t worry, there’s no way any of this has any merit. The world media, US, UK, Israeli governments, Hollywood, all controlled by blackmail of pedophiles? That’s fucking crazy. That’s beyond evil.
It’s Satanic.
My model is that the super rich were paying him mgmt fees to get access to his harem. They didnt care about his financial savvy. His clients valued access to that harem in the millions, which seems a totally reasonable valuation for a billionaire to give to that sort of thing.
How about the alternate theory that he threw really good parties that were fun to go to, with lots of willing girls there who despite being young and very pretty were really into middle-aged men, and this helped him continue making contacts that were useful for keeping his business of managing wealth for rich folks. He was the kind of guy who would always show you a good time, who would give you a ride on his private jet just because you needed one, etc. And this was a good way of maintaining the relationships that kept him in business and made him rich.
The underage hookers were a *business expense*. Just one he also enjoyed as a hobby.
I'll admit that I keep thinking of him as Littlefinger in my mind. Sometimes art imitates life too well.
Yeah, but this is complicated by the fact that there are plenty of young, attractive women ready to sleep with rich/famous people for free, and are not prostitutes. Even Epstein used the cover of "modelling careers" and introductions to the right circles as bait, not "come work as an escort at my sex parties".
And it's hard for rich people to differentiate between "is this hot young woman making herself agreeable to me a prostitute provided by the party host, or just someone who attends these parties hoping to hook a rich boyfriend?"
I think there's two things being conflated here: the parties he threw as part of being in the swim of the social scene, and then the private island and the alleged client list for underage girls where everyone knew it was for sex. The latter is what all the allegations and criminal activity is about, and where the demands for the list of names and dates etc. is coming from.
This theory that some people have that Epstein was running some kind of organized business providing underage girls to millionaires makes about as much sense as the idea that Scott, to supplement his income, is growing a shit ton of weed in his basement. And that he's got a bunch of weed subscribers to each of whom he guarantees a monthly baggie of their favorite variety -- Spice of Life, Stinky Heaven, whatever.
See the things wrong with that? (1) Doesn't seem like Scott needs to supplement his income. (2) If he did, he could do more of what's working for him already -- see more psychiatric patients, or do more writing. And increasing his income in either of those ways would be better paying and pleasanter than crapping around with a basement full of weed plants, LED lights and misters. And of course psychiatry and writing are way, WAY safer than a business that involves keeping records of customer's names along with their favorite variety, amount wanted per month, how much they have paid, etc.
Plus the customers would be idiots to get their weed in a way that involves records of that kind.
OK, same goes for sourcing underage girls, if you're a billionaire.
Plus, you are not offering a service that is hard to find elsewhere. Women are for rent all over the damn planet. If you want a teen you just get some acquaintance who has contacts in the underworld to put out the word about what you want (without mentioning your name, of course} and how much you are offering. Won't be long before the kid's dropped off for you in some discreet way, and there are no records of the transaction. Or you just fly in your private jet to Thailand (? -- or someplace poor where the government give zero fucks), talk to the contact one of your acquaintances has put you in touch with, & hand over a sum of money that's small by US standards.
I dont think you are understanding 2 points I am trying to make. My points may be wrong but you arent engaging them.
1. There is no other source of income. No one values his finance expertise. They let him manage their money for access to the ancillary benefits.
2. Value of sex willing non prostitute is >>>> prostitute. The only trick is by its very definition you cant buy it directly. But if you can figure out a business model to sell it, you get very rich. Much richer than a good pimp. He figured it out.
The non prostitute part is really important. i dont think his clients generally thought of themselves as buying girls. They knew he threw the best parties. When they went to those parties, they met the coolest hottest girls that were totally into them. They wanted as many of those party invites as possible. Epstein knew what the business model was. The clients did not.
Also as i said at the beginning I dont think much of this involved anyone underage. So the clients werent doing anything illegal
Yeah, I agree with this. I think that there's been some sort of memetic mutation from "list of guests on Epstein's private island (where they could fuck minors if they liked)" to "list of clients Epstein was supplying with underage sex slaves or some shit". People are now howling for the latter which was never actually asserted to exist.
Hell, as far as your ordering young + discretion, I'm pretty sure there's a supply chain for that in the Beltway exclusively for the use of the members of Congress. The guys who are supposed to be judging Epstein for that kind of shit are almost certainly doing it themselves in some non-negligible proportion.
The most likely thing you get from investigating Epstein is a list of people he was known to associate with and maybe people who went to some of his parties. This looks bad for those people, but isn't enough to prove any kind of crime--if you show I was at a party that also had some underaged prostitutes, but can't prove I did anything with them, you're not going to get a conviction.
Remember the Mark Foley scandal?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_Foley_scandal
"The Mark Foley scandal, which broke in late September 2006, centers on soliciting emails and sexually suggestive instant messages sent by Mark Foley, a Republican congressman from Florida, to teenaged boys who had formerly served as congressional pages."
And of course there was Bill and Monica. No need for external providers if you want some Congressional action!
The conspiracy is that it’s a honey trap. Probably by an agency, domestic or foreign.
There *are* a lot of false conspiracy theories surrounding Epstein. E.g it's extremely unlikely that he was murdered or worked for intelligence. But the fact that Trump did a sudden 180 on an issue he'd been pushing for years is a very notable story, even when the underlying claims about Epstein are largely nonsense. And there are some things which are true, like that Trump was a long-time close friend of Epstein. Make of that what you will.
I mean, it's *possible* he was murdered. Prison guards are famously corrupt and indifferent and inept, so it's possible he was murdered because someone paid off the guards, or because the guards were outraged about the pedo island claims and decided to kill him. But also it's possible he just committed suicide and the guards who were supposed to prevent that sort of thing were busy playing poker or catching a nap right then, so didn't notice.
Life isn't an action movie, so indifference seems like a pretty good bet. (And Epstein had a lot of incentive to kill himself--he could expect nothing more for the rest of his life than sitting in locked prison cells and/or being abused by other inmates or guards.) But it's not like it would be a total shock if it turned out someone had him killed, either.
Meh, the 180 was obvious and nigh-inevitable. That Epstein was working for "intelligence", or was a criminal mastermind running a private honey trap, was always a conspiracy theory. But it was a type of conspiracy theory that was going to be highly attractive to Donald J. Trump. It is absolutely no surprise at all that Donald Trump 2024 was going to be all "when I get back into the White House, I'm going to open the Epstein files and bring down all the Liberal Elite". He never had to worry about bringing down *himself*, because he's the one person he knows didn't sleep with one of Epstein's underage hotties.
It's also no surprise that he (and his minions) continued this take into 2025, rather than shutting their mouths and doing due diligence by actually reading all the Epstein files before making grant promises.
Which leaves us with "what does Donald Trump do when he finds out he can't deliver on one of his promises?", and the answer to that one cannot involve anything that might be read as Donald Trump admitting he was wrong about anything. So here we are.
The only thing surprising is that a few specks of dirt are actually sticking to the teflon this time. But not enough to matter.
> E.g it's extremely unlikely that he was murdered
A lot of rich and powerful people were, I'm sure, happy and relieved that he was dead.
And isn't it oh-so-convenient that there were gaps in the recordings of his prison cell?
> or worked for intelligence
Some points that suggest otherwise:
Using sex to entrap/coerce people is so common in intelligence it's got a name: "honeytrap".
If Epstein was getting kompromat on lots of important people, the CIA would be aware of it. Yet they let it carry on.
Lots of current/former Mossad leaders were at Ghislaine Maxwell's father's funeral. Make of that what you will.
> Lots of current/former Mossad leaders were at Ghislaine Maxwell's father's funeral
The father who also died in mysterious circumstances somewhere in the middle of the Atlantic in the middle of the night and showed up floating naked off Spain? Yep, that one.
I only vaguely remember the Robert Maxwell death thing, it was something that people made jokes about in the early 90s. I do remember that in Tomorrow Never Dies, when James Bond defeats the media baron villain in his stealth ship and M quickly dictates a press release to Moneypenny saying that he mysteriously vanished from his luxury yacht, that's a reference to Maxwell's death.
He also stole his employees' pensions, and law enforcement was catching up on him, which is why he is suspected of killing himself.
Is he genuinely interested, or is it just that he sees feeding this beast as useful?
My read is that he is not genuinely interested in anything except his own fame, glory and wealth.
I don't like eating vegetables. I still try, but I'm probably taking nowhere near the ideal amount.
Is there an easier way to get the health benefits? Are stuff like vitamins and vegetable drinks actually good for you?
Also, where do you all get your health-related advice? I feel skeptical for most things on TV, Google search gives me some combination of ads, random blogs, professional advices that contradict each other.
There was a Swedish study done in 90s I think which found that benefit to vegetables appeared only when they were consumed with butter.
For fat soluble vitamins, you're better off consuming them in fat. This shouldn't be too controversial. That said, if you drink the cooking water, you aren't losing much in terms of vitamins, aside from denaturing...
No benefit with vegetable oil. The benefit is from butter, not from vegetables.
If you situation makes this option accessible, consider getting an all-in-one complete food. Commercial brands include Huel and Soylent. I also used a DIY soylent (non-capital s) recipe for easy food while I was living along in college (although, the recipe I picked was complex enough that even a four day batch wasn't much of a time save; it's possible to scale up production to a few weeks at a time if you invest in the infrastructure a little). Check out the subreddit r/diysoylent for the main community.
On the other hand, I enjoy the taste of vegetables. Apart from steaming/frying brocolli etc., one of my favourite foods is roast vegetable soup. Put some root vegetables and some onions in an oven for 40min with olive oil, then blend with stock. Oh, that reminds me, roasted eggplants marinated with soy and honey and a bit of apple vinegar are heavenly. I'm getting hungry just writing about it.
Butter. Sure it's extra calories, but if it helps you sustainably eat veggies your body needs, it's better.
Then later you can graduate to olive oil, then (I suggest) garlic salt and pepper.
You're probably fine. Health research is garbage and no one knows how to be healthy outside of not getting really sick. Just don't eat too much and don't get scurvy, the rest is overblown.
This.
Just don’t over-eat (fat) or under-eat (low energy).
If interested I'm still small enough in readership to help with any questions from subscribers-
https://cooper81.substack.com/
Do you like fruit? If so you can probably get most of the same benefits eating a good variety of fruits. The fruit vegetable distinction, culinarily speaking, is somewhat arbitrary and both are a great source of micro-nutrients and fiber. How about whole grain foods? Great source of soluble and insoluble fiber depending on the grain and preparation.
If you "don't like eating vegetables" -- is the problem the ones you've been eating? How many beets do you eat? Carrots? Are there a few vegetables you do like? (Onions? Garlic?). Swiss Chard? Spinach? If you are saying "I don't like eating vegetables" -- have you tried celeriac? How about turnips? Do you like pumpkin pie?
Vitamins and Turmeric supplements and all are actually good for you. Vegetable drinks are equivalent to fruit drinks -- you're getting a lot of sugar, and not doing much to "dilute" it. Probably better if you consume carrot juice as "shots in chicken broth" rather than by itself.
For other readers who, like me, thought "celeriac" was a typo: it's not
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Celeriac
In your defense, celeriac does sound like a bowel condition.
You should include why you don't like eating them. For the taste or texture, are you worried about what it signals to the people around you, do they cost too much compared to other foods, are they inconvenient to prepare?
Why not create a data point of one, and study yourself? You will need to record metrics like how you feel, hair quality, weight and energy levels, and other things using blood tests. What metrics, how often - ask your doctor. They won't want yiur insurance to pay for it though.
I have become expert in making tasty salads and dressings. I mainly eat salads and Mediterranean and Indian food. I try to use quinoa instead of processed grains like rice. I use Ragi instead of wheat since all wheat has been processed in recent decades. I taught myself all this
I'd focus on trying to cook things you enjoy. Think new spices, textures, and not just flavors.
Smoothies by Rhonda Patrick (PhD in a biology area) on FoundMyFitness youtube channel are very good. Do look up one of her smoothie recipes for ideas. A Vitamix blender pulverizes greens.
Other than eating healthy, I try to focus on sleep and exercise (yoga, walk, weights). Everything is impacted by nutrition. I'd call the diet I eat vegetarian with eggs and a whole foods diet. One healthy item glaringly missing is fish but I grew up vegetarian and even eating eggs was a challenge.
https://n1.tools/ might be useful for this
Looks interesting! How exactly did you use this, if you don't mind sharing?
If you eat a variety of meats including liver than you have a superior source of vitamins and minerals compared to plants. You can get enough fiber from oatmeal.
Does one need fiber?
No, but fiber makes food more filling and a small amount helps with digestion.
You're pretty low on antioxidants if you do it that way, and your gut is likely to be ... very weird and badly behaved.
Body can produce any and all anti-oxidants it needs. No need to steal from plants.
If this were the case, we wouldn't have seen an antioxidant-mediated protective effect from smoking and NOX air pollution during covid19. (Otherwise known as Pittsburgh: a case study).
You can get antioxidants from green tea and berries. There are also other non-vegetable sources of fiber like mushrooms and nuts.
If he doesn't eat vegetables his gut is already adjusted and he would fare worse if he started to suddenly eat lots of veggies with lots of fiber.
Veggies are definitely an excellent source of a bunch of stuff, but putting them all in one bag feels like disservice. E.g: some people will happily munch on raw celery and carrot sticks, others will find this repellent and conclude they hate vegetables. But you have options that might not be apparent to you: oven roasted bell peppers + dried tomatoes + garlic + eggplant kept in olive oil will make a great topping to add to sandwiches and burgers; add a few bits of butternut or other sweet squash to your roasted potatoes, add a few bits of cauliflower to mash, get some eggplant dips, drink a glass of gaspacho... You can get a bunch of the good stuff that way, but you might need to ask around / read a bunch of recipe books to get ideas.
Vitamin supplements tend to be useful in case of real deficit in one thing or other. anything else is kind of up in the air, for what I know. And for dietary news, just use o3 :)
What did you mean by o3?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenAI_o3
Standard LLM disclaimer to check the results, but you can iterate on questions quickly with listed sources etc.
What do you mean by iterate on questions quickly?
Using AI again?
I don't trust AI that much yet. It lies sounding confident. How do you trust its nutrition advice? I don't have graduate level knowledge in nutrition to know which are good studies in the field. It's a field full of contradictions anyway.
Nutrition might be the one field where I think that the hallucinated LLM lies are not any worse than the field itself. Once you get beyond the _extremely_ basic "eat a wide variety of foods, don't eat too many calories, try to have a decent amount of fruits and vegetables, not too much sugar", everything else is poorly supported hogwash.
That's not to say I would personally use an LLM for this, just to say that there _are_ no good sources for anything that goes beyond the "common sense" advice.
What about saturated fat? And salt?
Dr. Jason Fung says people are confused about the data on this.
I'm trying to decide whether to eat fat-free yoghurt or regular yoghurt. And whether to avoid egg yellow. And what he says on salt is if you minimize processed food, that's going to reduce salt intake automatically and he says that's the way to think.
Not answering your question, but: are you eating vegetables cooked and flavoured well? Have you experimented with ways of preparing them, e.g. heavy on soy sauce, roasted until soft, raw? Vegetables is a broad category and there are many ways to prepare them, so I'm sceptical you couldn't find a subset you enjoy.
tritto to this. Broccoli cut into small floret, tossed with sesame oil, and roasted ~425F is pretty good. Blanching vegetables is often much, much better than boiled (which makes me want to gag); toss with a little truffle-infused olive oil.
Rather than trying to both figure out **what you like** and at the same time **how to cook it properly**, maybe try ordering vegetables at higher-end restaurants. Once you appreciate some ways that they CAN be prepared, it gives you a much better target in mind when you try to cook them.
Seconding this. I mostly didn't like the cooked veggies of my childhood. And even as an adult, it took me 10-15 years to really figure out that "grilled" veggies is the way to go. And it took me *another* few years to figure out that my standard (european-type) electric oven has a grill function, that is actually very decent. I grill my veggies for 5-8 minutes - it's both the fastest and by far tastiest way of eating veggies in any way. Season with some oil, salt, pepper, chilli afterwards. Add some feta cheese or meats in the oven for extra deliciousness.
It has become my personal "fast food" at home.. which is ironic, because it is also the most healthy food I eat.
Similar here. I don't understand why the cooks in my childhood, or even my mother now, are so obsessed with vegetables cooked so long that they no longer have any taste left.
Tomatoes and cucumbers and ice lettuce are nice to eat raw.
Most of the remaining vegetables are nice to eat after cooking them briefly in rice cooker. Add oil, salt, pepper, other spices. Eat with meat, cheese, yogurt, or hummus.
I'm pretty sure that overcooked vegetables are a result of Victorian era scientism. Medical men in the Victorian era tended to be obsessed with the digestibility of food because that was a subject on which they had a lot of good scientific information. Thoroughly cooked vegetables break down faster in the stomach and that seemed a self-evidently good thing and so medical men derided the English habit of serving half-cooked vegetables and insisted that vegetables should be thoroughly cooked.
There was a bit of a reversal by the mid-twentieth century when the medical types became preoccupied by vitamins and became interested in the fact that heat tended to break down (and/or activate enzymes that broke down) ascorbic acid and thiamine.
An office mate of mine used to take inulin supplements. Cheap, colorful, crunchy pills the size of my thumb that purportedly help with your fiber needs.
I've tried before to articulate some of the main issues I have with rationalism. (E.g. https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/open-thread-305/comment/44751417). I think I obscured them a bit by also ranting about how obnoxious I find Yudkowsky's writing style. So I'll put that objection aside (I stand by it, but it's become clear that many people just don't see it, which I find baffling but I'll have to just accept). The other thing that happened was that some people kept telling me I was wrong when I accused rationalists of doing x, or demanding evidence that rationalists did x, which I thought was a bit of a distraction even though I invited it by arguing along the lines of "x is bad, rationalism does x, therefore rationalism is bad".
So here, I'm going to be clear that my argument is not that the following things are bad, rationalists do them, therefore rationalists are bad. It is, rather: insofar as rationalists do the following things, they are bad. If they in fact never do these things, then great, I'm wrong and there's nothing wrong with rationalism (well, not on these topics). And if they sometimes don't do them, then in the contexts and to the extent that they don't, they're fine in those contexts and to that extent.
(...deep breath)
There are a lot of things that could be objected to in rationalism, but I'm focusing on things to do with fundamental truth. This is PART I of my critique.
***
The first thing rationalism seems to often do (again if you think some don't then I'm not objecting to them) is approach fundamental questions about reality *not* by reasoning from first principles, but by sort of tentatively assuming a metaphysical framework and then reasoning from within that. So instead of starting from the Cartesian position of radical doubt and seeing what if anything you can come to certainty of, *or* simply taking some initial premises on dogma or faith and accepting that that's unavoidable, they instead seem to do something like: "let's assume materialist empiricism and start from there, then see what we can do with that, including reflecting on the paradoxes and problems with materialism and empiricism". But these are huge, huge assumptions to even *start with*. They involve assuming that there is an external world to us, that we perceive it accurately, that it has a regularity and that its future will resemble its past. Among many other things.
Making an assumption of such a framework, even if you then go on to examine the problems with it (and I'm not sure how often that's done anyway) isn't any more rational than starting with a basic Christian assumption, or a basic Hindu assumption, and then addressing objections to this framework from within the framework itself. A medieval European scholar could reason thus: "let's assume the obvious position, the basic Christian framework, and see if we can address the objections to Christianity within that framework" (many Christians in fact still do this, it's called "presuppositional apologetics"). An Indian in Gupta times could reason thus "let's assume the obvious position, the basic Hindu framework, and see if we can address the objections to Hinduism within that framework" (realistically it would be something more specific than "Hindu" because Hinduism is several different things). And a pop intellectual in the modern US can reason thus: "let's assume the obvious position, the basic materialist/empiricist/humanist framework, and see if we can address the objections to materialism/etc within that framework" (again I'm not really sure I've even seen much of the last part being seriously attempted by rationalists, but I may have just missed it; I'll assume that the small amount of it I've seen has in fact been done a lot, for the sake of argument).
Now, all these three approaches do exactly the same thing: assume the "obvious position" which is really just "the intellectual orthodoxy of our time". (Notice how the last of the three is a clunky three-part description; that's a clue it's the current orthodoxy, lacking a succinct term that isn't very positively biased, like "the scientific worldview"; the same would have been true for the Hindu and Catholic Christian forms at their times). Now the problem is that if you assume a philosophical worldview and reason *from* instead of *towards* it, you have basically crippled your ability to actually question it, or to even properly comprehend the objections to it. You may think you're assuming very little; actually you're assuming an entire dogmatic framework and your "reasoning" will be extremely limited and superficial from then on. How can the Christian take seriously the objections to Christianity when he has already decided to take its foundational claims as assumptions? By his own stipulation, he has declared the dogmas of Christianity *more basic* than the tools of reasoning itself (i.e. he hasn't actually assumed that "arguments of a certain form are always valid" the way he has assumed "the Christian framework"). So if an argument (of a form that would usually be recognised as valid) is presented against the Christian framework, he will sooner take it as proving that arguments of such form must not always be valid, than that the Christian framework is unjustified. Ditto for the Hindu and the rationalist.
Relatedly but additionally, it's important to notice that assuming such frameworks may feel like assuming very little; this is an illusion. The rationalist thinks he's only assuming some really basic premises about the external world and the laws of induction--in fact he's assuming that several absolutely foundational millenia-old philosophical problems are just "somehow solved, we'll figure out how later". And he's also implicitly assuming all of the innumerable further metaphysical, epistemological etc claims that are implied by the assumptions he's explicitly making. If he tried to reason from first principles, he'd realise all of this implicit metaphysical baggage that comes from even the smallest assumption; skipping that approach obscures almost all of it.
And furthermore, the rationalist should be able to see very clearly the pitfalls of this approach when *others* do it. The Christian also thinks he's making some very basic assumptions--that God exists, that He is somehow three persons, and so on. The rationalist will immediately see how many extremely broad metaphysical and epistemological claims are implied by these assumptions, how much unimaginable philosophical baggage has just been taken as given without any positive argument for it at all. When he does the same himself, especially when he's surrounded by a group of people who share the same premises and thus don't challenge them, he's blind to it.
[Continued...]
Assumptions aren't the problem. Assumptions that arent recognised as assumptions are the problem.
Great points here. This is the conclusion that convinced me rationality, and more broadly physicalism as a metaphysics, was at least worth questioning. And eventually I decided it was almost certainly false.
My first-order gripe with the current rationalists (Yudkowsky et. al.) is that they hijacked the term rationalism to describe themselves. Granted, calling themselves less-wrongers is awkward, but they're misrepresenting themselves in the greater context of philosophical and scientific thought. The historical rationalists, like Descartes, Spinoza, and Leibniz, believed that Knowledge comes primarily from reason and a priori deduction. While the contemporary rats believe the mind is an imperfect reasoning machine based on an organic substrate shaped by evolution (and they most discount environmental influences on cognition). And they *claim* to rely on a hodgepodge of Bayesian "reasoning", probability theory, and normative decision theory built upon a particular view (and I think a biased view) of cognitive science.
My second-order gripe is their heavy reliance on Bayesian reasoning when Bayesianism has the seeds of its own failure modes baked into it.
My third-order gripe is their general inability to understand why other intellectuals may not buy into their program. Thus, labeling themselves rationalists becomes a type of virtue signaling. But the real irony of the contemporary rationalist enterprise the cognitive dissonance of both believing that Truth is probabilistic and subject to updating, while buying into a rationalist reductionist view of the universe. It's analogous to a physicist claiming to believe the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics but also insisting there's an underlying Bohm-de Broglie pilot wave mechanism determining the outcome of an observation.
>My second-order gripe is their heavy reliance on Bayesian reasoning when Bayesianism has the seeds of its own failure modes baked into it.
In what way?
>cognitive dissonance of both believing that Truth is probabilistic and subject to updating, while buying into a rationalist reductionist view of the universe.
What's the dissonance? You've got an epistemic claim, and an ontological claim there. If it you believe that the universe is ontoligically well.defined with no quantum.fuzziness, it can still be reasonable to belief that probabilistic reasoning and incremental updating are the best ways of working with the limitations of the human mind.
OK, I'm back. Regarding my cognitive dissonance snark...
Listen, we all start out with commitments to certain ontological beliefs. My problem with the Yudkowskian Rationalists is that they don't examine their ontological commitments. They build a scaffolding of reason, supposedly based on the empirical probes of reality, but they never question whether their understanding of reality is faulty. Ascend (@ascend675430) said it best above: "The first thing rationalism seems to often do (again if you think some don't then I'm not objecting to them) is approach fundamental questions about reality not by reasoning from first principles, but by sort of tentatively assuming a metaphysical framework and then reasoning from within that." Rationalists go on and on about how they're updating their priors in the face of new evidence, but if we confront them with doubts about the materialist assumptions that support the scaffolding of their reason, they call it philosophy and wave it aside.
Like Andrew Curral, here...
> Sorry, the first criticism you can think of of rationalism is that rationalists assume an external world exists? Err... why pick on rationalists here? Basically everyone but the most abstruse philosophers do that.
And Peter Defeel, here...
> What are the disadvantages to assuming an external world exists? If academic philosophy thinks this is worth debating at all, it’s time to ignore it. Even more.
The cognitive dissonance of Yudkowskian thinking is to never question their ontological priors.
I’m forced to reply with my iPhone right now – so my apologies if spellchecker adds confusion and my responses are a bit short.
In regards to Bayesian failure modes, two problems I see with Bayesian inference are…
1. The assumption is that the prior studies used to derive the posterior distribution are clean. A lot of crap gets through the peer review – or pure non-review – process. If poorly designed studies, p-hacked studies, or outright fraudulent studies contaminate the priors, the posterior is useless.
That’s not to say that Bayesian meta studies can’t be cleaned of data contamination, but I doubt if most Meta study authors take the time to verify the validity of the priors. Garbage in. Garbage out.
2. Selection bias in prior studies can yield a biased result. I’m thinking of the infamous Cochrane review of masks, whose primary author is a extreme critic of masking, and they went out of the way to select studies that supported their bias, and they distorted the results of studies that contradicted their bias. Yet the Cochrane review never retracted this Meta study.
And let’s not forget the first use of Bayesian statistics proved the existence of God based on the assumption that the miracles described in the Bible or real observations.
I’ll respond to the cognitive dissonance claim later this evening.
I tend to use the term "Yudkowsians", since it's clearer and doesn't import the halo-bagage that "rationalist" does. (Plus it's a great way to contrast Yudkowsky style rationalism to the Scott Alexander camp and the like)
Ok other guy doesn't care but mister Lapras, I want to know what the different camps are like?
I don't know if they persist as different camps, but the main "breaks" I see between Yudkowsky's writings and Scott's are:
- EY coined "politics is the mind killer" and SA specifically addresses contemporary politics
- EY thought arguing about God was important; SA doesn't really bother (most of the time!) (I admit that this is also part of a broader culture shift)
- EY has an extremely high P(doom). SA has a much lower (but still very scary) one
- Oldschool LessWrong writings from EY took psychological studies at face value. One of the major themes in SA's writing is about trusting scientific studies and worrying about the replication crisis, even kind of worrying about science generally (see "The Control Group is Out of Control")
- EY is more willing to reason from first principles and take contrary positions. SA is more wary of Chesterton's Fence
But at the meta level, they both assume the world can be apprehended via Bayesian reasoning on top of a core belief of materialism, don't they?
Goodness, Scott and Yudkowsky belong to different rationalist camps? Dare I ask how they differ? No, don't answer. My eyes would either glaze over and roll back in my sockets, or I'd run away screaming from my laptop.
Pragmatically, "materialist empiricism" is a world view which gets you from a medieval tech level to having nukes and supercomputers. Its agnostic version (which asserts not so much that the material world is all that exists, but only that you can learn stuff about the material world from observing it, divorced from any woo) is the common base for pretty much all frameworks which get you from plows to integrated circuits.
Iranian or North Korean nuclear technicians might be very religious or die-hard communists. US chip designers might be woke or MAGA. It does not matter, in their day job, materialist empiricism is the name of the game.
The world could be different. Perhaps the most impressive achievement of science and mathematics was that they had figured that the length of the diagonal in a unit square is roughly 3/2 and inventing an octagonal proto-wheel, while the faith of the Great Ayatollah allowed him to destroy cities with a prayer or turn the desert into paradise with a thought. In such a world, it seems unlikely that Eliezer would write sequences explaining cognitive biases. Arguably, the empiricism comes before the materialism, and a rationalist who realized that the paradigm with which one can change the world on its most fundamental level is Shia Islam would likely convert to some form of it, likely the minimum viable reality-affecting version.
The strong atheist version of materialist empiricism is simply the minimum viable theory to explain what we understand of the world. Rats want their beliefs to pay rent in anticipated evidence. Anything beyond that, such as believing in God or 256 sterile fundamental particles which do not interact with the observable matter in the universe just makes the theory longer without making it explain more observations.
It seems like you're arguing for a pragmatist theory of truth: truth is whatever helps us achieve our goals.
This does seem to be an aspect of what rationalists think they're doing ("rationalists should win"), and could be a coherent approach to take, but I don't think it's taken coherently or consistently at all. It would mean that "have true beliefs" is meaningless as anything additional to "have effective beliefs", it would mean that a religion is true (literally) whenever it has good consequences for society, it would mean that there's no such thing as a useful lie, since anything useful is by definition true, and it would mean if rationalism had a bad effect on society that would *make* it false.
If you bite these bullets, I agree that could work as an approach. If you don't want to, you're going to need a more standard theory of truth by which "x produced nukes" doesn't mean x is true.
YudkowskIan's tend to believe in both epistemic (truth seeking) and instrumental (usefulness seeking) rationality ..And want to believe they are the same thing, with no tension between them.
pragmatically those nukes and computers can make us extinct, so i'm not sure why one is that better than another according to rationalist long-termers.
a lot of this relies more on how much faith you have in humanity non-pragmatically ironically.
"Science is good" is the motte. The bailey is "you should ignore all scientists and listen to an auto-didact fanfic author instead".
Could you point me to the sequence where EY says so?
I think of Eliezer (and Scott) mostly as communicators. A lot of the ideas in both the sequences and on SSC/ACX are not original, and even their original ideas are not entirely original (because nothing ever is).
Nothing would stop me, in principle, from reading all the journal articles and books Eliezer cited in the sequences and just read them and think really hard about them. Nor would anyone stop me from reading all the books which Scott has reviewed and think very hard and long about them, or discuss their contents with some random smart people. Or I could reject them picking subjects and find my own interesting articles in an ocean of scholarship.
That would be fine. There is nothing in the rat creed that the sequences are the only path to salvation.
Personally, I am both lazy and also not the kind of deep thinker they are. Reading an ACX book review thus has much higher ROI for me than reading through the book without deeply engaging with the matter would.
Calling Eliezer an "auto-didact fanfic author" is certainly technically correct. This is a criticism which can equally be leveled at Scott Alexander: from a credentialism point of view, we might barely let him speak about psychiatric matters (but we should really prefer to listen to someone who has published about the specific topic at hand in a reputable journal, and tenure). But letting him write about face masks or Aborigine mating patterns is so far outside his certified area of expertise that it is little different from having that autodidact write about Bayes theorem or having a sex worker write about fetishes. Preposterous!
I for one believe that credentials are highly overrated. They certainly work to ensure a basic level of competence, if you ask a distinguished professor of entomology how many legs ants typically have, their answer is likely to be correct. (Unless it is about face masks.)
Scott is a great example that (very smart) people can understand the world for themselves in a lot of areas without hiding behind a lack of credentials in whatever field they want to study. As far as I am concerned, the same is true for EY and a lot of the LW regular writers.
The foremost experts in most fields are not blogging, because blog posts will at best be neutral to advancing your career. In most cases, they will also not be very engaging writers. So there is a niche for autodidacts who can get really close to the frontier of knowledge and write popular blog articles about it.
>Could you point me to the sequence where EY says so?
He doesn't quite, but there is a bit where he is dismissive of an actual AI researcher who turned out to be right.
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/NyFuuKQ8uCEDtd2du/the-genie-knows-but-doesn-t-care?commentId=3jXHEyGhsDG3yQ5bn
> Calling Eliezer an "auto-didact fanfic author" is certainly technically correct. This is a criticism which can equally be leveled at Scott Alexander: from a credentialism point of view, we might barely let him speak about psychiatric matters (but we should really prefer to listen to someone who has published about the specific topic at hand in a reputable journal, and tenure). But letting him write about face masks or Aborigine mating patterns is so far outside his certified area of expertise that it is little different from having that autodidact write about Bayes theorem or having a sex worker write about fetishes. Preposterous!
I think this is an interesting question, why is Scott so much better at writing on subjects outside his field of expertise than Eleizer? The answer, I think, is that Scott is an expert in _something_, he went to the trouble of going to university and diving deeply into one thing for years, meaning that he understands how deeply human knowledge actually goes. When he visits another field, he understands that he's only scratching the surface on a subject that would take lifetimes to master.
Eleizer, on the other hand, is an expert in nothing, he's never actually dived deeply into any subject in particular so he has a surface-level understanding of a whole bunch of things and assumes that's all their is. He gives the impression of someone who has read, like, one book on every subject, and decided the whole subject is too trivial to be worthy of further exploration. He read one book on quantum mechanics and decided that the Many Worlds Interpretation is obviously right and everyone else is stupid. He read one book on ethics and decided that utilitarianism is obviously right and everyone else is stupid.
I've always said that if you want to be a generalist, you should start by being a specialist, and this is why -- unless you specialise in _something_ you'll never really get a proper appreciation of how deep every subject really goes.
W. V. O. Quine (following Neurath) said we must repair & reconstruct our boat (scientific understanding) while it is at sea, rather than beginning from nothing. https://iep.utm.edu/quine-sc/ In this respect, you are accusing rationalism of following his advice. I recall that Robin Hanson (who actually has a masters in the philosophy of science, having previously been a physicist) used the metaphor of having many individually weak thin thread supporting one's beliefs, in contrast to Bryan Caplan's attempt to establish iron chains of confident beliefs he could reason from, but unfortunately I can't find the post where he used those metaphors now.
To take your first objection, I think you sorta kinda do have to assume there's a "there" out there, else the "tools of reasoning" aren't any use at all. Since, if we have no idea if reality is external to us and our sense-organ reports are any kind of accurate to fact, or if there is even such a thing as 'reality' at all objective or otherwise, then we can't even reason about that since we can't even trust that the tools are indeed "this is a hammer" when in fact it's a sponge made out of chocolate.
If I start from a "Cartesian position of radical doubt", there's nothing to stop me coming to the conclusion that I doubt Descartes even existed at all.
This isn't to say I accept the (what you describe as) rationalist assumption of materialist empiricism, but before we can even begin to discuss "is A or B or maybe even W more correct?"., we have to agree on some ground rules. If I assume the sun will rise in the morning because laws of nature, and you assume the sun can dance the libertango with Orion because there are no laws, there is no nature, stuff just happens!, how on earth can we begin to even approach "what is real, what is true?"
"how obnoxious I find Yudkowsky's writing style. So I'll put that objection aside (I stand by it, but it's become clear that many people just don't see it, which I find baffling but I'll have to just accept)"
Depends what the piece of writing is. Some of the little anecdotes in the Sequences* are actually funny, especially when the obvious authorial self-insert of the Wise Old Sage** is lecturing the class of budding Super Sekrit Wisdom Initiates about tips'n'tricks to be hyper-successful in solving complex problems in five seconds flat by thinking (1) really hard (2) really quick. Just so long as you don't take it seriously as any kind of recommendation about "let's emulate the alchemists to foster future generations of smart, rational people" training.
The "Three Worlds Collide" story is good, much to my surprise. I do want to slap our future descendants around a bit, but that's because they're so drippy. However, that's because I'm one of the unregenerate from the bad old days before everyone became instantly enlightened, and now "rape" apparently means "if you flirt with someone you better follow through or else they can take you up on that offer of free sex, because if you're flirting with someone it is understood by all parties that you are offering free sex".
HPMOR makes me want to commit bloody murder. I hate and loathe Harry Three-Names with a burning passion that would make the most fanatical Inquisitors out of the deepest fever dreams of the Black Legend go "hold on there a minute", and there are some out there who agree with me! As many as several! I've seen them!
* No, of course I haven't read them in order, or much at all, but I have followed the links to "this is what we're talking about when we're talking about X, Y or Z".
** Being fair, this is done in a tongue-in-cheek, nod and a wink, style where we know what's going on, he knows we know, and everyone is in on the joke so he's not taking himself 100% seriously. 70-85% maybe, depending on the little snippet, but not all the way.
Sorry, the first criticism you can think of of rationalism is that rationalists assume an external world exists? Err... why pick on rationalists here? Basically everyone but the most abstruse philosophers do that.
First, not my first criticism but one of the most foundational, and one the clearest examples of where largely refusing to engage with and situate yourself within academic philosophy will lead to bad places.
And second, no I don't think most actual philosophers assume an external world the way rationalists do. They generally either (a) regard it as an unsolved problem, with the implicit understanding that the coherence of a large amount of what work they have done is conditional on certain unproven truth claims, (b) have an argument from first principles that they defend (if rationalists have done this I haven't seen it; I don't know if most of them defend Moore's argument or Nozick's or Armstrong's or if most of them even know or care who these people are; if I *did* know that, it would be vastly easier to engage with them), or (c) take it as a foundational dogma that ultimately can't be justified, and acknowledge that).
Basically, I think most philosophers have VASTLY more intellectual humility than Yudkowsky and his followers, though I'm sure there are a few exceptions.
> First, not my first criticism but one of the most foundational, and one the clearest examples of where largely refusing to engage with and situate yourself within academic philosophy will lead to bad places.
What are the disadvantages to assuming an external world exists? If academic philosophy thinks this is worth debating at all, it’s time to ignore it. Even more.
Every-day, practically, no disadvantage.
Conceptually, I think the risk is something like anthropomorphisation of reality - my observations are "real" (they exist independent to any observer? What could that mean?)
I'm not laughing at you, I'm just very amused by the notion of a philosopher getting up from his desk after writing a long piece about how there is no evidence for an external world, then going to have his lunch because his stomach is rumbling and he's hungry and his wife bought that nice fresh loaf of crusty bread and some good ham this morning so he'll make a cheese and ham sandwich with that sharp Cheddar in the fridge 😀
External reality may be an unsolved problem, but they're still living in it the same way as us rubes.
It's a philosopher. He's on pot and has the munchies. : - )
And I'm not laughing at you, but I'm amused at the number of people who think experiencing something means they understand it (it reminds of the woke discourse on how being black makes you an expert on the sociology of racism, actually).
More relevantly, the archetypal philosopher will write along the lines of "Suppose I say 'I know for certain that I am [eating a ham and cheese sandwich], it is absolutely certain that I am...[y]ou are wrong, you do not know that you are [eating the sandwich], it is not absolutely certain that you are...[y]ou do not know for certain that you are not dreaming...'" (reworking G.E Moore in "Certainty" here), so I think you're presuming a bit to suggest they haven't noticed this...
This is a weird example because for if the philosopher who is asking if you are dreaming is true, he does not exist: he is part of the dream the dreamer created.
to ask the dreamer means you must both have shared experiences and a mutual reality that exists independent of you both. A lot of radical skepticism removes yoir ability to ask a question in the first place if true.
This is all worthless.
If external reality is not actually true then either:
1) I’m living in my own reality, ie solipsism. In which case I might as well treat the world as if I’m playing GTA. Y’all don’t exist and morality is pointless
.
2) I’m a mind in some mysterious world where there are other minds that are in the same mysterious world which isn’t real but seems the same to all the minds. In this world if i’m eating a ham sandwich and the other minds agree that i’m eating a ham sandwich then i’m probably safe to assume that i’m eating a ham sandwich.
And it actually doesnt matter of that ham sandwich exists or not, its dealing with my hunger.
There’s a intermediate third option, a copy on write option, where if the physical body (which seems to be mysteriously attached to my mind ) kills the body of the mind Bob, Bobs reality changes so that he’s still alive in his reality but not mine. Something like a quantum change, although of course that’s not how quantum branches work. That’s not very distinct from 1) as Bob is unharmed so I can also do what I want.
That philosophers gain anything moral from this seems absurd, it’s mostly word play.
In fact morality can only exist in this real world, or a word assumed to be real.
What if we're living in a simulation? The external reality isn't there, but our individual subroutines are interacting as if it were. I'm not claiming that I believe this, but it offers up an alternative to the either/or dilemma you raised.
Likewise, Bernardo Kastrup has offered up an inventive riff on panpsychism, where Reality is mental, not physical. The universe exists within a universal consciousness, a.k.a the “mind-at-large”, and is not independently outside us. Our "individual" minds are the result universal-level Dissociative Identity Disorder, where the universal consciousness generates individual perspectives that are partially separated from the whole, but they fall back to the whole when we die. I'm unconvinced by his arguments, but I'm also unconvinced that reality will ever be captured by materialist explanations.
Let us laugh together at the folly of the world!
Oh, I'm not saying they haven't noticed it. But they still go and eat the sandwich as if it's really there and they're really eating and hunger is a real thing and not eating will have real consequences in a real world.
Which is not to condemn them, for all we have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God, even if we believe as perfectly as is possible for us.
[...continued]
And let's look at postmodernism, for a particularly striking example. People love to dunk on postmodernists, rationalists especially. It seems so obvious how incoherent their philosophy is, right? Every truth is relative, but *that* truth is somehow objective? Resist totalising discourses and metanarratives, but do so from within the totalising metanarrative of structural oppression and identity politics? Everything can be deconstructed, well then deconstruct the gun I'm pointing at your head, punk! And so on, and so on.
Wrong. They're not incoherent at all, not within their own framework. "Yes", they'll say, "the truth that every truth is relative is itself relative. So what? If you claim that this admission implies something about our philosophy, well that claim is also relative." It never ends, you won't trap them. They'll admit that every deconstruction can itself be deconstructed (though this admission can also be deconstructed). But they'll continue deconstructing from a very explicit Marxist or feminist perspective. And if you tell them that's a metanarrative they'll sort of agree, but keep doing it. After all, all perspectives are valid so no one can tell them what perspectives they're allowed to write from. Telling them they have to avoid metanarratives because they criticise metanarratives? What an oppressive metanarrative! Telling them they can't condemn other people's metanarratives if they're going to use one themselves? Another oppressive metanarrative! And as for the gun, they'll happily deconstruct your statement that you have a gun pointed at their head. "No," you say, "deconstruct the actual gun". And they'll proceed to further deconstruct the statement "deconstruct the actual gun". And so on in perpetuity. You'll never prove they're inconsistent, as long as they're speaking from *within their own framework*. And if you somehow *do*, so what? The idea that inconsistency is bad is just another metanarrative.
If you want to defeat this circular insanity, the *only* way is to deny them the right to take their own framework as a starting point. "No," you say, "I'll not accept your philosophy unless you argue it from first principles". And they can splutter all they like about how they've never seen such an oppressive metanarrative in their life, but you will remain unmoved. "No, prove it to me, or I don't accept it". And there'll be nothing they can do. Unless they agree to reason from first principles, they will be entirely unable to make you accept any of their claims. Which means that in the most basic objective sense of there being another existent being who refuses to accept their philosophy, the philosophy remains unproven.
It's the same with the Christian, the same with the Hindu, and the same with the rationalist. Whether it's the One Triune God, the transmigration of the soul in Samsara, or the mechanistic external world, the foundations of reality, and knowledge of reality, are not something you can shortcut. Not something you can just assume, or "start with", are a certain way. Not even if it's the orthodoxy of your culture and time.
And note that although rationalists are appealing to the intellectual orthodoxy of the modern West, empirical materialism, by reasoning in the presumptive way described above they are behaving much less rigorously than the average intellectual who shares that orthodoxy. Most scientists will acknowledge they take materialism as a kind of dogmatic foundation for the purpose of doing science, and leave the proper justification for it to the philosophers. Most philosophers will engage with the objections to empiricism in a foundational way that attempts to argue from either first principles or from (actually) very minimal premises. (And they will accept the limitations of the worldview, e.g. by adopting coherentism or contextualism, when they don't.) Similarly, most Christian thinkers have taken the Aquinas approach that God's existence and nature can be proven from first principles. Both such attempts (Christian and scientific) to justify the foundations of knowledge and reality have been widely acknowledged to have great limitations, but at least they were attempted and the acknlowledgement was made. This can't be said for the approach above.
In "When Recursive Justification Hits Bottom", which is linked and discussed at length in the thread linked at the beginning, Yudkowsky says of "using my current brain" (i.e. the metaphysical and epistemological starting points I discussed above) to reflect on those starting points, "[w]hat else could I possibly use?" I hope my answer in this essay is clear now. You could attempt to reason from the very foundations of deductive logic and Cartesian doubt, but don't expect this to be easy. Or you could simply accept that the foundations of your worldview are not justified, that they are taken as starting dogmas and your philosophy is no more rational than any other built on different starting dogmas, but don't expect this to be satisfying to your pride.
Or, of course, you could write some blog posts declaring that it's actually easy and satisfying, all you need to do is "forget about the problem of philosophical justifications, and ask yourself whether it's really truly true" (same post). But don't expect this to be taken seriously.
(Further parts to this critique coming either immediately, at a later time, or not at all, depending on my time and the response to this one.)
"If you want to defeat this circular insanity, the *only* way is to deny them the right to take their own framework as a starting point. "No," you say, "I'll not accept your philosophy unless you argue it from first principles". And they can splutter all they like about how they've never seen such an oppressive metanarrative in their life, but you will remain unmoved. "
Another attack is to substitute your own metanarrative. Postmodernism is optimized to attack modernism and Pinker-style meritocratic liberalism that worries about oppression, but a white nationalist or 4channer who just goes "yeah, and sexism and racism are *good things*--that's *my* metanarrative" can't really be refuted either. "No, I'm oppressed, and if I'm not, it's good that I'll be able to oppress you. Vae victis."
I wonder if this is a factor behind the recent rise of the far right--if there's no objective truth, you can just pick the one that makes you look good, and lots of white guys decided the pyramid of intersectionality can be turned upside down.
My personal impression is that Yud's concerns were different than academic philosophers. Academics are mostly interested in things like "how can I put epistemology on an IRON CLAD FOUNDATION with exactly 100% certainty" just for the warm glow of knowing things with 100% certainty. Yud was interested in "I want to win (at defeating AGI), Reductive Materialism seems like the most productive framework, let's go with Reductive Materialism".
Like, this was the point of the Ultimate Newcomb's Problem [0]. Is there a causally-legible, IRON CLAD reason why you should one-box? Well, no. Not really. But would you rather your arguments be IRON CLAD? or would you rather *win*.
[0] https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/RAh4fekdiRhZxb2Kw/the-ultimate-newcomb-s-problem
I do not need firm first principles to reject the postmodernists. I can just notice that the most impressive outcome their proponents get is tenure, which is hardly unique to them, while proponents of other world models also achieve things like moon landings beside.
Now you can claim that empiricism is my solid first principle (in which case rationality would have a rather solid first principle!), but I think it is equally valid to just see it as an innate preference shaped through evolution, just like a goat might prefer drinking fresh water to drinking salt water.
It is less 'I reject them because I believe they are wrong' and more 'I reject them because their theories do not even make worthwhile predictions about the world'.
They did a nice job taking over academia and putting their ideas into every young person. So it was effective at obtaining mind share, if not at building a thriving society.
By not having firm first principles, *you become* a postmodernist.
Is this a bit like interjecting into a discussion about chess strategy and saying "I don't like chess, just slap him across the face if you want to see who is stronger"
Edit -
Very post-modern!
It is possible to square this circle: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chess_boxing
Human reason, in one sphere of its cognition, is called upon to consider questions, which it cannot decline, as they are presented by its own nature, but which it cannot answer, as they transcend every faculty of the mind. It falls into this difficulty without any fault of its own. It begins with principles, which cannot be dispensed with in the field of experience, and the truth and sufficiency of which are, at the same time, insured by experience. With these principles it rises, in obedience to the laws of its own nature, to ever higher and more remote conditions. But it quickly discovers that, in this way, its labours must remain ever incomplete, because new questions never cease to present themselves; and thus it finds itself compelled to have recourse to principles which transcend the region of experience, while they are regarded by common sense without distrust. It thus falls into confusion and contradictions, from which it conjectures the presence of latent errors, which, however, it is unable to discover, because the principles it employs, transcending the limits of experience, cannot be tested by that criterion. The arena of these endless contests is called Metaphysic.
I think it was Yudkowsky who pointed out that someone could rely on reversed induction, so that if something has never been true in the past it is bound to be true now, and applying that to reversed induction itself would just cause it to be accepted because it kept failing. So you can never get anywhere from there, and if you choose priors of 0 or 1, no evidence can make you change your mind https://www.readthesequences.com/Zero-And-One-Are-Not-Probabilities Nor did he expect to convince an "ideal philosophy student of perfect emptiness" https://www.readthesequences.com/Search?q=%22philosophy+student+of+perfect+emptiness%22&action=search He could instead reason with an actual philosophy like Quine, who I mentioned in another comment here.
I think Yudkowsky first used the 'anti-induction' example here (https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/zmSuDDFE4dicqd4Hg/you-only-need-faith-in-two-things).
I think it's the Modus Morons idea from Susan Haack (1976), applied to induction.
Also, honestly:
"(No, this is *not* the "tu quoque!" moral equivalent of starting out by assigning probability 1 that Christ died for your sins.)"
Well, that clears it up. Silly me for thinking you need an actual argument. "You need to have faith, but this faith isn't at all like other kinds of faith, because it isn't!"
I continue to be bewildered at his popularity around here.
Yup, that's it, thanks!
What are the first principles? You appeal to them, but don't describe them. So, for example, in your view of how to proceed, what is the first principle from which you are starting and from which you derive the next step?
"First principles" is a great term, but it also is a metaphysical framework. "You could attempt to reason from the very foundations of deductive logic and Cartesian doubt" - and where does deductive logic and Cartesian doubt get their standpoints? What are their roots? What are the assumptions they, too, start off with? Doubt in what? If you are doubting something, there has to be something there to doubt. If it "doubt in everything", then that doubt itself must be doubted, and all the way down, the same as the post-modernists you decry (and aren't we on post-post-modernism now? I can never keep the layers straight).
I'm not sure if my reply to Richard clarifies where I'm arguing from and answers your questions. If not, tell me.
It helps, but can you expand on Cartesian doubt? I just read something in Oleg's post about " Following Descartes and Locke, the absolute basic things about the existence of which we can be sure are our own thoughts and feelings" and it immediately struck me that there's a layer of doubt even below that, call it Buddhist doubt, about maya and illusion and the non-existence of the self. We can't be sure of our own thoughts and feelings because even the "I" is an illusion. So that step of the ladder is broken off at the very start.
I'd say Cartesian doubt is about taking the radical starting point of not assuming anything, then seeing if you can come to anything at all from there. It's the approach Descarte claimed to be taking, but it doesn't have to refer to the exact literal arguments that he used. Most obviously, he solved the whole problem with an appeal to an ontological argument for God's existence (different to Anselm's more well known one, but of a similar structure), which most modern philosophers obviously (being mostly atheists) don't think makes any sense. They'd probably also reject his cogito as stated: "I am" implies the whole metaphysical baggage of a self, as you say. "Thought exists" would be a better candidate for the absolutely undeniable.
"Thought exists" would be a better candidate for the absolutely undeniable."
But then we get into "what is thought?" I am thinking, but am I just thinking I'm thinking? How do I know if you're thinking? How do we both agree on what thinking is or is not? Do we mean "thought as a process run on an organic brain" or do we mean "thought is an objectively existing thing of some sort"?
The relevant question today is "Does/can AI think?" and there's debate around that.
I think (ha!) we have to start off with some accepted but unproven standards before we can even begin to do anything, because if we radically doubt everything, we can continue on doubting forever (if thought is something that happens e.g. electrical signals in an organic substrate, then what says that this thought is any more reliable as a description of reality than the illusions sent by the electrical signals of the organs of vision to the brain centre that processes sight?)
The conclusions of thought, e.g. mechanisms such as deductive reasoning, can be as wrong and subjective as "you're not really seeing the colour red, just the signal from the processing of wavelengths of light all bouncing around the messy meat lump in your skull, and there is no 'red' in reality".
What makes your preferred starting point, "the very foundations of deductive [l]ogic and Cartesian doubt", not just another metaphysical framework, just another place to start from? And where do you get to from it?
Even deductive logic is questionable, as Descarte himself noted. Honestly I'm lowering the bar beneath where it really should be, although deductive logic IS unique in that it is literally impossible to think outside of, unlike the other assumptions.
"Cartesian doubt" is not a starting point, it's the name for when you accept no starting point.
Your last sentence, that is the question isn't it? Not very far in most cases, because fundamental truth (what we call "philosophy") is *hard*. I'm sure there are some self-described rationalists who admit this and admit that most of what we know isn't really justified and that wisdom consists in realising how ignorant you are. This essay isn't directed at them.
So what is your point? That we can know nothing, we cannot even know that we know nothing, there is nowhere on which to stand, we are all plummeting into a bottomless void, all supposed knowledge is but the ignorance of Wile E. Coyote three feet past the edge of the precipice, even our knowledge of our ignorance is but further ignorance, and so on forever? It reminds me of Eliezer's description of the Ashamnu ritual (https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/DoLQN5ryZ9XkZjq5h/tsuyoku-naritai-i-want-to-become-stronger) of reciting one's faults, and feeling repentance for them, but with no plan to ever do better, and it's against the rules to claim to actually have done better.
As Deiseach points out, the sceptical philosopher still has lunch.
ETA: Deductive logic first began to be properly formulated in the 19th century. On the scale of that achievement, Aristotle and the mediaevals barely count.
I thought I stated my point fairly clealy in the OP. Yes, we could accept we know nothing and we're on the precipice etc. Or we could take foundational beliefs as dogmas and acknowledge thst they're dogmas, themselves unjustifiable and ultimately quite arbitrary. Or we could defend a particular argument for the justification of the foundations. If the rationalists did the latter, it would look like saying "this is our argument for the external world etc; if this argument were to be refuted, we'd have to rethink everything", not dancing around and dodging the question except to sometimes vaguely "justify" with an appeal to the very premises that need to be justified.
And you're mixing up actual deductive logic (that you can't think a literal contradiction etc) with when it got named and formalised.
>Or we could defend a particular argument for the justification of the foundations.
That's putting in a foundation under your foundation, and open to exactly the same demand. At some point one gets up and have lunch, ignoring the people sitting on the sidelines with their endless whines of "but why?", because no answer can satisfy them. It's not up to the people you're criticising to tear everything down and start over, it's up to people such as yourself to do the starting over and build something worth the attention of the people they are trying to reach.
Minor point, but "we cannot even know that we know nothing" is a paradox, since "knowing that one knows nothing" is already knowing something.
What about believing? Is it possible to believe in a world where knowing for certain is not possible?
>Is it possible to believe in a world where knowing for certain is not possible?
Isn't that this very world? "0 and 1 are not probabilities" and all that. (https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/QGkYCwyC7wTDyt3yT/0-and-1-are-not-probabilities)
On the other hand, we rarely mention degrees of certainty, an example of the general rule that whatever exotic systems of logic we may invent, at the meta-level and in everyday life we always revert to plain old classical logic.
Just learned that Cremieux has a post explaining in great detail how if someone wanted to save on GLP-1 drugs they would be able to source the peptides and prepare injectable solutions safely.
Whole thing's just an interesting thought experiment, you know? If you're curious, it's here: https://www.cremieux.xyz/p/how-to-get-cheap-ozempic
Yes, this seems to be roughly what Scott linked in his Ozempycalypse article. A good search term is "lyophilized semaglutide".
FWIW, I have now paid some 200$ to some Chinese vendor which may or may not ship, may or may not get intercepted by customs and may or may not turn out to be baking soda (or botox for all I know), and once I know more (in two weeks or so) I was planning to write an LW article on it.
if you want to crowdsource having purity checked by an independent lab, I'm willing to contribute solely on "this is kinda awesome" grounds.
the hardest will be quality control / checking on sourced peptide purity, isn't it? in my experience, you often need to repurify sourced compounds and not take specifications to face value. So if you have access to an HPLC / GC setup and a column for chromatographic purification + a bunch of solvent + a fume hood, completely possible.
I think for 95% of the rationalists, repurification is a terrible idea.
This is a compound which you inject (because the oral dose would be prohibitively expensive). I have a strong bias for stuff I inject to be sterile.
I think I can use sterile syringes, needles, bacteriostatic water and a sterile vial of lyophilized peptide to reconstitute a solution which will hopefully be sterile.
I do not think I can reliably run chromatographic purification at home and end up with a solution which is both sterile and also safe to inject (i.e., not 80% ethanol). Nor do I want to play in my kitchenette with the kind of solvents for which I would need a fume hood (e.g. Diethyl ether).
The standard dosage instructions do not depend on the body mass, which I take as a clear sign that they are more meant on a 50% precision level than on a 5% precision level.
I think I will probably pay a lab to test the actual concentration in the solution I prepared for the first vial within a 10% error (i.e. "sema 1mg/ml, other peptides 0.2mg/ml). If there are significant contributions of stuff which is not sema, or if it turns out that the amount of sema per vial is grossly misstated, then I will throw out the vials and go to the next vendor. (Or if it so happens that cremieux has sourced from the same vendor as I have and also posted an analysis, I will just believe theirs if it looks fine.)
I think that mass spectroscopy should be good enough to get this analysis, I am willing to believe that anything with the right atomic mass is the good stuff, but I am also willing to trust the recommendations of experts here.
Hard agree on the "bad idea for 95%". But injectable chemistry is definitely something that should not be done without verification either, and I speak from experience when I say fine chemistry retailers - even reputable ones - are not models of consistency (and china / india tend not to be paragons of good manufacturing practices).
Best bet I see would be group buys (a la Dallas Buyers Club) from very reputable outfits (sigma-ald., or most probably WuXi) that also provide whole batch analyses and protocols? These do not provide for small orders, but a big enough club could get the best of both worlds?
He recommends sending one vial in your batch to a particular lab he names for testing. Many have done that now with peptides from various sources, so there is a shared knowledge base of which sources send peptides that are consistently found to be high purity
Just shared a new essay: The Key to Love is Understanding
This one’s a bit of a divergence from the usual SSC-adjacent epistemic deep dives—it’s about love, but not in the abstract or game-theoretic sense. More like: how do we actually come to understand another person, and why might that be the central act of love? It’s an attempt to think clearly about something that resists clean modelling, messy, emotional, full of perceptual nuance. This was inspired by the famous Nietzsche quote placing conversation as the most important part of marriage + my take on why friends to lovers arcs are the best.
It’s earnest, but hopefully not saccharine. If you’ve ever wanted a LessWrong-adjacent take on love that still believes in magic, this might be up your alley :)
Curious what others here think. https://velvetnoise.substack.com/p/the-key-to-love-is-understanding
Nietzche himself never married, so what did he know?
Yeah and on top of that he was famously miserable and had a miserable love life...
I agree it was earnest, very well-phrased, and not saccharine. Thanks for writing! I think where I differ, or perhaps extend, is that I take an expansive view of conversation. The whole of everything that is communicated (verbal or nonverbal)—in fact, any influence on each other— is part of the long conversation
What is your opinion on the breakup, then? I'm hearing a lot of songs about "we're just strangers now, we're not even friends anymore" about relationships that ended.
So what happens when you do come to know that other person, and then you decide, or they decide, or you both decide "okay, we've come to the end of the road"? Friends to lovers sounds great, but what happens when it's friends to lovers to strangers?
Is it because they don't start out as friends, so once desire has burned itself out there's nothing remaining to maintain a relationship, even if it's a different one to the romantic relationship? Can the romance burn up the friendship so that it's impossible to remain friends, or so that what you liked as a friend is now outweighed by the faults as a lover?
1. The breakup is a result of some massive betrayal sufficient to overcome existing bonds.
2. The closeness of your relationship is a threat to future partners, requiring distance.
Or some other variation on "Distance is needed to find a more compatible partner."
3. One partner changes radically in some way, introducing genuine incompatibility.
4. As you mention, I think some people are not really friends with their sexual partners in the sense that they are with other people.
> Can the romance burn up the friendship so that it's impossible to remain friends, or so that what you liked as a friend is now outweighed by the faults as a lover?
Not the OP at all, but just imagine being with somebody, truly knowing them deeply, and then rejecting them after years or decades - wouldn't most people feel bad about being so known, judged, and rejected?
And certainly it also depends greatly on the participants' emotional makeups and conflict resolution styles - after all, even after decades of marriage, their are both bitter divorces and mutually amicable divorces.
I think breakups are a fascinating area that's largely still driven by intuition and tacit social skills, and this is a shame, because the difference between a good and a bad breakup is absolutely immense in human cost, and it would benefit everyone if people gave thought to it or tried to do better.
So to that end, I will present my "Better Breakups: theory and practice" mini practicum here.
So what's the potential spread, what value can you drive by being personally better at initiating breakups?
Literally, a bad breakup can be suicidal, and a good breakup can end with awesome break-up sex and both of you staying friends and being open to seeing each other again. Quite a chasm between those two endpoints, so maybe it’s worth it to think and exert a little effort in this area, both as individuals and societally!
I personally favor an "economics" interpretation, in keeping with the overly rational turbo-nerd spirit of the ACX commentariat.
One of the interesting corollaries of the concept of sexual market value (“SMV”) and the framing of dating as a market, is that any two people are A) trying to optimize their bid / ask spread, and B) are literally just marginally together.
Any two people who are together are just barely together, and anytime you are with somebody, they have significant costs and downsides that are just marginally outweighed by their upsides.
If this is true, the real trick to a good breakup is increasing your own marginal costs in important-but-not-immoral areas to your soon-to-be-ex partner. As in, don't cheat, don't finally unleash years of pent up sentiment on your mother in law, find a mutually irreconciliable difference and highlight it.
I mean, you probably KNOW the things your partner hates about you, because people aren’t shy about complaining or nagging. But we’re not looking for behaviors here - this isn’t some milquetoast “start leaving the dishes in the sink because they hate that, and they’ll eventually be happy to break up” BS - we’re looking for fundamental and unchangable traits.
We don’t want to make both our lives miserable and drag things out here, we want to break up cleanly and quickly, and with feelings as good as we can manage on both sides, so you can both move on with your lives.
So again, back to those immutable characteristics that are downsides to YOU, what are YOUR immutable downsides to your partner? This is what you need to know / figure out. I think it’s probably not that hard with a bit of introspection and honesty. And if it IS hard, ask close friends who know you both, they’ll know for sure.
Now you use the intersection or conjunction of your downsides and their downsides to find (or make) some irreconcilable difference that can’t be overcome with talking or compromise or whatever.
Now in terms of the actual impact, and the big spread between potential outcomes, I think the key insight to successful breakup theory is that the emotional distress is at least partially optional - you can ameliorate this greatly for both sides with good practices. Unfortunately the strongest lever is "choose an emotionally stable and non-neurotic partner from the outset," but since this is largely rare / impossible, you just have to do the best you can.
How you bring it up and frame it is basically everything - the gestalt you’re shooting for is “my god, this is such a tragedy, because you’re such a great person in nearly every way, and I’m just impossibly attracted to you, but this difference is just irreconcilable.”
People almost never remember what you said, or the specifics and details of how you treated them in the years together - but they ALWAYS remember how you made them *feel.*
I have a whole post about this, but I know this is already sounding pretty psychopathic and weird to probably 90%+ of the audience here (most of whom will be older and/or married, and so will not have had to think or deal with this issue for a long time), so I'll leave it at that.
I just wanted to put it out there, because the value to the 10% it's relevant to might actually be meaninfully high enough to drive some positive impact for somebody out there. If you're one of those, feel free to DM me on Substack and I'll send a link.
"I have a whole post about this, but I know this is already sounding pretty psychopathic and weird"
No, I wouldn't say that, but it does sound dishonest - and mean. "“my god, this is such a tragedy, because you’re such a great person in nearly every way, and I’m just impossibly attracted to you, but this difference is just irreconcilable.” is a lie, because you are no longer attracted to them, you don't want to be with them anymore, and you're just looking for an excuse to break up that doesn't leave you sounding like the bad guy.
The "irreconcilable difference" was okay so long as you wanted to stay in the relationship, and the other problem is that pitching is as "I'm still attracted to you, you're still great, it's just this one thing" then the other person may offer to work on the one thing - let's go to couples counselling, therapy, I'll get a better job, we can move, etc.
That just drags it out and makes it more painful. Be honest, even if it's "I'm not feeling it anymore" or "I don't see this as being long term". "Baby you're fantastic but I just can't stick around because I'm a no-good hound dog" and then six weeks later they find out you're in a new relationship and haven't changed a thing about being a hound dog, despite that being the ostensible reason for breaking up - that you're not fit for a relationship until you work on overcoming the hound dogness? - yeah, that's going to leave a very bad taste in the mouth. At the very least, they'll feel like they've been played for a fool.
I think the "love is understanding" model only works for some people. Other people may prioritize sex, money, adventure, etc.
So one reason for breakup, despite understanding your partner well, could be that your partner wants something else... and finds more of it elsewhere.
Or maybe you realize that it is not enough for you to understand your partner, but you also need your partner to understand you... but your partner is not interested in this kind of exploration.
Another reason could be deception. You thought you understood your partner well, but one day you find out that it was only a nice facade created to fool you.
Or maybe it is you who keeps a small secret, and either the secret grows, or keeping the secret becomes emotionally unbearable.
So, whats 'good communication', anyway? And how do you go about learning it? In the context of close personal relationships, everybody says its 'key', but to me it seems like most people are decent at it at best.
For example, many choices and judgements are guided by feelings, and then the reasoning, the part thats communicated, seems to be 'discovered' afterwards. This is especially bad if you're hungry/tired/stressed/distracted. Would be nice if people could just say(communicate!): "this is my mood now, just for your information", but thats not how things work. How to approach this? Is the best way just to get good at recognising other peoples moods, and give them som slack? Say I wanted to train hard so I myself was never hangry (only hungry) again, could I do this?
I suspect the phrase "good communication" is mostly intended to correct for the typical-mind fallacy. I.e. people often just assume that others can read their minds, my desires are obvious, these boundaries are self-evident, etc. But actually, it's not obvious at all. So it's often better to pedantically, explicitly, meticulously describe what you want from your spouse/friend/etc and to set personal boundaries. For things that might seem very mundane and basic. Like "please don't eat my fries again" or "yelling at my driving makes me spazz out".
For context, once in a blue moon, I used to read an advice column in the newspaper, which solicited relationship questions from readers and dispensed specific advice. My impression was that a lot of the advice came down to setting boundaries, and acknowledging locus of control.
It's not entirely clear to me if this is what you're asking about, though.
One of the most important pieces is understanding that people are normally often having conversations at two different levels at the same time.
Saying "this is my mood, FYI", is... not really cognizant of how the other person feels, or addressing what might be some of their second-level concerns.
Saying, "I really care about how you feel, but because I'm tired right now, I won't be able to listen intently. I'm happy to listen anyway if you're okay with me being zoned out, or happy to talk tomorrow if you need my undivided attention"... that really, REALLY goes a long way. Although if you can't see why, I can elaborate.
Also learn to say, "are you looking for sympathy, or solutions? Either way, you get a hug..." can be pretty powerful.
And learning to tell which of those things YOU currently want is pretty important, too.
This is the best reply here. Communication is a bit of a misnomer in that it sounds like "information transmission"... but it's not about information transmission, it's more about noticing when the other person might be thinking/feeling something
I think a good chunk of what we call "good communication" really comes down to (or at least begins with) self-control. Being hungry, being tired, being frustrated with X or Y or Z is an emotional state, and to an extent emotions kind of are what they are. We can't expect ourselves or our partners to just push a button on the spine somewhere and just "turn off" feeling sad, angry, or whatever. However, we can and should have expectations that emotions are expressed in a *healthy* way. If my spouse does something that angers or hurts me, and I punch a hole in the wall, it doesn't matter if *later on* I can I can unpack how that thing they did was just like a thing my father used to do and it triggered this strong emotional reaction from me and x and y and z... I'm still a person who failed to control that anger in the moment. "First, he explodes with rage he can't control, then later he unpacks that rage and figures out where it came from, and can clearly explain his emotional responses" might accurately convey information later, but overall it's still a shitty communication style.
In that vein, I don't think a person would train themselves to "not be hangry," so much as training themselves to (a) recognize that they are upset, (b) identify that maybe it's that they're just hungry, and (c) take a breath, hold back from snapping at someone or otherwise doing something impulsive with that upset feeling, and instead try to eat a granola bar or something (or at least exercise some patience if food is not readily available). That enables you to be a "good communicator" - if the person you are with notices something is off, when that long awkward silence is pierced by the inevitable "are you okay," you're in a position to calmly answer "yeah I'm just a little hungry and I think it's making me grumpy" rather than pop off an inappropriate behavior. Or, even better, you can *tell* that you're getting hungry or grumpy or whatever and gently communicate it to them beforehand - but, either way, as I see it, it really begins with self control.
Interval fasting does a good job of teaching you how to never be "hangry" again. Your body learns that "living on fat" is the standard mode, and occasionally says "Hey, bro, feed me?" but you can just ignore that.
Let's assume we are talking about close relationships only. Communication, like the rest of your interactions, is going in a tacit ledger of who is most invested. Good communication, in my experience, is being aware of this, and take care to invest in a mindful way. Your example with the moods: you do communicate these, if only through nonverbal cues, and someone making an investment to communicate with you will pick up on it. someone not investing in communication will not -e.g: someone just stating stuff / filling the space-.
This theory of the tacit ledger is actually salient in my thinking these days about one critical aspect of conversation in a couple: persuasion. Your spouse is the one you most likely will need to persuade on a number of things over time (where to go to dinner, whether to have kids, where to live, how to spend your money, political povs, etc), but as with any human abilities, there will be differences in individual powers of persuasion: did one of you do debate for fun? did one of you have a much better memory for on the spot examples? Was one of you just a bit more introverted, or needs more time to format arguments? Then you will definitely "overinvest" in this ledger in some ways, the best persuader leaving the room vindicated often but the other party feels put upon and still is not convinced. So take care to recognize this imbalance in a relationship and purposefully rein in the competitive arguing.
In all interactions repeated over time, balance the ledger according to what relationship you want.
I like the model with the tacit ledger.
I have most certainly been naive to what investments I make in which relationships previously, although I am getting better at this.
<: Would be nice if people could just say "this is my mood now, just for your information", but thats not how things work
You can do that! It's fine. I do it a lot. "If you talk to me while I'm trying to squeeze into this parking space I'm going to be cranky, I can't help it. Just don't talk." "Wait to tell me about your trip til we sit down and have some wine. I'm too frazzled right now to appreciate it." "This is a good time to brainstorm if you want to do it because I'm feeling relaxed and optimistic."
I agree here, I also do this sometimes, and it works well. I was probably too vague, my point is that it doesn't *always* work like that, and it does require a good dose of feeling-mood-communication awareness. Is that awareness trainable?
<it does require a good dose of feeling-mood-communication awareness. Is that awareness trainable?
I don't see why it wouldn't be. I know that years ago I didn't very often give people these little bulletins on my state of mind, and now I do, so it's at least possible for it to change. Seems to me like it would help to form a habit of asking yourself "what do I *really* feel like doing right now?." And if you realize you just want to listen to some music or talk about trivial stuff, not discuss politics, then you can consider just saying that. Or you can say a weaker version, like "I'm kind of stressed and this politics conversation isn't exactly hitting the spot for me, but if you really need to get this stuff off your chest I'll do my best to participate."
You could even do little things to remind yourself to ask notice how you're really feeling -- have little alerts at random intervals with an emoji that you'd know is the reminder.
For most people? Yeah, probably. At least when you're not "erasing your memory of entire hours" due to the significant loss of processing power
Nonstandard subnational flag emoji! (Well, subnational flag emoji that are not recommended for general Interchange, as they say.) Some computer systems support some. For instance, if your system is like mine, this will display the flag of New Mexico: 🏴
(Apologies to the Unicode Consortium for using one of these in general interchange, I suppose. :P )
I'm really curious about these. Like, what systems support them and which ones do they support? What components are responsible for this? Is there any way I can enumerate which ones my computer supports? How widespread is this? (Do you see the New Mexican flag?) Is any of this documented anywhere??
For the unfamiliar (most of you I'm guessing), Unicode has a mechanism for national flags, and then later they added a separate mechanism for subnational flags, but they decreed that the only subnational flags that are recommended for general interchange are those of England, Scotland, and Wales, I think because they realized things would get out of hand otherwise. So for other subnational flags, even though it's clear how they *would* work (hence how I was able to generate the New Mexico flag above; that part's well-documented), they're essentially nonstandard and definitely not universally supported (plenty of people I've tried sending them to have said, yup, that's a question mark flag on my system).
The ones I tried on my computer that seem to work are:
1. US states and DC (not US territories, because Unicode treats those like national flags and they're actually standard!)
2. Candian provinces and territories
3. Mexican states and Mexican federal district
4. Northern Ireland (which, y'know, officially doesn't have a flag, but my computer displays the Ulster Banner anyway)
Other countries I've tried subdivisions of have yielded no results. I'm using Linux Mint 21.3 with MATE 1.26.0; a friend of mine who is using Pop! OS with GNOME (so, yeah, two systems that are both Ubuntu-based) says his appears to support the same ones.
Does anyone know anything about this?? It's the sort of question I don't really know where to ask about (and where I have tried has yielded nothing), so why not, I figured I'll try here.
And uh if people want more explanation as to how exactly these work and how to make them, I can explain that, but I figured that that sort of technical detail I should probably omit at first.
Just fyi, with Chrome on Windows (probably THE most common desktop system), you don't get even the standard national flags, just an ugly rendering of the two-letter ISO code; you can get an extension which fixes it though, and it should be trivially reusable to allow subnational flags as well, as long as you have a font which all the flags you want.
Huh. I'm running Chrome on Windows 11, and although I don't see the New Mexico flag (which I had to look up), I do see a little black flag. Maybe it's a generic flag, I don't know.
You're right, I see the subnational flags rendered as generic black flags too. It's the national flags that render as: 🇺🇸.
Interesting! This page seems to show a bunch: https://emojipedia.org/emoji-tag-sequence
On my machine (Macbook / Chromium), I see black flags for all but England, Wales, Scotland.
On my Android 13 (ColorOS 13) all are displayed as grey flags with nothing but a blue question mark in them, except for 🏴 England 🏴 Scotland
and 🏴 Wales.
Ooh, that's a useful page, thanks! I hadn't previously encountered that while searching for information. I wonder if all the sequences listed there are supported at least somewhere? If so they don't say where. Of the ones there, it is indeed the case that my computer only supports the ones I mentioned above.
Well, Androud seems not to care about this - lots of flags for oversea territorries and colonies of the US and the UK and French Oversea Departments in my built-in emoji set (besides England, Scotland and Wales). However, US State Flags seem not to work - I'm shown a white flag with a question mark.
However, my most pressing question: Why did the Great Britain part of the UK get their own flags, but not Northern Ireland?
> lots of flags for oversea territorries and colonies of the US and the UK and French Oversea Departments in my built-in emoji set (besides England, Scotland and Wales)
This is because the territories / colonies / overseas departments are actually treated by Unicode as national flags, and are considered standard (RGI), unlike the US state flags! Yeah the whole system's kind of bolted-together.
I too am getting all black flags. As for Norn Iron, oh boy. Sit back for a history lesson.
So, the current Union Jack flag is an amalgam of (some) traditional flags/emblems associated with the separate countries of Scotland (cross of St Andrew, diagonal white cross on a blue background), England (cross of St George, ordinary red cross on a white background) and Ireland (cross of St Patrick, diagonal red cross on a white background). Wales gets no look in, but does have the very cool national flag with the red dragon.
England, Scotland, Ireland (and to a lesser extent Wales) were all separate countries; the union of the separate kingdoms of Scotland and England happened under James VI (of Scotland) and I (of England) when he was the only viable heir after the death of Elizabeth I (he was already king of Scotland, and on her death became king of England). This was formalised by the Act of Union 1707 which made Scotland and England (Wales was lumped in as functionally part of England anyway by this time) one entity called Great Britain.
Ireland was still notionally a separate kingdom, and besides us wilful and ungrateful Paddies were always rebelling and rejecting the rightful authority of the monarch. We got our own Act of Union in 1801 after the bunch of ingrates in the Irish parliament turned their coats and sold their country (literally, getting a pay-off in some cases) and voted to amalgamate with Great Britain, thus forming the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland (you can tell what version of history I learned in school, can't you? 😁)
This historic occasion called for a snazzy new flag, hence the Union Jack:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Union_Jack
Now! Come with me forward one hundred and twenty years to the partition of Ireland! Since three-quarters of the country was now a separate entity, this divided up the country into Northern Ireland (which stayed in the United Kingdom) and Southern Ireland.
This created the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, and also meant the feckin' Brits didn't have to change their flag, as by hanging on to the Six Counties they could still lay claim to the cross of St Patrick (pause here to spit on the ground in derision).
But! Norn Iron had its own teeny-weeny little problem! While about one-half of the population (figures are very fuzzy from here on) had no problems at all with the Union Jack as their flag, the other half had plenty, as they wanted to be part of the Irish Free State/later Republic of Ireland.
Aside from *that*, on the Union Jack loving side, the cross of St Patrick was a bit iffy. Slightly associated with all them Papists down south. And why shouldn't the North have its own (version of a) national flag like the other countries in the union?
Here's where we start wading into heraldry, (pseudo-) history, and competing claims over who precisely are the aboriginal population of the country or parts of it. Too complicated to get into, so very briefly:
(1) there's a version of flags for the four provinces of Ireland, the one for Ulster uses the coat of arms of the Earls of Ulster, which is a red cross on a yellow background, combined with the Red Hand of Ulster.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coat_of_arms_of_Ulster
(2) a sort of official flag granted after partition, which uses the cross of St George heraldry (red cross on a white background, see the subtle distinction from the cross of St Patrick? to emphasise the true Protestant Loyalist patriotism?) and also combined with the Red Hand of Ulster on a six-pointed star (representing the six counties of Ulster which remained in the United Kingdom), surmounted by a crown (just to make sure we all know what the ruling authority is here):
"The Ulster Banner (also unofficially known as the Ulster Flag or Flag of Northern Ireland) is a heraldic banner taken from the former coat of arms of Northern Ireland, consisting of a red cross on a white field, upon which is a crowned six-pointed star with a red hand in the centre. It was the flag of the former Government of Northern Ireland and common flag of Northern Ireland from 1953 until that government was abolished in 1973 with the passing of the Northern Ireland Constitution Act 1973."
The Red Hand part is tricky, because if it's associated with the O'Neills, well there's a famous O'Neill chieftain who rebelled against Elizabeth I, so it's not a signifier of untrammelled and unbroken loyalty to crown and monarch:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hugh_O%27Neill,_Earl_of_Tyrone
So that brings us to the lovely sectarian rows over whose flag where, and indeed whose flag? and thus the entire Flags and Emblems Act of 1954 to try and calm things down (which it did a very little but these kinds of symbols are very potent; to quote the late Seamus Heaney, "phrases make history here"):
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flags_and_Emblems_(Display)_Act_(Northern_Ireland)_1954
And indeed I get a bit irritated myself at seeing the Irish harp on British coats of arms, because most of the country is no longer in their possession so you'd think the feckin' hoors would be gracious about it but no, the Brits never give up whatever they laid claim to before, why would they start now? (Just imagine if they were still using some North American symbol from pre-Revolutionary times on royal and official seals). That's why the current usage for the Republic is the Uncrowned Harp:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coat_of_arms_of_Ireland
> And indeed I get a bit irritated myself at seeing the Irish harp on British coats of arms, because most of the country is no longer in their possession so you'd think the feckin' hoors would be gracious about it but no, the Brits never give up whatever they laid claim to before, why would they start now?
Do you think it would be fair if the UK stopped using the Irish harp on their arms if in exchange the Republic of Ireland would stop calling itself the Republic of Ireland and instead go for something more reasonable like, say, The Republic of The Southern Four Fifths Of Ireland?
I'm a thirty-two county Republican, so you don't catch me out with that one 😁
Because there's no official flag and it's a sectarian issue apparently. From [Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flag_of_Northern_Ireland):
"The only official flag for Northern Ireland is the Union Flag, the flag of the United Kingdom; there is no official local flag that represents only Northern Ireland.[1][2][3] The flying of various flags in Northern Ireland is a significant sectarian issue, with different communities identifying with different flags.[4]
The Ulster Banner was used by the Northern Irish government from 1953 until the government and parliament were abolished in 1973. Since then, it has had no official status."
Intriguing - I assumed the Ulster banner without shield in the center was the official flag due to its use as emblem for Northern Ireland in sports contexts. Thanks for sharing!
Do we have a timeline for the ACX Fall meetups? I wanted to host both this summer and last fall but was too late. This time I wanna get it right.
I will post the Call For Organizers this coming week, and the meetups will take place between 9/1 and 10/31. Sorry I'm a bit late on this one.
No problem, I'm glad it's happening! Cheers!
Why are you sharing this article?
The ideas in there have been in circulation since around 2010 and it opens with vague scare phrases like "algorithmic tyranny". Did you find anything of value there?
I shared the article because it shows solid advice in a clear manner.
If you think there are no risks of blindly trusting algorithms, I'd like you to describe why.
It's interesting because I never said anything to that effect. I've been extremely aware of social feed algorithms and I'm just surprised because everything that's said in this article has been gone over a thousand times. If you want to, a better resource would be anything posted by the EFF because using opaque phrases like "algorithmic tyranny" is actually the opposite of being clear.
Edit: thinking more on this, the reason why the opaque phrases made me react and question is because there was a lot of that kind of stuff floating around 2010s and while it persuaded me, it did nothing for the general public who couldn't give a rats ass about aesthetic phrases like "algorithmic tyranny". Schneier's clear and simple "Data & Goliath" came too late to affect the discourse. I can't remember off the top of my head but people working against surveillance leaning in the 4th amendment have had more impact by getting eg. cities to curb public police surveillance by focusing on local policy.
Fair enough. Points taken.